Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  Sabet might well have more men with her now that Amir’s caravan had been reduced by half. But a couple of Igla missiles would more than even the score if they ever did catch up and get close enough to force Amir’s hand.

  It was with these dark thoughts in his mind that Richard began to look around the outskirts of El Thamad, for it seemed to him like an excellent place from which to mount an ambush. Half the houses of the little Bedouin township were empty and on the verge of ruin. There seemed to be no people about – no one, at any rate, who might need the services of a bank or an ATM. The first life he saw was a little herd of scrawny, flop-eared black and white piebald goats that ambled across the highway as blithely as the one that the late, unlamented Tariq had crashed into, nearly killing Nahom. There was no one herding them. Nor was there anyone seemingly in charge of the next living thing – a camel sitting by the roadside with its legs folded under its swollen belly, its head turning to watch them pass with all the disdain of an outraged duchess. The shamaal was still blowing powerfully enough to be carrying sand out of the Sinai’s extension of the Great Sand Sea in the north and depositing it on the slopes astride the Wadi El Thamad to the south. The air over the little dustbowl of a town was thick and red. The light blood-coloured and shadowy. Even as they neared the town centre, all Richard could make out were dark, distorted figures hurrying between ill-defined buildings, their robes billowing in the wind, their keffiyehs over their faces and their dark glasses over their eyes, like alien life-forms in some strange and sinister Sci-Fi movie.

  The desolation of the place abruptly gained a further edge of danger as Sabet observed quietly, ‘We’re in the Red Zone now. The border with South Sinai is down there beyond the hills to the south. We’ll be in the Red Zone almost all the way to Taba, so keep an extra eye out.’

  ‘Is safe,’ opined Saqr. ‘Jihadists, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis men and ISIS men are all up in the north near Gaza. But we watch out for army …’

  ‘And keep our ID to hand,’ added Sabet.

  ‘Has Hakim got any ID?’ wondered Richard. ‘I didn’t see him bring anything out of the truck.’

  ‘I’m his ID,’ said Sabet. ‘Me and the handcuffs.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Richard, ‘let’s hope we’re not stopped by any trigger-happy security patrols.’

  ‘Let’s hope Amir and his crew are stopped instead,’ said Sabet thoughtfully. ‘I doubt they’ll even have slowed down here by the look of things. But if a security patrol or checkpoint stops them, then we’ll have a better chance of catching up.’

  ‘And even more guns on our side,’ added Saqr with quiet satisfaction.

  Richard nodded and kept to himself the thought that if this road was one of Amir’s regular routes then he either knew the men in the patrols and check points he was likely to encounter or he knew ways to get past them unmolested.

  The only sign of modern life in the town came as they pulled into the petrol station. The place looked battered and only half built. But there were petrol pumps, a little glass-fronted shop with a promising array of ill-stacked shelves and half full fridges and freezers. And there were facilities – what the Americans called ‘comfort facilities’, without much comfort, thought Richard as he went through the door to the men’s room to find that it consisted of a long wall of red mud stained with the leavings of the men who had visited the place before him. He fervently hoped that Sabet’s facilities were less basic. Whether she used them or not he never knew, because as he came out of the men’s room while the others all piled in, Saqr and Kareem with the prisoner between them, he found her in earnest conversation with the proprietor of the petrol station in the front of the mercifully cool little shop.

  The trucks had an operational range of five hundred miles on full tanks and they had both been filled that morning in Nekhel, so Sabet didn’t need any fuel. But she needed water for her command; though by the look of the nearest packages, jars and tins, the use-by dates were so long past that they would be better waiting until they hit Taba before they looked for anything to eat. Apart from the water and the facilities, she was also keen to glean any information that the petrol station owner might be persuaded to part with. Richard wandered around the dusty shelves as the sergeant interrogated him. To begin with he understood nothing of their conversation, but after a few moments Saqr joined him.

  ‘Sergeant ask if man see three trucks like ours. Man say yes. Trucks stop here an hour ago. Fill up with petrol. Not take much – tanks half full already. Lucky. New supplies not due from Belayim Petrolium till next week. Men used the facilities. All men from the trucks use facilities, take water. But not much petrol. Sergeant need petrol? Sergeant say no. She ask, What were men in trucks like? Man say he see only one of them up close – Bedouin chief with one bad eye. This man pay for what they take. Three men put fuel in trucks then come to shop for to carry drinks. Everyone else stay in trucks. Bedouin man pay. Not like army and police requisition now, pay later, much, much long time later – if they ever pay at all. Bedouin man offer AmEx cards but AmEx machine out of order here. Ask for ATM. None in town. Pay cash. Egyptian pounds. Pay for petrol. Pay for drinks. Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Hayat water. Man ask, Sergeant need water for men? Sergeant say yes. Sergeant pay cash like Bedouin man, not Security Force requisition. Only water left. But Sergeant say water is all she wants.’

