The ferry suddenly lurched, a tremor passing over the deck. All at once it rolled sickeningly and people at the higher sections came tumbling down, screaming, hitting the water and thrashing about. Garza was abruptly thrown into the water and Gideon dove in after him, swimming around and calling his name. But the man didn’t surface. Gideon looked around and then realized he had to get some distance from the boat or he’d be sucked under.
With a great roar of air lurching up from below, the ferry slid sideways. Gideon swam as hard as he could away from the boat, away from the screams and heartrending cries—and then, with a great turmoil of water, the prow of the ferry swung straight up into the air, people flung from it into the water on all sides—and the vessel began sliding straight down with a gigantic, horrible slurp and a boiling eruption of bubbles…and was gone.
Gideon treaded water, clothes weighing him down, observing the scene from a distance. The cries did not last long. Almost nobody, it seemed, could swim. Garza was gone, and the flotilla of women and children on the bundles of lumber had drifted off into the darkness of night. There was nothing more he could do. He looked up, found the North Star, and began to swim through the warm water, slowly and steadily, keeping the star on his right, heading for the unknown shore.
14
THE WATER WAS warm and calm, and Gideon saw no sign of sharks. He kept up a slow pace, alternating among breaststroke, backstroke, and an easy crawl, careful not to tire himself out, moving with a current that was already taking him toward shore. After a while, he could see the mountains of the Eastern Desert rising in the west, their outline blotting out the stars, and an hour later he could make out the sound of light surf on a beach. Soon his feet touched sand and he stood up and waded to shore.
He dragged himself up the strand, exhausted. The moon had set, but the starlight was bright enough to cast a faint illumination over the landscape. It was a desolate place: a long, empty beach that curved like a scimitar between low reefs extending into the sea. The water was calm, the gentle waves hissing up the sand. There was no sign of life—not a bush or blade of grass—just sand and rock.
He coughed and spat out the salty taste in his mouth. The image of Garza going down in the dark water overwhelmed him. He couldn’t think about that—somehow, somehow, he told himself, Garza must have survived. How could a man like Garza die: his companion on many missions, a man who had survived again and again, a cat with nine lives? When the ship went down, the deck was covered with items that would have been left floating, from bales of hay to luggage and other things he could cling to. If Garza had managed to claw his way back to the surface, Gideon told himself, surely he would have found something…
Then he remembered the way the doomed ship had slipped so quickly beneath the surface; the boiling eruption of bubbles; the desperate shadows of drowning people calling out for help…
He staggered up the beach, peering into the darkness. “Manuel!” he called. “Manuel!” He saw something rolling in the surf and ran toward it, splashing through the water. A body. He grasped it by the clothing and turned it over—an elderly man, obviously drowned. A little farther on he saw other bodies turning gently in the surf.
“Manuel!”
He stumbled toward them, trying to see their faces in the dim light, turning them over—men, women, and a child. All were drowned. None were Garza.
He continued up the beach to the end, where a jagged reef stuck out into the water. All the bodies seemed concentrated in the one place. He turned and jogged back.
“Manuel!” he screamed, voice hoarse.
He passed the place where he had dragged himself out of the water, and continued south along the beach. Nothing. No survivors, no more bodies.
Exhausted, he could go no farther. He sank to his knees in the sand, gasping for breath. It seemed nobody had made it to shore alive from the disaster, at least not in this area.
He dragged himself beyond the wet sand and lay back, staring up at the stars: a castaway on an unknown shore. After a while he collected his thoughts and recovered his breath. He remembered his money belt and felt his waist, relieved to find it still there, packed with about twenty thousand Egyptian pounds and his passport. But that was all. He had no food and no water, and the rest of their money had gone down with the ferry. It was, he figured, about two in the morning. When the sun rose, the extreme heat and lack of water would become a problem. He would do well to travel at night. He could not afford to rest much longer.
Still he lay there awhile longer, gathering his willpower, and then heaved himself to his feet, swaying momentarily. His mind slowly cleared. If memory served, Manuel’s map had indicated that a road ran along the coastline southward to the town of Shalateen, the last vestige of civilization before the frontier of the Hala’ib Triangle.
He began to walk inland, hoping to intersect the road, the salt water in his clothes drying quickly. The air was almost chilly and he shivered, thinking that he’d better enjoy the cold while it lasted. The ground was flat and sandy, the distant mountains a serrated absence of stars. To his relief, in about a mile he hit the road: a single-lane strip of asphalt running straight as an arrow from north to south.
He paused on the roadway, thinking. If the ferry sank at around one in the morning, they would have traveled about two hundred miles, going at roughly ten knots. That meant Shalateen was another eighty miles to the south, more or less. Too far to walk. But then, he reasoned, he had no other choice but to try.
He headed south, walking down the center of the road. Images crowded into his mind: of the sinking; of Garza being thrown into the water and going under; of all the helpless, screaming, drowning people. That last gesture of Garza’s, making the ultimate sacrifice to save others—and the old grouch had done it instinctively, without even thinking twice. It made his own struggles with a terminal disease, his months of existential angst, feel foolish; trivial; self-centered.
Well, all that was over now. The expedition was finished. There was no way he could continue on his own. What he needed was to push away these heavy thoughts and focus on getting to Shalateen alive. Then he could go back to his cabin in the Jemez Mountains and live out his last few weeks in the place he loved most—to hell with the Phaistos location.
After he’d spent three hours walking, the sky began to lighten in the east. It spread across the sea horizon in a brightening pink band, and soon afterward a yellow sun boiled up over the water, casting an oven-like heat into his face. It was amazing how quickly the temperature passed through the comfort zone to unbearable heat. He had lost his head covering, and the sun as it rose quickly began to feel as if it were pressing down on his head like hot iron, turning the salt in his hair to bitter dust. The mountains rising on his right looked black and as sharp as needles.
The road ran across the sandy coastal plains, absorbing the heat of the sun and radiating it back in shimmering patterns. No cars came, and in the areas where sand had blown across the road there were no tire tracks. It looked like nothing had passed down the road in days.
Around what seemed like noon, Gideon began to feel light-headed. The shore lay about a mile off, and he realized that to stave off heatstroke he should make use of the water. He veered off the road and walked to the shore, arriving at an area of flat reefs and a beach of orange sand. He waded into the water, soaking his clothes and dunking his head, feeling the instant relief of the cool water even if it did little to assuage his rising thirst. As he began walking back toward the road, he heard a distant sound. A car? He began to run. To the north, he could see what looked like two decrepit buses lumbering down the highway, belching diesel smoke.