by Chris Ryan
‘You survival experts. So boring,’ sighed Li, sending Alex a mischievous sideways glance from her uptilted eyes. ‘Do this. Do that. Always planning ahead. Can’t you, just for once, live in the moment?’
‘If you want to survive—’ began Alex.
‘—you have to be prepared,’ finished Li, crossing her eyes comically.
Paulo laughed at Li, then raked his dark curls back from his forehead and assumed a serious expression. ‘The four elements of survival are—’
‘—shelter, water, food, fire,’ recited Amber, Li, Paulo and Hex in perfect unison.
‘Well, they are!’ said Alex, trying to look offended. ‘But not necessarily in that order. The thing is,’ he continued, in a deadpan, lecturing tone, ‘you have to take account of your environment—’
He broke off as the others scattered, heading for the trailers and leaving him standing on his own.
‘No, listen,’ he continued as he followed them. ‘This is really interesting . . .’
Four plastic beakers flew through the air, aimed directly at his head. Alex dodged them easily, then began helping to unload the trailers with a broad grin on his face. He had hardly seen the others since Christmas, when they had spent a couple of weeks on Paulo’s ranch after completing a successful mission in Ecuador, and it felt good to be part of a team again.
They worked well together, moving quietly and efficiently to erect the awnings over the quads and trailers. The desert camouflage colours would hide the machines from all but the closest inspection. The awnings had a skeleton of fibreglass poles which, once assembled, kept them rigid and anchored. Within fifteen minutes the quads and trailers were hidden under the awnings and there was enough space around the machines for six people to stretch out in the shade.
Once the trailers were unloaded and the awnings in place, the team split up. Paulo overhauled the quads, checking oil and water and topping up the fuel. The machines had to be primed and ready in case a quick escape was needed.
Alex and Li set up the stove and started preparing a meal. It was against all Alex’s instincts to use the stove. He would much prefer to light a fire. He had his survival tin in his belt pouch, with his knife in a sheath beside it. Normally, that was all he ever needed, but fuel was scarce in the desert and, at least with the stove, there would be no tell-tale smoke to give away their position.
Hex sat down with his palmtop. His task was to send a progress report back to their base in Algeria. The flat aerial in the lid of the palmtop meant that he could connect with the nearest communications satellite and then surf the Net from anywhere in the world.
Amber unclipped the three GPS units from the handlebars of the quads and sat down cross-legged on the sand with the small black boxes laid out in front of her. They looked a bit like calculators with oversized display panels, but they were a lot more sophisticated than that. The initials GPS stood for global positioning systems, which meant that the units used satellite technology to navigate with pinpoint accuracy anywhere in the world.
There had been very few landmarks along the route they had taken that night, but every time Amber had spotted one she had carefully stored it as a waypoint in the memory of her quad’s GPS unit. Now she needed to key the same information into the other two GPS units. That way, if the quads became separated for any reason, the drivers would each be able to find their way back over the border into Algeria by using the GPS backtracking facility.
Amber switched on all three GPS units, then sat back to wait while they locked on to the NAVSTAR system, a network of twenty-four satellites owned and operated by the US military. Once the units were receiving signals from three or four of the satellites, then they would be ready to give an accurate position, but it usually took a couple of minutes to get a fix. While she waited, Amber looked across at Hex. He was hunched over his palmtop and his fingers were flying across the keys at such a speed, they were only a blur. Her face creased into an affectionate smile. As a rule, she would rather die than let Hex see her looking at him with anything but disdain, but once he was on the Net he was lost to the world. A herd of stampeding camels could race through the camp and he would not even glance up from the screen.
‘You like him?’ said a soft voice behind her.
Amber jumped and twisted round in the sand, her eyes wide with shock. She was holding one of the GPS units in her hand and, in the green light thrown out from the little screen, a face from a horror movie loomed into view. The lips were pulled back in a lopsided grimace and the whole of one side of the face, from chin to brow, was a mass of shiny, puckered scar tissue. The ear was a shrivelled stump and the scalp surrounding it was hairless and pulled tight against the skull.
