The Power of Five Oblivion

carry that?”
    “Of course.” Rémy loaded a bullet into the chamber. “But I do not believe that Tarik would do this, Richard. He is a good man.”
    “Maybe he was a good man once. But you fight any war long enough and in the end it’s going to be hard to remember who you are. He’s had too much blood. And maybe too much sand. I’d say he’s become everything he set out to defeat.”
    They pulled in. Richard switched the engine off. “I really hope this is going to work out,” he muttered to Scarlett.
    “Now I know why Matt thought so much of you.”
    “Did he?” Richard smiled. “He never told me that.”
    They got out.
    And stood face-to-face with Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad.
    Although Richard and Scarlett had never seen him before, they knew it had to be him. After a lifetime in uniform, the Arab dress looked almost ridiculous on him. He had the face and the eyes of a soldier and he was examining them with undisguised pleasure.
    “Scarlett Adams,” he said, and even hearing the way he pronounced her name, Scarlett knew that he had little knowledge of English. “I am glad to see you,” he continued, framing his words carefully, as if each one had been plucked out of a dictionary.
    “I take it your name isn’t Ali,” Richard said.
    “It is not.”
    Akkad raised a limp, carefully manicured hand. It was a signal. Two armed men appeared, tumbling out of the front of the building. They were dressed in the same dark-green uniforms that Richard and Scarlett had seen when they first arrived. A third uncurled himself from his hiding place on the roof, aiming down with a machine gun.
    “It is over for you,” Akkad said. He had also produced a gun, which he aimed at Richard. “The Englishman dies here and now. He should have died before. The girl will come with me.”
    “And what do you get out of this?” Richard asked.
    “My reward will be great…!”
    He got no further.
    The explosion was huge and deafening. It came from behind them, from the top of the hill they had just left. The force of it almost threw them off their feet and it was enough to blast the man on the roof onto one knee. A whole torrent of sand and smoke, scooped up from the desert floor, fell on them. They were blinded. But even at that moment, in all the chaos, Richard knew Tarik had paid the full price for his treachery.
    Perhaps he and his men had survived the blast but Richard doubted it. Even if there had been time for it, he would have felt no pity for them. They had tried to turn Scarlett and him into unknowing suicide bombers, but they were the ones who had died. How he must have relished his moment of triumph as his finger pressed the button. He had detonated the bomb, thinking it was in their jeep, the vehicle that he had persuaded them to drive down the hill. He had thought that it would kill his greatest enemy, Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad, even if it killed the three of them too.
    Richard had the advantage. He had known what was about to happen and so he was the first to react, throwing himself at the Field Marshall, fighting for control of the gun. And Rémy hadn’t hesitated either. However strong his belief in Tarik, it had surely been shattered now. He had seen at once the danger they were in, and even as the blast echoed in his ears he fired three times. The man on the roof cried out and fell backwards. The other two tried to return fire but although one of them let off a couple of rounds, they were too slow and Rémy shot them both.
    “Richard!” Scarlett stared in horror. The trap was bigger and more elaborate than any of them could have expected. All around them, men were appearing. They were all in desert camouflage and must have been lying flat until the moment of the explosion, but now they were rising out of the sand as if from the grave, fifteen or twenty of them, forming a circle about fifty metres away. Fortunately, they hadn’t dared get any closer. They couldn’t risk being seen. But they were already moving quickly, covering the distance between them.
    Not all of them were men. Scarlett saw a creature with the head and pincers of a scorpion, another dragging broken wings, half-man, half-eagle. These were the mutations that the Old Ones had created to serve them, the shape-changers. The bird-thing screeched in anger and ran forward. The circle closed in.
    There was nothing Richard could do. He was still struggling with Akkad, the man’s face close to his, his eyes bulging. Richard could