David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is a television journalist making a documentary film on post-colonial Africa. To finish the film, he is in the Sahara desert seeking to meet with and interview rebel fighters involved in Chadian Civil War (1965–79). Struggling to find rebels to interview, he is frustrated when his Land Rover Series#Series III gets hopelessly stuck on a sand dune. After a long walk through the desert back to his hotel, a thoroughly glum Locke discovers that an Englishman, Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), who has also been staying there and with whom he had struck up a friendship, has died overnight at the hotel from a heart condition.