Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  Ali was in the threadbare, sagging front passenger seat now, though he was clearly the leader of this section of the enterprise. He was a lean and angular mongoose of a man with a false grin and shifty eyes. He had been working as a ward orderly in the hospital and that was where first contact had been made after Nahom’s return. It had been Ali who’d guided the Englishman Mariner to the finance office and – almost without thinking – made a mental note of the PIN number reflected in the convex mirror which revealed what the Englishman’s fingers were typing into the terminal.

  Ali had sidled up to Nahom in his private room almost exactly a day ago and whispered that he might be able to help the young man with his mission. He had introduced the other man as Tariq as they bundled Nahom out of the ambulance and into the yellow vehicle in the Old Town a couple of hours earlier, both praising Allah who had seen fit to ensure the prisoner was transferred without an armed guard. Tariq, built like a hippopotamus, was the ambulance driver. They both, obviously, worked for the men who were holding Tsibekti. Ali had cut all ties with the hospital as far as Nahom could see – there would be no going back for him. But Tariq was in two minds and seemed to have evolved a plan that might allow him to go back to work if things went wrong here or wherever they were heading for.

  Tariq was driving the Nasr now as though he had flashing lights and a siren. That in itself was a terrifying experience, not really ameliorated by the wall of religious icons and texts that cluttered the dashboard or hung from the rear-view mirror, or even by the copy of the Holy Qur’an that was wedged in a glove compartment too small to hold it. In fact, the rear-view mirror’s main function seemed to be as a hook on which to hang things, for Tariq never seemed to look in it. If he wanted to know what was behind him he tended to glance back over his shoulder or, occasionally, to twist right round as far as his bulk allowed and study the road behind with narrow, pig-like eyes. But it was Ali who was turned around in the passenger seat now with no thought of wearing a seatbelt. He was waving his phone at Nahom and shouting angrily.

  ‘What a fool I am,’ bellowed Ali over the screeching of the elderly eleven hundred cc engine as it tried to pull the battered old body along at one hundred kilometres per hour – a feat it had hardly been capable of even on the first day it was bought. And that was many years and owners ago now. ‘I have the wit to look into the fish-eye mirror for the PIN number of the English crusader’s American Express card but not the wit to charge my cell phone! Look at it! Dead as Tutankhamen! Tariq, where is yours?’

  ‘I left it in the ambulance. After we are finished with this run I will go back to Sharm and report to the police. I will tell them I was hit in the head and have no memory. Then I will ask for my job back. Leaving my cell behind makes this story look more true.’

  ‘That is very cunning, Tariq. Good luck with it. Nahom? Where is yours?’

  Nahom’s mind raced. Would he be more or less likely to be killed if he admitted his phone was with his money and his money belt in the hands of the police? More likely, he calculated. Tell them as little as possible, he thought. ‘I can’t get a signal,’ he said. Which was true, after a fashion. And, to be fair, it was quite believable. They had left Sharm behind a good while ago, easing their way through the security point by the skin of their teeth. El Tor was still a long way ahead. The road was quite busy, mostly with buses and trucks – many of them on the run between Sharm and Cairo. But on one side of it, the rust-coloured desert stretched away to the flat blue line of the sea. On the other it stretched away to the jagged red line of the mountains. Apart from occasional stunted bushes of acacia and camel thorn, often draped in plastic bags blown there by the relentless wind, there was nothing to be seen. Certainly neither real palm trees nor the impossibly tall, straight ones constructed by the phone company to house their cell phone aerials.

  ‘They will be trying to contact us!’ snarled Ali. ‘I had just begun to report in when the battery went flat.’

  ‘Will we stop in El Tor and go to an ATM machine there?’ asked Nahom, who had been terrified that the theft would be discovered and the cards cancelled long before he got the money, almost as much as he was consumed with guilt at having stolen from the man who had saved his life. But it wasn’t for himself, he kept repeating. It was for Tsibekti. Desperate situations required desperate actions. Allah would surely understand that.

