gave orders to Brick, the man who had made the first foray into the cave.
Brick switched on a xenon torch. The three men entered the gloom.
There were no dead leaves or other organic materials to leaven the sharp mineral reek. They could feel the deadweight of the rock massif above them. Lindros was reminded of the feeling of near suffocation he had experienced when he'd first entered the tombs of the pharaohs down in the depths of Cairo's pyramids.
The bright xenon beam played over the rock walls. In this bleak setting, the male corpse did not look altogether out of place. Shadows fled across it as Brick moved the light. The xenon beam drained it of any color it might have had, making it seem less than human-a zombie out of a horror film. Its position was one of repose, of utter peace, belied by the neat bullet hole in the center of its forehead. The face was turned away, as if it wished to remain in darkness.
"Wasn't a suicide, that's for sure," Anders said, which had been the starting point of Lindros's own train of thought. "Suicides go for something easy-the mouth is a prime example. This man was murdered by a professional."
"But why?" Lindros's voice was distracted.
The commander shrugged. "With these people it could be any of a thousand-"
"Get the hell back!"
Lindros shouted so hard into his mike that Brick, who had been circling toward the corpse, leapt back.
"Sorry, sir," Brick said. "I just wanted to show you something odd."
"Use the light," Lindros instructed him. But he already knew what was coming. The moment they had stepped inside the cave both the rad detector and the Geiger counter had beat a terrifying rat-tat-tat against his eyes.
Christ, he thought. Oh, Christ.
The corpse was exceedingly thin, and shockingly young, not out of its teens, surely. Did he have the Semitic features of an Arab? He thought not, but it was nearly impossible to tell because-"Holy Mother of God!"
Anders saw it then. The corpse had no nose. The center of his face had been eaten away. The ugly pit was black with curdled blood that foamed slowly out as if the body were still alive. As if something were feasting on it from the inside out.
Which, Lindros thought with a wave of nausea, is precisely what is happening. "What the hell could do that?" Anders said thickly. "Tissue toxin? Virus?"
Lindros turned to Brick. "Did you touch it? Tell me, did you touch the corpse?"
"No, I-" Brick was taken aback. "Am I contaminated?"
"Deputy Director, begging your pardon, sir, what the hell have you gotten us into. I'm used to being in the dark on black-ops missions, but this has crossed another boundary altogether."
Lindros, on one knee, uncapped a small metal canister and used his gloved finger to gather some of the dirt near the body. Sealing the container tightly, he rose.
"We need to get out of here." He stared directly into Anders's face.
"Deputy Director-"
"Don't worry, Brick. You'll be all right," he said with the voice of authority. "No more talk. Let's go."
When they reached the cave mouth and the glare of the blasted, blood-red landscape, Lindros said into his mike, "Anders, as of now that cave is off limits to you and your men. Not even to take a leak. Got it?"
The commander hesitated an instant, his anger, his concern for his men evident on his face. Then it seemed he shrugged mentally. "Yessir."
Lindros spent the next ten minutes scouring the plateau with his rad detector and Geiger counter. He very much wanted to know how the contamination had gotten up here-which route had the men carrying it taken? There was no point in looking for the way they had gone. The fact that the man without a nose had been shot to death told him that the group members had discovered in the most horrifying way that they had a radiation leak. They would surely have sealed it before venturing on. But he had no luck now. Away from the cave, both the alpha and gamma radiation vanished completely. Not a hint of a trace remained for him to determine its path.
Finally, he turned back from the perimeter.
"Evacuate the site, Commander."
"You heard the man," Anders shouted as he trotted toward the waiting copter. "Let's saddle up, boys!"
"Wait," Fadi said. He knows.
"Surely not." Abbud ibn Aziz stirred his position beside Fadi. Crouched behind the high butte three hundred meters above the plateau, they served as advance guard for a cadre of perhaps