Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  Only then did it occur to Nahom that this truck was also in danger of being buried. He heaved himself to his feet only to topple back on to his seat as the truck lurched sideways as the men opposite raised their guns threateningly. The hole in the canvas between the two gunmen burst wide, torn by the weight of sand piling directly against it. A modest avalanche cascaded over the men as they dropped their guns and leaped to their feet. The red river of grit piled itself unsteadily on the floor at Nahom and Tsibekti’s feet. He looked down at it, up at the two shocked smugglers and back through the rear opening. The monstrous red earth back on the spot where Ali’s Nasr had been was already higher than the truck’s canvas roof, though it was mercifully falling further and further behind. The truck lurched again. The two smugglers were slammed back into their sand-covered seats by the movement. Their sand-covered guns slid back beneath their feet. Nahom threw a protective arm round Tsibekti at exactly the same moment as her arm went round him. They looked at each other, wide-eyed.

  Then Nahom looked up. The roof was bulging down, taut as a drumskin, hanging like hammocks between the struts supporting it. Struts that were beginning to bend and buckle under the weight of the sand pouring down on them. The truck lurched sideways again and suddenly tilted as it left the main highway and began to slide sideways down the outer slope of the causeway. At once the sand began to slide off the top and the truck surged forward, down and out into the flat sand south of the highway. Nahom got a strangely angled view of the collapsing red wall rolling right across the highway, its foundations massively solid – for all they were spreading like a tidal wave. The air above filled with a red mist of finer grains, whipped away southwards as the shamaal pushed the last of the great sand obstruction out of its way. And, oddly, before the red mist closed around the truck, Nahom was granted one last clear vision. For there, less than a mile away, behind them on the desert floor, there were two trucks almost identical to the one he was in at the moment. His heart leaped automatically. Perhaps the tail end of the smugglers’ convoy had escaped after all, he thought.

  But then he realized, no; these trucks had police markings. And his heart leaped once again, for exactly the opposite reason. Perhaps Captain Mariner and Major Ibrahim were still on his trail after all!

  Richard shaded his eyes, wishing poignantly that he still had Saiid’s incredibly powerful Zeiss Victory 8 X42 T*FL binoculars. That way at least he would be able to make out a little more about the three trucks less than a mile ahead on the flat sand and get some idea of who was in them. On his left, up in the cab, Sabet was speaking calmly and forcefully into a portable radio. Beyond her was the highest part of the collapsed dune, the mid-point at which they proposed to start looking for survivors once Fawzi was up to speed. On his right, the twelve soldiers of the police command stood, awestruck, just waiting for someone to take command and tell them what to do. Sabet was speaking in Egyptian Arabic but Private Kareem, one of Ibrahim’s men, was standing closest to Richard and translating for him.

  ‘The road is completely blocked, Captain Fawzi,’ Sabet said in Arabic, and Kareem echoed a moment later in strongly accented American English. ‘But it is worse than that. We have driven along the sand to the site of the main collapse where we saw the trucks go under. I estimate that at least three trucks, as full of people as our trucks are, all buried beneath the sand. That’s at least thirty-six, not counting drivers and anyone else in the cabs. It is unlikely there will be many survivors but I urge you to send as many men as possible as quickly as you can with the necessary equipment to start digging them out. If Captain Mariner and I are correct then there will be innocent captives as well as smugglers guarding them in all of the vehicles. Of course, I and the men with me will do what we can starting at once, but I urge you to be as quick as you can with back-up.’

  Richard gave a curt nod. The sergeant was right. Time was of the essence here. It would mean losing sight of the other trucks further up ahead. In fact, they had started moving off as soon as Sabet’s truck began to roll forward, and they had kept going even when the police trucks stopped and they got down to start searching for survivors. Somehow it never occurred to him that the smugglers would come back for their buried colleagues or their captives. But there was at least a chance that Nahom and Tsibekti were buried here somewhere under the drifting sand in any case. They’d better get busy if they were going to save anyone at all. ‘Are there spades or shovels in those trucks, Private?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Kareem answered. ‘Shovels, flashlights, all kind of emergency equipment.’

  ‘Right. Then let’s get on it. Time is of the essence.’

  Sabet joined them and the three of them went to the back of the trucks and called the men over to join them. They unloaded the emergency equipment as fast as they could – everything from spades to first aid, then, spades in hand, they ran over to the long slope of shifting red sand and set to work as best they could.

