Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘This is a good position,’ Kareem said in English. ‘We could do some damage from here.’ He caressed his AKM meaningfully.

  ‘No,’ said Sabet at once, also in English – not so much to benefit Richard as to keep Hakim in the dark for the moment. ‘We only have a field of fire on the trucks and the people around them. We can’t tell from here whether they’re smugglers or victims. I don’t want any more of those prisoners dead. We don’t open fire until we can see whatever machine guns are firing at us. Then we fire back at them.’

  ‘We need to get even higher to do that,’ said Richard. ‘Mind if I try?’

  ‘I’m not sure Major Ibrahim would allow it,’ said Sabet.

  ‘But the major’s not here. Let me borrow a really good shot and his rifle and we’ll see what we can do without putting ourselves at too much risk. A little sniping, at least.’

  ‘That would be me,’ said Kareem. ‘I’m the best shot in the major’s command except for yourself, Sergeant …’

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But if you get yourselves killed I’ll have you up on a charge when we get back!’

  ‘That was a joke,’ explained Kareem as they ran, crouching back up the wadi.

  ‘Was it? I’d never have worked that out!’ gasped Richard.

  ‘Yes. A joke.’ Kareem was very serious. And heart-warmingly protective of his superior. ‘She is a most unusual sergeant!’

  ‘She’s certainly the strangest one I’ve ever come across,’ agreed Richard cheerfully.

  The conversation, such as it was, took them past the others, from whom Kareem collected some more ammunition for his AKM, and deeper into the wadi. The walls here were steeper but not impossible to climb. The pair of them scrambled upwards, glad of the afternoon shadows which were allowing the lower slopes to cool a little. The rocks were searingly hot as they reached the top of the slope however. The crest of the wadi was lined with rocks and boulders varying conveniently from the size of a head to the size of a Halloween pumpkin. It would take a very acute pair of eyes indeed to discriminate between stones and skulls. They eased forward and found themselves looking down over the lip of the opposite wadi half a mile distant, beside the stranded trucks. With the light behind them, it was easy enough to see down on to the little machine gun nest that the smugglers had set up. And they were using a Minimi light machine gun by the look of things, though there were more men with semi-automatics around the lip of the little depression also blazing away. Even had Richard and Kareem not been so well positioned, the muzzle flashes and the smoke of discharge would have given the enemy position away. But as things were, Richard reckoned Kareem had a clear shot. And if he was as good as he boasted, the men behind the hyperactive Minimi were in for a very nasty surprise.

  And they didn’t have much time for playing around, thought Richard, because two of the trucks were already up on the solid roadway, and every pair of shoulders at the smugglers’ disposal was jammed against the tailgate of the third. Richard knew better than to hurry a sniper, and in any case, Kareem could see the larger picture as clearly as he could himself, so he held his peace and watched as the young policeman set himself up for his first shot. In order to do this, he slid down into a deeper incline that looked straight down at the machine gun emplacement, but closed off the wider view like a pair of blinkers on a thoroughbred racehorse.

  ‘It’s the wind,’ said Kareem conversationally in English, and revealing the soul of a gun-lover as he spoke. Charlton Heston reborn, thought Richard as he listened. ‘I have to make allowance for the shamaal. Over half a mile or so it will make a difference. But at least it’s blowing steady, not gusting too badly. And this,’ he added, ‘is not a sniper rifle. Although it is the most accurate AKM I have ever handled. I’d like a scope to be sure, though. And of course I’d rather have a Dragunov, a British L115A3. Or one of those new American M24’s that are accurate at nearly two miles …’

  By the time he finished speaking, Kareem was set up. He fell silent, concentrating. Richard waited, equally silently. He would have given much to climb back up to where he could see more clearly how the third truck was progressing up the slope, but the position they were now in looked down on the machine gun nest and not much more. While he considered this fact, Kareem squeezed off his first shot. One of the men firing the Minimi slumped sideways. His mate sprang up and ran down the hillside shouting and waving his arms, followed by the others from the little nest. Kareem squeezed off another series of shots to hurry them on their way, but they were all still upright as they vanished from sight. The surprise was so effective that they even left the Minimi and a couple of their own guns behind. The withering rate of fire ceased immediately. As soon as the last of them was out of sight, Richard rolled back down the slope. ‘I think there’s another machine gun somewhere out there,’ he said. ‘See if you can spot it. I need to see what’s happening with the last truck.’

