Five minutes later, they were all sharing a hot brew.

‘Fucking excellent,’ said Kevin McMullen. ‘What a morale booster, eh.’

Carr drank his share, and then looked east. ‘I’ll take this last bit to Geordie,’ he said.

He moved over to where Geordie lay in the sand, scanning the area.

‘Here you go, mate,’ he said, handing over the brew.

‘Cheers, John,’ said Skelton, swigging back the remnants. ‘Just what I needed.’ He went back to his binoculars. ‘Not being negative,’ he said, ‘but what do you reckon if…’ Then he stopped. ‘Wait one,’ he said. ‘We’ve got company.’

Carr took his own binos and followed Geordie’s gaze.

Four or five klicks south he could see a column of dust, picked out against the pale blue early dawn sky.

‘Take Fred back his mug and tell the guys to stand-to,’ said Carr.

Geordie quickly moved back and Carr kept his binos trained on the dust column.

It grew slowly, until at about two kilometres he could make out four vehicles, moving across the open plain.

At a thousand metres, he saw that they were pickups: Toyota Hiluxes, two camouflaged, two white.

He relaxed slightly.

About fucking time, he thought.

Chapter 79.

79.

THE VEHICLE HANDOVER went smoothly, and they left the RV at a little after 07:00hrs, driving in the direction of a small desert settlement called Tabaqah.

A one-horse town where the horse was a long-dead bag of bones buried in a fifty-foot sand dune, it lay alongside a dry wadi roughly halfway to their target, though well to the south and away from populated areas.

The days of navigating using time and distance bearings had long gone, but it made a useful reference point on the map – not that John Carr was going anywhere near the place. He would turn north and skirt round it thirty kilometres out.

Their route took them across country, just under the Jebel Nafusa mountains, and over the Al-Hamada al-Hamra plateau, a wide, elevated stretch of stony emptiness, blackish with desert varnish on the lower reaches and turning red-brown as they climbed.

It was a barren and unpopulated place, and the latest intelligence they had received from Justin Nicholls helped them to avoid suspect locations.

Still, several times they saw fast-moving vehicles in the distance. They might have been Islamists, or tribal militia, or people traffickers – or they might have been innocent traders, themselves desperate to avoid all three – but Carr worked on the basis that every other living soul out here was a bad guy; each time, Kev changed his direction and moved away.

Fred maintained a distance of some 150 metres, slightly offset, so as to avoid the inevitable dust cloud thrown up on the desert tracks.