Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  But in fact, although he knew the wadi was dry, the power radiating from the sun and the rocks it heated twisted the air itself, so that from here the whole valley seemed to be filled with crystal-clear water – a huge, trembling lake on which the monastery, the vegetation around it and the tourists within it all seemed to be floating. Richard had seen mirages before, but never anything like this. It was as though the furnace heat of the huge white ball at the top of the hard blue sky was able to twist the very fabric of reality. Or, at the very least, was powerful enough to make this part of the earth, already seemingly at red heat, tremble on the verge of melting.

  ‘Richard!’ Saiid’s voice interrupted his reverie. He lowered his binoculars. Saiid was offering him a paper plate on which a split pita was filled with rapidly wilting salad and what looked like the delicious Tamiya falafels he enjoyed so much last night. He dropped the Zeiss glasses to hang from his neck by their strap and took the plate and the bottle of iced water Saiid was also offering. As he did so, Saiid continued, speaking quietly, ‘It looks as though the police car that followed us from Sharm has given up the chase and gone home.’

  ‘That’s good. So it was well worth stopping here after all. What about the tail we thought we’d picked up on the way past Dahab?’

  ‘No sign. We’re in the clear. When we’ve finished here we’ll go up through the Watia Pass then try some of the back roads down into the wilderness.’

  Richard nodded his agreement and pulled his keffiyeh away from his mouth. Using the Defender’s bonnet as a table, he ate the delicious food hungrily and followed every second or third mouthful with a couple of sips from the small half-litre bottle of chilled Hayat water, feeling the liquid being translated into sweat all over his body even as he swallowed it.

  ‘In half an hour or so you’ll be able to look down on a Wilderness of Sin instead of a valley of prayer,’ Saiid joked cheerfully.

  Richard smiled and nodded, his mouth too full of pita and falafel to answer. He was well aware that the word ‘Sin’ in the name of the area was supposed to refer to the moon-goddess Zin; not to the breaking of any of the Commandments. But it was still an amusing notion. And, given the mission they were on, amusing notions were few and far between.

  ‘Will anything be moving in heat like this?’ he asked, swallowing the last of his lunch and his water.

  ‘The sun will be heading west by the time we get to the best position,’ Saiid assured him. ‘We need to be high up, with an unrestricted view, but we also need to be west of the wilderness so that we can look down with the sun behind us and anyone looking up towards us will have the glare in their eyes. And, of course, beyond the watershed, all the valleys open to the west, so we’ll be looking into them from the best angle.’

  ‘And you know such a place?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Let’s go then.’

  Robin leaned forward in the chair and looked across Major Ibrahim’s fastidiously tidy desk. Even though the day outside was blazingly hot beneath the noon sun, in here the atmosphere was cool – as cool as the glass of water the major had poured for her the instant she sat down. The air-conditioning unit murmured softly in the background. The hornets clustered along the lines of shade on top of the mesh frames outside. It was as though the air conditioning was giving the swarming insects a voice. ‘Richard has gone to the monastery of Saint Catherine,’ she said, raising her voice above the persistent hum. She was, frankly, a little surprised that her request to talk to someone about security in the mountains should have taken her from the police station’s reception to the major’s office so rapidly. Surely a man in his position would have more to do than to discuss terrorist fears with passing tourists. Except, she suspected, that he was actually hoping to get some further information out of her about precisely what her errant husband was really up to. Particularly as Sabet’s report about the theft of Richard’s cards was on the desk in front of him. It was written in Arabic script and was utterly impenetrable to her, of course. But he had marked off one or two details as he checked them through with her.

  ‘Why the sudden interest in matters of religion?’ asked Ibrahim now, pushing the theft report aside, resting his elbows on the edge of his desk and steepling his forearms. His right elbow brushed against an old-fashioned mahogany-covered intercom box, the sort of thing that cell phones seemed to have replaced. ‘Is he hoping for divine intervention in the matter of his stolen cards?’

  ‘It’s not sudden,’ answered Robin. ‘And it has nothing to do with his cards. Richard is a church warden at home in England – on the rare occasions we’re actually there for any length of time. He couldn’t be here on the Sinai and not go to one, maybe both of the holiest sites nearby. So he’s at Saint Catherine’s monastery – or on his way there – now. And he’ll be trying to visit Gebel Musa itself, maybe, later on. Though I am aware that the actual position of the biblical Mount Sinai is a matter of some discussion. And so is he. I just wanted some reassurance that he’s going to be safe out there beyond the Sharm security cordon.’

