Sahara (10 page)

“It’s very good.”

“Especially with the
khalta.
We civilized people, on the other hand, buy nicely butchered, sliced meat in supermarkets. We don’t witness cattle being brained with an electronic hammer, or sheep and pigs having their throats cut. We miss the fun part. So we’re more conditioned to simply expressing fear, anxiety, and misery. A few might shoot up the landscape and kill the neighbors in a fit of madness, but we would never eat anyone.”

“What type of exotic toxin can cause those problems?” asked Pitt.

Eva drained her wine and waited until the waiter poured another glass. “Doesn’t have to be exotic. Common lead poisoning can make people do strange things. It also bursts capillaries and turns the whites of the eyes beet red.”

“Do you have room for dessert?” Pitt asked.

“Everything is so good, I’ll make room.”

“Coffee or tea?”

“American coffee.”

Pitt motioned to the waiter who was on him like a skier attacking fresh snow. “An
Um Ali
for the lady and two coffees. One American, one Egyptian.”

“What’s an
Um Ali?”
asked Eva.

“A hot bread pudding with milk and topped with pine nuts. Soothes the stomach after a heavy meal.”

“Sounds just right.”

Pitt leaned back in his chair, his craggy face set in concern. “You said you’re catching a flight tomorrow. Do you still intend to go to Mali?”

“Still playing the role of my protector?”

“Traveling in the desert can be a murderous business. Heat won’t be your only enemy. Someone out there is waiting to kill you and your fellow do-gooders.”

“And my knight in shining white armor won’t be there to save me,” she said with a tinge of sarcasm. “You don’t frighten me. I can take care of myself.”

Pitt stared at her, and she could see a look of sadness in his eyes. “You’re not the first woman who said that and wound up in the morgue.”

In a ballroom in another part of the hotel Dr. Frank Hopper was wrapping up a news conference. It was a good turnout. A small army of correspondents representing newspapers around the Middle East and four international wire services were besieging him with questions under a battery of lights from local Egyptian TV cameras.

“How widespread do you believe the environmental pollution is Dr. Hopper?” asked a lady from Reuters News Service.

“We won’t know until our teams are in the field and have a chance to study the spread.”

A man with a tape recorder waved his hand. “Do you have a source of the contamination?”

Hopper shook his head. “At the moment we have no idea where it’s coming from.”

“Any possibility it might be the French solar detoxification project in Mali?”

Hopper walked over to a map of the southern Sahara that was hung on a large display stand and picked up a pointer. He aimed the tip at a desolate region of desert in the northern section of Mali. “The French project is located here at Fort Foureau, well over 200 kilometers from the closest area of reported contamination sickness. Too far for it to be a direct source.”

A German correspondent from
Der Spiegel
stood up. “Couldn’t the pollution be carried by winds?”

Hopper shook his head. “Not possible.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“During the planning and construction stages, my fellow scientists and I at the World Health Organization were consulted every step of the way by the engineers of the Massarde Entreprises de Solaire Energie who own the facility. All hazardous waste is destroyed by solar energy and reduced to harmless vapor. The output is constantly monitored. No toxic emission is left to be carried on the wind and infect life hundreds of kilometers away.”

An Egyptian television reporter thrust a microphone forward. “Are you receiving cooperation from the desert nations you plan to enter?”

“Most all have invited us with open arms,” answered Hopper.

“You mentioned earlier there was reluctance on the part of President Tahir of Mali to allow your research team into his country.”

“That’s true, but once we’re on site and demonstrate our humane intentions, I expect that he’ll have a change of heart.”

“So you don’t feel you are endangering lives by prying into the affairs of President Tahir’s government?”

The beginnings of anger stirred in Hopper’s voice. “The real danger is malaise in the minds of his advisors. They ignore the sickness as if it doesn’t exist by letting it go officially unnoticed.”

“But do you think it is safe for your team to travel about Mali freely?” asked the correspondent from Reuters.

Hopper smiled a shrewd smile. The questions had turned in the direction he had hoped. “If tragedy should occur, I count on you, the ladies and gentlemen of the news media, to investigate and lay the wrath of the world on the doorstep of the guilty party.”

