Carnifex

22/7/469 AC, Tariq Pass, Kashmir

This was not one of the big passes. Narrow and rugged, untraversable by vehicles, it had three major advantages. It was located about where Bashir could have gotten to if he had begun the trek back the night of the ambush. It had a small, flat plain on the southern side just large enough for a Cricket to land with two men and take off again with its pilot aboard. Lastly, it was not much used by anybody. Thus, it was unlikely that the Cricket would be seen, less still reported.

The pilot brought the plane into the rough field slowly, not much faster than a man could run, Bashir thought. He was thankful beyond measure when the thing touched down. His only previous flight had been on the helicopter that took him into his brief captivity. He'd hated that, but at least he hadn't had to see the ground below him or the clouds around. The Cricket gave no such mercy.

With hand gestures, the pilot directed Bashir to help him turn the plane around to face into the wind. They did this by the simple expedient of picking up the tail and shuffling sideways, pivoting the plane around the fixed landing gear. Then he'd clapped the Pashtun on the back and bid him on his way.

As Bashir caught his last ground-bound glimpse of the plane, before turning along the rock-strewn path, he saw the pilot pouring fuel into it from a twenty liter fuel can. When next he looked, the plane was already airborne.

Bashir didn't know why he had been selected. He was, and he knew it, the least intelligent of the two brothers. Moreover, the infidel, Fernandez, had made similar offers to both to which both had agreed.

What had decided Fernandez, though he never made this plain, was that Salam had seemed incrementally more likely to seek his own safety and abandon his relatives to their fate than Bashir had. The key to this was that that Bashir, unbeknownst to himself, had broken under beating much later than Salam, and then only after hearing his brother being pounded. "He's the better kid," Fernandez had told Carrera. "He cares more for his family."

Though he didn't know, Bashir suspected it might be something like that. Salam was a good brother . . . but you did have to watch him.

He'd been left off with very little: some food and water, the pack he'd been captured with, his rifle, a bandoleer of ammunition and a very small radio. The radio was underpowered, due to its size among other things. On the other hand, it would pick up broadcasts as would any other radio that looked like it; which is to say that looked like a cheap, yellow transistor radio made in Zhong Guo.

No matter about the range; a Cazador team was going to be inserted, at night, close enough to pick up any broadcast. That would not happen for another few days, giving Bashir time to get to his destination. He was instructed not to even try to broadcast for ten days, and then only to send one of two words, "yes" or "no" and, if "yes," a number, for the number of days until the event for which he was waiting was to take place. He was to avoid making other broadcasts entirely except under very narrowly constrained circumstances. Further, if captured and not accepted back into the Ikhwan, he was advised to make a place for his parents, brothers and sisters in Paradise.