Sahara Page 37

  "The world environmental regulation organizations must be told of this," exclaimed Grimes. "The damage a toxic dump the size of Fort Foureau can produce is inestimable."

  "Enough talk," said Hopper. "Time is precious. We have to move forward on the escape plan for these men."

  "What about the rest of you?"

  "We're in no shape to cross the desert. Our strength has been sapped and our bodies racked from slaving in the mines, too little sleep, and almost no food or water. No way we can make it. So we did the next best thing. Hoarded supplies and prayed for someone like you to arrive in good physical condition."

  Pitt looked down at Eva. "I can't leave her."

  "Then stay and die with the rest of us," Grimes said abruptly. "You're the only hope for everyone in this hellhole."

  Eva clutched Pitt's hand. "You must go, and go quickly," she pleaded. "Before it's too late."

  "She's right, you know," added Fairweather. "Forty-eight hours in the shafts and they break you. Look at us. We're washed out. None of us could cross 5 kilometers of desert before dropping."

  Pitt stared at the dirt floor. "How far do you think Al and I'd get without water? Twenty, maybe 30 kilometers farther than you?"

  "We've only hoarded enough for one man," said Hopper. "We'll leave it to you to decide who makes the attempt and who stays."

  Pitt shook his head. "Al and I go together."

  "Two will never get far enough for rescue."

  "What kind of distance are we talking about?" asked Giordino.

  "The Trans-Saharan Motor Track is close to 400 kilometers due east of here, across the border in Algeria," replied Fairweather. "After 300, you'll have to trust to luck to get you the rest of the way. Once you reach the track, you should be able to flag down a passing vehicle."

  Pitt tilted his head as if he didn't hear Fairweather right. "Maybe I missed something. You neglected to explain how we breeze past the first 300 kilometers?"

  "You steal one of O'Bannion's trucks once you reach the surface. It should carry you that far."

  "A little optimistic, aren't we," said Pitt. "What if its fuel tank is empty?"

  "No one ever keeps an empty petrol tank in the desert," Fairweather said firmly.

  "Just walk out of here, punch an elevator button, ride to the surface, steal a truck, and roll merrily on our way," Giordino scowled. "Sure we will."

  Hopper smiled. "Do you have a better plan?"

  "To be honest," Pitt laughed, "we don't even have an outline."

  "We'd hurry things up a bit," warned Fairweather. "Melika will be dragging everyone back to the mines within the hour."

  Pitt looked around the prisoners' cave. "Do you all blast and load ore?"

  "The political prisoners, which includes us," answered Grimes, "dig and load the ore after it's blasted from the rock. The criminal prisoners labor in the rock crusher and recovery levels. They also make up the blasting crew. Poor devils, none of them last long. If they don't blow themselves to bits with explosives they die from the mercury and cyanide used in the amalgamation and refining of the gold."

  "How many foreign nationals are you?"

  "There are five of us left from the original team of six. One was murdered by Melika, who beat her to death."

  "A woman?"

  Hopper nodded. "Dr. Marie Victor, a vivacious lady and one of the finest physiologists in Europe." Hopper's jovial expression had vanished. "She was the third since we arrived. Two of the wives of the French engineers from Fort Foureau were murdered by Melika too." He paused to look sadly at the wasted little girl in the bunk. "Their children suffer the worst, and there is nothing we can do."

  Fairweather pointed to a group of people clustered around three of the tiered bunks. Four were women, eight were men. One of the women was holding a little boy about three against her body.

  "My God!" Pitt whispered. "Of course, of course! Massarde couldn't allow the engineers who constructed his project to return to France and spill the truth."

  "How many women and children all told are down here?" Giordino asked with an expression clouded with wrath.

  "The current count is nine women with four small children," Fairweather answered.

  "Don't you see," Eva said softly. "The sooner you get free and bring help, the more people you'll save."

  Pitt didn't need any further convincing. He turned back to face Hopper and Fairweather. "Okay, let's hear your plan."

  <<38>>

  It was a plan shot full of holes, the scheme of desperate men with little or no resources, incredibly oversimplified, but just crazy enough to work.

  An hour later, Melika and her guards walked through the cavern dungeon and forced the slave laborers into the main chamber where they were assembled in work gangs before moving toward their assigned stations in the mines. It seemed to Pitt as if she took devious delight in wielding her thong right and left against the sea of unprotected flesh, cursing and beating men and women alike who looked as if they belonged in coffins.

  "The witch never tires of adding sears to the helpless," Hopper seethed.

  "Melika means queen, a name she gave herself," Grimes said to Pitt and Giordino. "But we call her the wicked witch of the west because she was a matron in a women's prison in the United States."

  "You think she's rotten now," Pitt muttered. "Wait until she finds the ore cars Al and I covered with a facade of rock."

  Giordino and Hopper hovered beside Pitt as he circled his arm around Eva's waist and guided her outside. Melika spied Pitt and moved toward him, stopped, and then stared at Eva menacingly. She grinned, knowing she could enrage Pitt not by striking him but laying the thong on Eva.

