It was Leilani.
He grabbed her and shoved her forward with the next wave, and they surged through into the calmer section of water inside the protective ring of the reef.
Kurt swam hard. Leilani did the same. When his feet hit the sand, he dug in and waded forward, one hand on Leilani’s life jacket, dragging her with him.
They made it out of the surf and collapsed on the white sand, far enough down the beach that the waves still washed up against them.
Breathing was almost the limit of what he could handle at the moment, but he managed to say a few words: “You all right?”
She nodded, her chest heaving and falling, as his was.
Kurt looked around. They were alone. “Ishmael?”
He saw nothing, heard no response.
“Ishmael!”
“There!” Leilani said, pointing.
He lay facedown in the foam as the waves washed him up onto the sand and then dragged him backward.
Kurt got up, stumbled in Ishmael’s direction and crashed back into the sea. He grabbed Ishmael and dragged him to shore.
Ishmael began coughing and choking and spitting up water. A brief look told Kurt he would survive.
Before he could celebrate, a pair of long shadows fell over Kurt from behind. He recognized the shapes of rifles and burly men in the surreal shadows painted on the sand.
He turned. Several men stood with the sun to their backs. They seemed to be wearing ragged uniforms and helmets and carrying heavy bolt-action rifles.
As they approached, he saw them better. They were dark-skinned men, looking almost like Aboriginal Australians but with Polynesian features as well. Their rifles were old M1 carbines with five-shot clips and their uniforms and helmets looked like U.S. Marines circa 1945. Several more of them stood among the trees at the top of the beach.
Kurt was too exhausted and too surprised to do much more than watch as one of the men approached him. The man held the long rifle casually but wore a look of utter seriousness on his face.
“Welcome to Pickett’s Island,” he said in deeply accented English. “In the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I make you my prisoner.”
CHAPTER 44
FROM JOE’S PERSPECTIVE EITHER THE DOCKING PROCEDURE for the ferry was overly complicated or the boat and its captain were ill suited to the task. A full hour after the bay doors had been opened and the ship had been shunted back and forth a dozen times, they finally bumped against a pier.
Joe remained huddled in the rear of the flatbed. The drivers and crewmen had clambered into their rigs long before the ship stopped and now began firing up the big trucks. For another few minutes they idled their engines, and despite the open doors Joe was sure he would pass out from the diesel fumes before they left.
At last, with a headache pounding inside his skull like a jackhammer, the trucks began to roll. One by one they pulled out of the cargo hold and onto the pier. Joe didn’t risk a peek until he felt they were away from the waterfront. But he was surprised at how quickly they were moving only minutes after leaving the ferry.
He crept past the barrels to the back end of the truck. Since his truck had been the first into the hold, it became the last one out. They were now the tail-end Charlie of the convoy, which meant he could look out without fear of being spotted.
He lifted the tarp a few inches, saw gray-weathered macadam flying out behind them as the trucks flew along a road at speeds they’d never come close to in Yemen.
It was almost night yet again after twenty hours on the boat. Joe saw desert terrain in all directions. It looked remarkably like he’d arrived back in Yemen.
“Didn’t we just leave all this?” he mumbled.
There were differences of course, primarily the paved road. There was more vegetation and the occasional road sign. There had been none out in the deserts of Yemen. As signs whipped past, Joe tried to read them, but he could see only the back side of those on his side of the road, and those meant for drivers heading the opposite way were lit only by the big trailer’s taillights. The dim red glow was not bright enough for Joe to see much before the sign went out of range.
All he noticed was the lettering. It was done in the swirling calligraphy of Arabic and also the block letters of English, the mere presence of which meant he was much closer to civilization than he’d been in days.
As Joe waited for more signs, the night grew darker and the landscape became monotonous. The only thing that changed was the scent. Joe began to smell dust and moisture and the desert wet with rain. It reminded him of Santa Fe, where he’d grown up, when the dry season ended. Looking up, he realized the sky was a curtain of starless black.
Moments later, rain began splattering the truck and the road around him. Joe heard thunder in the distance. As the trucks drove on, the shower intensified and the air grew cool and damp. To Joe’s surprise it wasn’t a passing shower but a steady soaking rain that continued to fall as the convoy pounded out the miles. Before long the tarp above him was soaked and dripping.
“Rain in the desert,” Joe whispered to himself. “I wonder if this is good news or bad.”
As the rain fell, they passed another group of signs. As luck would have it, a car was traveling in the opposite direction at almost the same instant. Its high beams cut through the rain and lit up a sign on the far side of the road long enough for Joe to read it.
The weathered blue placard was sandblasted and bent, but the words were clear enough.
“Marsa Alam,” Joe said as he read the sign. “Fifty kilometers.”
The name was familiar. Marsa Alam was the name of an Egyptian port on the Red Sea. It lay behind them. It must have been where the ferry tied up and the trucks disembarked. That meant they were three-quarters of the way from Cairo to the Sudanese border and only a couple of hours from Luxor.
“I’m in Egypt,” Joe whispered, quickly realizing what that meant. “These guys are headed for the Aswan Dam.”
CHAPTER 45
RAIN CONTINUED TO PELT THE CONVOY OF JINN’S TRUCKS as they rumbled west on the highway from Marsa Alam. With the moisture, the natural cooling of the desert at night and the wind swirling around the back of the truck as it raced along, Joe began to shiver.
At first he welcomed it as a relief from his time in Yemen and in the hot box of the ferry, but as the night wore on, the cold began to seep into his bones, and Joe pulled the flap shut to keep the wind and the mist from the truckbed.
It was four hours overland from Marsa Alam to Aswan, but after three hours the convoy began to slow as they came out of the open desert and into the swath of civilization that bordered the Nile.
The trucks crossed the Nile on a modern bridge and entered the town of Edfu on the west bank of the river. As Joe looked around, he saw multistory apartment blocks and storefronts and government buildings. It wasn’t exactly the Beltway, more like a dusty version of East Berlin in the desert, but it was civilization.
The truck slowed further, and Joe hoped they’d come to a red light, but they found a roundabout instead, turning a three-quarter circle before heading north in a straight line once again.
“It had to be a roundabout,” Joe mumbled.
He figured they might end up back on another highway at any moment and that he’d be in Aswan before he
