Sahara (8 page)

4

Company officials at the Backworld Expeditions offices in Cairo realized something was wrong when the desert safari group failed to arrive in the fabled city of Timbuktu on schedule. Twenty-four hours later, pilots of the aircraft that was chartered to return the tourists to Marrakech, Morocco, flew a search pattern to the north but saw no sign of the vehicles.

Fears intensified after three days passed and Major Fair-weather had still failed to report in. Mali government authorities were alerted and they cooperated fully, sending out military air and motorized vehicle patrols to backtrack the safari’s known route across the desert.

Panic began to reign after the Malians failed to find any sighting of people or the Land Rovers during a concentrated search lasting four days. An army helicopter flew over Asselar and reported seeing nothing but a dead and abandoned village.

Then on the seventh day, a French oil prospecting team, pushing south along the Trans-Saharan Motor Track, discovered Major Ian Fairweather. The sky over the flat, rock-strewn plain was open and empty. The sun burned down and baked the sand so that the heat waves shimmered and danced. The French geologists were astonished when a distorted apparition suddenly appeared through a wavering heat mirage. One moment the image seemed to float free, and then expand and retract to grotesque proportions in the hot, freakish air.

As the range closed they distinguished a figure waving his arms like a crazy man and stumbling directly toward them. Then he staggered to a stop, swayed like a small whirlwind, and slowly crumpled into the sand face first. The shocked driver of the Renault truck nearly braked too late and was forced to swerve around the fallen man, halting in a flurry of dust.

Fairweather was more dead than alive. He was badly dehydrated and the sweat on his body had crusted into a fine layer of white salt crystals. He soon regained consciousness as the French oil men slowly trickled water past his swollen tongue. Four hours later, his body fluids restored after drinking almost 2 gallons of water, Fairweather thickly croaked out the story of his escape from the massacre at Asselar.

To the one Frenchman on the prospecting team who understood English, Fairweather’s tale sounded like a drunken fabrication, but it also rang with urgent conviction. After a brief discussion, the rescuers carefully lifted Fair-weather into the back of the truck and headed toward the city of Gao on the Niger River. They arrived just before dark and drove straight to the city hospital.

After kindly seeing that Fairweather was comfortably bedded down and attended by a doctor and nurse, the French thought it wise to inform the Chief of the local Malian Security Forces. They were asked to write a lengthy report while the Colonel in command of Gao headquarters apprised his superiors in the capital city of Bamako.

To the Frenchman’s surprise and indignation they were detained and jailed. In the morning an interrogation team arrived from Bamako and grilled them separately about their discovery of Fairweather. Demands to contact their consulate were ignored. When the oil geologists refused to cooperate, the interrogation turned ugly.

The French were not the first men to enter the city’s security building and not be seen again.

When supervisors at the oil company headquarters in Marseilles received no word from their oil exploration team, they became concerned and requested a search. The Malian Security Forces made a show of sweeping the desert again but claimed to have found nothing but the oil company’s abandoned Renault truck.

The names of the French geologists and the missing tourists from Backworld Expeditions were simply added to the list of outsiders who disappeared and perished in the vast desert.

Dr. Haroun Madani stood on the steps of the Gao hospital, beneath the brick portico with its unfathomable designs running around the top of the walls. He stared nervously down the dusty street running between the seedy old colonial buildings and the single-story mud brick houses. A breeze from the north blew a light coating of sand over the city, once the capital of three great empires but now a decaying relic of French colonial days.

The call to evening prayers drifted over the city from the high-towered minarets that rose above the mosque. The faithful were no longer summoned to prayer by a Muslim holy man, or muezzin, who climbed the narrow steps inside the minarets and wailed from the balcony. Now the muezzin stayed on the ground and offered the prayers to Allah and the Prophet Muhammad through microphones and loudspeakers.

A short distance from the mosque, a three-quarter moon reflected its beam on the Niger River. Wide, scenic, its current slow and gentle, the Niger is a mere shadow of its former course. Once mighty and deep, decades of drought had lowered it to a shallow stream, plied by fleets of small sailing ships called pinnaces. Its waters once lapped at the base of the mosque. Now they sluggishly flowed nearly two city blocks away.

