‘I think it’s splendid. Glad you agree with me.’ He stroked the soft, smooth hide. She felt this was not the moment to spoil his boyish pleasure. ‘As soon as we have sorted out Taita’s puzzle, I intend writing a paper on it for the Natural History Museum, the same lads that called Great-grandpapa a liar. Restore the family honour.’ He laughed and spread a dust-sheet over the model. Carefully he lifted it down from the table and placed it safely in a corner of the room where it was out of harm’s way.
‘That was the first surprise I had saved up for you. But now for the big one.’ He pointed to a sofa against one wall. ‘Take a seat. I don’t want you to be bowled over by this.’
She smiled at his nonsense, but went obediently to the furthest end of the sofa and curled her legs under her as she settled there. Sapper Webb came to sit awkwardly at the other end, obviously uncomfortable at being so close to her.
‘Let’s talk about how we are going to get into the chasm on the Dandera river,’ Nicholas suggested. ‘Sapper and I have talked about nothing else the whole time that you have been away.’
‘That and catching fish, I’ll warrant.’ She grinned at him, and he looked guilty.
‘Well, both subjects involve water. That is my justification.’ His expression became serious. ‘You recall that we discussed the idea of exploring the depths of Taita’s pool with scuba gear, and I explained the difficulties.’
‘I remember,’ she agreed. ‘You said the pressure into the underwater opening was too great, and that we would have to find another method of getting in there.’
‘Correct.’ Nicholas smiled mysteriously. ‘Well, Sapper here has already earned the exorbitant fee that I have promised him – promised, I emphasize, not yet paid. He has come up with the alternative method.’
Now she too became serious and unfolded her legs. She placed both feet on the floor and leaned forward attentively, with her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her hands.
‘It must have been all those brains of his that pushed out his hair. I mean, it’s very neat thinking. Although it was staring us both in the face, neither you nor I thought of it.’
‘Stop it, Nicky,’ she told him ominously, ‘you are doing it again.’
‘I am going to give you a clue.’ He ignored the warning and went on teasing her blithely. ‘Sometimes the old ways are the best. That’s the clue.’
‘If you are so clever, how come you aren’t famous?’ she began, and then broke off as the solution occurred to her. ‘The old ways? You mean, the same way as Taita did it? The same way he reached the bottom of the pool without the benefit of diving equipment?’
‘By George! I think she’s got it!’ Nicholas put on a convincing Rex Harrison imitation.
‘A dam.’ Royan clapped her hands. ‘You propose to redam the river at the same place where Taita built his dam four thousand years ago.’
‘She’s got it!’ Nicholas laughed. ‘No flies on our girl! Show her your drawings, Sapper.’
Sapper Webb made no attempt to disguise his self-satisfaction as he went to the board that stood against the facing wall. Royan had noticed it, but had paid no attention to it, until now he pulled away the cover and proudly displayed the illustrations that were pegged to it.
She recognized immediately the enlargements of the photographs that Nicholas had taken at the putative site of Taita’s dam on the Dandera river, and others that he had taken in the ancient quarry that Tamre had shown them. These had been liberally adorned with calculations and lines in thick black marker pen.
‘The major has provided me with estimates of the dimensions of the river bed at this point, and he has also calculated the height that we will have to raise the wall to induce a flow down the former course. I have, of course, allowed for errors in these calculations. Even if these errors are in the region of thirty per cent, I believe that the project is still feasible with the very limited equipment we will have available to us.’
‘If the ancient Egyptians could do it, it will be a breeze for you, Sapper.’
‘Kind of you to say so, major, but “breeze” is not the word I would have chosen.’
He turned to the drawings pegged beside the photographs on the board, and Royan saw that they were plans and elevations of the project based upon the photographs and Nicholas’s estimates.
‘There are a number of different methods of dam construction, but these days most of them presuppose the availability of reinforced concrete and heavy earth-moving equipment. I understand that we will not have the benefit of these modern aids.’
‘Remember Taita,’ Nicholas exhorted him. ‘He did it without bulldozers.’
‘On the other hand, the Egyptians probably had unlimited numbers of slaves at their disposal.’
