Sahara

by Clive Cussler

  In a typical windowless room somewhere in a little traveled part of the Pentagon building, Air Force Major Tom Greenwald put down the phone after notifying his wife he would be late for dinner. He relaxed for a long minute as he turned his thoughts from the satellite photo analysis of the fighting going on between Chinese army units and democratic rebel forces to the job at hand.

  The film from the GeoSat cameras sent by courier from Chip Webster at NUMA was processed and loaded in the military's sophisticated display and enhancing equipment. When all was ready, Greenwald settled himself in a comfortable chair with a console installed in one arm. He opened a can of Diet Pepsi and began turning the dials and knobs on the console as he stared up at a television monitor the size of a small movie theater screen.

  The GeoSat photos reminded him of the old spy-in-the-sky images of thirty years ago. Granted, the GeoSat was designed purely for space geological and water current survey, but it came nowhere close to the incredible imagery detail received by the latest intelligence-gathering Pyramider and Houdini satellites sent up by the space shuttles. Yet it was a vast improvement over the old LandSat that mapped the earth for over twenty years. The new model had cameras that could penetrate darkness and cloud cover, and even smoke.

  Greenwald made adjustments and corrections with his console as each photo, showing different sections of the Malian northern desert, crossed the viewing screen and was computer-enhanced. He soon began to pick out tiny specks that were flying aircraft and a camel train winding across the desert floor from the salt mines of Taoudenni south to Timbuktu.

  As the photo trail moved north from the Niger into the Azaouad, a barren region of dunes and nothingness that made up but one of the many areas of the Sahara, Greenwald found fewer and fewer signs of human presence. He could discern bones of animals, camels most likely, scattered around isolated wells, but a standing human was very difficult to detect, even for his exotic electronics systems.

  After nearly an hour, Greenwald rubbed his tired eyes and massaged his temples. He had found nothing that indicated the slightest trace of the two men he had been asked to look for. The photos of the extreme northerly search grid that Webster thought they might have reached on foot were examined unsuccessfully and set aside.

  Greenwald had done his bit for the cause and was about to call it a day and go home to his wife, but he decided to give it one final try. Years of experience had taught him that a target was never where he expected to find it. He sifted out the satellite photos revealing the deeper regions of the desolate Azaouad and gave them a fast scan.

  The stark void appeared as empty as the Dead Sea.

  He almost missed it, he would have missed it but for an indescribable feeling that a tiny object on the landscape did not fit its surroundings. It might have passed as a rock or a small dune, but the shape was not irregular like geology produced by nature. The lines were straight and well defined. His hand moved over a row of knobs, magnifying and enhancing the object.

  Greenwald knew he was on to something. He was too much the expert to be fooled. During the war with Iraq, he became something of a legend for his uncanny knack at detecting the Iraqi army's hidden bunkers, tank and artillery emplacements.

  "A car," he muttered aloud to himself. "A car covered over with sand to hide its presence."

  After tighter study, he could distinguish two tiny specks alongside the car. Greenwald wished he was looking at images received from a military satellite. He could have read the time on the target's wristwatches. But the GeoSat was not built for fine detail. Even with careful tuning he could just make them out as two humans.

  Greenwald took a moment to sit back and savor his discovery. Then he walked over to a nearby desk and dialed a phone. He waited patiently, hoping that a taped voice wouldn't come on with an announcement to leave a message. On the fifth ring, a man answered who sounded as if he was out of breath.

  "Hello."

  "Chip?"

  "Yes. This Tom?"

  "You been jogging?"

  "The wife and I were out in the backyard talking to neighbors," explained Webster. "I ran like hell when I heard the phone ringing."

  "I found something I think you'll be interested in."

  "My two men, you pulled them from the GeoSat photos?"

  "They're over 100 kilometers further north than you reckoned," said Greenwald.

  There was a pause. "Sure you're not looking at a pair of nomads?" asked Webster. "No way my people could have walked that far across a burning desert in forty-eight hours."

  "Not walked but drove."

  "Like drove a car?" asked Webster in surprise.

  "Difficult to make out details. Looks to me as though they cover it with sand during the day as camouflage from searching aircraft and drive by night. It has to be your two guys. Who else can be playing fugitive games where the grass don't grow."

  "Can you tell if they're trying for the border?"

  "Not unless they have a lousy sense of direction. They're smack in the center of northern Mali. The nearest border to another country is a good 350 kilometers."

  Webster took a long moment to reply. "It must be Pitt and Giordino. But where in hell did they find a car?"

  "Looks to me like they're resourceful men."

  "They should have given up searching for the contamination source long ago. What madness has overtaken them?"

  It was a question Greenwald could not answer. "Maybe they'll give you a call from Fort Foureau," he suggested, half serious, half in jest.

