the offer, and pushed into the opening beside him.
'There's an obstruction,' she cried in disappointment.
'Did Taita do that deliberately?'
might have,' Nicholas gave his opinion. 'Hard to tell.
A lot of this rubble and flotsam has been sucked in from the main flow
of the river, but he might have filled the tunnel behind him as he
pulled out.'
'It's going to take a tremendous amount of work just to clear it enough
to find out where this passage leads to.' Royan's voice had lost its
ring of excitement.
'I am afraid it is,' Nicholas agreed. 'We are going to have to clear
every bit of this rubbish by hand, and there won It be time for the
niceties of formal archaeological excavation. We are just going to rip
it out.' He clambered back out of the coffer, and reached back to hand
her up the bank. 'Well, at least we have the-floodlights he added, 'We
can keep the men working in shifts, night and day, until we get
through.'
hey have dammed the Dandera river,' said Nahoot Ouddabi, and Gotthold
von Schiller stared at him in astonishment.
'Dammed the river? Are you certain?'he demanded.
'Yes, Herr von Schiller. We have a report from our spy in Harper's camp.
He has over three hundred men working in the gorge. That is not all. He
has air-dropped huge amounts of equipment and supplies. It is like
a.military operation. Our spy tells us that he even has an earth, moving
machine, some sort of tractor, which he has brought in.'
Von Schiller looked across the table at Jake Helm for confirmation, and
Helm nodded. 'Yes, Herr von Schiller.
That is true. Harper must have spent a large amount of money. The air
charter alone could have cost him fifty grand.'
Von Schiller felt the first stirrings of real passion since the 'Urgent
satellite message had summoned him from Frankfurt. He had flown directly
to Addis Ababa, where the jet Ranger had been waiting to carry him to
the Pegasus base camp on the escarpment above the Abbay gorge.
If this was true, and he did not doubt Helm's word, then Harper was on
to something of enormous importance.
He looked out of the window of the Quonset hut to where flowed down the
valley below the base camp.
the Dandera It was a large river. To dam that volume of water would be
an expensive and difficult project in this remote and primitive
situation - not a project to be taken on lightly without the prospect of
substantial reward.
He felt a reluctant admiration for the Englishman's achievement. 'Show
me where he has placed his dam!' he ordered, and Helm came around the
table to stand beside him. Von Schiller was standing on his block, and
their eyes were on the same level.
Helm bent over the satellite photograph and carefully marked in the site
of the dam. They both studied it for a minute, and then von Schiller
asked, 'What do you make of it, Helm?'
Helm shook his head, hunching it down on his bulllike shoulders. 'I can
only guess.'
