The Storm (NUMA Files 10)

“No,” Joe said, “I’m not a tourist. I need to speak to the police. Actually, I need to speak to the military. We’re in danger here. We’re all in danger.”

“What kind of danger?” the guard asked suspiciously.

Joe looked him in the eye. “Terrorists are going to destroy the dam.”

CHAPTER 46

THE FIVE TRUCKS IN JINN’S CONVOY RUMBLED NORTH, eventually pulling off the main road and onto a dirt track. They passed the dam and continued on, traveling a perimeter road that wound along the jagged shore of Lake Nasser.

A half mile up from the dam, they came to a gate left conspicuously open and went through it. Traveling in the cab of the lead truck, Sabah ordered the lights doused and had the drivers use night vision goggles.

Blacked out in this manner, the convoy reached a boat ramp at the edge of the lake.

“Turn the trucks around,” Sabah ordered. “Back them in.”

Sabah climbed out of the lead truck and directed traffic. The big rigs lined up side by side, the wide ramp large enough to accommodate all five at once like great crocodiles basking on the shore.

Because the lake was so high from all the rain, most of the ramp was submerged. Sabah estimated a hundred feet of concrete lay hidden beneath the water before the ramp intersected the natural lake bed.

On his signal, the trucks began to ease down the ramp. The drivers took it slow, checking their progress in mirrors and through open windows.

As the flatbeds began backing into the water, Sabah took a radio controller from his pocket. He extended the antenna, pressed the power switch and pressed the first of four red buttons.

In the back of the five trailers, magnetic seals around the yellow drums popped open. The pressurized lids popped up and slid off to the side.

A green light told Sabah the activation had been successful.

Unseen by anyone, the silver sand of the microbots came alive, stirring and swirling, as if there were snakes hidden beneath the top layer, and beginning to climb over the edges of the barrels.

Unaware of what was happening in the flatbeds behind them, the drivers continued backing down the ramp, allowing gravity to do the work. None of them had done this before and most felt like they were being pulled in.

Sabah judged their progress. Their caution pleased him. It meant they weren’t paying attention to him.

“Good,” he whispered as he pressed the second of the four red buttons.

Inside the cabs, the door locks slammed down, the windows slid up into a ninety-percent-closed position and froze. The noise and movement startled the drivers.

An instant later chloroform gas began pumping from tiny canisters and filling the cabins. The men lasted only a second or two, none managed to pry open a door. One got a window half down before p

assing out and slumping onto the seat.

Without waiting, Sabah pressed the third button. The truck engines revved. They began to accelerate backward, crashing through the water like a herd of thundering hippos.

The engines had been modified to include a secondary air intake, disguised as an exhaust stack rising high above the roof of the truck. When Sabah activated the chloroform, the primary intake had been sealed shut and this secondary intake had opened. In effect, it acted like a snorkel, allowing the engine to breathe and continue to rev even after the entire truck was submerged.

Because of that, the motors continued to run and the wheels continued to spin in reverse, pushing the trucks down the ramp and out across the submerged rocks and gravel beyond it.

The charging trucks fanned out like the fingers of a hand, burrowing beneath the water and vanishing from view.

Momentum and the slope of the stony lake bed allowed them to continue even after their engines were finally swamped. When the trucks finally settled, they were thirty feet below the surface, one hundred and fifty feet from shore.

The unconscious drivers soon drowned. If and when they were discovered, they would be identified as Egyptian radicals. Sabah and Jinn’s connection to the incident would remain unknown, except to General Aziz, who would do well to keep silent and most likely have no choice but to return to the bargaining table.

As the waters settled, Sabah pressed the final button on his controller. A half mile away, on the wall of the dam, two separate devices began to issue homing signals.

The size of an average carry-on suitcase, but shaped something like mechanical crabs, the two devices had been placed there by a scuba diver forty-eight hours before. One was just below the waterline while the other clung to a spot on the sloping wall of the dam seventy feet below.

If the divers had done their jobs properly, ten-foot starter holes had already been bored through the outer wall and into the aggregate behind it. A batch of dedicated microbots from each crab would already be hard at work expanding those holes.