  ‘We will if we get the chance,’ confirmed Ali. ‘And if the security at the checkpoint outside town isn’t too tight. A guard was blown up here in 2014. They’ve been a bit jumpy ever since. We’ll certainly try, though. At El Tor there will be somewhere I can charge my phone. Somewhere you can get a signal as well as the money.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Nahom cunningly, ‘you could charge your phone and make contact while I get the money. That would be quicker all round.’

  ‘And,’ added Tariq, turning round in his seat like Ali to show a great, gap-toothed grin, ‘we can use some of the English crusader’s money to buy a good big meal! There are some really good restaurants in the souq behind the El Mecca Hotel.’

  ‘If you do that,’ snarled Ali, ‘you had better hope that the others don’t find out. Or they’ll find another way to make your story of having been hit in the head look more believable!’

  ‘Inshallah,’ shrugged Tariq. If God wills. He gave Nahom another gap-toothed grin and a big conspiratorial wink.

  So Nahom, in the back seat, was the only one in the Nasr actually looking at the road ahead when the goat apparently appeared from nowhere and nonchalantly ambled into the carriageway in front of them.

  ‘You will need to pretend to be Nahom. Can you do this?’ asked Robin.

  ‘I can,’ answered Aman Kifle confidently. ‘Tsibekti and Nahom are my cousins. Bisrat is my brother. We live in the same village. We grew up together. I had always hoped one day Tsibekti would be my wife. That is why I came with Nahom. That is why I nearly drowned trying to free him from the anchor when the boat ran on to the reef and sank.’

  For a frustrated lover recovering from a near-death experience whose bride had been kidnapped by a band of rapacious murderers, Aman sounded disturbingly cheerful to Robin. There was something about the cocksure young man that really grated with her. Unlike Richard with his Chinese proverbs, she felt no further responsibility for the person whose life she had saved.

  ‘Do you know of any passwords or codes the kidnappers might use to confirm Nahom’s identity?’ asked Robin, suddenly, her head full of vague memories of Hollywood blockbusters and TV police series.

  ‘Nahom talked of the famous landmark near our village. The bridge at Dogali.’

  ‘She will recognize your voice,’ added Ibrahim with a frown. ‘What good will a password be then?’

  ‘She will, but no one else would. What will these Bedouin know to tell one Eritrean voice from another? It is the Bedouin who will want the password. Tsibekti will surely just pass messages and say what they tell her to. But Tsibekti is quick-thinking and determined. When I begin to speak with her I will make her understand what is going on without giving anything away. It will be like a game.’

  ‘That’s a strange game, Kifle,’ snapped Sergeant Sabet, clearly as unimpressed by the glib, overconfident young man as Robin.

  ‘You have never played it, Sergeant? Perhaps you do not come from a large family. Or you have never wished to discuss things with a sister or a cousin in front of parents and older relatives but still being secret about the truth of what you are saying. I thought all teenagers had such a code. Tsibekti, Nahom, Bisrat and I certainly did.’

  Sergeant Sabet sniffed her disapproval. Robin caught her eye and smiled in sisterly sympathy. Sabet’s frown deepened. She, also, apparently, disapproved of this intimacy.

  ‘Is that water?’ asked Aman, blissfully unaware of the byplay his breezy confidence was engendering, eyeing Robin’s untouched glass as he spoke.

  ‘Here.’ She passed it to him, hoping the action did not upset any of Ibrahim’s notions of hospitali
ty. Sabet’s frown had made it clear that she was only still in the room by the skin of her teeth. One false move and she would be out on her ear.

  ‘What you may not be aware of,’ rumbled Ibrahim, ‘is the prisoner Selassie’s current situation. On his way here from the hospital, he has escaped or been abducted. Two men are missing with him. A hospital orderly named Ali Haykal and an ambulance driver called Tariq Fathi. He has no money – though I suggest it would be unwise for this information to be made public.’

