Sahara Page 49

  "Do you have a name?"

  "Ernie Nelson."

  "What agency you with? National Security? Federal Bureau? Special Secrets?"

  "I'm not at liberty to say," answered Nelson officially.

  "Aren't you going to blindfold me?"

  Nelson gave a quick shake of his head. "No need. Since your request to search through historical files was approved by the President, and you once held a Beta-Q clearance, I think you can be trusted not to reveal what you see today."

  "If you had dug deeper into my file, you'd have seen that this is my fourth research trip to ASD."

  The agent did not respond and remained silent for the rest of the trip. He turned o$' the main highway and drove down a paved road to a security gate, showed his credentials, and entered. They passed through two more guard stations before the road led into a small barn-like structure in the middle of a farm complete with pigs and chickens and wash hanging on a line. Once inside the barn they rolled down a wide concrete ramp that dropped deep underground. They finally arrived at a security station where the agent parked the car.

  Perlmutter knew the routine. He exited the car and walked over to a waiting electric vehicle that looked similar to a golf cart. An archivist/curator wearing a white lab coat shook Perlmutter's hand.

  "Frank Moore," he introduced himself. "Good to see you again."

  "A pleasure, Frank. How long has it been?"

  "Three years since you were last here. You were doing research on the Sakito Maru."

  "The Japanese passenger-cargo ship that was sunk by the U.S. submarine Trout."

  "As I recall, she was carrying German V-2 rockets to Japan."

  "You have a good memory."

  "I refreshed it while digging out the records of your previous visits," Moore admitted. "What can I do for you this trip?"

  "Civil War," answered Perlmutter. "I'd like to study any records that might throw some light on the mysterious loss of a Confederate ironclad."

  "Sounds interesting." Moore motioned to a seat in the electric car. "Our Civil War records and artifacts are housed in buildings about 2 kilometers from here."

  After a final security check and a brief meeting with the Curator-in-Charge, Perlmutter signed an affidavit stating that he would not publish or make public any of his findings without government approval. Then he and Moore moved off in the electric auto, passing a small crew of men who were unloading mementos and keepsakes people had left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Photographs, old army boots and uniforms, buttons, watches and wedding rings, dog tags, dolls, each object was cataloged, tagged, and placed in plastic wrappers on endless shelves.

  The government threw nothing away.

  Though he had seen part of the subterranean expanse on his previous visits, Perlmutter could not help but be astounded by the incredible size of the place and the tier upon tier of storage bins full of records and old artifacts, a great many of them from foreign countries. The Nazi section alone covered the size of four football fields.

  The Civil War memorabilia was housed in four three-story buildings-the concrete ceilings of the depository were 15 meters high. Placed in neat rows in front of the structures, different types of cannon from the Civil War stood as pristine and immaculate as when they were sent to fields of battle. They were mounted on their carriages and hitched to limbers that still held shot and shell. Immense naval cannon from such famous ships as the Hartford, the Kearsage, the Carondelet, and the Merrimack were also on display as if for inspection.

  "The records are kept in Building A," explained Moore. "Buildings B, C, and D hold weapons, uniforms, medical relics, and furniture once belonging to Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Lee, Grant, and other famous people from the war between the states."

  They stepped from the vehicle and entered Building A. The ground floor was one vast sea of filing cabinets. "Any papers pertaining to the Confederacy are on the ground floor," Moore said, sweeping his hands around the cavernous room. "All Union records are filed on the second and third. Where would you like to begin?"

  "Anything you have on the Texas."

  Moore paused to thumb through several pages of a directory he had carried in from the vehicle. "Confederate naval records are kept in the blue files along the far wall."

  Despite the fact that no one had been through the files in years, and many cases never since storage, there was surprisingly little dust. Moore helped Perlmutter zero in on a packet containing the known history on the ill-fated ironclad.

  Moore pointed to a table and chair. "Make yourself comfortable. You're familiar with the regulations regarding the care of records and know that I'm required to remain close by to monitor your research."

  "I'm fully aware of the rules," Perlmutter acknowledged.

  Moore held up his watch. "Your permit to conduct research at ASD ends after eight hours. Then we must return to the curator's office where you will be driven back to Forestville. Do you understand?"

  Perlmutter nodded. "Then I had best get started."

  "Go ahead," said Moore, "and good luck."

  Within the first hour, he had cleaned out two gray metal file cabinets before he found an ancient yellow file folder containing records of the Confederate steamship Texas. The papers inside revealed little historic information that wasn't already known and published. Specifications of the warship's construction, eyewitness reports of her appearance, one sketch by her chief engineer, and a list of her officers and crew. There were also several contemporary accounts of her running battle with Union warships during her historic dart: into open seas. One of the articles, written by a northern reporter on board a Union monitor that took hits from the Texas, had two lines cut out. Why the censorship, wondered Perlmutter curiously. It was the first time in all his years of researching on Civil War shipwrecks that he had come across a display of censor's scissors.

