The Crisis (5 page)

She told him that whatever Kyriazis had brought had been either expended or taken home with him; she had no explosives and for that matter no arms. That was what had confined her to the compound for the last weeks: unrest in the hinterland, lack of security and field support from the ministry. Could he supply escorts and assistance? Fuel? Bond paper, which she was almost out of? (She didn't mention the toilet paper situation, knowing how Ashaarans reacted to any hint of female uncleanness.) The president had assured her the ministry would support her efforts to clarify the country's water resources, especially in the teeth of drought and famine.

Assad listened expressionlessly. He moved to a piece of graph paper taped to the wall. It was frail and darkened, as if held over a fire. A series of broken lines, crossed by a diagonal rising from left to right. “What does this convey?”

“Demographic water scarcity versus a technical use-to-availability ratio.”

“These lines have the names of countries.”

“Yes, that's correct.”

“Why is Ashaara at the bottom?”

She said wearily, “That chart's fifteen years old, Major. From Dr. Kyriazis's report. Do you remember him? Ever heard his name before?”

“Foreigners come and go in Ashaara.”

“He was here for twenty years. The horizontal lines denote water supply needed to support a population, including household use, industrial uses, and agricultural production. Yes, Ashaara's at the bottom. He predicted what was coming. Massive drought, drop in groundwater levels, then famine. He laid out how you had to change the way you farmed and how you used water, and advised the president to seek aid to do that.

“Instead, the U.S. and the Russians fed in more weapons, playing you off against the Eritreans. You built a useless concrete industry. Now drought's hit again, and you don't know what to do, any of you. What
will
you do? Do you have any idea?”

But the major's eyes were riveted where her bush shirt gaped, fixed on the claddagh her husband had given her, long ago. “A strange symbol. Is it Christian?”

She told him about the Galwayman captured by pirates and sold to an Arab goldsmith, and how when he had been released he'd set up his shop
in the oldest fishing village in Ireland. Knowing all the while Assad must have something else in mind. Abdiwali had brought stories from the marketplace about growing clan friction. The president had to go. That was perfectly clear, even if no one said so in her presence, and she knew enough never to comment on how badly he'd indebted and looted this nation.

Assad nodded, looking around again. “What exactly are you doing in our country, Dr. O'Shea?”

“Do I need to repeat everything I've just told you? I investigate ground-water resources.”

“What do you do with these resources?”

“Primarily just now we map them.”

“Why do you map them?”

She found this line of questioning both tedious and disturbing. Assad seemed to be probing for some deeper motivation. As if he suspected she was hiding some . . . secret. A drop of sweat rolled down her back.

Could he know?

Impossible. Not even at the ministry had she dropped the slightest hint. She held his eyes until they slid aside. He was sweating too.

Someone fired a shot outside. A flat bark that ebbed away over the desert. “Abdiwali,” she muttered. Bolting to the trailer door, shouldering Assad aside, she threw it open.

To a blaze of light and heat like the flare of a welding machine. The major's guards stood a few yards off, aiming at stones piled one atop another. Another shot snapped out. It went wide by five feet, and the men laughed, the shooter too. She squinted around. Her assistant was far off down the road, headed toward the village.

“Why do you map them?” Assad repeated, behind her. She smelled musky sweat and dust and a distinctive scent. Qat, though he wasn't chewing it at the moment.

She lost patience. Would she ever understand this country? “I
map
them because that's my
job.
What's yours, Major? Why are you here bothering me? You know I can pick up my cell and call the president's office, don't you?”

“Oh, you can call. Maybe you can call the president himself, yes? But will anyone answer?”

“What do you mean? ‘Will anyone answer'—”

Assad pushed by before she'd assimilated his sentence. “I apologize for ‘bothering' you. Perhaps the next time we meet I will convince you of my importance.” He stalked toward his vehicle, shouting at the men, who abandoned their game and ambled to join him.

. . .

