The Crisis

by David Poyer

  The first day the Seabees had dug postholes and put up targets, then fired rifles for two hours, the cracks fading echoless into the desert. Some rite, perhaps, to remind them they were soldiers.

  Then they’d put away their weapons and begun assembling equipment, and it quickly became evident they were also a good deal more.

  The lieutenant had left a chief in charge. He’d immediately started preparing the site. A desert tan front-end loader had scraped away meters of gravel and sand, exposing bare rock. They’d leveled equipment, stacked pipes on wooden racks clear of the ground, and covered them with tarps. Unloaded barrels, electric lights, pumps, generators. Other teams dug pits and lined them with heavy green construction plastic, the edges carefully turned and buried to present a smooth surface to the wind. They bolted together a steel shed and positioned a satellite station and trucks for water, fuel, and maintenance.

  By the end of the first shift everything was set up but the drill rig. They leveled the ground once more, then erected a steel tower. By the time the floodlights came on that evening drilling was under way. She’d sat out on the sand most of that day, keeping her sunscreen fresh and her hat pulled low, watching one man.

  The Chief, they called him.

  She’d known when Fletcher had stepped down out of his truck he was going to be significant in her life. His easygoing drawl was unlike any she’d ever heard. His muscles outlined under his damp T, the casual way he strolled among his troops, their obvious respect, all turned her on. He’d looked back, too. He wore a wedding ring. He chewed something, not qat, some kind of tobacco. That would have to go.

  But they were both a long way from home.

  He’d come to her tent that night. She’d already changed and dabbed on some Je Reviens. A heavy scent, but when water was scarce that was what you needed. She’d offered him a drink. It hadn’t taken long after that.

  His first name was Efrain. He said it was from his grandmother’s family. She tried to feel guilty about her husband, but it seemed like so long since she’d cared. His chest hair felt like a wire strainer against her nipples. His mouth tasted of whatever he’d been chewing, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Her first boyfriend had smoked.

  None of this sounded romantic but it still felt very nice indeed to bring her legs back to her chest, in her sleeping bag, and take him in. It had been a long time and when she came it seemed to last for a month and a half while she hung on, making small sounds she hoped didn’t carry to the other tents.

  When she returned he was looking into her eyes. Dipping his head to kiss the silver symbol on her flushed chest, then her nipples, first one, then the other. “Oh. God,” she said.

  And he’d said, “My turn.”

  ALL the next week the drilling went on.

  The diesels chugged or roared, depending on how hard the strata was. The mud pump gurgled and spat. organized into teams, the Sea-bees drilled right through the dark hours. They averaged thirty to fifty meters a day, depending on what they were punching through. Every four hours they brought samples to her tent. She examined each core with a poker face, filing each in its own plastic sample box.

  Fletcher spent the nights with her, but they treated each other with distant politeness on the rig. Did the others guess? There were probably a few discreet liaisons going on in the unit itself, the hardworking men and the sunburned, muscular women in sweaty T-shirts with navy-issue bras visible beneath. Those who wore them; not all did. As she passed she felt their gazes, men and women alike.

  Efrain had frowned when she told him how deep this well would be. He’d never gone past nine hundred feet, and according to her estimate, the lens would be at least six hundred meters deep—more than twice as far. But he’d agreed, after saying he’d have to order more pipe.

  The refugees had started coming the day after they began. She had no idea how they knew. The camp was fifteen kilometers away. Perhaps they’d heard the generators, in the night. They walked the entire way. They brought brightly colored water containers and left them in neat lines, weighed down by rocks in case the wind came up.

  One day, bored, she climbed in the Rover and drove to Refugee Camp Three. Threw a scarf over her head; red hair had an unfortunate effect on the kids, and old women would scold her. She didn’t understand their words, but she’d just as soon avoid spoiling anyone’s day.

  As they walked the camp the Swiss director explained the situation in French. “The coast road is our lifeline. We truck water in from the port and issue it with oral rehydration salts. Sometimes the bandits stop the convoys, or there are breakdowns. We keep a reserve for drinking but actually we’re only ever three days away from being completely out.”

