"Where do you come from?"
"The ruins of Pergamon."
"Turkey?"
"Yes," Yerli cut in quickly. He never trusted telephones and hated what he thought were childish codes. "I am in the bar of the Hotel Algonquin. When can I expect you?"
"One A.M. too late?"
"No. I'll have a late dinner."
Yerli hung up the phone thoughtfully. What did the Americans know about Massarde's desert operation at Fort Foureau? he wondered. Did their intelligence services have a hint of the true activities at the waste disposal plant and were they snooping around? If so, the consequences could be disastrous, and the fall of the current French government would be the least of the backlash.
Behind him was black darkness, ahead the sparsely scattered street lights of Gao. Gunn still had 10 meters to swim when one of his kicking feet dug into the soft riverbed. Slowly, very cautiously, he reached down and grabbed the silt with his hands, pulling himself through the shallows until he was lying at the waterline. He waited, listening and squinting into the darkness shrouding the bank of the river.
The beach sloped at an angle of 10 degrees, ending at a low rock wall that bordered a road. He crawled across the sand, enjoying its heat against the wet skin of his bare arms and legs. He stopped and rolled onto his side, resting for a few minutes, reasonably secure that he was only an indistinct blur in the night. He had a cramp in his right leg and his arms felt numb and heavy.
He reached back and felt the backpack. For a brief instant, after he had struck the rushing water like a cannonball, he thought that it might have been torn from his back. But its straps still clung tightly to his shoulders.
He rose to his feet and sprinted in a crouching position to the wall, dropping to his knees behind it. He warily peered over the top and scanned the road. It was empty. But a badly paved street that ran diagonally into town had a fair amount of foot traffic. Out of the upper edge of one eye he caught a dim flare and looked up on the roof of a nearby house in time to see a man light a cigarette. There were others dim figures of people, some illuminated by lanterns, happily chatting with their neighbors on adjoining roofs. They must come up like moles, Gunn surmised, to enjoy the cool of the evening.
He studied the stream of the pedestrians on the street, trying to absorb a rhythm to their movements. They seemed o glide up and down the street in their loose, flowing garments on silent feet like wraiths. He unstrapped the backpack, opened it, and removed a blue bed sheet. He tore art of it in a crude body pattern and then draped it around himself in the style of a djellaba, a long-skirted garment with full sleeves and a hood. He wouldn't win a local fashion award, he thought, but felt reasonably satisfied it would pass unnoticed in the dimly lit streets. He considered removing n is glasses, but decided against the idea, positioning the hood to cover the rims. Gunn was nearsighted and couldn't see a moving bus 20 meters away.
He slipped the backpack under the robe and strapped it around his front as if it was simply a protruding stomach. He then sat on the wall and swung his legs over to the far side. He casually stepped across the road and up the narrow street, joining the citizens of Gao who were out for their evening stroll. After two blocks he reached a main intersection. The only vehicles prowling the streets were a few dilapidated taxis, one or two run-down buses, and a few scattered motorbikes and a bevy of bicycles.
It would be nice to simply hail a cab for the airport, he thought wistfully, but that was inviting attention. Before abandoning the boat he had studied the map of the area and knew the airport was a few kilometers south of town. He considered stealing a bicycle, but quickly eliminated the idea. The theft would have probably been noticed and reported, and he wanted no trace of his presence known. If the police or security forces did not have reason to think there was an illegal alien wandering in their midst, they would have no cause to search for him.
Gunn leisurely walked through the main section of town, past the market square, the decrepit Hotel Atlantide, and the merchants hawking their wares from stalls under arches across from the hotel. The smells were anything but exotic. Gunn welcomed the breeze that fanned most of the town's odors into the desert. Signposts were nonexistent but he navigated down the sandy streets by occasionally glancing up at the north star.
The people dressed in a blaze of green and blues and a smattering of yellow. The men were dressed in some form of djellaba or caftan. A number wore western pants and tunics. Few were bareheaded. Most male heads and faces were heavily swathed in blue cloth. Many of the women were covered in elegant cloaks, others long, flowered dresses. Most all were unveiled.
They all chattered constantly in strange low tones. Children ran everywhere, no two dressed alike. Gunn found it hard to imagine such social activity and congeniality in the middle of great poverty. It was as though nobody informed the Malians they were poor.
Keeping his head down and face covered by the hood so the white skin of his face wouldn't show, Gunn merged with the crowd and made his way out of the busy part of town. No one stopped him and asked awkward questions. If for some unexpected reason he was apprehended and interrogated he would claim to be a tourist on a hiking trip along the Niger. He did not dwell on that possibility for long. The danger of being stopped by someone who was looking specifically for an illegal American was nil.
He passed a road sign with a pointing arrow and a drawing of an airplane. He was making his way toward the airport easier than he expected. His luck hadn't skipped out on him yet.
He walked through the more affluent merchant-owned neighborhoods and into the surrounding slums. From the time he left the river, Gao had given him the impression of a town where, with the coming of darkness, some unseen horror crawls up through the sandy streets. It seemed to him a town drenched in the blood and violence of centuries. His imagination began to work overtime as he walked the dark and nearly deserted streets, beginning for the first time to see curious and hostile looks from people sitting in front of their crumbling houses.
He ducked into a narrow alley that looked to be empty and paused to take a revolver from the backpack, an old, snub-nosed Smith & Wesson 38-caliber Bodyguard model that had belonged to his father. His instinct told him that this was a place you didn't walk at night if you expected to see the dawn.
A truck rumbled past, stirring up the fine sand, its flatbed piled with bricks. A quick realization that it was going in his direction, and Gunn threw caution to the desert winds. He took a running leap and scrambled up the back of the truck. He came to rest flat on his stomach on top of the bricks facing forward and looking down on the roof of the cab.
The smell of the exhaust from the diesel engine came as a relief after the aroma of the town. From his vantage view atop the truck's cargo, Gunn picked out a pair of red lights blinking a few kilometers ahead and to his left. As the truck bounced closer, he could see a few floodlights mounted on a terminal building and two hangars across a darkened field.
"Some airport," he muttered to himself dryly. "They turn out all the runway lights when it's not in use."
A dip in the road showed in the truck's headlights, and the driver slowed. Gunn took advantage of the decreased speed and hit the ground running. The truck rolled on into the darkness, sand streaming from its tires, the driver blissfully unaware he'd carried a passenger. Gunn followed the truck's taillights until he came to an asphalt side road and a wooden sign painted in three languages that advertised the Gao International Airport.
"International," Gunn read aloud. "Oh how I hope so."
He walked along the side of the entry road, keeping off to one side in the remote chance a vehicle might happen by. There was little need for caution. The airport terminal was dark and the parking lot totally empty. His hopes took a downturn at a close-up view of the terminal building. He'd seen better-looking condemned warehouses than the wooden structure with a rusting metal roof. It took a brave man to climb and work in the nearby control tower sitting precariously on support girders that were almost eroded through. He walked around the buildings onto the dead and darkened tarmac. Across the field, illuminated by floodlights, sat eight Malian jet fighters and a transport plane.
He stood motionless as he spied two armed guards sitting outside a security shack. One was dozing in a chair, the other was leaning against the shack smoking a cigarette. Great, he thought, just great. Now he had to contend with the military.
Gunn held up his Chronosport dive watch and peered at the dial. It read twenty past eleven. He suddenly felt tired. He'd made it this far only to find a deserted airport that looked as if it hadn't seen an arriving or departing airliner in weeks. If that wasn't bad enough, the field was guarded by Malian air force security. No predicting how long he could sit it out before being discovered or expiring from lack of food and water.