As the thirty National Guardsmen corralled the camp, the rotors and the wind threw the fine grains in stinging clouds into their faces. The two tents had come to rest in bushes of low scrub thorn a hundred yards from the camp, but the bedding that had been with them, and the clothes, were still in loose flight, scudding over the sand. The pilots broke their huddle. They shouted into the ear of the Marine Corps major: the storm was not lifting, the gusting sand would infiltrate every aperture in the helicopters' engines, they should get the fuck out not negotiable -now. It was already clear to them, to the Saudi colonel, to the men of the Saudi Arabian National Guard and to Duane Littelbaum that the raid had failed.

The man they sought had evaded them.

Littelbaum felt it keenest. He stood in the centre of the camp, huddled against the wind and the blast of the rotors, the sand crusting on his face, and gazed around him. The information had been good. It had come from the interception of the signal of a digital mobile telephone. The antennae on the eastern coast had identified the position across the Gulf from which the call had been initiated, and the position in the Empty Quarter where it had been received. It should have led them to the man Duane Littelbauifl hunted.

There was one prisoner. The man was heavy-set, jowled, and he lay on his stomach with his arms bound behind him at the wrist and his ankles tied sharply. He wore the clothes of a Bedouin tribesman, but his physique and stomach were too gross for him to have been from this group of camel herdsmen. Littelbaum knew the face of the prisoner from the files, knew he came from Riyadh, was a courier for the man he tracked.