There was a muffled roar, and a blood-red geyser shot hundreds of feet into the air like a water spout. They covered their faces with their hands against the scalding rainfall and the cloud of steam that followed. When they dared to look they saw that the pier had completely vanished.

A wave at least ten feet tall was rolling in their direction.

“These boats are supposed to be unsinkable,” Zavala said tensely.

“That's what they said about Titanic,” Gamay reminded him.

Austin brought the boat around so the bow was facing into the wave. They braced themselves, expecting to be swamped, but the surge simply lifted them high in the air and rolled beneath them. Austin remembered that even a tsunami doesn't amount to much until it hits the shore. He hoped the power of the wave would ease before it hit the Nevada side.

Things were happening on land as well. A plume of smoke rose from the forest where Austin had seen the turrets of the building complex from his parasail. As they watched, the smoke changed in character, becoming thicker and darker. Austin reduced their speed and stared at the great black billows streaked with red and yellow flames that were rising high above the trees.

“Gotterdammerung,” he murmured.

Gamay overheard him. “Twilight of the Gods?”

“I was thinking more of a goddess. ”

They were all silent, the only sound the drone of the motors and the hiss of the bow through water. Then they heard a hooting like a deranged owl and turned to see a red, white, and blue confection steaming in their direction. The Tahoe Queen blew its whistle again. Paul's tall figure could be seen waving from the top deck. Austin waved back, goosed the throttle, and pointed the Whaler toward the oncoming riverboat.

Epilogue Libyan Desert, six months later

The village elder was as thin as a stork and his leathery face so creased by decades of desert sun that it would have been impossible to find room for one more wrinkle. Years of malnutrition had reduced his inventory of teeth down to two, one up and one down, but the lack of dentures didn't keep him from smiling with pride. As he stood in the center of his domain, a cluster of yellow clay hovels and a few palm trees marking a muddy oasis, he could have been any big city mayor presiding over the ribbon cutting at a public works project.

The village was located far to the west of the Great Pyramids at Giza in one of the most inhospitable regions in the world. Between Egypt and Libya lie thousands of square miles of hot, dry sand broken here and there by the bones of panzers left over from World War II. A few scattered settlements cling precariously to life around oases of unpredictable reliability. Sometimes the oases dry up, and when that happens the crops die and famine stalks the villages. The cycle between subsistence and starvation had been a way of life for centuries, but all that was about to change.