Amber gave a low, frightened scream and dropped the GPS unit. As soon as the green light from the screen was gone, the horror mask rearranged itself into the familiar, scarred features of Khalid, their young guide. He had made his way back into the camp so silently, no-one had heard him arrive. Instantly, Amber regretted her scream, but Khalid’s lopsided grin remained in place. He was not at all self-conscious about his mangled face. It had been with him since he was a baby, strapped to his mother’s back as she and his father cleared the ground around their date palms. They had returned to their home in Western Sahara after the ceasefire had been declared and had begun to reclaim the overgrown oasis, but they had disturbed a buried landmine. Khalid’s father and mother had both been killed. He had been protected from the blast by his mother’s body, except for the left half of his face, which had been peeping over her shoulder as she bent to her work. This was partly why thousands of Sahawari refugees remained in the camps in Algeria, despite the ceasefire. Their homeland was sown with thousands upon thousands of landmines.
It was also the reason why Alpha Force was in Western Sahara that night.
‘Khalid! Don’t creep up on me like that!’ hissed Amber, putting her hand to her heart. ‘You scared me.’
‘You like him?’ repeated Khalid teasingly, in the broken English he had picked up from the foreign aid workers in the refugee camp. Like most Arabs living in Algeria, French was his second language, but he preferred to practise his English when he had the chance.
‘Hex? Are you kidding? Perlease . . .’
‘I think answer is yes,’ grinned Khalid.
Amber could feel a blush spreading across her face and frantically searched around for something to say. Alex, Paulo and Li were already listening with amused interest. She had to change the subject before Hex tuned into the conversation.
‘So, is it all quiet out there?’ she asked, busying herself with the GPS units.
‘All is quiet,’ said Khalid.
‘In that case,’ said Alex, casually getting to his feet, ‘I’m just going to have a quick look up top.’
‘Not further than top,’ warned Khalid. ‘Is danger further.’
‘Not further,’ promised Alex. He looked over at Hex, but Hex was still lost on the Net. He shrugged and looked over at Paulo. ‘Coming?’
Paulo nodded and grabbed two sets of night-vision goggles from the quads. He handed one pair to Alex and they made their way over to the base of the dune.
‘Ready?’ asked Paulo.
Alex nodded. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
THREE
Hex hardly glanced up from his palmtop as they started to climb, but Li, Amber and Khalid all stopped what they were doing to watch. Their faces were serious as they followed Alex and Paulo’s slow progress up the steep slope. They all knew what was waiting on the other side of the dune.
When Alex and Paulo reached the top, they went down on to their bellies and crawled the last couple of metres. Khalid had said it was all quiet, but that was no reason to carelessly skyline themselves. Once they were in position, they both lowered the night-vision goggles over their eyes. They lay there in silence for a few minutes, taking in the scene below, then Alex tapped Paulo on the shoulder and they wriggled down the slope until it was safe to stand again. Their faces
were grim as they flipped up the goggles and shared a look before turning to begin the trek back down.
‘Still there?’ asked Li, when Alex and Paulo arrived back at the base of the dune.
‘Still there,’ said Alex briefly, heading for the stove to check on the progress of the boil-in-the bag meals he and Li were preparing. Paulo took the night-vision goggles back to the quads and began stowing away the jerry cans of fuel, oil and water he had been using. Amber watched them both for a moment, but neither of them said any more. She looked at their grim faces and bit back the questions she wanted to ask. They would talk when they were ready.
She returned to her work on the GPS units and Khalid settled down to watch her. He was fascinated with them, but Amber was more impressed with Khalid’s navigational skills. She considered herself to be a pretty expert navigator, but Khalid’s ability to find his way through almost featureless desert without a map or compass was way beyond her capabilities.
‘Tell me how you found your way here tonight, Khalid,’ she said.
‘The stars,’ said Khalid.
