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.