by Evans, Jon
The only way to go overland from Morocco to Mauritania was in a military convoy that leaves twice a week. At first I assumed this was just paranoid bureaucratic convention. I changed my mind when we drove past the first shattered Land Rover. We saw a good half-dozen of those, plus a few heaps of metal that might once have been motorcycles, the half-buried skeleton of a truck that looked disturbingly like ours, and occasional piles of bleached camel bones. Once we saw an actual land mine, unearthed from the sand by the desert wind. It looked like a rusted, frisbee-sized can of tuna.
On our second day in no-man's-land Big Bertha broke down. Big Bertha was our Big Yellow Truck, thirty-year-old army surplus, never designed to cross the Sahara where the omnipresent sand wreaks endless havoc on every moving part of any machine foolish enough to enter. We counted ourselves lucky if she broke down only once a day. For the umpteenth time Hallam and Steve donned their overalls, peeled back the cab, and dove into the grease and machinery. After a little while Steve emerged to warn us "It'll be a few bloody hours. Unless it's a few fucking days."
Big Bertha was physically divided into the cab, which fit three people comfortably, and the body, about thirty feet long, where us passengers rode. Between the cab and the body was a six-inch gap where the main table and assorted tools were stored. We entered the body via a retractable iron staircase in the middle of the left-hand side. Those stairs took you up to "second class" or "the mosh pit", a flat wooden floor with inward-facing benches on either side that extended towards the back of the truck. To the left of the entry staircase, two more steps went up to "first class", three rows of padded double seats with an aisle in the middle. At the very back of the truck was a big wooden cabinet that contained our packs and, beneath them, the safes for our valuables. Instead of windows there were thick transparent plastic sheets attached to the roof of the truck which we could roll down and lash to thin vertical steel bars, spaced about two feet apart, that ran around the perimeter of the truck. Here in the desert we kept the sides open. With the plastic down the truck quickly became an oven.
Not a cubic inch was wasted. Overhead lockers hung above the benches. There was storage space beneath the seats and benches. Food supplies were under the mosh-pit floorboards, engine parts below first class. The bookcase, tape player, and frequently-broken fridge were at the front of the mosh pit opposite the stairs. Compartments accessible from the outside of the truck held twenty jerrycans of water, extra fuel, more tools, firewood, the stove, tents, folding chairs, cooking gear, etc., behind locked iron gates. The roof held spare tires and firewood. In all Big Bertha would have been one of the most impressive expeditionary vehicles on the planet, if only her engine didn't falter and fail at least twice a week.
Broken down in the middle of a minefield, in the middle of no-man's-land, in the middle of the Sahara Desert. It sounded desperate and romantic, but at the time it was teeth-grindingly boring. Melanie's thermometer told us it was 45 degrees in the shade. Too hot to read, too hot to play cards, too hot to do anything but sit and be miserable. So I decided to go for a walk.
Not quite as stupid as it sounds. We had finally left the trackless desert behind and were driving on a hard-packed, semi-permanent trail. From the roof of the truck we could see down the trail to the military checkpoint where the rest of the convoy waited, maybe two miles away. It seemed perfectly safe so long as we didn't venture off the trail. And no matter how many times I read page 17 of Walden I was too hot and too far away from New England to understand a thing.
I closed the book and looked around. A dozen people looked at me listlessly from whatever shade they had managed to improvise for themselves.
"Anybody want to go for a walk?" I asked.
There was no response. I felt a little like a visitor in a hospital's terminal-cases wing. The only life came from the few, Michael and Emma and Robbie, who occasionally raised their Sigg water bottles and used the tiny hole in the screwtop to drip a little water on themselves. It didn't really help. The only thing that cooled you down was the spray bottle, but Hallam had forbidden its use until we took on water in Nouadhibou.
"Nobody?" I said dolefully.
A voice emerged from the raised seats at the front of the truck. "I'll come."
I turned my head and looked at her. She smiled at me. I smiled back.
