Max sat on a rock while he ate a small tin of beans and fixed his eyes on a point to the north. It was the only way to walk in a straight line. People always ended up walking in circles, unless they had a good reference point. Right handed people walked in a spiral to the left and Max was right handed. It made the old Hollywood myth about travelling at night in the desert impossible. The stars would give you a good idea of where to go, but you'd still end up going to the left all the time. Plus walking in the dark was likely to give you a broken leg from steeping into a hole in the rocks.
"Yeah, that's as close to north as matters." He muttered.
A boulder on a hillside locked in his mind and it was just after dawn. Max would walk until the heat became unbearable and find shelter until late afternoon. Then he'd carry on until he'd either reached the boulder or it was too dark to see it. It wasn't rocket science, but it was the same method the Romans had used, to build all those nice straight roads. Luckily there were enough rocky outcrops and holes in the ground, to offer decent shelter from the sun.
Max wasn't a stranger to surviving in deserts; he'd had to walk out of quite a few in his time. He'd work for anyone and tried to be politically neutral. If they had the money and he was likely to survive the mission, he'd work for just about anyone. The walk out of the Sinai had been the toughest; only four out of twelve goods men had survived. The tunnels into the Palestinian Gaza had been increasing in number, people tunnelling out, rather than tunnelling in with supplies. It was strange and the Israeli's had asked the American's for advice. Max had a pretty good idea what was going on, but no one had asked him. Max had a bit of a thing about giving advice for free.
Three days guarding a few private security consultants, what could go wrong ? They weren't a private corporation of course, they were pure blood CIA, as most of them tended to be. Even so, he'd taken along three of his best people and looked forward to few days of well-paid babysitting. Max was known, he had a hell of a reputation. No half-starved Palestinian was going to be daft enough to take him on, were they ?
"I really was an arsehole in those days." He muttered.
No one knew who'd taken out their two helicopters, still didn't after years of investigating. It was one of those times when everyone in the Sinai was fighting everyone else. It might even have been an American drone being targeted by an idiot. One minute they had two shiny new helicopters. A few seconds later they had two burning wrecks with dead pilots. No one saw or heard anything, it was almost like a magic trick, but two men were dead. Twelve of them had to walk to the nearest civilisation and there were a lot of pissed off tribesmen in the way. Max had led them out and only four of them had survived to drink a beer in Cairo.
Most people didn't like to dwell on times they'd been on the losing side, but Max used those times as learning experiences. He rarely did things by the book, he considered his experiences were better teachers than any book.
"Crap !"
There was a steep gully in front of him, too steep to climb out of on the other side. It meant a long diversion and only a few miles covered before bedtime. Never mind, he wasn't on anyone's clock and he had his goals. Goal six was killing Ruby Anne Mason. Only he wasn't so sure now, after two years to think about it. True Ruby had killed someone who mattered to him, but it had been in the heat of battle. After all those Friday nights playing chess with Kallina, something had changed inside him. She was wrong, he wasn't going to be like her in three hundred years time, he was like her now. He hated that! He had money in places no one would think of looking, it was possible to start again.
"I'll probably die in this shit hole desert anyway." He muttered.
Max laughed at his own joke and carried on following the gully.
