The Pharaoh's Secret

21

The cockpit of the old DC-3 shuddered continuously as the aircraft crossed the desert at an altitude of five hundred feet, while traveling at nearly two hundred knots. Based on the vibration, Paul Trout estimated the propellers were out of sync or perhaps slightly unbalanced. He morbidly wondered if one of them was about to come off the hub and fly off into the waiting desert or slice into the cabin like a vengeful can opener.

As usual, Gamay shared none of his fears. She was in the right seat, where the copilot would normally sit. Enjoying the view out the window and the thrill of traveling so quickly at such a low altitude.

Reza, their host, stood with Paul just behind the pilots’ seats.

“Do we have to fly so fast?” Paul asked. “And so close to the ground?”

“It’s better this way,” Reza insisted. “Otherwise, the rebels have an easier time shooting at us.”

That was not the kind of answer Paul was looking for. “Rebels?”

“We’re still in a low-level state of civil war,” he said. “We have militias, who alternately work with us or oppose us; foreign agents, especially from Egypt; the Muslim brotherhood; even members of Gaddafi’s old regime — all fighting for power. Libya is a very complicated place these days.”

Suddenly, Paul wished they’d stayed an extra day in Tunisia and flown home to the States. He could be sitting on his porch, smoking a pipe and listening to the radio instead of risking his life out here.

“Don’t worry,” Reza said. “They would be fools to waste a missile on such an old plane as this. Usually they just take potshots at us with their rifles. And they haven’t hit us yet.”

With that, Reza reached around Paul and knocked on the wooden trim that lined the bulkhead. Like everything else in the DC-3, it was literally from another era, worn almost to the core where people had brushed against it stepping in and out of the cockpit for the past fifty years.

The controls were in the same state. Big, bulky metal levers with grooves worn in them where men and women had handled them for decades. The pilot’s yoke was the old half steering wheel type, it was even bent in the middle. The one in front of Gamay looked little better.

“Maybe we should have driven,” Paul said.

“The journey is eight hours by truck,” Reza replied. “Only ninety minutes by air. And it’s much cooler up here.”

Ninety minutes, Paul thought, checking his watch. Thank goodness. That meant they were almost there.

Still cruising at high speed, they crossed a series of rocky folds that rose out of the sand like a sea monster’s back emerging from the ocean. They continued south and made a circle around what looked like a dry salt bed, before lining up for a final approach to a dirt strip that ran beside what Paul assumed was an oil field, complete with towers, derricks and several large buildings.

The landing was relatively smooth, with a single bounce and then a long rollout as the plane slowed. Like most aircraft from the early days of aviation, the DC-3 was a tail dragger. It had two large wheels under the wings and a small guide wheel at the back, beneath the tail. Because of this, landing was accompanied by the odd sensation of touching down flat and then the nose tilted up as the plane slowed. It was backward, Paul thought, all of it, but he was happy to be on the ground again.

As soon as his boots hit the sand, he turned to help Gamay out, offering his hand. She grabbed it and hopped free. “That was amazing,” she said. “When we get back home, I’m learning to fly. Joe could teach me.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Paul said, trying hard to appear supportive.

“Did you see the Berber Oasis?” she asked.

“No,” Paul said, thinking back. “When did we pass it?”

“Right before we turned onto final approach,” Reza said.

“You mean that dried-up area?”

Reza nodded. “In a week, it went from a healthy tropical paradise to a salt bed. The same process we saw in Gafsa is now being witnessed all over the Sahara.”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Paul said.

Reza was holding a hand against the sun. “Let’s get inside,” he said.

He led them to the main building, bypassing a large bank of pumps and a series of pipes that stretched out into the distance, heading back toward Benghazi. After the heat of the desert, being back in the air-conditioning was a welcome relief. They approached a group of workers.

“Any change?” Reza asked. “For the positive, I mean.”

The lead technician shook his head. “We’re down another twenty percent on output,” he said grimly. “We’ve had to shut three more pumps down. They were overheating and bringing up nothing but sludge.”

As he listened to the conversation, Paul looked around. The room was covered with display screens and computer terminals. The few windows there were had a dark reflective tint to them. It reminded him of an air traffic control center.

“Welcome to the headwaters of the Great Man-Made River,” Reza told him. “The largest irrigation project in the world. From here, and several other sites, we draw water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer and deliver it across five hundred miles of desert to the cities of Benghazi, Tripoli and Tobruk.”

Reza tapped a display screen and it began to cycle through photographs of giant pumps churning, wells being sunk and water flowing down huge dark pipes in a torrent.

“How much water do you bring up?” Gamay asked.

“Until recently, seven million cubic meters a day,” he said. “That’s almost two billion gallons, for you Americans.”

Paul was studying the boards; he saw indicators in yellow, orange and red. Nothing was lit up in green. “How badly has the drought affected you?”

“We’re down almost seventy percent already,” Reza said, “and it’s getting worse.”

“Have there been any earthquakes?” Paul asked. “Sometimes, seismic activity can shear off wells and destabilize aquifers. Making the water more difficult to retrieve.”

“No earthquakes,” Reza said. “Not even tremors. Geologically speaking, this area is incredibly stable. Even if it’s not so politically.”

