“Volcanic atoll,” he said. “We’re going to have to get over the reef to get on dry land. We might have to swim for it.”
He looked at Ishmael and then to Leilani.
“You still have his gun?”
She nodded. “Yes, but—”
“Give it to me.”
She handed him the pistol that both of them knew was empty. He held it at the ready. “She’s going to untie you,” Kurt said. “You cause any trouble, I’ll fill you full of more holes than the boat.”
“No trouble,” Ishmael said.
Kurt nodded and Leilani disconnected the carabiner and heaved the anchor over the side. Next she untied his legs and threw the rope away.
Kurt waited for him to make some move, but all he did was stretch his legs and smile with relief.
By now they were closing in on the reef that surrounded the island. The waves weren’t too bad, but it was pretty turbulent where there were gaps in the reef.
“Should we look for a calmer spot?” Leilani asked.
“Tank’s got to be almost dry,” Kurt replied.
He went for the first gap he saw. The floundering boat plowed toward it like a barge, shoving a low surge of water in front of it. The water around them changed from dark blue to turquoise, and the chop got worse where the submerged sections of the reef affected the wave dynamics.
One second they’d crest a two-foot wave and the next they’d be hit from the side by another and dropped into a trough that seemed to drag them backward. The hard spine of the boat ground across something solid, and the prop chewed into it.
Two waves from behind combined and shoved them forward and to port. They scraped over more coral as the foam from a third wave washed over them.
Kurt turned the outboard this way and that, gunning the throttle and backing off, using it as both a motor and rudder. The backwash through the gap fought against them, but with the next set of breakers they surged forward again. This time the port side hit hard and both the chambers were ripped open.
“We’ve taken a hit,” Leilani shouted.
“Stay in the boat as long as you can,” Kurt shouted.
He gunned the throttle once more. The outboard revved for ten seconds or so and then began to sputter. He backed off a little, but it was too late. The motor stalled, starved of fuel. Another wave smashed them sideways.
“Go!” Kurt shouted.
Ishmael clambered over the side. Leilani hesitated and then went in, diving forward. Another wave smacked the sinking boat, and Kurt also lunged forward into the surf.
He swam with everything he had. But twenty-four hours without food, a lack of water and the exertion of the past two days counted against him. Fatigue would not wait long to set in.
The undertow pushed him back and then a wave swept him forward. He scraped over some more coral, jammed his foot onto a solid piece and pushed off hard, again launching himself forward. The boots made it hard to swim, but they were worth their weight in gold each time he kicked off against the reef.
When the undertow returned, he wedged his feet into the coral and held his ground. The foam blinded him as the swells rose over him. Something soft crashed into him from the front.
It was Leilani.
He grabbed her and shoved her forward with the next wave, and they surged through into the calmer section of water inside the protective ring of the reef.
Kurt swam hard. Leilani did the same. When his feet hit the sand, he dug in and waded forward, one hand on Leilani’s life jacket, dragging her with him.
They made it out of the surf and collapsed on the white sand, far enough down the beach that the waves still washed up against them.
Breathing was almost the limit of what he could handle at the moment, but he managed to say a few words: “You all right?”
She nodded, her chest heaving and falling, as his was.
Kurt looked around. They were alone. “Ishmael?”
He saw nothing, heard no response.
“Ishmael!”
“There!” Leilani said, pointing.
He lay facedown in the foam as the waves washed him up onto the sand and then dragged him backward.
Kurt got up, stumbled in Ishmael’s direction and crashed back into the sea. He grabbed Ishmael and dragged him to shore.
Ishmael began coughing and choking and spitting up water. A brief look told Kurt he would survive.
Before he could celebrate, a pair of long shadows fell over Kurt from behind. He recognized the shapes of rifles and burly men in the surreal shadows painted on the sand.
He turned. Several men stood with the sun to their backs. They seemed to be wearing ragged uniforms and helmets and carrying heavy bolt-action rifles.
As they approached, he saw them better. They were dark-skinned men, looking almost like Aboriginal Australians but with Polynesian features as well. Their rifles were old M1 carbines with five-shot clips and their uniforms and helmets looked like U.S. Marines circa 1945. Several more of them stood among the trees at the top of the beach.
Kurt was too exhausted and too surprised to do much more than watch as one of the men approached him. The man held the long rifle casually but wore a look of utter seriousness on his face.
“Welcome to Pickett’s Island,” he said in deeply accented English. “In the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I make you my prisoner.”
CHAPTER 44
FROM JOE’S PERSPECTIVE EITHER THE DOCKING PROCEDURE for the ferry was overly complicated or the boat and its captain were ill suited to the task. A full hour after the bay doors had been opened and the ship had been shunted back and forth a dozen times, they finally bumped against a pier.
Joe remained huddled in the rear of the flatbed. The drivers and crewmen had clambered into their rigs long before the ship stopped and now began firing up the big trucks. For another few minutes they idled their engines, and despite the open doors Joe was sure he would pass out from the diesel fumes before they left.