  Richard was not in the least surprised to note that Sabet led from the front. She could have hung back, giving orders; she could have busied herself with sorting out the first aid stuff. Instead, she rolled her sleeves up, tucked her headscarf across her nose and mouth, then fell-to with such energy that you might have thought it was her own family buried beneath the shifting red slope. Richard mimicked her in every regard and buried his spade in the sand just beside hers.

  As they dug feverishly in spite of the bludgeoning heat of the sun, Richard felt rather than saw the others joining them. It was no great surprise to find Kareem and Ibrahim’s other man beside them, but after a few moments the men from Captain Fawzi’s command joined in as well, led by Saqr, the driver of their truck. Richard had a fleeting thought that the sergeant wasn’t going to have too much trouble keeping this mixed bunch of half-soldiers and half-policemen behind her after all. Not after this.

  Just as it was Sabet who started digging first, it was Sabet who found the first truck. She was at the bottom of a wide depression, with Richard and several others fighting to keep the sloping sides from slithering down on top of her, when her spade hit metal. She stopped digging at once and, as she had done every few minutes since they started, she called out. There was no reply. Gently, gingerly, she began to ease the sand away from whatever she had found. And so she revealed the rib of a cage that had supported the canvas covering to the rear passenger compartment. A moment more of careful exploration revealed several things – none of them very positive. The rib led to a downward curve at one end and a low metal side at the other. The truck had been knocked over by the pressure of the sand, therefore. And the rib had almost certainly only survived because the canvas shrouding it had been torn away by the sand that was filling the vehicle before the weight of the grains on the cloth could damage the hollow strut. In all probability, whoever had been in the rear section of the vehicle would now be piled one on top of another hard against the road surface. The odds were that they would have been dragged some distance – either as the truck skidded forward or was pushed back by the weight of the sand. And even if this had not happened, they were still somewhere beneath several more metres of red soil. Several more tons of it, in fact. And none of them was likely to be alive.

  Sabet stopped digging, apparently exhausted. The others also paused, and as they did so heard a muffled tapping sound from the sloping pile of sand on the east side of their depression. ‘That’s about where I’d guess the driver’s cab to be,’ said Richard. ‘Now that we know where the truck itself is, thanks to Sergeant Sabet, perhaps we should extend our excavation in this direction.’

  It took them another fifteen minutes to uncover the miraculously unbroken driver’s nearside window. Beneath the glass, like a swimmer trapped under an ice sheet, a bearded face peered up at them, eyes wide with terror and wet with relief. ‘Do we risk opening the window?’ wondered Richard. ‘Or do we try and uncover the whole door?’

  ‘Go with the window,’ ordered Sabet. ‘To uncover the whole door we’d have to make the hole much
, much wider – and risk standing on the glass into the bargain.’

  ‘Right,’ said Richard, standing back, unsteadily, on the slope of sand. ‘See if you can get him to wind the window open, otherwise we’ll have to break it.’

  Sabet moved forward until she was looking down into the submerged cab. Richard noted that her usually immaculate white uniform was so completely covered in red sand that her badges of identity and rank were completely obliterated. She pulled the headdress off her face and smiled down at the man in the cab. When she gestured for him to wind down the window he must have thought he had been transported to paradise and was about to meet an immortal houri. With his wide eyes fixed unwaveringly upon her, he obeyed and the window squealed down as the sand grains on the rubberized edge scored the glass. Once the window was open, he reached upwards and Sabet stood back while two of her men pulled him up to safety.

  ‘Is there anyone else in there?’ Sabet asked gently as the rescued man stood unsteadily, uncertainly on the shifting sand beside her, safe at last. Richard understood the question from her gestures.

  Kareem supplied a quiet translation of the answer: ‘Only the fool, Basir, and he broke his neck when the truck tipped over. Then he smashed the window with his head and left most of his face on the highway. He wouldn’t have been worth your time even if he had still been alive.’

  Oh, this guy’s a charmer, thought Richard ironically. We did the right thing pulling him out. But his description of what happened to the unfortunate Basir gave him a sickeningly clear idea of what probably happened to the people in the back before the collapsing dune brought the truck to a final halt and buried what was left of them.

