Clive Cussler - Sahara

The desert held its secret well. The sands became Kitty Mannock's burial shroud. The enigma of her flight to nowhere would not be solved for another half a century.

FRENZY

May 5, 1996

Asselar Oasis, Mali, Africa

After traveling through the desert for days or weeks, seeing no animals, meeting no humans, civilization, no matter how tiny or primitive, comes as a stunning surprise. To the eleven people in the five Land Rovers, plus five tour driver/guides, the sight of a man-made habitat came as a great relief. Hot and unwashed, tired after a week of driving across pure desolation, the adventurous tourists on the Backworld Explorations' twelve-day Across the Sahara Safari were only too happy to see humans and find enough water for a refreshing bath.

They sighted the village of Asselar sitting in barren isolation in the central Sahara region of the African nation of Mali. A sprawl of mud houses clustered around a well in the dry bottom of what must have been an ancient riverbed. Scattered around the outskirts were the crumbling ruins of a hundred or more abandoned houses and beyond them the low banks that dropped below the alluvial plain. From a distance the village was almost impossible to see, so well did the timeworn buildings merge with the austere and colorless landscape.

"Well, there she is," pointed Major Ian Fairweather, the safari leader, to the tired and dusty tourists who exited the Land Rovers and grouped around him. "You'd never know to look at her that Asselar was once a cultural crossroads of western Africa. For five centuries it was an important watering hole for the great trade and slave caravans that passed through to the north and east."

"Why did it go into decline?" asked a comely Canadian woman in halter-top and brief shorts.

"A combination of wars and conquests by the Moors and the French, the abolition of slavery, but mostly because the trade routes moved south and west toward the seacoasts. The deathblow came about forty years ago when its wells began to dry up. The only flowing well that still supports the town has been dug nearly 50 meters deep."

"Not exactly a metropolitan paradise," muttered a stout man in a Spanish accent.

Major Fairweather forced a smile. A tall, lean ex-Royal Marine who prodigiously puffed on a long filtered cigarette, he spoke in clipped, seemingly rehearsed tones. "Only a few Tuareg families that gave up the nomadic tradition reside in Asselar now. They mainly subsist on small herds of goats, patches of sandy soil irrigated by hand from the central village well, and a few handfuls of gemstones gleaned from the desert that they polish and carry by camel to the city of Gao where they sell them as souvenirs."

A London barrister, impeccably dressed in khaki safari suit and pith helmet, pointed an ebony cane at the village. "Looks abandoned to me. I seem to recall your brochure stating that our tour group would be `enthralled by the romance of desert music and native dancing under flickering campfires of Asselar."'

"I'm sure our advanced scout has made every arrangement for your comfort and enjoyment," Fairweather assured him with airy confidence. He gazed for a moment at the sun setting beyond the village. "It will be dark soon. We'd better move on into the village."

"Is there a hotel there?" asked the Canadian lady.

Fairweather stifled a pained look. "No, Mrs. Lansing, we camp in the ruins just beyond the town."

A collective groan went up from the tourists. They had hoped for a soft bed with private bathrooms. Luxuries Asselar had probably never known.

The group reboarded the vehicles, then drove down a worn trail into the river valley and onto the main road leading through the village. The closer they came the more difficult it was to visualize a glorious past. The streets were narrow alleyways and composed of sand. It seemed a dead town that reeked of defeat. No light was seen in the dusk, no dog barked a greeting. They saw no sign of life in any of the mud buildings. It was as though the inhabitants had packed up and vanished into the desert.

Fairweather began to feel uneasy. Something was clearly wrong. There was no sign of his advance scout. For an instant he caught a glimpse of a large four-legged animal scurrying into a doorway. But it seemed so fleeting, he shrugged it off as a shadow from the moving Land Rovers.

His merry band of clients would be grumbling tonight, he thought. Damn those advertising people for overexaggerating the allure of the desert. "An opportunity to experience a once-in-a-lifetime expedition across the nomadic sands of the Sahara," he recited under his breath. He'd have wagered a year's pay the copywriter had never ventured past the Dover coast.

They were almost 80 kilometers from the Trans-Sahara Motor Track and a good 240 from the Niger River city of Gao. The safari carried more than enough food, water, and fuel for the remainder of the journey, so Fairweather kept open an option to bypass Asselar should an unforeseen problem arise. The safety of Backworld Explorations' clients came first, and in twenty-eight years they had yet to lose one, unless they counted the retired American plumber who teased a camel and was kicked in the head for his stupidity.

Fairweather began to wonder why he saw no goats or camels. Nor did he see any footprints in the sandy streets, only strange claw marks and round indentations that traveled in parallel as though twin logs were dragged about. The small tribal houses, built of stone and covered with a reddish mud, appeared more rundown and decayed since Fairweather had passed through on the last safari not more than two months ago.

Something was definitely amiss. Even if for some odd reason the villagers had deserted the area, his advance scout should have met them. In all the years they had driven the Sahara together, Ibn Hajib had never failed him. Fairweather decided to allow his charges to rest for a short time at the village well and rinse off, before continuing some distance into the desert and making camp. Better keep a guarded eye, he thought as he pulled his old Royal Marine Patchett submachine gun from a compartment between the seats and tucked it upright between his knees. On the muzzle he threaded an Invicta silencer, giving the weapon the look of an extended pipe with a long curved shell clip protruding from it.

"Something wrong?" asked Mrs. Lansing, who along with her husband rode in Fairweather's Land Rover.

"Just a precaution to scare away beggars," Fairweather lied.

He stopped the four-wheel-drive and walked back, warning his drivers to keep a sharp lookout for anything suspicious. Then he returned and drove on, leading the column to the center of the town and passing through the narrow and sandy streets that were laid out in no particular order. At last he stopped under a lonely date palm that stood in the middle of a spacious marketplace near a circular stone well about 4 meters in diameter.

Fairweather studied the sandy ground about the well in the last light of the day. It was surrounded by the same unusual tracks he'd spotted in the streets. He stared down into the well. He barely saw a tiny reflection deep in the bowels of the sandstone. He recalled that the water was quite high in mineral content that gave it a metallic taste and tinted it a milky green. Yet, it had quenched the thirst of many lives, human and animal, over the centuries. Whether it was hygienic for the uninitiated stomachs of his clients did not concern Fairweather. He merely intended for them to use it to rinse the sweat and dust off their bodies, not drink it.

He instructed his drivers to stand guard and then showed the tourists how to hoist a pigskin bucket of water by use of an ancient hand winch tied to a frayed rope. The exotic image of desert music and dancing by flickering campfires was quickly forgotten as they laughed and splashed like children in a lawn sprinkler on a hot summer afternoon. The men stripped to the waist and slapped water on their bare skin. The women were more concerned with washing their hair.