One of Mr. Colenso's reporters, C. Mark Brinkley, 27, was among those few permitted to hunker down with the marines on a desert airstrip near Kandahar.

Two planes landed in Dawson's Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan.

On the Libyan side, construction crews are completing two new desert airstrips and border bases are ringed with barbed wire, mine fields and 10-foot-high walls of sand.

The vague silhouette of a pipe-head pumping station was visible near the private desert airstrip where thev'd landed.

Johns involved a United States Customs drug smuggling investigation in Arizona where Customs officers followed two pickup trucks to a remote desert airstrip, and set up surveillance.

On 3 March, Royal Air Force C130 aircraft were sent to a desert airstrip at Zilla in the south of the country to rescue expatriate oil workers.

But almost nothing is moving behind more than three miles (4.8km) of chain-link fencing that now surrounds the town, the plant and its small desert airstrip.

Even before they touched down at the desert airstrip, a transport helicopter and two attack helicopters had their rotors spinning for the trip to the front.

That crackdown was provoked by the Popular Front's hijacking of several international airliners to a Jordanian desert airstrip, where they were blown up.

While some have resisted, other Indians have been seduced by the quick fortunes that can reward those who manage desert airstrips or offer other services to the drug cartels.