Pierre Marimbert, a forty-year-old, sun-beaten Algerian _colon_, eldest
man on the team, sank into his place at the table. He poured the
balance of his can of beer into a glass.
Johnny said, "What ... what can we do? How many spare pumps can you get
into there, and how soon?"
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."