Sahara

by Clive Cussler

  "You dirty scum," she hissed. "You'll suffer for this."

  Giordino puckered up his lips and blew her a kiss. "Love-hate relationships are the best."

  His cockiness cost him. He missed the sudden shift of the eyes, the foot lifting off the ground as the knee bent and thrust into his groin. Giordino released his grip on her wrist, dropped to his knees, and fell to his side, writhing in silent agony.

  Melika smiled satanically. "You fools have condemned yourselves to a hell you can't imagine." She wasted no more time with talk. She retrieved the thong and waved it toward an empty ore car and said the single word: "In."

  Five minutes later the train of ore cars stopped and then backed into a shaft. Lights strung along the timber trailed into the dark shadows. It looked to be a new working. Men's voices traveled over the noise of the train and a moment later the gleam of their lamps flickered around a bend. They were herded along by Tuareg guards with whips and guns, chanting in tired, hoarse voices. All were Africans, some southern tribesmen, some desert people. Zombies in old horror movies looked in better health than these poor dregs. They moved slowly, dragging their feet. Most were dressed only in ragged shorts. Sweat covered their bodies that were also heavily coated with rock dust. The glazed look in their eyes and the ribs showing through their chests told of a starvation diet. All were scarred by lash marks and a number of them were missing fingers; a few had dirty bandages around the stumps that once were attached to hands. Their weak chanting faded as the light from their lamps was lost around the next bend.

  The tracks ended at a pile of rock that had been blasted by the explosive crew they had passed in the shaft. Melika unhitched the locomotive. "Out!" she ordered.

  Pitt helped Giordino climb over the bucket edge of the car and half supported him as they stood staring ferociously at the barrel-shaped slave driver.

  Her huge lips spread in a Novocain grin. "You'll soon look like those scum."

  "You should pass out vitamins and steel gloves," said Giordino, suddenly straightening, his face pale with, pain.

  Melika raised her thong and slashed him across the chest. Giordino did not blink or flinch. These men weren't yet cowed, she thought. It was only a question of days before she reduced them to animals. "The blasting crew has accidents," she said matter-of-factly. "Lost limbs go with the job."

  "Remind me not to volunteer," muttered Pitt.

  "Load this rock into the cars. When you've finished, you can eat and sleep. A guard will make his rounds at unannounced times. He finds you sleeping, you work extra shifts."

  Pitt hesitated. A question was on the tip of his tongue. But it stuck in his throat. It was time to lay low. He and Giordino stared at the tons of ore piled at the end of the shaft and then at each other. It seemed a hopeless, backbreaking task for two men to accomplish in less than forty-eight hours while hampered by shackles.

  Melika climbed onto the electric locomotive and nodded at a TV camera mounted on a cross beam. "Don't waste your time thinking of escape. You're under constant surveillance. Only two men made it out of the mines. Their bones were found by nomads."

  She gave off a witch's cackle and rode off down the mine shaft. They watched until she had disappeared and all sounds faded. Then Giordino raised his hands and let them drop to his sides. "I think we've been had," he muttered as he sadly counted up to thirty-five empty ore cars.

  Pitt lifted the chain attached between his hand and ankle manacles and hobbled over to a large stack of beams, waiting to shore up the tunnel as it was excavated. He paced off one beam and did the same with an ore car. Then he nodded.

  "We should be able to wrap this up in six hours."

  Giordino gave him a very sour look indeed. "If you believe that, you'd better sign up for a course in elementary physics."

  "A little trick I learned picking raspberries one summer in high school," said Pitt curtly.

  "I hope it fools the surveillance camera," Giordino groaned.

  Pitt grinned insidiously. "Watch and learn."

  <<37>>

  The guards came and went with irregularity as Melika promised. They seldom stayed but a minute, satisfying themselves that the two prisoners were feverishly loading ore cars as if attempting to set some kind of record. In six and a half hours all thirty-five cars appeared brimming over with ore.

  "Giordino eased to a sitting position with his back against a timber. "You load 16 tons and what do you get?" he said, quoting the song.

  "Another day older and deeper in debt," Pitt finished.

  "So that's how you picked raspberries."

  Pitt settled next to Giordino and smiled. "During a trip around the states with a school buddy one summer, we stopped at a farm in Oregon that advertised for berry pickers. We thought it would be easy gas money and applied. Whey paid fifty cents a lug, which if I remember correctly, held about eight small boxes. What we didn't know is that raspberries are much smaller and softer than strawberries. Picking as fast as we could go it seemed forever to fill up a lugs"

  So you loaded the bottoms with dirt and layered the tops with berries."

  Pitt laughed. "At that, we only averaged thirty-six cents an hour."

  "What do you think will happen when the old bitch finds out we laid timbers as false floors in the ore cars and only piled a few rocks on top to make them look fully loaded?"

  "She won't be happy."