  “How much do you use?”

  “Each family needs forty to fifty liters for cooking, washing, and drinking. At the moment, that’s thirteen thousand liters a day.”

  “Chlorination?”

  The woman looked at her proudly. “The water on the trucks is treated to one and a half milligrams per liter. That gives us an adequate residual concentration by the time it gets into the pots in their tents. Unfortunately, if we don’t receive enough, they have to walk half a mile to a wadi.”

  “What’s that taste like?” Gráinne asked her.

  “The treated water?”

  “No, from the wadi. Is it bitter?”

  The Swiss woman made a face. “I’ve not tasted it, Doctor. It’s probably contaminated.”

  “I agree. Let me ask you something. If I had a message for New York—could I send it through you?”

  “No e-mail, but I have a radio. We talk to the airport several times a day. If you have a message, we can forward it.” She held her hand out.

  “I don’t yet. About your wadi source: it most likely is contaminated. Most surface water is. I could test it for you.”

  “It wouldn’t matter. What else can I give them? And there’s no fuel to boil it. I truly am worried, if we have to keep them here much longer. Of course, most of our residents have lived in near-drought conditions all their lives. They’re Afar, after all. The desert has made them what they are. Do you know how they refer to this drought? As a blessing from Allah. I’m never sure if they’re being mystical, or just ironic.”

  “I thought they were Nasaris . . . ?”

  “That’s a tribe of the Afar. They’re a very clean people, so long as they’re on the move. Unfortunately, they’re not used to living in large, static groups.” She blinked, hugging herself. “You’re alone, out in the desert?”

  Gráinne smiled. “I have a hundred and sixty-eight armed troops with me. I don’t really worry.”

  “We all need to be careful.” The Swiss woman glanced away. “I see people about the camp I don’t know. When I ask, I learn nothing. When I look again, they’re gone.”

  “I’ll stay until we find you some water, anyway.”

  “Oil, you mean?”

  She’d blinked, then grinned. “Is that what they’re saying? Believe me. There’s no oil here.”

  “Of course. Well. If you do find water, I have enough fuel to send a jeep twice a day. It would save many from dying.”

  Gráinne had wanted to tell her then, this small worrying woman with her hundreds of children. But she couldn’t. No one must know until she was sure, and her own office must hear it first. So she’d just patted her arm. “I hope I can help. But only the drilling will tell for sure.”

  . . .

  ANOTHER week passed. Now Efrain came every other night. He said he had to sleep sometime. She wondered where this was going. At first she hadn’t. A fling, nothing more.

  The trouble was, she’d miss him, when it was over. He always seemed to know what to do. She’d never met anyone like that. Reece had never seemed to know shite.

  She couldn’t go back to him. Nor to Ireland. Maybe Fletcher was just simpler, not better. He’d never said he wouldn’t go back to his wife. And children. But whatever happened with him, her marriage was over.

  Maybe he was he
r way of proving it to herself? She’d smiled wryly. “Overanalysis, O’Shea,” Dr. Kyriazis would have said.

  She wished he, Costa, were with her now. To see if his great suspicion was right.

  Every day was the same. A hearty breakfast, with eggs. The diesels roared. The mud pump gurgled. The water truck refilled the pits. The men shouted, manhandling the collar into position to take the next length of pipe. Foamy brown mud bubbled up and ran down into its settling pit. The smell of burning diesel fuel and shit drifted over the camp in the evening. They had a latrine for women, all plastic, with a minute sink built in and even a soap dispenser. Ridiculous, but better than squatting in a ravine, or worse, on an open plain, while your driver pretended not to wonder if your hair was red there too. No showers, though. She kept to her liter a day for an evening wash.

  Out on the sand, lines of colorful jugs waited.

  Was it possible? Today she might find out. She paced rapidly around the compound. No fence, no wire or guard posts. It wasn’t that kind of camp, and anyway, out here in the Quartier Vide, whom had they to fear?

