Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  Nahom shook his head gingerly, clearly having no idea what Richard was talking about. The way he moved made Richard ask, ‘Is your neck OK? Neck?’ he gestured.

  Nahom shrugged and rolled his head. Richard was close enough to hear the vertebrae crackling as the column moved – but there seemed to be no serious damage. ‘Think you can stand?’ he asked.

  The pair of them rose unsteadily together, and once they were upright, the vultures winged silently away to join their companions circling low above the dead goat.

  The back seat of the Defender was a bench seat. They gently wedged Nahom between Mahmood and Ahmed, then Richard swung back into the front passenger seat and Saiid climbed into the driving seat. They all strapped in. Saiid eased them back on to the road and headed back southwards, pushing the speed up towards one hundred kilometres per hour once again. As soon as Richard sighted the first unnaturally tall, straight palm tree, he pulled out his cell phone, dialled the number for the Sharm el-Sheikh police, and reported in.

  By this time, Nahom had consumed a couple of bottles of cool water and was beginning to look a little more with it. ‘Where were you going?’ asked Richard. ‘Before you hit the goat?’

  ‘Nekhel,’ answered Nahom.

  ‘Nekhel,’ echoed Richard. ‘That’s a name that keeps coming up. Tell me all about Nekhel, Saiid.’

  ‘Nekhel is the heart of the Sinai,’ answered Saiid. His voice became almost dreamy. ‘It has stood there since the age of the Pharaohs. It was part of the province of Du Mafkat in Ancient Egypt, and a fortress was built there long before the prophet Musa saw the burning bush at Saint Catherine and led his people to Mount Sinai and to freedom.

  ‘Sixteen hundred years before the birth of the prophet Isa, whom you Christians call Jesus, the Pharaohs built the way of Shur across Sinai to Beersheba and on to Jerusalem, and the way of Shur passed through Nekhel, whose power, importance and fortifications were strengthened beyond measure. In succeeding years towards properly recorded history, Nekhel was always part of the Egyptian Empire, even after the Pharaohs fell from power and Cleopatra loved first Caesar, then Antony of Rome and handed the power of the land to the Roman Emperor Augustus. It was the ancient capital of the entire Sinai province of Egypt because of its strategic location at the exact centre of the peninsula. The region provided the Egyptian Empire, then the Roman Empire with minerals, turquoise, gold and copper. As you know, there are well-preserved ruins of mines and temples all around there. In those days, Sinai was known as The Land of Turquoise and Nekhel stood at its heart.

  ‘Nekhel slowly fell out of favour and importance, becoming little more than an isolated desert waypoint after the collapse of the Roman Empire. But then, in the days of the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, the town began to prosper once again. Nekhel found itself located on the new Hajj route as the faithful came up out of Africa through Sinai towards Mecca. It became once again the capital of Sinai – the main rest and trade destination for Muslims during Hajj season. Thus it was rebuilt as an even more imposing citadel guarding the oasis called the Well of the Sultan, built by Sultan Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri for the pilgrims coming north and south.

  ‘These were the days of peace on the Sinai before Richard I became the crusader king of England. By that time, in the twelfth Christian century, crusade after crusade had attacked the lands of Islam. Consequently, several Sultans had built forts and castles in Nekhel to defend Egypt from Crusaders coming out of the west and south along the Red Sea. Nekhel’s importance was further enhanced as it played a central role as a military base in defeating succeeding Crusades and freeing numerous provinces of the Islamic Caliphate. It has featured as a part of every war in the nearby area ever since. And the toll of this led the town itself to shrink even as the forts grew ever larger.

  ‘Early in your Christian nineteenth century, the fort was a great building with stone walls but the city had waned in size and importance. There was a large reservoir of water for the pilgrims filled from a brackish well. The fort’s garrison consisted of about fifty soldiers and the building was used as a magazine to provision the Egyptian Army. Even though the route was still regularly used by pilgrims, the road was supposedly infested with dabba – hyenas, which fed on the dead camels which had fallen by the wayside. Packs were known to have attacked solitary travellers and infested the outskirts of the town which were now largely abandoned. The residents of Nekhel would not leave the centre of town at night for fear of attack and kept dogs to frighten off the scavengers.

