The private flight to Algiers was a welcome thing. Belyayeva planned to take Brick’s advice from the briefing and sleep through most of it - not like there was much else to do anyway unless the squad was feeling chatty, but she wasn’t too keen on taking sleeping pills. That was the main reason she welcomed the absence of howling toddlers and chattering hags that seemed to plague public transport. After hopping from Algiers to Tamanrasset, some local packed them into cars for a drawn-out ride around the town, but at least it afforded them time to get used to the dry air. Dry air and the damn dust.

It was wisely decided to wait until night, when among obvious benefits, the lower temperature made the low air humidity more bearable. As they left the city, the Russian couldn’t pass up the opportunity to remark that the road they were driving along - in the middle of nowhere - was in a much better condition than many in her homeland. Alas, all good things must come to an end. They’d hardly find their guy just sitting on the highway, and as they turned off the paved road and into the desert proper, Katya resigned herself to stare out into the darkness to cover her sector, likely for hours unend. She could only pity the second vehicle for having to drive in their wake. It didn’t take long for a possible contact to show itself, which immediately made a part of her think it was just a wisp of sand caught in the wind or some such false alarm. No matter, the trail vehicle could keep a better eye on it anyway.

When their humble convoy stopped to investigate, she got out of the car and chambered a round, flicking the fire selector to semi and covering the gap between the top cover and main body with her left hand to prevent any stray sand from getting into the rifle for as long as she could avoid it. Someone once joked that the difference between the AK and AR-15 platforms was that Mikhail Kalashnikov wanted to make a rifle that would work when there was junk in it, while Eugene Stoner wanted to make a rifle that would keep the junk out.

“Unless whoever’s following us notices we’re no longer kicking up dust clouds.” she chipped in when Brick mentioned their possible tail driving into their ‘embrace’, sticking by the front end of her Nimr to maximize the protection it offered while looking toward the dune’s edge - for one to see if someone was following them and decided to drive around the dune rather than over it, and also because that was mostly downwind and kept the dust out of her eyes. Nice thing about night time desert was the quiet so one could hear things clearly, but she could do without the cold. That was one part of home she didn’t miss. “Bloody deserts, too hot in the day, too cold in the night. Is there no golden middle path here?” she grumbled off-comms as the familiar calmness was joined by a nervous tingle at the back of her mind. Back in the field after a year.

“May I suggest we start East?” she chose to err on the side of caution when Bakker asked his question “Wherever we find the poor sod, we’ll still have to go West to get out of here, so if he’s there, it’s along the way. I’d rather not waste time and resources backtracking if he’s not. For all we know we might need that extra breathing room to get out of a bad spot later.” She explained her reasoning.