They drove by night, navigating by GPS, their headlights dancing as they climbed tall dunes and rolled down the other side. At the top of each dune, the headlights would point at the sky, like searchlights in search of aeroplanes long vanished. Ethan wondered if his grandfather had journeyed like this, listening for German planes, twisting the dial on his radio to stay in touch with base.
When they camped by day, they switched off their engines and a silence fell on them like no other silence. In that silence, they thought they could hear the Earth turn. The silence, like the sand, went on for ever. Sarah could have lived in it an entire lifetime. She thought it cleansed her. The silence, and with it the great emptiness and the pure, pure air. When she breathed, she could feel the air reach her lungs, and she wanted to drown in it, to feel the perfect desert air reach inside her, driving out all the filth and contamination Egon Aehrenthal and his men had inflicted on her.
When she listened it was as if she listened to the most perfect music, to a singer with perfect intonation, a song with perfect harmony. The silence became a code for the desert itself, a place that could swallow whole armies and coffles of slaves without trace.
Sometimes a lonely bird would creep across the sky, its wings outstretched to ride on the air currents. Once she saw a kestrel, once a flight of ducks. She thought of the birds often, their freedom and mastery of the air. She would watch them soar, wondering where they had come from.
They drove south to Jalu, a palm-fringed oasis where they stopped for dates. They proceeded down along the palificata track, the old Italian route to Kufra. Here and there they saw signs of the Second World War: abandoned jerrycans, a rusted tank, strands of barbed wire, a telegraph pole — the detritus of a conflict over territory on which no one would ever grow a fruit tree or flowers.
Ethan followed Sarah late one afternoon after they woke, walking beside her along a flat alley between high dunes. In winter, the desert was cold and more bleak than at any other time, but the further south they travelled the warmer it grew.
There had been few opportunities for them to talk. If they weren’t in the jeeps, they were bivouacked in a circle of monks in leather jackets, while a guard watched for bandits or Aehrenthal. Behind them, at the camp, the monks were saying morning prayers.
He looked at her. Time was healing her, but after what had happened in the house at Sighisoara, he could not be sure she would not slip back to her horror and self-disgust. Feeling his eyes on her, she slipped her hand inside his.
‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘What happened before… I’m sorry about that. I didn’t doubt you, don’t think that. I wanted you, I have never wanted a man so much. You must understand that.’
‘I was too fast. You need to recover. Aehrenthal, that whole crew, they aren’t behind you yet. Who knows, it may take years, your entire life, to be over it.’
She walked with him a few more steps.
‘Don’t say that,’ she said. ‘You forget that I love you. You forget you love me. That has already made a difference. Sometimes I have nightmares, and I dream I’m being raped again, and it terrifies me, you can’t imagine how much. But other times I have good dreams, and I mostly dream about you, and sometimes I dream we’re in bed.’ She grinned.
He grinned back, then took her in his arms. She made no attempt to resist, letting herself fall against him, with her head on his shoulder. They stood like that, defying everything, for a long time, while all around them the desert grew dark and the moon and stars grew bright in a cloudless sky.
Someone beeped a horn, calling them back. It was time to go.
They stayed in Kufra only long enough to restock on food and water. Apart from the Italian fort that towered over the oasis, and the stark contrast between green fields and the ochre shades of the sand, there was nothing to keep them in the oasis. Gavril didn’t want to draw attention to the expedition, so only he, Ethan, and their guide went in.
Gavril wanted to find out whether Aehrenthal had passed through Kufra. Unfortunately, he had no photographs of the Austrian, and no idea how large his party might be. He instructed the guide to ask the most obvious people in the oasis, people who might have supplied a party heading west towards Rebiana and the great sand sea beyond it. No one knew anything, or so they said. Ethan spotted some tourists and overheard them speaking English. One, he guessed, was German, another Scottish. He walked over to where they were haggling for a can of petrol.
‘I heard you speaking English,’ Ethan said. There was a pretty girl among them. She smiled at him and looked away.
The Scottish man, whom Ethan put at about twenty-five, dressed in a thermal vest and stained blue dungarees, answered.
‘Piss off. We dinnae want any fucking hash. We’ve got more than we can smoke already.’
‘You’re welcome to it,’ Ethan said. ‘But I’m not here to play games. How long have you been in Kufra?’
‘What’s it tae you? If you’re polis, this is no your country.’
‘It’s not yours either, chummy.’ Ethan walked right up to him. He had handled hard cases like the Scot from the first day he went out on the beat.
‘Listen to me, sonny,’ he said. ‘Very carefully. You talk to me politely, you tell me the truth, and you walk out of Kufra with both fucking legs. The same thing goes for anybody with you. I have jeeps out there and men with guns in them, and believe me, they will hurt you if you try to mess with me.’
‘Sonny’ went red with anger, but the flare-up lasted only seconds. Adding things up, he melted like butter. Without another word, he slouched over to join the girl. She shifted out of his way and started talking to another one of their party. Ethan turned to the man he thought was German.
‘I want to know if you’ve seen a second party like ours. An expedition heading into the deep desert. All men. Tough-looking bastards. Their leader is a tall man with a scar on one cheek.’
‘I saw someone like that. He was speaking German, that’s why I noticed. Is your man German?’
‘Austrian.’
‘Of course. His accent.’
‘Where did they go?’
The German waved his hand in the vague direction of the west.
‘Out there somewhere,’ he said.
‘How long ago was he here?’
‘Maybe two days. Yes, I’m sure — two days. And you’re right, they were tough-looking bastards.’
27
The Sand Sea
All was not lost. Just because Aehrenthal had gone into the desert in search of Wardabaha, there was no reason to suppose he would arrive there ahead of them. There were no roads where he was going, just acre upon acre of sand, whipped up into high dunes by the wind. A wrong turning, a false intuition could take a car far out of its way as it dropped down from an unclimbable dune and was forced to drive between the high sands until a gap opened up to let them through. Even then, there might still be repeated twisting and turning before they could get back to their original route.
Ethan spoke to their guide, a young Arab from Tripoli who had been born and bred in Kufra and knew the desert well. His name was Ayyub. He was a tall, good-looking man whose green eyes looked out on everything with a wide, searching gaze. He spoke good English with a strong accent.
Ethan asked him if there was a specific route another guide might have sent them on. Ayyub shook his head.