The Storm (35 page)

“Any idea how it works?” Leilani asked.

“Just a guess,” Kurt said. “Simple harmonic vibration. The sound waves travel at slightly different speeds and slightly different angles. They converge in the zone where the water is jumping, amplifying the effect. Almost like a beam of sound.”

“I’m glad you didn’t use it on us,” Leilani said to Tautog.

“You landed on the wrong beach,” Tautog replied matter-of-factly.

Kurt was glad for that. “One point for hasty navigation.”

As he watched the water buzzing, a new idea began to form in his mind, but to risk it he first needed to know how effective the Pain Maker really was.

“I want to test it.”

“We can demonstrate on the prisoner if you like.”

“No,” Kurt said, “not on the prisoner. On me.”

Tautog regarded him strangely. “You are a curious person, Kurt Austin.”

“I do what I have to in order to survive and get the job done,” Kurt said. “Other than that, I’m not interested in seeing anyone suffer. Even a former enemy.”

Tautog pondered this, but he voiced neither agreement nor disagreement. He flipped a switch, the speaker box near them shut off and a gap in the wall of sound appeared over the beach and out onto the bay.

Leilani grabbed his arm. “Are you nuts?”

“Probably,” Kurt said, “but I need to know.”

“I warn you,” Tautog said, “the impact will hurt a great deal.”

“Strange as it sounds,” Kurt replied, “I honestly hope it does.”

A minute later Kurt was on the sand at the water’s edge. He noticed a few fish floating motionless in the waves. Apparently they hadn’t all escaped unscathed.

Around him, the sound waves from the other speakers reverberated and continued to vibrate the air and water, but most of the energy was in a range beyond human hearing. What he could hear were ghostly and ethereal sounds.

Kurt looked back up the beach to the bluff. He saw Leilani with her hands clasped in front of her mouth. Tautog stood proudly, and Kurt steeled himself like a gladiator about to do battle.

“Okay,” Kurt said.

Tautog threw the switch. Kurt felt an instant wave of pain through every fiber of his body as if all his muscles were cramping up at the same time. His head rang, his eyes hurt, the ethereal buzz he’d heard before was now a wailing sound he felt through his jaw and into his skull. He thought his eardrums would burst, and maybe his eyeballs too.

With all the considerable strength and willpower he possessed, Kurt stayed on his feet and tried to fight his way forward. It felt like he was pulling a great stone block behind him or pushing one up the beach. He could barely move.

He made it one step and then another, and then the pain became unbearable and he collapsed in the sand, covering his ears and head.

“Turn it off!” he heard Leilani shout. “You’re killing him.”

At another time and place Kurt might have chalked those words up to female hysterics, but as the waves of pain racked every millimeter of his body he thought she might be right.

The speaker shut down and the agony vanished like a rubber band breaking—one instant it was everywhere, the next it was gone.

It left behind fatigue and a feeling of complete and utter exhaustion. Kurt lay on the sand unable to do any more than breathe.

Leilani ran to him and dropped down in the sand beside him.

“Are you okay?” she asked, rolling him over onto his side. “Are you all right?”

He nodded.

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t I look it?” he managed.

“Not really,” she said.

“I am,” he insisted. “I swear.”

“I haven’t known you very long,” she said, helping him to a sitting position, “but you’re really not normal. Are you?”

Even through the exhaustion Kurt had to laugh. He was hoping for something like
I don’t want to lose you
or
I’ve started to care for you
or a similar sentiment along those lines.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I really thought you were going somewhere else with that,” he said. “But that doesn’t make you wrong.”

She smiled.

“How far did I get?” It felt like he’d climbed Mount Everest with a heavy pack on his shoulders.

“All of two feet,” she said.

“That’s it?”

She nodded. “The whole thing lasted only a couple of seconds.”

It had seemed like an eternity.

Around them the other beams shut down. Tautog came to see them, arriving as the first undisturbed wave lapped the beach.

“I agree with her,” he said. “You are not even close to normal.”

Kurt felt his strength returning. “Well, as long as we’ve settled that question, my next request shouldn’t come as any surprise.”