  She swung but Giordino stepped between them and the thong made a sickening slapping sound as it met and bounced off his flexed biceps.

  Except for an angry red welt that formed and began to ooze blood, Giordino showed no ill effects from a blow that would have left any normal man clutching his arm and groaning in agony. Without so much as a tic, he gave her a cold stare and said, "Is that the best you can do?"

  The mob went dead still. They all halted in mid-stride, holding their breath for the storm that would surely come. Five seconds passed as if time was frozen in ice. Melika stood numb from the unexpected show of boldness, and then she quickly turned crimson with crazed anger. She reacted as though she couldn't cope with ridicule, snarling like a wounded bear and lashing out at Giordino with the thong.

  "Restrain yourself!" came a commanding voice at the gate.

  Melika spun around. Selig O'Bannion was standing just outside the dungeon, a giant amid munchkins. She held the thong poised in mid-air for a few moments before lowering it, glaring at O'Bannion in humiliation, her eyes coals of bitter resentment, like a neighborhood bully chastised in front of her victims by the cop on the beat.

  "Do not injure Pitt and Giordino," ordered O'Bannion. "I want them to live the longest so they can carry the others into the burial chamber."

  "Where's the sport in that?" said Pitt.

  O'Bannion laughed softly and nodded at Melika. "Breaking Pitt physically will give me little enjoyment. Breaking his mind into quivering mush will be a happy experience for both of us. See that they have a light work load for the next ten shifts."

  Melika begrudgingly nodded her head in compliance as O'Bannion mounted a locomotive and rode into one of the shafts for an inspection tour. "Out, you stinking scum," she growled, waving the blood-stained thong above her grotesque head and barrel-like body.

  Eva stumbled, barely able to keep on her feet, as Pitt helped her to where the laborers assembled. "Al and I will get through," he promised her. "But you've got to hang on until we return with an armed force to rescue you and these other poor souls."

  "Now I have a reason for living," she said softly. "I'll be waiting."

  He kissed her on the lips and the bruises on her face lightly. Then he turned to Hopper, Grimes, and Fairweather, who were standing around them in a protective ring. "Take care of her."
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  "We will," Hopper nodded in assurance.

  "I wish you wouldn't deviate from our original plan," said Fairweather. "Hiding you in one of the ore cars going up to the crusher is safer than your idea."

  Pitt shook his head. "We'd still have to move through the ore-crushing level, then the refining and recovery areas before reaching the surface. I don't like the odds. Taking the direct route up the executive elevator and through the engineering offices has more appeal."

  "If there's a choice between sneaking out the back door or strutting out the front," said Giordino plaintively, "he'll go for style every time."

  "Do you have a rough guess as to the number of armed guards?" Pitt directed his question to Fairweather because the safari leader had endured the mines longer than Hopper and his people.

  "A rough guess?" Fairweather thought a moment. "Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. The engineers are armed too. I've counted about six of them besides 0'Bannion."

  Grimes passed two small canisters to Giordino who hid them under his tattered shirt. "All the water we've been hoarding. Everyone contributed out of their ration. A little less than 2 liters is all we managed. I'm sorry there isn't more."

  Giordino placed his hands on Grimes' shoulders, unusually touched by the sacrifice. "I'm aware of the cost, thank you."

  "The dynamite?" Pitt queried Fairweather.

  "I have it," answered Hopper, slipping Pitt a small stick of explosives with a detonation cap. "One of the blasting crew smuggled it out in his shoe."

  "Two final items," said Fairweather. "A file to cut through your chains, stolen out of a locomotive toolbox by Grimes. And a diagram of the shafts that also shows the surveillance cameras. On the back, I've drawn a crude map of the country you have to cross before reaching the Trans-Saharan Track."

  "If anybody knows the desert, Ian does," affirmed Hopper.

  "I'm grateful," said Pitt. Uncharacteristically, his eyes began to water. "We'll do our best to return with help."

  Hopper put a great bear-like arm around Pitt. "Our prayers and hearts go with you."

  Fairweather shook his hand. "Remember to skirt the dunes. Don't attempt to cross them. You'll only get bogged down and die."

  "Good luck," Grimes said simply.

  A guard came over and prodded Pitt and Giordino away from the others with his gun butt. Pitt disregarded him, leaned down, and gave Eva a final light kiss.

  "Don't forget," he said. "You and I and the bay of Monterey."

  "I'll wear my most revealing dress," she smiled gamely.

  Before he could say more, the guard shoved him away. As he reached the exit tunnel, he turned to wave a farewell, but she and the others were lost to view amid the milling mass of laborers and guards.

  The guard led Pitt into the shaft where they'd loaded ore a few hours earlier and then left them. Another empty ore train was sitting on the track alongside a fresh pile of excavated rock.

