The Lost Army of Cambyses (56 page)

the sandfall slackened off. The man was staying

where he was. There was another long silence and

then a shout: 'It looks like he's been up here,

but then he went back down again. We must have

missed him further back.'

There was a pause and then the crunch of

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receding feet. Khalifa breathed a sigh of relief,

shoulders relaxing.

'Thank you, Allah,' he mumbled.

Abdul's mobile phone started ringing.

The sound was so unexpected it took Khalifa a

couple of seconds to realize what it was. When he

did he drove his hand desperately into the holdall

in an attempt to turn the phone off. Too late. He

could hear the man above him shouting and the

slap of running feet. He squirmed frantically out

from beneath the overhang and, raising his gun,

fired off three shots in quick succession. The first

was too high, the second wide. The third hit the

man square in the forehead, throwing him back-

wards and out of sight down the far side of the

dune.

Immediately Khalifa was on his feet, scrambling

up to the dune's summit. As he reached it a burst

of gunfire ripped up the sand in front of him, forc-

ing him back and onto his stomach. There was a

pause and then another burst of gunfire, although

it wasn't aimed at the top of the dune. Khalifa

eased himself upwards. The man below had shot

out the tyres of the second dune bike. Raising his

pistol Khalifa fired, but missed. The man swung

and sprayed the dune-top with bullets again,

forcing the detective back. There was another

brief pause and then the sound of a motorbike

starting.

Khalifa counted to three and lifted his head

again. The bike was already pulling away. He

came up onto his knees and, aiming, emptied the

clip at the rider's back. The man jerked, but didn't

come off and, with no bullets left, Khalifa could

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only watch helplessly as the bike roared away

down the valley. After a hundred metres it came to

a stop and, turning in his seat, the rider fired a

volley of bullets back at the stricken Toyota. He

continued firing for five seconds and then sud-

denly, with a deafening roar that echoed far out

across the desert, the car erupted in a ball of flame,

a mushroom of heavy black smoke rising into the

air above it. The bike sped away.

For a long moment Khalifa stared down at the

furnace below, his breath coming in short, sharp

gasps, his hands trembling. Then, taking a couple

of deep gulps of air, he slowly came to his feet and

trudged back down to his bag, where the mobile

phone was still ringing. He took it out, pressed the

'Yes' key and held it to his ear.

'Yusuf, you old rogue!' boomed Abdul's voice.

'What took you so long? Just calling to make sure

my car's OK.'

Khalifa looked round at the column of velvety

black smoke spiralling upwards into the air and

his heart dropped.

'Yes, Abdul,' he lied. 'It's absolutely fine.'

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39

T H E WESTERN DESERT

Sayf al-Tha'r had been on the dune-top since

dawn, watching as beneath him more and more of

the army had slowly been uncovered. The sun had

risen, levelled and dropped again, and all the while

the excavation crater had spread inexorably out-

wards like a vast mouth levering open. By noon so

many bodies had been dug up, and so much equip-

ment stripped from them, that they'd run out of

packing crates. More would be arriving with the

camel train later that night, but they still wouldn't

be enough to deal with the thousands of artefacts

piled up below. The valley floor looked like an

enormous scrapheap, ancient weapons, armour

and bodies piled up everywhere.

Now, however, Sayf al-Tha'r had turned his

back on the army and was instead gazing out at

the plume of smoke rising in the distance. An hour

ago one of the patrols had radioed in to say they'd

found a set of tracks leading across the desert. The

smoke presumably indicated they'd caught up

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with whatever vehicle had made them. He should

have felt relieved. Instead he had a curious sense of

foreboding.

The boy Mehmet scrambled up beside him.

'What is it?' the man asked. 'What has

happened?'

'They found a car, Master. Destroyed it.'

'The driver?'

'He got away. Killed one of our men. The

other's on his way back.'

Sayf al-Tha'r was silent. The column of smoke

was rising higher and higher into the air, as though

some noxious black gas was hissing from a rip in

the desert surface. A breeze tugged at its upper

part, stretching and twisting it.

'Let me know when the patrol comes in,' he said

eventually. 'And send the helicopter over. The

driver can't have gone far.'

'Yes, Master.'

The boy turned and ran back down the side of

the dune. Sayf al-Tha'r began pacing, hands

locked behind his back, a cloth wrapped around

his scorched palm.

Who was this intruder, he wondered. What was

he doing out here in the middle of the desert?

Was he alone or were there others?

