Sahara (45 page)

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.”

“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 of 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 O’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 fall 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.

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.

It
was
a catacomb, a subterranean cemetery for the dead. They had stumbled into the burial cave where O’Bannion and Melika stored the bodies of the laborers who were beaten and starved and overworked until death came as a welcome parole. The dead showed little sign of decomposition in the dry atmosphere. No ceremony here. The stiffened bodies were stacked crudely like timbers, nearly thirty to a pile. It was a ghastly, unnatural, and sorrowful sight.

“My God,” Giordino gasped. “There must be over a thousand stiffs in here.”

“Most convenient,” Pitt said as a white flame of anger burnt within him. “O’Bannion and Melika don’t have to bother with digging graves.”

A chilling vision passed before Pitt’s eyes, a vision of Eva, Dr. Hopper, and the rest heaped like all the other corpses, their sightless eyes staring at the rock ceiling. He closed his eyes, but the scene remained.

Only when the ore train clattered by the entrance to the crypt did he shake off the terrible image in his mind. When he spoke his voice came in a rasping whisper he scarcely recognized as his.

“Let’s get to the surface.”

The sound of the ore train faded into the distance as they paused and peered from the fissure leading to the catacomb, checking to see that there were no guards patrolling close by. The tunnel was clear and they ran into a side shaft that Fairweather’s map indicated as a shortcut to the engineer’s elevator. Then came an incredible piece of luck. This shaft was dripping damp and floored with duckboard.

Pitt tore up one of the duckboards and stared almost joyously at the puddle of water underneath. “Happy hour,” he said. “Drink your gut full so we can save the canisters Hopper gave us.”

“I don’t have to be told,” said Giordino, dropping to his knees and downing the cool water from cupped hands.

They had just taken their fill and were dropping the duckboard back in place when they heard the sound of voices at the rear end of the passage followed almost at once by the clank of chains.

“A work crew coming up behind us,” Giordino murmured softly.

They hurried on, refreshed and with building optimism. Another minute and they reached the iron door leading to the elevator. They paused as Giordino shoved the small stick of dynamite in the keyhole and connected the cap. Then he moved back as Pitt picked up a rock and hurled it at the cap. He missed.

“Just pretend you’re trying to drop a pretty girl into a water tank at a carnival,” suggested Giordino wryly.

“Let’s just hope the bang doesn’t arouse the guards or alert the elevator operator,” said Pitt, picking up another rock.

“They’ll think it’s only an echo from the blasting crew.”

This time Pitt’s throw was true and the cap burst, detonating the dynamite. The resulting detonation came as a sharp thud as the lock was blown apart. They rushed forward and pulled the iron door open, quickly entering the short passage to the elevator.

“What if there is a code for calling down the elevator?” asked Giordino.

“A little late to think of that now,” Pitt grunted. “We’ll just have to use our own code.”

He stepped up to the elevator, thought for a moment, and then pressed the button beside the door once, twice, the three times, paused and pressed twice more.