He and Gibbs did not have the energy, or for that matter the tools, to bury the body. They had no choice but to leave it out in the open for the jackals to find and dispose of.

''You'll do the same for me,'' Gibbs said. ''When the time comes. Won't you, sir?''

''The time isn't coming,'' said David, striding purposefully on.

Frigid night. Relentless day.

The landscape became no smoother, no less stone-strewn and rugged. Nothing changed except the amount of effort it took to keep going. They must have covered sixty miles by now. They must have covered far more. Gibbs kept casting sullen looks David's way, as if to say, You lied to me. David kept ignoring the looks, as if to say, So fucking sue me.

There was no one else. There was nothing here. Just desolation. You could have called the place Ra-forsaken, but for the fact that Ra was there most of the time, a pitiless shining presence, baking the sky, blast-furnacing the air.

Gibbs was flagging. For every twenty paces David took, he managed ten. David repeatedly had to stop and wait for him to catch up.

Gibbs was mumbling. Mostly he was cursing his luck, wishing he'd never joined the army, sometimes hurling veiled insults at David, sometimes talking to his own father as though Gibbs senior were strolling alongside him. It wasn't quite delirium but it wasn't far off.

Gibbs was refusing to take one more step. He had had enough. They weren't anywhere near Freegypt. They were never going to reach it. They were going to die here in this fucking desert where nobody would even find their bones.

He made a lunge for David, catching him off-guard. Before David could stop him he had snatched the Horusite ba lance off his back.

''Gibbs,'' David said, ''give that back to me. Now. That's an order.''

Wild-eyed, raw-skinned, Gibbs shook his head. ''Can't do that, sir.''