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“You’ll see him,” says Hayward, “in sixty seconds.” He leads us over to the video debrief rig, which is just an encryption cam mounted on the light bar of one of their trucks. The operator is just slating Chris and me, when we hear surface engines approaching from the west and see two rooster tails of dust emerge from behind the basalt ridge.
    A pair of HSDs skim into view, moving fast and tracking toward us. The vehicles have no armor, no doors, and no windshields—just two aircraft-type seats slung between four all-terrain tires, with a light bar overhead and a roll cage tubed around. Materials are all superlight, stealth composite, even the 2.7-inch rocket clusters topside and finned-round autosights fore and aft. No vehicle that rollson wheels can keep up with one of these speeders, and nothing that flies can zero its sights on them. I don’t know what the military version costs, but the civilian type, made by Ford with a Rolls-Royce engine, goes for 2.1 mill.
    The two HSDs slalom into the ravine and brake in a storm of sand and grit. Chris and I squint. Through the swirling alkali we see Salter dismount from the lead vehicle. He wears cargo trousers, a calf-length duster, and sand goggles. No helmet, no flak jacket. He pulls the goggles off over a peaked desert cap and beats the dust off both by swatting them against his right trouser leg. In a shoulder holster rides the M9 pistol that has been his trademark since Marine Corps days.
    Two more CAAT vehicles and a surface-to-air missile truck come up behind Salter’s vehicles, disperse into a perimeter, and stop, facing outboard. Hayward trots over. Salter, with Hayward and a couple of officers from the scout teams, mounts the ridge on foot, scanning the horizon to the east with binoculars. The force protecting him is, to put it kindly, underpowered. There’s only one cloaking truck, no airborne security, and not another fighting vehicle as far as the eye can see.
    “Far be it from me to criticize our commander,” says Chris, “but what the fuck is Salter doing this far forward with nothing to protect him bigger than my nine-inch dick?”
    “He leads from the front.”
    “I do too, bro. But I’m not the maraschino cherry on top of the hot fudge sundae.”
    Salter glances in our direction. Hayward is telling him something and pointing toward us. We can see Salter react with animation. He strides down the ridge. Chris and I move toward him, saluting.
    “Stand easy, gentlemen!”
    Salter comes up with his right hand extended. “Gent, you sonofabitch!”
    He grabs my hand and embraces me warmly. He gives me shit about Abd el-Kadr and the Land Cruiser and makes a joke of times we nearly got killed in Yemen and East Africa. Such intimacy is one of Salter’s gifts as a commander. It can’t be faked. Though he is light-years beyond us, his junior commanders, in intellect and force of command, he makes us know that he loves us as brothers and as equals; we are his blood and he is ours. I feel with Salter now—as I have felt before, every time I have been in his presence—that unprovable but indelible certainty that he and I have known each other in earlier lifetimes and will know each other again.
    I introduce Chris. “I know, I know,” says Salter, indicating the satellite truck. “Hayward and I have been following you characters’ getaway for the past three days.”
    Salter debriefs us himself. We deliver our assessments of Nazirabad, of Col. Achmed, of the sense of the situation. I present the engineers and hand over the document our team had been assigned to collect. I haven’t looked at it; I have no idea what’s in it. Salter passes the paper to his ADC, who stashes it at once in a locking briefcase. He starts to say something to the aide about delivering the report by hand and at once. Then an impulse seems to strike him. He glances to Hayward, then back to me.
    “What division is your contract with, Gent?”
    I tell him. He asks my pay grade.