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its earliest meaning was the portion of land given to the firstborn, but later came to be associated with fate and destiny.  Taking this as omen, Garral had elected to adopt the boy and ascribed him that distinctive surname. "Nick" was chosen for more prosaic reasons; Garral's own father was named Nicklaus.
    Because he had no memory of his strange nativity, Kismet had over the course of the years, regarded the matter with some suspicion; his father was not above spinning a whopper of a tall tale.  His uniquely stimulating childhood had kept him from agonizing overmuch about the matter as Garral's adventures took him to exotic environments in every corner of the globe.  When at last it became time for him to formalize his education, his affinity for the many places he had visited in his youth led him to pursue the study of international law.  In order to help pay for his studies—a matter of personal pride on his own part, for Garral was certainly wealthy enough to foot the bill—he had joined the Army ROTC, and his grasp of several different languages had led him to choose Military Intelligence as his occupational specialty.  It had all been academic up until the events of late 1990, when armies from Iraq had invaded Kuwait and seemed poised to attack Saudi Arabia as well.  Although he had always recognized the possibility of a deployment, the activation orders had come with the finality of a guillotine.  He had said his good-byes and after a brief train-up, shipped out to Riyadh.
    After the initial shock of dislocation had faded, he had come to accept his part in the greater mission to liberate Kuwait, but on one fateful night his world had been turned upside down.  Seemingly from out of nowhere, he had been given orders for an over the border operation—the rescue of a defector with important military secrets.  Compounding the irregularity of the orders was the fact that he would be accompanied only by a squad of Gurkhas.  Britain's answer to the French Foreign Legion, the Gurkhas were a regiment of soldiers named for the fierce warrior tribe of Nepal whose signature weapon was a boomerang-shaped chopping knife called a kukri , and like their namesake, the Gurkhas fought heroically wherever they were sent.  Half a century after the fact, they were still boasting about the fact the Gurkhas had suffered the highest casualty rates of Allied soldiers during the Second World War.  Kismet's escorts had certainly honored the memories of their predecessors that night with a sacrifice of their own blood, but not before Kismet made contact with the defector, a man who identified himself as Samir Al-Azir, an engineer for the Iraqi regime who had, in the course of rebuilding the ancient city of Babylon, discovered a strange and extraordinarily valuable relic dating back to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar.  Fearing that the United States might capture the relic and return it to Israel, Saddam Hussein had ordered Samir to destroy it, but the engineer had demurred choosing instead to use the artifact as a bargaining token to secure safe passage for himself and his family.
    And that was where it really got strange, for when Samir Al-Azir had contacted a British government official, requesting asylum, he had specifically asked to be met in Tall al Muqayyar—the ruins of ancient Ur, near the modern city of Nasyriah—by an American named Nick Kismet.  All of this was revealed to a young and disbelieving Second Lieutenant Kismet in the half-buried remains of a long forgotten nobleman's dwelling, but before Kismet could fully comprehend what he was being told, a group of commandos had stormed the location, and slaughtered Samir and his family.  Stranger still, the leader of the assault force, a man who identified himself as Ulrich Hauser, indicated that Kismet's life was to be spared out of deference to his mother.  Hauser had then disappeared with the captured relic, leaving only a