‘Slaves I can promise you. Or the modern equivalent thereof. Unlimited numbers? Well, perhaps not.’
‘The more labour you can provide, the sooner I can divert the flow of the river for you. We are agreed that this has to be done before the onset of the rainy season.’
‘We have two months at the most.’ Nicholas dropped his flippant attitude. ‘As regards the provision of labour, I will be relying on enlisting the aid of the monastic community at St Frumentius. I am still working out a sound theological reason that might convince them to take part in the building of the dam. I don’t think they will fall for the idea that we have discovered the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Ethiopia and not in Jerusalem.’
‘You find me the labour, and I will build your dam,’ Sapper grunted. ‘As you said earlier, the old ways are the best. It is almost certain that the ancients would have used a system of gabions and coffer dams to lay the foundations of the original dam.’
‘Sorry,’ Royan interrupted. ‘Gabions? I don’t have an engineering degree.’
‘I am the one who must apologize.’ Sapper made a clumsy attempt at chivalry. ‘Let me show you my drawings.’ He turned to the board. ‘What this fellow Taita probably did was to weave huge bamboo baskets, which he placed in the river and filled with rock and stone. These are what we call gabions.’ He indicated the plans on the board. ‘After that he would have used rough-cut timber to build circular walls between the gabions – the coffer dams. These he would also have filled with stone and earth.’
‘I get the general idea,’ Royan said, sounding dubious, ‘but then it is not really necessary for me to understand all the details.’
‘Right you are!’ Sapper agreed heartily. ‘Although the major assures me that there is all the timber we will need on the site, I plan to use wire mesh for the construction of the gabions and human labour for the filling of the mesh nets with stone and aggregate.’
‘Wire mesh?’ Royan demanded. ‘Where do you hope to find that in the Abbay valley?’
Sapper began to reply, but Nicholas forestalled him. ‘I will come to that in a moment. Let Sapper finish his lecture. Don’t spoil his fun. Tell Royan about the stone from the quarry. She will enjoy that.’
‘Although I have designed the dam as a temporary structure, we have to make certain that it is capable of holding back the river long enough to enable the members of our team to enter the underwater tunnel in the downstream pool safely—’
‘We call it Taita’s pool,’ Nicholas told him, and Sapper nodded.
‘We have to make sure that the dam does not burst while people are in there. You can imagine the consequences, should that happen.’
He was silent for a moment while he let them dwell upon the possibility. Royan shuddered slightly and hugged her own arms.
‘Not very pleasant,’ Nicholas agreed. ‘So you plan to use the blocks?’ he prompted Sapper.
‘That’s right. I have studied the photographs taken in the quarry. I have picked out over a hundred and fifty granite blocks lying there completed or almost completed, and I calculate that if we use these in combination with the steel mesh gabions and the timber coffer walls, this would give us a firm foundation for the main dam wall.’
‘Those bl
ocks must weigh many tons each,’ Royan pointed out. ‘How will you move them?’ Then, as Sapper opened his mouth to explain, she changed her mind. ‘No! don’t tell me. If you say it’s possible, I will take your word for it.’
‘It’s possible,’ Sapper assured her.
‘Taita did it,’ Nicholas said. ‘We will be doing it all his way. That should please you. After all, he is a relative of yours.’
‘You know, you are right. In a strange sort of way, it does give me pleasure.’ She smiled at him. ‘I think it’s a good omen. When does all this happen?’
‘It’s happening already,’ Nicholas told her. ‘Sapper and I have already ordered all the stores and equipment that we will be taking with us. Even the mesh for the gabions has been precut to size by a small engineering firm near here. Thanks to the recession, they had machines standing idle.’
‘I have been down there at their workshop every day, supervising the cutting and packing,’ Sapper butted in. ‘Half the shipment is already on its way. The rest of it will follow before the weekend.’
‘Sapper is leaving this afternoon to take charge and get it all loaded. You and I have some last-minute arrangements to see to, and then we will follow him at the end of the week. You must remember I was not expecting you back from Cairo so soon,’ Nicholas said. ‘If I had known, I could have arranged for us all to fly down to Valletta together.’
