Sahara (6 page)

“Something wrong?” asked Mrs. Lansing, who along with her husband rode in Fairweather’s Land Rover.

“Just a precaution to scare away beggars,” Fairweather lied.

He stopped the four-wheel-drive and walked back, warning his drivers to keep a sharp lookout for anything suspicious. Then he returned and drove on, leading the column to the center of the town and passing through the narrow and sandy streets that were laid out in no particular order. At last he stopped under a lonely date palm that stood in the middle of a spacious marketplace near a circular stone well about 4 meters in diameter.

Fairweather studied the sandy ground about the well in the last light of the day. It was surrounded by the same unusual tracks he’d spotted in the streets. He stared down into the well. He barely saw a tiny reflection deep in the bowels of the sandstone. He recalled that the water was quite high in mineral content that gave it a metallic taste and tinted it a milky green. Yet, it had quenched the thirst of many lives, human and animal, over the centuries. Whether it was hygienic for the uninitiated stomachs of his clients did not concern Fairweather. He merely intended for them to use it to rinse the sweat and dust off their bodies, not drink it.

He instructed his drivers to stand guard and then showed the tourists how to hoist a pigskin bucket of water by use of an ancient hand winch tied to a frayed rope. The exotic image of desert music and dancing by flickering campfires was quickly forgotten as they laughed and splashed like children in a lawn sprinkler on a hot summer afternoon. The men stripped to the waist and slapped water on their bare skin. The women were more concerned with washing their hair.

The comical scene was eerily illuminated by the Land Rover’s headlights that threw their cavorting shadows on the silent walls of the village like film projectors. While Fairweather’s drivers watched and laughed, he walked a fair distance down one of the streets and entered a house that stood next to a mosque. The walls appeared old and time-worn. The entrance led through a short, arched tunnel to a courtyard that was littered with so much human trash and rubble that he had difficulty climbing over it.

He shone a flashlight around the main room of the structure. The walls were a dusty white, the roofs high with exposed poles over a stick matting, much like the latilla viga on the ceilings of Santa Fe architecture of the American Southwest. The walls were indented with many niches for keeping household goods in, but they were all empty, their contents scattered and broken around the floor along with jumbled furniture.

Because nothing obvious appeared to be missing, it looked to Fairweather as if vandals had simply trashed the house after the occupants had fled, leaving all their possessions behind. Then he spotted a pile of bones in one corner of the room. He identified them as human and began to feel extremely uneasy.

In the glimmer of the flashlight, shadows formed and played weird tricks on the eyes. He swore he saw a large animal flit past a window to the courtyard. He removed the safety on the Patchett not so much from fear as from a sixth sense of the menace that was forming in the darkening alleyways.

A rustling sound came from behind a closed doorway that opened onto a small terrace. Fairweather approached the door quietly, stepping softly around the debris. If there was someone hiding inside, they went silent. Fairweather held the flashlight in front of him with one hand and gripped the submachine gun, muzzle aimed forward, with the other. Then he kicked the door open, knocking it off the hinges onto the floor where it threw up a cloud of dust.

There was someone there all right, or was it
something?
Dark-skinned and evil, like a demon escaped from hell, it looked like an animal-like subhuman, swaying on hands and knees, staring insanely into the beam of light through eyes that were as red as burning coals.

Fairweather instinctively stepped back. The thing reared up on its knees and lunged at him. Fairweather calmly squeezed the trigger on the Patchett, holding the butt of the gun against his flexed stomach muscles. A rapid stream of 9-millimeter, 100-weight-grain, round-nose bullets spat from the muzzle with the muffled sound of popcorn pop ping.

The hideous beast made a ghastly retching sound and collapsed, its chest almost blown away. Fairweather stepped up to the huddled form, leaned over, and beamed his flashlight on it. The body was filthy and completely naked. The wild eyes were staring sightlessly, a bright red where white should have been. The face was that of a boy, no more than fifteen.