WHEN he was gone she drank down a cup of water, then another. The plastic gave it a musty taste. She stabbed at the air conditioner, but it was already at max. “Feck,” she muttered. She threw the cup across the trailer, then grabbed her bush hat and stomped out.

Behind the trailer, at the edge of the gorge. Below her vultures pushed and cawed and fought; something dead must lie down there in the brush. More circled above the compound, cocking an eye her way each time they banked past.

She stood at the edge of an immense emptiness. Miles stretched from the tips of her black Blunnies to where the Western Mountains rose purple and lavender, and beyond them the frost-capped heads of the far Mahawayo. She came here when the stupidity and arrogance became too outrageous. She had no patience. Her mother had told her this when she was small. She saw no signs she'd ever changed.

The gorge was dry, with eroding layers of buff and ruddy sedimentary rock, volcanic ash, and central basin dioctahedral clays. She'd always expected it to yield the bones of tiny protohumans, primordial hairy East African leprechauns, half simian, half hominid. Like Olduvai. Two years ago a small team had come in from Stony Brook, not well funded, and she'd tried to persuade Tim White and Berhane Asfaw to come after that, but they'd refused, said there were no indications. She squinted at the crumbling soil for anything that might be ancient bone. It was supposed to turn almost black, stained with minerals. She was a hydrogeologist, but she'd always wondered about hominids. If you knew where there was water once, wouldn't that have been where the buggers gathered?

This desert reassured her it didn't matter, what human beings did now. What folly and crime. How many millions died, of fever, disease, starvation, war. They'd lived in East Africa for four and a half million years. And they'd still be here long after she was gone.

 

WHEN she went back in an icon pulsed on the screen. She was back online, and she had a message. In a mailbox she didn't share with Abdiwali, that no one in Ashaara or even at the UN had access to.

She hesitated, hand on the mouse. Got up, checked that the trailer door was locked, and sat again. “Face the music, O'Shea,” she whispered. Typed in the password, double-clicked, and sucked a breath as the message opened.

It was from Sweden.

 

Ratios of dissolved salts in the four samples submitted were compared. All samples contained a low but consistent content CaSO4 and
MgSO4. Ratio of dissolved salts and percentage of sulfate content support the hypothesis of common source.

Isotope analysis: Deuterium excess from the four samples:

 

Sample A - 21.41
Sample B - 21.38
Sample C - 21.41
Sample D - 21.62

 

All samples fall near the Levant meteoric line confirming original pluvial derivation from within the Mediterranean basin. Conformity of sample confirms sulfate analysis, again supporting the hypothesis of a common source paleowater deposit dating to 30K BCE. However data on supply and recharge rates are not adequate to speculate on size of common recoverable aquifer as proposed in the letter accompanying samples.

To clarify this further data collection is suggested at the following locations and depths . . .

 

She exhaled, letting tension ooze out of her fingertips, evaporate out of her wet scalp. Stress she'd carried for months. She felt weak, then immensely strong.

It was there.

But with the same thought came the knowledge: it was superlatively dangerous.

She moved to print out the e-mail, then lifted her fingers from the keys. Instead she closed that window and brought up another file.

A jagged, waist-pinched Ashaara stretched three hundred miles inland from the Red Sea, sticking its elbow deep into Sudan. Just under five hundred miles north to south, it looked like an outline of a human knee, the port of Ashaara City perched at the kneecap. Two river systems bisected it, streaming, at least in good times, toward the Red Sea from the Western Mountains. The red lines of the road network were disappointingly sparse, though not as disappointing as in reality, since whole sections had degenerated into sloughs of mud, dust, or loose stones. The south had been the most fertile region, orchards and farms during Italian times. It had produced agricultural surpluses until collectivization, when the brief but brutal rule of the aptly named Morgue had broken the Bantu and Ashaari farmers.

But she wasn't looking there, but north, to what was perhaps the most striking feature of the whole country.

