Sahara (30 page)

In harmony he and Giordino began shouting and pounding on the bottom of the deck plate. Startled by the sudden hiss of escaping steam and seeing it billow from between the seams in the deck, the guard reacted as per Pitt’s script and yanked open the plating. A billow of steam engulfed him while Pitt’s unseen hands reached up from below and yanked him into the mist-filled bilge. The guard dropped headfirst and struck his jaw against a steel beam. He went out instantly.

One second later Pitt had torn the automatic rifle from the stunned guard’s hands. Another five seconds later Giordino had blindly rummaged the man’s pockets until his fingers touched the key to the locks of their handcuffs. Then as Giordino freed his wrists, Pitt leaped catlike onto the upper deck and crouched, swinging the barrel of the automatic rifle. The engine room was empty. No other crewmen had been on duty except the guard.

Pitt turned and knelt down, wiping the moisture falling from his brow, squinting into the rolling steam. “You coming?”

“Take the guard,” an invisible Giordino grunted through the mist. “No reason to let the poor bastard die down here.”

Pitt groped downward, feeling a pair of arms, and clutched them. He dragged the unconscious guard into the engine room and laid him on the deck. Next, he caught Giordino’s wrist and pulled him from the hellhole, wincing from the pain that suddenly burst from his hands.

“Your hands look like boiled shrimp,” said Giordino.

“I must have roasted them when I slipped my chain over the end of the pipe.”

“We should wrap them with something.”

“No time.” He lifted his manacled hands. “Mind doing me the honor?”

Giordino quickly unlocked Pitt’s chain and cuffs. He held up the key before dropping it in his pocket. “A keepsake. You never know when we’ll get arrested again.”

“Judging from the mess we’re in, it won’t take long,” muttered Pitt. “Massarde’s passengers will soon be complaining about the lack of heat, especially any women wearing bare-shouldered dresses. A crewman will be sent to repair the problem and discover us gone.”

“Then it’s time to exit stage left with style and discretion.”

“With discretion anyway.” Pitt moved to a hatch, eased it open, and peered onto an outside deck that ran aft to the stern of the houseboat. He moved out to the railing and gazed upward. People could be seen through large view windows in the lounge, drinking and conversing in evening dress, oblivious to the punishment that Pitt and Giordino had suffered almost directly below in the engine room.

He motioned for Giordino to follow, and they moved stealthily along the deck, ducking under portholes that opened into the crew’s compartments until they came to a stairway. They pressed back in the shadows beneath the steps and stared through the upper opening. Sharply defined under bright overhanging lights, as if in full daylight, burgundy and white paint etched against the black sky, they could clearly see Massarde’s private helicopter moored to the roof deck over the main salon. It sat deserted without a crewman around.

“Our chariot awaits,” said Pitt.

“Beats swimming,” Giordino agreed. “If Frenchy had known he was entertaining a pair of old air force pilots, he’d have never left it unattended.”

“His oversight, our fortune,” Pitt said mildly. He climbed to the top of the stairs and scanned the deck and peered through nearby ports for signs of life. What few heads he spotted in the cabins were uninterested in events outside and were turned away. He moved quietly across the deck, opened the door to the copter, and climbed in. Giordino pulled out the wheel chocks and removed the tie-down ropes before following Pitt, closing the door and settling in the right seat.

“What have we got here?” Giordino murmured as he studied the instrument panel.

“A late model, French-built, twin turbine Ecureuil, by the look of her,” Pitt answered. “I can’t tell what model, but we have no time to translate all the bells and whistles. We’ll have to forgo a checklist, stoke her up, and go.”

A precious two minutes were lost in start-up, but no alarm had been sounded as Pitt released the brake and the rotor blades began slowly turning, accelerating until they reached lift-off rotation. The centrifugal force fluttered the helicopter on its wheels. Like most pilots, Pitt didn’t have to translate the French labels on the gauges, instrument, and switches spread across the panel. He knew what they indicated. The controls were universal and caused him no problem.

A crewman appeared and stared curiously through the spacious windshield. Giordino waved at him and smiled broadly as the crewman stood there, indecision etched on his face.

