Night of No Return by Eileen Wilks

Author:Eileen Wilks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silhouette
Published: 2000-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

“Pipe bomb,” Nora said flatly. She rose to her feet, dusting off her hands in a gesture more symbolic than necessary.

“Oh, my God.”

“But who would do such a thing?”

“Let me have a look, Nora. With the mess things are in, I don’t see how you can tell.”

She glanced at Tim. “Sure. Look away. But that piece of pipe embedded in the pump housing didn’t get there by accident.” She moved away, feeling angry and out of her depth.

The pump, of course, was a complete loss. The damage to the well was less severe—it could be cleared, but that would take time and money. And her shower—oh, her shower was a mess. It was stupid to feel that one minor loss so keenly, but she did. Jagged pieces of metal from the pump housing had flown out when the motor exploded, slicing the canvas walls.

Damn, damn, damn. She knew how to deal with bureaucracies on both sides of the ocean. She could lecture to seventy bored freshmen or survive an academic tea without making too many enemies. Most of all, she knew the painstaking care involved in excavation and the leaps of intuition that made interpretation so exhilarating.

But pipe bombs? What did she know about pipe bombs, or people who blew things up to make a point?

Yet she was supposed to be in charge. She would have to figure out how to handle this—and quickly, too. Her people were shaken. Ahmed looked pale beneath the bronze pigment of his skin. Gamal was speaking loudly and gesturing broadly to Lisa, who hugged her arms to her chest and didn’t speak. DeLaney had followed Tim to the well, where they both crouched, inspecting the twisted metal of the pump housing.

Alex stood slightly apart. Instinctively Nora moved toward him.

He glanced her way. His expression puzzled her, mainly because there was no expression on his lean face. If he had a reaction to the newest disaster, he was hiding it.

“You’re going to have to report this,” he said when she reached him.

“I know. I was going to talk to Ibrahim anyway.” She sighed, dreading it. “Something tells me it will not be a fun conversation.”

“I meant that you’ll have to report it to the authorities.”

“It’s going a little far to call this a terrorist act, isn’t it?” That came from Tim. He looked upset, but already he was recovering—and ready to argue with anything Alex said.

Nora was in no mood for his antagonism. “Enough, Tim. What else can we call a bomb?”

“Especially considering the note someone left us,” Alex said, and nodded at the back of the main tent.

Startled, Nora looked in the direction he’d indicated. Arabic letters staggered in splotches of blue paint across the canvas.

“What does it say?” DeLaney asked in a small voice.

“‘Power to the people.’”

Tim scowled. “That’s semantically all but meaningless.”

“Oh, it has meaning,” Alex said. “It means that this was a political act.”

“Or that someone wants us to think so.”

Nora’s temper hitched a notch higher. Finding that trite slogan

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.