Pierre looked up at him wearily. "You didn't quite hear what I said, Johnny. I only checked forty. Forty out of nearly a thousand in that vicinity. Twenty-two of them were destroyed, better than fifty percent. For all I know, that percentage applies throughout the whole In Ziza area. If so, there's damn few of your trees going to be left alive. We have a few spare pumps on hand here, but we'd have to get a really large number all the way from Dakar."
Derek said softly, "That took a lot of men and a lot of dynamite. Which means a lot of transport—and a lot of money. We've had trouble before, but usually it was disgruntled nomads, getting revenge for losing their grazing land."
Johnny snorted, "Damn little grazing this far north."
Derek nodded. "I'm simply saying that even if we could blame our minor sabotage on the Tuareg in the past, we can't do it this time. There's money behind anything this big."
Johnny McCord said wearily, "Let's eat. In the morning we'll go out and take a look. I'd better call Timbuktu on this. If nothing else, the Mali Federation can send troops out to protect us."
Derek grunted. "With a standing army of about 25,000 men, they're going to patrol a million and a half square miles of desert?"
"Can you think of anything else to do?"
"No."
Pierre Marimbert began dishing cous cous into a soup plate, then poured himself a glass of vin ordinaire. He said, "I can't think of a better place for saboteurs. Twenty men could do millions of dollars of destruction and never be found."