  Today they’d hit six hundred meters. Of course the depth of the upper lens was only a guess. It could happen tomorrow, or this morning. She stood by the rig, blotting sweat and sunblock off her forehead.

  “We’re ready, if it happens,” Fletcher said behind her.

  She turned, fingering the claddagh. He was smelly, hard hat shoved back, cheek smeared with mud. He looked absolutely cunning and she wanted to take him in her arms there and then.

  But she didn’t. A woman in a blond ponytail was greasing threads on the next section of pipe. So she just murmured, “When it does, let’s take a shower together. I’ll take you to the Cosmopolite. It’s on the Champs Nationale, the best hotel in Ashaara City.”

  She got a grin, but he said nothing, neither yes nor that he couldn’t, or that the Navy would probably send him somewhere else; just looked away. A blade twisted in her stomach. Don’t do this to me, she thought. Not today.

  “Do what?” he said, gaze back on her.

  She must have spoken aloud. “Nothing,” she said, feeling herself flush. Get a grip, O’Shea. You’re not sixteen anymore. She rubbed at a burning where sunblock had run into her eyes. “I’m going to lie down in my tent. Call me if anything happens.”

  THEY didn’t hit anything that day, though, and she sat up late trying to write a letter to her mother. They hadn’t had e-mail contact for weeks, and her mother would be worried. Efrain had said that if she posted a letter with the fleet post office system, it’d get to Ireland eventually. He’d put his return address on it, so it’d go free. But everything she wrote sounded trivial.

  She woke to the blond-ponytail trooper shaking her. “Water” was all she said.

  All she needed to say. Gráinne squirmed out of her sleeping bag—it got cool in the evenings—and shook out her boots, shook out her smelly bush trousers, which she’d meant to wash but hadn’t yet. She’d been stung by a scorpion in the Sudan, and ever after had inspected every item of clothing before putting it on. Her heart was beating faster than usual.

  When she ducked out dawn was breaking. They were all standing around the rig. When she looked down the floodlights gleamed on a smooth jet of clear fluid, leaping from the drill collar to weep down into the sand. The dirt around it was dark with moisture.

  She examined their faces as they handed her a plastic cup. Her hand shook. She brought the cup to her nose and sniffed, alert for the telltale stink of sulfur dioxide, the bite of dissolved CO2. She didn’t smell either. She held it to the floodlights, looking for turbidity or foaming. There was a bit, particulate too, but that could be from the drilling.

  She took a sip delicately as a oenophile at a wine tasting. Tasted with the front of her palate, then tongued it back into the corners of her mouth. No salt, her biggest worry. Hints of calcium or magnesium compounds, but they wouldn’t make the water undrinkable. In fact, just the opposite.

  She’d have to test it, of course. But it tasted good. Rainwater from thirty thousand years ago, held down there in trust all this time.

  “You have to keep drilling,” she told them.

  “Isn’t it good? Tastes fine to me,” Fletcher said, frowning. “All we need to do’s the sanitary seal.”

  “It’s excellent water. But I need data. How thick this sandstone is. How thick the aquifer is. So we can . . . so I know if it can support additional wells.” She let herself smile, let excitement show. “It’s wonderful water. You’ve done a fantastic job.”

  Efrain’s hand was on her shoulder. “You led us here, Doc. It’s your water more than mine.”

  Since everyone else was hugging her, she didn’t think it would hurt if she let him kiss her cheek.

  THE sandstone was soft. The bit went through it much faster than it had the harder strata above. She tested at each string of pipe. They got to seven hundred meters before the lens ended.

  There was a lot of water down there. A lot of water.

  And the artesian seeps she’d mapped told her it ran west, and north, for nearly a hundred miles.

  She tucked a little Skoal against her gum and held it while she wrote her report in longhand. There was no Ministry of Interior Resources anymore. No Dr. Isdheeb to report to. She was wary about telling the Americans, too. Fletch she trusted, but Ahearn and those above him she did not. She addressed it to her funders at the Hydrological Programme. They’d know what to do.

