Sahara (27 page)

The beach sloped at an angle of 10 degrees, ending at a low rock wall that bordered a road. He crawled across the sand, enjoying its heat against the wet skin of his bare arms and legs. He stopped and rolled onto his side, resting for a few minutes, reasonably secure that he was only an indistinct blur in the night. He had a cramp in his right leg and his arms felt numb and heavy.

He reached back and felt the backpack. For a brief instant, after he had struck the rushing water like a cannonball, he thought that it might have been torn from his back. But its straps still clung tightly to his shoulders.

He rose to his feet and sprinted in a crouching position to the wall, dropping to his knees behind it. He warily peered over the top and scanned the road. It was empty. But a badly paved street that ran diagonally into town had a fair amount of foot traffic. Out of the upper edge of one eye he caught a dim flare and looked up on the roof of a nearby house in time to see a man light a cigarette. There were others: dim figures of people, some illuminated by lanterns, happily chatting with their neighbors on adjoining roofs. They must come up like moles, Gunn surmised, to enjoy the cool of the evening.

He studied the stream of the pedestrians on the street, trying to absorb a rhythm to their movements. They seemed to glide up and down the street in their loose, flowing garments on silent feet like wraiths. He unstrapped the backpack, opened it, and removed a blue bed sheet. He tore part of it in a crude body pattern and then draped it around himself in the style of a djellaba, a long-skirted garment with full sleeves and a hood. He wouldn’t win a local fashion award, he thought, but felt reasonably satisfied it would pass unnoticed in the dimly lit streets. He considered removing his glasses, but decided against the idea, positioning the hood to cover the rims. Gunn was nearsighted and couldn’t see a moving bus 20 meters away.

He slipped the backpack under the robe and strapped it around his front as if it was simply a protruding stomach. He then sat on the wall and swung his legs over to the far side. He casually stepped across the road and up the narrow street, joining the citizens of Gao who were out for their evening stroll. After two blocks he reached a main intersection. The only vehicles prowling the streets were a few dilapidated taxis, one or two run-down buses, and a few scattered motorbikes and a bevy of bicycles.

It would be nice to simply hail a cab for the airport, he thought wistfully, but that was inviting attention. Before abandoning the boat he had studied the map of the area and knew the airport was a few kilometers south of town. He considered stealing a bicycle, but quickly eliminated the idea. The theft would have probably been noticed and reported, and he wanted no trace of his presence known. If the police or security forces did not have reason to think there was an illegal alien wandering in their midst, they would have no cause to search for him.

Gunn leisurely walked through the main section of town, past the market square, the decrepit Hotel Atlantide, and the merchants hawking their wares from stalls under arches across from the hotel. The smells were anything but exotic. Gunn welcomed the breeze that fanned most of the town’s odors into the desert. Signposts were nonexistent but he navigated down the sandy streets by occasionally glancing up at the north star.

The people dressed in a blaze of green and blues and a smattering of yellow. The men were dressed in some form of djellaba or caftan. A number wore western pants and tunics. Few were bareheaded. Most male heads and faces were heavily swathed in blue cloth. Many of the women were covered in elegant cloaks, others long, flowered dresses. Most all were unveiled.

They all chattered constantly in strange low tones. Children ran everywhere, no two dressed alike. Gunn found it hard to imagine such social activity and congeniality in the middle of great poverty. It was as though nobody informed the Malians they were poor.

Keeping his head down and face covered by the hood so the white skin of his face wouldn’t show, Gunn merged with the crowd and made his way out of the busy part of town. No one stopped him and asked awkward questions. If for some unexpected reason he was apprehended and interrogated he would claim to be a tourist on a hiking trip along the Niger. He did not dwell on that possibility for long. The danger of being stopped by someone who was looking specifically for an illegal American was nil.

He passed a road sign with a pointing arrow and a drawing of an airplane. He was making his way toward the airport easier than he expected. His luck hadn’t skipped out on him yet.