  ‘However,’ interrupted Sabet, ‘he almost certainly has the credit cards belonging to Captain Mariner. Those will make a very acceptable alternative if they can access the funds at a bank or an ATM. Do we know what sort of funds they could access?’

  ‘The American Express card will deliver ten thousand US dollars a day up to a limit of one hundred thousand dollars,’ said Robin. And was surprised by the sudden silence that surrounded her. ‘Or it would,’ she added, ‘except that Richard has blocked it.’

  ‘These men, Ali and Tariq,’ said Aman, after a moment, ‘are they part of the gang holding Tsibekti?’

  ‘We must assume they are,’ answered Ibrahim.

  ‘Then they may have notified their friends of what is going on.’

  ‘A risk we’ll have to take,’ decided Ibrahim.

  ‘Not that we’re actually taking it,’ observed Robin drily. ‘Nahom and Tsibekti are.’

  Sabet opened her mouth to snap a riposte, but the instant she did so, Nahom’s phone began to ring again and Tsibekti’s picture filled the screen.

  Ibrahim nodded. Aman picked up the phone.

  Robin understood only four Arabic words of the conversation that Aman Kifle had with whoever was at the far end of the connection. These were: Dogali, Tsibekti and Nahom, which all arrived in the early part of the animated Arabic exchange. And, right at the end, Nekhel, which was said first in a rising, interrogative tone, then repeated flatly and forcefully. But in the middle, again more than once, the even more familiar English, ‘American Express.’

  There were other, half-familiar words that simply got lost in the rapid conversation, but almost from the word go Robin was out of her depth, with no chance whatsoever of following what Aman was saying in his disguise as Nahom either to Tsibekti or to her captors.

  But then, as abruptly as the conversation had begun, it stopped.

  Aman put the phone back down on Ibrahim’s desk gently, as though it were delicate or dangerous. Or both. The round-cornered oblong of the screen was blank. The little machine was silent. The air conditioning buzzed, giving a sinister voice to the frustrated hornets roasting outside. All three of the Arab speakers looked at each other thoughtfully – perhaps, thought Robin, even calculatingly.

  ‘What was all that about?’ she asked.

  ‘Perhaps Mr Kifle will explain to all of us,’ suggested Ibrahim. ‘Although I taped the conversation, of course, I only got his side of the exchange.’

  ‘And we do need to get some idea of where the kidnappers are, and what they plan to do next,’ added Sabet. ‘Particularly because the major called in one of our shiny new American Apache attack helicopters to take a look at the Wilderness of Sin this afternoon.’

  ‘There!’ said Richard. ‘Can you see it? Just beneath the peak of Gebel Foqa. In those caves on the lower slopes?’ He pushed his elbows down almost painfully on the hot, rough top of the boulder he was using as a table to steady the Zeiss binoculars.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Mahmood. ‘I see it. A movement … Something …’

  Although Richard was using Saiid’s top-of-the-range binoculars, the others were also well equipped, for they knew what their mission would entail and had kitted themselves out accordingly. They were looking through a range of Leicas, Orions and Lugers – the cost of which added together would have come to a good deal less than the Zeiss Victory 8X42 T*FL binoculars he was holding. He zoomed in to maximum magnification as the tiny figures began to emerge from the black-mouthed caverns low on the mountainside into the first promise of evening shadows. The super-heated atmosphere was weirdly helpful to the four men spying from above. The air itself seemed to act like an extra lens, making the mountainside and everything on it seem larger. To Richard, in fact, it seemed as though he was watching a group of people quite nearby walking down a brick-red slope towards a crystal lake. But as they approached the surface of the mercury-silver illusion, they twisted weirdly, like aliens in a Sci-Fi movie, and became inhuman, then invisible, swallowed by the vagaries of the superheated air.

