IN the baking heat of a Middle Eastern desert, service people from RAF Leeming are sleeping eight to a tent and drinking up to seven litres of bottled water a day to help fend off heat exhaustion.

Fifteen regional reporters, including Brian Redhead of the D&S Times, have just spent a whirlwind five days in Oman with those involved in the bilateral Exercise Saif Sareea 2 (Arabic for Swift Sword 2), which began last month and is due to end in November.

RAF Leeming is one of the UK air bases involved in the £93m event, where British forces from the Army, Royal Navy and RAF are exercising with their military counterparts from the relatively tiny Arab nation, which has had close links with this country for more than 200 years.

The official view is that it remains an exercise for, despite media speculation since the terrorist attacks on America last month and Mr Tony Blair's statement that Britain stands shoulder to shoulder with the US, there are no visible indications that British forces in Oman are about to be plunged into war.

"This is not an operation and everything is going on exactly as we planned it," insisted RAF spokesman Sqn Ldr James Hill. "We have no other task except exercising. This has been planned for two years, well before the terrorist strikes."

Air and ground crews from Leeming remain uncertain about what role, if any, they would play if the RAF became involved in strikes against Afghanistan, and commanding officers would say only that there was a policy of keeping personnel informed of developments from the UK.

But the amount of military hardware assembled in the tense region has left observers with no doubt about the firepower that could be deployed if it came to the crunch.

More than 20,000 British soldiers, sailors and air people are working alongside 13,000 troops from the Sultan of Oman's armed forces on the biggest exercise mounted by this country for 15 years, involving an imagined insurrection in a fictional Middle East country.

As well as 30 fast jets, there are 27 ships led by the carrier HMS Illustrious, 60 Challenger tanks and another 900 armoured vehicles.

Grp Capt Andy Walton, station commander at Leeming, is leading 250 of his personnel with Tornado fighters from 11 squadron. He is base commander at Thumrait, one of seven camps involved in the exercise.

In daytime temperatures which have been known to soar to 50C, Brian Redhead met people from Northallerton, Thirsk, Ripon and Darlington playing important roles in the exercise. He watched them at work, stayed with them in their tented "village," shared their food and learned how they were coping with the heat.

In special reports with pictures next week's D&S, he describes the "steaming jungle" of a Hercules transport aircraft in which service people and reporters were kept for an hour because of security restrictions when it made a scheduled landing on an internal flight between camps.

Personalities include the co-pilot, from Ripon, of a huge Boeing Sentry early warning aircraft, a Darlington man flying Tornados with the famous 617 (Dam Busters) squadron, a medical expert from the same town, and a Leeming airwoman working in a field kitchen where temperatures can reach 71C.