  But as he joined Sabet once again, it was not the last truck that claimed his attention. It was the sight of the smuggler standing beside it, out of everyone’s field of fire unless someone wanted to risk standing on the spot where Richard’s head was concealed, hopefully indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks. A smuggler standing, looking very much as though he knew exactly what he was doing with a shoulder-launched missile in position ready to fire, its tell-tale green tube, so dark it had looked black when Richard had first glimpsed it, sitting snugly beside his right ear. It was the nightmare scenario Richard had feared. ‘Down!’ he shouted. ‘That thing’s designed to take out tanks and aircraft. It could kill most of us with one shot!’

  Obediently, they all slid down into the relative safety of the wadi floor. Richard actually found that he was holding his breath.

  But instead of the roar of ignition he was expecting there came the whip-crack of a rifle shot, followed by a good deal of shouting and the revving of truck motors, all of which faded into near silence with unexpected rapidity. After a moment, Richard climbed back into position, with his head amongst the boulders. All the smugglers’ trucks were gone. Providentially, so had the man with the MANPAD. In their place, sitting at the crossroad, clearly having just come out of the road leading south to Newbia and Dahab, was the familiar shape of a battered white Land Rover Defender. And Richard didn’t need his Zeiss binoculars to make out the unmistakable figure of Saiid standing beside it with a nasty-looking Enfield SA80 assault rifle still smoking at his shoulder.

  ‘One shot took out the man with the Igla,’ said Saiid a few moments later. ‘Though I don’t think I killed him. And the rest seemed keen to move on when they realized they were between a rock and a hard place.’

  ‘I’m not surprised at that,’ answered Richard. ‘But I am surprised to see you. What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Ibrahim sent us,’ Saiid explained. ‘Though I’d have come in any case. And I suspect the others would have accompanied me no matter what.’

  Richard looked past Saiid into the Land Rover’s interior. Ahmed the dive master and Mahmood, Captain Husan’s lieutenant, both from Katerina, waved at him, grinning cheerily. The last time he had seen them was on the way back from the Wilderness of Sin. ‘Ibrahim?’ said Richard, raising a hand and a smile for each. ‘But why?’

  The Bedouin’s strange eyes flicked past Richard to watch Sabet as she stood at the mouth of the wadi back up the slope, guiding her two trucks reversing back out on to the road. ‘I have no idea,’ he said blandly, tongue in cheek. ‘None whatsoever. But he did ask me to bring some extra paperwork which he suggests may make things easier for Sergeant Sabet if she has to negotiate with the military authorities in Taba.’

  ‘Still,’ said Richard thoughtfully, ‘it’s an amazing coincidence that you caught up with us when you did – just in the nick of time.’

  Saiid smiled and shouldered his rifle. ‘Less of a coincidence than you suppose, perhaps. We are part of the twenty-first century, even out here. Captain Fawzi’s trucks have GPS beacons on them. All our major poli
ce vehicles do. Ibrahim has been tracking your progress all day and keeping me up to date on my cell phone as I drove up through Dahab and Neweiba.’

  ‘Could he track the smugglers as well?’

  ‘No. They aren’t carrying GPS beacons. Or cell phones, come to that. Well, they probably are, but they have them disabled for the moment to prevent Ibrahim from doing that very thing. They are also more modern than they look.’

  ‘They’ve certainly got some modern weaponry.’

  ‘As, you may remember, we do too. But nothing to match an Igla MANPAD guided missile.’

  ‘Yeah. We’d better be extra careful if we come too close to cornering them again.’

