So they were holed up on or near a road. Not a piste. It confirmed another expectation.

Lime watched the plane go away and the car drive up the desert track to the northeast, and then he tapped Orr on the shoulder and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

“We going to follow him? I mean he’ll see our lights. It’s getting too dark to travel without lights.”

“No need to follow him,” Lime said.

“Because he’s bugged?”

“Because I know where he’s going.”

They walked to the Land Rover and Lime cranked up the scrambler. “Gilliams?”

“Yes sir.”

“Get me a caravan.”

“What?”

It was one of the advantages of having limitless dollars and limitless armies to command.

The camel caravans of North Africa were a tradition going back a thousand years; they were more than a method of transportation: they were a way of life, a self-perpetuating institution. Each caravan numbered anywhere from a dozen to two hundred camels and made one trip a year but the trip was of a year’s duration: they started somewhere along the Niger with a cargo of pelts and salt and dried meat and handicrafts, they traveled slowly north trading on the way—trading cargo and camels as well—and six months later they reached the Atlas Mountains and picked up a new cargo of manufactured things, dates, kerosene, gunpowder; then they turned around and went back. A caravan was a home: you were born and lived and died in the caravan.

There was usually a caravan around here. It was near the northern terminus. No matter what route they had taken to get here from the south they all converged on the string of foothill towns south of Algiers. It was no great feat for Gilliams to locate one west of Touggourt, and no difficulty to hire its services. Everything was for sale or for hire.

The caravan was in motion less than two hours after Lime’s call. At the same time Lime’s little convoy of Land Rover and truck set out overland, heading across the bled to rendezvous with it.

The fact that Renaldo was driving an ordinary automobile had pinpointed the hiding place for Lime. There was only one passable road from the wadi. It went northeast as far as the old Foreign Legion post at Dzioua and then turned due east to cross ninety miles of broken country to Touggourt and the main highway to Biskra.

The Legion fort was still in use as a district admin headquarters. But for every full-dress fortress there had once been a string of outpost bomas at one-day’s-ride intervals. Thirty miles southeast of Dzioua was a small boma which had been abandoned after World War II. Once or twice in the fifties Lime had visited the place and found evidence someone had been there: bandit fellagha or FLN guerrillas. Conceivably Sturka had used it as a rallying point even in those days. It sat on a two-hundred-foot height and commanded an excellent field of view—or of fire—and it was within a few hundred feet of the present road. It was an ideal place to hold Fairlie—impossible to approach unseen.

The American planeloads and helicopter-loads of personnel had landed at Touggourt, sixty miles from the boma, and they would be ready by the time Lime joined the camel train. There was a doctor, there were several pints of AB-negative blood, there were dozens of sharpshooters and communications people and gadgets. Lime was going to need speed and firepower. He couldn’t sneak inside Sturka’s fortress by stealth or subterfuge.

The risk was enormous: the risk to Fairlie. If it failed Lime would be condemned as a murdering blunderer. Probably they would find a way to put him away for the rest of his life, if they let him live. But everything entailed risk. He could leave Sturka strictly alone and see what happened if he cooperated in turning the Washington Seven loose into asylum. But there was no way to force Sturka to keep his word and release Fairlie; so that risk was equally high. In a way it was better odds to attack—because the people with Sturka weren’t professionals, they weren’t trained to kill without thought, and all he really had to worry about was keeping Sturka away from Fairlie until he could get to Fairlie. The rest of them wouldn’t instinctively know what to do and in their confusion he had a good chance to break through.

The Land Rover bounced across rocks and gullies, its headlights heaving wildly around; Lime gripped his seat and smoked furiously and began to sweat.

WEDNESDAY,

JANUARY 19

4:15 A.M.North African Time She was lying in a rowboat drifting on a placid lake. A blue sky and a pleasantly warm sun, glass-calm water with only enough current to keep the boat moving gently along. There was no one else; everything was soundless. She didn’t raise her head to look but she knew that the lake emptied into a deep tunnel and that sooner or later the boat would drift into that tunnel and carry her cozily into its warm darkness.

“… Peggy. Hey.”

“Whum?”

“Come on come on. Do I got to slap your face?”

“All right—all right.” She was awake now; she threw the blanket back. “Time’s it?”

“Little after four.”

“Four in the morning?”

“Sometheen wrong with the pig. You got to look at him.”

The words brought her sharply to her senses. “What’s the matter with him?” She was reaching for the veil and robe.

“I don’ know. He just doesn’t look too good.”

She remembered her watch and took it downstairs with her into the cellar corridor.

Alvin had a worried face. He had the door open and Peggy eeled in past him.

Fairlie looked like a corpse. She held the watch crystal to his nostrils and after a moment the crystal fogged slightly. Tested his pulse—it was down, way down.

Oh shit. “You’d better get Sturka.”

Cesar left. She heard his heavy tread on the stair. Not that Sturka could do anything, she thought. She beckoned to Alvin. “I think we ought to try to get him on his feet. Walk him back and forth.”

“You mean like when people take an overdose of sleeping pills?”

“I don’t know anything else to do. Is there any coffee?”

“I’ll have a look. You want me to make some?”

“Yes.”

Alvin left and she heaved Fairlie into a sitting position: slid his feet off the cot and turned him, got her shoulder under his arm and tried to lift him to his feet. But the angles were wrong and she fell asprawl across him and got untangled and tried it again.

It still didn’t work. He was limp and it was going to take two of them to walk him. She left him propped against the wall and waited for the others.

Alvin returned with half a cup of coffee. “I put some more on. This is cold.”

“That’s all right. Let’s try and get it down him. You hold his head.”

She didn’t have to open his mouth; his jaw hung slack. She tipped his head back. “Hold him that way.” Poured a little coffee in to see if he would swallow it.

Sturka’s voice made her jump. “What’s the matter with him?”

“Bad reaction to the drugs,” she said. She looked over her shoulder, filled with anger. “Too much drugs.”

“Well never mind that right now. I think we have visitors.”

Cesar appeared in the doorway behind Sturka. Alvin said, “What kind of visitors?”

Peggy was trying to get coffee down Fairlie. “Hold his head still damn it.”

Cesar said, “Some kind of camel caravan.”

Alvin was suspicious. “Traveling at night?”

“Sometimes they do,” Sturka said. “But I don’t trust it. Let’s go.” He pointed to Cesar. “You out to the back. You know your post.”

Cesar went. Peggy watched Fairlie’s Adam’s apple move up and down when he swallowed. It was a good sign she thought. Then she heard Sturka say, “Bring him upstairs.”

Alvin said dubiously, “We’ll have to carry him.”

“Then carry him.” Sturka had an ugly AK submachine gun slung across his back; he flicked it into his hand and went nimbly into the corridor. Peggy heard him go up the stairs—softly and quickly, two steps at a time.