The more he thought about it, the more uneasy

he became. Not because he feared they'd been dis-

covered. It was more elemental than that. He

could feel something. It was as if a hand was

stretching towards him out of the past. He stared

at the plume of smoke and it seemed to him that it

had assumed an almost human form, towering

above the desert like a genie. He could make out a

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head, and shoulders, and an arm, and even two

eyes where the breeze had punched holes through

the fumes. They seemed to be looking directly at

him, glaring angrily. He turned away, annoyed at

himself for imagining such things, but he could

still feel the black shape looming malevolently at

his back. He closed his eyes and started to pray.

'You're breaking up, Abdul . . . I can't . . . you're

. . . it's . . .'

Khalifa pressed his mouth to the receiver and

made a noise that he hoped sounded like static,

then switched the mobile off. For a brief moment

he wondered whether he should call for help, but

immediately dismissed the idea. Who would he

call, after all? Chief Hassani? Mohammed Sariya?

Hosni? Even if they believed him, what could they

do? No, he was on his own. He threw the phone

into the holdall and hurried back to the top of the

dune, the air heavy with the smell of petrol and

burning rubber.

Flames were still leaping from the four-by-four's

shattered windows. Directly beneath him, at the

bottom of the slope, lay the body of the man he'd

killed, sprawled face up on the sand, one arm

twisted at an unnatural angle beneath his head. He

started down towards it, stopping briefly to check

the ruptured water container. Most of its contents

had drained away, although there was still a small

reservoir of liquid in one corner. Carefully raising

the receptacle to his lips he swallowed what was

left and continued down to the valley floor.

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The dead man's face was a gruesome mask of

blood and sand, his forehead gaping open to

reveal a mash of bone and brain within. Trying

not to look, Khalifa prised free the machine-gun

that was still clasped in the man's hand and began

to strip the body of its clothes. He didn't like

doing it, but if he was to get into Sayf al-Tha'r's

camp unnoticed he would need them. He rolled

the robe and headscarf into a bundle, grabbed the

gun and started back up the dune. After ten

metres, however, his conscience got the better of

him and, turning, he hurried back down and

scooped a shallow grave out of the loose sand. It

wasn't a proper burial, but he couldn't just leave

the body to be picked at by vultures or jackals or

whatever other creatures lived out here in this

god-forsaken wilderness. Enemy or no enemy, the

man deserved at least that small show of respect.

The gesture almost cost him dear because as he

came back up to the top of the dune he heard,

distant but unmistakable, the thud of helicopter

rotors. Another twenty seconds and he would

have been spotted. As it was, he just had time to

snatch up his holdall and scramble down beneath

the overhang before the helicopter swept over-

head, its downdraught sweeping a spray of sand

from the dune's ridge. For a minute it hovered

overhead taking in the scene and then rose and

swung away north-westwards.

His initial plan had been to get away from the

spot as quickly as possible, but with the helicopter

around it wasn't safe out in the open, so he

decided to stay where he was until dark. He

loaded the one remaining clip into his pistol,

474

jammed the black robes into his holdall and lay

back in his sand cave, lighting a cigarette and gaz-

ing out across the dune sea as it slowly faded in

the dying light of the day. An hour, he reckoned,

perhaps less. He hoped the moon wasn't going to

be too bright.

The sun had dropped beneath the horizon and the

first faint stars were twinkling in the sky when the

bike leaped over the dune and bucked down

towards the camp, skidding to a halt in front of a

pile of crates. The rider dismounted, clutching his

shoulder, and collapsed. A crowd gathered around

him, including the boy Mehmet, who knelt at his

side, took something from him and then pushed

his way out through the mass of men and sprinted

up the dune towards his master.

'Well?' said Sayf al-Tha'r.

'He found these', panted the boy, 'in the car.' He

handed over Khalifa's wallet and police ID.

'And the helicopter?'

'It's been searching, but there's no sign of him.

He's disappeared.'

The man shook his head. 'He's out there some-

where. I can feel him. Keep the helicopter

searching until nightfall. And double the guards

around the army. He'll have to come here. There's

nowhere else. Tell every man to be alert.'

'Yes, Master.'

'And send Dr Dravic up. Immediately.'

'Yes, Master.'

The boy spun and ran back down the slope. For

475

a moment Sayf al-Tha'r remained where he was,

gazing out at the column of smoke, still just visible

in the thickening twilight, and then opened the ID

card and looked down at the name and photo

inside. His face registered no emotion, although

his eyes widened fractionally, and his Adam's

apple quivered as if something was crawling

beneath the skin of his throat.

He stared at the card for almost a minute, then

slipped it into his pocket and began going through

the contents of the wallet. He removed a picture of

Khalifa's wife, another of his three children, and

another of his parents, standing arm in arm in

front of the pyramids. There was a Menatel phone

card, twelve Egyptian pounds and a miniature

book of Koranic verses. Nothing else.

Or at least he thought there was nothing else.