"I"ll try, but that might be a bit tricky," said Amber. "She"s only little and I"m not sure whether she has much idea of time."
Amber"s conversation with the little girl went on for several minutes and involved a lot of pointing at the sky. Finally, Amber nodded and turned back to the others.
"OK. I"ve been asking her what the sky was like at the time the child-stealers came. She remembers the position of the moon and a couple of the constellations. If she"s remembering right, I"m guessing Khalid was taken roughly two hours ago."
"Two hours," said Paulo. "They will not be too far ahead, not in a Unimog." He patted the side of the Monster. "She is a good machine. I could catch them."
Alpha Force looked at one another as the same idea to go and get Khalid back formed in all their minds. Amber bent down to the little girl and gently told her not to worry any more. They would sort everything out. The little girl gave a relieved smile and raced off to see what was for breakfast.
"These tracks won"t be around for much longer," said Alex, watching the little girl skip away. "There"ll be other traffic soon and that wind is getting stronger."
"What about Philippe?" said Paulo. "Won"t he wonder where we"ve gone?"
Hex shrugged. "I don"t see why. He knew we were planning to set off at dawn with Khalid. He"ll just presume that we"ve gone off on our trip to the dunes, as planned."
"The Monster"s packed and ready to go," said Amber. "Guys? What do you think?"
"Why not?" said Li with a grin, climbing up into the cab. "Let"s go get Khalid."
NINE.
The Monster"s engine idled as Paulo stared out through the dusty windscreen at the deep wadi which cut across their path. The Unimog was poised on the edge of the bank that led down into the dry river bed. Paulo had already negotiated the vehicle across several wadis, but none of them had sides as steep as this one.
"Can you do it?" asked Amber.
Paulo looked across at her, then back to the slope. His jaw was clenched so tightly, the muscles were jumping.
"We"re out in the middle of nowhere, here," said Amber. "If you don"t think you can do it, we"ll find another way round. It"s not worth the risk-"
Amber stopped as Paulo engaged four-wheel drive and put the Unimog into first gear. He touched the accelerator and eased the big vehicle over the edge of the slope. Everyone gasped as it plunged down the bank at such an acute angle it seemed almost vertical.
"Brake! Brake!" yelled Amber as the Unimog"s cha.s.sis groaned and shook. Instead, Paulo took his foot from the brake pedal and placed it on the floor.
"Are you crazy?" yelled Amber.
"If I brake on a slope like this, I will put her into a skid," said Paulo, gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. "She is in the lowest gear. I must let her find her own way down."
Just then, the Unimog began to slide as the wheels lost traction.
"Brake! Now!" demanded Amber, but Paulo did the opposite. He touched the accelerator gently until he felt the speed of the spinning wheels catch up with the speed of the descent. The wheels bit, finding traction again, and he eased back off the throttle.
It worked. The Unimog creaked and groaned its way down to the dry bed of the wadi, then jounced off the slope and on to level ground. Paulo let out a sigh of relief and headed out across the dry river bed. Almost immediately he encountered another problem as the Unimog drove into a drift of soft sand that had gathered in the wadi. The engine roared as the wheels lost traction again. Quickly, Paulo accelerated to keep the momentum going. If the Monster slowed too much, they would become bogged down and they could not afford any delays.
"Come on," he muttered fiercely. "Come on!"
The Monster wallowed for a few seconds, then the combination of low gear and four-wheel drive triumphed and the big wheels found enough traction to break free of the soft sand on to firmer ground. It lurched forward with a jerk and they all jolted back in their seats.
"Watch it, Paulo!" yelled Hex from one of the back seats. He held up his palmtop. "I"m talking to my friends here! I"ve hit so many wrong keys, they"re going to think I"m an idiot."
"Yeah, well, it"s about time they found out the truth," snapped Amber, turning from her seat in the front to glare at Hex. "Paulo"s doing his best," she added, forgetting that she had been calling him crazy just a minute earlier. "Right, Paulo?"