‘Valletta?’ Royan looked mystified. ‘As in Malta? I thought we were going to Ethiopia.’
‘Malta is where Jannie Badenhorst has his base.’
‘Jannie who?’
‘Badenhorst. Africair.’
‘Now you have really lost me.’
‘Africair is an air transport company that owns one old ex-RAF Hercules, flown by Jannie and his son Fred. They use Malta as their base. It’s a stable and pragmatic little country – no African politics, no corruption – and yet it is the door to most of the destinations in the Middle East and in the northern half of Africa where Jannie and Fred do most of their work. His main employment is smuggling booze into the Islamic countries, where of course it is prohibited. He’s the Al Capone of the Mediterranean. Bootlegging is big business in that part of the world, but he does take on other work. Duraid and I flew into Libya from there with Jannie on our little jaunt to the Tibesti Massif. Jannie will be taking us down to the Abbay.’
‘Nicky, I don’t want to be a killjoy, but you and I are now undesirable immigrants to Ethiopia. Had you overlooked that little fact? How do you propose to get back in there?’
‘Through the back door,’ Nicholas grinned, ‘and my old pal Mek Nimmur is the gatekeeper.’
‘You have been in contact with Mek?’
‘With Tessay. It seems that she is now his go-between. I imagine it’s very convenient for Mek to have her on board. She has all the right connections, and she can slip in and out of Khartoum or Addis or places where it might be awkward or even dangerous for him to be seen.’
‘Well, well!’ Royan looked impressed. ‘You have been busy.’
‘Not all of us can afford a holiday in Cairo whenever the fancy takes us,’ he told her tartly.
‘One more little question.’ She ignored the jibe, although she realized that despite his easy smile her absence must have irked him. ‘Does Mek know about Taita’s game?’
‘Not in detail.’ Nicholas shook his head. ‘But he has some suspicions, and anyway I know I can rely on him.’ He hesitated, and then went on. ‘Tessay was very cagey when I spoke to her on the phone, but it seems that there has been some sort of attack on St Frumentius monastery. Jali Hora and thirty or forty of his monks were massacred, and most of the sacred relics from the church were stolen.’
‘Oh, dear God, no!’ Royan looked stricken. ‘Who would do a thing like that?’
‘The same people who murdered Duraid, and made three attempts to wipe you out.’
‘Pegasus.’
‘Von Schiller,’ he agreed.
‘Then we are directly responsible,’ Royan whispered. ‘We led them to the monastery. The Polaroids they captured from us when they raided our camp would have shown them the stele and the tomb of Tanus. Von Schiller wouldn’t have to be a clairvoyant to guess where we had taken them. Now there is more blood on our hands.’
‘Hell, Royan, how can you take responsibility for von Schiller’s madness? I am not going to let you punish yourself for that.’ Nicholas’s tone was sharp and angry.
‘We started this whole thing.’
‘I don’t agree with that, but I admit that von Schiller is the one who must have cleaned out the maqdas of St Frumentius and that the stele and the coffin are now almost certainly part of his collection.’
‘Oh, Nicky, I feel so guilty. I never realized what a danger we were to those simple devout Christians.’
‘Do you want to call off the whole thing?’ he asked cruelly.
She thought about it seriously for a while, then shook her head.
‘No. Perhaps when we go back we will be able to compensate the monks for their losses with what we find in the bottom of Taita’s pool.’
‘I hope so,’ he agreed fervently. ‘I do hope so.’
The giant Hercules C-Mk1 four-engined turboprop aircraft was painted a dusty nondescript brown, and the identification lettering on the fuselage was faded and indistinct. There was no Africair legend displayed anywhere on the machine, and it had a tired and scruffy appearance that spoke eloquently of the fact that it was almost forty years old and had flown well over half a million hours even before it had fallen into Jannie Badenhorst’s hands.
‘Does that thing still fly?’ Royan asked, as she looked at it standing forlornly in a back corner of the Valletta airfield. Its drooping belly gave it the air of a sad old streetwalker who had been put out of business by an unexpected and unlooked-for pregnancy.