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s fine as a basic direction finder, but how do you find your way right to this particular dune? They all look the same to me.’
‘We leave, how you say, signs?’
‘Markers?’
Khalid nodded. ‘We put stones.’
‘In piles? Cairns?’
Khalid nodded again.
‘A bit like this,’ said Amber, holding out one of the GPS units so that Khalid could watch what she was doing. ‘I’ve put electronic markers on to this, see? That one there, that’s the location for the ruined fort we passed. And that’s the position of the big oasis we could see on the horizon. Do you know the one I mean?’
Khalid’s lopsided smile disappeared. He nodded and looked away.
‘What?’ asked Amber. ‘What is it?’
‘My family.’
‘That was the oasis where they died? I’m sorry, Khalid. My parents are dead too, you know. They were killed in a plane crash. I should have been on the plane with them, but I changed my mind at the last minute. It was sabotage. Do you know what that means?’
Khalid nodded. ‘Why?’
‘They were secretly involved in some very dangerous stuff,’ said Amber. ‘They wanted to help people, you see. People too poor or trapped to help themselves. They wanted to make a difference – something more than just giving money away. They worked undercover all over the world. They put themselves in danger and made some very nasty enemies and then—’ Amber shrugged and gave Khalid a wobbly smile – ‘and then, one of their enemies decided to stop them.’
‘And now, you do same as parents?’ asked Khalid.
‘We all do,’ said Li, sitting down beside Amber.
‘That’s why Philippe called us in,’ said Hex, closing the lid of his palmtop and coming to join them.
‘Ah! Dr Philippe!’ smiled Khalid, his eyes shining. Philippe Larousse was his hero. He was a French plastic surgeon who came to Khalid’s refugee camp every year to work with landmine victims. He had been at the camp eleven years earlier, when the baby Khalid had been brought in after the explosion. Philippe had saved both his life and the sight in his left eye. He looked around the group, eager for any details about his hero. ‘How you meet Dr Philippe?’
‘You could say Philippe was there at the start of Alpha Force,’ said Alex, bringing over the hot food.
Paulo followed after him, hungrily sniffing the air. ‘We were all stranded on an Indonesian island and, well—’
‘—we saved his life,’ finished Amber proudly.
‘You save Dr Philippe? Then my life is yours,’ vowed Khalid, looking at Alpha Force with a new respect.
Nobody quite knew what to say to that. Paulo looked at the young boy’s serious face and rubbed his nose in embarrassment. ‘Let us eat,’ he said, taking one of the mess cans of food.
‘Don’t ask me what it is,’ warned Alex, handing out the other mess cans. ‘It’s brown and it’s hot. That’s about all I can tell you.’
By the time they had all finished eating, the sky was growing lighter by the second. It was time to retreat under the shade of the awnings and try to snatch some sleep. But first they needed to talk about the next phase of the mission. Hex unloaded the polished steel case from the quad trailer and carried it over to the circle, where everyone was looking expectantly at Alex and Paulo. The two boys glanced at one another and Paulo nodded. Alex took a deep breath and started to describe what he and Paulo had seen on the other side of the dune.
‘OK. It’s exactly as Khalid described. There’s a defensive berm running east to west.’
‘What is berm?’ said Khalid, looking puzzled.
‘That’s military-speak for a wall,’ explained Li, giving Alex a withering look. ‘He does that a lot. His dad’s in the SAS, you see, and it rubs off on him.’
‘Sorry,’ said Alex. ‘Wall. There’s a massive, defensive earth wall, built by the Moroccans during the war. It’s fortified with razor wire and mines. The ground between the wall and this dune is also, as we know, sown with mines. It’s flat, stony ground. About halfway across is where . . .’ Alex hesitated and glanced at Khalid.
‘Where my friends are?’ asked Khalid.
‘Yes. Your friends. They’re about halfway across. Two of them. Two bodies.’