Paulo said nothing, but as he stared at the far bank of the wadi, trying to pick the best route back out, his face was stony. A tense silence descended in the cab of the Unimog. They were all getting edgy. Alpha Force had been pursuing the slavers for ten hours and it had been tough going.
Alex was in the front of the cab. He was their tracker, following the tyre tracks of the other Unimog across the desert while Paulo concentrated on the driving. The trouble was, the tracks had become progressively harder to follow as the day went on. To start with, they had been driving across the type of desert known as reg: vast plains of silty gravel and stones that had been deposited over ten million years earlier when the Sahara was mainly sea. The tyre tracks were easy to follow in the reg, standing out clearly in the silt as two darker lines stretching towards the horizon, but then they had disappeared into a great field of boulders. Paulo had slowed to a crawl to negotiate the boulders, but even so Alex still had to keep clambering down from the cab to scout around for the tracks in the blazing sun. At midday the boulders gave way to a stretch of completely smooth saltpan. By that time the sun was a ball of white fire directly above them, which meant there were no shadows: what little impression the tyres had made on the saltpan was virtually invisible. Alex"s eyes were burning with the strain of peering through the glare by the time they reached the other side of the saltpan.
Hex had spent the hours crouched over his palmtop in the back of the cab, weaving together all the fine threads of information he could find on the child slave trade, and in particular the Scorpion. Slowly, using all his far-flung contacts, he had built up a picture of a shadowy individual who had been operating for years, making regular trafficking runs from Nigeria, Benin or the Ivory Coast, up through the Sahara to Morocco. The authorities and the child protection agencies knew about him, but they had never managed to catch him. He was very good at staying invisible, with a knack for knowing who to bribe, who to threaten and even, if the rumours were correct, who to kill.
"Keep away from the Scorpion," warned one of Hex"s Nigerian contacts. "This man is very bad news." Hex scowled when he saw that message on the palmtop"s little screen. He was beginning to wonder whether Alpha Force had taken on more than they could manage this time.
Amber sat between Alex and Paulo, navigating with the GPS unit. As well as recording their route and inputting waymarks so that they would be able to find their way back again, she was using the information stored in her unit"s worldwide map database to try to work out where the Scorpion was heading. He was going north, that was for sure. Her guess was that he was heading for a small town on the western tip of the Algeria-Morocco border. He was keeping his head down, travelling off-road and staying well away from any of the trans-Saharan highways. In one way this was good there were bandits operating on the highways and the routes were patrolled by military convoys but it also meant that they were heading into one of the more remote parts of the Algerian Sahara, and that made Amber nervous. She could map-read and calculate co-ordinates with the best of them, and the GPS unit would pinpoint any location in the desert to within fifty metres, but all that counted for nothing if they were involved in an accident. It was useless knowing exactly where you were, if you were trapped in an overturned Unimog with nothing but sand for miles around. To make things worse, she had discovered the tracker unit she was supposed to have given to Philippe still wedged in the door pocket where she had shoved it the night before. That meant their only contact with the outside world was via Hex"s palmtop.
Li was doing nothing at all. She was a pa.s.senger and it was driving her crazy. Everyone else had a job to do, while she slouched in the back of the Unimog feeling very much like a spare part. She was still ashamed of her behaviour at the minefield. She had put Hex and Paulo in danger because of her own stupidity and now all she wanted to do was prove to the rest of Alpha Force how useful she could be. But so far they seemed to be managing fine without her. Li scowled and slumped further down in her seat.
Paulo set the Unimog up the slope that would take them out of the wadi. The big engine did not let him down, and minutes later he was easing the front wheels on to the level ground at the top of the bank. He let out a deep breath and rolled his shoulders to try to ease the tension. That had been the most difficult bit of driving so far, and the terrain had not been easy.
Alex squinted through the fierce glare of the sun as he looked for the tyre tracks they were following. "Over there," he said, pointing the way for Paulo, and they headed on in silence, moving further and further north across a stretch of level ground towards a long line of dunes.
