Zara attached the lid to the flask, looked at him and said, “They’re half a day’s ride away, at best.” She started walking again without waiting for his response.
“We’ll never outrun them on foot,” Sam said, putting his flask away and trying to match her pace.
“No. I’m hoping we won’t have to.”
“You think we’re close to the camels?”
“No. I’m hoping we’re getting further away.”
Sam looked around at the sand in front of them. “Further away?”
“Have you seen tracks recently?” she asked.
“No. I lost sight of them coming down that deep sand dune. I assumed you were still tracking them.”
“I was until I realized we’d never catch up to the camels in time. Even if we did, they looked in a poor condition, certainly unlikely to be able to carry us out.”
“So you decided to make the conscious decision to change direction, hoping your pursuers would follow the heavier camel prints in the sand, instead of slowing down and noticing ours?”
She nodded and said nothing.
“Won’t they see us on the horizon?”
“Might do, if we aren’t quick enough.”
“And are we?”
She nodded again. “They’re going to need to stop and water their beasts before they continue. They’ll wait in the worst heat of the day in the expectation they’ll easily catch us afterwards. As for us, we’ll have to keep walking through the worst of the heat. Can you do that, Mr. Reilly?” She said the last bit as a challenge.
“It looks as though we don’t have much of a choice, do we Dr. Delacroix —”
“Just, Zara,” she corrected him. “I think we’re well beyond surnames whether we like it or not.”
“Pleased to meet you, Zara.” Sam smiled at her, revealing a kind face and handsome blue eyes.
“You won’t be once they catch up with us, which they almost certainly will.”
“Wow, aren’t you full of optimism. Look, Tom and I have been in a few close scrapes over the years — we’re not easily killed. We’ll find a way out of this.”
“This is not the ocean, Mr. Reilly. I think you’ll find the Sahara is far less forgiving than any sea you’ve ever visited.”
“How did you know who I am?” Sam asked.
“I’m an archeologist. I read your dissertation on the Mahogany Ship.”
“What did you think?”
“I think the Sahara is a much larger desert than anything found in Australia, and far more dangerous than you grant it.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sam stopped at the crest of the next highest sand dune. He checked his compass and looked out. At least six other dunes were easily visible in the distance. A small town, barely anything more than a trading post blended with the horizon like a mirage. “How long do you think it will take to reach?”
He watched as Zara made a mental note of their location. Zara had no navigational equipment, no compass, sextant or GPS, but she spoke with the authority of someone who’d traveled the regions for so many years and intrinsically knew her precise location. “I could do it in three days. With you, it might take four. We’ll have to continue at this pace. It will be a hard walk before we reach Mao. That’s considering you and your friend survive the journey at all.”
“Mao?” Sam looked at her face to see if he’d misunderstood her. He vaguely recalled looking at the place on a map earlier, but he and Tom had ruled Mao out as being too far south for the American agent to make the diamond transition, so they had left it. “Are you talking about the desert outcrop deep into Chad and bordering Niger?”
“Yeah.” She smiled at him. “Where did you think I was heading?”
“I don’t know about you, but Tom and I are heading to the township of Bilma. It’s less than fifteen miles to the west of us. Once there, we should be able to pay someone to get us out.”
She laughed. “Who do you think you’re dealing with? Someone inside General Ngige’s rebel army will have a satellite phone. By now, Nigige would have phoned his contacts in Bilma. We go there, we’ll get captured for sure.” She shook her head. “Much better to risk dying out here than getting captured by one of Ngige’s men.”
“Okay, so even if you can make the trek on foot — what is it, two hundred miles?”
“Two-fifty,” she said without pausing to calculate.
“Then what?”
“Then we get the hell out of the Sahara and the whole damned African continent for that matter. I work out what the hell Nostradamus wanted me to do with his damned book or sell it and make my fortune. And you can go back to searching for whatever it really was you were looking for here. Because I’m pretty certain you know better than to go looking for the Golden City of the Garamantes this far south.”
Sam said nothing and watched as Tom caught up with them. He appeared completely unfazed by the exertion of nearly six hours hard walking through the desert. As Sam expected, Tom’s slow and steady method was going to allow him to win the race.
Tom looked at the two of them. “Where do you want to head?”
“We’re working that out now,” Sam said looking at Zara. “She wants to skip Bilma and head further south on to Mao. What do you think?”
“I think crossing a desert on foot with only a few flasks of water is insane.”
“So, you think we head to Bilma?” Sam asked.
Tom shook his head. “No. Crossing the desert on foot is insane, but heading towards Bilma is suicide. There must be close to a thousand men following our trail. Anyone with that much of an army in the area must have people capable of resupplying them. With Bilma being by far the closest, I doubt we’d last the hour, before someone handed us over to the General.” He grinned. “And after you burned out one of his eyes, I can’t image him being very understanding when he gets you.”
Sam looked back at Zara again. “Okay, Mao it is. What direction is it?”
Zara pointed and both Sam and Tom took a compass bearing with their wristwatches.
“All right, I’ll meet you there,” Tom said and continued his slow and steady pace down the next sand dune.
Zara followed, next to Tom, making sure no one followed in each other’s footsteps, so that the trail was hard to follow if Ngige’s men ever picked it up. Sam trailed last, taking one last glance over his shoulder at the sand plume, the only sign of the army gaining on them. It had moved towards the west, and for the first time since they’d left the outlying Bilma oasis, the size had shrunk — which meant their pursuers had taken the bait, and were following the camel’s tracks and not theirs.
Sam grinned and caught up with Zara. “What’s the population of Mao?”
“About nineteen thousand,” Zara replied.
“Won’t Ngige have contacts there, too?”
“Of course he does, but I doubt he’d believe we’d be stupid enough to try and cross the desert on foot.”
“Without anywhere to fill up on water we’ll never make it, will we?”
“I grew up in these deserts.” Her hazel eyes appeared a dark green in the sunlight. They were wide and full of mystery. There was something hardened about her face that Sam couldn’t quite place. It seemed at odds with her natural beauty. There was the sort of resounding confidence, and hardened resolve, of a person who’d experienced some incredible pain for so much of her life, that it had simply become a part of her. She had accepted it as a fact. It was neither good nor bad. Yet, despite that, she was still quite capable of seeing the beauty of some of the most unique experiences of life. Her hardened face was broken by a grin. He’d seen that sort of grin before in the mirror. It meant, whatever happened, she was going to beat it. “This place is full of water if you know where to look.”