  Ibrahim looked at her in silence for a moment. She met his gaze squarely, genuinely wanting reassurance. Sharm was the only area of the entire peninsula that was currently a Green Zone under the ruling of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Green Zone rating meant the British government considered it safe for all sorts of visits and visitors. Richard was out in the Amber Zone – where the British officials advised visits only in the case of an emergency. And he was heading towards the North Sinai Red Zone which they advised all British travellers to avoid at all costs because of the apparent lawlessness of the place – even in the face of the Egyptian Army – and the danger of kidnap by Bedouin, or terrorists fond of decapitation, or of suicide attack either by individuals or by vehicles.

  Ibrahim looked away first, unwilling to reveal that he had had Saiid’s Land Rover followed into the Amber Zone – even though she would possibly find the idea of a police escort reassuring. Except for the fact that historically it was the police and army who were the terrorists’ main targets.

  ‘If, as you say, he and his guide have gone via the Dahab route, then he should be perfectly safe,’ he said at last. ‘There have been terrorist attacks in South Sinai, but not for a long time now. And none anywhere near where you say he has gone. It is well over ten years since there was any terrorist activity in Dahab, though there was some unrest amongst the local Bedouins a few years back because one of their number was being held in the Dahab police station. It all came to nothing. However, there was an incident in El Tor in May 2014. A guard manning a security point there was killed. That is probably why Captain Mariner and his guides chose to go east instead of west. But there has been no repetition of violence in El Tor.’

  ‘I thought some tourists were killed going to Saint Catherine …’ Robin’s tone was truly worried. The sight of the guns in Saiid’s Land Rover had not reassured her that Richard and his guides would be safe at all. It was bad enough that he had gone haring off after Nahom and the stolen credit cards, but even the smugglers seemed less worrying than the possibility that he might find himself face-to-face with tribes of Bedouin keen to follow the Somali technique of kidnap for ransom, groups of well-armed Jihadists willing to chop the heads off foreigners and put the executions on YouTube or to blow themselves up for their beliefs. Or, indeed, with platoons of nervous, trigger-happy soldiers with orders to shoot first and ask questions later.

  ‘In February 2014. Indeed, a tragic incident.’ Ibrahim nodded. ‘The victims were members of a religious group. But they had already visited the monastery. They were waiting at Taba to cross the border into Israel when the atrocity occurred. Two men and a woman from South Korea died along with the Egyptian bus driver. And, of course, the bomber himself, who was also, apparently, Egyptian. Responsibility was claimed by a terrorist group called Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, who have been active in the North Sinai. Their spokesman said the attack would be the first of a series and indeed more soldiers have b
een killed in terrorist incidents since then. However, if Captain Mariner has gone to Saint Catherine as you say, then he would have turned off the Sharm to Taba highway long before he got to Nuweiba, let alone Taba and the Israeli border.’

  Robin nodded, satisfied. On the terrorist front, at least. ‘Will that be all?’ asked Ibrahim. But just as he did so, a phone started ringing. He frowned, looking around in mild confusion. The ringing phone clearly did not belong to him. ‘It’s not mine,’ said Robin.

  ‘Nor mine,’ confirmed Ibrahim. He sat back from the desk, unlocked a drawer and slid it open. The ringing got louder. ‘It’s the cell phone I confiscated from Nahom Selassie,’ he said. ‘I must have switched it on accidentally as I put it away.’ He lifted the phone out of the drawer carefully and showed it to Robin. The screen was filled with a picture of Tsibekti. ‘His sister is calling.’

  ‘Or her kidnappers are.’ She nodded. ‘Should you answer it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He frowned.

  ‘Maybe safer not to, unless you are fluent in Eritrean Arabic.’

  ‘No. Anyone listening would know at once. My accent …’

  ‘You can still get through if you’re quick, though,’ she said. ‘You must have the better part of a dozen Eritreans in custody here.’

  ‘So I do. That is a very good thought.’ He pressed a button on the mahogany intercom box on his desk. ‘Sergeant Sabet,’ he said. ‘I need one of the Eritrean prisoners in here at once.’

  ‘Preferably one who knows Nahom, or comes from his village,’ added Robin.

