Sahara Page 18

  "Here, this should wake you up. Good Egyptian coffee with mud on the bottom of the cup."

  "How long was I in dreamland?"

  "You were dead to the world for a little over two hours."

  "Have we passed Gao?"

  "Cruised past the city about 50 kilometers back. You missed seeing a floating villa with a bevy of bikini-clad beauties throwing kisses to me from the railings."

  "You're putting me on."

  Giordino held up three fingers. "Scout's honor. It was the fanciest houseboat I've ever laid eyes on."

  "Is Rudi still reading strong toxin levels?"

  Giordino nodded. "He says the concentration gets hotter with each passing kilometer."

  We must be close."

  "He thinks we're almost on top of the stuff."

  Just for an instant something flickered deep in Pitt's eyes, a sudden gleam, almost as if something was created, something imagined that reflected from inside his brain. Giordino always knew when Pitt departed reality and traveled to some unknown destination. With a blink of his opaline eyes all recognition was gone, replaced with a view of another scene.

  Giordino stared at him curiously. "I don't like that look."

  Pitt came back down to earth. "Just thinking of a way to keep the Calliope from a despotic backwater jerk who wants it for his drunken orgies."

  "And how do you expect to erase the possessive gleam in Kazim's eye?"

  Pitt smiled like a reincarnated Fagin. "By conjuring up a dirty scheme to defeat his expectations."

  Shortly before sunset, Gunn called from below. "We've crossed into clean water. The contamination just disappeared off my instruments."

  Pitt and Giordino immediately turned their heads and scouted both shores. The river at this point ran on a slight angle from west of north to east of south. There were no villages or bordering roads to be seen. Only desolation met the eyes, level and barren without disruption all the way to the four horizons.

  "Empty," muttered Giordino. "Empty as a shaven armpit."

  Gunn emerged, staring back over the stern. "See anything?"

  "Look for yourself." Giordino swung an arm like a compass. "The cupboard's bare. Nothing but sand."

  "We have a break in the geology to the east," said Pitt, motioning at a wide ravine dividing the shore. "Looks as though it once carried water."

  "Not in our lifetime," said Gunn. "Appears to have been a tributary into the main channel during wetter centuries."

  Giordino studied the ancient streambed solemnly. "Rudi must have tuned in a video game. There's no contamination entering the river here."

  "Swing around and make another run so I can recheck my data," said Gunn.

  Pitt complied and ran several lanes back and forth as if mowing a lawn, beginning close to the shore and working out into the channel toward the opposite bank until his props churned silt on the rising bottom. The radar showed the tailing gunboat had stopped, the captain and his officers probably wondering what the crew of the Calliope was up to.

  Gunn popped his head through the hatch after the final run. "Swear to God, the highest concentration of toxin comes from the mouth of that big wash on the east bank."

  They all stared dubiously at the centuries-old dry riverbed. The rock-strewn bottom curled northward toward a range of low dunes in the desert wasteland. No one spoke as Pitt set the throttles on idle and let the yacht drift with the current.

  "No evidence of toxic residue beyond this point?" questioned Pitt.

  "None," Gunn answered flatly. "The concentration goes off scale just below the old wash and then disappears upstream."

  "Maybe it's a natural by-product of the soil," offered Giordino.

  "This ungodly compound can't be produced by nature," muttered Gunn. "I promise you that."

  "How about an underground drainage pipe running from a chemical plant beyond the dunes," Pitt speculated.

  Gunn shrugged. "Can't tell without further investigation. This is as far as we can go. We've kept our end of the bargain. Now it's up to contamination specialists to pick up the rest of the pieces."

  Pitt gazed over the stern at the gunboat that had crept into view. "Our hounds are getting nosy. Not bright of us to show them what devilment we're about. We'd best continue on course as though we're still taking in the scenery."

  "Some scenery," grunted Giordino. "Death Valley is a garden spot compared to this."

  Pitt pushed the throttles forward, and the Calliope lifted her bow and surged ahead with a mellow roar from her exhaust. In less than two minutes the Malian gunboat was left far in the yacht's spreading wake. Now, he thought, comes the fun part.

  <<18>>

  General Kazim sat in a leather executive chair at the end of a conference table flanked by two of Mali's cabinet ministers and his military Chief-of-Staff. At first glance the modern paintings on the silk-covered walls and the thick carpet gave the meeting room the look of a posh office in a modern building. The only giveaway was the curved ceiling and the muffled sound of the jet engines.

  The elegantly furnished Airbus Industrie A300 was only one of several gifts Yves Massarde had presented to Kazim in return for allowing the Frenchman industrialist to conduct his vast operations in Mali without wasting time on such trifling details as government laws and restrictions. Whatever Massarde wanted, Kazim gave, so long as the General's foreign bank accounts became fat and he was kept in expensive toys.

  Besides acting as a private means of transportation for the General and his cronies, the Airbus was electronically fitted out as a military communications command center, mostly to divert any accusations of corruption from the small but vocal opposition party members of President Tahir's parliament.

