Perhaps Harrison Hamblin should have known when that body hit the Land Rover's hood. With a huge, unexpected thump. As it slid hesitantly off the hood, next hitting the road's feeble rock barrier, and tumbling into the ravine.

Maybe he should have known what his colleague, the Navajo genius Michael ThreeHats, explained. "As my brothers the Apache's would have done. A warning. Turn around, leave our land, or meet our challenges." Harry was naively eager to meet this latest test. So he has accepted the challenge of carrying unknown, probably contraband freight to his old stamping ground, Dar es Sabir (Door of patience). And putting up with the irritable band of Tuaregs who seem be trailing him constantly.

And other tests and challenges: Encountering excitable Tuaregs, odd, half-starved pygmies, Jean d'Argent his former manservant, now a successful entrepreneur, a past love and old friends and acquaintances in Dar es Sabir, now a newly declared city-state renamed the Republic of Independent People. The RIP is the fabrication of Wahid, the former revolutionary who conquered Sabir on the third try. And Harry even admired him as a kind of Robin Hood before this revolution.

But things had changed. Wahid had become tyrannical, potential foes were "counting dunes," (a euphemism for summary execution), and his father's rumored lost treasure was foremost on his mind. Driving all his decisions. Bad ones.

Harry has acquired the name, passport and identity of a German arms dealer who was coincidentally his bunk-mate as he sailed to Algeria.

We also soon learn that Wahid is a practicing pedophile, that the reputedly honest judge has compromised his own integrity, and that the beautiful Amina (protagonist for three years in Harry's dreams), has married Wahid but has failed to bear him children. In the background lurks Alain, evil twin to Antoine, the former police chief.