Receiving a blank stare from the major, Joe paused. “You guys know what a rabble-rouser is, right?”
Major Edo pulled his feet off the desk, landing them on the wooden floor with a heavy clump. He pulled the cigarette from the ashtray, where he’d put it, threatened to actually smoke it for a second and then leaned toward Joe instead.
“You come to warn us of trouble?” he said as if Joe had been hiding that fact.
“Yes,” Joe said. “Terrorists from Yemen are going to destroy the dam.”
“The dam?” Edo repeated with a tone of disbelief. “Aswan High Dam?”
“Yes,” Joe said.
“Have you seen the dam?”
“Only in pictures,” Joe admitted.
“The dam is made of stone, rocks and concrete,” the major said with fervor. “It weighs millions of tons. It’s two thousand feet thick at the base. These men—if they exist—could hit it with fifty thousand pounds of dynamite and they would only take a small chunk out of one side.”
With every phrase, the major waved the cigarette around. Ash flew here and fell there, the thin line of smoke danced, but still the cigarette didn’t go to his lips. He sat back, utterly convinced of himself. “I tell you,” he finished, “the dam cannot be breached.”
“No one said anything about blowing it up from the bottom,” Joe replied. “They’re going to cut a channel across the top, just below the waterline where the dam is narrowest.”
“How?” the major asked.
“How?”
“Yes,” the major said, “tell me how? Are they going to drive backhoes and diggers up on the top and begin an excavation without us noticing?”
“Of course not,” Joe said.
“Then tell me how it is to be done.”
Joe went to speak but stopped with his mouth wide open before uttering a word.
“Yes?” the major said expectantly. “Go on.”
Joe closed his mouth. The way he saw it, he could explain what he knew, telling the major that the dam would be brought down by machines so small no one could see them, and expect only laughter and utter dismissal. Or he could make something up and do nothing but muddy the waters and send the major off looking for a threat different than the one that actually existed.
“Can I make a phone call?” he said finally.
If he could reach the American Embassy or NUMA, he could at least warn someone else of the danger in Aswan and also of the impostor’s presence on the floating island.
“This is not America, Mr. Zavala. You have no entitlement to a phone call or to an attorney or to anything I choose not to give you.”
Joe tried another tactic. “How about this,” he said. “There are five trucks out there. Identical flatbeds, with tarps over the top. They were heading north, carrying yellow barrels in the back, drums filled with a silvery sandlike substance. Find them and detain them, question the drivers. I’m sure you’ll discover they have no visas, passports or credit cards either.”
“Ah yes,” the major said scornfully. He picked up a notepad and scanned it under the harsh lighting.
“The five mystical trucks from Yemen,” he said. “We have been looking for them since you first gave us your story. By air, by car, on foot. There are no trucks out there to be found. Not here. Not in any warehouse large enough to hide them. Not near the dam or on the shore of the lake. Not even on the road back to Marsa Alam. They do not exist except, I think, in your imagination.”
Joe sighed in frustration. He had no idea where the flatbeds could have gone. Edo’s men had to have missed something.
The major tossed the notepad aside. “Why don’t you tell us what you’re really up to?”
“I’m just trying to help,” Joe said, as close to surrendering out of frustration as he’d ever been. “Can you at least inspect the dam?”
“Inspect it?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Look for leaks, look for damage. Anything that might be out of the ordinary.”
The major considered this for a second, sitting up straighter and nodding. “An excellent idea.”
“It is?”
“Yes. That’s just what we’ll do.”
“We?”
“Of course,” the major said, standing and mercifully stubbing the cigarette out at last. “How will I know what to look for if I don’t bring you along?”
Joe wasn’t sure he liked this idea.
“Guards,” the major shouted.
The door opened. Two Egyptian MPs came in.
“Shackle him appropriately and deliver him to the dock. I’m taking our guest on a tour.”
As the men began to bind Joe in irons, the major spoke. “You will see that the dam is impregnable, and then we can end this charade and talk about your true purpose, whatever that might be.”
CHAPTER 50
TWENTY MINUTES LATER JOE FOUND HIMSELF IN A PATROL boat motoring quietly up the Nile in the dark. The Egyptian major gave orders while another soldier piloted the craft and a third man stood by with an assault rifle.
The night air was cool, but fortunately the rain had passed. The stars had come back out as the sky cleared. There was little traffic on the river at this hour, but the valley was lit up. Hotels and other buildings on the banks of the river virtually glowed with the illumination, as did the dam, awash in the glare of floodlights like a football stadium at night.
Because Aswan was an embankment dam made of aggregate, it blended better into the background than dams like the Hoover. Instead of a towering gray wall at one end of a narrow valley, Joe saw a huge sloping structure like a giant ramp almost the color of the desert around it.
The outside of the structure was a thin layer of concrete designed to prevent erosion. Beneath that shell lay compacted rock and sand and, in the center, a watertight clay core that led down to a concrete structure known as a cutoff curtain.
Behind the dam sat a wall of water over three hundred feet tall.
“Do we have to be on this side?” Joe mumbled.
