The Age of Ra

recently. The landscape was no longer rocks and hard-packed earth, but sand, nothing but sand. Scooped, ribbed, undulating, supple sand, mile upon mile of it, wave upon wave. Sand that got everywhere: in your socks, in your hair, up your nose. David had even found grains of it under his foreskin.

Keeping the tents to his right he went in a broad semicircle, slithery-footed on the dune slopes. Finally he began his approach on the camels. He had already singled out the one he was going to take: an elderly male, so beaten and worn down that there was no more obstinacy left in it. This docile creature would, he reckoned, accept an inexperienced rider at the reins and not try to throw him off at the first opportunity.

He checked the sleepy guards again. As he looked, one of them gave in completely to tiredness and slumped to the ground. The man ended up in a sitting position, head bowed over the rifle in his lap.

The other guard turned and eyed his colleague. He muttered something to him, then went over and nudged him with a toe. The sleeping man didn't stir. Another, firmer toe-nudge sent him tumbling over onto his side in a loose heap. The second guard bent and rapped him on the cheek. He looked closer. He straightened up in alarm.

Then David heard it: a soft twang. It came from out in the darkness.

At the same moment, he saw the guard clutch his neck and reel. The rifle fell to the sand with a muffled thud. A second later, and no less quietly, the guard fell too.

David hunched down and felt his heart rate pick up and the world grow slow around him. Figures appeared at the periphery of his vision, a couple of dozen of them descending from the brows of the dunes and stealing towards the camp. They wore form-fitting black and moved in two-by-two formation, each pair swapping the lead with another pair. Their weapons, as far as he could tell, were pistols and short-stemmed crossbows, strictly not ba tech.

The first two raiders to reach the camp inspected the downed guards, then signalled the all-clear. The rest came padding in and set up a perimeter around the tent entrance. The camels made a few uneasy grumbles, but the black-clad raiders were so silent and precise in their actions that the beasts weren't unduly disturbed. Two of the raiders went into the tent and came out with one of the strongboxes. They carried it carefully between them, holding it perfectly level. Another two went in, and another. Soon all six strongboxes had been retrieved and the raiders got ready to pull out from the camp with their booty.

Then two things happened at once.

The first was that David felt the barrel of a gun being pressed against the back of his neck.

The second was that a Bedouin man emerged from the tent next door to the one where the strongboxes were kept.

The raiders froze. As did David, for a different reason.

''Stay still,'' whispered a voice behind him. ''Do not speak. Do not even breathe. Or I put a bullet in you.''

Meanwhile the Bedouin hitched up his robes and began to relieve himself on the sand. He glanced casually around him and spotted the raiders crouching by the adjacent tent. His urine trickled to a halt mid-flow, spattering onto his feet.

One of the raiders rose and aimed a pistol at the Bedouin, who would no doubt have lifted his hands in surrender if he had been less startled and if his hands had been clasping anything less crucial.

''Shoot,'' the voice behind David hissed urgently, although the man with the pistol could not possibly have heard. ''You have a silencer. Shoot the bastard.''

Gunmetal ground into David's nape, and he prayed that if a trigger was going to be pulled in the next few seconds, it wouldn't be this one.

Over in the camp the Bedouin gaped at the raider, while the raider seemed hesitant, unsure whether or not to fire on an unarmed man.

Then the Bedouin let out a beseeching cry.

Then the pistol went off, with an almost apologetic pfft.

The Bedouin collapsed. But his cry had been enough. Other Bedouin were roused from their tents. They staggered blearily outside, took stock of the situation. Rifles appeared.

The person holding David at gunpoint yelled out an order in Arabic: ''Fall back! Fall back!'' Now he knew for sure what he had suspected before, that it was a woman. Her voice, when low, had been husky, of indeterminate gender, but when raised it was clearly, unmistakably, and authoritatively, female.

The raiders obeyed, laying down fire as they retreated with the strongboxes. The Bedouin answered with a volley of bullets, trumping the handguns' silencer-suppressed pops with sharp, loud rifle cracks. Their weapons had greater range and velocity, not to mention accuracy. The raiders started dropping. Meanwhile, the camels upped and fled in terror.

The woman behind David cursed. He heard the rasping squelch of a walkie-talkie channel being opened. The woman barked a command, and somewhere far off a car engine started up. Headlight beams forked through the darkness as the engine revved, getting rapidly louder.

Muzzle flashes flickered in the camp like firefly phosphorescence. Gun smoke drifted. The Bedouin had the majority of the raiders pinned down and were blazing away at them without let-up. The strongboxes had been dropped and the raiders were concentrating on self-defence. Plunder was no longer as important as survival.

Then, cresting a dune with a raucous diesel roar, came a jeep. It skidded to a halt fifty metres from the camp. A man sprang from the passenger seat and clambered back onto the flatbed, where a heavy-calibre machine gun was mounted on swivel bearings. He took up position at the machine gun's controls and started firing. Belt-fed rounds chugged into the chamber and were spat out at the camp, striking sand, tents, and Bedouin indiscriminately. The Bedouin took cover, returning fire as best they could. Several of their shots ricocheted off the jeep, but the machine gun's burping stutter continued unabated. David watched with increasing dismay as the tents again and again fell within its veering arc of discharge, their sides flapping and ripping under the bullet impacts.

Finally he couldn't help himself. ''Stop,'' he told the woman. ''Tell them to stop. There are women and children in those tents.''

Just a brief hesitation, then she said, ''So? I do not care.''

''Well, I fucking do.''

David leapt to his feet, heedless of the woman and her gun.

''Take one step towards that jeep,'' she warned, ''and I will…''

Ignoring her, he ran headlong into the camp. All the way he expected to feel the smack of a bullet impact in his back. It didn't come. Perhaps the woman had decided that if he wasn't going for the jeep then he couldn't do any harm. Besides, down in the camp there were enough stray bullets flying around to do the job for her.

He lunged into one of the women's tents. There was shrieking and wailing inside, and he saw a wizened grandmother, possibly the oldest person in the goum, lying on the rugs with half her face missing. A middle-aged woman was prone over the corpse, sobbing. Others were hoisting up the back of the tent to create a gap to crawl out through. David bent and helped. The girls went first, then their mothers. He urged them to run, go as far as they could as fast as they could into the darkness. They didn't understand his words but they understood his tone. He grabbed the mourning woman and shoved her through the gap. Waiting arms on the other side seized her and bundled her away to safety.

Ducking low, David made for the next tent in line, which happened to be ''his'' tent.

Only the boys remained inside — and Uncle Chessboard Smile. He was on his knees, holding two of the boys to his chest and cowering behind them. They boys protested and squirmed but Uncle Chessboard Smile had a grip like iron. His human shield wasn't going anywhere.

Bullets whanged and thwacked through the tent's blanket walls. David made a dive for Chessboard, locking an arm around his neck. The Bedouin let go of the boys in order to reach backwards and grapple with David. He clawed at David's face, but he was not the only one with a grip like iron. David clung on, tightening the hold, pushing Chessboard's head forward with one arm and crushing his windpipe with the other. The two boys weighed in to help, grabbing their rapist relative's flailing hands. Chessboard choked and gurgled. His efforts to resist grew feebler. His eyes bugged. His tongue bulged. David did not let up until he heard and smelled bowels loosening. Then, to make doubly certain Chessboard was dead, he twisted the man's neck till it snapped.

Having seen the boys safely out of the camp, David prepared to move to the next tent. Then he noticed that the gunfire had slackened off. The rifles were shooting infrequently and the machine gun wasn't shooting at all. He surveyed the scene. The raiders appeared to have withdrawn completely. He couldn't see them or the jeep