Declare

knelt in front of the opening, blocking Hale’s view; then the old man raised his hands and bowed forward.
    Hale quickly slung the rifle and bent to pick up the radio, and then he stepped across to his couched camel and scrambled up onto the saddle. He tapped her neck to get her to stand, and as she rocked up onto her feet, he tucked the .45 and the radio into a saddlebag by his ankle, and neither he nor bin Jalawi looked back as they goaded their mounts into a gallop after their fleeing companions, away from the pursuing ride rs and the living sulfur pool and the splashing, sucking, cracking sounds behind them.
    Hale thought of Elena’s friend Maly, who had voluntarily gone to Moscow to be killed, and he wondered fleetingly if Ishmael had also been a religious man, once.
    Hale was straddling the saddle and clinging to the rifle as his camel began lumbering after her fellows against the hot breeze, her hooves pounding the sand and the saddlebags flopping as she picked up speed. Hale braced himself with one hand on the forward saddle pommel, and he craned his neck to look back.
    The strangers were gaining; he could clearly see the fluttering white robes and head-cloths, and the brandished rifles. And not all of the weapons were simply being waved in the air—his ribs went icy cold as he heard the chatter of a short burst of full-automatic gunfire, and then another.
    He had just glanced down at the trigger assembly of the rifle that was jolting in his lap and flicked the change lever from single-fire to auto when he was startled by a loud and wildly prolonged burst from only a few yards to his right. Bin Jalawi had turned around on his own saddle and raked the whole quarter of the compass behind them.
    More jackhammer racket replied, and Hale saw simultaneous spurts of sand kicked up along the ridge of a low dune ahead of them.
    “Bloody hell,” he wailed through clenched teeth. He clamped his legs on the saddle and then twisted his body around to point the heavy rifle’s muzzle at the riders. When the front sight was bouncing closely across his view of the figures he pulled the trigger and released it, sending three or four 7.62-millimeter slugs toward them. The barrel jumped out of line, and he swung it back and fired briefly again.
    When he glanced ahead he saw an underslung, streamlined olive-green shape scudding low over the dunes—it was the helicopter, flying toward them half in profile, and now he could hear the thudding of its rotors.
    He lunged forward over the hot barrel of the rifle and snatched the radio out of the saddlebag by his ankle; he found the set’s power switch, and he yelled into it in English, “Rabkrin! I’m the two riders! Shoot the ones behind me!”
    He didn’t know whether they understood English or had even heard him, but a moment later he saw a bright spot of fluttering muzzle fire in the dark rectangle of the helicopter’s open cargo door; for several seconds the nearly continuous flashes didn’t cease, and he could hear the choppy whisper of bullets ripping through the air over his head; then the muzzle flashes went dark and his ears were belatedly battered by the stuttering roar of the machine gun.
    Clouds of sand scooped up into the air a hundred yards ahead. The helicopter was apparently settling down for a landing, its tail elevated as if the pilot was afraid of hitting one of the low sand dunes with the tail rotor.
    The camels began hitching and lifting their heads as they pounded closer to the hovering aircraft, and when they were still fifty yards short of it they wobbled to a halt and balked at going any farther.
    “—not bothered by a bloody genie,” Hale snarled as he gripped the rifle and the .45 and simply jumped from the saddle. He knocked his chin with one knee when his bare feet hit the hot sand, but a moment later he had got up into a crouch and was limping to bin Jalawi’s mount.
    And Salim bin Jalawi rolled off of his saddle, slid facedown across the glistening water-skins and thumped heavily to the sand on his hip and shoulder. He was facing Hale, and the front of his robe was bright red with blood.
    The sunlight seemed to dim, and there was a shrill keening in Hale’s head. Ignoring several crackling, megaphone-amplified shouts from the helicopter, Hale crouched helplessly beside the dying Arab.
    “Salim!” Hale’s breath wavered in his throat. “Salim!”
    The Arab opened his eyes. The flap of his kaffiyeh had been pulled away from his