  Sabet called the driver over then. He loaded up with gallon plastic bottles of water from the fridges and staggered out. A moment or two later Private Kareem and several others came in and also loaded up. By the time they were finished, the shop was out of water and Sabet, by the look of things, was a good deal poorer. Richard briefly considered buying himself a two-litre bottle of Fanta but almost immediately decided against it. He was one of Sabet’s men at the moment. He would drink what the troops drank, though it went against the grain to take what he could easily afford from a woman who was probably cash strapped herself.

  But then, on the other hand, thought Richard, she was another several notches more popular with her parched and sand-covered command. And the water waiting for him in the lead truck’s cab was cold, clear, and as welcome as the finest champagne.

  As soon as they were back on the road, Sabet returned to her interrogation and, as the eastern outskirts of El Thamad faded into the red mist in the rear-view, Saqr took up his translation duties once again. Or at least Richard thought he had until he realized that Saqr was voicing his own thoughts. He had changed into the cheerily garrulous character Richard had briefly wished for earlier. Saiid’s amused voice echoed in his memory: Be careful what you wish for. The djinn of this place have a wicked sense of humour.

  ‘The road itself dangerous between here and Taba,’ Saqr observed. His grasp of English got no better, but Richard became more adept at filling in the blanks. ‘The floods of May 2014 did much damage to this road, and to the side road from Dahab and Newebia that runs up Wadi Watir, as well as to the town itself and the Taba Heights resort. Under the circumstances, repairs have been slow to start and even slower to complete.’ His foot eased off the accelerator and the Hand of Fatima stopped jumping and rattling.

  ‘Floods?’ enquired Richard. ‘I don’t think I heard about them.’

  ‘They were not widely reported,’ explained Saqr. ‘I don’t think anyone was killed but a good deal of damage was done both to the town and the resort as well as to the roadways. I think they were even planning to close the airport. Not that any of your tour companies or airlines fly in there any more. Like Dahab, and like Sharm to a certain extent, Taba is squeezed between the mountains and the sea. The floods rushed down the wadis on the mountainsides and straight through the buildings. I have seen pictures on YouTube. It looks like the Japanese Tsunami. But the water is red, not black.’

  ‘If that was back in 2014,’ said Richard, ‘there’s been time to make repairs, surely.’

  ‘Some have been started. Some have not yet been completed, including repairs to this roadway. Most of the hotels on Taba Heights have
been seen to. They are supported by international chains. Sol Y Mar, Movenpick, Hyatt, Hilton. Money comes in from Spain, Germany, America … Especially as Taba Heights is in the Amber Zone, and still a popular tourist destination, though not for tourists from Spain, Germany or America who, like the British, have been warned off by their governments. People still come from Russia, Eastern Europe, Israel.’

  ‘But Taba City itself is in the Red Zone, isn’t it?’ asked Richard.

  ‘That is so,’ confirmed Saqr. ‘Local money – money from Cairo – has been a little slower to flow towards Taba City.’

  Suddenly Sabet was joining in the conversation. ‘That is why, according to Hakim, Amir and his smugglers are heading for Taba Old Town, down by the docks. There are areas there which are effectively still derelict. They can get themselves sorted out before they move on.’

  ‘Move on from the docks?’ probed Richard.

  ‘On to boats and away across the Gulf,’ she confirmed grimly. ‘Out of our jurisdiction. Unless we stop them first.’

  They were coming up out of the erg-type sand desert now into the more mountainous reg. Richard was reminded of the Wilderness of Sin as the red, green and black-banded hill slopes gathered themselves into wadis, all of which seemed to flow north or south, at right angles to the all too weather-beaten road. The truck ground up a steepening incline as, on either side, but especially to the north, even deeper in the Red Zone, the sharp red peaks scored the sky like the claws of the leopards that once roamed here.

  Suddenly Richard’s attention was distracted. For low in the sky immediately above them a passenger jet came roaring through its short finals, flaps down and wheels unfolding from the fuselage. Richard ducked without thinking. That massive undercarriage looked low enough to take the top off the truck. The air behind the huge turbofans wavered, hotter even than the shamaal. As though approaching Kai Tak through the high rise apartments of old Hong Kong, the jetliner seemed to be swooping between the rock walls of the north-facing wadi, its wingtips seemingly mere feet from the jagged peaks. ‘He’s getting ready to land at Taba International,’ observed Sabet.

  ‘Must be Russian,’ said Saqr. ‘Or Swiss.’

  ‘The markings look like EgyptAir,’ offered Richard, ‘and they both only fly Airbuses and Boeings. But you’re right. I think it was a Tupolev.’ He craned forwards to see the great jet slide away along the valley, settling towards the nearby airport. ‘Maybe its Czech Airlines,’ he said. ‘Or Orenair. I hear they still fly in.’