  Kazim listened silently while his Chief-of-Staff, Colonel Sghir Cheik, explained in detail the reports of the destruction of the Benin gunboats and helicopter. He then passed Kazim two photographs taken of the super yacht on her passage up the river from the sea. "In the first photo," Cheik pointed out, "the yacht is flying the French tricolor. But since entering our country, she is sailing under a pirate flag."

  "What nonsense is this?" demanded Kazim.

  "We don't know," Cheik confessed. "The French ambassador swears the boat is unknown to his government and is not documented under French ownership. As to the pirate flag, it is an enigma."

  "You must know where the boat came from."

  "Our intelligence sources have been unable to trace its manufacturer or the country of origin. Its lines and style are unfamiliar to the major boat yards in America and Europe."

  "Japanese or Chinese perhaps," suggested Mali's Foreign Minister, Messaoud Djerma.

  Cheik pulled the hairs of his wedge-shaped beard and adjusted his tinted, designer glasses. "Our agents have also canvassed boat builders in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan who design premier yachts with speeds exceeding 50 kilometers an hour. None had any record or knowledge of such a boat."

  "You have no information about this intrusion at all?" Kazim asked unbelievingly.

  "Nothing." Cheik held up his hands. "It's as though Allah dropped her from the heavens."

  "An innocent-looking yacht that changes flags like a woman changes dresses sails up the Niger River," Kazim snarled coldly, "destroys half the Benin navy and its commanding Admiral, calmly enters our water without bothering to stop for customs and immigration inspection, and you sit there and tell me my intelligence network can't identify the nationality of the builder or the owner?"

  "I'm sorry, my General," said Cheik nervously. His myopic eyes avoided Kazim's icy stare. "Perhaps if I had been permitted to send an agent on board at the dock in Niamey. . ."

  "It cost enough as it was to bribe Niger officials to look the other way when the boat docked for refueling. The last thing I needed was a bumbling agent causing an incident."

  "Have they replied to radio contact?" asked Djerma.

  Cheik shook his head. "Our warnings have gone unanswered. They have ignored all communications."

 
"What in Allah's sacred name do they want?" questioned Seyni Gashi. The Chief of Kazim's Military Council looked far more like a camel trader than a soldier. "What is their mission?"

  "It seems the mystery is beyond my intelligence people's mentality to solve," said Kazim irritably.

  "Now that it's entered our territory," said Foreign Minister Djerma, "why not merely board and take possession?"

  "Admiral Matabu tried it, and now he lies at the bottom of the river."

  "The boat is armed with missile launchers," Cheik pointed out. "Highly effective judging from the results."

  "Surely, we have the necessary firepower-"

  "The crew and their boat are trapped on the Niger with nowhere to go," interrupted Kazim. "There is no turning back and running 1000 kilometers to the sea. They must realize any attempt to flee will be cause for our fighter aircraft and land artillery to destroy them. We wait and watch. And when they run out of fuel, their only hope of survival will be to surrender. Then our questions will be answered."

  "Can we safely assume the crew will be persuaded to reveal their mission?" inquired Djerma.

  "Yes, yes," Cheik quickly answered. "And much more."

  The copilot stepped from the cockpit and snapped to attention. "We have the boat in visual sight, sir."

  "So at last we can see this enigma for ourselves," said Kazim. "Tell the pilot to give us a good view."

  The weariness of the punishing grind and the disappointment of not pinpointing the actual source of the toxin had dulled Pitt's vigilance. His usually sharp powers of perception lagged and his mind sidetracked any vision of the steel pincers that were slowly snapping shut on the Calliope.

  It was Giordino who heard the distant whine of jet engines, looked up, and saw ii first-an aircraft flying less than 200 meters above the river, running lights blinking in the blue dusk. It visibly swelled into a large passenger jet with Malian national colors striped along the side of its fuselage. Two or three fighters as escorts would have been enough. This plane was surrounded by twenty. It seemed at first the pilot intended to fly straight down the river and buzz the Calliope, but 2 kilometers away it banked and began to circle, drawing closer in a slow spiral. The fighter escort spun off upward and launched into a series of figure eights overhead.

  When the jet-- Pitt by now had spotted the huge radar dome on the nose and recognized it as a command center aircraft-- came within 100 meters, faces could be distinguished through the ports staring down, taking in every detail of the super yacht.

  Pitt exhaled a long, silent sigh and waved. Then he made a theatrical bow. "Step right up, folks, and see the pirate ship with its merry band of river rats. Enjoy the show, but do not damage the merchandise. You could get hurt."

  "Ain't it the truth?" Crouched on the ladder to the engine room, poised to leap at his missile launcher, Giordino stared warily at the circling plane. "If he so much as waggles his wings I'll divide, demolish, and disperse him."

  Gunn leisurely sat in a deck chair and doffed his cap at the aerial spectators. "Unless you have a method for making us invisible, I suggest we humor them. It's one thing to be an underdog, but it's quite another to be easy pickings."

