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Company officials at the Backworld Expeditions offices in Cairo realized something was wrong when the desert safari group failed to arrive in the fabled city of Timbuktu on schedule. Twenty-four hours later, pilots of the aircraft that was chartered to return the tourists to Marrakech, Morocco, flew a search pattern to the north but saw no sign of the vehicles.

Fears intensified after three days passed and Major Fairweather had still failed to report in. Mali government authorities were alerted and they cooperated fully, sending out military air and motorized vehicle patrols to backtrack the safari’s known route across the desert.

Panic began to reign after the Malians failed to find any sighting of people or the Land Rovers during a concentrated search lasting four days. An army helicopter flew over Asselar and reported seeing nothing but a dead and abandoned village.

Then on the seventh day, a French oil prospecting team, pushing south along the Trans-Saharan Motor Track, discovered Major Ian Fairweather. The sky over the flat, rock-strewn plain was open and empty. The sun burned down and baked the sand so that the heat waves shimmered and danced. The French geologists were astonished when a distorted apparition suddenly appeared through a wavering heat mirage. One moment the image seemed to float free, and then expand and retract to grotesque proportions in the hot, freakish air.

As the range closed they distinguished a figure waving his arms like a crazy man and stumbling directly toward them. Then he staggered to a stop, swayed like a small whirlwind, and slowly crumpled into the sand face first. The shocked driver of the Renault truck nearly braked too late and was forced to swerve around the fallen man, halting in a flurry of dust.

Fairweather was more dead than alive. He was badly dehydrated and the sweat on his body had crusted into a fine layer of white salt crystals. He soon regained consciousness as the French oilmen slowly trickled water past his swollen tongue. Four hours later, his body fluids restored after drinking almost 2 gallons of water, Fairweather thickly croaked out the story of his escape from the massacre at Asselar.

To the one Frenchman on the prospecting team who understood English, Fairweather’s tale sounded like a drunken fabrication, but it also rang with urgent conviction. After a brief discussion, the rescuers carefully lifted Fairweather into the back of the truck and headed toward the city of Gao on the Niger River. They arrived just before dark and drove straight to the city hospital.

After kindly seeing that Fairweather was comfortably bedded down and attended by a doctor and nurse, the French thought it wise to inform the Chief of the local Malian Security Forces. They were asked to write a lengthy report while the Colonel in command of Gao headquarters apprised his superiors in the capital city of Bamako.

To the Frenchman’s surprise and indignation they were detained and jailed. In the morning an interrogation team arrived from Bamako and grilled them separately about their discovery of Fairweather. Demands to contact their consulate were ignored. When the oil geologists refused to cooperate, the interrogation turned ugly.