The Scorpion"s Unimog was still nowhere in sight half an hour later, when they had reached the beginnings of the dune system. Alex rubbed his eyes tiredly, then sat up in his seat as he spotted the tyre tracks swinging over to the left. "They"re turning," he said, pointing the way for Paulo.
Paulo nodded but, instead of turning left to follow the tracks, he brought the Monster to a gentle stop and turned off the engine.
"What?" said Amber, waking from a fitful doze. "What"s happening? Why have we stopped?"
"I was wrong," admitted Paulo. "I thought I could catch them. I cannot. We are averaging forty kilometres an hour, no more. If I keep following in their tracks, we may never catch them."
"What"s the alternative?" asked Hex, leaning forward in his seat.
Paulo turned to look at Amber. "You say they are heading north, always north?"
"Yeah. Straight as an arrow."
"Straight as an arrow, all this way. So why have they turned now?"
"Ah," said Alex, realizing what Paulo was getting at. "They"re going round the dunes."
Li sat up, suddenly catching on. "So. If we go across the dunes instead of all the way round, we might just catch up with them."
Amber was working intently on the GPS system, bringing up a 3D map of the area, including the dune system. "OK. This could work," she said, holding out the screen for the others. "That"s the dune system. See? There are two things in our favour. The shape is long but very narrow so we could scoot across while they"re still working their way around the edge."
"And the other thing in our favour?" asked Alex.
"Going by this map, the dunes are all reasonably low. That"s good from a driving point of view. Right, Paulo?"
"Yes, but there must be a reason why the slavers have chosen to make a diversion," said Paulo. "I think they have driven this route many times before. They know the problems. It will be difficult driving. It could be dangerous. We must decide together."
Li looked around the group, unable to keep the excitement out of her eyes. "All those in favour of going over the top, raise your hand!" She stuck her hand straight up in the air. Alex followed her lead, then Amber. Hex hesitated, looking at Paulo then raised his hand too.
Paulo nodded, then turned the ignition key. The Monster roared into life. He patted her dashboard, then turned her nose towards the dunes and moved off.
TEN.
As the Monster fought her way across the spine of the dune system the rest of Alpha Force saw how good a driver Paulo was. Time after time, he took the Unimog up vast slopes, moving diagonally across the incline at just the right speed to avoid bogging down in the soft sand. Time after time, he clambered down from the cab and climbed the next dune-face to see what was on the other side and plan his next move. He kept to the firmer sand of the windward slopes where he could, riding high on the side of the dune banks so that he had a downward slope for extra momentum if he needed it. It was exhausting work but Paulo stuck at it until, finally, they came to a dune-face so steep, he knew he would have to take it head-on. If he tried to traverse that incline diagonally, the Unimog would roll.
Paulo sighed and prepared to clamber down from the cab once more and check out the other side of the dune.
"I"ll come with you," said Alex, grabbing his binoculars and clambering from the other side of the cab. Instantly, he felt the skin on his face and hands tighten as the sweat evaporated away in the hot wind. The sun hit the back of his neck like a hammer, and under his gandourah and sirwal the sweat formed in a slick layer. Alex licked his dry lips and reminded himself that they were all due a water break when he got back to the Unimog.
They reached the top of the dune and Paulo"s exhausted face creased into a tired smile. Ahead of them stretched a sandy plain of low, undulating rises. "Dios "Dios," he breathed. "I thought we would never reach the other side."
Alex grinned at Paulo, then peered more closely at the plain ahead of them. There was a cl.u.s.ter of low buildings about halfway across. Alex lifted his binoculars and focused.
"It"s a village," he said. "Out here in the middle of nowhere. There"s a small date palmery around an oasis and some tatty-looking mud-brick houses. A few goats on the outskirts, the usual thing." He held the binoculars out to Paulo. "It"s a poor place, not much to look at, but they might be able to tell us something about the slavers."