  Then he found a brittle news clipping and carefully unfolded it on the table. It was a deathbed statement given by a man named Clarence Beecher to a British reporter in a small hospital outside of York. Beecher claimed he was the only survivor of the mysterious disappearance of the C.S.S. Texas. Beecher's dying words described the voyage across the Atlantic and up a large African river. The ship steamed comfortably past hundreds of miles of lush shorelines before entering the outskirts of a great desert. Because the pilot was unfamiliar with the uncharted river, he mistakenly turned off the main channel into a tributary. They steamed on another two days and nights before the Captain realized the mistake. When coming about to return downriver, the ironclad grounded, and no amount of effort could set her free.

  The officers conferred and decided to wait out the summer until the fall rains raised the river again. There was a limited supply of food on board but the river would provide the necessary water. The Captain also bought goods from passing tribes of Tuaregs, paying with gold. On two occasions large bands of desert bandits made the mistake of attempting to attack and loot the grounded warship of its seemingly inexhaustible gold supply.

  By August, typhoid, malaria, and a starvation diet had ravaged the crew, decimating their numbers until there were only two officers, the president, and ten seamen who could still walk.

  Perlmutter stopped and gazed off into space, his curiosity snagged. Who was the president Beecher referred to? He found it most intriguing.

  Beecher went on to say that he and four other armed men were selected to row down the river in one of the ironclad's boats to try and find help from the outside world. Only Beecher barely survived to reach the mouth of the Niger River. Nursed back to health by merchants at a British trading outpost, he was given free passage to England, where he eventually married and became a farmer in Yorkshire. Beecher said he never returned to his native state of Georgia because he was certain to be hung for the terrible crime committed by the Texas, and he had been too frightened to speak about it until now.

  After he breathed his last, the doctor and Beecher's wife shrugged off his final-statement as the demented ravin
gs of a dying man. It appeared that the reporter's editor had only printed the story because of a slow news day and a lack of editorial to fill up that day's paper.

  Perlmutter reread the article a second time. He would have liked to accept it at face value despite the skepticism of the wife and doctor, but a quick check of the crew showed there was no Clarence Beecher present during muster immediately before the Texas left the navy yard at Richmond, Virginia. He sighed and closed the file.

  "I have all I'm going to find here," he said to Moore. "Now I'd like to hunt through Union navy records."

  Moore helpfully returned the files to their respective cabinets and guided him up a steel stairway to the second floor. "What month and year are you interested in?" he asked.

  "April 1865."

  They threaded their way through narrow aisles stacked to the roof with cabinets on top of cabinets. Moore produced a ladder in case Perlmutter wanted to probe files in the upper stratosphere and directed him to the proper cabinet.

  Methodically, Perlmutter began expanding his search from April 2, 1865, the date the Texas cast off from the pier below Richmond. He had his own system for research investigations and there were few who were better at scratching out leads than him. He used dogged persistence along with instinctive reasoning to narrow down the deadwood from the consequential.

  He started with official reports of the battle. When he exhausted those, he went on to eyewitness accounts by civilians who watched along the banks of the James River and crewmen on the Union warships. Within two hours, he had scanned the pertinent contents of nearly sixty letters and fifteen diaries. He transcribed notes on a large legal pad, all the while under the watchful gaze of Frank Moore, who trusted Perlmutter but had caught too many certified researchers trying to steal historical papers and letters not to be conscientious.

  Once Perlmutter found the thread, he began to unravel it as one offhand description, one seemingly insignificant bit of information led to revelation after revelation of a story that seemed too incredible to believe. Finally, when he could go no further, he motioned to Moore.

  "How much time do I have?"

  "Two hours and ten minutes."

  "I'm ready to move on."

  "Where do you wish to look?"

  "Any private correspondence or documents you might have of Edwin McMasters Stanton."

  Moore nodded. "Lincoln's crusty old Secretary of War. I've no idea what we have on him. His papers have never been fully cataloged. But it would be upstairs on the U.S. government documents floor."

  The Stanton files were voluminous, ten file cabinets full. Perlmutter worked steadily, stopping only once to go to the nearest bathroom. He waded through the documents as swiftly as he could, finding surprisingly little on Stanton's relationship with Lincoln near the end of the war. It was a well-known bit of history that the Secretary of War did not like his President and had destroyed a number of pages from the diary of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, including a number of papers relating to Booth's co-conspirators. To the frustration of historians Stanton had purposely left many unanswered questions swirling around the assassination at Ford's Theater.

  Then, with only forty minutes left on his deadline, Perlmutter struck pay dirt.