  She told Efrain she was going to the city overnight; did he want to go? Take that shower at the Cosmopolite? He said he couldn’t leave his people. She understood that, and the tone of his voice, too. He’d be moving on to the next job. Building a school. Repairing a road. Their time was over. She allowed herself a short cry on the dirt track down to the coast road, then cleaned her face with a desiccated wet wipe and concentrated on not blowing a tire.

  The roadblock was set up on the reverse slope of a gravel ridge. The men had black headwraps over their faces. They were armed, of course. She slammed on the brakes, remembering suddenly, with a cold sweat, how Abdiwali had died.

  How could she have driven out alone? Cursing her stupidity, she clutched the wheel as a dark man with a beard tapped on the glass. Politely, or it might have seemed polite, if he hadn’t been tapping with the muzzle of a rifle.

  She rolled the window down and held out the paper. “This is very important,” she told him, and repeated it in French. “Tres importante. C’est l’eau. Water for everybody, for all Ashaara, for many years. Please let me pass. You have to let me pass.”

  The paper fluttered to the sand, torn into bits. Too late, as they pulled her out of the Rover, she realized she spoke no language they would recognize.

  20

  The Old Quarter, Ashaara City

  THEY spend the night in an abandoned bakery filled with wrecked machinery. Every scrap of copper’s been looted and the walls daubed with intertwined clan symbols, ADA slogans, obscenities from the Assad forces. Hasheer throws out several squatter families and posts guards before he waves Ghedi’s driver in. And even then, has armed men running alongside, shielding him.

  There are still those who say Hasheer’s not loyal. But Ghedi’s never seen any evidence of it.

  This morning they eat lamb and rice from the common dish, drinking chai so thick with powdered milk and sugar it’s almost pudding. Ghedi chews painfully, trying not to tear the roughly stitched flesh where the bullet tore apart his gums. Each man scoops and eats, wiping his lips after each rolled ball, left hand swathed in his robe or tucked under his haunch. Their weapons lie to hand. A buzzing echoes in the hot air. When he looks up Ghedi sees hornets’ nests. The insects drift toward bullet holes in the metal roofing, clamber clumsily through them, then disappear on their errands.

  The men around him are silent with anger. They lost many at Uri’yah, but were victorious. Juulheed’s charge broke the enemy. They not only captured hundreds of prisoners, they gained hundreds of recruits among the sold
iers. The captured officers, though, he did not welcome. He shot General Michel and all his staff, officers from the old army. Some begged for mercy, saying they sympathized with the Waleeli, or had sent information to Ikrane before the battle. These too he shot. Who can trust traitors not to turn again?

  He says, “I’ll go alone. As the sheekh asks.”

  “They stopped us after the victory. Why?”

  They speculate quietly. Finally his deputy voices what’s on all their minds. “What’s to prevent them killing you?”

  Juulheed may have a point. Ghedi rolls another bite and chews thoughtfully. “You think they’d kill me?”

  “They founded the Waleeli, but you lead the great army. Can they let you live?”

  Could God have spared him in battle, to have him die at the hands of assassins? It seems unlikely. Could his old teacher turn against him? Someone ordered him to stop fighting, on the verge of triumph. What can that be but treachery?

  He holds out his cup for more chai as his bodyguards watch each other. He flicks glances at Hasheer, at the mumbling Juulheed. At Ini Fiammetta, who stopped his bleeding and sewed his mouth, a scarred intense nomad who despite his Italian name is Issa, who seems to carry in his throat a coiled snake he’s forever swallowing.

  “God will prevent them.” Ghedi swallows the last of the tepid chai and rises, brushing off his camouflage trousers. American, taken from one of the officers he shot. A light fabric with many pockets. He likes them better than any other he’s ever worn.

  “God carries us only so far,” Hasheer murmurs. “Then we must act for ourselves.”

  The others ignore him, too pointedly. Ghedi slaps his shoulder, then hugs him. He looks at his new watch, also a battlefield prize. He checks his AK and slings it. The others get up.

  “We’ll find out what is in their minds,” he says. “And I will not go alone. Come, then. We will meet with the sheekh.”