Sahara by Clive Cussler Read Free Book Online

village well and rinse off, before continuing some distance into the desert and making camp. Better keep a guarded eye, he thought as he pulled his old Royal Marine Patchett submachine gun from a compartment between the seats and tucked it upright between his knees. On the muzzle he threaded an Invicta silencer, giving the weapon the look of an extended pipe with a long curved shell clip protruding from it.
    “Something wrong?” asked Mrs. Lansing, who along with her husband rode in Fairweather’s Land Rover.
    “Just a precaution to scare away beggars,” Fairweather lied.
    He stopped the four-wheel-drive and walked back, warning his drivers to keep a sharp lookout for anything suspicious. Then he returned and drove on, leading the column to the center of the town and passing through the narrow and sandy streets that were laid out in no particular order. At last he stopped under a lonely date palm that stood in the middle of a spacious marketplace near a circular stone well about 4 meters in diameter.
    Fairweather studied the sandy ground about the well in the last light of the day. It was surrounded by the same unusual tracks he’d spotted in the streets. He stared down into the well. He barely saw a tiny reflection deep in the bowels of the sandstone. He recalled that the water was quite high in mineral content that gave it a metallic taste and tinted it a milky green. Yet, it had quenched the thirst of many lives, human and animal, over the centuries. Whether it was hygienic for the uninitiated stomachs of his clients did not concern Fairweather. He merely intended for them to use it to rinse the sweat and dust off their bodies, not drink it.
    He instructed his drivers to stand guard and then showed the tourists how to hoist a pigskin bucket of water by use of an ancient hand winch tied to a frayed rope. The exotic image of desert music and dancing by flickering campfires was quickly forgotten as they laughed and splashed like children in a lawn sprinkler on a hot summer afternoon. The men stripped to the waist and slapped water on their bare skin. The women were more concerned with washing their hair.
    The comical scene was eerily illuminated by the Land Rover’s headlights that threw their cavorting shadows on the silent walls of the village like film projectors. While Fairweather’s drivers watched and laughed, he walked a fair distance down one of the streets and entered a house that stood next to a mosque. The walls appeared old and time-worn. The entrance led through a short, arched tunnel to a courtyard that was littered with so much human trash and rubble that he had difficulty climbing over it.
    He shone a flashlight around the main room of the structure. The walls were a dusty white, the roofs high with exposed poles over a stick matting, much like the latilla viga on the ceilings of Santa Fe architecture of the American Southwest. The walls were indented with many niches for keeping household goods in, but they were all empty, their contents scattered and broken around the floor along with jumbled furniture.
    Because nothing obvious appeared to be missing, it looked to Fairweather as if vandals had simply trashed the house after the occupants had fled, leaving all their possessions behind. Then he spotted a pile of bones in one corner of the room. He identified them as human and began to feel extremely uneasy.
    In the glimmer of the flashlight, shadows formed and played weird tricks on the eyes. He swore he saw a large animal flit past a window to the courtyard. He removed the safety on the Patchett not so much from fear as from a sixth sense of the menace that was forming in the darkening alleyways.
    A rustling sound came from behind a closed doorway that opened onto a small terrace. Fairweather approached the door quietly, stepping softly around the debris. If there was someone hiding inside, they went silent. Fairweather held the flashlight in front of him with one hand and gripped the submachine gun,