John Carr, you mad bastard, he thought to himself, with a smile. How the fuck did you get yourself on this one?

Three hours later, the A400 landed at NAS Sigonella in Sicily, taxied into a secure hanger, and the team disembarked and started to sort their equipment out.

‘Guys, listen in,’ shouted Arnold. ‘Everyone including aircrew in the briefing room in sixty minutes.’

It was just after 14:00hrs local time – a little under eleven hours until they launched.

Chapter 109.

109.

AT THAT MOMENT, John Carr was relieving Geordie Skelton on stag in the depression in the desert, sixty kilometres south of Houn.

It had been a tough, wearing few hours since he had received confirmation from Justin Nicholls that the aircraft would be coming in at 03:00hrs the following morning, and his eyes were sore with sweat and grit from a light sandstorm which had hit them a little earlier.

The temperature in the silent, exposed bowl had touched the early nineties in the midday sun. They’d erected some overhead protection to create some shade, but the heat was still punishing and exhausting.

The two women had slept fitfully, often crying out in their sleep, and Geordie Skelton and McMullen had managed to grab an hour’s kip here and there.

But Carr himself could not – would not – close his eyes.

He was now as confident as he could be that there’d be no follow-up, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility that any survivors had put out a message offering a reward for the return of the two Western girls, and the heads of their rescuers. The place might be crawling with search parties, for all he knew.

Human instinct was to move, to get further south, to put as many miles as possible between him and the carnage to the north.

But he knew that wasn’t a good option – he didn’t know what lay beyond the horizon, and moving in daylight was too risky, a man down and light on ammo.

Hunkered down in this bowl, they’d have to be fucking unlucky for someone to stumble on them.

So the best thing to do was to sit tight, watch the shimmering horizon, and wait for the sun to sink in the western sky.

At least the summer days were reasonably short at this latitude, and the twilight brief. The light would start to fade at 18:20hrs, and full darkness would envelop them not long after that. Then they would move south.

It was only a relatively short journey – sixty or so kilometres – to the RV, a stretch of road leading into the tiny Berber settlement of Al Fuqaha.