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  "I hope I'm not late for dinner, O'Bannion. As I recall, you expressed a wish to dine with me."

  "You!" O'Bannion hissed, the color ebbing from the skin showing around his eyes.

  "Back to haunt you," Pitt said with a half smile. "And I brought a few friends who don't take kindly to sadists who enslave and murder women and children."

  "You should be dead. No one could have crossed the desert without water and lived."

  "Neither Giordino nor I died."

  "One of General Kazim's search aircraft found the truck overturned in a wadi far to the west of the Trans-Saharan Track. You couldn't have reached the track on foot."

  "And the guard we left tied at the wheel."

  "Alive, but he was soon shot for allowing you to escape."

  "Life is certainly cheap in these parts."

  The shock was slowly fading from O'Bannion's eyes, but there was still no fear. "Have you come to rescue your people? Or to steal gold?"

  Pitt stared at him. "Right on the first, wrong on the second. We also intend to put you and your scum out of business, permanently."

  "Your force has invaded a sovereign nation. You have no rights in Mali or jurisdiction over me and the mine."

  "My God! You're lecturing me on jurisdiction? What about the rights of all the people you enslaved and murdered?"

  O'Bannion shrugged. "General Kazim would have executed most of them anyway."

  "What stopped you from providing them with humane treatment?" Pitt demanded.

  "Tebezza is not a resort or a spa. We are here to mine gold."

  "For the profit of you, Massarde, and Kazim."

  "Yes," O'Bannion nodded. "Our aims are mercenary. " what?"

  O'Bannion's cold and ruthless character threw open floodgate of anger in Pitt, released a series of mental pictures of the suffering endured by countless men, women, and children, pictures of the corpses stacked in the underground crypt, memories of Melika beating the helpless laborers with her bloodstained thong, the conviction that three men sick with greed were responsible for untold slaughter. He walked over to O'Bannion and smashed the shoulder stock of his machine gun into the part of the indigo litham covering O'Bannion's mouth.

  For a long moment Pitt stared down at the nomad-robed Irish mining engineer who now lay stretched on the carpet, blood spreading through the cloth of his headdress, swore in maddened fury, and then slung the unconscious man over his shoulder. He met Levant in the corridor.

  "O'Bannion?" asked the Colonel.

  Pitt nodded. "He had an accident."

  "So it would seem."

  "How do we stand?"

  "Unit four has secured the ore recovery levels. Units two and three are meeting little resistance from the guards. It appears they're better suited for beating helpless people than fighting hardened professionals."

  "The VIP elevator to the mine levels is this way," said Pitt, setting off down a side corridor.

  The carpeted and chromed-wall elevator had been abandoned by its operator as Pitt, Levant, and the members of unit one who were not guarding O'Bannion's engineers and office workers dropped down to the main level. They exited and approached the iron door that was hanging askew on its hinges and whose lock was still shattered from the blast of dynamite.

  "Someone beat us to it," mused Levant.

  "Giordino and I blew it when we escaped," explained Pitt.

  "Looks like they never got around to repairing it."

  The shaft reverberated with the sharp explosions of gunfire from somewhere within the bowels of the mine. Pitt hoisted O'Bannion's still limp body onto the shoulder of a big, muscular commando and set off at a run down the shaft in the direction of the cavern holding the prisoners.

  They reached the central chamber without meeting resistance and met up with members of unit two that were in the act of disarming a group of O'Bannion's guards who stood fearfully with hands clutched behind their necks. Giordino and two of the tactical team had shot off the lock and were leaning against the great iron gate to the slave laborers' dungeon cavern. Pembroke-Smythe spotted Levant, hurried over, and reported.

  "Sixteen guards have been rounded up, Colonel. One or two escaped into the mine shafts. Seven made the mistake of resisting and are dead. We only have two men wounded, neither seriously."

  "We have to speed things up a bit," said Levant. "I fear they transmitted an alert before we could cut off communications."

  Pitt stepped beside Giordino and added his muscle into heaving open the gate. Giordino turned and looked at him.

  "Well, it's about time you made an appearance."

  "I paused for a brief chat with O'Bannion."

  "Does he need a doctor or a mortician?"

  "A dentist actually," Pitt answered.

  "Have you seen Melika?"

  "No sign of her in the engineering offices."

  "I'll find her," said Giordino, a biting fierceness in his voice. "She's mine."

  The gate was manhandled against its stops, and the tactical team stepped into the cavern. Through firsthand experience Pitt and Giordino knew what to expect, but they were still sickened at the sight. The commandos froze, their faces gone white at the overpowering stench and the incredible degree of suffering before their eyes. Even Levant and Pembroke-Smythe stood shocked before mustering up the effort to enter.

  "Good lord," Smythe mumbled, "this looks as bad as Auschwitz and Dachau."

