Beside him, Joe had been tackled as well.
“Pick them up!” Jinn shouted. “Throw them in!”
Kurt struggled mightily, but Jinn’s men had him by his arms and legs. They carried him toward the well like a spectator crowd surfing at a rock concert.
Joe was faring no better. One guard had him in a half nelson, pushing him forward, about to shove him over the edge.
As Kurt reached the well, he shook a leg free and kicked one of the men in the face. The man fell back, caught his ankle on the low adobe wall and tumbled backward, headfirst, into the well. His scream echoed for a second and then abruptly stopped.
The group holding Kurt wobbled like a table on three legs and then heaved him toward the opening.
As they released Kurt, he twisted, saw the low wall and the small A-frames made of iron jutting up from it. He threw his arms out, caught it and held on.
A second later Joe was shoved into the pit. He grabbed Kurt’s legs, perhaps instinctively.
The added weight pulled Kurt down until only a death grip on the scalding-hot bars held them up.
A shadow moved in front of the setting sun.
Jinn held a baton in his hand. He swung it back and whipped it forward toward Kurt’s fingers. Before it hit, Kurt let go.
He and Joe dropped straight down. They fell twenty feet, crashed into a pile of sloping sand and slid another ten feet to the bottom.
The impact jarred Kurt, but the slope of the sand and a pair of decaying bodies acted like an air bag of sorts, absorbing much of the impact. He ended up in an awkward position, facedown against the floor.
Stunned and all but knocked cold, Kurt forced his eyes open. Joe lay a foot to the left, piled up against the wall like a rag doll thrown in the corner. His arms were under him, one leg was bent up at an odd angle. He wasn’t moving.
A sound above caught his ear, Kurt didn’t dare move, but from the corner of his eye he saw Jinn leaning over the edge of the well. A group of shots rang out, and dirt and chinks of rock flew around the bottom of the well. Something sharp cut Kurt’s leg, and a bullet or rock fragment hit inches in front of his face, kicking dirt into the air.
Kurt held still, not flinching, not moving, not even breathing.
He heard shouting in Arabic and distorted words from far above. A flashlight came on, pointed down the well. The beam danced around them almost hypnotically. Kurt remained still. He wanted them to see him as nothing more than another dead body at the bottom of the well.
More words were exchanged. The light snapped off and the faces disappeared.
A minute later the sound of engines starting up echoed down the gullet of the well. Kurt listened to the vehicles driving off until he could no longer hear them. He and Joe had been left for dead. At least for the moment they weren’t, but if they didn’t get out of the well, it was just a matter of time.
CHAPTER 26
GAMAY WALKED INTO THE MAKESHIFT LAB TO CHECK ON Marchetti. She found him hunched over an experiment that involved a heat lamp, several temperature probes and a tall, narrow beaker full of water, the top layer of which looked murky.
“Am I right to assume there are microbots in that beaker?”
Marchetti sat straight up. “Oh, Mrs. Trout,” he said, holding his chest. “You snuck up on me.”
“Not really. You’re just very into your work.”
“Yes,” he said, tinkering with one of the probes and checking a display.
“Care to tell me what it is?”
“I’m just trying to figure something out,” he said, sounding as if he’d rather not talk about it.
She sat across from him and stared into his eyes. “Why is it men don’t like to share their hunches?” she asked. “Are you so afraid to be wrong?”
“I’ve been wrong a million times,” Marchetti said. “I’m more afraid to be right, actually.”
“About what?”
“I have a hunch as to what might be occurring out there.”
“And yet you’re keeping it a secret,” she said. “Like most men I’ve known, you want proof before you speak, or at least a reasonable amount of corroborating evidence.”
She waved her hand over the setup. “This looks like an attempt to get that to me.”
“You really have a marvelous sense of intuition, Mrs. Trout. I bet Paul can’t get away with anything.”
“He’s learned not to try.”
“A wise man,” Marchetti said, offering a sheepish grin. “You’re right of course. I have a hunch that the microbots are indeed responsible for the temperature anomaly. I remember hearing of a plan to stop global warming. It involved years of continuous rocket launches and the dispersal of millions upon millions of reflective discs in orbit around the planet or perhaps only over the poles, I really can’t recall for certain. These reflective discs would block a portion of the sunlight, reflecting it back into space. A small percentage. Just enough to counteract the effect we’ve begun feeling.”
She remembered hearing something about it.
“Obviously there were huge problems with the idea,” Marchetti continued, “but the concept intrigued me. I’ve often wondered if it would really work.”
“There are precedents,” Gamay said. “After large volcanic eruptions, the ash in the air spreads around the globe, doing much the same thing as these discs you’re talking about. Famines in the sixth century have been blamed on ash dimming the sun’s output and causing crop yields to fall. Eighteen fifteen has been called the year without a summer because the average temperatures around the globe were surprisingly low. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia is the prime suspect.”
“I feel a similar principle may be at work here,” Marchetti said. “Not in the atmosphere but in the sea.”
He pointed to the experiment. “I’ve attempted to re-create a solar warming-and-cooling cycle in this water sample. But there’s a problem with my theory. Even with the murky layer of bots at the top, it behaves almost like regular salt water.”
“Meaning?”
“The microbots absorb some of the heat, but nowhere close to what would be required to cool the water in the manner we’ve seen.”
“How large is the difference?”
“Very substantial,” he said. “Close to ninety percent deviation. And that’s a lot in anyone’s book.”
“You mean in your experiment you found—”
“Only ten percent of the cooling we’ve recorded out there in the open ocean. Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
She looked around. She didn’t have to ask if he’d done the experiment right or if he wanted to try it again. He’d been secluded up here for hours, and he’d been an engineer before becoming a computer programmer. She guessed he knew what he was doing. Besides, she saw six other setups that looked identical to the one in front of them. She assumed they were controls.
“So what does that mean?” she asked. “And this time pretend you’re a woman and share.”
“There are two possibilities,” he said. “Either something else is responsible for the majority of the cooling or the microbots are cooling the ocean through some other process or mechanism that we’ve yet to observe or discover.”
“All the more reason to keep sailing toward them,” she said.
“I’m afraid so,” he replied.
Before Gamay could say anything more, an alarm began to sound throughout the lab. It was sharp, piercing, and accompanied by flashing strobes.
“What’s happening?”