  But by the time Sergeant Sabet escorted the man Robin recognized as the Eritrean she had brought to the surface herself and announced, ‘The prisoner Aman Kifle says he can help, Major,’ Nahom’s phone was quiet once again.

  Tsibekti’s picture, and the chance of contacting her, had gone.

  As Saiid’s Land Rover ground up the final incline and into the Watia Pass, Richard looked around, awestruck. The mountain slopes rose almost vertically on either side, to jagged peaks hundreds of feet higher than the narrow, precipitous roadway. Against the blue-steel dome of the sky, they looked almost black. Lower slopes were terracotta red, vertically banded with serpentine green. They were ridged with jagged valleys, as though the rock walls themselves were cracking open with the bludgeoning heat.

  The Land Rover lurched over the watershed and on to the western downslope. The enormous V between the peaks was suddenly filled with the tyrannical white ball of the afternoon sun. Richard pulled his keffiyeh tighter and settled his sunglasses so that they covered the slit between his forehead and nose. There was a fan on the dashboard but all it seemed to be doing was circulating incredibly hot air, like some mechanism in a blast furnace. Richard was at that stage where he felt he needed protection, even if it meant suffocation.

  ‘Not long now,’ called Saiid as he shifted gear.

  The mountain pass opened briefly into a simmering vision of red peaks dancing and wavering like the fires of hell. And, far away, beyond the farthest of them a still, steady line the colour of royal-blue ink reached from north to south. It took Richard an instant to recognize it as the sea. The Gulf of Suez, in fact, which he had sailed more times than he could readily remember, cocooned in the air-conditioned security of his command bridge, blissfully unaware of the colossal nuclear energy being unleashed by the sun upon the place he was passing. No sooner had the dazzling vista appeared before Richard’s steaming eyes than it was gone again as the black slopes closed like curtains. ‘Not long now,’ repeated Saiid.

  He was as good as his word. Richard was still trying to blink the tears away when the Land Rover swung hard right. The blinding blaze of the west-facing road was replaced by a narrow, shady track running northwards, parallel to the distant coast. Richard understood at once why Saiid favoured the Land Rover – and why the vehicle was so battered. What they were driving down seemed little better than a camel track, littered with stones and occasional boulders. The slope steepened until Richard began to wonder whether they would ever be able to get back up it again, should they need to. But after ten more minutes or so, Saiid swung left and the path began to level out. They were following a gorge that appeared to be little more than a steep-sided cleft in the living rock of the mountain side. The sky was a thin band high above, the sun nowhere near as overpowering as it had been up at the watershed. The temperature in the lurching vehicle cooled, and Richard pulled his damp keffiyeh away from his perspiring face. Then he removed his sunglasses and slipped them into the breast pocket of his gilet. The fan on the dashboard was suddenly effective, chilling his face and throat as it dried the sweat which had gathered there. He looked across at Saiid, but his face was closed, his concentration absolute. Richard could well understand why. A second later the front left tyre hit a boulder and the whole vehicle jumped sideways, the door beside Richard crashing into the black stone wall of the canyon. Now was clearly not a good time for a chat.

  The Land Rover continued to rumble and buck its way westward for half an hour before Saiid suddenly swung hard right again. After ten or so minutes, the walls of the canyon vanished. The Defender came to a juddering halt. Richard found himself looking down across the three-dimensional maze that Saiid had described last evening at dinner. The Wilderness of Sin. But he was high above it, looking back eastwards, with the sun, as Saiid had promised, westering behind him. The camel track that Saiid had been following turned south-westwards again and vanished into what appeared to be a tiny crack in a beetling black cliff at the western edge of the rocky outcrop. But here, just for a few tens of metres, the weird geology of the place dictated a flat-topped balcony thrusting out of the north-eastern face of the three thousand foot peak of Mount Serabit.

  ‘Everybody out!’ called Saiid. ‘I need to hide the Defender. It stands out against the rocks too clearly. Even someone looking up into the sun could probably make out a white Land Rover parked in front of a black cliff.’

