ter the
cause for which they fought. Refugees who fled simply because others
fled, for terror is a most contagious disease.

Colonel Midan Ibrahim of the crack motorized units of the Arab Legion
which occupied Tamanrasset, was fuming. His task was a double one.
First, to hold Tamanrasset and its former French stronghold Fort
Laperrine; second, to keep open his lines of communication with
Ghademes and Ghat, in Arab Union dominated Libya. To hold them until
further steps were decided upon by his superiors in Cairo and the
Near East--whatever these steps might be. Colonel Midan Ibrahim was
too low in the Arab Union hierarchy to be in on such privy matters.

His original efforts, in pushing across the Sahara from Ghademes and
Ghat, had been no more than desert maneuvers. There had been no force
other than nature's to say him nay. The Reunited Nations was an
organization composed possibly of great powers, but in supposedly
acting in unison they became a shrieking set of hair-tearing women;
the whole being less than any of its individual parts. And El Hassan?
No more than a rumor. In fact, an asset because this supposed mystery
man of the desert, bent on uniting all North Africa under his
domination, gave the Arab Union, its alibi for stepping in with
Colonel Ibrahim's men.

Yes, the original efforts had been but a drill. But now his Arab
Legion troopers were beginning to face reality. The supply trucks,
coming down under convoy from Ghademes, reported the water source at
Ohanet destroyed. The major well would take a week or more to repair.
Who had committed the sabotage? Some said the Tuareg, some said local
followers of El Hassan, others, desert tribesmen resentful of _both_
the Arab Union and El Hassan.

One of his routine patrols, feeling out toward Meniet to the north,
had suddenly dropped radio communication, almost in mid-sentence. A
relieving patrol had thus far found nothing, the armored car's tracks
covered over by the sands.

[Illustration]

And rumors, rumors, rumors, Colonel Midan Ibrahim, born of
aristocratic Alexandrian blood, though trained to a sharp edge in Near
Eastern warfare, was basically city bred. The gloss of desert training
might take on him, but the bedouin life itself was not in his
experience, and it was hard for him to trace the dividing line between
possibility and fantasy.

Rumors, rumors, rumors. They seemed capable of sweeping from one end
of the Sahara to the other in a matter of h