Haunt of djinns and nomads, repository of myth and legend, the Empty
Quarter meant nightmare and death for outsiders. Endless desert, dunes, salt flats; only a few nomad encampments mapped by the British during the Second World War dotted its forty-thousand-square-mile expanse. It was into the dreaded Quartier Vide that the Austrian archaeologist Karl Von Zirkel had disappeared in 1894, seeking a lost city mentioned by the early Coptic Fathers. It was from the Quartier Vide that the infamous Sheikh Dahir had harried the French in the twenties, until their planes wiped out his tribesmen with mustard gas. To this day small bands of
indigènes
roamed its wastes, nomading from seepage to seepage, or hand-dug oasis wells fed by shallow groundwater tables under the dunes.

Tabbing back and forth from her e-mail to the map, she etched numbers beside symbols. Gradually they formed a vast dotted-line oval that stretched to the Western Mountains, nearly to the Red Sea, and across the Sudanese border. The eastern one was marked A. The western, C. The northern, B. The southern, a few miles north of where this trailer sat, was marked D.

The numbers matched the sample names of the results from Sweden.

She saved this in a hidden folder, one invisible to a casual user. Then erased the e-mail from her in-queue. She sat back, blotting her cheeks with a tissue from a dried-out container of wet wipes.

It was real.

What Costa Kyriazis had intuited, and died wondering about. What she'd suspected, inspecting photos taken from space, but never been able to prove.

What had been found before in Libya, in the Sinai, in other regions considered arid and uninhabitable for all recorded history.

The samples she'd sent to Scandinavia had come from wells or artesian seeps at widely separated locations. Yet chemically and isotopically, they were the same.

Which meant they came from the same source, and the same era—an epoch thirty thousand years in the past.

Hundreds of meters beneath the Empty Quarter, in the porous Nubian sandstone that stretched from the Mediterranean deep into Africa, lay a reservoir of “fossil” water. An underground aquifer, a primeval lake. She'd proved it existed, but not how large it was. Perhaps enough to irrigate all Ashaara for decades. Maybe centuries, if the watery lens was thick enough. But only drilling would answer that question.

A more fabulous hoard than any legend of genies and gold. An unexpected, long-sequestered treasure. A secret that, once revealed, could lead to a secure and fertile future for an entire region prone to chronic drought and famine—or to war, mass murder, and genocide.

A secret far more powerful than any explosive, Major, she thought.

One she'd have to keep locked within her brain till she could consider how best to reveal it, and to whom.

Pursing her lips, she took a last long look. Then shut down the computer, and sat in the whirring heat, alone.

W
HEN the trucks leave she searches for her brothers through the litter of the crying and the wounded, those hit by bullets maybe not even aimed at them. A sick jerky feeling seeps into her stomach. She wants to claw her family back to her out of the milling dust. She thinks she hears them shouting, and she screams. But how small her voice is, how thin amid the crying and shouting all around. She stumbles. Rocks cut her feet. The dust's too thick to make out the road. She glimpses a shadow with a gun. She turns and rushes away, until her sight reels and the air torches her lungs.

Hours later she wanders an apocalyptic land. The wind's kicked up hot as flames. Not a blade of grass is left on the stony ground. She moans, hands hiding her face. Should she go back to the village? But then she'll never see Ghedi or Nabil again. Her little brother's so small. She saved the last piece of corn bread for him.

When she comes across the road again she sinks into the dust. People trudge by. They look dazed. Before they were all walking in one direction. Now they wander, women without
hijab
, men without shirts, calling in cracked voices to those who've vanished. A blind man totters past, groping the air, scabbed eyes lifted as if he can see. She sits. A man speaks to her. He compliments her eyes, her small feet. She doesn't answer or look up, and at last he goes on.

Toward evening she wakes from wherever she was. She eats the last crust. Her teeth hurt. The stars are coming out. One is so bright, like a candle in the sky. Maybe that's where Paradise is.

She decides to go back to the village. She's afraid to go toward the city now. Even if Uncle's there. She has a confused notion they're still there, she'll push the gate open and there'll be her mother feeding the chickens, the baby on her hip, her brothers wrestling in the shade. This is some evil dream, sent by the Devil.