He walked through the more affluent merchant-owned neighborhoods and into the surrounding slums. From the time he left the river, Gao had given him the impression of a town where, with the coming of darkness, some unseen horror crawls up through the sandy streets. It seemed to him a town drenched in the blood and violence of centuries. His imagination began to work overtime as he walked the dark and nearly deserted streets, beginning for the first time to see curious and hostile looks from people sitting in front of their crumbling houses.

He ducked into a narrow alley that looked to be empty and paused to take a revolver from the backpack, an old, snub-nosed Smith & Wesson 38-caliber Bodyguard model that had belonged to his father. His instinct told him that this was a place you didn’t walk at night if you expected to see the dawn.

A truck rumbled past, stirring up the fine sand, its flatbed piled with bricks. A quick realization that it was going in his direction, and Gunn threw caution to the desert winds. He took a running leap and scrambled up the back of the truck. He came to rest flat on his stomach on top of the bricks facing forward and looking down on the roof of the cab.

The smell of the exhaust from the diesel engine came as a relief after the aroma of the town. From his vantage view atop the truck’s cargo, Gunn picked out a pair of red lights blinking a few kilometers ahead and to his left. As the truck bounced closer, he could see a few floodlights mounted on a terminal building and two hangars across a darkened field.

“Some airport,” he muttered to himself dryly. “They turn out all the runway lights when it’s not in use.”

A dip in the road showed in the truck’s headlights, and the driver slowed. Gunn took advantage of the decreased speed and hit the ground running. The truck rolled on into the darkness, sand streaming from its tires, the driver blissfully unaware he’d carried a passenger. Gunn followed the truck’s taillights until he came to an asphalt side road and a wooden sign painted in three languages that advertised the Gao International Airport.

“International,” Gunn read aloud. “Oh how I hope so.”

He walked along the side of the entry road, keeping off to one side in the remote chance a vehicle might happen by. There was little need for caution. The airport terminal was dark and the parking lot totally empty. His hopes took a downturn at a close-up view of the terminal building. He’d seen better-looking condemned warehouses than the wooden structure with a rusting metal roof. It took a brave man to climb and work in the nearby control tower sitting precariously on support girders that were almost eroded through. He walked around the buildings onto the dead and darkened tarmac. Across the field, illuminated by floodlights, sat eight Malian jet fighters and a transport plane.

He stood motionless as he spied two armed guards sitting outside a security shack. One was dozing in a chair, the other was leaning against the shack smoking a cigarette. Great, he thought, just great. Now he had to contend with the military.

Gunn held up his Chronosport dive watch and peered at the dial. It read twenty past eleven. He suddenly felt tired. He’d made it this far only to find a deserted airport that looked as if it hadn’t seen an arriving or departing airliner in weeks. If that wasn’t bad enough, the field was guarded by Malian air force security. No predicting how long he could sit it out before being discovered or expiring from lack of food and water.

He resigned himself for a long wait. Not good to hang around during daylight. He moved 100 meters into the desert before stumbling onto a small pit half filled with debris from some long-forgotten shed. He scooped out a depression in the dry sand, climbed in, and pulled several rotting boards over him. The hole could have been filled with ants or scorpions for all he knew, but he was too tired to care.

He was asleep within thirty seconds.

Roughly manhandled by Massarde’s crewmen, Pitt and Giordino’s wrists were cuffed, and they were forced in a kneeling position by short chains that wound around a steam pipe. They were helplessly confined in the bilge area below heavy steel plating that served as a deck of the engine and power-generating room above. Overhead, a guard armed with an automatic machine pistol slowly paced back and forth, his shoes clicking on the steel floor. They knelt in the dank bilge of the houseboat, their wrists chafing in the tight handcuffs, bare knees below their shorts only a few degrees from being burned by the hot metal flooring.

Escape was impossible. It was only a matter of time before they were turned over to General Kazim’s security police, and their existence would end with a virtual death sentence.

The atmosphere in the bilge was stifling and nearly unbreathable. Sweat streamed out their pores from the damp heat that radiated from the steam pipe. The torment increased with each passing moment. Giordino felt badly weakened and debilitated, his strength almost totally sapped away after two hours of confinement in that hellhole. The humidity was worse than any steam bath he had ever sat in. And the loss of body liquids was driving him half mad from thirst.

