Sahara

by Clive Cussler

  "Yes," beamed Matabu. "My brother will be most happy when I present him with a fine, new pleasure craft."

  "The Frenchmen have arrived within the time you predicted." Ketou was tall, slender, with a proud bearing. "Your foresight is truly inspiring."

  "Very considerate of them to do as my thought waves demand," Matabu gloated. He did not mention that his paid agents had reported on the passage of the Calliope every two hours since it entered the delta in Nigeria. The happy fact that it cruised into Benin waters was a wish come true.

  "They must be very important people to own such an expensive boat."

  "They are enemy agents."

  Ketou's face reflected a balance of uncertainty and skepticism. "They appear somewhat conspicuous for enemy agents."

  Matabu dropped the binoculars and glared at Ketou. "Do not question my information, Commander. Believe me when I say those white foreigners are part of a conspiracy to rape the natural wealth of our country."

  "Will they be arrested and tried in the capital?"

  "No, you will shoot them after you board and discover evidence proving their guilt."

  "Sir?"

  "I forgot to mention that you shall have the honor of leading the boarding party," Matabu said pompously.

  "Not an execution," Ketou protested. "The French will demand an investigation when they learn several of their influential citizens were murdered. Your brother may not condone-"

  "You will throw the bodies in the river and not question my orders," Matabu coldly interrupted.

  Ketou caved in. "As you wish, Admiral."

  Matabu stared through the binoculars again. The sport yacht was only 200 meters away and slowing. "Position your men for boarding. I will personally hail the spies and order them to receive your party."

  Ketou spoke to his first officer, who repeated the commands over a bullhorn to the captain of the second gunboat. Then Ketou turned his attention back to the approaching yacht. "Something funny about her," he said to Matabu. "No one is in sight except the man at the helm."

  "The European slime are probably lying drunk below. They suspect nothing."

  "Strange, they do not appear concerned at our presence nor do they show any reaction to our trained guns."

  "Shoot only if they try to escape," Matabu cautioned him. "I want that boat captured undamaged."

  Ketou focused his binoculars on Pitt. "The helmsman is waving to us and smiling."

  "He won't be smiling for long," Matabu said, his teeth showing ominously. "In a few minutes he'll be dead."

  "Come into my parlor said the spider to the three flies," Pitt muttered under his breath as he waved and flashed a wide, humorless smile.

  "Did you say something?" asked Giordino inside the missile turret.

  "Just mumbling to myself."

  "I can't see zilch from the bow ports," Gunn spoke from the forward quarters. "What's my line of fire?"

  "Be ready to knock out the gunners on the boat off our starboard beam on my command," said Pitt.

  "Where's the helicopter?" asked Giordino, who was blind until he dropped the turret shield.

  Pitt scanned the sky over the boat's wake. "She's hovering 100 meters directly astern, about 50 meters above the surface of the river."

  There were no half measures in their preparations. No one doubted for an instant the Benin gunboats and helicopter were going to let them pass unchallenged. They all went silent, each man settled and resigned to fight to stay alive. Any fear was quickly passing as they approached the point of no return. There was a determination, a single-minded stubbornness against losing. They were not the kind to meekly submit and turn the other cheek. Three armed vessels against one, but surprise was on their side.

  Pitt propped the launcher with the incendiary/concussion grenades under a niche beside his chair. Then he slipped the throttles to "Idle" as his gaze swept back and forth between the two boats. He ignored the helicopter. In the opening stages of the battle, it would be Giordino's problem. He was close enough now to study the officers and quickly concluded that the fat African strutting the bridge of the gunboat in a Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera uniform was in command. His unblinking eyes also stared in hypnotic fascination into those of the Angel of Death, who stared back from the black nuzzles of the guns, all aimed at him.

  Pitt could not know the identity of the swaggering officer on the bridge who peered back at him through binoculars. Nor did he care. But he was thankful his opponent had made a tactical error by not stretching his two boats broadside across the river bow to stern, effectively blocking any passage while every gun could be brought to bear on the Calliope.

  The wave carved by the bow fell away as the Calliope slipped between the two gunboats that had already stopped and were drifting with the river current. Pitt reduced speed just enough to maintain a slight headway. The hulls of the gunboats loomed over the Calliope, no more than 5 meters off her sides. From his cockpit, Pitt could see most of the crewmen standing in casual attitudes, each armed only with holstered automatic pistols. None held automatic rifles. They looked as if they were waiting their turn on a shooting range. Pitt gazed innocently up at Matabu.

  "Bon jour!"

  Matabu leaned over, the counter and shouted back in French for Pitt to stop his boat and take on boarders.

  Pitt didn't understand a word. He called back. "Pouvez vous me recommander un bon restaurant?"

  "`What did Dirk say?" Giordino asked Gunn.

  "Good Lord!" Gunn moaned. "He just asked the head honcho to recommend a good restaurant."

  The gunboats were slowly drifting past on both sides as Pitt kept the sport craft idling in gear against the current. Matabu again ordered Pitt to stop and prepare to be boarded.

  Pitt stiffened and tried to look suave and disarming.

  "J'aimerais une bouteille de Martin Ray Chardonnay."