Kurt put out his hand. Tautog grabbed it and pulled Kurt up to his feet.

“And what request would that be?”

“I need a boat,” Kurt said, “a dozen rifles and one of these machines.”

“You are planning to rescue your friends,” Tautog guessed.

“Yes,” Kurt said.

Tautog smiled. “Do you really think we will let you go alone?”

CHAPTER 49

SINCE FINDING THE GUARD SHACK AT THE TEMPLE OF Horus, Joe Zavala’s luck had turned decidedly sour.

First, it proved an epic undertaking to get anyone from the military out in the pouring rain to speak with him. When they did come, they arrived with no interpreter, forcing the temple’s part-time security guard to act as the go-between. Despite his valiant effort, Joe was certain that important details were being lost in translation.

With each attempt at clarification, the military men went from looking perplexed to incredulous to annoyed.

When Joe insisted that their delay was only increasing the danger, they began shouting at him and pointing fingers as if he was making threats instead of bringing a warning.

Maybe this was how messengers get themselves shot, Joe thought.

And with that, he’d been hauled out of the guard shack at gunpoint, thrown in the back of a van and driven to a military compound of some kind, where he ended up in the stir Egyptian military style.

The filthy holding cell would have given any germaphobe nightmares. And Joe found little solace in the fact that sooner or later ten trillion gallons of water from behind the shattered dam would sweep in and wash the cell clean.

His luck began to change when the new shift arrived at four a.m. With them came an officer who spoke better English.

Major Hassan Edo wore tawny military fatigues with only a few adornments beyond his name. He was in his mid-fifties, with close-cropped hair, a hawklike nose and a thin mustache that might have been at home on Clark Gable’s face.

He leaned back in his chair, propped his boots up on the enormous desk in front of him and lit a cigarette that he proceeded to hold between two fingers as he spoke, never actually taking a puff.

“Let me get this straight,” the major said. “Your name is Joseph Zavala. You claim to be an American—which isn’t the best thing to be around here these days—but even then you have no proof. You say you’ve entered Egypt without a passport, a visa or any other kind of documentation. You do not even have a driver’s license or a credit card.”

“Without trying to sound overly defensive,” Joe began, “
entered Egypt
kind of makes it sound voluntary. I was a prisoner, held by terrorists who are intent on severely damaging your country. I escaped, came here to warn you and so far have been treated like some kind of rabble-rouser.”

Receiving a blank stare from the major, Joe paused. “You guys know what a rabble-rouser is, right?”

Major Edo pulled his feet off the desk, landing them on the wooden floor with a heavy clump. He pulled the cigarette from the ashtray, where he’d put it, threatened to actually smoke it for a second and then leaned toward Joe instead.

“You come to warn us of trouble?” he said as if Joe had been hiding that fact.

“Yes,” Joe said. “Terrorists from Yemen are going to destroy the dam.”

“The dam?” Edo repeated with a tone of disbelief. “Aswan High Dam?”

“Yes,” Joe said.

“Have you seen the dam?”

“Only in pictures,” Joe admitted.

“The dam is made of stone, rocks and concrete,” the major said with fervor. “It weighs millions of tons. It’s two thousand feet thick at the base. These men—if they exist—could hit it with fifty thousand pounds of dynamite and they would only take a small chunk out of one side.”

With every phrase, the major waved the cigarette around. Ash flew here and fell there, the thin line of smoke danced, but still the cigarette didn’t go to his lips. He sat back, utterly convinced of himself. “I tell you,” he finished, “the dam cannot be breached.”

“No one said anything about blowing it up from the bottom,” Joe replied. “They’re going to cut a channel across the top, just below the waterline where the dam is narrowest.”

“How?” the major asked.

“How?”

“Yes,” the major said, “tell me how? Are they going to drive backhoes and diggers up on the top and begin an excavation without us noticing?”

“Of course not,” Joe said.

“Then tell me how it is to be done.”

Joe went to speak but stopped with his mouth wide open before uttering a word.

“Yes?” the major said expectantly. “Go on.”