The Malian people are a mixture of the lighter-skinned descendants of the French and Berbers, the dark brown of the desert Arabs and Moors, and the black Africans. Dr. Madani was coal black. His facial features were Negroid with deep-set ebony eyes and a wide flattened nose. He was a big bull of a man in his late forties, beefy around the middle, with a wide square-jawed head.

His ancestors had been Mandingo slaves who were brought north by the Moroccans who overran the country in 1591. His parents had farmed the lush lands south of the Niger when he was a boy. He was raised by a major in the French Foreign Legion, educated and sent through medical school in Paris. Why or how this came about he was never told.

The doctor stiffened as the yellow headlights of an old and unique automobile swung into view. The car rolled quietly down the uneven street, its elegant rose-magenta-colored body oddly out of sync amid the dismal and austere mud structures. There was an aura of dignified elegance about the 1936 Avions Voisin sedan. The design of the coachwork was an odd combination of pre-World War II aerodynamics, cubist art, and Frank Lloyd Wright. It was powered by a six-cylinder sleeve-valve engine that provided smooth silence and simple endurance. A masterwork of uncompromising engineering standards, it once belonged to the Governor General when Mali was a territory of French West Africa.

Madani knew the car. Almost every city dweller of Mali knew the car and its owner, and they shrank in nervous foreboding whenever it passed. The doctor observed that the car was followed by a military ambulance and he feared a problem. He stepped forward and opened the rear door as the driver braked to a perfectly noiseless stop.

A high-ranking military officer rose from the backseat and unlimbered a lean body inside a tailor-made uniform whose creases could have cut cold butter. Unlike other African leaders who listed to port under a mass of decorated hardware, General Zateb Kazim wore only one green and gold ribbon on the breast of his army jacket. Around his head, he wore an abbreviated version of the
litham,
the indigo veil of the Tuaregs. His face bore the dark cocoa shade and sculpted features of a Moor, and the eyes were tiny topaz dots surrounded by oceans of white. He might have been borderline handsome if it hadn’t been for his nose. Instead of being straight and even, it rounded to a point, overhanging a sparse moustache that stretched off to the sides of his cheeks.

General Zateb Kazim looked like a benign villain out of an old Warner Brothers cartoon. There was no other way to describe him.

He oozed self-importance as he pompously brushed an imaginary speck of dust from his uniform. He acknowledged Dr. Madani’s presence with a slight nod.

“He is ready to be moved?” he asked in a measured tone.

“Mr. Fairweather has fully recovered from his ordeal,” Madani answered, “and is under strong sedation, as you ordered.”

“He’s seen and talked to no one since being carried in by the Frenchmen?”

“Fairweather has only been tended by myself and a nurse from a tribe of Tukulor who speaks only in a Fulah dialect. He’s had no other contact. I also carried out your instructions and admitted him to a private room away from the open wards. I might add that all records of his stay have been destroyed.”

Kazim appeared satisfied. “Thank you, Doctor. I’m grateful for your cooperation.”

“May I ask where you’re taking him?”

Kazim flashed a death’s head grin. “To Tebezza.”

“Not that!” Madani muttered thickly. “Not the gold mines at the penal settlement of Tebezza. Only political traitors and murderers are condemned to die there. This man is a foreign national. What has he done to deserve a slow death in the mines?”

“It matters little.”

“What crime has he committed?”

Kazim looked Madani up and down as if the doctor was merely an annoying insect. “Do not ask,” Kazim said coldly.

A dreadful thought crossed Madani’s mind. “And the Frenchmen who found Fairweather and brought him here?”

“The same fate.”

“None will last more than a few weeks in the mines.”

“Better than simply executing them,” shrugged Kazim. “Let them work out the little time left of their pitiful lives doing something useful. A stockpile of gold is good for our economy.”

“You’re a very sensible man, General,” said Madani, tasting the bile of his servile words. Kazim’s sadistic power as a judge, jury, and hangman was a fact of Malian life.

“I’m happy you agree, Doctor.” He stared at Madani as though he was a prisoner in the dock. “In the interests of our country’s security I suggest you forget Mr. Fairweather and erase all memory of his visit.”