‘Jannie keeps it looking that way deliberately,’ Nicholas assured her. ‘The places that he flies to, it’s best not to draw envious eyes.’
‘He certainly succeeds.’
‘But both Jannie and Fred are first-rate aero-engineers. Between them they keep Big Dolly perfect under her engine cowlings.’
‘Big Dolly?’
‘Dolly Parton. Jannie is an avid fan.’ The taxi dropped them and their meagre luggage outside the side door of the hangar, and Nicholas paid the driver while Royan thrust her hands into the pockets of her anorak and shivered in the cold wind off the Mediterranean.
‘There’s Jannie now.’ Nicholas pointed to the bulky figure in greasy brown overalls coming down the loading ramp of the Hercules. He saw them and jumped down off the ramp.
‘Hello, man! I was beginning to give up on you,’ he said as he came shambling across the tarmac. He looked like a rugby player, as he had been in his youth, and the slight limp was from an old playing-field injury.
‘We were late leaving Heathrow. Strike by French air traffic control. The joys of international travel,’ Nicholas told him, and then introduced Royan.
‘Come and meet my new secretary,’ Jannie invited. ‘She may even give you a cup of coffee.’
He led them through a wicket in the main hangar door and into the cavernous interior. There was a small office cubicle beside the entrance with a sign over the door saying ‘Africair’ and the company logo of a winged battleaxe. Mara, Jannie’s new secretary, was a Maltese lady only a few years younger than himself. What she lacked in youth and beauty she fully made up for across the chest.
‘Jannie likes them mature and with plenty of top hamper,’ Nicholas murmured to Royan from the side of his mouth.
Mara gave them coffee, while Jannie went over his flight plan with Nicholas.
‘It’s a little complicated,’ he apologized. ‘As you can imagine, we will have to do a bit of ducking and diving. Muammar Gadaffi is not wallowing in affection for me at the moment, so I’d rather not overfly any of his territory. We will be going in through Egypt, but without landing there.’ He pointed out their flight path on the maps sp
read over his desk.
‘Bit of a problem over the Sudan. They are having a little civil war there.’ He winked at Nicholas. ‘However, the northern government are not equipped with the most up-to-date radar in the world. Lot of old Russian reject stuff. It’s an enormous bit of country, and Fred and I have worked out their blank spots. We will be keeping well clear of their main military installations.’
‘What’s our flying time?’ Nicholas wanted to know.
Jannie pulled a face. ‘Big Dolly is no sprinter, and as I have just told you we will not be taking any short-cuts.’
‘How long?’ Nicholas insisted.
‘Fred and I have rigged up bunks and a kitchen, so that during the flight you will have all the comforts of home.’ He lifted his cap and scratched his head before he admitted, ‘Fifteen hours.’
‘Has Big Dolly got that sort of endurance?’ Nicholas wanted to know.
‘Extra tanks. Seventy-one thousand kilos of fuel. Even with the load you have given us, we can get there and back without refuelling.’ He was interrupted by the huge hangar doors rolling open, and a heavy truck being driven through. ‘That will be Fred and Sapper now.’ Jannie swigged the last of his coffee and hugged Mara. She giggled, and her bosom quivered like a snowfield on the point of an avalanche.
The truck parked at the far end of the hangar, where an array of equipment and stores was already neatly stacked, ready for loading. When Fred climbed down from the cab, Jannie introduced him to Royan. He was a younger version of the father, already beginning to spread around the waist, and with an open bucolic face, more like a Karroo sheep farmer than a commercial pilot.
‘That’s the last truckload.’ Sapper came around the front of the truck and shook Nicholas’s hand. ‘All set to begin loading.’
‘I want to take off before four o’clock tomorrow morning. That will get us into our rendezvous at the optimum time tomorrow evening,’ Jannie cut in. ‘We have a bit of work to do, if we are going to get some sleep before we leave.’ He gestured to the pallets waiting to be loaded. ‘I wanted to get some of the local lads to give a hand with the loading, but Sapper wouldn’t hear of it.’