* * *
We had spent nearly six weeks in Morocco but this was only our second real conversation. Our first had been in Marrakesh, just before her two-week fling with Lawrence ended, almost a month ago. One of the weird things about truck life was that you were always but always in a group. With twenty people constantly crammed together, one-on-one conversations with anyone but your tent partner were rare.
We set out to the south, hatted, sunblocked, carrying a litre of brackish desalinated water apiece. For a little while we walked in silence.
"I really like the desert," I said. "I guess I knew I would. I mean my favourite movie was always Lawrence Of Arabia. But I didn't know just how much."
"I do too," she said. "Although I was expecting more, you know, Hollywood, English Patient desert than this."
Up until today the Sahara had consisted mostly of plains pounded absolutely flat by sun and wind, punctuated by straggling chains of rock and tufted with thorn bushes and cacti. Today even that hardy vegetation had begun to dwindle away. We didn't know it then, but Hollywood desert, the windswept fields of enormous dunes between Nouadhibou and Nouakchott, was only two days away.
"But it's amazing," she continued. "It, not to be all hippie on you, but it feels like it's alive. You know? It's the most blasted, dead place there is, but it feels…present."
"You can be all hippie on me," I said. "I don't mind."
"Okay. Good. And you can be all cynical on me if you like."
"Do you think I'm cynical?" I asked.
"I think you'd like to be. But you never will."
"Why not?"
"You're too nice," she said.
"Oh."
We walked on a few paces.
She said "That was intended as a compliment, in case you're unclear."
"I know," I said, smiling sheepishly. "Thanks."
"Sorry. I'm crap at being praised too. I never know what to do."
"I know!" I exclaimed. I'd often thought that but never heard anyone else say it. "What are you supposed to do? You can say thank you insincerely, and then you look like you're just being polite and don't really care, or you can say say it sincerely and make a point of it, and then you seem insecure, or…I don't know."
"Maybe we should just stick to taking the piss out of each other," Laura suggested. "We're all pretty good at dealing with that."
"You Brits are."
"Really? Is it very British?"
I raised my eyebrows. "Are you kidding? You guys are miles, light-years, more sarcastic than the worst of my friends back home. In Canada you'd all be ostracized in seconds. One look and boom. National silent treatment."
"Would you really ostracize me? Poor little old me?"
"Well…no. I'd still talk to you. But nobody else would. You'd have to rely entirely on me for translation."
"Would you still talk to me if I told you Canadians were rude? And wimps when it gets cold? And crap at ice hockey? And," barely keeping a straight face, "secretly you all wish you were American?"
I grinned and put on a mock John Wayne drawl. "Listen, lady, you better know where I draw the line. And I draw it way back over thataway. And you know what you find on this side of that there line?"
"What do I find?"
"Trouble. Trouble with a capital T."
I half-noticed when we passed two piles of large flat rocks on the right-hand side of the trail, spaced about thirty feet apart from one another, but paid them no mind. We were too busy entertaining one another and gaping at the landscape. The desert had changed its look yet again. Here the sand had been densely packed by the wind and then baked by the sun into near-sandstone. The result was a huge field tiled by a
fractal pattern of cracks, occasionally interrupted by puddles of soft sand, or by swooping, curving forty-foot ridges worn smooth as glass by the wind, all of it coloured the rich gold of a lion's pelt.
Our trail was marked by deep tire ruts that could have been gouged decades ago. Occasionally it disappeared into patch of soft sand fifty or a hundred feet wide before re-emerging. As we crossed one of those patches, I saw a flicker of movement in the distance, and I stopped and squinted.
"Look," I said. "Camels." A half-dozen of them, barely visible.
"One hump or two hump?" she asked.
I shook my head. "Too far to tell."
"They could be horses," she said.
I looked at her.
"You know," she said, "with big growths on their backs. Hunchback horses. That happens. A ship carrying a whole circusload of hunchback horses might have crashed on the coast here and released them into the desert. And maybe it was years ago and they've survived ever since by sneaking up on convoys like ours and ambushing them at night."
