would be up to the diplomats to figure out the best solution.
Although the head of the Shu’ta Valley was only a half mile from the shoreline of Lake Nasser, Mercer decided to use a boat rather than an aircraft to reach the sunken tomb. They needed to bring a lot of equipment and he didn’t trust any of the charter flight companies to keep their activities secret.
Booker had gone out first thing this morning to find them a suitable vessel.
“What is it?” Mercer asked.
Booker smiled broadly. “Hope you’re keeping a running tab on what the government owes you ’cause the only thing that would work for us is a Riva.”
Mercer was familiar with the Italian luxury boat builder and could just imagine the rental price. “How bad?”
“She’s a sixty-foot Mercurius. Sleeps four and has a compressor for refilling scuba tanks, provided extra, of course. According to the lease agent she has a top speed of forty knots and was only available because the German couple who had rented it this week ran into a little difficulty when the husband found the wife in bed with his business partner. And because we don’t want to use the owner’s crew, the price is a paltry two grand a day.”
Cali winced. “Admiral Lasko will need to be awfully creative explaining this during his next budget hearing.”
Mercer slipped on his sunglasses. “When can we leave?”
“They’re topping the tanks right now.”
They checked out of the hotel, putting the three rooms on Mercer’s Amex, and took the ferry to Aswan’s riverfront corniche, where hawkers immediately tried selling them statues, postcards, T-shirts, and assorted tourist geegaws. There was a taxi stand near the main post office. Ten minutes later they were passing the Aswan High Dam, a two-mile-long concrete behemoth that held back the waters of the Nile.
Built at a cost of a billion dollars in the 1960s, it was financed partly by the Soviet Union in a political ploy to curry favor in the region and partly from revenue generated by the Egyptians’ seizure of the Suez Canal. To make way for the fifteen-hundred-square-mile lake it would create, nearly a hundred thousand Nubians in northern Sudan and southern Egypt were relocated, often to unsustainable lands. Twenty ancient temples and shrines were disassembled and rebuilt above the flood mark, the most famous being Abu Simbel far to the south and the Temple of Philae near Aswan. Countless more ancient sites were left for the inundation, and an unknown number more would remain undiscovered because of the project.
While the dam did its job of preventing the Nile from flooding its banks and wiping out villages all along its length, it had also prevented nutrient-rich sediment from reaching farms, necessitating the import of a million tons of fertilizer per year. The fragile Nile Delta was being slowly eroded away without the replenishment of dirt from the interior of Africa, and salt contamination from the Mediterranean had reached as far south as Cairo.
Ten miles south of the dam they came to a marina. Mercer paid off the driver while Booker hauled their luggage from the trunk. The waters of Lake Nasser were deep blue and still, hemmed in by desert hills sprinkled with the occasional palm. It reminded Mercer of Lake Powell in Utah where the Colorado River had been penned behind the Glen Canyon Dam. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning but the sun was a sizzling torture baking the dry earth.
The Egyptian leasing agent greeted Booker like a long lost brother and ordered two marina workers to lug their bags to the jetty. Amid the houseboats, water-ski runabouts, and hundred-foot tourist cruise ships, the Riva looked like a thoroughbred in a herd of Shetland ponies.
She was beamy but her long, rakish lines made her look like a javelin. She had a small dive platform at her transom, a white inflatable, and an open cockpit over the main salon. Her hull was a deep black while her upperworks and radar arch over the cockpit were snowy white. With a pair of MAN 1300 horsepower engines under her deck Mercer didn’t doubt her speed. She looked like she was already on plane just sitting tied to the dock. Her name,
Cali pecked Booker on the cheek and threw Mercer a look. “Now, you know how to treat a lady. Mercer would have gone for that rowboat over there.”
“Yeah, and made me row,” Book laughed.
“I won’t tolerate a mutiny until we’re at least on the boat.”