  ‘By the beginning of your twentieth century there was little more than a square fort on absolutely barren ground built as a place to provide Hajj pilgrims with water, but little shelter. The fort was manned by an officer and ten soldiers; there was little more than a village around the fort consisting of fifteen to twenty houses inhabited by ex-soldiers and their families. All food was transported from Gaza or Suez though the villagers cultivated small patches of ground with corn and maize when the nearby Wadi el-Arish flooded. This did not occur every year and the wadi dried up very quickly. Some of the villagers also kept camels. It took the Cairo pilgrims three days to reach Nekhel from Suez and another three days to reach Aqaba. There was little for them in Nekhel any more. At about this time, therefore, the pilgrimage switched its route to one along the shores of the Gulf of Suez and Nekhel went into almost terminal decline. The fortress was blown up by the Turkish army during the First World War. Two British cavalry columns with three aeroplanes, commanded by Colonel William Grant, approached Nekhel in 1917 to find that it had been abandoned. This was the last British action in their Sinai campaign against the Turks, in spite of the famous involvement of the man you know as Lawrence of Arabia, who crossed the Sinai north of Nekhel at about the same time and nearly died among the sand dunes of the Great Sand Sea there.

  ‘During the Second World War, there was no action in the Sinai and Nekhel had no military significance, therefore. But on the evening of the thirtieth of October, 1956 by the Christian calendar, during Israel’s Sinai campaign, Nekhel was captured by the 202nd Paratroop Brigade of the Israeli Army under the command of Colonel Ariel Sharon, who used the ruined fort as a base, re-emphasizing its military importance. Little more than ten years later, in the 1967 war, Nekhel fell to the Israeli Defence Force’s 14th Armoured Brigade, a force belonging to General Ariel Sharon’s 38th Division. In the battle the Egyptians lost sixty tanks, over 100 guns and 300 other vehicles. It was these actions at Nekhel that cemented Sharon’s reputation and led to his election as Prime Minister of Israel. Ironically enough, they also led to the rebirth of both the city and the fortification – as their strategic importance could no longer be overlooked by the government in Cairo.

  ‘Nowadays, Nekhel is a township on the boundary where South Sinai becomes North Sinai. It is border country, where one law stops and another starts. Where the police are no longer so fully in charge and have handed control over to the army because what happens north of Nekhel is not so much acts of illegality as acts of outright war. There is an international peacekeeping post close by and a brand-new landing strip has been constructed there to keep the place supplied.

  ‘But Nekhel itself is the last bastion. It is where, sometimes, given the right circumstances, people can meet in peace who would otherwise find themselves in conflict. Where negotiation can prevent annihilation, where bargains can be struck before throats are cut. There is still something lingering there of the Well of the Sultan and of the ancient Bedouin laws of hospitality; a chance for life shared in the face of death. Shared with all who come, equally, without fear or favour. If we can catch Nahom’s sister and her fellow travellers at Nekhel, we might have a chance. If we miss them there, the chance may well be lost.’

  ‘Nahom says if you let him wash he will be fine,’ translated Mahmood. ‘He has hurt his head and scraped his knees and elbows. He is covered in bruises but most of the blood and all of the brains are not his. They belong to the goat. He reminds you that he has been a servi
ng soldier and is well trained in self-preservation, as is Tsibekti. Do not underestimate their strength and fortitude. He also says the cards are gone. Ali and Tariq must have taken them.’

  ‘The cards are not important,’ said Richard. ‘I have put a stop on them.’

  While Mahmood translated this for Nahom, Saiid pushed the Defender at top speed south towards Sharm. ‘In any case,’ he said to Richard over the quiet hum of conversation in the back and the rumble of the big engine hard at work, ‘It is not we who will decide about Nahom’s ablutions. It is Major Ibrahim …’

  He would have said more, but he was interrupted by an exclamation of surprise and anger from the rear seat, followed by an impenetrable stream of Eritrean Arabic. ‘He says,’ translated Mahmood, ‘if the cards are worthless then it is more important than ever that he retrieves the money belt and gets it to the kidnappers before they visit any further violence on Tsibekti.’

