The Hidden Oasis Read Online Free PDF

coming. I apologize for bringing you here at such short notice, but something has … cropped up.’
    The speaker drew heavily on his cigarette, wafting a hand to dispel the smoke and gazing intently at the seven men and one woman gathered round the table in front of him. The suite was windowless, sparsely furnished, nondescript, the same as hundreds of other offices within the cramped catacomb of the Pentagon, its sole distinguishing feature a large map of Africa and the Middle East covering most of one wall. That and the fact that the only lighting came from a battered Anglepoise lamp sitting on the floor at the foot of the map, so that while the map itself was illuminated everything else in the room, including those in it, was sunk in deep shadow.
    ‘Forty minutes ago,’ the speaker continued, his voice low, throaty, ‘one of our stations picked up a radio message from over the Sahara.’
    He reached into his pocket and produced a hand-held laser pointer, directing its eye towards the map. A jerky red dot appeared in the middle of the Mediterranean.
    ‘It was sent from about here.’
    The dot slid down the map, coming to rest in the southwest corner of Egypt, close to the intersection of the borders with Libya and Sudan, over the words Hadabat al Jilf al Kabir (The Gilf Kebir Plateau).
    ‘The message came from a plane. A Cayman-registered Antonov, call sign VP-CMT 473.’
    A pause, then:
    ‘It was a Mayday.’
    There was an uneasy shifting in chairs, a muttered ‘Jesus Christ.’
    ‘What do we know?’ asked one of the listeners, a burly man with a balding head.
    The speaker sucked out the last of his cigarette and drilled the stub into an ashtray on the table.
    ‘At this stage not much,’ he replied. ‘I’ll give you what we’ve got.’
    He talked for five minutes, tracing lines across the map with his pointer – Albania, Benghazi, back to the Gilf Kebir – occasionally referring to a sheaf of papers scattered in front of him. He lit another cigarette, and then another, chain-smoking, the atmosphere in the room growing steadily thicker and more acrid. When he finished everyone started speaking at once, their voices merging into a confused cacophony from which certain words and half-sentences leapt out – ‘Knew it was crazy!’ ‘Saddam!’ ‘World War Three!’ ‘Iran-Contra’, ‘Fucking catastrophe’, ‘Gift to Khomeini’ – but from which no overall sense could be made.
    Only the woman remained silent, tapping her pen thoughtfully on the tabletop before rising to her feet, walking over to the map and gazing up at it. Her body cast a slim silhouette, her bobbed blond hair glowing in the lamplight.
    ‘We’ll just have to find it,’ she said.
    Although her voice was soft, barely audible amidst the hubbub of male argument and counter-argument, there was an underlying strength to it, an air of authority that commanded attention. The other speakers quietened down until the room was silent.
    ‘We’ll just have to find it,’ she repeated. ‘Before anyone else does. I’m assuming the Mayday went out on an open frequency?’
    The speaker acknowledged that it had.
    ‘Then we should get to work.’
    ‘And how exactly do you propose we do that?’ asked theburly, balding man. ‘Phone Mubarak? Put an ad in the paper?’
    His tone was sarcastic, confrontational. The woman didn’t rise to it.
    ‘We adapt, we improvise,’ she said, still gazing up at the map, her back to the room. ‘Satellite imaging, military exercises, local contacts. NASA has a research unit in that part of the world. We use whatever we can, however we can. If that’s OK with you, Bill?’
    The balding man muttered something, but was otherwise silent. No one else spoke.
    ‘That’s it then,’ said the original speaker, pocketing his laser pointer and shuffling his papers into a neat pile. ‘We adapt, we improvise.’
    He lit another cigarette.
    ‘And we’d better do it quickly. Before this whole thing turns into even