dozen strides across, its rim clear to see, and there were other, smaller, circle shapes near to it, and a scattering of dark grey stones.
The crater had a raised lip. Five hundred years before, or five thousand, or five million, a mass of rock had hurtled down from the heavens. Having burst the atmosphere it had detonated on impact.
The entry heat would have melted the external parts of the rock, leaving them as blackened slag, fusing the iron ore that was its signature, and creating intense heat sufficient to turn sand to glass.
There would have been, in that part of the Sands years before, the equivalent of an explosion by five kilotonnes of TNT. Perhaps there had been people close by, perhaps the desert had been as empty as now, but anything living within hundreds of metres of the ejecta field would have been killed. Her mind, mechanically, made calculations and estimates of the size of the meteorite, while her thoughts were on the young man who had saved her, who had told her, with steel authority, 'You never met me, I was never here… You never saw my face.'
Beth had been eight times to the Wabar site, the ninth largest in the world, with a principal crater four hundred metres across where an iron core mass of three thousand tonnes had impacted. The largest known was in Arizona, fourteen hundred metres in diameter, but to Beth that was a tourist site, boring, and she had not visited it. Nor had she gone to the site at Chicxulub, on Mexico's Yucatan coast, which dated back sixty-five million years: there, a rock said to have been the size of Everest had hit the earth's surface at perhaps six thousand miles an hour and had caused such seismic shocks as to destroy the dinosaur population and shift fractionally the earth's orbit – coachloads went there, utterly boring.
His fingers had been at her throat, and she had felt no fear. Over the years men had tried to impress her, had put on peacock feathers
… He had not. The men she had known, at university and in her social life in London, and on the field trips, had sought to create an indebtedness, had bought her dinner, taken her to the theatre, carried her bags ostentatiously, tried to insinuate themselves… He had not.
There were men who had made her laugh, and men who had demonstrated their cleverness with intense and earnest talk… He had refused to answer her questions. Men told her their life stories
… She knew nothing of him.
There was not one person in the world, no one she knew, to whom she would have talked about the encounter in the dunes, not even her mother. He had wanted nothing of her. There had been a serenity about him, a strength, and a gentleness when he had moved her arms to stand and slip away while she pretended to sleep.
What confused her most – at Shaybah she met Arabs from every country in the Middle East, Yemenis, Egyptians, Kuwaitis and Jordanians, and there were labourers from Pakistan, but she could not place or match his accent.
Every aspect of her life was based on certainty, except him. No name, no start point and no destination. She cursed out loud.
Her voice, yelling the obscenity, rolled back at her from the sand wall. Angry, as if he watched her, she flounced back to the Land Rover, snatched up her camera, her samples bag and clipboard. She started to work where no other human had stood before, but she could not escape him.
For the first time, Caleb rode. He would not have done but Ghaffur insisted. Ghaffur made him ride, shouted at him in his high-pitched voice, and showed him. Ghaffur said that if they were to catch the caravan then Caleb must learn, and that if he fell off he should mount again. He had to ride because they must rejoin the caravan by nightfall.
The boy called the camel the Beautiful One.
Caleb rolled, rocked on the hump. The Beautiful One went her own way at her own speed. Caleb had no control over her. He sat on a saddle of sacking and clung to the reins or to her neck and clamped his thighs to her flanks, but he survived, did not fall… Again he crossed the chasm. The memory was from far back, rain on his face, darkness and bright lights around him, and the quiet of the Sands was replaced with raucous noise: it was a fairground and he rode a roller-coaster. Boys screamed and girls shrieked… but the desert was around him, and the quiet. It had been something from the past, breaking into his memory, and he rode the hump and obliterated it.
The Beautiful One crossed the sand with long, weary strides. He had seen the way Rashid treated his camels; foul-tempered to the men he escorted, but sweet with the animals – almost love. The boy turned often, as if expecting to see that he had been pitched off, but there was not the usual mischief on the young face. They made time. Caleb realized that the boy had caught from his father a new suspicion of his resolve, and had caught it, too, from Hosni and Fahd and Tommy: all of them – without his intervention – would have killed Beth Jenkins and would have left her body for the wind and sand to strip, for the sun to rot.
Twice they found the tracks of the caravan, each time close to a gully between the dunes where the sand was sheltered from a brisk wind. Each time they had gone through the gully, the tracks were lost. The surface of the sand seemed to float and it filled the hoofprints. Caleb marvelled that the boy could go with certainty after the caravan when he, himself, saw no tracks.
They did not stop to rest, eat or drink. He perched on the hump, bounced on it, would not fall. He had forgotten her, she was no part of him, the long night was behind him, and the wind blew the smell of her from his robe.
'I've got a target.' Gonsalves was flushed with excitement at the Ground Control's door. They needed the excitement he peddled: the door hadn't been more than half open, and he'd only had a glimpse of the back of the pilot's head and the profile of the sensor operator's, but the shoulders and back postures told him excitement was in short supply. 'I've got a real target for you.'
He had been strapped into the Cessna for the flight down, had never loosened his belt. Now he paced the tiny space behind their workbench. He thought that the pilot desperately wanted to believe him, that the sensor operator was suspicious of gifts that might be snatched away.
'What I'm telling you is for real. Doesn't come often, but this is HumInt, it is eyewitness. What I told you stands. They are hunted, they are regrouping, they are trying so damned hard to get their shape again. What we have is a camel caravan, and it has crossed the Oman-Saudi border and it has gone into the Rub' al Khali. By going the hard way, they tell us they have with them at least one man of exceptional value, but they are also carrying sophisticated weapons that we consider to be of lesser but still considerable importance.'
He took from his briefcase a photocopied sheet. He reached forward and slapped it on to the bench between the console the sensor operator used and the joystick that the pilot's fingers were on.
'That is a Stinger box. As it's reported to me, second hand, it is at least similar to the ones the HumInt saw loaded on the camels.
Stinger is a shoulder-launched ground-to-air missile, it-'
The woman said, 'I think we know what a Stinger is, Mr Gonsalves.'
Deflated, Gonsalves said, 'There are six of them, loaded in pairs on three camels.'
On the workbench, covered for protection with Cellophane sheeting, was a large-scale map of the Rub' al Khali. Over the sheeting were the squares they had drawn, and a pitiful few had crosses on them with dates and times.
The woman did the talking for herself and the pilot. 'Where did the caravan cross the border?'
Gonsalves checked his own map, then stabbed with his pencil at theirs. The point rested on the broken line of the international frontier.
'Very good,' she said quietly. 'And when does the Humlnt say the caravan crossed?'
'These people are vague. They don't do days of the month like we do.'
'When?' Her question was icy calm.
'More than a week, could be ten days, up to two weeks. We were lucky to get this much.'
Disappointment clouded the pilot's face, his eyes losing hope.
Gonsalves could see them through the thick lenses of the spectacles.
She talked for him.
'We would have to estimate, Mr Gonsalves, that a camel train can move at twenty-five land miles on a bad day, thirty-five miles on a good day – something between there on an average day.'
She used a black Chinagraph and drew three half-circles on the Cellophane, each covering more of the box squares than the last. He understood. A great segment of the desert was enclosed by the outer half-circle, and its