  "They're heading for the French solar waste project?"

  "They've only another 50 kilometers to go. And it's the only slice of Western civilization around."

  "Thank you, Tom," said Webster sincerely. "The next favor is mine. How about me taking you and our wives to dinner?"

  "Sounds good. Pick any restaurant and call me with day and time."

  Greenwald dropped the receiver in its cradle and refocused his attention on the fuzzy object and the two tiny figures next to it.

  "You guys have to be crazy," he said to the empty room.

  Then he closed down the system and went home.

  <<32>>

  The dawn sun came up and cast a wave of heat across the desert like an oven door thrown open. The cool of the night vanished as quickly as the passing of a cloud. A pair of ravens flew across the oppressive sky, spied something that did not belong on the empty landscape, and began circling in hopes of finding a meal. On closer inspection they saw that a live human offered nothing of taste, and they slowly winged off to the north.

  Pitt lay stretched out on the upper slope of a low dune, almost buried in the sand, and stared up at the birds for a few moments. Then he turned his attention back to the immense sprawl of the Fort Foureau solar detoxification project. It was an unreal place. Not simply a man-made edifice to technology but a thriving, productive facility surrounded by a land that had long since died under the onslaught of drought and heat.

  Pitt twisted slightly as he heard the soft movement of sand behind him and saw Giordino approaching on his stomach, wiggling up the dune like a lizard.

  "Enjoying the scenery?" asked Giordino.

  "Come take a look. I guarantee you'll be impressed."

  "The only thing that would impress me right now is a beach with nice cool surf."

  "Don't let your curly locks show," said Pitt. "A black tuft of hair against the yellow-white sand stands out like a skunk on a fence post."

  Giordino grinned like the village idiot as he poured a handful of sand into his hair. He moved alongside Pitt, peering over the summit of the dune. "My, my," he murmured in awe. "If I didn't know better, I'd say I was looking at a city on the moon."

  "The sterile landscape is there," Pitt admitted, "but there's no glass dome over the top."

  "This place is almost as big as Disney World."

  "I'd estimate 20 square kilometers."

  "We have incoming freight," said Giordino, pointing to a long train of railroad cars dr
awn by four diesel engines. "Business must be booming."

  "Massarde's toxic gravy train," Pitt mused. "I estimate about a hundred and twenty cars filled with poisonous garbage."

  Giordino nodded toward a vast field covered with long trough-like basins with concave surfaces that bounced the sun's rays like a sea of mirrors. "Those look like solar reflectors."

  "Concentrators," said Pitt. "They collect solar radiation and concentrate it into tremendous heat and proton intensities. The radiant energy is then focused inside a chemical reactor that completely destroys the hazardous waste."

  "Aren't we the bright one," said Giordino. "When did you become an expert on sunlight?"

  "I used to date a lady who was an engineer with the Solar Energy Institute. She took me on a guided tour of their research facilities. That was several years ago when they were still in the test stages of developing solar thermal technology for eliminating industrial toxic wastes. It appears Massarde has mastered the techniques."

  "I've missed something," said Giordino.

  "Like what?"

  "This whole setup. Why go to the added expense and effort to erect this cathedral to sanitation in the middle of the world's biggest sandbox. Me, I'd have built it closer to a major industrial center. Must cost a bundle just to transport the stuff across half an ocean and 1600 kilometers of desert."

  "A most astute consideration," Pitt admitted. "I'm curious too. If Fort Foureau is such a masterpiece of toxic waste destruction, and is judged by hazardous waste experts to be a safe, blue-ribbon operation, it doesn't make sense not to set it in a more convenient location."

  "You still think it's responsible for the contamination leak into the Niger?" Giordino asked.

  "We found no other source."

  "That old prospector's story about an underground river may well be the solution."

  "Except there's a flaw," said Pitt.

  "You never were the trusting type," Giordino muttered.

  "Nothing wrong with the underground flow theory. What I don't buy is leaking contamination."

  "I'm with you," Giordino nodded. "What's to leak if they're supposed to be incinerating the crap?"

  "Exactly."

  "Then Fort Foureau isn't what it's advertised?"

  "Not to my way of thinking."

  Giordino turned and looked at him suspiciously. "I hope you're not thinking of strolling around down there as if we were a couple of visiting firemen."

  "I had cat burglars more in mind."

  "How do you propose we get in? Drive up to the gate and ask for a visitor's pass?"

  Pitt nodded at the line of freight cars rolling over a siding that paralleled a long loading dock inside the facility. "We hop the train."

  "And for a getaway?" Giordino asked suspiciously.

  "With the Voisin's fuel gauge knocking on empty, bidding a fond farewell to Mali and driving off into the sunset was the last thing on my agenda. We catch the outward bound express for Mauritania."

