Paul Christopher - The Templar Cross

He tried to imagine what it would have been like for the bomber crew, most likely only four men since there would have been no need for gunners: pilot, copilot, engineer and navigator.

They would have hit the silk low because the aircraft would have been flying that way to conserve fuel. They would have hit the desert hard but close together, and then they would have taken stock of their situation. It couldn't have been good.

The men would almost certainly have had neither water nor food, and if by some chance they did, it wouldn't have been much-sandwiches perhaps, or a thermos or two of coffee. Four men, probably relatively small in stature, as most airmen were at the time, would last seventy-two hours at most and probably much less if they traveled in the heat of the day. They would have known that, but they would have tried anyway. But how far can a person walk in the shifting sands of a desert in the three or four days they had before they collapsed and died? Sixty miles, seventy, a hundred at most. Not enough.

Somewhere along the way they would have started stripping off their clothes, the worst thing they could do since it would only accelerate the evaporation of their sweat, hastening their dehydration. Their tongues would thicken, their lips would crack and their noses would begin to bleed.

Eventually they'd stop perspiring and fever would set in. As the cells in their brains dried out convulsions and hallucinations would begin. Trapped within the skull the cerebral fluid would actually begin to boil. Soon after that the kidneys and other major organs would begin to fail one after the other, leading quickly to toxemia, plasma loss, coma and eventually death.

It would be an inexorable, inevitable, excruciating way to die. Somewhere in the rolling sands around him, probably mummified, were the remains of those four men, anonymous and long forgotten, their mission lost to eternity.

Somehow, as Holliday plodded on hour after hour, it became terribly important that he find out the names of the crew of Your Heart's Desire, and he vowed to do just that if he somehow managed to get out of his own predicament. Failed or not, the mission and the men who flew it deserved their small place in history.

On the thirteenth day of their journey the landscape began to change; the rolling dunes gave way to smaller, more sculpted waves of sand, broken with hard crust desert and stretches of barren, hard, rocky plateaus with very little sand. They traveled faster on the plains and traveled longer, sometimes far into the numbingly cold nights. There was a tension in the air; Holliday had seen it often enough on forced marches-they were nearing their destination. It couldn't be soon enough for him; Peggy had been missing for more than three weeks now and Holliday was beginning to fear terribly for her safety. Rafi was almost frantic with worry.

On the fourteenth day the landscape changed again. The broken plain gave way to a massive escarpment rising above the flatland at least two thousand feet, a huge, apparently impenetrable wall directly in front of them. As they approached it throughout that day Holliday began to pick out sandy scars in the face of the escarpment, the mouths of wadis, or ancient riverbeds forming sloping approaches to the high wall.

Toward the end of the day they reached one of these and barely slowed as they climbed up the escarpment along the winding trail of sand. Holliday tried to imagine what this place would have looked like when man first walked here a hundred thousand years ago. Probably paradise; in huge areas of Libya and Egypt the weather ran in cycles, drying and wetting, the desert expanding and contracting like a gigantic lung. As recently as the time of the pharaohs much of the landscape they were traveling through had been home to waving fields of grain, tumbling rivers and streams and forests and veldts alive with herds of wandering animals and their predators. The riverbed they were working their way along was easily as wide as the Mississippi and had probably been much faster. It was all very hard to imagine.

They reached the top of the escarpment and left the sand-filled riverbed as darkness fell, and by the time they pitched camp for the night they had traveled a good distance along it. The next day was spent moving across the top of the plateau, traveling more west than south now. Every now and again they passed the abandoned ruins of mud- and salt-brick villages and once something that had to have been an old colonial fort, Italian or French. At noon they actually crossed a road lined with electrical transmission towers and in late afternoon they crossed another.

By Holliday's rough calculations they had traveled at least six hundred miles from the wreckage of Your Heart's Desire. That put them closer to the border of Algeria, Niger, and Chad than anywhere else. From one frying pan into another, he thought. Algeria was a corrupt semidictatorship and a hotbed of ethnic Berber al-Qaeda terrorists, Niger was in the midst of a Tuareg insurrection and Chad had their UFDD rebel alliance. Who was it who said that God had forgotten Africa? A very bad place for an American to be, worse for a woman and suicide for an Israeli. Getting out of this was going to be some piece of work.

The sixteenth day turned out to be the last. Late in the morning they reached another, much narrower wadi and instead of crossing it they turned abruptly, following it almost due north. By midafternoon the wadi petered out and they climbed up out of the ancient watercourse. They were at the edge of the escarpment, two thousand feet above a giant tract of rolling desert that reached the horizon. The small caravan came to a momentary stop.

To their left, along a precipitous goat track that angled down the face of the cliff, there was a sand rift between the main escarpment and a long extrusion of sandstone. It looked like the space between a person's thumb and forefinger. From where Holliday sat perched on his camel the sandy rift looked to be ten or twelve miles long. Big enough to hide an entire army if you wanted. To the right, in the far distance, was a large blot of green shimmering like a mirage in the light of the burning sun. Something that looked suspiciously like a paved road ran directly through it, angling along at the foot of the escarpment.

Civilization.

Holliday felt a single small surge of hope and exhilaration. He saw what the men from Your Heart's Desire had not: a way out of their predicament. He yelled to the man on the camel in front of him.

"Hey!"

The man in the Tuareg robes turned in his saddle, the lethal automatic rifle clutched in his hands. When he spoke his muffled voice was harsh and dry; he was a man who had spent his life in the parched desert.

"Matha tureed?" the Tuareg said, dark eyes peering out over the masklike veil over the lower half of his face. Holliday pointed toward the oasis in the distance. The turbaned man looked.

"Where are we?" Holliday said, his arm extended, finger still pointing. The man called to his companion on the camel ahead of him and the other Tuareg turned in his own saddle and replied in a long string of guttural Tamasheq. The man in front of Holliday nodded, then turned again.

"Wadi el Agial, sadiqi. Zinchechra. Germa."

Whatever the hell that meant.

They edged down the goat path for several hours, the unprotected drop only a gut-clenching foot or so away from their camels' slapping hooves, every lurching, swaying step threatening to be their last. Holliday had never had a problem with heights, but after twenty minutes or so he was forced to look the other way and finally simply shut his eyes against the nauseating vertigo.

They reached the bottom at about four o'clock and spent another hour crossing the flat hardpan of the little valley, heading for the fingerlike extension of the escarpment that separated them from the expanse of desert beyond.