Sahara (43 page)

O’Bannion stepped over to his desk and pressed a button, on a small console. The door opened and the two guards walked into the room and stood behind Pitt and Giordino Giordino glanced at Pitt, searching for a sign, a nod on movement of the eyes signaling a coordinated attack on the guards. Giordino would have charged an oncoming rhino without hesitation if Pitt had given the word. But Pitt stood there stiffly as if the feel of the manacles on his ankles and wrists had dulled his sense of survival. Somehow, above all else, he had to focus his wits on getting the secret of Fort Foureau into Sandecker’s hands or die trying.

“I’d like to know who I’m working for,” Pitt said.

“Didn’t you know?” asked O’Bannion dryly.

“Massarde and his pal, Kazim?”

“Two out of three. Not bad.”

“Who’s the third?”

“Why me, of course,” O’Bannion answered patiently. “A most satisfactory arrangement. Massarde Enterprises provides the equipment and arranges for the sale of the gold. Kazim provides the labor, and I direct the mining and ore extraction operation, which is only fair since it was I who discovered the vein of gold.”

“What percentage do the Malian people receive?”

“Why none,” O’Bannion said impassively. “What would a nation of beggars do with riches if they were dropped in their laps? Squander or be fleeced out of them by shrewd foreign businessmen who know every angle for taking advantage of impoverished peoples? No, Mr. Pitt, the poor are better off poor.”

“Have you notified them of your philosophy?”

O’Bannion’s expression was one of pure boredom. “What a dull world this would be if we all were rich.”

Pitt plunged on. “How many men die here in a year?”

“It varies. Sometimes two hundred, sometimes three, depending on disease epidemic or mine accidents. I really don’t keep count.”

“Amazing the workers don’t strike,” said Giordino idly.

“No work, no food,” O’Bannion shrugged. “And then Melika usually gets them moving by whipping the skin off the ringleaders.”

“I’m lousy with a pick and shovel,” Giordino volunteered.

“You’ll quickly become expert. If not, or you cause trouble, you’ll be transferred to the extraction section.” O’Bannion paused to check his watch. “Still time for you to work a fifteen-hour shift.”

“We haven’t eaten since yesterday,” complained Pitt.

“Nor will you eat today.” O’Bannion nodded at the guards as he turned back to his bookshelves. “Take them.”

The guards prodded them out. Apart from the receptionist and two men wearing tan coveralls and hard hats with miners’ lamps, speaking in French and examining a piece of ore under a magnifying glass, there were no other people to be seen until they reached an office-type elevator with carpeted floor and chrome walls. The doors opened and the operator, a Tuareg, motioned them inside. The doors rattled shut and the hum of machinery reverberated off the walls of the shaft as they descended.

The elevator dropped quickly, the ride seemingly never-ending. Black caverns flashed past, their circular openings marking the entrance to upper galleries. Pitt judged they had dropped well over a kilometer when the elevator began to slow and finally stopped. The operator opened the door, revealing a narrow, horizontal shaft leading off into the rock. The two guards escorted them to a heavy iron door. One of them took a key ring from his robe, selected a key, and turned the lock. Pitt and Giordino were pushed against the door so that it swung open. Inside was a much larger shaft with narrow rails laid on its floor. The guards closed the door and left them standing there.

As a matter of routine, Giordino checked the door. It was a good 2 inches thick and there was no handle on the inside, only a keyhole. “We won’t be using this exit unless we can steal a key.”

“Not to be used by the hired help,” said Pitt. “For O’Bannion and his cronies only.”

“Then we’ll have to find another way. They obviously remove the ore through a different vertical shaft.”

Pitt stared at the door thoughtfully. “No, I can’t accept that. It’s the executive elevator or nothing.”

Before Giordino could reply, the whirring of an electric motor and the clanking sound of steel wheels against the rails came from one end of the shaft. A small generator-driven locomotive pulling a long train of empty ore cars appeared and slowed to a stop. A black woman climbed down from the driver’s seat and confronted the two men.

Pitt had never laid eyes on a woman with a body that was almost as wide as it was tall. She was, he decided, the ugliest woman he had ever laid eyes on. She’d have made a fitting gargoyle, he thought, on the eaves of a medieval cathedral. A heavy leather thong extended from her hand as if it had grown there. Without a word she stepped up to Pitt.