“This guy can’t figure out who we are,” said Giordino.

“He got a gun?”

“No, but his buddies who are charging up the stairs look none too friendly.”

“Time to be gone.”

“All gauges read green,” Giordino said reassuringly.

Pitt didn’t hesitate any longer. He held a deep breath and lifted the helicopter into a brief hover over the deck before dipping the nose and applying the throttles, forcing the machine into forward flight. The houseboat dropped behind, a blaze of light against the black of the water. Once clear, Pitt leveled at barely 10 meters and swung the craft on a course downriver.

“Where we headed?” asked Giordino.

“To the spot where Rudi found the contamination spilling into the river.”

“Aren’t we heading in the wrong direction? We found the toxin entry a good 100 kilometers in the other direction.”

“Merely a feint to throw off the hounds. As soon as we’re a safe distance away from Gao, I’ll swing south and we’ll backtrack across the desert and pick up the river again 30 kilometers upstream.”

“Why not drop in at the airport, pick up Rudi, and get the hell out of the country?”

“Any number of reasons,” explained Pitt, nodding at the fuel gauges. “One, we don’t have enough fuel to fly more than 200 kilometers. Two, once Massarde and his buddy Kazim spread the alarm, Malian jet fighters will hunt us down with their radar and either force us to land or blow us out of the sky. I give that little scenario about fifteen minutes. And three, Kazim thinks there were only two of us. The more distance we can put between Rudi and us gives him that much better chance to escape with the samples.”

“Does all this just strike you out of the blue?” Giordino complained. “Or do you come from a long line of soothsayers?”

“Consider me your friendly, neighborhood plot diviner,” Pitt said condescendingly.

“You should audition for a carnival fortune-teller,” Giordino said dryly.

“I got us out of the steam bath and off the boat, didn’t I?”

“And now we’re going to fly across the middle of the Sahara Desert until we run out of fuel. Then walk across the world’s largest desert looking for a toxic we-know-not-what till we expire or get captured by the Malian military as fodder for their torture dungeons.”

“You certainly have a talent for painting bleak pictures,” Pitt said sardonically.

“Then set me straight.”

“Fair enough,” Pitt nodded. “Soon as we reach the location where the contamination seeps into the river, we ditch the helicopter.”

Giordino looked at him. “In the river?”

“Now you’re getting the hang of it.”

“Not another swim in this stinking river—not again.” He shook his head in conviction. “You’re nuttier than Woody Woodpecker.”

“Every word a virtue, every move sublime,” Pitt said airily, then, suddenly serious, added: “Every aircraft the Malians can put in the air will be searching for this bird. With it buried under the river, they won’t have a starting place to track us down. As it is, the last place Kazim would expect us to run is north into the desert wastes to look for toxic contamination.”

“Sneaky,” said Giordino. “That’s the word for you.”

Pitt reached down and pulled a chart out of a holder attached to his seat. “Take the controls while I lay out a course.”

“I have her,” Giordino acknowledged as he took hold of the collective control lever beside his seat and the cyclic-pitch control column.

“Take us up to 100 meters, maintain course over the river for five minutes, and then bring us about on a heading of two-six-oh degrees.”

Giordino followed Pitt’s instructions and leveled off at 100 meters before looking down. He could just discern the surface of the river. “Good thing the stars reflect on the water or I couldn’t see where the hell I was going.”

“Just watch for dark shadows on the horizon after you make your turn. We don’t want to spread ourselves over a protruding rock formation.”

Only twenty minutes passed during their wide swing around Gao before they approached their destination. Massarde’s fast helicopter flitted through the night sky like a phantom, invisible without navigation lights, with Giordino deftly handling the controls while Pitt navigated. The desert floor below was faceless and flat, with few shadows thrown by rocks or small elevations. It almost came as a relief when the black waters of the Niger River came into view again.

“What are those lights off to starboard?” asked Giordino.

Pitt did not look up, but kept his eyes on the chart. “Which side of the river?”

“North.”

“Should be Bourem, a small town we passed in the boat shortly before we moved out of the polluted water. Stay well clear of her.”