  Giordino made a glum face. "You expect me to ride first class in freight cars that have carried tons of toxic chemicals? I'm too young to melt into sludge."

  Pitt shrugged and smiled. "You'll just have to be careful not to touch anything."

  Giordino shook his head in exasperation. "Did you consider the obstacles involved?"

  "Obstacles are made to be hurdled," Pitt answered pontifically.

  "Like the electrified fence, the guards with Doberman pinschers, the patrol cars bristling with automatic cannon, the overhead lamps that light up the place like a baseball stadium?"

  "Yes, now that you had to go and remind me."

  "Mighty strange," Giordino reflected, "that a toxic waste incinerator has to be guarded like a nuclear bomb arsenal."

  "All the more reason to inspect the premises," said Pitt calmly.

  "You won't change your mind and head for home while we're still a team."

  "Seek and ye shall find."

  Giordino threw up his hands. "You're crazier than that old prospector and his cockamamy story of a Confederate ironclad with Abe Lincoln at the helm that's buried in the desert."

  "We do have much in common," Pitt said easily. He rolled on his side and gestured toward a structure about 6 kilometers to the east a short walk from the railroad tracks. "See that old abandoned fort?"

  Giordino nodded. "The one with Beau Geste, Gary Cooper, and the French Foreign Legion written all over it. Yes, I see it."

  "Where Fort Foureau got its name," said Pitt. "No more than 100 meters separates its walls from the railroad. As soon as it's dark we'll use it for cover until we can hop an incoming train."

  "I've already noticed they whip over the rails too fast for even a professional hobo to board."

  "Prudence and patience," said Pitt. "The locomotives begin to slow just before they reach the old fort. Then they come to a crawl when they pull into what looks like a security station."

  Giordino studied the station the train had to pass through to enter the heart of the project. "A dime to a dollar an army of guards checks out every freight car."

  "They can't be too overzealous. Examining over a hundred freight cars filled with drums of toxic waste is not exactly a job a sane man would throw his heart and soul into. Besides, who would be dumb enough to stow away in one?"

  "You're the only one who comes to mind," Giordino said dryly.

  "I'm always open to more practical suggestions for sneaking past your electrified fence, Dobermans, floodlights, and patrol cars."

  Giordino was in the middle of giving Pitt a long solemn look of exasperation when he tensed and twisted his head at the sky in the direction of the oncoming thump of an approaching helicopter.

  Pitt looked up too. It was coming from the south and heading directly over them. It was not a military craft but a beautifully streamlined civilian version that was easily identified by the Massarde Enterprises name along the fuselage.

  "Damn!" cursed Giordino. He looked back at the mound of sand they had thrown over the Voisin. "Any lower and he'll blow the sand right off the car."

  "Only if he passes directly over it," Pitt said. "Burrow down and don't move."

  An alert eye might have caught them, noticed the suspicious sand dune with its strange shape, but the pilot was concentrating on the landing pad near the Project's main office building and did not glance down at the disturbed sands or the forms hugging the dune. The helicopter's sole passenger was occupied with studying a financial report and did not glance out a window.

  It swept right over them, banked slightly, sank down toward the pad, hovered for a few moments, and then settled to the concrete. A few seconds later the rotor stopped, the passenger door opened, and a man climbed down to the pad. Even at half a kilometer without binoculars, Pitt correctly guessed the identity of the figure who vigorously strode toward the office complex.

  "I think our friend has returned to haunt us," he said.

  Giordino cupped his hands around his eyes and squinted. "Too far to tell for sure, but I do believe you're right. A shame he didn't bring the piano player from the houseboat."

  "Can't you get her out of your mind?"

  Giordino looked at Pitt with a hurt expression. "Why would I want to?"

  "You don't even know her name."

  "Love will conquer all," Giordino said moodily.

  "Then conquer your amorous thoughts and let's rest up until nightfall. Then we've got a train to catch."

  They had bypassed the well described by the old prospector when the Oued Zarit's former riverbed meandered in a different direction. The soft drinks were gone and their supply of water was down to 2 liters, slightly more than 2 quarts. But they divided and drank it all to avoid dehydration, trusting in finding a source near the project.

  They parked the Voisin in a small ravine a kilometer south of the abandoned fort that sat beside the railroad, then burrowed into the sand under the car, achieving a small measure of shelter from the sweltering heat. Giordino dropped off quickly, but Pitt's m
ind was too restless for sleep.

  The night sweeps across the desert quickly. The dusk is short before the darkness. There was a strange stillness, the only sound coming from the faint tick of the Voisin's engine as it cooled. The dry desert air became cleansed from the heat and blowing sand of the day and magnified the great storm of stars that gleamed in an obsidian sky. They were so sharp and distinct Pitt could actually separate the red stars from the blue and green. He had never seen such a cosmic display, even on the open sea.