“Um-m-m. Listen, that’s them coming. Right down the wadi. Get going, men. Abe, you cover me.”

Abe Bakr looked at him. “Wha’d‘ya mean, cover you, man? You slipped all the way round the bend? Listen, let me plant a couple quick land mines to stop ’em and we’ll get ourselves behind these rocks and blast those cats half way back to Cairo.”

“We’ll warn them as per orders.”

“Crazy man, like you’re the boss, Homer,” Abe growled. “But why’d I ever leave New Jersey?” He made his way to the right, to the top of the wadi’s bank and behind a clump of thorny bush. He made himself comfortable, the light Tommy-Noiseless with its clip of two hundred .10 caliber, ultra-high velocity shells resting before him on a flat rock outcropping. He thoughtfully flicked the selector to the explosive side of the clip. Let Homer Crawford say what he would about not setting off a Fourth of July, but if he needed covering in the moments to come, he’d need it bad.

The chips were down now.

The convoy, the motors growling their protests of the hard going even here at the gravel-bottomed wadi riverbed, made its way toward them at a pace of approximately twenty kilometers per hour.

The lead jeep—Skoda manufacture, Homer Crawford noted cynically—was some thirty meters in advance. It drew to a halt upon seeing him and a turbaned Arab Union trooper swung a Brenn gun in his direction.

An officer stood up in the jeep and yelled at Crawford in Arabic.

The American took a deep breath and said in the same language, “You’re out of your own territory.”

The officer’s face went poker-expressionless. He looked at the lone figure, dressed in the garb of the Tuareg, even to the turban-veil which covers all but the eyes of these notorious Apaches of the Sahara.

“This is no affair of yours,” the lieutenant said. “Who are you?”

Homer Crawford said very clearly, “Sahara Division, African Development Project, Reunited Nations. You’re far out of your own territory, lieutenant. I’ll have to report you, and also to demand that you turn and go back to your origin.”