  So they were all looking upwards as they came over the crest of the hill. The road ahead fell steeply into a complexity of land forms gathered round an unexpected road junction. Most obvious was the wadi coming up from the south, containing a wide, black-top road which joined theirs at the bottom of the slope down which they were suddenly rolling. Rocking and rolling, actually, thought Richard as he dragged his gaze away from the plane and looked down at the state of the disintegrating road beneath their wheels. The wadi the jet was apparently following had caused some serious degradation here when last it flooded. Beyond the junction with the road from the south, the Nekhel–Taba road ran on across a short, flat plain before starting to climb another hillside more than half a mile distant. But the road surface on the far slope was in even worse shape than the one they were bumping over now. Once again a red-walled valley led off to the north over there, and it was clear that sometime in the recent past this too had flooded, not only tearing the road surface into tarmacadam boulders, but washing most of them away down the slope into the bargain.

  Which, all things considered, explained why the three trucks they had been pursuing all day were apparently stuck halfway up it.

  The moment Sabet’s trucks came over the crest, however, the smugglers, who must have been keeping careful watch, fearful of this very eventuality, came piling out of the stranded vehicles, brandishing their rifles.

  His mind suddenly full of forebodings and Igla anti-tank rockets, Richard shouted, ‘Look out!’

  Sabet demanded, ‘Can you get off the road?’

  ‘Up that wadi,’ suggested Richard, gesturing to the valley that the low-flying plane had just followed. But the quick-thinking Saqr was already in action, slewing the six-wheeler round in a tight curve and doing yet more damage to the crumbling road surface as he roared down the slope of the road’s raised causeway and into the shelter of the mercifully dry wadi. Richard glanced in the rear-view above the waving Hand of Fatima and was relieved to see the second truck was hot on their tail. As soon as the valley wall had them safely hidden, both trucks skidded to a halt, kicking up swirling clouds of yet more red dust, which was whipped away instantly by the shamaal as it came funnelling fiercely down the valley as though one of the jet’s engines was wedged up there, running at full blast.

  That’s certainly how it felt, thought Richard as he jumped down on to the slippery, pebble-strewn slope. But he had no real time for reflection, for he was in action at once following Sabet, Kareem and Ibrahim’s other man up the slope to the edge of the valley from where they could look down at their enemies. All around him, Captain Fawzi’s Nekhel contingent came running wordlessly up from the trucks on the valley floor, the only sounds coming from them the clatter of their boots on the stony surface and the metallic clicking of their weapons being cocked. Last of all came Saqr, dragging Hamid along by the chain between his handcuffs. The reluctant prisoner was not coming quietly. A nonstop whine of pleading, alternating with a little threatening and some self-righteous indignation, tumbled from his thin, downturned lips. Richard went with these two up to the ridge beside Sabet. ‘Ekhres!’ she spat at Hamid and he was instantly silent. ‘Get down,’ she added in English, but Richard was already flat on his belly on the furnace-hot ground.

  Richard slithered forwards, bitterly regretting yet again that he had not thought to borrow Saiid’s Zeiss binoculars, especially as the sun was beginning to sink westwards behind them, so there was little chance of anything reflecting in the lenses to give his position away. In fact, taking everything into account, Sabet’s little command were not in too bad a position here. They had the high ground. They could move if they wanted for their trucks were OK and the road still holding together. The sun was behind them and shining into the eyes of Amir’s smugglers, who might have taken shelter on the lip of the lower wadi now, but who would have to expose themselves if they wanted to get back to their trucks. Had Sergeant Sabet been a little more like Julius Caesar, things would have gone from bad to worse for Amir and his men.

  And the smuggler seemed to know this. He did the only thing he could do under the circumstances. Relying on the old maxim that attack is the best form of defence, he opened up with everything he had. Everything, thankfully, except the MANPAD missiles, thought Richard as he ducked beneath the rock wall as ricochets and splinters began to fly. He looked around the police privates who were also exercising a sensible amount of self-preservation and made a mental list of the firepower at their disposal. Sabet had a Helwan nine-millimetre handgun. The others of her command were all clutching Al Maadi-made AKM assault rifles. It was hard to assess what the opposition had, but Richard was rapidly beginning to suspect that although there were fewer of them, they were better armed – not even counting the MANPAD missiles. He racked his brains and taxed his photographic memory to the limit, but he couldn’t remember seeing any identifiable small arms when he was looking through Saiid’s binoculars. The Egyptian security forces had Minimi light machine guns and he could have used one right at this moment. For he suspected most forcefully that they were being shot at with something equivalent – or even heavier. Something along the lines of an FN MAG 7.62mm GPMG, for instance.

  Even so, Sabet was not about to sit still. She rapped out several orders which clearly added up to ‘Stay down till I tell you different!’ and was in motion, even before Richard had finished his train of thought, snaking her way over to the lower slope at the mouth of the wadi which had not yet received any enemy fire. Kareem and
his buddy followed her. Saqr and Hamid the Foolish followed them so Richard joined the little sortie, falling in behind the reluctant smuggler. The move was a wise one and the position Sabet chose gave a good view across the crossroads without exposing them to any more enemy fire. It was immediately clear why Amir had ordered his heaviest guns to lay down such a weight of fire. The trucks were surrounded by people – smugglers and prisoners alike by the look of things – who were busily heaving the massive vehicles forward, lending their shoulders to help the snarling motors as they eased the vehicles forward in the lowest gear up on to the more solid section of the road ahead.