The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [36]
“Why would you lie to us?” asked Hassam. “We are all that stands between you and the Mahdists.”
“You are just the most comforting, reassuring bunch of guys I’ve ever met,” said Lara.
“We are?” he replied, brightening noticeably.
She sighed and decided not to explain the notion of sarcasm to him.
At noon the next day they reached the Great Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, with its four sixty-five-foot-tall statues of the seated Pharaoh. Everything the ancient Egyptians had built was on a giant scale, and except for the pyramids, the Great Temple was the most gigantic and impressive of all, made even more so by the knowledge that UNESCO engineers had disassembled and moved the entire structure, as well as the nearby Temple of Hathor, the almost-as-impressive monument to Ramses’ consort, Queen Nefertari, from its original site, now submerged beneath the Nile.
There were the usual few hundred tourists milling about, and Lara assumed another hundred were inside the Great Temple with their local guides. She felt very exposed, because there were no other boats of any kind in the vicinity. Tourist ships never went south of the High Dam; any groups that wanted to visit were flown in from Aswan.
“Do you see anything suspicious?” she asked, staring intently at the shore.
“It looks normal to me,” said Omar.
“But I was told there would be Mahdists waiting at Abu Simbel,” she continued.
“There probably are,” agreed Omar. “But they’re waiting for three men and a woman approaching the Great Temple on camels. They are not looking for four male fishermen floating leisurely past in a felluca.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Lara, “but . . .”
“But what?”
“But I think you’re making them out to be a lot dumber than they probably are.”
“Look at the people on shore,” said Hassam. “They are paying no attention to us.”
“If I was going to shoot four people in a boat from the shore, I wouldn’t do it in front of a hundred tourists,” said Lara. “I’d do it from the top of one of the temples, or from behind one of those parked vans.”
“We are drifting farther and farther past the temples,” said Gaafar. “I think if they were going to shoot, they’d have fired already.”
“Then where are they?” said Lara.
“Maybe they are not here after all,” suggested Hassam.
She shook her head. “Your information has been accurate so far. Why should it be wrong this time? The Mahdists have to have known for more than a day that we didn’t die at the oasis.”
“I have no answers,” said Omar. “I am just grateful that our information was wrong. In another three or four minutes we will be out of rifle range and then there will be no question that they were not waiting for us.”
“Just keep your eyes open,” she said, scanning the shore.
But nothing happened for the next five minutes, and finally even Lara began to relax.
“It’s very puzzling,” she said. “No plane lands between Aswan and Abu Simbel. I doubt that there are even any landing strips for private planes. The train won’t run from Cairo to Khartoum for at least another week. They have to know that we’re still alive, and they know the only two routes to Khartoum will take us past Abu Simbel, one by land, one by water. So why weren’t they waiting for us?”
“They didn’t want to shoot us in front of witnesses,” said Gaafar.
She shook her head. “I’m not buying that for a minute.”
“Why not?”
“Let’s say three bearded men who are mostly covered by the same robes everyone else around here wears shoot four people in a boat and drive off ten seconds later. How many tourists will even notice what happened, let alone be able to identify them? The police or the army won’t get very far searching for three bearded men in the south of Egypt.”
“Then why do you think they let us pass?” asked Gaafar.
“Maybe they have decided that Lara Croft is their best chance of finding the Amulet, and that killing her would be, as the British say, counterproductive,” said Omar.
“They just tried to kill us the night before last,