especially for a primitive culture, operating in a hostile region.”
“That’s the fiendish beauty of the thing. Remember how I said the Sudd spreads a little every year? Narmer knew that. He could build his tomb on what was then the edge of the Sudd, keeping its location secret. There’s a vast system of volcanic caves just below the surface of the Sudd valley. After his death, the swamp, expanding ever outward, would hide all traces of his tomb. Nature would do the job for him.” Rush’s face took on a troubled look. “Almost too well.”
“What do you mean?”
“You heard Stone. The site is up and running, smooth as clockwork. All the experts are in place, the technicians and archaeologists and mechanics and the rest. Only…” He hesitated. “Only the precise location proved a little more difficult to find than Stone’s experts assumed.” Rush sighed. “Of course there is the usual need for a low profile-not as much as on a typical site, of course, but it’s there nonetheless. And it’s the worst time of the year to work, too: the rainy season. It makes the Sudd that much more difficult and unpleasant and unhealthy a place to work.”
Logan remembered Stone’s words: We are under some significant time pressures. “So why the frantic pace? Why not just wait for the dry season? The tomb has sat there for five thousand years-why not another six months?”
As if in answer, Rush stood and beckoned Logan to follow him out of the saloon. They regained the deck and walked carefully forward to the bow. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, the pitiless white ball now an angry orange. The Nile spread out from the prow in thick undulating lines. The cry of waterbirds was giving way to strange trumpetings from either bank.
Rush spread his hands. Glancing ahead, Logan saw a range of hills rising on both sides of the river, widening to form a vast amphitheater ahead of them, marching on into the distance where sight failed. “You see that?” Rush asked. “Beyond those is the Af’ayalah Dam. Already it’s nearing completion on this, the Sudanese side of the frontier. In five months, all this-everything, the whole useless godforsaken place-will be underwater.”
Logan peered into the gathering gloom. Now he understood the hurry.
As he peered thoughtfully into the water ahead, he began to notice bracken floating in the lazy current. First, just bundles of papyrus reeds. But then the reeds began forming small islands, attaching themselves to promontories of mud that rose out of the river like miniature volcanoes.
“The dam provides us with a great cover story,” Rush went on. “We’re posing as a team researching the ecosystem, documenting it before it’s gone forever. But that layer of phoniness costs extra money, and, again, the longer it continues, the more difficult the deception becomes.”
The boat began to slow as the debris grew thicker. Now Logan could see huge logs, twisted together as if in titanic struggle, moss and rotting weeds hanging from their flanks like so much webbing. A stench of decay and overripe verdure began rising around them. A door in the superstructure opened and two mates appeared, each carrying a strange, harpoonlike weapon attached to pneumatic hoses. They took up positions in the platforms on each side of the bow, leaning out over the water, devices at the ready.
Suddenly, a floodlight snapped on in the forecastle, sending a shaft of surreal blue light ahead of the bow. The turbine throttled back still further. A light rain had begun to fall. The vegetation was growing ever thicker, a nearly impenetrable carpet of weeds and papyrus and branches and vile muck that now surrounded them. The men in the bow began using their pneumatic devices to violently push the heavier logs and clots of fibrous matting out of the way. Their machines made deep, ugly snuck, snuck noises. Ahead, in the narrow lane of open water the boat was following, Logan caught sight of a small light, bobbing in the swamp, flashing quickly in the reflected glow of the vessel’s searchlight. One of the mates fished it out as they passed.
“The daily search chopper drops beacons as it charts a fresh path through this hell,” Rush explained. “It’s the only way for the boats to get through.”
They crawled forward into an ever-thicker tangle of logs and bracken. The noises from the riverbanks-if indeed there were still any banks to be found in this morass-had all but ceased. It was as if they were now surrounded by an infinite riot of flora, dead and dying, all wedged into one colossal tangle. They waited in the bow, barely speaking, as the boat followed the line of flashing beacons. Now and then the path seemed to Logan to lead to a dead end; but each time, after making a blind turn, the fetid tangle of vegetation widened once again. Frequently, the boat had to use its own superstructure to push aside the oozing warp and weft.
At one point they reached a spot through which there was no clear passage. Up in the pilothouse, Plowright, the captain, goosed the turbine; the vessel lifted bodily into the air and forced its way over the matted surface- twenty-five, fifty feet forward-with a horrible clanging and scraping along the underside. It became clearer than ever to Logan why the boat’s motive power, the huge fan, had been mounted atop the deck: any normal propeller would have been snagged in a minute. The two mates leaned forward over the bow, plying their pneumatic prods. The cloying heat, the stench of rotting vegetation, grew overpowering.
“It’s been a long day,” Rush said suddenly, out of the fading light. “Tomorrow, you’ll meet some of the key members. And you’ll get what I think you’ve been waiting for the most.”
“What’s that?”
“The last piece of the puzzle. The one that answers your other question: why you, of all people, are here.”
Here? Logan glanced ahead. And then, quite suddenly, he understood.
The boat had made a sharp turn through a vast screen of knotted limbs and papyrus, and now a most unusual sight greeted Logan’s eyes. Ahead, floating on at least a half-dozen vast pontoon platforms, lay what appeared to be a small city. Lights twinkled from beneath countless mosquito nets. Canvas tarps the size of football fields were erected over the structures, shielding them from the sky. There was a faint hum of generators, barely louder than the whine of insects that hovered and dove in clouds around their boat. It was an outrageous sight, here in this most remote and dreadful of spots: an oasis of civilization that might just as well have been set down on one of Jupiter’s moons.
They had arrived.
8
The airboat slowed to a crawl, gave a blast of its horn. Almost at once, a rectangle of lights came on beneath one of the huge tarps. Logan watched, fascinated despite his weariness, as a bank of mosquito netting was drawn back from beneath the tarp like a curtain from a theater stage. Slowly, they glided beneath the tarp and into a covered marina. To their left was another huge airboat identical to the one they were on; to their right, moored to short, floating piers, were numerous smaller craft and Jet Skis.
Plowright maneuvered the vessel into its slip, and somebody in shorts and a flowered shirt trotted down the pier to tie them up. With a whisper, the external netting was drawn back into place. Logan glanced at it: beyond the glow and sparkle of the marina lights, the Sudd was a wall of blackness.
Dr. Rush led the way down the gangplank and onto the pier. “This way,” he said, ushering Logan onto a walkway made of stamped metal, then through a doorway and down a long, tunnel-like floating pier and onto what seemed to be an immense, bargelike structure covered by another vast sheet of what appeared to be opaque Mylar, almost in the fashion of a circus tent.
“Seven p.m., local time,” Rush added. Even at this hour the air was sticky and oppressive. From the darkness beyond the netting, Logan could hear, amid the patter of raindrops, a strange fugal drone of insects, frogs, and other less-identifiable creatures.
He looked around. “Does this thing have a name?”
Rush laughed. “Nothing official. Most people just call it the Station-after Heart of Darkness, I suppose. The six primary floating structures, the ‘wings,’ that make up the base are color coded, and they’re referred to by their colors. The one we’re entering now is Green. It’s where the back-office work of the expedition is done: interfacing with suppliers, transportation coordination, vessel and equipment maintenance, that sort of thing. It’s also the, ah, public face of the expedition-such as it is.”
They were now walking down a narrow passageway, rather grimy and scuffed, studded with open doors. It was cooler inside this enclosed structure, and Logan noticed that the walls were, in fact, painted green. He peered