The slick leasing agent led them aboard and showed them the highlights. He demonstrated how to remove the little inflatable from its concealed garage, as well as the compressor and all the dive equipment. The interior of the motor yacht was as elegant as the outside, with sleek leather furniture, marble in the two baths, and silk sheets on the beds. The galley was small but functional and the refrigerator was packed. They were shown where extra stores were hidden in secret compartments throughout the salon. Mercer said he was satisfied when he found an assortment of liquor in one of the cabinets.
The agent had a wireless point-of-sale device and happily swiped Mercer’s card. If he had any questions about two men and a single woman going out for a week alone on a floating bordello he kept them to himself.
“Just think of all the airline miles you’re racking up,” Booker said.
“When this is all said and done I’ll have enough for a flight on the space shuttle.”
The master’s cabin in the bow had a queen-sized bed and private bath. Cali staked it for herself. Book had already tossed his bag into the other large cabin, leaving Mercer with a single bed tucked into a tiny room in a corner. Booker laughed at him and nodded at the closed master suite door. “Damn, man, just go in there and do it already.”
Mercer grinned ruefully. “I’ve got the feeling if your sorry ass wasn’t here I’d be invited.”
Booker shook his head and went for the stairs leading to the main deck, muttering, “Crazy white people.”
Mercer threw his duffel onto his bed and changed into shorts and a Penn State T-shirt. Cali emerged from her stateroom as he was about to join Booker. She wore sandals, a brief pair of shorts, and a bikini top. Her red hair fell over her shoulders in a shimmering cascade. It was the most revealing Mercer had ever seen her and his imagination hadn’t done her body justice. Though her breasts were small, they were perfectly shaped and proportional to her lean torso, and her legs seemed to stretch forever. Her skin was flawlessly smooth and freckled.
“I’m sorry about the sleeping arrangements,” she said shyly. “It’s just with Booker here…you know I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
“That’s okay,” Mercer said, stepping close enough to smell the tropical sunscreen she’d already applied. “If I didn’t bring you to a screaming orgasm in the first five seconds he’d never let me hear the end of it.”
She slapped him playfully. “Pig.”
The leasing agent was still on the dock, and without ever taking his eyes off Cali he managed to cast off the lines when Mercer fired the Riva’s engines.
After the engines had come up to temperature Mercer bumped the throttles and eased the motor yacht from her berth. There was a lot of boat traffic around the marina, fishing boats mostly and a little cruise ship coming back from its regular six-day excursion to Abu Simbel. Mercer kept his speed to ten knots, working the wheel to get used to how the boat responded. It came as no surprise she was as nimble as a JetSki.
A few tourists waved as they passed, while fishermen either ignored them altogether or eyed them with ill- disguised contempt. When the boat traffic thinned as they reached the broad lake, Mercer began to edge the throttles. The big boat reacted instantly as vessel and master tested each other, and the more Mercer asked for the more the Riva wanted to give, until they were planing across the water at thirty-eight knots.
He could hear Cali’s laughter chiming over the bellow of the engines and the wind whipping past them. “I love boats,” she screamed. Her upper chest and throat were flushed, her lips had plumped and reddened, and her eyes had gone startlingly wide. The adrenaline rush of speed had obviously aroused her. Mercer felt it too and once again he cursed Booker’s presence. He looked over his shoulder. Booker had also noticed and he shot Mercer a cocky wink.
They stayed well out of the regular shipping lanes used by the tourist boats, so it seemed they had the lake to themselves. Mercer took lunch at the helm, enjoying the chunks of flatbread smeared with hummus Cali fed him. And while beer had first been perfected in Egypt thousands of years ago, there were no modern breweries in the Muslim country so he settled for an Italian Peroni from the fridge to wash it down.
Booker and Cali took turns spelling Mercer at the wheel as the day wore on. She’d put on loose cotton pants and a top to protect herself from the sun, a baseball cap taming her wind-tossed hair.