A fear struck with such shock, such stunning force, that Fairweather was for several moments numbed with the realization of the danger. He knew now what made the odd tracks in the sand. There must have been a whole colony of them that crawled through the village. He turned suddenly and began running back to the marketplace. But he was too late, far too late.

A wall of shrieking fiends burst from the evening dark and tore headlong into the unwary tourists at the well. The drivers were swallowed in the seething tidal wave before they could cry out an alarm or put up a shred of defense The savage horde came on hands and knees like jackals pulling down the unarmed tourists and snapping at and exposed skin with their teeth.

The horrible nightmare, illuminated by the headlights of the Land Rovers, became a frenzied press of writhing bodies with the terrified screams of the panic-stricken tourists mingled with the banshee shrieks of their attackers. Mrs!

Lansing gave a tortured cry and disappeared in a tangled mass of bodies. Her husband tried to climb on the hood of one of the vehicles but was pulled down into the dust and mutilated like a beetle under an army of ants.

The fastidious Londoner twisted the head of his cane from a hollow sheath, revealing a short sword. He flayed about him viciously, temporarily keeping the mob at bay. But they seemed to possess no fear and quickly overwhelmed him.

The area around the well was choked solidly with struggling humanity. The fat Spanish man, blood streaming from several teeth wounds, jumped into the well to escape, but four of the crazed killers jumped in after him.

Fairweather ran up and crouched, firing the Patchett into the surging attackers, careful not to shoot one of his own people. The mob, unable to hear the silenced gun, ignored the unexpected gunfire and were either too crazed or too indifferent to realize a score of their number being cut down around them.

Fairweather must have shot nearly thirty of the murderous crowd before the Patchett spent its last shell. He stood helpless, unseen and unnoticed as the uncontrolled slaughter slowed and eventually ceased as his drivers and clients were all slain. He could not comprehend the suddenness that turned the marketplace into a charnel house.

“Oh God,” he whispered in a tight, choked voice, watching in cold horror as the savages set upon the bodies in a cannibalistic frenzy, gnawing at the flesh of their victims. He went on watching with a morbid fascination that slowly transformed to anger and outrage at the sickening tragedy being played out before him. Fairweather was caught in the nightmare of it, powerless to do anything but stare at the horror.

Already the butchers who weren’t tearing at the hapless tourists were smashing the Land Rovers. Hurling rocks through the windows, shattering the glass. Venting their insatiable savagery on anything that was foreign to them.

Fairweather stepped back into the shadows, sick at the thought that he was responsible for the deaths of his men and clients. He had failed to provide for their safety and unknowingly led them into a bloody disaster. He cursed his impotency to save them and his cowardice at not dying with them.

With great force of willpower, he turned his attention away from the marketplace and began running through the narrow streets, through the ruined outskirts, and into the desert. To warn other desert travelers of the massacre that awaited them at Asselar, he had to save himself. The distance to the next village to the south was too far to reach without water. He settled instead for the motor track to the east, hoping to find a passing vehicle or a government patrol before he died under the blazing sun.

He took a bearing on the north star and settled down to a fast walk across the desert, knowing his chances of survival were next to nil. Never once did he turn and look back. He could see it all clearly in his mind, and his ears still rang with the agonized screams of the dead.

2

May 10, 1996

Alexandria, Egypt

The white sands of the empty beach flared beneath the bare feet of Eva Rojas, the fine grains sifting between her toes. She stood and gazed at the Mediterranean Sea. The deep water was? dyed cobalt blue, becoming emerald as it shallowed, and then fading to aquamarine as its waves fanned out on the bleached sand.

Eva had driven her rental car 110 kilometers west from Alexandria before stopping at a deserted section of beach not far from the town of El Alamein where the great desert war of World War II was fought. Parking off the coastal highway, she collected her tote bag and walked through low dunes toward the tide line. She wore a coral one-piece stretch jersey bathing suit that fit her like a second skin. Her arms and shoulders were covered by a matching top. She stood gracefully, lightly, and her body was firm, the limbs slim and tan. Her red-gold hair was tied in a long braid that fell down her back almost to her waist and glistened under the sun like polished copper. She stared from Dresden blue eyes that glowed from a face with smooth skin and high cheekbones. Eva was thirty-eight but could have easily passed for thirty. She would never make the cover of
Vogue,
but she was pretty with a vibrant wholesomeness that men, even much younger men, found very appealing.