Paulo ignored the binoculars. He was gazing intently over to the west. "We may not need to ask," he said quietly.
Alex turned to look and saw a fast-moving cloud of dust heading towards the village. Quickly, he focused the binoculars on the dust cloud and got his first look at the Scorpion"s Unimog. It was rattling along and the canvas covering over the back was rippling in the wind. The canvas was laced tightly shut to hide what was inside. Alex clenched his jaw as he imagined Khalid under that canvas, packed in with a scared huddle of other children, baking in the airless heat and hanging on to the bench seat to stop himself being flung to the floor.
"They"re definitely heading for the village," he said, lowering the binoculars. "They must be planning a stop." He scanned the open ground at the base of the dune. "See that wadi?"
Paulo gazed down at the dry river bed and nodded.
"Here"s what I think we should do," said Alex. "We"ll hide the Unimog in the wadi, then me and Amber can take one of the quads and head for the village."
"Why Amber?" asked Paulo.
"She speaks excellent French: if we"re spotted, we may need to do some fast talking," said Alex, gazing across the plain. "I"m hoping we can sneak in, though. If we take a quad, we can use those b.u.mps and rises for cover."
"And once you are there?"
"We"ll just check things out. See if we can spot Khalid. Find out how much manpower the Scorpion has. Then we"ll report back here."
Alex grinned across at Paulo and slapped him on the shoulder. "Well done, Paulo! We caught up with them! You did it."
"Not quite," said Paulo, looking back at the steep slope they had just climbed. "I still have to get us over this thing."
Ten minutes later they were back in the Unimog. "OK, everyone," cried Paulo, over the noise of the revving engine. "Are we ready?"
Alex and Amber braced their feet against the front of the cab, while Hex and Li gripped the armrests of their seats. Paulo had explained what he was going to do. He was planning to push the Monster around the bowl of the dune like a rider on the wall of death, until he had built up enough speed. Then he was going to drive straight at the incline and hope for the best. They only had one chance. If the Unimog lost momentum and slid down into the soft sand at the bottom of the dune bowl, there would be no way of getting out again.
"Go for it!" yelled Li, and Paulo floored the accelerator.
The Monster roared forward, sending up huge gouts of sand from the wheels. The cab leaned further and further over to the side as Paulo circled the bowl, building up speed. The Unimog rose higher and higher up the sides of the bowl and a cyclone of sand and dust whirled outside the cab. Alpha Force hung on, feeling as though their bones were being shaken loose inside them.
"Here we go!" yelled Paulo, twisting the wheel. The Unimog roared as he pointed its nose straight up the slope and Alpha Force were slammed back into their seats. They held their breath as the big machine tackled the incline, straining to climb higher and higher.
"Come on!" yelled Paulo. "Come on!"
And suddenly they were all yelling at the tops of their voices. "Come on!" They strained forward in their seats as though that might help the struggling engine. Slowly, the windscreen of the Unimog filled with sky and Paulo watched, trying to judge the right moment to take his foot from the accelerator. It had to be just as the front wheels of the vehicle rolled over the edge of the dune crest. If he eased off too soon, the Unimog might end up straddling the crest on its belly or, even worse, rolling back down into the bottom of the dune bowl. He timed it just right, easing off as the front wheels tipped and allowing the momentum to carry them over the crest, then he slipped into first to take them down the far slope.
Two minutes later they were neatly parked in the wadi at the base of the dune, out of sight of the village. Paulo leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
"That was extreme," he sighed with a satisfied smile.
In the end it was Alex, Amber and Li who set off to recce the village. Alex had explained to Li that if she came too, they would have to take both quads, which lessened their chances of coming up on the village un.o.bserved, but Li stubbornly refused to stay with the Unimog.
"I"m coming with you," she insisted. "I"ve been sitting in the Monster doing sweet nothing all day."
