by Les W Kuzyk
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Vince followed beside Brad and their new guide as they left the hotel entrance. The heat seared more intense in the front, than the shaded pool. Down the steps and walking across the asphalt they approached an attentive teenager standing with crossed arms beside a waiting SUV. The guide and youth looked both to be of medium height, dark, and with brown eyes. Strands of curly black hair poking out contrasted with their blue turbans and bright colored clothing. Aahil, that was his name, and his introduced son was Hilal. The father held his head straight and true, his chin up and his gaze appeared terminally calm.
Vince found himself in the back seat beside Brad, and he watched out the window as their guide drove them from hotel parking out onto the street. They turned, then circled the Rond and pulled onto Pont Kennedy, the long green bridge.
“This bridge gotta be a half mile long,” Brad said.
“Yes,” Aahil said, “A small amount less. Seven hundred and ten meters.”
Brad laughed. “You guys are metric here too.” He looked at Vince.
“Only Americans still count feet and miles,” Vince said.
“Hey, no problem.” Brad grinned. “You guys may be the word language experts, but I can speak metric. Zero point seven one kilometers.”
As they passed over the bridge Vince gazed out at the many people walking back and forth along sidewalks on either side. Brad pointed, and Vince also noticed a well-dressed man in a suit beaming at them from a poster hung on each sequential light post.
“Who’s that guy?” Brad asked Aahil.
“The president of Niger.”
“Lotta posters.”
“He promises a miracle to his people—the Green Sahara will be returned to us.”
“Sounds bogus,” Vince said. “How could anyone do that?”
“Our president has ideas and an election to win.”
Vince felt Brad’s eyes on him, but he turned to stare far along the river not wanting to hear that atmosphere word again. Not yet…yet he had talked of Mars followers living in fantasy.
Crossing the bridge Aahil told them of the picture alongside the bright smiling face—the Dabous Giraffes. There had been a time, long before recorded history, when the Sahara was truly green. But not all records were written in words. The Dabous Giraffes had been etched in stone at that time and the famous pictograph remained to this day. Carved some seven thousand years past, the giraffe pair told of the time when the desert had not been desert, but grew grass enough for hoofed animals. The people listened when the president spoke of this age. Other records neither in words spoke of a green Sahara, but the image of those two giraffes caught the peoples’ attention best. Beautifully carved into the stone of Dabous, the male beside the female, they stood a full five meters high, life-size.
“The Dabous Rock is half way to Arlit from Agadez close to the Aïr Mountains.” Aahil told them. “But a few kilometers off the tar road. We will go, if you wish to see.”
“Mountains.” Brad grinned, nodding.
They sped up as urban development thinned. The road became the N6 which, Aahil told them, would take them to the border of Burkina Faso. The N1, the other way before the bridge, back past the airport would take them to Dosso and from there the N7 south to the border with Benin. There would be the closest ports on the Gulf of Guinea. Uranium flowed to port that way. Oil wealthy Nigeria sat to the east of Benin, with all its peoples and all of its oil companies. Prosperous times there now, for some.
“Nigeria,” Vince repeated. He turned to Brad. “That’s one potential material source on the list they provided. Storage tanks, steel pipe and liquid sulphur dioxide. If this thing goes anywhere past Preliminary that is.”
They pulled up to the compound entrance. Aahil introduced them to the guard, speaking lightly in one of the local dialects. The guard smiled broadly, opening the gate to let them in. “Green Sahara,” he said in English. Vince and Brad looked to Aahil.
“This man dreams—he believes you have come to bring the miracle,” Aahil said. “But as you now know him, you have access to this compound. At any time.”
They drove into the compound and over to the warehouse building. The guard had followed and he unlocked and pulled open one of the warehouse doors. They all stepped out of the vehicle, and the two engineers walked inside, looking around.
“Hey, this looks like a passenger balloon with a basket,” Brad said. “Probably helium. Should work.”
“So cloud base right? “Vince looked sideways at Brad. “Ten thousand feet you said.” He paused, scanning the plastic and metal containers stacked against the walls. “So what’s that in metric?”
“Fifty meters more than 3 kilometers.” Brad beamed. “Like I said Vince, you really gotta come along. You’ll love it up there; if you don’t mind heights. The views, the freedom. Fantastic.” He turned to their driver standing in the doorway. “We’re gonna need you guys, Aahil, to follow this balloon with us in it and pick us up for a ride back here. We’ll use GPS to coordinate locations. A lot depends on the wind direction that day.”
Aahil lifted his chin to acknowledge, nodding his ascent.
Vince walked over to a large steel vessel. The red paint characters SO2 were stencil-painted on the tank. The pressure gauge told him liquid sulphur dioxide and the float gauge showed the tank full.
“What prevailing winds you got around here this time of year?” Brad asked.
“The winds blow this season from northeast,” Aahil said.