Paul was truly baffled and he uttered the only thing that made any sense. “I’m sure no one wants to say it, but is it possible that the aquifer is running dry?”

“It’s a very good question,” Reza replied. “The groundwater here was left over from the last Ice Age. As we pull it out, it’s obviously not being replaced. But most estimates suggest it should last at least five centuries. The most conservative assessment suggests a supply of at least a hundred years. We’ve been drawing on it for only twenty-five. And yet, like you, I have no other answer. I don’t know where the water is going.”

“What do you know?” Gamay asked.

Reza moved to a map. “I know the drought is progressing, it’s getting rapidly worse. It also seems to be sweeping westward. The first wells to report issues were here on the eastern border.” He pointed to a spot south of Tobruk, where Libya and Egypt met. “That was nine weeks ago. Shortly thereafter, wells in Sarir and Tazerbo, in the center of the country, began to lose pressure. And thirty days ago, we noticed the first drop in volume at our western wells, south of Tripoli. The onset there was rapid and the volume of water pumped was halved within days. That’s why I went to Gafsa.”

“Because Gafsa is farther to the west,” Paul noted.

Reza nodded. “I needed to see if the effect was continuing and it is. My counterparts in Algeria are beginning to feel the effects as well. But none of these countries are as dependent on the groundwater as we are. In the twenty-five years we’ve been operating, Libya’s population has doubled. Our irrigated agriculture has increased five thousand percent. Our industrial use of water five hundred percent. Everyone has become dependent on the flow.”

Paul nodded. “And if they go to the tap and find nothing there when they turn it on, you’ll have problems.”

“We already do,” Reza assured him.

“Aside from you, is anyone else looking into this?” Gamay asked.

Reza shrugged. “Not really. There’s no one else qualified to do it. And, as you can imagine, with a civil war still going on, the government has bigger issues to deal with. Or so they think. They asked if it was the rebels’ doing. I should have said yes. They would have given me every resource in the country to figure it out. But I said no. In fact, I told them such a thought was ludicrous.” Reza’s face scrunched up as he recounted the incident. “Let me tell you, it’s not wise to tell a politician his question is ludicrous. At least not in my country.”

“Why?”

“I would have thought that was obvious.”

“No,” Gamay corrected. “I mean, why couldn’t it be the rebels?”

“Rebels blow things up,” he said. “This is some kind of natural phenomenon that we’re grappling with. A natural disaster in the making. Besides, everyone needs water. Everyone has to drink. If the water goes, there will be war but nothing left to fight for.”

“How is the country surviving?” Paul asked.

“For now, the reservoirs outside Benghazi and Sirte and Tripoli are holding everyone over,” Reza told them. “But rationing has already begun. And, without a change, we’ll be shutting off entire neighborhoods within days. At that point, everyone will do what desperate people do. They’ll panic. And then this country will fall back into chaos once again.”

“Surely they’ll start taking you seriously if you show them these projections,” Gamay suggested.

“I’ve shown them,” Reza said. “All they do is tell me to solve the problem or insist they will just replace me and blame me for mismanagement. Either way, I have to have a solution before I go back to them. At least a theory as to why it’s happening.”

“How deep is the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer?” Paul asked.

Reza brought up a cutaway view of the drilling process. “Most of the wells go to depths between five and six hundred meters.”

“Could you drill deeper?”

“My very first thought,” Reza said. “We’ve sunk a couple of test wells to a thousand meters. But we came up dry. We sank one to two thousand meters. Also dry.”

Paul studied the schematic. The diagram showed their compound on the surface as a collection of little gray squares. The well shaft was colored bright green, which made it easy to see as it descended through layers of earth and rock and into the reddish sandstone where the water from the Ice Age remained trapped. A dark-colored layer rested beneath the sandstone; it continued downward to a depth of one thousand meters. The area beneath that was gray and unmarked.

“What kind of rock underlays the sandstone?” Paul asked.

Reza shrugged. “We’re not sure. No survey was done to study anything deeper than two thousand meters. I’d guess it’s probably more sedimentary rock.”

“Maybe we should find out,” Paul said. “Maybe the problem isn’t in your sandstone. Maybe it lies underneath.”

“We don’t have time to drill that deep,” Reza said.

“We could do a seismic survey,” Paul suggested.

Reza folded his arms across his chest and nodded. “I would like very much to, but to see through that much rock we need a powerful bang to emit the vibrations. Unfortunately, our stock of explosives has been confiscated.”

“I guess it makes sense. The government doesn’t want the rebels getting ahold of explosives,” Gamay replied.

“It was the rebels who took them,” Reza said. “The government then chose not to replace them. At any rate, I have nothing here capable of creating a sound that would penetrate so much rock and reflect back to us with any type of clear signal.”

For a moment, Paul was stumped. Then an idea came to him, an idea so crazy it just might have a chance of working. He glanced at Gamay. “Now I know how Kurt feels when the inspiration hits. It’s like madness mixed with genius all at the same time.”

Gamay chuckled. “With Kurt, the balance can be a little out of whack sometimes.”

“I’m hoping that’s not the case here,” Paul said, before turning back to Reza. “Do you have sound equipment to record a signal?”

“Some of the best in the world.”

“Get it ready,” Paul said. “And, much as I hate to say it, have them fuel up that old plane of yours. We’re going to take it up for a spin.”