  "We're overmatched all right," Pitt said, shaking off any trace of weariness. "Nothing we do will make any difference. They've got enough firepower to blow the Calliope into toothpicks."

  Gunn scanned the low banks of the river and the barren landscapes beyond. "No use in grounding on shore and making a run for it. The countryside is wide open. We wouldn't get 50 meters."

  "So what do we do?" asked Giordino.

  "Surrender and take our chances," Gunn offered lamely.

  "Even chased rats slash and run," said Pitt. "I'm for the last defiant gesture, a wasted gesture maybe, but what the hell. We give them a nasty sign with our fists, shove the throttles to the wall, and run like hell. If they get downright belligerent, we make cemetery fodder out of them."

  "More likely they'll do it to us," complained Giordino.

  "You really mean that?" Gunn demanded incredulously.

  "Not on your life," Pitt said emphatically. "Mrs. Pitt's boy has no death wish. I'm gambling Kazim wants this boat so bad, he paid off Niger officials to let it pass into Mali so he could grab it. If I win, he won't want even the slightest scratch or dent in the hull."

  "You're putting all your eggs in the wrong basket," argued Gunn. "Shoot down one plane and you'll stir up a hornet's nest. Kazim will send everything he's got after us."

  "I certainly hope so."

  "You're talking like a crazy man," said Giordino suspiciously.

  "The contamination data," Pitt said patiently. "That's why we're here. Remember?"

  "We don't have to be reminded," said Gunn, beginning to see a slip of light in Pitt's seeming loss of reality. "So what's boiling in your evil caldron of a brain?"

  "As much as I hate to ruin a beautiful and perfectly good boat, a diversion may be the only way one of us can escape and carry the results of our operation out of Africa and into the hands of Sandecker and Chapman."

  "There's method to his madness after all," Giordino admitted. "Keep talking."

  "Nothing complicated," explained Pitt. "In another hour it will be dark. We reverse course and get as close to Gao as we can before Kazim gets tired of the game. Rudi goes over the side and swims for shore. Then you and I start the fireworks show and take off downriver like a vestal virgin chased by barbarian hordes."

  "That gunboat might have something to say about that, don't you think?" Gunn reminded him.

  "A mere trifle. If my timing is on key, we'll flash past the Malian navy before they know we've come and gone."

  Giordino peered over his sunglasses. "Sounds remotely possible. Once the good times roll, the Malians' attention won't be focused on a body in the water."

  "Why me?" Gunn demanded. "Why not one of you?"

  "Because you're the best qualified," Pitt justified. "You're sly, cunning, and slippery. If anyone can grease their way into the airport at Gao and onto an airplane out of the country, it's you. You're also the only bona fide chemist among us. That alone entitles you to lay bare the toxic substance and its entry point into the river."

  "We could make a run for our embassy in the capital city of Bamako."

  "Fat chance. Bamako is 600 kilometers away."

  "Dirk makes good sense," Giordino agreed. "His gray matter and mine put together couldn't give you the formula for bathroom soap."

  "I'll not run out and allow the two of you to sacrifice your lives for me," Gunn insisted.

  "Don't talk stupid," Giordino said stonily. "You know damn well Dirk and I don't have a mutual suicide pact." He turned to Pitt. "Do we?"

  "Perish the thought," Pitt said loftily. "After we cover Rudi's getaway, we fix the Calliope so Kazim never enjoys its luxury. After that, we abandon ship ourselves and then mount a safari across the desert to discover the true source of the toxin."

  "We what?" Giordino looked aghast. "A safari . . ."

  "You have an incredible knack for simplicity," said Gunn.

  "Across the desert," Giordino mumbled.

  "A little hike never hurt anybody," Pitt said with a jovial air.

  "I was wrong," Giordino moaned. "He wants us to self-destruct."

  "Self-destruct?" Pitt repeated. "My friend, you just said the magic words."

  <<19>>

  Pitt took one final look at the aircraft overhead. They still circled aimlessly. They had shown no inclination to attack and obviously had no intention of making any now. Once the Calliope began her dash downriver Pitt could not afford the time to keep them under observation. Running wide open over a strange waterway in the black of night at 70 knots would take every shred of his concentration.

  He shifted his gaze from the aircraft to the huge flag he'd run up the mast that supported the shattered satellite antenna. He had removed the small Jolly Roger from the stern jackstaff after finding a United States ensign folded away in a flag locker. It was large,
stretching almost 2 meters, but with no breeze to lift it in the dry night air, it hung curled and flaccid around the antenna.

  He glanced at the dome on the stern. The shutters were closed. Giordino was not preparing to launch the remaining six rockets. He was attaching them around the fuel tanks before wiring them to a timer/detonator. Gunn, Pitt knew, was below, stuffing the analysis data tapes and water sample records in a plastic cover that he tightly bound and stuffed in a small backpack along with food and survival gear.