"I don't think that's very likely," I said sternly.
She blinked at me innocently.
"But," I said, "they could be people wearing camel suits. You know. Soldiers. Saudi Arabian soldiers who got lost because they didn't make the eye slits big enough. They might have just taken a wrong turn in the Sinai and wound up over here."
She nodded. "That's possible too."
"But from this distance you just can't tell."
"I guess just to be safe we shouldn't really call them camels," she said, her lip quivering with repressed laughter. "We should call them Unidentified Dromedarial Objects."
I nodded very seriously. We managed another two seconds of sober looks before both of us burst into laughter.
The rest of the convoy, a dozen civilian vehicles escorted by three military Jeeps, waited for us at the checkpoint. Europeans, mostly, in Land Cruisers and Land Rovers brought across from Gibraltar, plus four crazy Germans on fully-decked-out motorcycles, two Belgian girls cycling around the world, and a half-dozen multinational hippies in a Volkswagen man who looked older than me. There were also a few African families driving back home in battered but serviceable Renaults and Peugeots.
The rest of the convoy seemed even more bored and bad-tempered than our group. The checkpoint itself was a brick pillbox just big enough for four soldiers dressed in jungle camouflage suits and carrying AK-47s. Like all the soldiers they were Arabic and not black. There had been more and more black faces as we moved south through Morocco, but rarely among soldiers or officials.
A French couple approached us and demanded that we tell them what was wrong with our camion and how long it would take to fix. They had to repeat it five times before my rusty high-school French decoded what they were saying. "Trois heures, peut-etre plus," I said with a casual shrug, annoyed by their hostile tone. The French pair muttered with frustration and retreated back to their Land Rover, casting occasional angry glances our way.
The Moroccan and Mauritanian soldiers who escorted the convoy were within earshot of the conversation but paid no attention. They had the African relationship to time. Things happen when they happen, if they happen at all.
Laura and I decided to abandon the convoy and walk up the hill above the checkpoint, bigger at maybe a hundred feet than any other hill in sight. The view from the top was incredible. An endless stark sea of golden desert extended to the horizon in every direction. Our Big Yellow Truck looked as small and unimportant as a Tonka toy.
"You know what I'd really like?" Laura said, after we had our fill of gaping and sat down. "I'd really like to take a shower and eat some ice cream. But not at the same time. And if I could only have one I'd pick the shower."
I nodded. "Between the sand and the sweat I feel like I grow a new layer of crud every day."
"And you don't have to deal with a bra," she said, looking down at herself. "You blokes get to walk around topless all day. You can only imagine our troubles."
"Another victory for the grand patriarchal conspiracy."
We smiled at each other. After a moment she closed her eyes, lay back on the ground, and tipped her Tilley hat over her face. I sat and watched her. I wasn't exactly ogling her but I was very aware of her presence. Even encrusted in sand, her long dark hair pulled into a ponytail, she was pretty. She wore sandals, khaki shorts, and a white shirt, and just beneath the brim of her hat I could see the small smile that was her default expression. She was a naturally happy person. I liked that about her. Just being near her made me happy, right from the start.
"Cookies?" a voice from behind asked.
I turned around and looked. A goateed man grinned down at me and held out a bag of Spanish chocolate-chip cookies. They seemed so out of place in the middle of the Sahara that for a moment I wondered if the man was a mirage. But he was real, and the cookies were delicious. I couldn't remember the last time I had tasted anything so sweet. Laura devoured three, closing her eyes to savour the taste. We used the last of our water to wash them down, and our Spanish angel Fernando offered to fill up our water bottles from his own, claiming he had plenty of water. After a moment we accepted.
"Oh my," Laura said, after a sip. "Real water. Clean water." I nodded blissfully. For ten days now we had been stuck with safe but foul-tasting desalinated water from the town of Dakhla, and Fernando's water tasted like champagne by comparison.
