“Take that laptop and get everyone to meet us there,” Kurt said. He looked at Tautog. “Get your men up here. We’re leaving by air.”
“Not to the boats?” Tautog asked.
“The boats won’t help us now.”
Tautog went to the balcony and began yelling to his men, waving for them to come up. Marchetti grabbed a microphone and began an island-wide broadcast through a series of loudspeakers.
Kurt noticed two small radios on the flat part of the control console. He grabbed them and then shoved Jinn toward the elevator doors. “Let’s go.”
Moments later Kurt and his growing entourage stood on the lighted helipad suspended between the two pyramid buildings. From this vantage point the sea around Aqua-Terra looked more like solid ground covered with millions of beetles. They reflected the glare of Aqua-Terra’s floodlights in a smoky charcoal color. Streams of them could be seen coming inland like long, probing fingers.
“They look thick enough to walk on,” Paul mentioned.
“I wouldn’t try it,” Kurt said.
A hangar door opened in the side of the starboard pyramid, and Marchetti’s men began rolling one of the airships out. Two others waited behind it.
“How many people can each one hold?” Kurt asked.
“Eight. Nine at most,” Marchetti said.
“Dump out everything you don’t need,” Kurt said. “See if you can lighten the loads.”
Marchetti went to supervise. Paul and Gamay went with him. Leilani stepped over to Zarrina, who was standing against the edge of the helipad with Jinn.
“So you pretended to be me,” she said.
“I wouldn’t get too close,” Kurt warned.
“You’re a weak little woman,” Zarrina said. “That was the hardest part to play.”
Kurt grabbed Leilani as she went to slap Zarrina, pulling her away a safe distance.
“She’s baiting you,” Kurt said. “Go help the others.”
Leilani pouted but did as he asked.
“It’s too bad you didn’t try more to comfort me,” Zarrina said. “You might have enjoyed it.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Kurt said.
Beside her, Jinn fumed.
Tautog greeted the last of his men and shepherded them toward the hangar. “What about the prisoners?” one of them asked.
Kurt looked at the sadistic leader. “What’s it going to be, Jinn? Are you going to leave your men to be eaten alive?”
“Whether they live or die means nothing to me,” he said. “But perhaps you’d like to go get them since you care for them so much.”
“No,” Kurt said, “I’m not sending anyone down for them.”
“Then you are as ruthless as me.”
Kurt glared at Jinn. The man disgusted him. But Kurt wouldn’t risk one good person for the lives of those down below.
“This is what’s going to happen,” Kurt said. “We’re going to get on those airships and fly away and you’re going to be left behind to die in a manner you justly deserve. Your power play does nothing but murder your own men and take the two of you with them in a slow-motion suicide.”
He took the laptop, placed it on the rough surface of the helipad and shoved it toward Jinn.
Jinn stared at it but did nothing more.
Zarrina seemed nervous. She bit her lip, hesitated and then spoke. “Type in the code,” she said to Jinn.
Behind them the first two airships were ready, their pods inflated to full volume, their fans powering up. The third was right behind them.
“What’s the word?” Kurt asked Marchetti without turning.
“If we deploy the air anchors and get up to speed before we go off the edge, I think we can carry eleven,” Marchetti said. “I think.”
“Put twelve on each.”
“But I’m not sure—”
Kurt silenced him with a glance and looked Marchetti in the eye. “I’m going to need your help,” he said, handing him one of the small radios. “Now, what’s the word?”
“Twelve,” Marchetti said. “We can do twelve … I hope.”
“That’s only thirty-six,” Gamay said, calculating quickly. “There are thirty-seven of us.”
Jinn smiled at the numbers. “I suppose someone is staying behind to die.”
Kurt replied without blinking. “I am.”
CHAPTER 56
JOE WENT INTO THE WATER OF LAKE NASSER IN AN OLD-school diving getup. It wasn’t exactly the old brass helmeted, Mark V salvage gear the U.S. had stopped using shortly after World War Two, but it came close.
A thirty-pound helmet of stainless steel fit over his head and onto the shoulders of the suit. A fifty-pound belt strapped around his waist and heavy, weighted boots made taking a few steps a Frankenstein-like walk.
An air hose, a steel cable and a high-pressure line for pumping the Ultra-Set were attached to the shoulder mounts. They made him feel like a marionette, but once he hit the water Joe was glad for every ounce of weight and the security of the steel cable.
The weight kept him balanced in the swirling current. The cable, which was attached to a dive boat above him, was the only way to ascend with so much weight on. If it snapped, he would sink to the bottom like a stone and probably be excavated in a thousand years or so, only to baffle future archaeologists.
Joe had no desire to be part of the Valley of the Dead. All he wanted to do was to stop the dam from being washed away.
If he and the supervisor were right, the main breach was containable, and while disastrous, especially for those close to the dam, it was not cataclysmic. It would widen, perhaps to the full width of the dam, but the clay core and the gentle slope of the structure would keep it from eroding any deeper.
Eventually, like water spilling out of an overflowing bathtub, the water level in the lake would drop to a level matching the depth of the breach and the flow would slow and eventually stop.
But if the microbots were burrowing into the clay core from the tunnel, the incredible pressure of the water would weaken the core itself. It would eventually fail. A bigger, deeper, more jagged breach would form and there would be nothing to keep the dam from total collapse.
As Joe’s feet touched down on the sloping surface below, the speaker in his helmet crackled.
“Barely,” Joe said.
Joe figured differently. Within twenty minutes, the breach would be too close for either he or the boat to fight the effects of the current.
“I never wanted to go over the falls in a barrel,” he said, “and I still don’t. Let’s get this done. Start pumping the dye.”
A pump above on the dive boat began to rumble, and a secondary line attached to the Ultra-Set hose pressurized.
Down below, a high-pressure spray of fluorescent orange particles began to jet out of the hose. Joe switched
