It was just after four when the navigator came aft and woke Gorde, who had fallen asleep with the curtain drawn across his window and his battered hat tipped to shade his eyes. ‘Jebel al-Akhbar coming up now, sir. Otto wants to know whether you’d like to fly over Hadd or make a detour?’
‘May as well have a look at the Emir’s hide-out,’ Gorde murmured, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘Long time since I last saw it.’ He got to his feet and motioned me to follow him.
The view from the flight deck was a blinding glare made bearable only by the green shade above the pilot’s head. All away to the right of us was sand as far as the eye could strain, a petrified sea corrugated by the action of the wind. But from the left mountains were closing in, bare, black, lava-ash mountains marked by patches of a livid, chemical green. They swept round ahead of us in a long curve, terminating abruptly at the sand sea’s edge in a bold headland topped by a pinnacle of bare rock. ‘Jebel al-Akhbar,’ Gorde said, nodding towards it over the pilot’s head. There’s an old stone fort on the top of it and the town of Hadd is right underneath. Remarkable place. There’s a saying amongst the Arabs of this part — Who holds al-Akhbar, holds Hadd. You’ll see in a minute.’
Otto was pushing the control column forward and as we lost height the headland began to come up fast. ‘See the fort?’ Gorde’s hand gripped my arm. ‘I got a gazelle there once. The Emir invited us hunting and a Saluki bitch named Adilla cornered it for me right under the walls there. My first visit to Saraifa,’ he added. The time we signed the original concession.’
I could see the fort clearly now, a biggish place, crumbling into ruin, with an outer ring of mud and rock walls and in the centre a single watch tower perched high on a pinnacle of rock. We skimmed it with about a hundred feet to spare and on the farther side the hill dropped sheer to a valley shaped like a crescent moon and half-ringed with mountains.
The valley floor was flat, a patchwork quilt of cultivation; date palms, grey with dust, stood thick as Indian corn in mud-walled enclosures, and there were fields of millet green with new growth. In the further reaches of the valley, where cultivation dwindled into grey, volcanic ash, a solitary sand-devil swirled a spiral of dust high into the air.
‘Hadd.’ Gorde stabbed downwards with his thumb, and peering over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of a mud town that seemed built into the rock below the fort. Right below us a melee of men and goats and camels stood transfixed beside a well. Mud walls towered above them, and looking back I saw the town of Hadd climbing into its rocky cleft with a great fortified palace built on many levels facing towards the desert. A green flag fluttered from a flagpole. ‘Always reminds me of the Hadhramaut,’ Gorde shouted in my ear. ‘They build like that in the Wadi Duan. Well-sited, isn’t it?’ He might have been a soldier, his interest was so professional.
Otto half-turned in his seat. ‘I’m setting course now for the position given in the search report, that okay?’ And when Gorde nodded he banked the plane so that I had a last glimpse of the Wadi Hadd al-Akhbar, a little oasis of green set against a nightmare backdrop of volcanic rock. And then it was gone and the arid, lifeless desert stretched out ahead of us.
Gorde produced the slip of paper he’d used for making notes and handed it to the navigator. ‘Those are the fixes for the Saraifa-Hadd border locations. Plot them now. We’ll be flying over them as soon as we’ve had a look at the spot where he abandoned his truck.’
We flew on in silence then and gradually the gravel plain gave place to sand, the dunes getting higher, their shadows longer until they were towering crescent-shaped downlands stretching into infinity. The navigator passed Otto an alteration of course and the shadow of the plane came ahead of us, growing imperceptibly bigger, as we lost height. ‘Have we crossed the border?’
The navigator nodded. ‘Just crossing it now.’
Gorde’s hand gripped my elbow. ‘That’s the trouble with this damned country,’ he said. ‘The borders are nothing but map references. Nobody cared so long as it was just a waste of desert sand. But you try explaining map references to an Arab sheikh once he’s dazzled by the prospect of oil.’
The navigator leaned across and made a circling movement with his hand. Otto tipped the plane over on the port wing-tip and we searched the glaring dunes below us. We circled like that, slowly, for several minutes, ana then suddenly we straightened out, swooping down towards the humped back of a dune, and there, halfway up it, was the truck, almost obliterated by sand. I never saw such a desperately lonely-looking object in my life, a piece of dead machinery lying there like a wrecked boat in the midst of an ocean of sand.
We slid down on to it like a hawk stooping to its prey. It was a big closed-in truck, old and battered looking and patched with rust. There were no markings on it and as it rushed away beneath us Gorde echoed my own thoughts: ‘What was the fool doing, driving that truck alone into these dunes?’ he demanded. ‘Do you know?’ He was glaring at me, and when I shook my head, he grunted as though he didn’t believe me. ‘A good twenty miles west of the survey locations,’ he growled. ‘He must have had some reason.’
Otto banked steeply so that the truck was there, just beyond the port wing for us to stare at. But looking at it couldn’t explain its presence on the slope of that dune, and in the end Gorde gave instructions for us to proceed to the locations David had surveyed and motioned me to follow him back into the relative quiet of the passenger cabin.
‘Well,’ he said, dropping into his seat, ‘what do you make of it, eh?’ But I could see he didn’t expect an answer. He was slumped in his seat, an old man lost in thought. ‘Doesn’t make sense, does it?’ he grumbled. ‘The boy dead somewhere down there below us and his father not caring a damn and busy drilling a well-’ He turned to me. ‘How did they get on, those two, do you know? What were their relations just prior to the boy’s death?’ And when I didn’t say anything, he snapped, ‘Come on, man. You must know something. You’ve come all the way out from England; you wouldn’t have done that unless you knew a little more than you’ve told me.’ He stared at me angrily. ‘Have you seen his sister?’
I nodded.
‘Well, what does she say about it? He must have talked to her.’
‘She’d like to think he’s still alive.’
‘What, in this country — and the truck lying there on that dune for almost two months?’
‘She’s never been into the desert.’
‘No, of course not.’ He asked me again what she had said about him, and whilst I was telling him the desert below gradually changed, the dunes altering shape until they were long ridges like waves with gravel flats in the troughs.
I was just telling him about the last visit David had made to his sister when the plane gave a lurch, the port wing tipped down and over Gorde’s shoulder I caught a glimpse of tyre marks running straight like the line of a railway along the length of a flat stretch between two dunes. A pile of rusted tins, the black trace of a fire, the remains of a dug latrine; they were there for an instant and then the plane straightened up and we flew on, following the tyre marks that had scored a straight line wherever the sand was soft.
Gorde got up then and I followed him forward. Indications of another camp came up at us, swept by beneath the plane. We were flying very low, the line of the dunes on either side closing us in. And then, straight ahead, the black shadow of a truck. It was stationary and we came up on it fast, belly to the gravel flat, roaring over it so close that I could read the black lettering on its side — G-O-D-C-O — and could see the drill at its rear turning.