  "Throwing a handful of dust on the lens of the TV camera to blur our images was a nice touch. The guards never caught on."

  "At least our little con job bought us some time without exhausting our reserves."

  "I'm so thirsty I could drink dust."

  "If we don't get water soon, we'll be in no shape to make a break."

  Giordino eyed the chains on his manacles and then the rails under the ore cars. "I wonder if we can cut our chains by laying them on the rails and running a car over them."

  "I thought about that five hours ago," said Pitt. "The chains are too thick. Nothing less than a full-size Union Pacific diesel locomotive could crush these links."

  "I hate a spoilsport," Giordino grumbled.

  Pitt idly picked up a piece of ore and studied it under the string of overhead lights. "I'm no geologist, but I'd say this is gold-bearing quartz. Judging from the grains and flakes in the rock, it comes from a fairly rich vein."

  "Massarde's share must go toward expanding his sordid empire."

  Pitt shook his head in dissent. "No, he wouldn't spread it around and incur tax problems. I bet he skips converting it into cash and hoards the ingots somewhere. Since he's French, my guess is one of the Society Islands."

  "Tahiti?"

  "Or Bora Bora or Moorea. Only Massarde or his flunky, Verenne, knows for sure."

  "Maybe when we get out of here we can go on a treasure hunt to the South Seas--"

  Suddenly Pitt sat up and held a finger to his mouth for silence. "Another guard coming," he announced.

  Giordino cocked an ear and gazed down the shaft. But the guard was not in sight yet. "Pretty clever of you to scatter gravel around the other side of the bend. You can hear the crunch of their footsteps before they appear."

  "Let's look busy."

  They both leaped to their feet and made a show of busily stacking ore on the heaps already topping the cars. A Tuareg guard walked around the bend and watched them for a minute. As he turned to leave and continue his rounds, Pitt shouted at him.

  "Hey, pal, we're finished. See, all loaded. Time to knock off."

  "Get food and water," Giordino jumped in.

  The eyes of the guard darted from Pitt down along the line of ore cars. Suspiciously, he walked the train from end to end and back again. He looked at the large pile of ore remaining on the floor of the shaft and scratched his head through his litham. Then he shrugged and gestured with his automatic weapon for Pitt and Giordino to begin moving toward the entrance of the shaft.

  "They're not big on small talk around here," grunted Giordino.

  "Makes it tough
to bribe them."

  Once into the main tunnel, they followed the narrow set of rails up a long sloping grade cut in the bowels of the plateau. An ore train with a guard driving the locomotive rumbled into view, and they had to press their backs against the side of the hewn wall to allow it to pass. A short distance later they reached a hollowed-out cavern where the rails from other cross shafts congregated at a large elevator that could hold four ore cars at one time.

  "Where are they taking the ore?" asked Giordino.

  "Must go to an upper level where it's crushed to powder and the gold is recovered and refined."

  The guards led them to a massive iron gate mounted on equally massive hinges and weighing close to half a ton. It was designed to keep more than chickens cooped up. Two other Tuaregs waited on the other side. They nodded and exerted every muscle in pulling open the gate, then silently motioned for Pitt and Giordino to move inside. One guard handed them dirty tin cups half filled with brackish water.

  Pitt gazed into the cup, then at the guard. "How creative, water garnished with bat's vomit."

  The guard couldn't understand the words but he easily read the savage look in Pitt's eyes. He snatched back the cup and threw the water in the dirt and kicked Pitt into the chamber.

  "That'll teach you to look a gift horse in the mouth," Giordino said, smiling broadly as he emptied his cup on the ground too.

  Their new home was 10 meters wide by 30 long and lit by four tiny light bulbs. Four-tiered wooden bunks were arranged the length of both walls. The dungeon, for that's what it was, had no ventilation and the stench of crowded living conditions was ghastly. The only sanitary conveniences were several holes sunk in the rock along the rear wall. In the center were two long eating tables with crude wooden benches. There had to be, Pitt guessed, more than three hundred human beings crammed in the nauseating area.

  The bodies slumped in the nearest bunks looked to Pitt as if they were comatose. Their faces looked as expressionless as cabbages. Twenty men were huddled around the table using their hands to eat out of a community pot like starving maggots. None of the faces looked frightened or worried; they were far beyond showing ordinary emotion; they were drawn and haggard from lack of food and exhaustion. They moved mechanically like living cadavers, staring through eyes dead with defeat and submission. None of them gave Pitt and Giordino so much as a glance as they made their way through the sea of human misery.

  "Not exactly a carnival atmosphere," muttered Giordino.

  "Humanitarian principles don't count for much around here," Pitt said in disgust. "It's worse than I ever imagined."

  "Much worse," agreed Giordino, cupping a hand over his nose in a futile effort to ward off the smell "The Black Hole of Calcutta had nothing on this dump."

  "Feel like eating?"

  Giordino winced as he stared at the remains of the slop clinging to the sides of the pot. "My appetite just filed for bankruptcy."

