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Page 42.

Chapter 11. Mauritania, 1942: Ruined Tower Mystery

Tim thought the ruined tower looked dreary.

Twenty feet square, the tower overlooked the beach on one side and the desert on the other. The tower’s whitewash, what was left of it, had long since gone dirty gray and was falling off, to reveal salt-stained brick underneath. From the tower’s rear, a deserted road led into the desert. As Tim approached, dazed by his hunger and thirst and by the wild beauty of this forsaken thousand-mile beach, he drew the Webley from its holster under his shoulders. He just wished it weren’t so heavy, and hoped it wouldn’t explode if he had to fire.

Nearby, he heard the roaring sound again, which sounded like a motorcycle revving. He conjured images of unfriendly troops, whether German or Vichy French, or the unknowns—Spanish, Moroccan, Berber, bandits—anything was possible.

The tower might once have been several stories tall, but it was now crumbling, and truncated halfway across its second story. One window had a sill of cracked mud bricks but no top, just moonlit clouds eerily drifting in a starry sky.

Tim walked around the concrete apron, holding the gun in his right hand and feeling his way along the wall with the palm of his other hand, partially for support because he felt weak and dehydrated. His lips were cracked and bleeding, his eyelids swollen. His nose felt swollen. Its surface seemed to be running with pus or fluid and wet shreds of sunburned skin that sloughed away when he brushed a hand across his face. Am I coming apart? He shuddered, seeing blood and skin shreds on his hand.

The road leading into the desert was overgrown with strange lunar-looking weeds that fit the silvery light in which they basked. Nobody had driven here in a long time, he could see. There were no tracks of any kind, and no vehicles, not even a rusty wreck. Nothing. No motorcycles either.

He came back around the front, to the open doorway whose wooden door had long ago vanished. He did notice a stenciled sign on a granite slab that had been mortised into the adobe facing, along with a faded tricolor and some sandblasted symbology referring to some obscure French army engineering unit. Faded French words looked official, but about as ludicrous as pompous edicts on shattered tablets of long-gone pharaohs along the Nile.

As he stepped across the stone threshold, a scrabbling noise caught his attention. Rats? He wished he had a flashlight.

In the next instant, something brushed past him, and he caught a clear glimpse: a large tan animal with an ungainly gait, gangling, clumsy.

A second later, he understood the roaring sound nearby.

He’d stumbled into a lion’s den and he’d just scared out one of the cubs.

Something else was in the dark, barren interior, lying on the concrete floor: one or two other cubs too small to move?

He didn’t have time to question. Now he understood the ear-splitting roar behind him. For an instant, he stared into the enraged face of one of nature’s largest predators. It was an ancient, savage face—oddly angular, a breed of lion that wasn’t quite like any he’d seen in photos or at the zoo. She was female, judging by the fact she had no mane—a primordial predator whose eyes glowed yellow in the moonlight, cold as a snake’s, calculating, filled with a mix of fear and calculation, didn’t matter which, and utter savage hatred because he stood between her and her cub.

He fired the revolver, but it only made a popping noise. Despite, or because of, being packed in grease to withstand the sea, the gun misfired. It sent off a shower of sparks that momentarily made the lioness flinch back a step. The mechanism jammed, and the trigger wouldn’t fire again.

Tim dodged aside, throwing the gun in the air to distract her.

The lioness hesitated, taking a step sideways as the heavy metal object thudded into the sand near her.

Tim made it another step.

The lioness hesitated again, making a slinking body language as she cast a glance at the tower, despairingly, toward her children.

Tim made it to the edge of the tower and had no place to go.

On a sandy ridge thirty feet away and twenty feet above his head, several other lion shapes appeared in a tactical formation. They would herd him down to the water, where he could not escape.

The lioness roared and started to lope toward him.

Tim froze in deadly icy fear.

At that moment, several shots rang out.

The lioness was in mid-jump when she was hit by heavy caliber bullets. She landed with a hollow slam that shook the ground near Tim’s feet curled up, and died with a final, truncated rasp. The other lion shapes disappeared.

Tim heard excited voices, men babbling, feet scrambling.

He smelled gunpowder and realized he was still alive, but frozen in place and trembling.

Abruptly, through the drifting haze of gunpowder, he saw several shapes swaying toward him. The shapes scrambled down the sand dune where the lions had been arrayed moments earlier, and approached Tim on the beach sand. They were Berbers on camels, with turbans wrapped around their heads and antique flintlock muskets protruding as long elegant shadows.

Several black men in torn khakis and red fezzes blocked the doorway and held a net among them. They laughed, showing broad white teeth as they babbled happily, and Tim instantly got the picture that there was a market someplace for live cubs as well as dead lionesses.

So if the lions had not killed him, would these desert nomads?

The leader of the Barbary nomads opened his turban, revealing a fierce, dark face with curly beard and scarred nose. The man jabbered at Tim in Arabic, French, and at least one local dialect.

Tim raised his hands and said: “Friend! Allah! Friend!”

“Allah?” Two of the camel-mounted men consulted each other. They swept their face coverings aside and looked at each other in disbelief, then at Tim with evident anger. Had he committed some kind of blunder, a blasphemy perhaps?

“Islam,” one man said, adding a torrent of words in Arabic while waving a small book. “Al Qur'an,” Tim understood. Allahu akbar... “God is almighty. Muhammad, Blessed Be His Holy Name, is his only Prophet. Are you a believer?”

“Whatever you say,” Tim said fervently, licking dry lips and feeling faint. As he spoke, men clambered from their mounts. One wrestled with a bulky object behind his saddle, producing a hydra-like hookah for multiple users. Men came menacingly toward Tim with ropes, guns, leering faces. At that moment, the world went blank, and Tim collapsed into darkness.