After dinner, Pitt escorted Eva to her hotel door. She fumbled with the key nervously, unsure of herself. She certainly had the excuse, she told herself, to invite him in. She owed him, and she wanted him. But Eva played by the rules of the old school and found it difficult to leap into bed with every man who showed an interest in her, even one who had saved her life.

Pitt noticed the faint shade of red rising from her neck into her face. He looked down into her eyes. They were as blue as a South Seas sky. He took her by the shoulders and gently pulled her to him. She tensed slightly but offered no resistance. “Postpone your flight.”

She averted her face. “I can’t.”

“We may not meet again.”

“I am bound by my work.”

“And when you’re free?”

“I’ll return to my family home in Pacific Grove, California.”

“A beautiful area. I’ve often entered a classic car in the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.”

“It’s lovely in June,” she said, her voice suddenly trembling.

He smiled. “Then it’s you and I and the Bay of Monterey.”

It was as if they had become friends on an ocean voyage, a brief interlude that planted the seed of mutual attraction. He kissed her softly, and then stepped back. “Stay out of harm’s way. I don’t want to lose you.” Then he turned and walked toward the elevators.

7

For a century of centuries Egyptians and the vegetation have fought to maintain their precious toehold between the pewter-blue waters of the Nile and the yellow-brown sands of the Sahara. Winding 6500 kilometers from its headwaters in Central Africa to the Mediterranean, only the Nile of all the great rivers of the world flows north. Ancient, always present, ever alive: The Nile is as alien to the arid North African landscape as it would be in the steamy atmosphere of the planet Venus.

The hot season had arrived along the river. The heat rolled over and settled on the water like an oppressive blanket pulled from the great sprawling desert to the west. The dawn sun came over the horizon with the fiery thrust of a poker, spawning a slight breeze that felt like a blast from an open furnace.

The serenity of the past met the technology of the present as a lateen-rigged felucca, manned by four young boys, sailed past a sleek research boat laden with state-of-the-art electronic gear. Seemingly little inconvenienced by the heat, the boys laughed and waved at the turquoise-colored boat heading on an opposite course downriver.

Pitt lifted his eyes from the high-resolution video screen of the subbottom profiler and waved back through a large port. The oven outside bothered him not at all. The interior of the research vessel was well air conditioned, and he sat comfortably in front of the computerized detection array sipping a glass of iced tea. He watched the felucca for a few moments, almost envying the boys as they scampered about the small deck and unfurled the sail to catch the breeze blowing upriver.

He turned his attention back to the monitor as an irregular anomaly began to creep across the screen in colored imagery. The vertical scan sensor of the subbottom profiler was recording a contact deep beneath the bottom silt below the moving water. At first it was merely an indistinct blob, but as the image was automatically enhanced the outline of an ancient ship began to materialize.

“Target coming up,” Pitt reported. “Mark it number ninety-four.”

Al Giordino punched in a code on his console. Instantly, the configuration of the river along with man-made landmarks and natural features behind the shoreline flashed into view on an on-line graphics display. Another code and the satellite laser-positioning system pinpointed with precise accuracy the image’s exact position as it related to the surrounding landscape.

“Number ninety-four plotted and recorded,” Giordino acknowledged.

Short, dark, and as compact as a barrel of concrete, Albert Giordino gazed through twinkling walnut eyes that sat under a wild mane of curly black hair. Give him a flowing beard and a sack of toys, Pitt often thought, and Giordino could have played a young version of an Etruscan Santa Claus.

Tremendously fast for a muscular man, he could fight like a tiger, and yet suffer the agonies of the damned if he was forced into conversing with women. Giordino and Pitt went back to high school together, played football at the Air Force Academy, and served in the final days of Vietnam. At one point in their service careers, at the request of Admiral James Sandecker, Chief Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, they were loaned out to NUMA on temporary status, a condition that had now stretched into nine years.

Neither man could remember how many times one had saved the life of the other, or at least prevented a very embarrassing situation that usually resulted out of some sort of devious mischief. Yet their escapades above and below the sea had become legendary, resulting in a certain amount of fame neither relished.