  The nearly unbreathable air and lack of ventilation in the dungeon-like cavern raised the heat and humidity from the packed bodies to unbearable levels. But Pitt suddenly felt himself turn as cold as if he'd stepped onto an iceberg. For a moment all the defiance and anger left him and the horror and suffering seemed to dissolve and fade as he recognized a figure bending over a bunk in a lower tier against the right wall of the cave. He rushed over and knelt beside a woman who was tending a sick child.

  "Eva," he said gently.

  She was bone weary from forced labor and lack of food, and her face was pale and marked by welts and bruises, but she turned and stared at him through eyes that gleamed with courage.

  "What do you want?"

  "Eva, it's Dirk."

  It didn't sink in. "Leave me alone," she muttered. "This little girl is terribly sick."

  He took her hand between his and leaned closer. "Look at me. I'm Dirk Pitt."

  Then her eyes widened in recognition. "Oh Dirk, is it really you?"

  He kissed her and gently touched the bruises on her face. "If I'm not, someone is playing a cruel trick on us both."

  Giordino appeared at Pitt's shoulder. "A friend of yours?"

  Pitt nodded. "Dr. Eva Rojas, the lady I met in Cairo."

  "How did she get here?" he asked in surprise.

  "How did you?" Pitt asked her.

  "General Kazim hijacked our plane and sent us here to work in the mines."

  "But why?" queried Pitt. "What threat were you to him?"

  "Our UN health team, under the supervision of Dr. Frank Hopper, was close to identifying a toxic contaminant that was killing villagers all over the desert. We were on our way back to Cairo with biological samples for analysis."

  Pitt looked up at Giordino. "Massarde asked us if we were working with Dr. Hopper and his group."

  Giordino nodded. "I recall. He must have known Kazim had already imprisoned them here."

  She dabbed a wet handkerchief on the little girl's forehead and suddenly leaned her head against Pitt's chest and sobbed. "Why did you come to Mali? Now you're going to die like the rest of us."

  "We have a date, remember?"

  Pitt was concentrating his attention on Eva and didn't see the three men cautiously moving in between the bunks and surrounding them. The leader was a big man with a red face and bushy beard. The other two looked haggard and worn out. They all bore lash marks on their naked backs and chests. The menacing expressions on their faces brought a grin from Giordino as he turned and faced them. Their physical conditions were so pathetic he was confident he could have laid out all three without breathing hard.

  "These men bothering you?" the red-faced man said to Eva protectively.

  "No, no, not at all," Eva murmured. "This is Dirk Pitt, the man who saved my life in Egypt."

  "The man from NUMA?"

  "The same," Pitt replied. He turned to Giordino. "This is my friend, Al Giordino."

  "By God, a real pleasure. I'm Frank Hopper and this shabby fellow on my left is Warren Grimes."

  "Eva told me a great deal about you in Cairo."

  "Damned sorry we have to meet under such grim circumstances," Hopper stared at the deep cuts on both of Pitt's cheeks and touched the long scab that ran across his own face. "It seems we've both angered Melika."

  "Only on the left side. The right one came from another source."

  The third man stepped forward and held out his hand. "Major Ian Fairweather," he introduced himself.

  Pitt shook the outstretched hand. "British?"

  Fairweather nodded. "Liverpool."

  "Why were you brought here?"

  "I led tourist safaris across the Sahara until one was massacred by plague-crazed villagers. I barely escaped with my life, and after struggling across the desert, was rescued and hospitalized in Gao. General Zateb Kazim arrested me so I couldn't reveal what I'd seen and sent me here to Tebezza."

  "We did pathology studies on the villagers Major Fairweather is referring to," explained Hopper. "All died from a mysterious chemical compound."

  "Synthetic amino acid and cobalt," said Pitt.

  Hopper and Grimes looked peculiarly stunned. "What, what did you say?" demanded Grimes.

  "The toxic contamination causing death and sickness throughout Mali is an organometallic compound that's a combination of an altered synthetic amino acid and cobalt."

  "How could you possibly know that?" asked Hopper.

  "While your team was searching in the desert, mine was tracking it up the Niger River."

  "And you identified the stuff," Hopper said with a look of optimism that wasn't there before.

  Pitt briefly told of the red tide explosion, his expedition up the river, and the presumed flight by Rudi Gunn with their data.

  "Thank God, you got your results out," muttered Hopper.

  "The source," pressed Grimes. "Where is the source?"

  "Fort Foureau," Giordino answered him.

  "Not a chance-"Grimes stared dumbly. "Fort Foureau and the contamination sites are hundreds of kilometers apart."
>
  "It's carried by underground water movement," Pitt clarified. "Al and I had a look around inside the project before we were captured. High-level nuclear waste, as well as ten times the hazardous waste that's being burned, is being buried in underground caverns where it leaks into the groundwater."