“So we’ll be drifting southwest. We land best as close to a road as possible for pick up. Somewhere along that N6 highway you say goes down to Burkina Faso. We definitely don’t want to cross any international borders.” Brad asked what kind of road pattern there was along the highway. Almost none, Aahil told him, but Brad listened close when their guide talked of the wadis. They would drive off road best along a drainage. There the exposed rocks kept any vehicle out of the sand, acting almost as a road.
“Hey Vince, almost like we’re a second shift.” Brad mused. “I mean my specs told me all of this equipment would be here. We’ve got the helium launch balloons, the helium tanks, those 100 litre PVC vessels must be to carry test sulphur. I’ll check with the inventory details on what’s here. But, just like someone was here before us getting things prepped.”
“Yeah same,” said Vince. “The sulphur dioxide volume we need for more than one test looks like it’s right here. This vessel holds three tons. I don’t know where the sulphur was sourced, but we easily run Preliminary multiple times. We’re set for that, anyway.”
They looked at each other, and back and forth at Aahil.
“Okay, so we take this passenger balloon up to cloud base, test a batch of those pop valves and carry out the Preliminary release. Try out the dispersal hardware.” Brad shrugged. “So basically, we debug the release procedure.”
“Yup.” Vince nodded.
“Hey Aahil,” Brad said. “I’ve been having a look at those ridges just to the south. What say you drive us over there and see if we can make it to the top. Anywhere up high. I left my wing back at the hotel, but looks like those could be some excellent launch sites. Easily a couple hundred feet of vertical. Can we get over there to check them out?”
“We can drive there, maybe two kilometers,” Aahil said, looking. “We will search for the wadi there.”
“Excellent,” Brad said.
“You have interest in mountains.” Aahil looked at Brad. “You may wish to go east and north to Agadez. There in the desert we have the Aïr Mountains. Those are the true mountains of Niger.”
They drove from the compound down the N6 highway, turning off onto a local street. Not much further the street opened up to the sand of a dry drainage. Aahil shifted the Nissan into four wheel drive and they followed the rocky stream bed up towards the point on the ridge Brad had picked. On a weaving path between boulders, Aahil wove a careful way partially up the ridge. But not to the top.
“No more,” Aahil told them st
opping on a level spot.
Vince turned to Brad.
“Excellent,” Brad said. “We hike up.”
As Vince stepped out he watched Brad orient their position relative to the edge of the rocky outcrop. Aahil lifted a hand from the window as they walked away. Brad picked a route for their upward trek, crunching on the rocky sun baked ground between scattered drifts of sand. Vince fell in behind. He could feel the day heating, but a cooling breeze blew up the ridge.
“So how do you see us packaging the sulphur?” Brad asked over his shoulder. “For Preliminary.”
“Ah, it’s liquid and low pressure,” Vince said. “One of those hundred litre plastic cans. A liquid litre being a kilogram, one of the wonders of the metric system.”
“Yeah, okay so your hundred kilograms that’s two twenty pounds no problem with the lift there,” Brad said. “You can rig up the dispersal hardware?”
“Yeah yeah,” Vince said.
They came to a set of protruding rocks almost like stairs, and they stepped along keeping single file.
“So we’re up in the helium balloon.” Brad turned back, stopping for a breath. “From there, we dump the plastic can with dispersal hardware and a helium lift balloon that takes it up up and away. We give a wireless call signal for release and we watch. Should work.”
“Two or three days and we report back on Preliminary.”
“Mostly a procedural test.”
“Yup.”
Brad grabbed a stone, and winged it up over the edge above them. They could hear the rock chip rattle and clatter out of sight. They went on.
“What we said back in the warehouse,” Vince said thoughtfully. “The contact lists, the project design specs. Someone did run through this before us. I mean everything’s there!”
“Yeah. And this is Africa,” Brad said. “My co-design guy Keith does developing country work and he says deadlines are typically a joke. Nothing on time and the schedule can be a mess. Hey, you’d like the guy. He’s got a daughter just like you.”
Brad brought up an infogram from Keith with his photo ID on the side. “You gotta meet the guy some day.”
“And he still does overseas work?”
“That’s his trade off, yeah.”
“Well, this plan’s been thought through.” Vince kicked a rock to the side, listening as it bounced and rolled behind him.
“So then I wonder if they got the right people. You and me I mean.” Brad said. “An American and a Canadian. Maybe they screwed up there. Could be they wanted a couple Chinese engineers.”
“Yeah, whatever. Just another contract,” Vince said. “Overseas bonus lets me pay the bills.”
An extra high step took them up and over a pinnacle. The natural rock surface lay flat before them, near level as the concrete floor back in the warehouse. Brad walked to the edge and looked down. As Vince edged closer to catch a glance, he could just make out the diminished figures of Aahil and his son standing by the Nissan far below.
“So dude.” Vince could sense that beaming face beside him. “You stand near the edge and inflate your wing. Right here. You got this nice little breeze coming up the ridge, that gives you lift, and so you step off into that wind like a cliff top hawk.”
Vince turned to stare at this fellow, shaking his head. But for the crazy climate crisis talk, this was beginning to feel like an adventure in the making.