the same grove of acacia trees at the end of the runway where they had
cached the pallets of dam-building equipment and the yellow tractor on
the inward journey.
Although they were all exhausted by this time, Mek set out his pickets
around the camp. The two women tended the wounded, working by the light
of a small screened fire as they used up the last of Mek's medical
supplies.
Sapper used the one electric torch whose batteries still held a charge,
and he gave Nicholas a discreet screened light while he set up the radio
and strung the aerial.
Nicholas's relief was intense when he opened the fibreglass case and
found that, despite its dunking in the Nile, the rubber gasket that
seated the lid had kept the radio dry.
When he switched on the power, the pilot light lit up. He tuned in to
the shortwave frequency and picked up the early morning commercial
transmission of Radio Nairobi.
Yvonne Chaka Chaka was singing; he liked her voice and her style. But he
quickly switched off the set so as to conserve the battery, and settled
back against the hole of the acacia tree to try and get a little rest
before daylight broke. However, sleep eluded him - his sense of betrayal
and anger were too strong.
uma Nogo watched the sun push its great fiery head out of the surface of
the Nile ahead of them. They were flying only feet above the water to
keep under the Sudanese military radar trans missions. He knew there was
a radar station at Khartoum that might be able to pick them up, even at
this range.
Relations with the Sudanese were strained, and he could expect a quick
and savage response if they discovered that he had violated their
border.
Nogo was a confused and worried man. Since the d6bdcle in the gorge of
the Dandera river everything had run strongly against him. He had lost
all his allies. Until they were gone he had not realized how heavily he
had come to rely on both Helm and von Schiller. Now he was on his own
and he had already made many mistakes.
But despite all this he was determined to pursue the fugitives, and to
run them down no matter how far he had to intrude into Sudanese
territory. Over the past weeks it had gradually dawned'upon Nogo, mostly
by eavesdropping on the conversations of von Schiller and the jr
Egyptian, that Harper and Mek Nimmur were in possession of treasure of
immense value. His imagination could barely asp the enormity of it, but
he had heard others speak of gr tens of millions of dollars. Even a
million dollars was a sum so vast that his mind had difficulty
assimilating it, but he I i had a vague inkling as to what it might mean
in earthly terms, of the possessions and women and luxuries it could
buy.
Equally slowly it had dawned upon him that, now that Von Schiller and
Helm were gone, this treasure could be his alone; there was no longer
any other person to stand in his way, other than the fleeing shufta led
by Mek Nimmur and the Englishman. And he had overwhelming force on his
side and the helicopter at his command.