  He moved the binoculars up fractionally once again, seeking sufficient detail to identify Tsibekti at least. But the best he could do was to detect a couple of figures whose robes were black, as opposed to the dazzling white preferred by the Bedouin. But then they started leading the camels out into the sunlight and he became distracted by a vision that seemed to come straight out of a painting by Salvador Dali.

  ‘Is there any way we can be sure that those are the people we’re after?’ he asked Saiid.

  ‘There won’t be very many other travellers out here in the Wilderness of Sin,’ he answered. ‘But you’re right. The only way we’d ever be one hundred percent is to get close enough to identify Tsibekti.’

  ‘Or get hold of one of the others and ask a few pointed questions,’ suggested Ahmed.

  ‘They’re too far away,’ said Saiid. ‘We’d be lucky to catch them.’

  ‘But they seem so close.’

  ‘They also,’ observed Mahmood, ‘seem to be stretching out like rubber and vanishing into a lake of mercury. You can’t rely on what you think you see.’

  ‘There’s no way we can get to them in time, is there?’ asked Richard, the tone of his voice showing that he already suspected the answer.

  ‘No,’ confirmed Saiid. ‘But at least we know where they are – and we have a pretty good idea where they’re going in the short term.’

  ‘North-east,’ suggested Richard.

  ‘North-east,’ confirmed Saiid.

  ‘So, what’s our next move?’ wondered Ahmed. ‘Do we drive down the next set of goat-tracks and try to follow them? Try to capture one or two? Rescue Tsibekti? What?’

  ‘It’s Nahom we have to watch out for,’ said Richard. ‘We need to keep an eye on these people until we’re sure Nahom’s not joining them, then, if he doesn’t appear, we need to see if there’s any way we can get to him before he tries to use my AmEx card.’

  ‘How will we know if he joins the party?’ wondered Mahmood.

  ‘I suppose if anyone new turns up, we’ll have to assume that’s him,’ answered Richard.

  The caves were empty now. All the black-and-white-clad figures and all the camels had wavered, disturbingly elongated, into the great still lake which did not exist, and were no doubt making their way invisibly towards their next secret path.

  Then it struck Richard. ‘Saiid,’ he said. ‘They’re moving. Moving, not waiting. Does that mean they’ve heard from Nahom, do you think?’

  Saiid nodded, transferring the gesture to Richard through the contact between their shoulders. ‘Looks like it,’ he said. ‘Looks like they’ve made another rendezvous.’

  ‘Off-hand,’ said Richard, ‘I’d say that was good news for Tsibekti. And good news for her must mean good news for Nahom. If anything had gone wrong so far, I guess there’d be a body or two left behind, here or wherever.’

  ‘That seems logical,’ Saiid agreed.

  ‘Except,’ added Richard darkly, ‘that we can’t see what they’re up to down in the wadi because of the heat haze. They could be slaughtering everyone left and right down there and we’d be none the wiser.’

  ‘No!’ called Ahmed. ‘Look. They are coming out of the haze now as they turn north towards the Forest of Pillars. They seem to be moving quickly. There isn’t much shelter down there.’

  ‘Lucky the afternoon’s beginning to cool down,’ said Richard.

  ‘It is up here,’ said Saiid. ‘I’m not so sure about down there.’

/>   ‘But at least,’ added Ahmed, ‘the Forest of Pillars opens on to an area that can be reached by vehicles. Well, four by fours.’

  ‘And where would they go?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Due north,’ answered Ahmed. ‘They’d come due south and then go back due north. It’s the only way.’

  ‘And what’s due north of the Forest of Pillars?’ asked Richard.

  But before any of the others could answer him, a deep thrumming sound suddenly came pulsing through the air. It did not fade up from near-silence – it was suddenly there, almost loud enough to drown conversation. Certainly loud enough to distract them all from what they were discussing.

  ‘What on earth?’ said Richard.