“Where do you want to ditch?”

“Upriver, just out of earshot of any residents with acute hearing.”

“Any particular reason for this spot?” asked Giordino suspiciously.

“It’s Saturday night. Why not go into town and check out the action?”

Giordino parted his lips to make some appropriate comeback, gave up, and refocused his concentration on flying the helicopter. He tensed as he scanned the engine and flight gauges on the instrument panel. Approaching the center of the river, he eased back on the throttles as he delicately pushed the collective and tapped right rudder, turning the craft with its nose upriver while in a hover.

“Got your rubber ducky life vest?” asked Giordino.

“Never go anywhere without it,” Pitt nodded. “Lower away.”

Two meters above the water, Giordino shut down the engines as Pitt closed all the fuel switches and electrical bars. Yves Massarde’s beautiful aircraft fluttered like a wounded butterfly, and then fell into the water with a quiet splash. It bobbed long enough for Pitt and Giordino to step out the doors and leap as far away as they could get, before diving into the river with arms and legs furiously stroking to escape the reach of the dying but still slowly spinning rotor blades. When the water reached the open doors and flooded the interior, the craft slipped beneath the smooth black water with a great sigh as the air was expelled from the passenger cabin.

No one heard it come down, no one from shore saw it sink. It was gone with the
Calliope,
settling into the soft silt of the river that would someday completely cover her airframe and become her burial shroud.

25

It wasn’t exactly the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, but to someone who had been thrown in a river twice, parboiled in a steam bath, and was footsore from stumbling around the desert in the dark for two hours, no watering hole could have offered greater sanctuary. He had never, Pitt thought, seen a dingier dive that looked so good.

They had the feeling of entering a cave. The rough mud walls met a well-trodden dirt floor. A long board propped on concrete bricks that served as the bar sagged in the middle, so much so it seemed that any glass set on its surface would immediately slide to the center. Behind the decrepit bar, a shelf that appeared wedged into the mud brick wall held a weird assortment of pots and valves that brewed coffee and tea. Next to it were five bottles of obscurely labeled liquor in various levels of consumption. They must have been stocked for the rare tourist who ventured in the place, Pitt surmised, since Muslims weren’t supposed to touch the stuff.

Against one wall a small stove was throwing out a comforting degree of heat along with a pungent aroma that neither Pitt nor Giordino as yet identified as camel dung. The chairs looked like rejects from both the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores. None of them matched. The tables weren’t much better, darkened by smoke, surfaces burned by countless cigarettes and carved with graffiti going back to the French colonial days. What little illumination there was in the closet-size room came from two bare light bulbs hanging from a single wire held up by nails in a roof beam. They glowed dimly, their limited power coming from the town’s overworked diesel generator.

Trailed by Giordino, Pitt sat down at an empty table and shifted his attention from the furnishings to the clientele. He was relieved to find that none wore uniforms. The room held a composite of locals, Niger boatmen and fishermen, villagers, and a sprinkling of men whom Pitt took for farmers. No women were in attendance. A few were drinking beer but most sipped at small cups of sweet coffee or tea. After a cursory glance at the newcomers, they all went back to their conversations or refocused their concentration on a game similar to dominos.

Giordino leaned across the table and murmured, “Is this your idea of a night on the town?”

“Any port in a storm,” said Pitt.

The obvious proprietor, a swarthy man with a massive thicket of black hair and an immense moustache, ambled from behind the makeshift bar and approached the table. He stood and looked down at them without a word, waiting for them to speak first.

Pitt held up two fingers and said, “Beer.”

The proprietor nodded and walked back to the bar. Giordino watched as he pulled two bottles of German beer from a badly dented metal icebox, then turned and stared at Pitt dubiously.

“Mind telling me how you intend to pay?” asked Giordino.

Pitt smiled, leaned under the table, and slipped off his left Nike and removed something from the sole. Then with a cool, watchful expression his eyes traveled around the room. None of the other patrons showed the slightest interest in either himself or Giordino. He cautiously opened his hands so only Giordino could see. Between his palms lay a neat stack of Malian currency.