Desert Pursuit (2 page)

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Authors: Chris Ryan

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Mysteries & Detective Stories

BOOK: Desert Pursuit
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‘All right, then. You take over.’
Amber blinked in shock. She knew how to operate the quad, but she was uneasy around anything that had an engine. Yachts or horses were much more her style. ‘I can’t drive!’ she spluttered. ‘I – I mean, I’m the navigator. I have to keep track of our route on the GPS system—’
‘Then why don’t you do that,’ grated Alex, slamming the night-vision goggles back down over his eyes. ‘And leave the driving to me?’
Amber looked solemnly into the round, green lenses of his goggles. ‘OK, Kermit.’
Alex grinned despite himself, and Amber grinned back. Then the smile left her face as she glanced over Alex’s shoulder. ‘Quick!’ she warned. ‘They’re changing direction!’
Alex turned to see the other two quads swinging right, towards a formation of dunes on the horizon. He realized that if he cut diagonally across the flat expanse of pebbly desert, he could gain some ground and catch up with them. Gritting his teeth, he opened up the throttle and the quad bike shot forward again.
It was Khalid who had told Paulo to turn east. Khalid was a twelve-year-old Sahawari boy from the refugee camp in Algeria, where they were based. He was acting as a guide for the mission and was riding behind Paulo on the lead quad. As soon as the dunes came into sight on the eastern horizon, he had tapped Paulo on the shoulder and indicated that they should head towards them. Paulo nodded to show that he understood and glanced over at the right-flanking quad to make sure Li had seen the signal too.
Li gave a thumbs-up sign, then peeled away in a turn so tight, it made her quad bike tip up on to the two right-side wheels. Smoothly, Li rose to her feet and leaned out to the left to provide counterbalance. Her long black hair feathered out behind her as she held the quad poised on two wheels, the trailer bouncing crazily along behind. Hex, her passenger and the fifth member of Alpha Force, grabbed at the edges of his seat and hung on grimly.
‘What the hell, Li!’ he yelled.
‘
Dios
,’ muttered Paulo, watching Li’s acrobatics with a mixture of worry and pride. He was more fond of the lively Anglo-Chinese girl than he cared to admit. This was her first time off-roading but she had taken to it like a natural. Years of training in martial arts and free climbing had given her a wiry strength, snake-fast reactions and a superb sense of balance, all of which came in very handy when driving a quad at full speed through the desert. On the down side, Li was also an adrenalin junkie, always looking for the next fix of excitement and with a bad habit of acting first and thinking later. If the quad bike tipped over, both she and Hex could be crushed under the heavy machine. Paulo turned his own quad and drew alongside her, shaking his head. Li grinned and deliberately kept her quad precariously balanced for a few more seconds before letting it settle back on to all four wheels.
As soon as the quad was stable again, Hex turned to make sure that a vital piece of equipment was still inside the trailer in its padded, hard-shelled case. He had wedged it in securely enough when they were loading up, but Li’s extreme driving could dislodge an elephant. He spotted a corner of the polished steel container poking out under the covering tarpaulin and gave a relieved sigh. That piece of equipment was his responsibility and without it, the whole mission would fail.
Hex settled back into his seat and automatically checked the soft leather pouch that was strapped across his chest, inside his shirt. Tucked into the pouch was a hand-sized portable PC so technologically advanced it was not yet available on the open market. Hex grinned as he patted the leather pouch. Having a software billionaire as a friend did have some advantages. Hex was an expert hacker and code-breaker and the tiny PC was precious to him. After all, it contained most of his life. He lived in London, but the Net was his real home, and other hackers from the furthest corners of the world were closer to him than his own family.
As Hex felt the familiar shape of the palmtop under his hand, his fingers started jumping, tapping imaginary keys. When he was not on assignment with Alpha Force, Hex spent most of his spare time on the Net and now he was suffering withdrawal symptoms. His green eyes narrowed into disgusted slits as he scanned the Saharan landscape. Other people saw a stark beauty in the desert but Hex saw only millions of grains of sand, any one of which might work its gritty way into his state-of-the-art palmtop and cripple the delicate electronics. Hex was no couch potato – his body was firm and muscled as a result of regular trips to the gym – but he had never understood why some people loved the great outdoors.
‘I hate it,’ he said, without realizing he had spoken aloud.
‘What?’ called Li over her shoulder.
‘Outside,’ shouted Hex, putting a protective hand over his palmtop as Alex and Amber caught up and cut across their path, sending a stinging spray of pebbly grit into the air. ‘I hate it!’
Alex took up his original position on Paulo’s left flank and Alpha Force continued on their way, speeding through the night, racing to beat the sun. Ahead of them loomed the black silhouettes of the dunes, their mission destination.
T
WO
The dune towered above Alpha Force as they stood in a tired huddle, stretching their aching muscles. They had reached the target zone. It had been a hard journey and they were glad to be off the quads at last. The machines and their trailers were parked neatly in a row at the base of the dune and the ticking of their cooling engines was loud in the silence of the desert.
Alex moved around the group, pouring water from the jerry can he had unloaded from one of the trailers. For a moment no-one spoke as they all drank thirstily and then held out their beakers for refills. Travelling at night meant that they had not been faced with the roasting desert sun, or the drying wind that always started up at sunrise. In fact, the night-time temperature had been a reasonable thirty degrees Celsius, but still they were all feeling dehydrated. They were dressed properly for the desert in gandourah and sirwal, and the flowing shirts and baggy trousers gave some protection against water loss through evaporation, but their bodies were still adapting to the arid conditions and at the end of the journey only Khalid had seemed unaffected by thirst. Alex shook his head in admiration as he remembered how the Sahawari boy had casually turned down the offered water before loping off into the darkness to scout the area.
‘We made it,’ sighed Paulo, once he had drained his second cup of water.
‘Only just,’ said Li, nodding at the sky. Behind the top of the dune, the first streaks of crimson were beginning to show in the east.
‘Hex, how much light are you going to need for the next phase of the mission?’ asked Alex.
‘It has to be full daylight for the best results,’ said Hex.
‘That’s still a few hours away,’ judged Li.
‘Until then, we shall be well hidden here, yes?’ asked Paulo.
Amber nodded. ‘Khalid told me the army patrols keep to the road unless they see anything suspicious. As long as we stay on the western side of the dune, we’re out of sight of the road.’
‘We should still pitch the camouflage awnings,’ said Alex. ‘Just in case they have helicopters or something. The awnings’ll give us shade, too. This hollow is going to turn into an oven once the sun climbs above the dune.’
He glanced around at the others, waiting for their agreement. In the red light of dawn, they looked as tired as he felt and he knew they must be tempted to simply curl up in the warm sand and go to sleep. He certainly was. His muscles felt as though they had been put through a shredding machine and his head was still full of the whining drone of quad engines.
‘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.

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