But fortune's scale-pan dipped in their direction, and all held still.
The sun-baked desert kept their secret. Onward they crawled, now over
sand, now over cracked mud-flakes of saline deposit where water had
dried at the bottom of a _ghadir_. All was calm as if the spirit of
rest were hovering over the hot, fevered earth, still quivering from
the kiss of its great enemy, the sun.
"Peace, it is peace until the rising of the morn!" a thought came to
the Master's mind, a line from the chapter Al Kadr, in the Koran. He
smiled to himself. "False peace," he reflected. "The calm before the
storm!" Prophetic thought, though not as he intended it!
On and on the trio labored, soundlessly. At last the chief stopped,
held up his hand a second, lay still. The others glimpsed him by the
starlight, nested down in a shallow depression of the sand. They crept
close to him.
"Lieutenant," he whispered, "you bombard the left-hand sector, toward
the fire and the sea. Rrisa, take the right-hand one. The middle is
for me. Fire at will!"
Out from belts and pockets came the lethal pistols. With
well-estimated elevation, the attackers sighted, each covering his
own sector.
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