The Pharaoh's Secret (NUMA Files 13)

“We already do,” Reza assured him.

“Aside from you, is anyone else looking into this?” Gamay asked.

Reza shrugged. “Not really. There’s no one else qualified to do it. And, as you can imagine, with a civil war still going on, the government has bigger issues to deal with. Or so they think. They asked if it was the rebels’ doing. I should have said yes. They would have given me every resource in the country to figure it out. But I said no. In fact, I told them such a thought was ludicrous.” Reza’s face scrunched up as he recounted the incident. “Let me tell you, it’s not wise to tell a politician his question is ludicrous. At least not in my country.”

“Why?”

“I would have thought that was obvious.”

“No,” Gamay corrected. “I mean, why couldn’t it be the rebels?”

“Rebels blow things up,” he said. “This is some kind of natural phenomenon that we’re grappling with. A natural disaster in the making. Besides, everyone needs water. Everyone has to drink. If the water goes, there will be war but nothing left to fight for.”

“How is the country surviving?” Paul asked.

“For now, the reservoirs outside Benghazi and Sirte and Tripoli are holding everyone over,” Reza told them. “But rationing has already begun. And, without a change, we’ll be shutting off entire neighborhoods within days. At that point, everyone will do what desperate people do. They’ll panic. And then this country will fall back into chaos once again.”

“Surely they’ll start taking you seriously if you show them these projections,” Gamay suggested.

“I’ve shown them,” Reza said. “All they do is tell me to solve the problem or insist they will just replace me and blame me for mismanagement. Either way, I have to have a solution before I go back to them. At least a theory as to why it’s happening.”

“How deep is the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer?” Paul asked.

Reza brought up a cutaway view of the drilling process. “Most of the wells go to depths between five and six hundred meters.”

“Could you drill deeper?”

“My very first thought,” Reza said. “We’ve sunk a couple of test wells to a thousand meters. But we came up dry. We sank one to two thousand meters. Also dry.”

Paul studied the schematic. The diagram showed their compound on the surface as a collection of little gray squares. The well shaft was colored bright green, which made it easy to see as it descended through layers of earth and rock and into the reddish sandstone where the water from the Ice Age remained trapped. A dark-colored layer rested beneath the sandstone; it continued downward to a depth of one thousand meters. The area beneath that was gray and unmarked.

“What kind of rock underlays the sandstone?” Paul asked.

Reza shrugged. “We’re not sure. No survey was done to study anything deeper than two thousand meters. I’d guess it’s probably more sedimentary rock.”

“Maybe we should find out,” Paul said. “Maybe the problem isn’t in your sandstone. Maybe it lies underneath.”

“We don’t have time to drill that deep,” Reza said.

“We could do a seismic survey,” Paul suggested.

Reza folded his arms across his chest and nodded. “I would like very much to, but to see through that much rock we need a powerful bang to emit the vibrations. Unfortunately, our stock of explosives has been confiscated.”

“I guess it makes sense. The government doesn’t want the rebels getting ahold of explosives,” Gamay replied.

“It was the rebels who took them,” Reza said. “The government then chose not to replace them. At any rate, I have nothing here capable of creating a sound that would penetrate so much rock and reflect back to us with any type of clear signal.”

For a moment, Paul was stumped. Then an idea came to him, an idea so crazy it just might have a chance of working. He glanced at Gamay. “Now I know how Kurt feels when the inspiration hits. It’s like madness mixed with genius all at the same time.”

Gamay chuckled. “With Kurt, the balance can be a little out of whack sometimes.”

“I’m hoping that’s not the case here,” Paul said, before turning back to Reza. “Do you have sound equipment to record a signal?”

“Some of the best in the world.”

“Get it ready,” Paul said. “And, much as I hate to say it, have them fuel up that old plane of yours. We’re going to take it up for a spin.”

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