At last, with a headache pounding inside his skull like a jackhammer, the trucks began to roll. One by one they pulled out of the cargo hold and onto the pier. Joe didn’t risk a peek until he felt they were away from the waterfront. But he was surprised at how quickly they were moving only minutes after leaving the ferry.
He crept past the barrels to the back end of the truck. Since his truck had been the first into the hold, it became the last one out. They were now the tail-end Charlie of the convoy, which meant he could look out without fear of being spotted.
He lifted the tarp a few inches, saw gray-weathered macadam flying out behind them as the trucks flew along a road at speeds they’d never come close to in Yemen.
It was almost night yet again after twenty hours on the boat. Joe saw desert terrain in all directions. It looked remarkably like he’d arrived back in Yemen.
“Didn’t we just leave all this?” he mumbled.
There were differences of course, primarily the paved road. There was more vegetation and the occasional road sign. There had been none out in the deserts of Yemen. As signs whipped past, Joe tried to read them, but he could see only the back side of those on his side of the road, and those meant for drivers heading the opposite way were lit only by the big trailer’s taillights. The dim red glow was not bright enough for Joe to see much before the sign went out of range.
All he noticed was the lettering. It was done in the swirling calligraphy of Arabic and also the block letters of English, the mere presence of which meant he was much closer to civilization than he’d been in days.
As Joe waited for more signs, the night grew darker and the landscape became monotonous. The only thing that changed was the scent. Joe began to smell dust and moisture and the desert wet with rain. It reminded him of Santa Fe, where he’d grown up, when the dry season ended. Looking up, he realized the sky was a curtain of starless black.
Moments later, rain began splattering the truck and the road around him. Joe heard thunder in the distance. As the trucks
drove on, the shower intensified and the air grew cool and damp. To Joe’s surprise it wasn’t a passing shower but a steady soaking rain that continued to fall as the convoy pounded out the miles. Before long the tarp above him was soaked and dripping.
“Rain in the desert,” Joe whispered to himself. “I wonder if this is good news or bad.”
As the rain fell, they passed another group of signs. As luck would have it, a car was traveling in the opposite direction at almost the same instant. Its high beams cut through the rain and lit up a sign on the far side of the road long enough for Joe to read it.
The weathered blue placard was sandblasted and bent, but the words were clear enough.
“Marsa Alam,” Joe said as he read the sign. “Fifty kilometers.”
The name was familiar. Marsa Alam was the name of an Egyptian port on the Red Sea. It lay behind them. It must have been where the ferry tied up and the trucks disembarked. That meant they were three-quarters of the way from Cairo to the Sudanese border and only a couple of hours from Luxor.
“I’m in Egypt,” Joe whispered, quickly realizing what that meant. “These guys are headed for the Aswan Dam.”
CHAPTER 45
RAIN CONTINUED TO PELT THE CONVOY OF JINN’S TRUCKS as they rumbled west on the highway from Marsa Alam. With the moisture, the natural cooling of the desert at night and the wind swirling around the back of the truck as it raced along, Joe began to shiver.
At first he welcomed it as a relief from his time in Yemen and in the hot box of the ferry, but as the night wore on, the cold began to seep into his bones, and Joe pulled the flap shut to keep the wind and the mist from the truckbed.
It was four hours overland from Marsa Alam to Aswan, but after three hours the convoy began to slow as they came out of the open desert and into the swath of civilization that bordered the Nile.
The trucks crossed the Nile on a modern bridge and entered the town of Edfu on the west bank of the river. As Joe looked around, he saw multistory apartment blocks and storefronts and government buildings. It wasn’t exactly the Beltway, more like a dusty version of East Berlin in the desert, but it was civilization.
The truck slowed further, and Joe hoped they’d come to a red light, but they found a roundabout instead, turning a three-quarter circle before heading north in a straight line once again.
“It had to be a roundabout,” Joe mumbled.
He figured they might end up back on another highway at any moment and that he’d be in Aswan before he could get free. As the engine growled in low gear and the truck picked up speed, Joe decided the time to abandon ship had arrived.
He climbed under the flap and out onto the rear bumper. He glanced around the edge of the tarp, straining to see what was coming. No telephone poles or lights or signs. The coast was clear, and Joe leapt off the truck.
He hit the wet macadam, rolled and slid through an expansive puddle of muck where the rain had gathered as it soaked the street. He stayed down in it for a moment, watching the trucks for any sign the drivers had witnessed his stunt.
They rumbled north in the dark, never changing speed or even tapping the brakes.
Soaking and filthy, Joe pulled himself from the muck and looked around. He’d landed in an open area. Through the rain he could see a huge structure to the left lit by spotlights.
Ignoring new pains in his shoulder and hip and doing the best he could not to notice how badly his ankle hurt once again, he limped toward the lit-up area. It looked like a construction site and an ancient temple cross-pollinated, and only as Joe got close did he realize he was standing in front of the Temple of Horus, one of the best preserved ancient sites in all of Egypt.
The front wall had two huge wings that rose a hundred feet into the night sky. Human figures carved into the wall were sixty feet tall, and gaps that allowed the light into its interior were spaced evenly up, down and across.