  Pitt rushed through the mass of packed captives who were numbed beyond desperation by the monotonous existence and starved into barely walking skeletons. He found Dr. Hopper sitting on a bunk staring blankly through dazed eyes, his filthy clothes hanging loosely on a body decimated by overwork and lack of food. He broke into a broad smile, lifted himself weakly to his feet, and embraced Pitt.

  "Thank God, you and AI made it. It's a miracle."

  "I'm sorry we took so long," said Pitt.

  "Eva never gave up` on you," said Hopper, his voice choking. "She knew you'd come through."

  Pitt looked around. "Where is she?"

  Hopper nodded toward a bunk. "You didn't get here a minute too soon. She's in a bad way."

  Pitt walked over and knelt beside a statue-like form in a lower bunk. Sadness showed in every line of his face. He couldn't believe how wasted she had become in a week's time. He gently took hold of her shoulders and gave her a light shake. "Eva, I've come back for you."

  Slowly she stirred, her eyes fluttered open, and she vaguely stared up at him. "Please let me sleep a little longer," she murmured.

  "You're safe now. I'm taking you out of this place."

  She recognized him then and her vision became blurred with tears. "I knew you would come for me. . . for us all."

  "We came within a hair of not making it:"

  She looked into his eyes and smiled gamely. "I never doubted for a moment."

  Then he kissed her, long, soft, and tenderly.

  Levant's medical team went to work immediately, treating the captives while the combat units began evacuating those who could walk to the upper level where they were loaded aboard the personnel carriers. Initial fears proved true as the operation went slowly because many were too weak to move on their own and had to be carried out.

  After seeing that Eva and the other women and children were cared for and on their way to the surface, Pitt borrowed a satchel of plastic explosives from Levant's demolition expert and then returned to a now conscious O'Bannion who sat beside an ore car under the watchful eye of a tough lady commando.

  "Come along, O'Bannion," Pitt ordered. "We're going for a stroll."

  O'Bannion's litham had unraveled and fallen away and now revealed a face heavily scarred and disfigured from a premature dynamite explosion during his younger mining days in Brazil. His ugly features were heightened by a mouth leaking blood and the lack of two front teeth, knocked out by the blow from Pitt's gun butt.

  "Where?" he asked abruptly through swollen lips.

  "To pay our respects to the dead."


  The guard stood aside as Pitt roughly pulled O'Bannion to his feet and prodded him along the ore car tracks toward the burial crypt. Neither man spoke as they walked through, the mine, occasionally stepping around the body of a Tuareg guard who had made the mistake of resisting Levant's assault force. When they came to the cavern of the dead, O'Bannion hesitated, but Pitt coldly pushed him inside.

  O'Bannion turned and faced Pitt, his eyes still contemptuous. "Why did you bring me here, to lecture me on cruelty to my fellow man before you execute me?"

  "Not at all," Pitt replied quietly. "The lesson is obvious without a lecture, and no, I'm not going to execute you. That would be too quick, too clean. A quick flash of pain and then darkness. No, I think you deserve a more appropriate end."

  For the first time a flicker of fear danced in O'Bannion's eyes. "What do you have in mind?"

  Pitt swung the muzzle of his weapon around the stacks of cadavers. "I'm going to give you time to contemplate your brutality and greed."

  O'Bannion looked confused. "Why? You're badly mistaken if you expect me to cry for forgiveness and beg for leniency."

  Pitt looked over at a pile of bodies, at the frail, starved frame and open unstaring eyes of a girl no more than ten years old. Anger flamed and seethed within him and he fought desperately to control his emotions.

  "You're going to die, O'Bannion, but very slowly, suffering the agony of thirst and hunger you imposed on these pitiful dead around you. By the time your friends Kazim and Massarde find you, providing they even bother to search, you'll have joined the rest of your victims."

  "Shoot me, kill me now!" O'Bannion savagely demanded.

  Pitt smiled a smile as cold as dry ice and said nothing. He jabbed his gun at O'Bannion, forcing him to retreat to the end of the cavern. Then Pitt stepped into the entrance tunnel, placed the plastic explosives at different intervals, and set the timers on the igniters. He gave O'Bannion one final callous wave and ran out into the shaft, crouching behind a train of ore cars.

  Four loud, booming detonations, each fractionally following the other, hurled dust and splintered support timbers from the crypt's entrance tunnel into the main shaft. The explosions echoed through the mines for several moments before an eerie silence took over. Pitt wondered in dumb anger if he had placed the explosives in the wrong positions. But then he heard a faint reverberating sound that amplified into a great rumble as the roof of the tunnel collapsed under hundreds of tons of rock and sealed the entrance to the burial chamber.

  Pitt waited until the dust began to settle before he casually shouldered his gun and began walking back to the evacuation area, along the ore car rails, whistling "I've been working on the railroad."

  Giordino heard a sound and then saw a movement in a crosscut shaft to his left. He stepped along the train rails until he came to a solitary, empty ore car. Silently edging along the wall, careful his boots did not strike any loose rock, he crept closer. Quick as a cat, he leaped over the rails and rammed the muzzle into the ore car.