Joe closed his mouth. The way he saw it, he could explain what he knew, telling the major that the dam would be brought down by machines so small no one could see them, and expect only laughter and utter dismissal. Or he could make something up and do nothing but muddy the waters and send the major off looking for a threat different than the one that actually existed.

“Can I make a phone call?” he said finally.

If he could reach the American Embassy or NUMA, he could at least warn someone else of the danger in Aswan and also of the impostor’s presence on the floating island.

“This is not America, Mr. Zavala. You have no entitlement to a phone call or to an attorney or to anything I choose not to give you.”

Joe tried another tactic. “How about this,” he said. “There are five trucks out there. Identical flatbeds, with tarps over the top. They were heading north, carrying yellow barrels in the back, drums filled with a silvery sandlike substance. Find them and detain them, question the drivers. I’m sure you’ll discover they have no visas, passports or credit cards either.”

“Ah yes,” the major said scornfully. He picked up a notepad and scanned it under the harsh lighting.

“The five mystical trucks from Yemen,” he said. “We have been looking for them since you first gave us your story. By air, by car, on foot. There are no trucks out there to be found. Not here. Not in any warehouse large enough to hide them. Not near the dam or on the shore of the lake. Not even on the road back to Marsa Alam. They do not exist except, I think, in your imagination.”

Joe sighed in frustration. He had no idea where the flatbeds could have gone. Edo’s men had to have missed something.

The major tossed the notepad aside. “Why don’t you tell us what you’re really up to?”

“I’m just trying to help,” Joe said, as close to surrendering out of frustration as he’d ever been. “Can you at least inspect the dam?”

“Inspect it?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Look for leaks, look for damage. Anything that might be out of the ordinary.”

The major considered this for a second, sitting up straighter and nodding. “An excellent idea.”

“It is?”

“Yes. That’s just what we’ll do.”

“We?”

“Of course,” the major said, standing and mercifully stubbing the cigarette out at last. “How will I know what to look for if I don’t bring you along?”

Joe wasn’t sure he liked this idea.

“Guards,” the major shouted.

The door opened. Two Egyptian MPs came in.

“Shackle him appropriately and deliver him to the dock. I’m taking our guest on a tour.”

As the men began to bind Joe in irons, the major spoke. “You will see that the dam is impregnable, and then we can end this charade and talk about your true purpose, whatever that might be.”

CHAPTER 50

TWENTY MINUTES LATER JOE FOUND HIMSELF IN A PATROL boat motoring quietly up the Nile in the dark. The Egyptian major gave orders while another soldier piloted the craft and a third man stood by with an assault rifle.

The night air was cool, but fortunately the rain had passed. The stars had come back out as the sky cleared. There was little traffic on the river at this hour, but the valley was lit up. Hotels and other buildings on the banks of the river virtually glowed with the illumination, as did the dam, awash in the glare of floodlights like a football stadium at night.

Because Aswan was an embankment dam made of aggregate, it blended better into the background than dams like the Hoover. Instead of a towering gray wall at one end of a narrow valley, Joe saw a huge sloping structure like a giant ramp almost the color of the desert around it.

The outside of the structure was a thin layer of concrete designed to prevent erosion. Beneath that shell lay compacted rock and sand and, in the center, a watertight clay core that led down to a concrete structure known as a cutoff curtain.

Behind the dam sat a wall of water over three hundred feet tall.

“Do we have to be on this side?” Joe mumbled.

“What was that?” the major asked.

“Couldn’t we inspect the dam from the other side or even from the top?”

The major shook his head. “We are looking for a leak, no? How do you expect to see a problem on the high side? Everything is underwater.”

“I was hoping you had some cameras or an ROV or something.”

“We have nothing like that,” the major said.

“I know a few people,” Joe mentioned, “I could probably get you one cheap.”

“No thank you, Mr. Zavala,” the major said. “We will inspect the face of the dam from here and I will show you that it is secure, and then we will discuss your lengthy incarceration for wasting my time.”

“Great,” Joe mumbled. “Just make sure my cell is far away from here.”

The patrol boat continued forward, easing into the restricted zone that stretched a half mile down river from the base of the dam.