  ‘Not if,’ said Saiid. ‘When …’

  Alerted by the trouble the smugglers had got themselves into, Sabet ordered her trucks to unload everything and everyone they reasonably could and to drive up the hill along the still solid causeway slope instead of the ruined tarmac of the highway itself. While Saqr and his opposite number ground slowly and carefully up the hill, Sabet led her men in a swift sortie, checking over the positions that the smugglers had taken up in the fire fight. They found one dead man that no one had dared go back for, one Minimi light machine gun, with a good deal of ammunition beside it, and a couple of assault rifles including a new-looking AK 12 which on closer inspection turned out to be chambered to take the same 7.62mm ammunition as the police AKMs. Richard, at last, had the weapon Ibrahim had forbidden him.

  And he had a more comfortable ride. As the little convoy pulled away over the crest and down the winding road towards Taba, he was sitting in the Land Rover’s front passenger seat beside Saiid. He regretted leaving Sabet, but practicalities as well as comfort dictated the move. Now that the chase was so much closer and his varyingly reliable input no longer so vital, Hakim had been dispatched into the back of the truck. Sabet needed the extra space between herself and Saqr to go through the paperwork that Saiid handed over on Ibrahim’s behalf. The last Richard saw of the sergeant before turning back to the Land Rover was her pink-stained figure bent over a large map of Taba and environs spread out across her lap and the empty sections of the truck’s bench seat on either side. Piled on the map was a stack of paperwork covered in official-looking Arabic script, in the top corners of which were several photographs, his own included.

  They rolled forward soon after he settled himself in the Land Rover and soon the road became better maintained so they picked up speed once again. Several more planes swooped low above them, heading into the International Airport, but the next incident of any note came when they arrived at the crossroads north of the airport itself. Four roads, including the one they had just travelled, stretched away across the hilly desert and Saba stopped them all in the middle. She climbed down and by the time Richard joined her, she had Hakim standing unhappily by her side. ‘Talk about The Road to Hell,’ said Richard as he came up beside her. The look of total incomprehension she shot him established that she was not a Chris Rea fan. But the point was well made. The road they had been following east from Nekhel stretched straight ahead, shimmering into the dusty distance. Its ill-maintained surface spoke of little usage, and the thick covering of sand on the tarmac showed no trace of tyre tracks. ‘That’s the road down to the border with Israel,’ said Sabet. ‘I guess they could have gone down there, then swung north and run up towards Gaza.’ She swung round to glare questioningly at Hakim, who looked down the road less travelled and shook his head. They had not gone that way. His gesture and the undisturbed sand made that quite clear.

  Sabet, Richard and Hakim walked over to the left. ‘This road leads north immediately in any case,’ she said, shading her eyes to look along a highway that seemed no better maintained or more recently used than the road heading east. ‘It eventually leads to Rafa. And a world of sorrow.’ Once again, she glared questioningly at Hakim, who twisted his body placatingly like a misunderstood dog.

  ‘This, on the other hand,’ she said, turning through one hundred and eighty degrees to lead them over to the road running south, ‘this is the road past the airport. The main road down to Taba.’ The road surface was well-maintained and, in spite of the shamaal, it was dust-free. ‘You did say Amir and his men were definitely going to Taba,’ she said, still lost in thought. Then, in the face of Hakim the Ignorant’s blank incomprehension, she repeated the question in Arabic.

  ‘Naam,’ he said, nodding feverishly. ‘Naam.’

  ‘Then that’s the way we go,’ she decided, and the three of them went back to their vehicles.

  The road down to Taba was steep and spectacular. There were near-vertical cliffs on each side that seemed to grip the high, steel-blue sky like the jaws of massive pliers crushing a metal strip. ‘I drove down here in May 2014,’ said Saiid conversationally. ‘I had business in Taba Heights. There were waterfalls pouring over the edges of those cliffs and cascading on to the road here every hundred metres or so. Big waterfalls. Some of them huge, in fact. And the downhill slope of the road channelled it all like an artificial wadi.’

  ‘I saw the videos on YouTube,’ added Ahmed’s deep boom from the back seat. ‘Some of the hotels in Taba were built on the outwash plain of the real wadi. There was water pouring through them, through the reception areas, the ground floor rooms, on out into the gardens and pool areas and on out into the bay. It was incredible. So much damage …’

  ‘And we thought the floods in England were bad,’ said Richard thoughtfully.

