SANDCATCHER by Jackman, Stuart

New York, 1980, Atheneum, first US edition, hard bound in dust jacket, Fine/Fine condition, 6x9, 218 pages...........1944: In the heart of the Saudi Arabian desert, in that desolate section called the Empty Quarter, something is very wrong. A band of marauding Bedouins led by a renegade sheik named Abu Marak has been terrorizing the scattered Bedu tribes, descending like wolves, looting, murdering, then vanishing. Military Intelligence in Cairo is worried: such anarchy is dangerous enough, but what if it is something more—the prelude to a jihad, a holy war, instigated by the Germans against the Allies?A four-man commando unit is quickly formed to find out, codenamed Sandcatcher. Its mission: to penetrate deep into the Empty Quarter, locate Marak and bring him in for questioning. Its men: Jack Blade, group leader, at the age of twenty-three already desert-hard and used to command; Corporal "Chaff"Finch, tough, easy, dangerous, a knife worn strapped to his wrist the way other men wear a watch; Hooper, an amiable giant able to fire from the hip and kill in one fluid motion; and Tom Race, the new man, a loner with a hint of foreign blood and a brittle arrogance that promises trouble. There is something odd about Race...In the days to come, these four men will undergo an adventure breathtaking in its danger and sudden shocks, an odyssey across uncharted desert amid sandstorms, jackals, breakdowns, treacherous ground, blazing heat, and, always, the threat of Marak and his men, unseen riders of the night. And there will be danger within as well. For as the men live and fight under tremendous pressure, the relationships between them will shift, loyalties blur, tensions grow—and secrets erupt. And one man is hiding the most astonishing secret of all.