The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [12]
She strapped her holsters on, spun the Black Demons into them, and opened the door.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come with me?”
“I’ve seen the boat,” said Mason, making a face. “It’s not worth a second look.” He stepped out on deck behind her. “I think I’m going to take a nap. Wake me when you’ve had enough fresh air—which, I might add, is well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and getting hotter.” He grimaced. “We’re a lot safer here, but at least an upscale cruise boat would have been air-conditioned.”
She walked out onto the deck, closed the door behind her, and set out to explore the Amenhotep. One glance told her that it wasn’t going to take very long.
There were ten doors facing the port side. Most of them had obvious mold and mildew damage. A couple had been riddled by termites. The wooden deck was warped and in need of repair. Beyond the rooms was a restaurant that would have had trouble passing a health inspection anywhere in the world. There was a small open area at the back of the boat—she couldn’t bring herself to think of it as a ship—that held three rickety wooden chairs and two broken chaise lounges.
She looked over the edge of the rusted railing. The boat was riding too high to have much of a cargo hold. Her first thought had been that it was carrying contraband material, but she quickly concluded that it couldn’t be anything heavier than drugs, and in an impoverished country like Egypt there simply wasn’t much profit in dealing drugs anywhere south of Cairo. Of course, they could be hauling some stolen antiquities if they were small enough and lightweight enough. . . . But she would never trust any valuable artifact to this dilapidated boat, and she was pretty sure that no one else would either.
Probably, she concluded, looking at three robed men sitting on the wooden chairs, the only cargo was human beings. What kind? She considered the possibilities. They could be felons on the run, men who had paid to be transported from Luxor to Aswan or even farther south. Perhaps they could even be terrorists. Or, she concluded with a shrug, perhaps the most likely answer was the correct one—that they were passengers who simply couldn’t afford any better transportation than the Amenhotep.
She looked ashore and tried to get her bearings. If they’d passed Luxor, they’d be coming to Esna and Edfu before long, and Kom Ombo and finally Aswan. The major tour boats plied their trade only between Luxor and Aswan, but she had a feeling that this one was going to follow the Nile a lot farther south. After all, if there were thousands of Mahdists looking for them, it didn’t make much sense for Mason to put them on a boat whose route terminated at a major city like Aswan, and it made even less sense to go back to Luxor.
She walked to the front of the boat, nodded pleasantly to the captain, who smiled back at her from the ancient controls inside a wood-and-glass cabin, then crossed to the starboard side. There were ten more rooms, almost identical to the port side, except that one door was missing entirely, and the iron railing was, if anything, even rustier.
As she had on the port side of the boat, she stared across the Nile at the arid landscape beyond, trying to spot some landmark so she would know exactly where they were. They passed by a small village where a dozen children were playing soccer up and down the single dirt street, and then the village ended as abruptly as it had begun and the land was cultivated for the next mile.
It’s amazing, she thought. Here along the Nile, it’s like good British farmland—green, rich, fertile. But go just half a mile inland from the river in either direction and it’s almost indistinguishable from the Sahara or the Gobi deserts.
She waved to a felluca that carried a quartet of local fishermen. They waved back. One of the men stood up unsteadily, gained his balance, pointed to her pistols, and mimicked a fast draw. She laughed, aimed her finger at him, and pretended