“What was that?” the major asked.
“Couldn’t we inspect the dam from the other side or even from the top?”
The major shook his head. “We are looking for a leak, no? How do you expect to see a problem on the high side? Everything is underwater.”
“I was hoping you had some cameras or an ROV or something.”
“We have nothing like that,” the major said.
“I know a few people,” Joe mentioned, “I could probably get you one cheap.”
“No thank you, Mr. Zavala,” the major said. “We will inspect the face of the dam from here and I will show you that it is secure, and then we will discuss your lengthy incarceration for wasting my time.”
“Great,” Joe mumbled. “Just make sure my cell is far away from here.”
The patrol boat continued forward, easing into the restricted zone that stretched a half mile down river from the base of the dam.
Constructed in the sixties with Soviet help, the dam was built in two distinct sections. The western side, on Joe’s right, presented the broad sloping face. On the eastern side, past a triangular peninsula of rock and sand covered with high-tension lines and transformers, stood a vertical wall of concrete with gaps in it for the spillways. It was set back on a narrow outlet known as a tailrace, where the high-speed water that flushed through and spun the turbines reentered the river and slowed.
Joe noticed that the water in the tailrace was relatively calm at the moment. “Aren’t you generating power?”
“The spillways are open to a bare minimum,” the major said. “Maximum power isn’t needed at night. Peak demand is in the afternoon, for air conditioners and commercial lighting.”
They continued to move closer, bearing to the right-hand side and the sloping portion of the structure.
The closer they got, the easier it was for Joe to appreciate the enormity of the dam. The massive segmented ramp was wider and flatter than he’d expected. It seemed more like a mountain dropp
ed into the river than a structure built by men.
“How thick is it again?”
“Nine hundred and eighty meters at the base.”
Nearly a full kilometer, Joe thought. Over half a mile. He began to see why the major was so confident. But Joe also knew a little about hydro engineering and he knew what he’d seen in the tank in Yemen.
The breach on the model had started up high and the collapse had proceeded from there, like a levy overtopped on the banks of the Mississippi.
“We’re not going to see anything from down here,” he said. “We need to inspect the top. We need to get teams out onto the dam itself and look for leakage.”
The major seemed exasperated.
“I had thought this would show you how foolish your efforts at wasting our time are,” he said. “I have no plans to imprison you. I was merely ‘yanking your chain,’ as you Americans like to say. But if you continue to try my patience, I will grow angry and have no choice but to …”
The major’s voice trailed off. He was looking past Joe, staring at the sloped wall of the dam. They were fifty feet away.
Joe turned. A trickle of phosphorescence could be seen where the water met the dam, turbulence where there shouldn’t be any. Water was running down the face of the dam and into the river. Not a flood, more like someone had left a spigot open somewhere high above, but there should not have been any.
“Oh no,” Joe mumbled.
“Take us closer,” the major ordered, stepping up to the front of the boat.
The driver nudged the throttles, and the patrol boat surged forward. A few seconds later they were right up against the face of the dam, two spotlights on the patrol boat’s light bar trained on the flowing water.
“It’s picking up speed,” Joe noted.
He stared upward along the sloping face as the major tilted one of the lights. An elongated snaking path led up and away from them.
“Can this be true?” Major Edo mumbled to himself. “Can this be happening?”
“I swear to you,” Joe said, “we’re in danger. The whole valley is in danger.”
The major continued to stare as if in shock. “But this is not that much,” he said.
“It’ll get worse,” Joe insisted, still looking up. “Can you see where it’s coming from?”
The major manipulated the spotlights to follow the path of the trickling water, but the trail disappeared where the lights faded.
“No,” the major said, all airs of superiority gone.
“You need to get a warning out,” Joe urged. “Get everyone away from the river.”
“It will cause a panic,” the major said. “What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not.”
The major was paralyzed. He didn’t seem able to act.
“Unchain me,” Joe shouted. “I’ll help you look. Once we find the source, maybe we can do something about it, but at least you’ll know for sure.”
All the time they waited, the flow increased steadily. Two spigots’ worth now, turned wide open.
“Please, Major.”
The major snapped out of it. He grabbed the keys from one of the guards, unlocked Joe’s cuffs first and then the shackles around his feet.
“Come with me,” the major said, grabbing a walkie-talkie.
Joe climbed off the boat and onto the angled surface of the dam. He ran alongside the major, clambering upward and following the trail of water.
The slope of Aswan is only thirteen degrees, relatively mild unless one is running up it at full speed. After covering seven hundred feet horizontally and ninety-one feet vertically, the major was winded, and they still hadn’t found the breach.
“The flow is getting worse,” he said, pausing near the stream.
Joe saw fine sand and other sediments in the flow. The scouring had begun already.
“We have to go higher,” Joe said.
The major nodded, and they resumed their climb. By the time they were within fifty feet of the top, the flow of water was a six-foot-wide stream, surging with foam and small rocks. Suddenly, a section of the wall gave way and the flow doubled instantly, rushing toward them.
“Look out,” Joe shouted, pulling the major aside.
He and Joe backed away from the flow. There could be no denying it now.
