Alpha Force: Desert Pursuit

by Chris Ryan

  Minutes later, Alex, Amber and Hex flattened themselves against the side of a truck that was parallel with the Unimog. Alex eased round the back of the truck until he had the Unimog in view. It was facing them head on, about ten metres away across the stony, hard-packed ground. The far side of the Unimog was in view, but it was deserted. So what had been making the metallic crash? As he watched, a gust of desert wind blustered across the compound and one of the Unimog’s cab doors swung open, slamming against the side of the vehicle. The wind died and the door slowly swung back until it was nearly, but not quite, closed.

  Alex felt his heart sink. Khalid would never leave the door slamming against the side of the Unimog like that. Hex was right: there was something wrong. He went into a crouch and peered under the vehicle. He could see no sign of a body lying underneath, but the ground below the vehicle was still full of shadows. Alex eased back up and tried to scan the inside of the cab but the windscreen reflected the low sun back into his eyes. There was only one thing for it. He was going to have to get closer.

  Alex waited until he could see that Paulo and Li were in position behind the last truck in the row opposite. He motioned them to stay there, then turned to Amber and Hex. ‘I’m going in,’ he whispered. ‘Hex, watch my back. OK?’

  Hex nodded, his green eyes steady and determined, and Alex immediately felt better. Hex might not have much to say on the subject of friendship, but Alex knew he would never abandon a mate.

  Alex turned to Amber. ‘You’re our back-up, Amber. If things turn bad, I want you to get out of here and bring some help.’

  ‘Get help. You got it,’ whispered Amber, looking into his eyes with an equal mixture of fear and determination.

  Alex nodded to them both, then he took a deep breath and raced across the open ground towards the Unimog at a crouching run. As he reached the swinging cab door, he rolled past it to make himself less of a target, then came to his feet again and flattened himself against the big front wheel of the vehicle. Nothing moved inside the cab, so he reached up and nudged open the door with his hand. Still nothing. Alex clenched his jaw, then made himself turn and look up, expecting to come face to face with the barrel of a Kalashnikov. The cab was empty.

  Alex sagged against the wheel with relief and something shot out from under the Unimog and grabbed him around the ankle.

  Hex heard Alex yell, then saw him fall. He launched himself forward at the same time as Li broke cover from the opposite direction, closely followed by Paulo. Amber wanted to follow but made herself hang back, ready to go for extra help if it was needed. The other three reached Alex together and Li automatically went into a fighting stance, balanced on the balls of her feet, while Hex lunged under the truck to free Alex’s leg. He grabbed hold of something, yanked hard – and a scared little gap-toothed girl slid out from under the Unimog with her hand still gripping Alex’s ankle.

  ‘That’s the one who’s always with Khalid,’ said Li, once they had recovered.

  ‘She was here last night,’ called Amber, hurrying over. ‘She arrived just as we were leaving, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember. The munchkin,’ said Hex.

  Paulo crouched down and checked that there was no-one else under the Unimog, then he turned to look at the little girl. Her face was smeared with dust and tears and her eyes were wide with fear. ‘Hello,’ he said with a gentle smile. ‘Are you hurt?’

  The little girl choked back a sob and stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘She doesn’t speak English,’ said Amber.

  Paulo tried again. ‘Can you tell us, where is Khalid?’

  At the mention of Khalid, the little girl grabbed on to Paulo’s shirt cuff and launched into a torrent of words in her own language. Now it was Paulo’s turn not to understand. He shrugged helplessly and looked up at Amber, the language expert of the group.

  ‘I’ll try her with French,’ said Amber, squatting down beside Paulo. French was the second language of Algeria – a legacy of the time when the country was a colony of France.

  Amber began to talk slowly and clearly in French and the little girl’s face brightened with understanding. She began to answer Amber’s questions, speaking so fast that she was almost gabbling.

  ‘She says she and Khalid were sleeping beside the Unimog, when the men came in the night,’ translated Amber. ‘The men were driving past, heading north, but they stopped when they saw her and Khalid. Khalid told her to hide under the Unimog.’

  ‘What sort of men?’ asked Alex. ‘Bandits?’

  Amber turned back to the little girl and the others waited impatiently.

  ‘No, not bandits. She says . . . it sounds like she’s saying “the child stealers”,’ said Amber.

  The little girl began talking again and Amber listened and translated at the same time.

  ‘They had a Unimog, like this one, but the cab was smaller and the back was covered like an army truck. There were bench seats down the sides and these seats were full of children.’

  ‘But why did they take Khalid?’ asked Li.

  ‘She says when the leader found out Khalid had no family, he took him away. Khalid went without a struggle because he did not want the man to find her too.’

  ‘This leader, can she tell us anything about him?’ asked Hex.

  Amber asked the question and the little girl gave a two-word answer they all understood: ‘Le scorpion.’

  ‘The scorpion? What does she mean?’

  The girl bent down and drew a picture in the dust with her finger. The drawing was crude, but there was no mistaking the curving tail with the stinger on the end. The little girl pointed to the sand drawing, then to her arm.

  ‘A tattoo?’ asked Hex. ‘He had a tattoo of a scorpion?’

  The little girl nodded hard. ‘Tattoo,’ she repeated.

  ‘I think he must be a trafficker. A child slaver,’ said Li. ‘My parents came across something like this on their last West African expedition. The traffickers take children from the poorer African countries, smuggle them north and sell them. Sometimes they give the parents money, and sometimes they just kidnap the children off the street. Some end up in the carpet industry in Morocco. Others end up as domestic servants in the Arab countries or Europe. Even worse, they’re sold into the sex trade.’

  ‘Ask her how long ago,’ said Alex, examining the tyre tracks on the packed-earth track that ran alongside the landing strip.

  ‘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 chassis 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 passenger 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.