57
The team deplaned at the al-Tanf Garrison, Syria.
The heat slammed into Miranda.
One of the waiting military escort must have seen her reaction. “You’re lucky it’s October; just ninety-five degrees today. July cracks a hundred with room to spare most days.”
Al-Tanf was a small cluster of buildings set in a featureless expanse of brown-beige desert. The dry expanse and lifeless rounded hills were broken only by the gray sliver of the M2 Baghdad-Damascus Highway. The garrison was a small outpost surrounded by absolutely nothing.
There was nothing here. To the southeast, the Iraqi border twelve miles away. A Jordanian refugee camp, just twenty miles south by air, was almost unreachable by road. The nearest town lay over seventy miles in the opposite direction. Which, according to Jere