The major brought the radio to his mouth and keyed the talk switch.
“This is Major Edo,” he said. “I report a level 1 emergency. Sound all alarms and begin a full evacuation. The dam has been compromised.”
Something unintelligible came back through the radio, and the major responded instantly. “No, this isn’t a drill or a false alarm! The dam is in danger! I repeat: The dam is in danger of imminent collapse!”
Another small section of the upper rim gave way, and the foaming water poured down the slope in turbulent fashion. If anyone doubted the major’s warning, all they had to do was look out the window and see for themselves.
In the distance the sound of alarms rose forth in the dark. They sounded like air-raid sirens wailing.
Down below, the patrol boat raced off to the south.
“Cowards!” the major yelled.
Joe couldn’t honestly blame them, but it left him and the major in a bad predicament. The dam began to tremble underfoot. The structure might have been massive and the breach only fifteen feet wide at the moment, but Joe and the major were far too close for it to be safe.
“Come on,” Joe said, grabbing the major by the shoulder and racing toward the crest of the dam. “We have to get to the top, it’s our only chance.”
CHAPTER 51
THE SAME DARKNESS THAT RULED OVER EGYPT HAD ALREADY settled across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, with one minor difference. The skies had cleared over Egypt but were clouding up over the ocean. Enough so, that two hours before dawn Kurt Austin could no longer see the stars.
That concerned him more than usual as he was standing on a fifteen-foot raft in the middle of the sea, navigating with a seventy-year-old sextant and a set of yellowed, moth-eaten charts left over from World War Two.
The boat was an outrigger-style craft. It resembled a cross between the famous Kon-Tiki raft and a Hawaiian five-man canoe. It had a raised bow, a wider central section and a squared-off stern. Its propulsion came from oars or, more preferably, a strange-looking triangular sail known as a crab claw that stuck out to one side.
The crab claw was an ancient sail, used for over a thousand years and very effective at propelling small boats without being ungainly. Ahead of it Kurt’s addition to the raft billowed in a ten-foot arc. The more modern-looking sail was a makeshift version of a spinnaker. It acted something like a wing and allowed the raft to sail closer to the wind.
Behind him, four similar rafts followed them. A flotilla from Pickett’s Island.
The plan was to sneak aboard and take over the floating island. With eighteen men plus Leilani and himself, five of the Pain Makers and forty rifles—the extras being brought along to arm the prisoners Kurt hoped to set free—it would almost be a fair fight, providing Kurt could lead them to the battleground.
He lowered the sextant.
“Any luck?” Leilani asked.
“No,” he said. “We’re sailing blind.”
Kurt stepped back from the bow and put the sextant away. He turned to Tautog. “Let’s stay on this heading for now.”
Tautog nodded. He and his nephew Varu were guiding the boat.
The fleet had been sailing for five hours. They’d been making good time because the winds had reversed direction, the way sea and land breezes alternated as day turned to night on the coast. The pattern was helpful, though it shouldn’t have been occurring in the open ocean. Kurt put it down to Jinn’s weather manipulation.
“You’re worried,” Leilani said, moving closer to him.
“I may have just sailed us all into oblivion.”
Kurt turned his gaze back to the John Bury’s old charts. Pickett had determined the island’s exact posit
ion and marked it on the map where there had been nothing but blue ocean. He’d also marked the other two islands and drawn a circle around them. The Bury Archipelago was scribbled in faded pen along with the letters U.S. It seemed Pickett had claimed them for America.
Leilani looked over his shoulder. “Where are we?”
“Roughly here,” Kurt said, pointing to a spot on the map.
“And where’s Aqua-Terra?”
“That’s a very good question,” he said.
After discovering the Pain Maker, Kurt had immediately gone to the charts. After a series of estimations and calculations, he’d guessed at Aqua-Terra’s location, assuming, perhaps foolishly, that it would remain in the same general area. Judging from the wind and the distance from Pickett’s Island, he calculated that they could just about reach Aqua-Terra before dawn if they left right away.
Any real delay would have made it impossible and meant waiting until the next night, since approaching the island in daylight would have been suicide. And that twenty-four-hour hold meant leaving Paul, Gamay and the others in Jinn’s clutches. It meant another day for Jinn’s scheme to play out or for him to leave the island behind and disappear. Kurt considered those possibilities unacceptable, and the fleet had moved out with great haste.
As it turned out, the small boats had sailed better than Kurt thought they would, enjoying more favorable winds along the way. They were well ahead of his schedule, but also it seemed on the verge of being lost.
“When we last saw Aqua-Terra, it was sitting idle right here,” he said. “If it stayed that way, we should be right on top of it.”
“I see light,” Varu said. “Light off the port bow.”
All eyes swung to port. There, perhaps three miles away, was a dimly glowing apparition. It almost looked like a ghost ship floating in the fog, but it was Marchetti’s island. It was running dark, with only a few lights turned on here and there.
Leilani smiled. “You were saying?”
Kurt grinned. “Let’s turn to the northeast,” he said to Tautog and then pointed. “That way.”
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