  "Now what's he saying?" demanded Giordino.

  Gunn sounded lost. "I think he ordered a bottle of California wine."

  "Next, he'll ask to borrow a jar of Grey Poupon Mustard," Giordino muttered.

  "He must be trying to stall them until they drift past us."

  On board the gunboat, Matabu and Ketou's faces registered a total lack of comprehension as Pitt called out, this time in his native tongue.

  "I do not understand Swahili. Can you try English?"

  Matabu pounded on the bridge counter in exasperation and growing anger. He was not used to humored indifference. He replied in broken English that Pitt could barely decipher. "I am Admiral Pierre Matabu, Chief of the National Benin Navy," he announced pompously. "Stop your engines and heave-to for inspection. Heave-to or I will give the order to fire."

  Pitt nodded furiously and waved both hands in a gesture of compliance. "Yes, yes, don't shoot. Please don't shoot."

  The cockpit of the Calliope was slowly coming even with the stern of Matabu's gunboat. Pitt kept just enough distance between the two boats to make it impossible for anyone but an Olympic broadjumper to leap across the gap. Two crewmen threw lines on Pitt's bow and stern decks, but he made no move toward them.

  "Tie the lines," Ketou ordered.

  "Too far away," Pitt shrugged. He held up a hand and made a half arc. "Hold on. I'll come around."

  Not waiting for a reply, he eased the throttles forward and swung the helm so that the sport yacht slowly slipped into a 180-degree turn around the stern of the gunboat before straightening out and pulling up along the opposite side of the hull. Now both vessels were on a parallel course, bows pointed downriver. Pitt noted with no small amount of satisfaction that the 30-millimeter guns could not depress low enough to strike the Calliope's cockpit.

  Matabu stared down at Pitt, eyes gloating, a smile of triumph beginning to spread across his thick jowls. Ketou didn't share his superior's wolfish expression. His face wore a very suspicious look indeed.

  Calmly, still grinning, Pitt waited until Giordino's turret was directly in line with the gunboat's engine room. Keeping one hand on th
e wheel, he casually reached under the chair and grasped the stock of the grenade launcher. Then he spoke softly into the microphone on his headset.

  "Helicopter dead ahead. Gunboat to starboard. Okay, gentlemen, it's show time. Let's take 'em!"

  As Pitt spoke, Giordino dropped the shield around his engine room turret and unleashed a rapier missile that ran straight and true into the helicopter's fuel tanks. Gunn popped up from the forward hatch two modified M-16 automatic rifles clamped under each armpit, both hands gripping and squeezing the triggers, muzzles blazing, blowing away the men manning the 30-millimeter guns as though they were chaff spewed from a grain combine. Pitt aimed the muzzle of the grenade launcher into the air and fired the first of his incendiary/concussion grenades over Matabu's vessel onto the superstructure of the second. Unable to see the backup gunboat, he fired blindly, judging a trajectory that would drop on his target. The grenade bounced off a winch into the river, exploding with a thunderous boom underwater. The next lob missed the boat completely, bursting with the same result.

  Matabu could never have been prepared for the horrific spectacle that exploded around him. It seemed to him as though the sky and air suddenly tore apart. His mind accepted only fleetingly in one stunned glimpse the total disintegration of the helicopter. It erupted in a giant fireball that was followed by a mushroom burst of shattered debris that rained down in a fiery torrent onto the river.

  "The white bastards tricked us!" Ketou yelled in abrupt anger at having swallowed the bait. He rushed to the rail and furiously shook his fist at the Calliope. "Depress guns and fire!" he screamed at his gun crews.

  "Too late!" Matabu cried in terror. The Admiral panicked and crouched there, frozen into immobility as he watched his crew crumple and die under the tearing slugs of Gunn's weapons. He stared petrified in disbelieving shock at the obscenely twisted corpses around the silent guns, all lying sprawled in fetal attitudes, their gore spreading across the deck. Matabu's mind simply could not accept a clandestine ship masquerading as an innocent yacht under a respected flag with the firepower to turn his comfortable little world into a horror. The stranger standing at the helm of the deadly boat had turned surprise into a tactical asset. Matabu's men were overwhelmed with shock they seemed unable to shake off. They milled about like cattle in a thunderstorm, caught off balance and struck with fear, falling without firing a shot in response. He realized then with blood-chilling certainty that he was going to die; he realized it when the turret above the stern of the sport yacht spun and unleashed another missile point blank against the gunboat that penetrated the wooden hull and struck a generator in the engine room before detonating.

  At almost the same moment, Pitt's third toss struck home. Miraculously, the grenade impacted on a bulkhead and ricocheted into an open hatch of the second gunboat. In a concert of explosions, it exploded in a roar of flame, setting off the ammunition and cannon shells in the boat's magazine. Flying debris and swirling smoke shot up in an umbrella of splintered bulkheads, ventilators, pieces of lifeboats, and broken bodies. Shockingly, the gunboat ceased to exist. The shock wave came like a sledgehammer and drove Matabu's vessel hard against the sport yacht, knocking Pitt off his feet.