The beach appeared deserted. She stood poised, turning her head and staring up and down the shore like a cautious deer. The only other sign of life was a Jeep Cherokee, painted turquoise with the letters NUMA on the door, sitting about a hundred meters up the road. She had passed it before pulling over and parking. The Jeep’s occupant was nowhere to be seen.

The morning sun had already warmed the sand, and it felt hot to her naked feet as she walked toward the water. She stopped a few meters short of the water’s edge and spread out a beach towel. She checked the time before dropping her watch in the tote bag. Ten after ten. After applying a number 25 sunscreen lotion, she stretched out on her back, sighed, and began soaking up the African sun.

Eva still suffered from the lingering effects of jet lag after the long flight from San Francisco to Cairo. That and four days of nonstop emergency sessions with physicians and fellow biologists over the strange outbreaks of nervous disorders recently discovered throughout the southern Sahara Desert. Taking a break from the exhausting conferences, she wanted nothing more than to immerse herself in a few hours of rest and solitude before traveling through the vast desert on a research mission. Gratefully, as the sea breeze soothed her skin, she closed her eyes and promptly dozed off.

When Eva awoke, she glanced at her watch again. It read eleven-fifty. She had been asleep an hour and a half. The sunscreen had held sunburn to a light shade of pink. She rolled over on her stomach and gazed around the beach. A pair of men in short-sleeved shirts and khaki shorts were slowly walking in her direction along the water’s edge. They quickly stopped as they spotted her observing them and turned as if staring at a passing ship. They were still a good 200 meters away, and she took no more notice of them.

Suddenly, something caught her eye in the water some distance from shore. A head with black hair broke the surface. Eva held a hand over her eyes to shade the sun and squinted. A man with a dive mask and swim fins was snorkeling alone in deep water beyond the breakers. He appeared to be spearfishing. She watched as he dove out of sight, remaining underwater for so long she thought he was surely drowning. But then he resurfaced and continued his hunt. After several minutes, he swam toward shore, expertly catching a breaking wave and body surfing into the shallows where he stood up.

He held a strange-looking spear gun with a long barbed shaft and surgical rubber attached to its ends. With his other hand, he carried a group of fish, none weighing less than 3 pounds and attached by a stainless steel hoop that hung from a belt and ran through their gills.

Despite a deep tan, his craggy face didn’t bear Arabic features. His thick ebony hair was plastered down by the salt water and the sun sparkled the drops of water clinging to the matted hair on his chest. He was tall, hard-bodied, and broad-shouldered, and walked with a loose grace that was impossible for most men. She guessed him to be close to forty.

As he passed Eva, the man coolly flicked his eyes over her. He was close enough so that she could see they were and opaline green, set wide with a clear glimpse of the white around the iris. He stared at her with such direct candor that it seemed to reach into Eva’s mind and mesmerize her. Part of her was afraid he might pause and say something, the other part wishing he would, but his white teeth showed in a devastating smile as he nodded and walked past her to the highway.

She watched him until he disappeared behind the dunes in the area where she had seen the NUMA jeep. What’s the matter with me, she thought, I should have at least acknowledged his attention with a smile in return. Then she dismissed him in her mind, deciding that it would have been a waste of time since he probably couldn’t speak English anyway. And yet, her eyes shined with a light that had not been there for a long time. How odd, she thought, to feel young and excited by a strange male who gazed at her for one brief moment, and who would never pass her way again.

She felt like going into the water to cool off, but the two men strolling along the beach had approached and were passing between Eva and the surf so she modestly decided to wait until they had passed on. They didn’t have the fine features of Egyptians, but the flatter nose, darker almost black skin, and matted curly hair of people who lived on the southern fringe of the Sahara.