  "Throw out your gun," he said sharply.

  Caught by surprise, the Tuareg guard slowly rose from the empty bucket of the ore car, his machine gun held high over his head. He could not speak English and did not fully comprehend Giordino's command, but he quickly recognized a lost cause. His eyes followed Giordino's gun as it, jabbed at him and moved off to the side. He caught the message and dropped his weapon over the edge of the ore car.

  "Melika!" Giordino snapped.

  The guard shook his head, but Giordino read the look of abject fear in the eyes. He pressed his gun muzzle against the guard's lips and pushed it into his mouth while flexing his finger on the trigger:

  "Melika!" the guard mumbled around the steel barrel jammed halfway down his throat, frantically nodding through the pain.

  Giordino pulled back the gun. "Where's Melika?" he demanded in a threatening tone.

  The guard appeared as frightened of Melika as he did of Giordino. With widened eyes he silently nodded his head into the depths of the shaft. Giordino motioned for him to move out of the crosscut and into the central shaft. Then he pointed.

  "Go back to the main cavern. You understand?"

  The Tuareg bowed with his hands over his head and backed out of the crosscut, stumbling and falling across the ore car rails in his haste to comply. Giordino turned and cautiously continued into the dark tunnel that stretched ahead of him, expecting a burst of gunfire with each step.

  It was deathly quiet save for the light step of his boots over the rail ties. Twice he paused, every sense of his body warning him of danger. He came to a sharp bend in the shaft and stopped. There was a glimmer of light coming around from the other side. There was also a shadow and the sound of rock against rock. He slipped a tiny signal mirror from one of the many pockets in his combat suit and eased it slowly around a support timber.

  Melika was working feverishly stacking ore rocks at the end of the shaft, raising a false wall to hide behind. Her back was to Giordino, but she was still a good 10 meters away, and a gun was propped against the tunnel wall within easy reach. She took no precautions as she worked, having placed her trust in the guard Giordino had already disarmed to warn her. Giordino could have stepped into the center of the shaft and shot her before she sensed his presence. But a quick kill was not in his mind.

  Giordino stealthily moved around the bend in the shaft toward Melika, stepping quietly, any sounds of his approach covered by the crunch of the rock as her hiding place was rushed to completion. When he came close enough, he snatched her weapon and threw it over his shoulder into the shaft behind him.

  She spun around, took in the situation within two seconds, and rushed Giordino, the deadly thong already in one hand whistling over her shoulder. Unfortunately for her the element of surprise did not exist. Giordino did not flinch. His face was a mask of cold implacability as he calmly pulled the trigger and shot away her kneecaps.

  Revenge dominated all of Giordino's emotions. Melika was as mad and vicious as a rabid pit bull. She had maimed and murdered for the pure enjoyment of it. Even now, as she lay twisted across the loose rock, legs grotesquely bent, she stared up at him with bared teeth and pure malignity glaring out of her black eyes. Her crazed sadism welled up from within and overcame the searing pain. She snarled at Giordino like a wounded beast and struggled to lash out at him with the thong while shouting the vilest of obscenities.

  Giordino easily stepped back and bemusedly observed her futile assault. "It's a violent, unrelenting world," he said slowly, "but less so now that you're leaving it."

  "You sawed-off little bastard," she snarled. "What do you know about a violent world? You've never lived amid filth and suffered the torment and rottenness I have."

  Giordino's expression was as hard as the rock in the mine shaft. "That didn't give you a license to inflict agony on others. As judge and executioner, I'm not interested in your life's problems. Maybe you have your reasons for becoming what you are. If you ask me, you were born sick. You've left a long road littered with innocent victims. There is no excuse for you to live."

  Melika did not beg. The black hatred and venomous malevolence poured out of her mouth in curses. With calculated efficiency, Giordino shot her in the stomach twice. The blazing eyes took their last look, seeing only Giordino's indifferent expression, and then went vacant as her massive body seemed to shrivel into the rock floor of the shaft.

  Giordino looked down at her for several moments before he finally spoke to an unhearing corpse.

  "Ding dong," he muttered, "the witch is dead."

  <<47>>

  "Total count is twenty-five," Pembroke-Smythe reported to Levant. "Fourteen men, eight women, and three children. All half dead from attrition."

  "That's one woman and one child less than when Giordino and I left here," said Pitt in solemn anger.

  Levant stared at the personnel vehicles that were being loaded with the freed captives and then glanced at his watch. "We're sixteen minutes over our dead
line," he said impatiently. "Hurry things along, will you, Captain. We must be on our way."

  "Ready to go in a jiff," Pembroke-Smythe said cheerfully as he rushed around the vehicles, urging the tactical team members to speed up the loading effort.

  "Where is your friend, Giordino?" Levant asked Pitt. "If he doesn't show soon, he'll be left behind,"

  "He had a chore to do."