We sat and chatted with Fernando for a little while, talking mostly about football and the girlfriend waiting for him in Senegal. His English was uncertain and it didn't take long for the conversation to peter out. The sun was beginning to sink from its apogee and I was growing tired from our constant exposure.
"Should we go back?" Laura asked, moments before I was about to suggest the same thing.
"Yeah," I said. "Time for a siesta."
We rained thanks on Fernando and began the walk back. At always it seemed three times as distant as the first leg. But with Laura by my side the time shrank away nearly to nothing.
"Hey," I said, about halfway back.
"What?"
"You're a lot of fun."
She smiled at me. "Thank you," she said. "So are you."
We walked in pregnant and slightly awkward silence for a little while, glancing at each other without saying anything. I was trying to work out if anything she had done during our expedition counted as flirting or whether she was just being friendly. Later she told me that she was pondering the same thing in reverse.
Then two hoarse, desperate voices called out, and we looked up in surprise. Just a few hundred feet away, right where those two piles of rocks met the side of the trail, was one of the military convoy's Jeeps. The two men inside were shouting to us in French. I couldn't make out what they were saying. Laura and I looked at each other, worried — they were were clearly alarmed by something — and hurried towards them. We were only twenty feet away when I realized, from the position of the Jeep between the rocks, that the soldiers had not driven on the visible hard-packed road that we walked on. Instead they had taken a longer and much fainter path I only now noticed that ran from those two rock piles — trail markers — to where the convoy waited.
"Oh shit," I said. I turned around and looked behind us, wide-eyed.
"What is it?" Laura asked.
"Nothing," I said. "Come on." I consciously made myself hurry to the Jeep before allowing myself to fully understand the implications. Laura followed.
"No walk there! No walk!" the soldier nearest us said loudly, anger and worry jostling for space on his face. He pointed to the trail the Jeep had followed. "Road!" He pointed to the road behind us, the stretch of obvious road between Jeep and the convoy, the length of which we had just walked twice. "No road!" he exclaimed. "No road! Minefield!"
"Oh my God," Laura said.
We stared at each other wide-eyed for a moment. Then, to the soldier's great disapproval, for no real reason, we both began to laugh.
"You could have died," Robbie said,
his voice faint with enormity, when we returned to the truck and told our story to the assembled masses.
Laura and I looked at each other. Then Laura turned back to Robbie.
"Believe me," she assured him solemnly, "those cookies were to die for."
* * *
When I woke up I believed, for half an instant, that Laura was there, with me in Cole Valley, still alive. That hadn't happened for almost a year. But the moment of realization had lost none of its power to hurt.
I went to work. At work I checked the Thorn Tree. There was only one new entry.
BC088269 11/04 06:01
Ha ha ha
The Bull is real, I am The Bull
and I'll stick knives in all your eyes
Random juvenilia by some mental twelve-year-old, I thought, and shut the window.
Then I sat bolt upright and opened it again.
Knives in all your eyes. Nobody had mentioned that. Nobody knew about the Swiss Army knives except myself, Gavin, and the Nepali police. Of course the LP article had mentioned mutilation. But still. I went back to the Thorn Tree and carefully reread that new entry.
What I saw the second time turned my spine into an icy river. The sender's name, an apparently random collection of characters. BC088269. I thought I had seen it before. And I thought I knew where.
I got up and walked out of work and took the N back home. So I missed an hour of work. Let them fire me. This was important.
I went into my house and dug into my stack of travel pictures, waiting to be filed into albums. Near the top was the picture I had taken in Muktinath, the picture of the false ledger entry the killer had made in Stanley Goebel's name. His name and his passport number.
His passport number was BC088269.
* * *
Of course it wasn't definite proof. It just meant there was someone who knew Stanley Goebel's passport number and the details of what had happened to him. But for me it was the straw that finally broke the skeptic's back. It was the final piece of inconclusive evidence which made me certain that there was more to this iceberg than just the tip. It made me certain that there was some kind of connection, that these deaths could not be coincidental one-off events. That there was somebody out there stalking and killing travelers on the Lonely Planet trail.