The Power of Five Oblivion

pyramids but the great expanse of the Nile with its palm trees and slender feluccas, the mosques and minarets, the colourful markets filled with spices and tourist souvenirs. He was wrong. Cairo was unrecognizable. It was a city at war with itself and it had clearly been for some time. They sped through streets covered with rubble, buildings blown apart. Burnt-out cars and trucks lined the way. There was barely a single wall that wasn’t pockmarked with bullets or shattered by mortar shells, and many of the pieces that were still standing were daubed in graffiti, political slogans in Arabic scrawled in dripping red paint.
    As far as Richard could see, the shops were empty, the offices abandoned, the entire infrastructure destroyed. And still the shooting continued, in the far distance, sounding disconnected and almost harmless until they drove around the next corner, when it became ugly, loud and horribly close. A military plane flew overhead. There was a brief pause and then the heavy blast of a bomb finding its target. The ground shook and smoke rose into the air, still heavy with sand. There was smoke everywhere, trickling up in separate columns that finally joined together to form a thick pall in the sky. Nobody was moving in the streets, but when Richard examined the broken pavements and the wreckage of the buildings, he saw that there were dead bodies everywhere, lying where they had fallen and left to rot in the sun. He could smell them. Whoever had started this war in Cairo, whoever was fighting for control of the city, they clearly hadn’t noticed that there was almost nothing left.
    Their convoy consisted of two jeeps – one carrying Richard, the other Scarlett – a covered truck and two outriders on ancient, dusty motorbikes. Richard knew that he would never be able to find his way out of here without a guide. Even if he could read the street signs, which were in Arabic, most of them had been twisted out of shape or smashed and all the streets were so damaged that they looked the same. Turn left past the wreckage, continue through the wreckage, turn right at the wreckage. Already his mind was racing, taking in the impossibility of what he was seeing. When he had travelled to Hong Kong, less than a week ago, there had been no war in Egypt. Unrest – yes. There was always unrest in the Middle East. Libya had recently fallen, soon followed by Syria. Iran was making threatening noises to anyone who would listen. But there had been no war in Egypt. How could this violence have begun and spread so rapidly? What had happened?
    He would worry about that later. Right now his thoughts were with Scarlett. She was in the vehicle ahead of him and he wondered if she was still alive. Would there be any hospitals still standing in all this wreckage that had the facilities to treat her? And what of Matt? Richard felt a wrench of helplessness, knowing that after all the two of them had been through together, they were suddenly apart. The door which had brought him from Hong Kong to Giza could have taken Matt anywhere. The two of them could be – and probably were – on opposite sides of the world.
    The lead jeep swerved around a corner, through a shattered archway and continued down a narrow alley that had shuttered windows on both sides and dozens of washing lines criss-crossing each other with sheets and ragged clothes hanging down. It was as if they had entered a secret passage. The way ahead was blocked. A bus had been abandoned in the street, but as they approached, it was somehow drawn aside to reveal a gateway behind. Richard saw armed soldiers, dressed in the same desert camouflage, waiting in a courtyard beyond and he knew that they had arrived.
    The compound was a rectangle of dust and concrete, surrounded by a breeze-block wall that was still intact and covered with faded posters and graffiti. Three anonymous buildings faced the main entrance, all of them three storeys high with barred windows, crumbling plaster and no sign of any decoration at all. As the vehicles pulled in, Richard saw goalposts with the tattered remains of a net and a wire hoop for basketball. This had once been a school. Or a prison. Behind them, more soldiers were sliding a heavy steel door across the entrance. There were wooden observation posts at each corner, manned by guards with guns and radio transmitters, doing their best to stay out of sight.
    The jeeps came to a halt. As Richard got out, he saw Scarlett being lifted by two