  Sabet wasn’t finished with the rescued driver. ‘I heard there were several Eritreans with you,’ she said, and Kareem stumbled over the word Eritreans. ‘Were they in your truck?’

  ‘No. They were up ahead, in the lead trucks with Amir.’

  ‘Amir?’

  ‘The leader.’

  ‘I see. And you are?

  ‘Hakim. What is your name, beautiful saviour?’

  ‘I am Sergeant Sabet of the police service. And you are under arrest for people smuggling. But I suspect that will only be the first of many charges …’

  Captain Fawzi and his rescue team arrived mere moments after the arrest of Hakim, whose name, Kareem explained, meant wise.

  ‘He turned out to be less than wise after all,’ chuckled the policeman as Sabet, Richard and he led the sand-covered but elated team back to their trucks, content to let Fawzi and his men take control of the disaster area, keen to get moving in pursuit of the ill-named Hakim’s heartless, cowardly smuggler colleagues, especially now that they were certain their primary objectives, Nahom and Tsibekti, were still alive and in dire need of help.

  While Fawzi’s men piled out of their transports and earth-movers, ready to begin their painstaking work, Sabet and her men gathered round their two trucks and began to dust each other down. Because of her rank and gender, Sabet had to do the best she could without anyone else’s help. Richard looked over Kareem’s shoulder as they patted clouds of red grit off each other and frowned with sympathy, all too well aware that he himself could not offer any aid or advice without destroying his colleague’s standing and reputation. Unless they went back to Nekhel for a shower and a change of clothes, they were all going to find their various skin-folds and creases packed with highly irritating lines of grit, and the intrepid sergeant was likely to suffer more than most because there was no question of going back. They were headed for Taba and the last of the smugglers, no matter how dangerous and uncomfortable the ride was likely to be.

  After ten minutes or so, they had done the best they could, so they stowed the emergency equipment and piled back aboard. Ironically, the only man there who was anything like clean was the prisoner, Hakim the Wise, who was now – willingly or not – going to join the rescue attempt. Had the cab been squashed before, now it was like a sardine tin with the ex-smuggler’s lean, clean body wedged between Richard and Sabet, whose positions on the bench seat had been reversed so that Richard was now beside the driver and the sergeant was wedged hard against the door. This time the driver looked respectfully across at the sergeant before he switched on the engine, clearly waiting for her orders.

  ‘It’s like Major Ibrahim observed,’ she said in English for Richard’s benefit, though her icy gaze was fixed on the prisoner. ‘There is one trail. It leads from here to Taba. One road. One trail.’

  ‘I don’t think he foresaw that the one trail would get buried beneath a passing dune, though …’ countered Richard.

  ‘It was the will of Allah,’ opined Saqr suddenly, and revealing that he spoke some English at least.

  ‘It was certainly unexpected,’ allowed Sabet. ‘But now, in case there are any more surprises, we have a guide.’ Then she turned to Saqr and began to give her orders in liquid Arabic. This was clearly as much for Hakim’s benefit as for Saqr’s, because as the quiet directions proceeded, the wiry little prisoner stiffened and glanced across at Richard with a look reminiscent of a rabbit caught in a speeding steamroller’s headlights.

  It was the best part of ninety miles to Taba, with the sprawling little Bedouin township of El Thamad roughly halfway along the mostly deserted desert highway. For the hour it took them to get there, Sabet quietly but efficiently grilled Hakim, who had already been petrified by her conversation with Saqr. And clearly, whatever she had said must have made a profound impression on the prisoner, thought Richard, to whom the flow of Arabic meant nothing at all. For the rat-like little people trafficker was already terrified at the thought of what Amir, the leader with the evil eye, might do to him when he found out that his erstwhile colleague was alive and in police detention.

  But to be fair, Sabet’s questions seemed innocent enough at first – even though the information that meant so little to Hakim was in many ways of vital importance to her. As he drove, with swiftly increasing confidence and speed – applauded once again by the Hand of Fatima hanging from the rear-view, Saqr suddenly took over Private Kareem’s duties as translator – though his English was at once a little less American and a lot less fluent.

  ‘She ask how many trucks carry Amir men and prisoners. He say six. Three gone under earth pile. He was last he saw other two go down.’

  That means they have only half of their men left, calculated Richard with brutal practicality. How many would they need to guard Nahom, his sister and their other victims? Four per truck? Six? Suddenly twenty-four well-armed policemen looked as though they would easily outgun their quarry.