Pitt bent forward and focused on a digital isometric screen. The computer rotated the three-dimensional image, displaying the buried ship in amazing detail. The image and dimensions were recorded and communicated to a data processor where they were compared with known data of ancient Egyptian Nile boats. In a few seconds the computer analyzed a profile and made its call. Data on the vessel’s construction blinked across the bottom of the screen.

“What we’ve got here seems to be a cargo vessel from the Sixth Dynasty,” Pitt read out. “Built somewhere between 2000 and 2200
B.C
.”

“Her condition?” asked Giordino.

“Quite good,” replied Pitt. “Like the others we found, she is well preserved by the silt. Her hull and rudder are still intact, and I can make out the mast lying across her deck. What’s her depth?”

Giordino studied his data-positioning screen. “She’s under 2 meters of water and 8 meters of silt.”

“Any metal?”

“Nothing the proton mag could detect.”

“Not surprising since iron wasn’t known in Egypt until the twelfth century
B.C.
What do you read on the nonferrous scan?”

Giordino twisted a dial on his console. “Not much. A few bronze fittings. Probably an abandoned derelict.”

Pitt studied the imagery of the ship that had sunk in the river forty centuries ago. “Fascinating, how the design of the vessels remained virtually unchanged for three thousand years.”

“Goes with their art,” said Giordino.

Pitt looked at him. “Art?”

“Did you ever notice that their art style stayed exactly the same from the First Dynasty to the thirtieth,” Giordino pontificated. “Even bodily positions remained static. Why hell, in all that time they never figured out how to show the human eye from a side view by simply drawing it in half. Talk about tradition. The Egyptians were masters at it.”

“When did you become an expert on Egyptology?”

True to type, Giordino gave a worldly wise shrug. “Oh I’ve picked it up here and there.”

Pitt was not fooled. Giordino had a sharp eye for detail. He seldom missed much, as proven by his observation of Egyptian art that went unnoticed by over 99 percent of the tourists and was never mentioned by the guides.

Giordino finished a beer and rolled the cold bottle over his forehead. He pointed a finger at the shipwreck as the research boat passed over and the image began to slip off the screen. “Hard to believe we’ve found ninety-four wrecks after surveying only 2 miles of river. Some stacked three deep.”

“Not so incredible when you consider how many thousands of years boats have been sailing the Nile,” Pitt lectured. “Vessels of all civilizations were lucky to last twenty years before being lost by storm, fire, and collision. And those that survived usually rotted away from neglect. The Nile between the Delta and Khartoum has more sunken vessels per square kilometer than any other place on earth. Fortunately for archaeologists, the wrecks were covered over with silt and preserved. They could well last another four thousand years before they’re excavated.”

“No sign of cargo,” said Giordino, peering over Pitt’s shoulder at the vanishing ship. “As you suggested, she probably outlived her usefulness and her owners let her deteriorate until she sank as a derelict.”

The pilot of the research boat, Gary Marx, kept one eye trained on the echo sounder while scanning the river ahead with the other. A tall blond with limpid blue eyes, he wore only shorts, sandals, and a rancher’s straw hat. He quarter turned his head and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “That finishes the downstream run, Dirk.”

“Okay,” Pitt replied. “Swing around and make another run as close as you can to the shoreline.”

“We’re practically scraping bottom now,” Marx said flatly, without due concern. “If we come any closer we’ll have to tow the boat with a tractor.”

“No need for hysterics,” Pitt said dryly. “Just bring us around, hug the riverbank, and mind we don’t snag the sensor.”

Expertly, Marx turned the boat into the main channel, made a sweeping U-turn, and brought her parallel to the shore at a distance of no more than 5 or 6 meters. Almost immediately, the sensors picked up another wreck. The computer profiled this one as a nobleman’s personal ship from the Middle Kingdom, 2040 to 1786
B.C.

The hull was slimmer than those of the cargo ships, and a cabin graced its afterdeck. They could see the remains of a guard rail running around the deck. The tops of the support posts looked to be carved with lions’ heads. There was a wide gash in the port side, suggesting it sank after a collision with another ship.