The whole moon seemed to have turned against them. The morning after they had established a provisional camp Yong and his troops had left early and continued their march across the open land towards the assumed position of one guerilla nest in the hinterland of Apachin. Well, strictly the whole of Three Hills was hinterland but that was really beside the point. They passed an isolated farmstead here and there but after quick sweeps they all turned out to be abandoned. One of them had actually been booby-trapped, but luckily for them the fuse malfunctioned and the whole building blew up five minutes after the sweep team had left it. Then came the sandstorm. Not one of the usual duststorms they had almost got used to. This one meant business. The soldiers covered their faces with pieces of cloth or whatever else was available and staggered along against the forces of the wind. It was impossible to see further than twenty, maybe twenty-five yards, allowing people only to keep visual contact with the comrades in their immediate vicinity. They lost all sense of direction, and on top of that the sensitive communication equipment got clogged up by the microscopic grains of sand and was rendered useless. Some transmitters still worked on short range but any attempts to wave the command of operation besieging Apachin were futile. They were cut off from the centre. Not only that, they also got cut off from each other. When the storm had subsided, Yong was left with only two companies, the 1st led which was now led by Captain Mendes and the 3rd under the command of Captain Dao. The bulk of his troops had disappeared in the storm, must have taken a wrong turn or gone into a different direction. They were caught in the middle of nowhere and none of the hills and rock formations around seemed to resemble any that had been visible before the storm hit them.

”Damn”, Yong said.

“Sir, what are we doing now?” Dao asked. The face on her skin was red from all the sand that had blown over it. Yong presumed that his own face loo