Madani nodded. “As you wish.”

“May no evil befall your people and goods.”

Kazim’s thoughts were clear to the doctor. The words from the nomad-greeting ritual struck home. Madani had a large family. So long as he kept his silence they would live in peace. The alternative was not a vision he wished to dwell upon.

A few minutes later, an unconscious Fairweather was carried out of the hospital on a stretcher by two of Kazim’s security guards and placed in the ambulance. The General gave Madani a casual salute and stepped into the Avions Voisin.

As the two vehicles moved off into the night, a chilling fear coursed through Dr. Madani’s veins, and he found himself wondering what terrible tragedy he had unwillingly participated in. Then he prayed that he would never know.

5

In one of the mural-walled suites of the Nile Hilton, Dr. Frank Hopper listened attentively from a leather sofa. Seated in a nearby matching chair on the opposite side of a coffee table, Ismail Yerli puffed pensively on a meerschaum pipe whose bowl was carved in the likeness of the head of a turbaned sultan.

Even with the universal sounds of the busy Cairo traffic seeping in through the closed windows to the balcony Eva could not bring herself to accept the nightmare of her brush with death on the beach. Already her subconscious was blurring the memory. But Dr. Hopper’s voice pulled her thoughts back to the here and now of the conference room.

“There is no doubt in your mind these men tried to kill you?”

“None,” Eva answered.

“You described them as looking like black Africans,” said Ismail Yerli.

Eva shook her head. “I didn’t say black, only that their skin was dark. Their facial features were more sharp, more defined, like a cross between an Arab and an East Indian. The one who burned my car wore a loose-fitting tunic and a thick, intricately wrapped headdress. All I could see were his ebony eyes and a nose shaped like an eagle.”

“The headdress, was it cotton and swathed about the head and chin several times?” asked Yerli.

Eva nodded. “The cloth seemed enormously long.”

“What color was it?”

“A deep, almost ink blue.”

“Indigo?”

“Yes,” replied Eva. “Indigo sounds about right.”

Ismail Yerli sat in silent contemplation for a few moments. He was the coordinator and logistics expert for the World Health Organization team. Lean and stringy, immensely efficient, and with an almost pathological love of detail, he was a smart operator with an abundance of political savvy. His home was in the Mediterranean seaport of Antalya, Turkey. He claimed Kurdish blood, having been born and raised in the Asia Minor hinterland of Cappadocia. A lukewarm Muslim, he had not been inside a mosque in years. Like most Turks he had a massive thicket of coarse black hair complemented by bushy eyebrows that met over the nose and were supplemented by a huge moustache. He displayed a humorous disposition that never quit. His mouth was always stretched in a smile that was a decoy for an extremely serious temperament.

“Tuaregs,” he said finally.

He spoke so softly that Hopper had to lean closer. “Who?” he questioned.

Yerli looked across the coffee table at the Canadian leader of the medical team. A quiet man, Hopper said little but listened long. He was, the Turk mused, the complete opposite of himself. Hopper was big, humorous, red-faced, and heavily bearded. All he needed to look like the Viking, Eric the Red, was a battle axe and a conical helmet sunk on his head with horns curving from it. Resourceful, precise, and laid-back, he was regarded by international contamination scientists as one of the two finest toxicologists in the world.

“Tuaregs,” Yerli repeated. Once the mighty nomadic warriors of the desert, who won great battles against French and Moorish armies. And perhaps the greatest of all the romantic bandits. They raid no more. Today, they raise goats and beg in the cities bordering the Sahara to survive. Unlike Arab Muslims, the men wear the veil, a cloth that when unwrapped measures over a meter in length.

“But why would a tribe of desert nomads want to do away with Eva?” asked Hopper to no one in particular. “I fail to see a motive.”

Yerli shook his head vaguely. “It would seem that one of them, at least, does not want her,
and
—we have to heavily weigh this possibility—the rest of the health teams investigating the outbreaks of toxic poisoning in the southwestern desert.”

“At this point of the project,” said Hopper, “we don’t even know if contamination is the culprit. The mystery malady could be viral or bacterial.”