  "I'll make a show of competing for employee of the month while you work on your chains out of camera range," said Pitt. He began tossing rocks in the ore cars as Giordino attacked his shackles with the file Grimes had provided.

  Fortunately, the iron was old and of poor quality. The file bit through the links quickly and Giordino pulled the broken chain through the loops in his manacles, freeing his hands and feet of restricted movement. "Your turn," he said.

  Pitt draped his chain over the edge of an ore car for support and sliced through a link in less than ten minutes. "We'll have to work on the cuffs later, but at least now we can dance and jab."

  Giordino casually swung his chain like an aircraft propeller. "Who takes the guard, you or me?"

  "You," answered Pitt candidly as he reinserted the split chain through his manacles. "I'll fake him out."

  A half an hour later, as the crunch of gravel announced the guard's approach, Pitt yanked the power supply cord from the TV camera. This time two guards appeared around the bend. Two Tuaregs moving on opposite sides of the ore train rails, guns leveled in an ever-constant firing position. Their unblinking eyes, barely visible through the slit in their lithams, seemed frozen in cold implacability.

  "Two coming to visit," whispered Giordino. "And they don't look in the mood for a friendly social call."

  The guard on the right approached and poked the muzzle of his gun in Pitt's ribs to hurt and harass him. A slightly raised eyebrow was all that indicated a surprised flinch. Pitt backed away and smiled disarmingly.

  "Nice that you could drop by."

  It was essential to make a lightning move before the guards realized they were about to be attacked. The words had hardly left his lips when Pitt snatched the gun with his left hand, twisted it away, and hurled a boulder with unerring aim. A strikeout pitch, the rock thudded against the guard's forehead. The guard arched over backward like a tightly strung bow and dropped flat across the rails.

  For two seconds, though it seemed much longer, the second guard stared unbelievingly down at his fallen companion. No guard at Tebezza had ever been attacked by the slave labor, and the realization that it was happening momentarily stunned him. Then the awareness of possible death struck him and he shook off the spell. He lifted his weapon to shoot.

  Pitt pivoted away from the gun muzzle, and threw himself to one side, grabbing desperately for the fallen guard's weapon. He had a fleeting glimpse of a chain being flipped over the Tuareg's head like a child's jump rope, and then of Giordino pulling and twisting the ends like a garrote. Giordino's great strength lifted the guard off the ground, feet kicking wildly in the air. The machine gun clattered onto the rails as the guard's hands released their grip and grabbed frantically at the chain biting into his throat.

  When the thrashing settled to a feeble twitch, Giordino loosened the chain and allowed the guard to fail to the ground next to his unconscious partner only two gasps away from death. Then he swept up the gun and cradled it in his arms, the sights aiming down the mine shaft.

  "How benevolent of us not to kill them," Giordino muttered.

  "Only a temporary reprieve," said Pitt. "When Melika gets through with them for allowing us to escape, they'll find themselves working alongside the people they've beaten and tormented."

  "Can't leave these guys laying around where they'll be found."

  "Dump them in one of the ore cars and cover them with rock. They won't wake up for at least two hours. More than enough time for us to be well on our way across the desert."

  "Providing a repairman doesn't rush to repair the camera."

  As Giordino went to work disposing of the guards, Pitt consulted Fairweather's diagram of the mine shafts. There was no way he could retrace his steps to the engineer's private elevator by memory, not with a maze of mine shafts honeycombing in every direction, and without a compass, picking the correct course was all but impossible.

  Giordino finished his chore and picked up the automatic rifles and studied them. "All plastic and fiberglass five-five-six-millimeter French-manufacture general military issue. Nice little piece."

  "No shooting if we can help it," said Pitt. "We have to be discreet before Melika realizes we're missing."

  Once outside their work shaft they went straight across the main tunnel into the opening directly opposite. Fifty meters later, carefully ducking the TV cameras marked on Fairweather's map, they had reached another cavern without seeing anyone. No one challenged them, no one attacked them. They were alone for the first part of their escape.

  They followed the railroad track that had carried them into the mines from the elevator, stopping at cross tracks for Pitt to recheck the map. Those precious seconds wasted seemed like years.

  "Got any idea where we are?" asked Giordino quietly.

  "I wished I sprinkled bread crumbs when we came in," Pitt murmured, holding up the map to a light bulb coated with dust. Suddenly, the approaching metal scraping against metal sounds of an ore train reverberated some distance behind in the tunnel.

  "Freight coming," said Giordino.r />
  Pitt pointed to a natural fissure in the rock just 10 meters away on the far side of the tracks. "In there till it passes."

  They darted into the fissure and stopped suddenly. A terrible sickly stench came through the crack in the rock, a putrid stench of nauseating vileness. Carefully, with great apprehension they moved through the fissure until it opened into a larger chamber. Pitt felt as if he was entering a dank catacomb. The chamber was pitch black, but the groping hand he ran along the wall touched an electrical switch. He pressed the switch upward and a vast cavern was illuminated in a ghostly light.