  Giordino's missile blasted the gunboat's engine room into a holocaust of shredded metal and slashed timbers. Water gushed in through a massive hole ripped out of the bottom, and the gunboat began to sink quickly. Virtually the whole interior was a blazing bedlam with fiery tongues darting through the open ports. Veins of oily black smoke curled and billowed into the tropical air before drifting over the forested riverbank.

  With no targets left standing at the guns or on the decks, Gunn fired his final rounds at the two figures on the bridge. Two slugs tore into Matabu's chest. He rose to his feet, stood there for several moments, hands in a death grip on the bridge railing, staring dumbly at the blood staining his immaculate uniform. Then he slowly sagged to the deck in a fat, inert lump.

  For several seconds a desperate silence fell over the river, broken by the soft crackling of burning surface oil. Then abruptly, like a shriek from the very pits of hell, an agonized voice screamed out over the water.

  <<13>>

  "Western filth!" Ketou cried. "You've murdered my crew." He stood there against the gray sky, blood seeping from a wound in his shoulder, dazed by the sheer physical shock of the disaster around him.

  Gunn stared up at him over the barrels of empty guns.

  Ketou glared back at him for a moment, and then he focused on Pitt who was pushing himself off the deck and reaching for the wheel.

  "Western filth," Ketou repeated.

  "Fair is fair!" Pitt shouted back above the crackle of the flames. "You lost the draw." Then he added, "Abandon your ship. We'll come around and pick you up.

  Fleetingly, almost like the blink of a camera shutter, Ketou leaped down the ladder and ran toward the stern. The gunboat had heeled sharply to port, her gunwales awash, as he struggled across the steeply angled deck.

  "Get him, Rudi," Pitt snapped into his mike. "He's going for the stern gun."

  Gunn said nothing but cast aside his useless weapons, ducked into the forward compartment, and snatched a Remington TR870 automatic shotgun. Pitt shoved the throttles to their stops convulsively, spinning the wheel to port and skidding the Calliope around in a violent sheer that ended with the bow aimed upriver. The propellers bit and dug in, the water boiled under her stern, and the Calliope leaped like a race horse out of the gate.

  There was only oil and floating debris drifting on the river now. Commander Ketou's gunboat was starting its final slide to the river bottom. The river flowed into the shattered hull and hissed in clouds of steam. Water was swirling around Ketou's knees when he reached the aft 30-millimeter guns, swung the muzzles toward the fleeing sport yacht, and pressed the fire control button.

  "Al!" Pitt hailed.

  His reply was the hissing blast of a missile that Giordino launched from his turret. A streak of orange flame and white smoke shot through the air toward the gunboat. But Pitt's abrupt turn of the wheel and the thrust of sudden acceleration had thrown off Giordino's aim. The missile swished over the sinking gunboat and exploded in the trees bordering the river.

  Gunn appeared at Pitt's side in the cockpit, took careful aim, and began blasting away with the Remington over the stern at Ketou. Time seemed to slow as the shot splattered around the gun mount and into the African boat commander. They were too far away to see the hate and frustration in his shiny black features. Nor could they see that he died over the gun sight, his lifeless hand doggedly forcing down the fire control button.

  A burst of fire shrieked after the Calliope. Pitt swiftly cut a sharp bend to starboard, but the irony of battle had yet to take its fair share. Ironic because a dead man had fought back through catastrophic defeat with a precision he could never know. Jets of water skipped white and straddled the speeding boat as shells ripped away the airfoil above and behind the cockpit that held the parabolic satellite dish antenna and communications antenna and navigation transponder, blasting the remains into the river. The windshield in front of the cockpit shattered and was carried away. Gunn threw himself prone on the deck, but Pitt could only hunch over the wheel and ride out the deadly storm. They could not hear the impact of the shells over the thunderous roar of the flat-out turbo diesels. But they could see the bits and pieces of debris bursting all around them.

  Then Giordino got in a clear shot and launched his last missile. The settling stern of the gunboat suddenly vanished in a puff of smoke and flame. And then the boat was gone, sliding under and leaving a large flutter of bubbles and a spreading slick of oil. The Commander-in-Chief of Benin's navy and his river fleet were no more.

  Pitt forced himself to turn his back on the flotsam-filled river astern and look to his own boat and friends. Gunn was coming shakily to his feet, bleeding from a cut across his balding head. Giordino appeared from the engine room looking like a man who had just stepped off a handball court, sweating and wea
ry, but ready for a new game.

  He pointed up the river. "We're in for it now," he shouted the words in Pitt's ear.

  "Maybe not," Pitt shouted back. "At this speed we'll cross into Niger in twenty minutes."

  "Hopefully, we didn't leave any witnesses."

  "Don't count on it. Even if there were no survivors, somebody must have caught the fight from shore."

  Gunn gripped Pitt's arm and yelled. "As soon as we're in Niger, back off and we'll take up the survey again."

  "Affirmative," Pitt agreed. He shot a quick look at the satellite dish and communications antenna. It was then he noticed they were gone along with the airfoil. "So much for contacting the Admiral and giving him a full report."

  "Nor can the labs at NUMA receive my data transmission," said Gunn sadly.