The soldiers are about 18 years old, dirt-poor conscripts from isolated villages, drafted into Egypt's paramilitary national police force and trucked across the Sinai to a republic of Northern European women wearing butt-floss, ragtag stoners from the four points of the compass, and slumming trustafarians with 200-dive hobbies and healthy credit cards. At first, it looks like the national troops have come to help Rotondi reclaim Club Red. As it turns out, they are really here to help themselves to a piece of land.

The Mezzeineh clan has reacted, of course. There are already ten shouting Bedouin in the courtyard; seven minutes later, there are ten more in the same space. Half are shouting into cell phones; most are dressed in spotless white or gray jalabiyyas, with red kufiyya head scarves carefully affixed using traditional goat-hair rope. Their sandals are nice; many sprout long pinkie nails, a traditional signal of wealth.

I snap off a couple of photos from my hip and head for the front desk. Three panicked Bedouin cut me off, waving their arms and shouting "No! No!" I had been conducting careful research on the history of the Sinai by reading The Adventures of Tintin: The Red Sea Sharks, so I think what my hero, the Belgian boy reporter and veteran of a thousand cartoon adventures, would say at this point.

"I'd like a room," I try.

The Bedouin immediately lead me inside; business continues, it appears, even in the midst of an invasion. I go through an absurd charade of inquiring after rooms—Blistering barnacles, Tintin, I must have a phone, and what do you mean there are no rooms left with air-conditioning—and then ask what all the soldiers are doing.

"Is no problem," I am told. And: "Their trucks break down. They come to fix their trucks. Going soon."

Meanwhile the soldiers are unloading four huge rolls of wire fencing, and they shut the front gate. A couple of guests wander past. "That's a bit frightening with all those soldiers," an American woman says calmly.

Outside, the main street of Dahab is blocked by two more jeeps and another six Egyptian GIs with AK-47s, with a circle of blocked pickup trucks and taxis honking their horns, and a crowd of another 30 spectators. The Club Red scuba shop is empty, but a few guests still lounge on cushions in the open-air restaurant, a typical Dahab construction of palm trees and lashed thatching, normally used as a groove zone for milkshake-nursing foreigners with sunburns. I take a seat and count about 30 angry Bedouin milling around now. Despite the noise and shouting, which give some idea of what the original January 23 high-noon invasion must have been like, they've established a kind of order, and several older men talk into their phones while the soldiers and Mezzeineh eye each other aggressively.

I get out the camera again but am busted at once. Three Bedouin rush over. I try to Tintin my way out of it, but I've underestimated them. "Please do not think we are stupid," a handsome young Bedouin with crusader-gray eyes tells me. "We see you taking pictures and making notes. We know what reporter is."

He is dressed like a Saudi prince, with the long pinkie nail. He learned his almost perfect English "in the streets of Dahab and in school," he says. He also has 195 dives in his logbook, and the same dream as every other young man in Dahab ("I start my Dive Master next week!").

We do things Bedouin-style. He orders tea and a much older, much less well dressed Bedouin goes off to get it, while he explains that a small strip of the courtyard was once, ten years ago, police property. The soldiers are simply reclaiming that tiny piece of land, so that no matter who wins in the Club Red legal dispute, their asset is protected. More important, he wishes to know, how much do pickup trucks cost in America?

The standoff lasts several hours. At one point a couple of Australian guests wander right through the sea of AK-47s, oblivious in the best Club Red tradition, locked in argument over the merits of diving naked.

"Fuck yeah," one of them explains to the other, "you'd need less weights!"