“I am Melika, foreman of the mines. I am to be obeyed and never questioned. Do you understand?”

Pitt smiled. “A new experience, taking orders from someone who resembles a toad with a weight problem.”

He saw the thong whipping through the air, but too late to duck or ward off the blow. It caught him high on the side of the face, and he saw stars in front of his eyes as he staggered back against a shoring timber. The blow struck with such force he came within a speck of blacking out.

“Seems as though everyone is hitting on me today,” Pitt said thickly through the agony.

“A short lesson on discipline,” she snapped. Then in a lightning movement, incredibly swift for someone of her heavy build, she swung the thong backhanded toward Giordino’s head. But she wasn’t fast enough. Unlike Pitt, he had warning. He grasped her wrist in an iron grip, stopping the thong in midair. Slowly, as if in a test of wills, the two arms trembled as their muscles exerted every pressure at their command.

Melika had the strength of an ox. She had never imagined that any man could have been capable of gripping her so hard. Surprise showed in her widened eyes, then disbelief, then anger. With his other hand, Giordino tore the thong from her grasp as one would snatch a stick from a snarling dog, and hurled it into an ore car.

“You dirty scum,” she hissed. “You’ll suffer for this.”

Giordino puckered up his lips and blew her a kiss. “Love-hate relationships are the best.”

His cockiness cost him. He missed the sudden shift of the eyes, the foot lifting off the ground as the knee bent and thrust into his groin. Giordino released his grip on her wrist, dropped to his knees, and fell to his side, writhing in silent agony.

Melika smiled satanically. “You fools have condemned yourselves to a hell you can’t imagine.” She wasted no more time with talk. She retrieved the thong and waved it toward an empty ore car and said the single word: “In.”

Five minutes later the train of ore cars stopped and then backed into a shaft. Lights strung along the timber trailed into the dark shadows. It looked to be a new working. Men’s voices traveled over the noise of the train and a moment later the gleam of their lamps flickered around a bend. They were herded along by Tuareg guards with whips and guns, chanting in tired, hoarse voices. All were Africans, some southern tribesmen, some desert people. Zombies in old horror movies looked in better health than these poor dregs. They moved slowly, dragging their feet. Most were dressed only in ragged shorts. Sweat covered their bodies that were also heavily coated with rock dust. The glazed look in their eyes and the ribs showing through their chests told of a starvation diet. All were scarred by lash marks and a number of them were missing fingers; a few had dirty bandages around the stumps that once were attached to hands. Their weak chanting faded as the light from their lamps was lost around the next bend.

The tracks ended at a pile of rock that had been blasted by the explosive crew they had passed in the shaft. Melika unhitched the locomotive. “Out!” she ordered.

Pitt helped Giordino climb over the bucket edge of the car and half supported him as they stood staring ferociously at the barrel-shaped slave driver.

Her huge lips spread in a Novocain grin. “You’ll soon look like those scum.”

“You should pass out vitamins and steel gloves,” said Giordino, suddenly straightening, his face pale with pain.

Melika raised her thong and slashed him across the chest. Giordino did not blink or flinch. These men weren’t yet cowed, she thought. It was only a question of days before she reduced them to animals. “The blasting crew has accidents,” she said matter-of-factly. “Lost limbs go with the job.”

“Remind me not to volunteer,” muttered Pitt.

“Load this rock into the cars. When you’ve finished, you can eat and sleep. A guard will make his rounds at unannounced times. He finds you sleeping, you work extra shifts.”

Pitt hesitated. A question was on the tip of his tongue. But it stuck in his throat. It was time to lay low. He and Giordino stared at the tons of ore piled at the end of the shaft and then at each other. It seemed a hopeless, back-breaking task for two men to accomplish in less than forty-eight hours while hampered by shackles.

Melika climbed onto the electric locomotive and nodded at a TV camera mounted on a cross beam. “Don’t waste your time thinking of escape. You’re under constant surveillance. Only two men made it out of the mines. Their bones were found by nomads.”

She gave off a witch’s cackle and rode off down the mine shaft. They watched until she had disappeared and all sounds faded. Then Giordino raised his hands and let them drop to his sides. “I think we’ve been had,” he muttered as he sadly counted up to thirty-five empty ore cars.