  ‘Hakim ask did we see Amir trucks? Sergeant say we did but they drove fast away. Hakim ask did we see brown car? Brown car was with the trucks. Sergeant say we see no car. Hakim say car likely buried also. Two men in car. Men from hospital in Sharm, work with Amir long time. Bring African boy and crusader’s AmEx cards with PIN number. Lose boy. Keep cards. Thought boy was dead. Big mistake. Look for ATM in El Thamad. Try cards there.’

  So, thought Richard, my cards are now buried under a couple of thousand tons of Egyptian desert, unless the men in the car gave them to Amir, the leader, before the dune stamped on them like a couple of ants at a picnic. Thank God I cancelled them.

  ‘Captain Mariner, can you call Captain Fawzi on the radio and warn him there’s a car under there as well, please? The two-way is in the glove compartment in front of you. The frequency is pre-set.’

  It took Richard an instant to realize that this was Sabet and she was talking to him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

  He pulled the walkie-talkie out of the glove compartment and put it to his ear. He pressed the button on the side and waited for connection. As he did so, a thought occurred to him, prompted by the probable fate of the car – something he hadn’t thought of while considering what had happened to the trucks. Fuel. A squashed car would likely result in a ruptured petrol tank. Trucks on their sides, under tons of dry sand would also likely be leaking – and th
e sand might well be soaking the gas up rather than letting it run away. The connection came through. ‘Captain Fawzi, this is Richard Mariner. Sergeant Sabet has asked me to alert you to the probability that there is a motor car buried alongside the trucks. You might also want to be alive to the possibility that there is a danger from spilt petrol soaking into the sand where you are working.’

  ‘Thank the sergeant for her information. We will take care,’ answered Fawzi stiffly. ‘Is there anything else?’

  Richard looked across at Sabet. She shook her head decisively. She was clearly keeping Fawzi on a ‘need to know’ footing. In case he tries to muscle in on whatever happened in El Thamad or Taba, taking credit away from Ibrahim.

  ‘Not at the moment, Captain. Out.’ Richard broke contact.

  As Richard put the walkie-talkie back in the glove compartment, Sabet’s interrogation of the unfortunate Hakim went up a notch. Once again, Saqr came to his aid. ‘Sergeant say what is plan? Hakim say what plan? Sergeant say what will Amir do with Africans? Hakim say he knows nothing. She better ask Amir if she ever catch up with him. She say we catch up in El Thamad if he’s waiting there to find ATM for crusader’s AmEx card. We arrest the whole lot. Unless they want to fight it out. But we have soldiers well trained and fully armed. Amir and his people better give in or else they die.’

  El Thamad, thought Richard. The Tombstone of the Sinai. It looked as though they were heading for an Egyptian OK Corral. But at least he was on the same side as Wyatt Earp.

  NINE

  Taba

  As they pulled into El Thamad, Richard began to suspect that the chances of a shoot-out here were slim after all. And that was probably just as well, now that he thought of it. Because he remembered suddenly the clear view Saiid’s Zeiss binoculars had given him of what looked like the business end of a Man-Portable Air Defence system sticking out of the load on one of the smugglers’ camels. It was just conceivable that what he’d seen was something else – something actually harmless – and he’d mistaken it for a lethal MANPAD. Certainly, Amir’s men hadn’t shown any inclination to use it against the chopper – and they could have done so quite easily if they had wanted to. But they had made their escape without escalating matters – and retained a very valuable sale item if what he had seen was what he thought it was: a Russian 9K38 Igla. And the fact that they had not wasted their weaponry on the helicopter which posed an immediate, nearly overwhelming threat, made it seem to him highly unlikely that they would set up an ambush to use the same precious weapons on a couple of trucks in pursuit at least an hour or more behind. Then again, if the smugglers were carrying anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems like that, perhaps they had all been in the three trucks lost beneath the sand. There was a logical argument suggesting that they might well be in the rearmost trucks – ready to see off any pursuers who came too close. But somehow he doubted it. Anyone firing an Igla over the tailgate of a truck would likely immolate everyone and everything behind him. Air defence systems were by no means indoor fireworks. Had he been Amir, the leader of a group of smugglers, he’d have kept artillery like that close at hand. In the lead truck, where he would ride himself. And he just knew in his bones that Amir would be doing the same.