They took a twisting route, always keeping higher ground between them and the village. When they came to the last shallow rise before the settlement started, they left the quads hidden at the bottom of the rise and commando-crawled up the slope. Just before they reached the top, Alex signalled to Amber and Li to stay down while he checked things out. He was pretty sure they had not been heard or spotted, but there was no harm in being careful. Cautiously, he lifted his head above the top of the rise, then immediately ducked down again.
"Bingo," he whispered.
Alex eased the binoculars up until they were resting on the top of the rise, then he peered through them as Amber and Li crawled up on each side of him. Directly ahead of them the slavers" Unimog was parked on the edge of the village. Eight children were hunkered down in a row on the desert side of the vehicle, out of sight of the village. One of the children was Khalid. Alex had picked him out immediately, even without the binoculars. Khalid"s Arab looks and clean gandourah made him stand out from the others, who were all West Africans, dressed in crumpled, filthy clothes. There were both girls and boys, most aged between eight and twelve, Alex estimated, although one little girl looked as young as five.
"Nigerians, I think," whispered Li, gazing at the bedraggled group. "Maybe Ivory Coast. They"ve travelled a long way."
There were two men guarding the children, and a tall, rangy dog with yellow eyes was lying in the shade under the truck with its tongue lolling from its mouth. One of the men turned to lift a girba from the side of the Unimog and Alex groaned as he saw the Kalashnikov slung across the man"s back.
"Bad news," he muttered. "They"re armed."
The man opened the top of the goatskin girba and poured some of the water into his mouth while the children watched thirstily. Then he poured water for the other guard. The dog scrabbled out from under the truck, wagging its tail eagerly and the man poured a stream of water into the creature"s open mouth. Much of the water splashed into the sand in front of the children. The little girl next to Khalid began to cry with thirst and he put a comforting arm around her shoulders. Finally, the guard turned and casually ran the upturned girba along the row of children. Quickly, they held out their cupped hands to catch their share of the sparkling stream of water, then they drank thirstily and licked their palms, catching every last drop.
"Oh, this is evil!" fumed Li. "We have to do something!"
"It"s not going to be that easy," muttered Alex as he spotted the second guard"s Kalashnikov propped against the wheel of the Unimog.
"Where"s the Scorpion?" asked Amber, her sharp eyes noting that neither of the men at the Unimog had a scorpion tattoo on his arm.
"Good question," said Alex.
He panned the binoculars in a slow arc, trying to spot the leader of the traffickers. The village behind the Unimog was nothing more than a ramshackle cl.u.s.ter of mud-brick houses that had seen better days. Many of them were derelict and abandoned. The houses were built so close together that the narrow, winding alleys between them were like dark tunnels. The oasis on the edge of the village was plainly failing after the years of drought in the Sahara. The network of irrigation ditches was dry and crumbling. There was still an inner ring of date palms growing around the well, but the skeletal remains of a much bigger palmery formed a sombre outer ring. There was a sandy square with a few mange-ridden camels gathered around a rusty water tank, and that was it.
As Alex studied the village, he saw a flurry of movement in the doorway of one of the houses. A tall, good-looking Arab man emerged from the house. He was wearing a layered headcloth to protect his head and neck from the sun, but that was his only concession to desert clothing. The rest of his outfit was right out of a bad Western. His cowboy boots were highly polished, his jeans were skin-tight and the sleeves of his checked shirt were rolled up to the elbow.
"Got him," grunted Alex as he spotted the scorpion tattoo on the man"s left forearm. The Scorpion strolled towards the Unimog and Alex checked him for weapons. He was not carrying a gun or a rifle, but a large knife in a tooled leather sheath hung from his belt.
Two boys followed the Scorpion from the house. The older one, a boy of about ten, held his head high and did not look back as he walked away. He was holding the hand of a younger boy. His little brother was crying and dragging his feet, looking back at the woman who stood in the doorway with tears streaming down her face. She held out her arms towards him and looked as though she was about to run after him, but a gaunt man appeared behind her, laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and drew her back into the little house.