“If I’m right,” Paul said, “there’s another aquifer under the Nubian Aquifer.”
“Another aquifer?”
Paul nodded. “Seven thousand feet below the surface. These formations suggest it’s literally swelling with water. But this sound wave distortion here, and here, suggests the water is moving.”
“Like an underground river?”
“I’m not sure,” Paul said, “but that’s the only thing the computer has been able to match the pattern to.”
“So where’s it going?” she said, perking up.
“I don’t know.”
“Why’s it moving?”
Paul shrugged. “It just is. The squiggly lines can tell us only so much.”
A large boom rattled the windows and both of them looked up.
“There’s no thunder in this desert,” Gamay said coldly.
“Maybe it was a sonic boom,” Paul said. “I used to hear them all the time when I lived near the air base.”
Two similar thuds followed, accompanied by shouting and the rapid Pop! Pop! Pop! of distant gunfire.
Paul put the printout down and ran to the window. Across the desert he saw another flash as one of the pumping towers was engulfed in an orange fireball before falling to one side.
“What is it?” Gamay asked.
“Explosions,” he said.
Reza came busting in seconds later. “We have to go,” he shouted. “The rebels are here.”
Paul and Gamay reacted slowly.
“Hurry,” Reza added, heading for the next room. “We have to get to the plane.”
Paul grabbed the printouts and he and Gamay chased after Reza. As soon as they’d gathered everyone, they made for the stairs. Across the gravel, the DC-3 was starting up, its engines coughing clouds of oily smoke as they came to life.
“There’s enough room for all of us,” Reza said. “But we have to go quickly.”
They raced across the ramp to the DC-3, piling in through the cargo door. Another explosion went off behind them as the control center was hit with a rocket.
“Move forward!” Paul shouted as others climbed into the plane through the door near the tail.
Reza counted heads. There were twenty-one people inside, plus the pilot. The center’s entire staff plus Paul and Gamay.
“Go!” he shouted.
The pilot moved the throttles up and the plane swung onto the runway, picking up speed, as more flashes lit the desert behind them.
Paul looked at Reza. “I thought you said even the rebels had to drink?”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
The engines roared to full power, drowning out all other conversation, and the plane gathered speed rapidly as the cool night air helped increase the horsepower. The acceleration was brisk, but a fully loaded plane meant a very long takeoff roll, and as they neared the end of the strip, the pilot had to make a choice.
He pulled back enough to get the plane off the ground, then lowered the nose and raised the landing gear. For another thirty seconds, they cruised along at twenty feet or so, buoyed by what pilots called ground effect, a little boost in lift that came when they were close to the surface of the earth. It allowed the plane to fly before it was really going fast enough and it gave them time to pick up speed and begin a proper climb. It also brought them right over the top of a group of pickup trucks with machine guns mounted on them.
“Incoming,” the pilot shouted, banking to the right and pulling up.
They never heard the sound of the guns firing, not over the roar of those huge engines, but the cabin was suddenly alive with metal confetti and glowing sparks.
“Paul,” Gamay called out.
“I’m all right,” he called back. “You?”
Gamay was checking herself over. “Not hit,” she said.
The DC-3 was racing along, climbing just high enough to avoid trouble and speeding into the dark. The men and women inside were shaking but unharmed. Except for one.
“Reza!” someone called.
Reza had tried to stand up and then fallen forward into the aisle.
Paul and Gamay were the first to reach him. He was bleeding from a stomach wound and leg wound.
“We have to stop the blood loss,” Paul said.
Shouts went back and forth.
Gamay said, “We need to get him to a hospital. Is there a town nearby?”
The men around them shook their heads.
“Benghazi,” Reza managed to say. “We must get to Benghazi.”
Paul nodded. Ninety minutes. Suddenly, that seemed like an inordinate amount of time.
“Hang in there,” Gamay urged. “Please, hang in there.”
37
At the bottom of the shallow bay, Joe shared the oxygen from his tank with the D’Campions, calming them and keeping them alive until Kurt and Renata found a way to haul them to the surface.
Getting them on the dive boat was a cumbersome process, and cutting the chains off more delicate, but soon enough they were free. By then, a new problem had become obvious.
“We appear to be sinking,” Joe said.
The dive boat had taken a pounding, the worst damage sustained when Kurt rammed the bridge.
“The whole forward compartment is flooded,” Renata said.
“Good thing we’re not far from the beach,” Kurt said.
He aimed for the shore and bumped the throttle. The damaged boat wallowed across the lagoon and beached on the sand moments later. The group climbed out, dropped into the shallows and waded the last few yards up onto the dry sand.
“Let’s head for the access road,” Kurt said. “Maybe we can flag down a ride.”
They hiked across the beach, checking on the defeated combatants along the way.
“All of them are dead,” Renata said. “Including the one I only shot in the legs.”
“This group has a twisted, backward view of No man left behind,” Joe said.
Kurt looked closer at the man Renata had hit in the legs. White foam was bubbling from his mouth. “Cyanide. We’re dealing with fanatics here. They must have standing orders not to get captured.”
“Wouldn’t it be easy to give such an order but rather hard to follow it?” Mrs. D’Campion asked.
“For normal people,” Kurt said. “But who knows what kind of an organization we’re up against.”
“Terrorists,” Mr. D’Campion suggested.
“They’re well versed in terror,” Renata chimed in. “But I think their goal is more than spreading fear.”
Kurt searched the body. He found no identification, no religious paraphernalia, jewelry or tattoos, no initiation scars that fanatic groups sometimes used to brand their own people. In fact, nothing at all to indicate who the men were or who they worked for.
“Make a call to the Maltese government,” he said to Renata. “See if they can get some cooperation from the Defense Force and security agencies here. The saying goes Dead men tell no tales, but in my experience that’s almost never true. Their weapons, their clothes, their fingerprints: sometimes those things can be traced. These guys didn’t just materialize out of nowhere, they have to have a past. And considering how they fought, I don’t think they were honor students or choirboys.”
She nodded. “Maybe we’ll get something out of the two that were captured near the Sophie C.”
“If they haven’t poisoned themselves yet,” Kurt said.
From there, the group began a long climb up the access road, past the abandoned resort buildings, to the road at the top of the bluff.
A few hours later, showered and wearing clean clothes, they were sitting in the baroque living room of the D’Campion estate as dusk fell. Overstuffed couches and chairs filled the lower level. Artwork, statues and a library’s worth of books covered the walls. A balcony from the loft looked down on them. In the center of one wall, a crackling fire burned in a huge stone hearth.