Shadows Out of Time

“I am honored by their company.” Phillips spoke to the men in their own tongue, praising them softly and again they bowed. Only their eyes showed any emotion. They were like hawks, eager for the hunt.

For most of the day the party nestled under the shadow of another vast dune, waiting for moonrise. Mamoudou came to Phillips and drew him aside, speaking softly.

“I should warn you. Though I know these men and trust them implicitly, there will be one whose mind is not fully open to me.”

“Then you’d better get rid of him.”

“It is not possible. I cannot say which man it is. I only know that Al-Qaeda has its spies everywhere. For certain one of them will be among our men, and his identity will be a deep secret. I suspect he will only be here to watch and report. Al-Qaeda shuns the remote desert as much as we do. I suggest we say nothing, but be vigilant.”

Phillips nodded. “Maybe you’re right. The last thing we want to do is stir them up. I’ll warn the engineers.”

Garner and O’Reilly received the news with ill-disguised horror. “This changes everything,” said Garner. “I’m going to have to contact base. We may have to pull the plug on this.”

Phillips shook his head. “There’s too much at stake.”

The two engineers exchanged glances, clearly deeply disturbed. They seemed to Phillips to be weighing something in their minds, facts he hadn’t been provided with. “If there’s something you’re not telling me,” he said, “you’d better spit it out.”

Garner cleared his throat, lowering his voice. “I told you we have the means to destroy the target. It’s a powerful weapon.”

“How powerful?” said Phillips.

“It’s not the sort of thing you want falling into the wrong hands. If Al-Qaeda got hold of it, that would be very bad. It can’t happen.”

“If they knew we’re carrying it,” added O’Reilly, “they’d send half an army to get it.”

“What, exactly, is it?”

“It’s in two parts,” said Garner. “We’ve got one section each. Individually they’re harmless. They can only be activated when they’re fitted together. There’s a variable timer. You can set it on a short fuse or a longer one, maximum one day. That’s how long we’ve got to get clear, and we’ll need the fastest camels we’ve got to escape the blast.”

Phillips met the steady gaze of the engineer, the eyes of a dedicated soldier, no less fanatic than the Al-Qaeda he fought. “It’s a nuclear device?”

“Now you understand why we can’t risk it being stolen. It could take out a small city.”

Phillips nodded slowly. “What we’re facing,” he said, “could take out a lot more than that.”

“Once we begin the trek,” said Garner, “we’re on our own. No air cover to call up. Nothing.”

“Who knows about the device?” said Phillips.

“No one else,” said Garner.

“So there’s no reason to think Al-Qaeda are aware? As far as they know, you’ve got something, enough to deal with the target. Explosives, but nothing special. No more than they already have access to.”

“Why are they here?”

“They watch everything that happens in this country. It’s one of their safest bases. As I see it, they fear the place we’re heading for, and the only reason they’ve turned a blind eye to our little sortie is they’re happy to have it destroyed, especially with someone else taking all the risks.”

“I don’t like it,” said O’Reilly.

“Look,” Phillips told them, “if we turn back now, there’s a good chance they’ll kill us all and take what they can. They’ve nothing to lose. While we’re on the mission, we’re potentially useful to them. They want the target eliminated.”

Garner looked at O’Reilly. “The target is Priority One. That’s the instruction.”

“What’s Priority Two?” said Phillips.

“Destroy the device,” said Garner. “If we go on, we’ll set it off rather than let it fall into the wrong hands. We’ll die doing it. How about you, Mr Phillips? You sign up to that? If not, we go back.”

Phillips grinned sardonically. “Not the best deal I’ve ever signed up to, but okay. It’ll soon be dark. Let’s go.”

They traveled across the endless sands by night, the dunes silvered by moonlight, each one indistinguishable from the next, although their guides knew the terrain as well as a city-dweller knew the alleys and side streets of his home town. Days turned into a week, two, and the slow, monotonous trek morphed all of the travelers into silent ghosts. They ate and drank sparingly, surrounded by utter silence, broken only by a brief desert wind. Phillips knew they were as far from civilization as they would have been traversing the Antarctic, their target hidden away deliberately in this dead, empty zone.

“We are close,” Mamoudou told Phillips at last. “We are on the edge of one of the ergs, a very great expanse of sand and rock. If we rest for the day, by nightfall we will see the place.”

Later Phillips sat with the two engineers outside their pitched tent. “Over the next long ridge,” he told them. “Tonight we arrive.”

“What’s the plan?” said Garner.