  Hidden in the extreme back of a cabinet, Perlmutter found a packet yellowed with age that still had an unbroken wax seal on it. He stared at the brown inked writing that gave the date as July 9, 1865, two days after Booth's fellow conspirators, Mary Surratt, Lewis Paine, David Herold, and George Atzerodt, were hanged in the Washington Arsenal's prison yard. Under the date were the words "Not to be opened until one hundred years after my death." It was signed Edwin M. Stanton.

  Perlmutter sat down at a study table, broke the seal, opened the packet, and began reading the papers inside with thirty-one years leeway on Stanton's instructions.

  As he read he felt as if he was transported back in time. Despite the coolness of the underground facility, beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. When he finished forty minutes later and set the final paper aside, his hands were trembling. He exhaled his breath in a long silent sigh, and shook his head very slowly.

  "My God," Perlmutter whispered.

  Moore looked across the table at him. "Find something interesting?"

  Perlmutter did not answer. He simply stared at the pile of old papers and muttered, "My God," over and over.

  <<50>>

  They lay together behind the crest of a dune, staring at the empty tracks that stretched across the sand like ghost rails to oblivion. The only signs of life to pierce the predawn darkness were the distant lights of the Fort Foureau hazardous waste site. Across the tracks, less than a kilometer west, the black shadow of the abandoned Foreign Legion fort rose against an ivory black sky like a gloomy castle out of a horror movie.

  The mad race across the desert had gone smoothly without detection or mechanical problems. The captives had suffered from the hard springs of the trucks but were too happy to be free to complain. Fairweather accurately guided them over the ancient camel trail that traveled between the old salt mines at Taoudenni south to Timbuktu. He had laid the convoy on the railroad within sight of the fort using only his knowledge of the terrain and a borrowed compass.

  Once during their journey, Pitt and Levant had stopped, listening as they detected the engine sounds of an unseen helicopter task force escorted by jet fighters. The aircraft were flying north toward Tebezza and the Algerian border. As Pitt had predicted, the Malian air force pilots flew over the convoy, blissfully unaware their quarry was sitting directly below them.

  "Fine work, Mr. Fairweather," complimented Levant. "As good a job of navigating as I've ever seen. You put us right on target."

  "Instinct," Fairweather smiled. "Pure instinct mixed with a bleedin' bit of luck."

  "Better move out across the tracks and into the fort," said Pitt. "We have less than an hour before daylight to hide the vehicles:

  Like strange creatures of the night, the dune buggy and personnel carriers drove on the track bed, bouncing over the concrete ties, until they came even with the fort. Pitt turned past the wreck of the Renault truck, the same one he and Giordino used for cover when they hopped the train to Fort Four eau, and came to a stop at the gate. The high wooden doors were still slightly ajar just as they had left them over a week before. Levant called up a squad of men who pushed them open wide enough to allow the convoy to enter the parade ground.

  "If I may suggest, Colonel," Pitt said tactfully, "there's just enough time for a detail of your people to brush away our tire tracks leading from the railroad to the fort. To an inquiring mind it should look like a convoy of Malian military vehicles rolled out of the desert and then continued along the track bed into the waste disposal project."'

  "Sound idea," said Levant. "Make them think it was one of their own patrols."

  Pembroke-Smythe, tailed by Giordino and Levant's other officers, gathered around their commander for orders.

  "Our first priority is to camouflage the trucks and find some sort of shelter for the women and children," said Levant. "Then prepare the fort for attack should the Malians decide they're chasing ghosts and look for any sign of our tracks the wind hasn't covered."

  "When do you plan to withdraw from here, sir?" asked an officer with a Swedish accent.

  Levant turned to Pitt. "How say you, Mr. Pitt?"

  "We stop the first outward-bound train that passes by here after dark," Pitt answered, "and borrow it."

  "Trains have communication systems," said Pembroke-Smythe. "The engineer will scream bloody murder if you attempt to abscond with his train."

  "Once alerted, the Malians will block the track down the line," finished the Swedish officer.

  "Don't give it another thought," Pitt said reproachfully. "Just leave it to old Jesse James Pitt and Butch Cassidy Giordino. We've been practicing the old-fashioned art of silent train hijacking for at least. . ." He looked at Giordino. "Al?"

  "At least a week from last
Thursday," Giordino responded.

  Pembroke-Smythe looked at Levant forlornly. "One might be advised to increase our insurance premiums."

  "Too late for that now," said Levant, surveying the darkened interior of the fort. "These walls were never built to stand up against air-to-ground missiles or heavy artillery. Kazim's forces can reduce this place to rubble in half an hour. So to prevent problems, we have to maintain it's abandoned look."

  "The Malians won't be going up against helpless civilians this time," Pembroke-Smythe said resolutely. "The ground is level as a cricket field for 2 kilometers in every direction. No cover for attacking forces. Those of us who survive any air assault will make Kazim pay a heavy price in blood before he takes this place."