“Good work, Marchetti,” he said. “Now, come back down here and help me clean up this mess.”
CHAPTER 60
KURT AUSTIN WAITED IN THE DARK AS THE AIRSHIPS CIRcled and finally began to approach. Standing at the edge of the helipad, he watched as the lead ship floated in, slowly sinking toward the pad. With the fans tilted down in a vertical position to slow the descent like retro-rockets on a moon lander, the microbots were blasted around like ash from a volcano.
They swirled into the air, a cloud of metallic dust, drifting and falling toward the zero deck below.
A few feet away, down on his knees, Jinn watched the cloud fall but otherwise made no movement. He was a beaten man, a broken man. He looked different, Kurt thought.
“You’ll send me to prison,” he mumbled.
“For ten times your natural life span,” Kurt replied.
“Can you see a man like me surviving in prison?” Jinn asked, looking up.
“Only long enough to go insane,” Kurt replied.
Jinn looked toward the edg
e. The darkness beckoned. “Let me go.”
Kurt could see what he had in mind. “Why should I?”
“As a kindness to a vanquished enemy,” Jinn mumbled.
Kurt stared at Jinn for a long moment. Without a word, he stepped back.
Jinn came up off his knees and glanced at Kurt. “Thank you,” he said and then turned away.
He took three steps and was gone.
CHAPTER 61
BY HIGH NOON IN EGYPT THE DANGER AT ASWAN HAD nearly passed. The water level in Lake Nasser had dropped twenty feet. A six-foot wave continued to pour across the crest and through the four-hundred-foot-wide gap, but it was a smoother, more controlled flow now. With the spillways, turbine gates and the diversion canal remaining wide open, it was hoped that a point of equilibrium would be reached by the middle of the next day.
Still, tragedy had not been completely averted.
As Joe stared downstream, it looked entirely different than what he’d seen the night before. The buildings were gone—not damaged, not flooded out, just gone. So were the docks and the boats and even some of the sandstone cliffs. The banks of the river remained flooded and instead of looking like a narrow river, it looked like a lake.
Above that lake, helicopters circled by the dozens like dragonflies over a pond. Small boats had been brought in and were zipping here and there. Power remained on at the dam, though there was nowhere to send it as all the transmission lines had been swept away.
Joe turned and slumped down by an Army trailer. At Major Edo’s insistence, a nurse checked on him. He could have used an IV, but he refused it. Medical supplies would run short rather quickly, he guessed, and others would need them more than him.
She handed him a bottle of water, threw a blanket over his shoulders and moved away.
Major Edo sat down and offered him a cigarette. Joe refused it, and the major stuffed them back in his pocket. “Dirty habit,” he said, trying to smile.
“How many?” Joe asked.
“At least ten thousand,” the major said sadly. “Probably twice that when we’re done looking.”
Joe felt like he’d gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight, survived, thinking he’d won, only to find out the judges had scored it the other way.
“It could have been millions,” the major said firmly. He put a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Do you understand?”
Joe looked up at him and nodded.
A helicopter landed nearby. A private ran up to the major. “We’re loaded with wounded.”