Rifle rounds zinged close over our heads like angry bees as we both crouched tight against the sand dune. Harry started to raise his head to peek over the edge of the dune and I grabbed him. "No! Stay down!" I hollered, wheezing and out of breath. I looked at my handheld locator device and continued, "We only have a few feet left to go. Let's get to it, we don't have much time."
     The sweat dripped off my forehead onto the face of the locator as I checked it again. The secret dugout was emitting a high frequency beam that the locator was picking up. It indicated the hideout to be about twenty feet in the opposite direction of the advancing Iraqi troops.
     "I gotta see where they are," he blurted between heavy breaths.
     He slowly raised his forehead, then his eyes over the edge of the sand dune. It wasn't a split second later when I heard the zip of a high-powered rifle round rip through the air followed by a huge splat, like the sound of someone hitting a ripe watermelon with a baseball bat. The back of Harry's head exploded and pieces of his skull, gray matter, and hair flew through the air as his body stiffened up and he fell straight backward.
     "Damn it to hell, Harry!" I screamed, but I knew he couldn't hear me anymore. I stared at the neat, round rifle hole in the center of his forehead as the bright red blood ran from a large gaping hole in the back of his head, turning the sand a sickening reddish hue.
I crouched tighter against the dune as I looked into his lifeless eyes staring straight into the hot desert sun. I sat frozen in space and time for a moment, in shock and disbelief that my best friend had just been killed. I gulped and strained to keep the vomit down that was pushing at the back of my throat.
     I quickly came to my senses and realized I'd better get a grip and get my head together, fast. My espionage training kicked in and I went into an automatic survival mode. I knew I had only seconds to crawl to the hidden dugout buried in the sand and cover my tracks before the troops were on top of me. I wasn't going to look over the edge of the dune to see how close they were. I didn't want to end up like Harry.
     We had done a year of extra training in the California desert for situations just like this and I was about to find out whether it was going to work or not. I slid away from the sand dune and took up a prone position. I raised myself onto my fingertips and toes and made my way backwards towards the plastic box buried in the desert floor, at the same time covering up my imprints exactly as I had been trained to do. As I inched toward the box, making sure not even my shirt touched the ground, I thought, this is taking too long, but I can't chance leaving any sign of a trail. I had to draw every ounce of energy I had, which wasn't much after being locked up in that Iraqi prison for two years.
     I watched the locator beam to make sure I was going in the right direction. The dugout would be impossible to find without this special electronic tool. It seemed like an eternity before I finally reached it and pushed away the sand to expose the top. I pulled it open and positioned the lid so that when I closed it, it would again be impossible to detect. I lowered myself halfway into the opening and took one last look at Harry's lifeless body lying stretched out in the hot desert sand.
     I lowered myself further into the box, and was about to close the lid over me, when an Iraqi army officer appeared on top of the sand dune and pointed a high-powered sniper rifle at my head. He peered through the scope at a spot right between my eyes, his eyeball huge through the lens as he started to apply pressure on the trigger. He must be the one who got Harry, I thought. I made a move to grab my 9mm pistol stuffed in my belt and as I took hold of it, he hollered in broken English, "Don't, my friend. I won't miss from this distance."
     I watched as his finger tightened even further on the trigger and braced myself for the muzzle flash and the impact of the round to slam into my skull.
     The thought shot through my mind, Screw this. If I'm going to die, I'm going out fighting. I tightened my grip on the pistol and was about to jerk it out of my belt and start blasting away when, to my surprise, the soldier lowered the rifle and said, "You better hurry and close the lid, my friend. The others will be here any second."