Giordino looked across at Pitt to see how his self-determined friend was taking this torturous confinement. As far as he could tell, Pitt showed no reaction at all. His face, soaked in perspiration, looked thoughtful and complacent. He was studying a row of wrenches that hung neatly in a row on the aft bulkhead. He could not reach them because the chain on his cuffs was stopped from slipping along the pipe by an overhanging brace. He thoughtfully measured the distance that stretched beyond his touch. Every so often he turned his attention to the grating and the guard, then back to the wrenches.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Stanley,” said Giordino, echoing a line from Laurel and Hardy comedies.

“Sorry, Ollie, all in the name of humanity,” Pitt said with a grin.

“Think Rudi made it?”

“If he stayed in the shadows and kept his cool, there’s no reason for him to wind up like us.”

“What do you think old French moneybags expects to gain by making us sweat?” Giordino mused, wiping the sweat from his face with his arm.

“I have no idea,” answered Pitt. “But I suspect we’ll know why he stuck us in this hot box instead of turning us over to the gendarmes before too long.”

“He has to be a real sorehead if he’s mad over us using his telephone.”

“My fault,” said Pitt, his eyes reflecting mirth. “I should have made a collect call.”

“Oh well, you couldn’t know the guy is a cheap screw.”

Pitt looked at Giordino in long, slow admiration. He marveled that the stocky Italian could still summon up a sense of humor despite being on the brink of passing out.

In the long, agonizing minutes that followed, their oven-hot cell in the bilge, their ominous predicament, was pushed aside in Pitt’s mind as he focused his thoughts on escape. At the moment any optimism was futile. There was not nearly enough muscle between them to break their chains, and neither he nor Giordino had the means to pick the locks on their handcuffs.

His mind conjured up a dozen contingencies, each ready to be canceled in favor of another. None were workable unless certain situations fell into place. The main hitch was the chains. Somehow or other they would have to come off the steam pipe. If not, Pitt’s best-laid plans evaporated before they could get off the ground.

He broke off his mental gymnastics as the guard pulled up one of the floor plates and swung it back on its hinges. He took a key from his belt and opened the cuffs attached to their chains. Four crewmen were standing in the engine room. They leaned down and lifted Pitt and Giordino to their feet, dragged them through the engine room, up a stairway, and into a lush-carpeted hallway of the houseboat. One knocked on a teak door, then pushed the door wide and shoved the two prisoners into the room.

Yves Massarde sat in the middle of a long, leather couch smoking a thin cigar and swirling a goblet of cognac. A dark-skinned man in an officer’s military uniform sat in a facing chair, drinking champagne. Neither man rose as Pitt and Giordino stood before them dressed only in shorts and T-shirts, dripping with sweat and moisture.

“These are the pitiful specimens you fished from the river?” asked the officer, regarding them curiously through black, cold, and empty eyes.

“Actually, they came aboard without an invitation,” replied Massarde. “I caught them in the act of using my communications equipment.”

“You think they got a message through?” Massarde nodded. “I was too late to stop them.”

The officer sat his glass on an end table, rose from his chair, and walked across the room until he was standing directly in front of Pitt. He was taller than Giordino, but a good 6 inches shorter than Pitt.

“Which of you was in contact with me on the river?” he asked.

Pitt’s expression cleared. “You must be General Kazim.”

“I am.”

“Just goes to show you can’t judge a person by their voice. I pictured you as looking more like Rudolph Valentino than Willie the Weasel—”

Pitt crouched and turned sideways as Kazim, his face abruptly flushed with hate, his teeth clenched in sudden rage, lashed out at Pitt’s groin with his booted foot. The thrust was vicious and carried most of Kazim’s weight behind it. His expression of wrath suddenly turned to one of shock as Pitt, in a lightning move, caught the flailing foot with his hands in midflight and gripped it like a vise.

Pitt did not move, did not cast Kazim’s leg aside. He merely stood there holding it between his hands, keeping the General balancing on one leg. Then very slowly he pushed the maddened Kazim backward until he dropped into his chair.