The two pairs went off, disappearing into the dark like black dots. Nearly ten minutes had passed — ten minutes of steadily increasing tension — before Tony came back on the air.
'OK, guys. Head right. We've found a tunnel.'
'Koger,' I answered. 'We're coming. Norm, did you get that?'
'Aye. I'll close on you. No luck this way.'
We found Tony and Pat on their feet, wielding their short-handled shovels like lunatics. They'd discovered a culvert, but sand had drifted into the mouth of it and left only eighteen inches of headroom. At first glance the task of clearing a passage looked colossal; but, as Tony had appreciated, the drift tapered off rapidly inside the tunnel, and we only had to lower the first few feet.
Again we lost ten minutes, at the end of which we were all sweating like pigs. When we moved off again the wind felt icy as it cooled the moisture on our bodies.
Now we really were up against the clock. It was 0315, and I reckoned we had ninety minutes at most before dawn broke. In that time we had to cross the wadi, find a site for an LUP, ditto for an OP, build the OP and settle down out of sight. I was needled by the multiple uncertainties ahead. The distance we had to travel was relatively small, probably not more than ten kilometres.
What mattered was the nature of the terrain ahead, What would we find in the area of the OP? Would we get a good enough view of the camp? Were the Libyans in the habit of coming out into this part of the desert?
Once more we made good progress, and soon Norm called back to say that he could see the feature hill.
'I have Mont Blanc on my left front, where it should be,' he reported. 'It's quite impressive in the moonlight.
Steep sides, crags on top. Reminds me of Stirling Castle.'
For Norm that.was an epic, the speech of a lifetime.
Boy, I thought, the desert must be really turning him
Having given the hill a wide berth we got back on to our northerly heading and pressed ahead, now with Tony in the lead. The ground became more and more stony, until we were jolting around over loose shale. In one way I was pleased — on this surface we would leave no tracks at all — but on another level I began to worry: if the terrain was like this close to the camp, we'd be screwed when it came to building our OP, and we might find ourselves in another Iraq-type fiasco.
The desert started to undulate, with small, dry valley, running north-east to south-west across our line of advance. I guessed they were tributaries of the main wadi ahead — and sure enough, Tony presently called back to say that he could see the valley ahead of him.
There we got our first lucky break. It was obvious that over the centuries winter torrents had cut a deep scar through the desert, and in many places the walls of the trench took the form of rocky cliffs, perhaps twenty feet high. But at the point where we arrived the bank had collapsed into a broad tongue of shingle, and, far from having to resort to ropes and winches, we were able to ride straight down it, leaving no trace. Boulders dotted the floor of the dry watercourse, and we wove our way between them easily enough for maybe one kilometre until another sloping bank took us out the far side.
That simple passage boosted morale and put us nearly back on schedule. By 0330 the moon was low on the horizon to our left, but by then I reckoned we were within five or six kilometres of the location for the LUP as one by one the surrounding features fell into place.
First we ran off the shale and back on to sand. Then we ' saw the ground ahead of us rising in dunes.
I called Tony to a halt and put pickets out to ride level with him, right and left.
Less than a minute later Whinger, who was out on the right, called, 'Eh, Geordie. I'm on a road.'
'A road? You can't be.'
'I fucking am. It's brand-new. Just been bulldozed out.'
'Stand by. I'm coming up.'
Whinger was right, of course. I found him parked on a dark-looking strip of track, with the sand scraped off into ridges on either side. The underlying rock felt pretty rough, but it was easily negotiable by vehicles with reasonable clearance.
'This wasn't on the satellite shots,' I said. 'They must have been working on it in the past few days.'
'It's coming down from the north-east,' said Whinger, checking his compass. 'Remember that track the satellite showed, leading out from the camp towards the range? I reckon this is an extension of it.'
'Looks like it. What a bugger!' I sat still for a moment, considering this new development. It meant that, if things went noisy, the Libyans would in theory be able to drive out behind our temporary positions and cut off our retreat.
'I don't like it,' I told Whinger. 'But we can't stop now.'
By ranging up and down, we found a point where sand gave over to rock and no new banks had been heaped up, and we crossed the line of the track there, in single file, leaving no trace of our passage. But the mere existence of'the road made me uneasy.
On we went, slowly now, into the dune-scape, circling the bases of'the hillocks. The sand here was very soft, so that although we were leaving wheel-marks they more or less filled themselves in behind us. Then Norm, who was scouting left, called, 'Watch your selves, lad. I can smell smoke.'
'Everyone stop,' I Went. 'What is it, Norm?'
'It smells oily, like diesel burning. Coming on the wind.'
'Probably some goatherds camping out,' I said.
'They'll be burning old oil in a drum. Can you see anything?'
'Nothing.'
'Pull off, then. Come back this way. leel your right, everyone. We're going round it.' So we made a detour, and slowly came back on to our heading.
The incident had done nothing to'reassure me. I didn't like the idea there were other people besides us out there in the desert.
Soon afterwards Whinger, who was still on the right, went up on to a rise and suddenly called, 'Geordie!
Lights ahead.'
I rode over and came up behind him. There was no need for him to point this time. The first thing I noticed, high in the air, was a single bright-red glare, then below it I saw lights burning faintly across our front, some in a line, others in clusters beyond them.
'Got it!' I said. 'That red thing must be the warning light on the comms tower.'
'I reckon so.'
'How far out are we?'
'Hard to tell. Could be one kilometre.'
'We're close enough, anyway. I'd like to put more ground between us and those bastards behind us, whoever they are. But we can't go any nearer the camp than this. Got to find an LUP site around here. That row of lights must be the perimeter fence, with other installations beyond.'
Everyone went look about, and within a few minutes Pat called to say he had located a good spot, away to our left. Closing on him, we found him in a gully, with sand underfoot and a vertical rock wall about three metres high along one side. There were fissures in the rock, into which we could drive pegs, and the whole area had a fairly rough texture. I saw straightaway, as he had, that if we parked the bikes nose-to-tail along the wall, and slung cam-nets over them at an angle like a sloping roof, it would make as good a hiding-place as we were likely to find.
The time was 0355, and already 1 thought I could detect a faint lightening in the eastern sky. We rolled the trailer in backwards, hitched it to Stew's bike again, and manoeuvred the rest of the quads into line ahead of it, ready for a quick take-off' Then we broke out the gear for the OP and prepared to move forward on foot.