Pitt lifted the chain attached between his hand and ankle manacles and hobbled over to a large stack of beams, waiting to shore up the tunnel as it was excavated. He paced off one beam and did the same with an ore car. Then he nodded.

“We should be able to wrap this up in six hours.”

Giordino gave him a very sour look indeed. “If you believe that, you’d better sign up for a course in elementary physics.”

“A little trick I learned picking raspberries one summer in high school,” said Pitt curtly.

“I hope it fools the surveillance camera,” Giordino groaned.

Pitt grinned insidiously. “Watch and learn.”

37

The guards came and went with irregularity as Melika promised. They seldom stayed but a minute, satisfying themselves that the two prisoners were feverishly loading ore cars as if attempting to set some kind of record. In six and a half hours all thirty-five cars appeared brimming over with ore.

Giordino eased to a sitting position with his back against a timber. “You load 16 tons and what do you get?” he said, quoting the song.

“Another day older and deeper in debt,” Pitt finished.

“So that’s how you picked raspberries.”

Pitt settled next to Giordino and smiled. “During a trip around the states with a school buddy one summer, we stopped at a farm in Oregon that advertised for berry pickers. We thought it would be easy gas money and applied. They paid fifty cents a lug, which if I remember correctly, held about eight small boxes. What we didn’t know is that raspberries are much smaller and softer than strawberries. Picking as fast as we could go it seemed forever to fill up a lug.”

“So you loaded the bottoms with dirt and layered the tops with berries.”

Pitt laughed. “At that, we only averaged thirty-six cents an hour.”

“What do you think will happen when the old bitch finds out we laid timbers as false floors in the ore cars and only piled a few rocks on top to make them look fully loaded?”

“She won’t be happy.”

“Throwing a handful of dust on the lens of the TV camera to blur our images was a nice touch. The guards never caught on.”

“At least our little con job bought us some time without exhausting our reserves.”

“I’m so thirsty I could drink dust.”

“If we don’t get water soon, we’ll be in no shape to make a break.”

Giordino eyed the chains on his manacles and then the rails under the ore cars. “I wonder if we can cut our chains by laying them on the rails and running a car over them.”

“I thought about that five hours ago,” said Pitt. “The chains are too thick. Nothing less than a full-size Union Pacific diesel locomotive could crush these links.”

“I hate a spoilsport,” Giordino grumbled.

Pitt idly picked up a piece of ore and studied it under the string of overhead lights. “I’m no geologist, but I’d say this is gold-bearing quartz. Judging from the grains and flakes in the rock, it comes from a fairly rich vein.”

“Massarde’s share must go toward expanding his sordid empire.”

Pitt shook his head in dissent. “No, he wouldn’t spread it around and incur tax problems. I bet he skips converting it into cash and hoards the ingots somewhere. Since he’s French, my guess is one of the Society Islands.”

“Tahiti?”

“Or Bora Bora or Moorta. Only Massarde or his flunky, Verenne, knows for sure.”

“Maybe when we get out of here we can go on a treasure hunt to the South Seas—”

Suddenly Pitt sat up and held a finger to his mouth for silence. “Another guard coming,” he announced.

Giordino cocked an ear and gazed down the shaft. But the guard was not in sight yet. “Pretty clever of you to scatter gravel around the other side of the bend. You can hear the crunch of their footsteps before they appear.”

“Let’s look busy.”

They both leaped to their feet and made a show of busily stacking ore on the heaps already topping the cars. A Tuareg guard walked around the bend and watched them for a minute. As he turned to leave and continue his rounds, Pitt shouted at him.

“Hey, pal, we’re finished. See, all loaded. Time to knock off.”

“Get food and water,” Giordino jumped in.

The eyes of the guard darted from Pitt down along the line of ore cars. Suspiciously, he walked the train from end to end and back again. He looked at the large pile of ore remaining on the floor of the shaft and scratched his head through his litham. Then he shrugged and gestured with his automatic weapon for Pitt and Giordino to begin moving toward the entrance of the shaft.

“They’re not big on small talk around here,” grunted Giordino.

“Makes it tough to bribe them.”