  ‘That too will be for Major Ibrahim to decide,’ observed Saiid.

  The Defender was waved through the security checkpoint at the junction of the road south to Ras Mohammed National Park, at the next one as they headed north towards Sharm and, indeed, through the internal checkpoints along the approach road to the Old Town, the Travco Pier and the hospital that stood beside it. The only things that slowed their progress, in fact, were the regular humps in the road that Richard thought of as ‘sleeping policemen’. The man responsible for this relatively swift and trouble-free passage was standing waiting for them in the reception with Sergeant Sabet beside him. And, unexpectedly, Aman Kifle, looking perky and self-important.

  ‘Nahom’s not as bad as he looks,’ said Richard as he and Mahmood led the blood-covered runaway back into the chilly brightness of the hospital lighting. ‘He says he just needs a wash and brush-up then he’ll be good to go.’

  ‘To go where?’ demanded Ibrahim at once.

  ‘Wherever you want,’ shrugged Richard. ‘Left to his own devices, he’d be off to Nekhel. The cards he stole are worthless, so his sister is back in all sorts of deadly danger. He says the men who helped him escape and then left him for dead will be heading there as fast as they can – given that they probably won’t dare stop at any checkpoints or go into any towns along the way. They’ll have to take a fairly circuitous route, therefore, and that will slow them down, for all the good it’ll do.’

  Suddenly Nahom himself was in full flow, his words tumbling over each other, his tone reeling between begging and demanding, reason and outrage.

  ‘He’s putting it to the major,’ translated Mahmood, ‘that the girl’s only hope now is the money belt. They must give him back the money belt and the phone. These are the only things standing between Tsibekti and a terrible death.’

  The major answered more calmly and reasonably than Richard supposed he would. Mahmood continued his half-whispered translation: ‘The major says they have the phone here. The kidnappers have been calling on it and Aman Kifle has been answering as though he was Nahom. The money belt is in his office up on El Benouk. If he thought it would help the situation he would indeed return it. But there is no way to get to Nekhel before the smugglers now. The race is lost. There is nothing to be done.’

  ‘Especially,’ added Richard, raising his voice, ‘if you have been in contact with the smugglers within the last hour or so Aman. Because if you have, as soon as they catch up and report in, Tariq and Ali are going to tell them they’ve been talking to a dead man.’

  ‘They will be bound to catch up at Nekhel,’ added Nahom desperately in English, ‘by morning prayers tomorrow.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Ibrahim in the same language. ‘But we are not djinn. We have no magic carpets. We cannot fly there …’

  ‘No,’ said Richard. ‘But … Wait a minute …’ He pulled his phone from his pocket and speed-dialled Robin. As soon as she answered, he said, ‘Robin, can you give me the number of that tour company who were offering to fly us from Sharm to Cairo at any time we wanted to go and see the pyramids?’

  Five minutes later, he was on to the number Robin had given him as the others watched, open-mouthed. ‘Hello? Is that SharmTours? Excellent. Your English is very good. Really? University of London? My name is Richard Mariner. My wife and I were enquiring about a day trip to Cairo by plane. We’re on your database … Wonderful. I was wondering whether I could make one or two changes. Price is no object … That’s right. OK, well, what I have in mind is …’

  Fifteen minutes later still, he broke the connection and looked around them all. ‘You probably got all the details anyway, but I’ll run through what we’ve agreed would be possible if you gave the go-ahead, Major. Pick-up time would be four-thirty a.m. tomorrow and we’d all go out to the International Airport. Obviously, you could make your own way there if you decided to come. We – and whoever else you wanted to bring, within reason – would go aboard an eight-seater jet. A Cessna Citation, the largest mid-range they have. That would be Robin, myself, Nahom and Aman. You, your sergeant if you wished to bring her and two other police personnel. We would depart Sharm at five thirty a.m. – or earlier if you could get us clearance. Cairo is a forty-five minute hop so the new landing strip at Nekhel would only take half an hour. We’d be there by dawn. And the plane would wait to bring us home if the mission’s a success. What do you say?’

