The High Yield Vector

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A few minutes before dawn Mark Savannah left the tent and, instead of heading directly towards the jeep that would take him and Amghar to Kidal, he climbed a dune to see the sun slowly rise above the horizon, casting its warm colors across the desert.

After six months in the desert, he still couldn't sleep wearing the tagelmust that left his cheekbones stained indigo. The stains looked like the crude tattoos of a prisoner serving a sentence in silence in the northeast of Mali.
Mark quickly wrapped his face in the blue, cotton tagelmust, covering his head, cheek and mouth, only his green eyes remained uncovered, shimmering and surprisingly bright.
He turned back for a moment near the top of the dune, and cast his eye over the Tuareg des Kel Adagh confederation camp, its orderly rows of tents interspersed with fenced off enclosures that held camels, horses and goats. The camp was silent, waiting for the new day.
Amghar was a chief of the Ihaggaren, a noble tribe from Northern Mali who lived in the highlands of Adrar des Ifoghas. He was Mark's Uyema, or brother and trusted friend. Amghar organized his tribe's activities: livestock farming, silver production and, for the last two years, short tourist trips into the desert – mostly for tourists who wanted a quick getaway in the desert, just to boast about it to friends, posting a few photos on Facebook. Amghar had fifty men with him, all trained in the use of firearms.
 
It was the second time that Amghar had hosted Mark, but many dust storms had passed over the terrain since they had met four years earlier, and just as the surrounding landscape was now unrecognizable, the two of them had also inexorably changed.
Mark stood on the crest of the dune, the sun seemed to emerge from the belly of the desert, and for a moment it seemed all the heat and silicon might simply devour that arid and hollow expanse before him, transforming it into a startling and dangerous expanse of glass.
Savannah sat there cross-legged in contemplation; the sand had penetrated his very being, it had become his hourglass, while the wind continuously changed the patterns of the dunes as if they were immense crystal balls, dynamic in their complexity. And he, of course, wasn't like the wind; he was like the unknowable and glittering dunes.
Mark Savannah was a fugitive, a former British intelligence agent now burned. He was officially dead after having halted the unconventional and criminal biotech activities of Colonel Reed, the third highest ranking officer in the CIA, and a man Savannah had failed to incriminate.
Reed had personal reasons for wanting Savannah dead: one evening in Washington DC, Mark had killed his father's murderer. Previously, his father had discovered illegal CIA activities in Afghanistan, their illegal dealing in opium, and for this reason was assassinated in Mogadishu in 1993 while driving a humvee. Reed's son, also a CIA operative, hit and obliterated that humvee with an anti-tank rocket; and now Mark was paying the consequences for taking revenge and killing him.

Mark stared for a moment towards the horizon, breathing in the warm colors of the land, and inevitably his thoughts went to Anaïs Degann, the CIA agent who had initially hunted him, and later had risked her life playing a double game, helping him stop her own boss, Colonel Reed, a man lost in a delirium of omnipotence. She was the sunniest and brightest woman he had ever met, an exceptional pilot, a terribly attractive woman and absolutely unforgettable.

Mark had last seen Anaïs in Switzerland with a FIM-92 Stinger on her shoulder as she aimed at the radio controlled, light-sport aircraft on which a dummy was flying in his place. He escaped alone in a Lambada motor glider, flying towards the Mediterranean.
Since then he hadn't heard from her. After hitting the aircraft, Anaïs had had to climb almost to the top of the Weisshorn; there she had to destroy all the devices that were used to throw the manhunt off Mark's tracks. Mark had sent an encrypted message in Morse code giving her his destination, but perhaps her radio had been broken or, much worse, something had happened to Anaïs. In fact, his friend Adrian had been trying to track her down for many months, but with no success.