  They were silent for a while after that, Richard for one sidetracked into imagining what the waterfalls flinging themselves off the high skyline must have been like – and how the increasingly steep roadway would have channelled all the millions of gallons down towards Taba and the coast increasingly swiftly and catastrophically. But long before they actually reached the town, the mountain slopes fell back and Richard understood with some relief that the water Saiid described flowing down the road must have washed away across the flat desert areas before it could do too much damage. The junction of the road down from the airport and the main Sharm to Taba coast road was completely undamaged, therefore, and the little convoy was able to swing left with a minimum of fuss, and follow the main road northwards.

  The road ran along the edge of the coast for the most part, on that slim little ribbon of level land between the mountains and the sea. The views on either side were spectacular and reminded Richard of diving holidays in Dahab. Almost at once, they found themselves rolling past a small but exclusive-looking hotel complex, dotted with trees and well-packed with buildings. Richard craned to see what was there, and the fact that the road was elevated allowed him to look down on a couple of piers, an unexpected jut of hillside and a good number of beach umbrellas. The hotel buildings were designed in the Moorish style and that feature seemed to run from the roadside down to the beach itself. And then, beyond it, a little way out across the bay, to an island whose steep, rocky sides rose to become the walls of a forbidding-looking fort with unusual crenulations almost in the shape of arrow-heads, similar to those he remembered from the Alhambra palace in Grenada. The castle was tall and strong looking, grey-walled and uncompromising. It dominated the little island on which it sat, seeming to encompass the whole rocky outcrop from the little docking facility on the landward side to the crest of the red rock cliffs on which it stood.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ asked Richard, awed. ‘It looks almost like Mont St Michel in France.’

  ‘It is the Pharaoh’s Island,’ said Saiid. ‘And the castle is the Fortress of Salah ed-Din. Whom you crusaders call Saladin, I think.’

  ‘It’s certainly spectacular,’ said Richard, awestruck. And he thought nothing more about it as the road swung inwards and mountains gathered on either side before it swung outwards again and continued to follow the coast.

  Less than a mile later, the trucks slowed and the Land Rover followed suit. Slowly, carefully, clearly with eyes skinned, they rolled through what looked like the main port facility near Taba. On th
e left there were warehouses, blocks of offices, secure areas. To the right, a proper, good-sized commercial pier reaching out into the still, blue water straddled by two smaller jetties suitable for pleasure craft or swimmers. But everything looked deserted. There were no trucks parked among the warehouses. No vessels secured alongside the pier. No lights on amid the gathering shadows on the dark side of the mountains. No activity of any sort – not even goats, dogs or cats. As they eased suspiciously along the road, nothing whatsoever moved. Then they were past the facility and back out on to the coast road, heading north towards Taba Heights – Taba proper – and the border with Israel.

  The only time the coast road moved significantly inland again was when it fell back to become the promenade through Taba Heights, which was the next point of interest. Suddenly there were trees on either side of the highway, through which hotels, their pools and their verdant, flower-bright grounds could be glimpsed as the trucks and the Land Rover rolled on. Hotels on the left and beach umbrellas on the right; the hotels becoming blazes of light amid the gathering shadows of evening. Tourists bustled excitedly from shop to shop, hotel to hotel, slowing the little convoy further as they wandered across the road between a maze of sleeping policemen, filling the beach with sunbathing bodies and the sea with swimmers and snorkellers, even though the full weight of the sun was well down behind the mountains now, and the only real brightness came from the red-tipped mountain tops of Saudi Arabia across the bay. Then, just as Richard was getting used to the new, upmarket ambiance and wondering whether the difference in atmosphere came from the fact that he was briefly back in the Amber Zone, the road swung out round white cliffs once more and there was only a stony breakwater between him and the Gulf of Aqaba. Back in the Red Zone almost at once, he thought, looking out at the empty sea as the light on the mountaintops opposite faded and they paled with unsettling rapidity from red to rose to grey.