  The Cessna canted to the left as it entered its short final approach to the new landing strip at Nekhel. The Pratt and Witney turbofans eased back a fraction. Robin leaned across Richard and both of them pressed their faces close to the window like children at a toy store. It was just dawn on the ground, though it had been full day for a while up here, and the beams of the rising sun threw everything below them into incredibly sharp relief in the clear desert air. The township of Nekhel sprawled along the brutal black line of the main Suez to Taba highway. The ancient fort sat behind and above it like something out of Beau Geste, clinging to the foothills of the Gebel El Tih. The compound which housed the International Peacekeepers stood a little to the west, and the airstrip lay in between. All of it was nestled against the incline of the gebel. The mountains rose, red and majestic, to the north, their east-facing slopes a startling terracotta, their valleys and west-facing slopes an impenetrable black. From up here, at least, there was no sign of life or even of vegetation. For a disorientating moment, Richard thought that he might as well be looking down on the planet Mars.

  To the south, seeming to start and end with the black ribbon of the six-lane highway, lay the great flat plateau of El-Tib, which they had flown over in the darkness just before dawn. Now it was revealed by the pitiless sun as a great, flat expanse, clearly almost as wide as the Sinai itself, and the better part of a hundred and fifty kilometres deep. The angle of the sun’s rays made every track and trail, every boulder, rock and stone stand out, each one seeming to cast a long, west-pointing shadow. And once again there was nothing moving – nothing growing. The Cessna tilted the other way and the panorama slid out of view. ‘I can see why you were worried you would never track the smugglers across that, Major,’ said Richard. ‘There must be as many ways across it as there are across the English Channel, and that’s about a fifth of the size.’

  ‘If I may continue your comparison,’ said the major, ‘it’s not so much the size of the plateau as the lack of safe ports on the northern side. If the people we are following need any kind of rest or refreshment, there are only two safe havens available to them: Nekhel and El-Thamad.’

  ‘But,’ added Sabet, ‘with a little planning and foresight, they can be met anywhere along the Nekhel to Taba road there and be put into trucks to be spirited away – and we would never catch them.’

  Nahom spoke forcefully, and Aman, who had replaced Mahmood as translator, explained, ‘Nahom says that almost everyone involved, from the leader of the smugglers to Ali and Tariq, all say they are to meet up at Nekhel. All we have to do is to get there ahead of them.’

  ‘And we also have to meet up with the men from Nekhel polic
e station,’ added Ibrahim. ‘I have only two of my men aboard and we will need many more than that.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Richard. ‘I …’ His mind raced as he tried to work out a way to reveal that he had a good idea of the size of the group without letting slip that he had escaped from the police watchers’ scrutiny by pretending he was stopping at St Catherine, that he had lied to Ibrahim and had seen the helicopter attack while spying on the men and women they were pursuing now. ‘I believe, from Saiid, that this is rumoured to be a large group. At least twenty, perhaps thirty. Counting victims and camel handlers.’

  ‘That is not unusual,’ nodded Ibrahim. ‘And they are likely to be heavily armed.’

  ‘Independently of any heavy arms that they might be smuggling,’ agreed Richard. A thought struck him. ‘Do you think they would use any weapons they were smuggling against us? I mean, if there were things like shoulder-launched missiles?’

  ‘It is only a few years,’ answered Ibrahim, ‘since somebody just outside Nekhel – somebody, I must say, who is still at large – launched a missile at the army base at Sheikh Zuweid of North Sinai. Similar rockets may have been fired from close by here towards Gaza. Everything from SAM7 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft systems to massive GRAD multiple-launch rocket systems have been confiscated or destroyed up here. At least one helicopter has been brought down with a rocket.’

  ‘I wish you’d told us that before …’ said Robin.

  ‘I am talking of some years in the past. And besides, this is a civilian plane; the targets are usually military or security personnel and equipment. No. If you wish to worry about anyone, worry about the patrol I ordered to be sent out from Nekhel as we were waiting to board this plane at Sharm. It has gone west from Nekhel along the road that leads to the crossroads with the highway down to Ras Sudr and El Tor, hoping to run into the battered Fiat and the two who left Mr Selassie for dead but brought your cards along.’