During the day the site would have been filled with tourists. But at night, in the pouring rain, it was empty. Except, Joe noticed, for a pair of security guards in a lit booth.
He ran toward it and rapped on the window. The guards just about died from shock, one of them literally jumping from his seat.
Joe pounded on the window again and eventually one of the guards opened it.
“I need your help,” Joe said.
The still-startled guard appeared confused, but he recovered quickly. “Ah … of course,” he said, “come in. Yes, come inside.”
Joe moved to the door. Fortunately for him, guards at the site were picked partly for their ability to speak English, as many of the tourists were Americans and Europeans.
Joe stepped into the lighted booth as soon as the door opened. He was soaking wet, dripping muddy water all over the floor. One of the guards handed him a towel, which Joe used to dry his face.
“Thank you,” Joe said.
“What are you doing out in the rain?” one guard asked.
“It’s a long story,” Joe replied. “I’m an American. I was a prisoner of sorts until I jumped out of a moving truck, and I really need to use your phone.”
“An American,” the guard repeated. “A tourist? Do you want us to call your hotel?”
“No,” Joe said, “I’m not a tourist. I need to speak to the police. Actually, I need to speak to the military. We’re in danger here. We’re all in danger.”
“What kind of danger?” the guard asked suspiciously.
Joe looked him in the eye. “Terrorists are going to destroy the dam.”
CHAPTER 46
THE FIVE TRUCKS IN JINN’S CONVOY RUMBLED NORTH, eventually pulling off the main road and onto a dirt track. They passed the dam and continued on, traveling a perimeter road that wound along the jagged shore of Lake Nasser.
A half mile up from the dam, they came to a gate left conspicuously open and went through it. Traveling in the cab of the lead truck, Sabah ordered the lights doused and had the drivers use night vision goggles.
Blacked out in this manner, the convoy reached a boat ramp at the edge of the lake.
“Turn the trucks around,” Sabah ordered. “Back them in.”
Sabah climbed out of the lead truck and directed traffic. The big rigs lined up side by side, the wide ramp large enough to accommodate all five at once like great crocodiles basking on the shore.
Because the lake was so high from all the rain, most of the ramp was submerged. Sabah estimated a hundred feet of concrete lay hidden beneath the water before the ramp intersected the natural lake bed.
On his signal, the trucks began to ease down the ramp. The drivers took it slow, checking their progress in mirrors and through open windows.
As the flatbeds began backing into the water, Sabah took a radio controller from his pocket. He extended the antenna, pressed the power switch and pressed the first of four red buttons.
In the back of the five trailers, magnetic seals around the yellow drums popped open. The pressurized lids popped up and slid off to the side.
A green light told Sabah the activation had been successful.
Unseen by anyone, the silver sand of the microbots came alive, stirring and swirling, as if there were snakes hidden beneath the top layer, and beginning to climb over the edges of the barrels.
Unaware of what was happening in the flatbeds behind them, the drivers continued backing down the ramp, allowing gravity to do the work. None of them had done this before and most felt like they were being pulled in.
Sabah judged their progress. Their caution pleased him. It meant they weren’t paying attention to him.
“Good,” he whispered as he pressed the second of the four red buttons.
Inside the cabs, the door locks slammed down, the windows slid up into a ninety-percent-closed position and froze. The noise and movement startled the drivers.
An instant later chloroform gas began pumping from tiny canisters and filling the cabins. The men lasted only a second or two, none managed to pry open a door. One got a window half down before p
assing out and slumping onto the seat.
Without waiting, Sabah pressed the third button. The truck engines revved. They began to accelerate backward, crashing through the water like a herd of thundering hippos.
The engines had been modified to include a secondary air intake, disguised as an exhaust stack rising high above the roof of the truck. When Sabah activated the chloroform, the primary intake had been sealed shut and this secondary intake had opened. In effect, it acted like a snorkel, allowing the engine to breathe and continue to rev even after the entire truck was submerged.
Because of that, the motors continued to run and the wheels continued to spin in reverse, pushing the trucks down the ramp and out across the submerged rocks and gravel beyond it.
The charging trucks fanned out like the fingers of a hand, burrowing beneath the water and vanishing from view.
Momentum and the slope of the stony lake bed allowed them to continue even after their engines were finally swamped. When the trucks finally settled, they were thirty feet below the surface, one hundred and fifty feet from shore.
The unconscious drivers soon drowned. If and when they were discovered, they would be identified as Egyptian radicals. Sabah and Jinn’s connection to the incident would remain unknown, except to General Aziz, who would do well to keep silent and most likely have no choice but to return to the bargaining table.
As the waters settled, Sabah pressed the final button on his controller. A half mile away, on the wall of the dam, two separate devices began to issue homing signals.
The size of an average carry-on suitcase, but shaped something like mechanical crabs, the two devices had been placed there by a scuba diver forty-eight hours before. One was just below the waterline while the other clung to a spot on the sloping wall of the dam seventy feet below.
If the divers had done their jobs properly, ten-foot starter holes had already been bored through the outer wall and into the aggregate behind it. A batch of dedicated microbots from each crab would already be hard at work expanding those holes.
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