  The three of them piled out into the sweltering afternoon and Saiid drove the Defender slowly and carefully into the gorge at the foot of the black rock wall. Richard could see why he drove so slowly and carefully: one thing that would stand out more clearly than a white Land Rover was a big cloud of red dust. Even as the Defender ground away, Richard was walking to the edge of the natural balcony. The sun was above and behind his right shoulder, but he was not casting a long shadow yet. Even so, the fearsome heat of midday was past. He left the tails of his keffiyeh dangling and did not bother with his sunglasses. At the edge of the natural balcony stood several battered red boulders. Richard crossed to one of these and used it as a table to steady his elbows as he brought Saiid’s binoculars to his eyes. With the magnification set to maximum, he swept across the panorama in front of him, simply staggered by the amount of detail he could make out. True, as Saiid had said, the Wilderness of Sin was a maze. Jagged peaks fell away from the distant line of the watershed. Between and among them, dry wadis writhed like the tracks of gigantic snakes. Interlocking spurs showed where forceful young torrents raged as soon as any rain fell. Red sand slopes showed where the outwash came, patterned like the root systems of enormous trees.

  In the sides of the steep-walled valleys there were the black dots of cave mouths; the black portals of mine shafts. On the one hand, because of his position high and to the west, all of the valleys – and the pathways they contained, seemed to open before him, giving the impression that there was nothing he could not observe. That no one moving down there could possibly escape his gaze. And yet, everything he could see seemed to swell and waver, like an undersea reef examined from above the waves, for there was still sufficient power in the sun and the super-heated landscape to make the air writhe into a heat haze that rendered even the clearest vision deceptive.

  ‘See anything?’ asked Saiid, coming to stand beside Richard.

  ‘Not yet. You were right, though. This is an amazing observation point.’

  Saiid made a movement of his upper body which Rich
ard felt rather than understood, until his guide spoke. He’d been checking his watch. ‘Half past three,’ he said. ‘If they’re down there, they’ll be moving about within half an hour or so.’

  ‘I thought you said they’d stay still and wait for Nahom,’ said Richard, mentally breaking the vista in front of him into squares and beginning to move the binoculars regularly across each one.

  ‘That was then. This is now. And the difference is that they have Nahom. Or rather, at least one of their associates has him.’

  ‘So we can assume that whoever is with Nahom knows the route and will be able to catch up more easily. Therefore there’s no need to hang around any longer,’ said Richard, his tone thoughtful.

  ‘So they’re likely to be on the move again,’ rumbled Ahmed. ‘Perhaps a call from the sister to motivate him a little further and then they’ll be off.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Richard, not entirely convinced. ‘Surely they’d only call Nahom if whoever is with him doesn’t realize his phone was confiscated along with his money and belt. Otherwise they’d just end up speaking to Major Ibrahim or Sergeant Sabet. If they’ve switched the phone on, of course. And there’s no guarantee that they will have done that.’

  ‘It’s all in the hands of Allah,’ rumbled Ahmed. ‘Such things are beyond our reckoning so they should not concern us.’

  ‘At least we have chosen the best moment to spot them,’ added Mahmood, his tone bracingly positive.

  ‘And we’re in the best position to do so,’ added Saiid.

  ‘The best except for in a helicopter,’ suggested Richard.

  ‘No,’ Saiid corrected him gently. ‘If we were in a helicopter we would never spot them. They would hear us coming and go to ground at once. What gives us the edge is not just our position but also our silence.’

  Nahom Selassie sat in the back seat of the battered little Nasr-built Egyptian version of the venerable Fiat 128, covered in sweat and shaking, almost deafened by the screaming of the motor. His condition was nothing to do with the exhaustion and dehydration – or even the snake bite – which had put him in hospital so recently. Both the perspiration and the uncontrollable jumping of his limbs came primarily from his mental confusion. He didn’t know whether he was elated or terrified; whether his actions were daring or criminal. Whether he was a hero riding to save his beloved sister or a victim heading towards an agonizing death and a shallow grave. But at least this time it looked as though he was really getting somewhere. For the first time since the boat hit the reef, in fact, and he had become entangled in the anchor rope. That memory made him shudder more. But in truth he was not nearly as weak and ill as he appeared to be. His body was naturally long and lean. Starvation had made it skeletal, but his muscles were strong as whip-cord. He was from the coastal plain of Eritrea and was therefore acclimatized to temperatures that could touch fifty degrees Celsius. Furthermore, like the majority of Eritreans his age, he had been forced to do some years of National Service, and the tough requirements of the army still lingered in the depth of his chest, the strength of his muscles and his ability to think quickly and clearly under pressure. Doing a little play-acting and pretending to be much less well than he truly was, while strengthening his contact with Ali, the hospital orderly, had really begun to pay dividends.