Two bodies. There was a silence as the reality of their mission in Western Sahara hit home. It had all started a few weeks earlier, when the Sahawari refugees in Algeria had heard that the Moroccans were inviting a multi-national oil company into Western Sahara to look for oil. The news had been too much for one group of older Sahawari boys, who were already feeling rebellious and unhappy with their life in the camps. The boys had cooked up a plan to draw attention to the situation, which involved going into Western Sahara, defusing landmines and then bringing them back across the border. The boys had planned on using the explosive charges from the mines to blow a hole in the supply pipe from one of the oil company’s installations in Algeria, but the plan had gone horribly wrong. Two of the boys had been killed outright in the Western Saharan minefield and the other three had staggered back into the refugee camp two days later, suffering from shock and dehydration.
Philippe Larousse had called in Alpha Force because he suspected that the remaining three boys were planning to try again. Once Alpha Force had arrived in the camp and seen the boys’ secretive, sullen faces, they had been forced to agree with Philippe’s assessment.
‘And this will stop them?’ asked Khalid, gazing at the metal case Hex was cradling.
‘Should do,’ said Hex, flipping open the case. ‘Your friends want to blow up the pipeline to get publicity for the Sahawari refugees. But if we get their publicity for them, then they won’t need to risk their lives playing with landmines.’ Hex eased a digital camcorder from the case and began to check it over. ‘We’ll film what happened here and get it out to every news station we can think of. That should keep your friends happy.’
‘Why are the bodies still there?’ demanded Amber. ‘Why haven’t the soldiers removed them?’
‘Well, for one thing, they may not have been noticed,’ said Alex. ‘There are other craters, other bodies out there. Animals that wandered on to the minefield.’
‘But surely they can tell the difference between people and animals?’ asked Li.
Alex and Paulo shared a look but said nothing.
‘That bad?’ asked Hex softly.
Li crossed her arms and stared at Alex. ‘We should do it.’
‘Retrieve the bodies?’ Alex shook his head. ‘Sorry, Li. If they’d been at the edge of the minefield, maybe. But they’re too far in.’
‘We should’ve brought a metal detector,’ said Amber.
‘Wouldn’t work,’ said Hex. ‘Mines are made out of plastic these days. Harder to detect.’
‘But we can’t just leave the bodies there to rot,’ pleaded Li. ‘Isn’t there some way we can reach them?’
<
br /> ‘Li,’ sighed Hex. ‘When I was on the Net earlier, I found out more than I ever wanted to know about landmines. You’d be less keen to go out there if you knew what these things can do to a person—’
‘Go on, then,’ said Li defiantly. ‘Tell me.’
Hex gave her a level stare, then began quoting word for word from the last website he had visited. ‘“A mine contains extremely explosive material that creates a wall of air and debris that expands outward at almost seven thousand metres per second. Some mines have metal projectiles inside, such as ball-bearings or nails, that puncture soft flesh and shred bones into a fine spray. The shock waves are so strong that many victims find their feet still in their boots, while splinters of their shin bones are blasted deep into the flesh of other victims. If you don’t die of blast injuries, blood loss or shock, then massive infection will result from all the dirt that the explosion has blasted into you and—”’
‘That is enough, I think,’ said Paulo quietly. He put his arm around Li’s shoulders and she hid her face against his chest.
Hex shrugged and sat back. He had made his point.
Alex got to his feet. ‘We’re all tired. We need sleep. In a few hours’ time we’ll do what we have to do and get out of here before the first patrol shows up. Job done. Simple.’
The rest of Alpha Force nodded agreement. Get the job done and get out. Simple. What could possibly go wrong?
FOUR
Hex slung the camcorder over his shoulder by its strap and squinted up at the top of the dune, shading his eyes against the glare. Alpha Force had delayed climbing the dune for as long as they dared, to get the best light for filming, but it was after nine o’clock now and the sun was high in the sky. Khalid was already in look-out position, lying on his belly at the highest point of the dune and watching the road beyond the berm. Hex waited until Khalid turned and gave him a thumbs-up signal, which meant there were no patrols in sight.