Operation: Mongolia

- 7 -

Banks had too many other things to worry about to pay much heed to the professor’s finds at this point. The phone was down, Wilkins was out of commission when it came to walking and the rain was now showing signs of becoming more persistent, darkening the sand itself and making the stonier patches they needed to walk on less distinctive. His gut roiled but he didn’t need the old signal to tell him that their troubles were mounting up. What had started as a simple mission was slowly but almost certainly getting out of control.

And we still have a long walk ahead of us.

“Will they send anybody to look for us if we’re late?” the professor asked.

“Doubtful,” Banks replied. “It’s a big desert and if your man’s right and there is a widespread EM problem, they’re not going to risk putting anything in the air until it’s cleared up. We’re on our own but dinna fret—we’re used to that.”

He gave the squad their fifteen minutes then gave the order to move out. He saw young Wilkins eyeing the camel warily.

“Just get up between yon humps and enjoy yourself, lad,” Wiggins said. “Pretend it’s the sarge’s wife.”

Wilkins climbed up with some difficulty, sat up in the saddle, and took the reins. He nudged the camel’s sides with his good leg. The beast didn’t budge.

“I’d better lead it,” Doctor Reid said. “They’re temperamental buggers at the best of times and this lassie’s a wee bit spooked.”

“It’s a lassie?” Wiggins said. “Let me at her.”

Reid laughed. “You’ve heard the joke then?”

“What joke’s that?”

“It’s as old as the hills. Stop me if you’ve heard it before. This wee man joins the French Foreign Legion and gets sent to a fort way out in the desert, miles from the nearest town. There are only men at the fort, no women. After a few months, the wee man gets desperate for a woman, so finally he approaches his sergeant and confesses.

“‘Sarge,’ he says, ‘I cannae take this any longer. A man has needs, ye ken? What do the lads here do for relief?’

“The sarge says ‘It was only a matter of time!’ He lowers his voice to a whisper and says ‘When the men get desperate, they use the camel.’

“‘That’s fucking gross,’ the wee man says. ‘I’d never do that.’

“The sarge simply smiles and says, ‘All men come to the camel in time. The desert is patient and can wait.’

“Sure enough, after a couple of more months pass, the wee man is beside himself with desperation. He dreams about women every night and wakes every morning with a raging hard-on. He cannae take it, so he returns to the sergeant and agrees to meet him in the stables that night.

“At midnight, the sergeant is waiting for him, with a bad-tempered, fly-blown, dung-encrusted, ancient-old camel on a short lead.

“‘I will hold her head,’ the sergeant says, ‘so she cannot bite you while you mount her.’

“The wee man disnae reply, he’s too embarrassed by the situation but his hard-on is getting bloody painful by this point, so he decides to do the business. While the sergeant holds the camel’s head, the wee man gets behind the beast. The animal grunts and bawls as the legionnaire thrusts and moans behind it. Eventually, the wee man sighs, catches his breath, and does up his flies.

“‘Thanks, Sarge,’ he says. ‘That was pretty gross but I feel better now.’

“Too late, he spots that the sergeant is horrified.

“‘I’ve never seen anything like that in my life! How could you do that to this poor old camel?’

“‘But you said all the men mount the camel when they get desperate!’ the wee man says.

“That they do,’ replies the sergeant. ‘Then they ride her to town, to meet women.’

They were all laughing as Banks gave the order to move out.

Their good spirits didn’t last long. The drizzle continued under low gray skies that washed all color out of the landscape. Banks now had Professor Gillings up front with him to check the lie of the land ahead but as the rain had got heavier so the wetness had seeped everywhere. It was much harder to distinguish the rocky parts from the sand so their going had slowed considerably. Banks was damp and feeling every pound of the weight of his rucksack. He wasn’t sure he could get much more miserable.

Then he found that he could. They had been in view of a group of buildings ahead of them for half an hour. He’d been looking forward to them possibly being inhabited and given that they appeared to be on a rutted track that ran east to west, possibly even in possession of a working telephone, but as they got within four hundred yards, it became obvious that the site was derelict. At one time, it had been a filling station of a kind. There were a pair of ancient pumps, a shack, and several outbuildings surrounded by half a dozen ancient trucks, but all had been abandoned many years before and the desert was making inroads into it, with sandy drifts lying alongside the walls and around the rusting vehicles.

Worse still, the ground between where they stood and the buildings was clearly a wide stretch of sand with no rock or stony patches in evidence.

Gillings didn’t seem to see the decay—he only had eyes for the trucks.

“We can surely get one of those running,” he said. “Come on, we can get back in an hour and retrieve my finds.”

Before Banks could stop him, the man stepped out onto the sand and broke into a shuffling run.

“Come back, you daft bastard,” Wiggins shouted but Gillings kept running, heading directly for the filling station. Banks held Doctor Reid back from trying to follow.

“Not yet, lad,” he said. “One daft bugger at a time is enough.”

Gillings got almost halfway to his goal before he collapsed, pole-axed. They all heard the whip-crack of a jolt of static electricity, then the sand around the fallen man began to roil and seethe.

“Fuck,” Banks said. “Wiggo, Davies, you’re with me. Sarge, watch these others.”

Banks broke into a run, his chest tight, his balls tucked up in hard knots between his legs, expecting at any moment to be hit with a jolt that would floor him. The sand sucked at his feet and ankles, like running through treacle. He unslung his rifle as he ran. Up ahead, the ground around the fallen man seemed to boil. A worm rose up out of the turmoil, four feet of it in length above the sand and almost two feet in diameter, a wide mouth full of teeth gaping. Banks fired on the run, blowing the whole top half of the worm to pieces with three shots. As the decapitated thing fell to the sand, the ground where it lay seethed even more violently and the worm disappeared quickly, dragged away below.

Banks arrived first, out of breath, over the prone body of the professor and laid down covering fire into the sand, not knowing if he was hitting anything, not caring, only hoping that the jolt and blue flash wasn’t in his immediate future. Wiggins arrived seconds later and began to fire downwards on the other side of the prone man, while Davies bent to check for vital signs.

The sands stopped roiling and seething under them. Banks’ magazine, then Wiggins’ ran dry and they stood, gunfire still echoing in their ears, on a suddenly, deafeningly quiet plain.

“No heartbeat,” Davies shouted and immediately started CPR on the downed man.

Banks looked back to where Hynd and Reid stood with the camel and Wilkins, then looked north to the derelict station. They were about equidistant. He slammed a new magazine into his rifle, still aiming at the sand, knowing that another attack could come at any moment.

We’re stranded in no-man’s land.

Davies continued to work frantically on the downed man. He had torn the professor’s shirt open and was pumping, double-handed, at his chest, alternating with blowing down his throat, trying for a kick-start.

“Davies? We cannae hang about here in open ground for long. Is he a goner?” Wiggins asked.

At that same moment, Gillings coughed and his eyes opened but they fluttered wildly and were unfocused. All color seemed to have drained from his normally ruddy features and he was breathing too fast, hyperventilating.

“He’s tachycardic,” Davies said. “We need to get him lying down somewhere safe where I can work on him properly.”

“Okay,” Banks said, pointing towards the derelict service station. “You two get him up and get him into yon shack over there. I’ll cover your arses. If anything but us moves, put it down hard and fast.”

He waved to Hynd to bring the others over and stood where he was while the two soldiers carried Gillings away.

The sarge and the others began to come towards him.