Sahara (56 page)

After seeing that Eva and the other women and children were cared for and on their way to the surface, Pitt borrowed a satchel of plastic explosives from Levant’s demolition expert and then returned to a now conscious O’Bannion who sat beside an ore car under the watchful eye of a tough lady commando.

“Come along, O’Bannion,” Pitt ordered. “We’re going for a stroll.”

O’Bannion’s litham had unraveled and fallen away and now revealed a face heavily scarred and disfigured from a premature dynamite explosion during his younger mining days in Brazil. His ugly features were heightened by a mouth leaking blood and the lack of two front teeth, knocked out by the blow from Pitt’s gun butt.

“Where?” he asked abruptly through swollen lips.

“To pay our respects to the dead.”

The guard stood aside as Pitt roughly pulled O’Bannion to his feet and prodded him along the ore car tracks toward the burial crypt. Neither man spoke as they walked through the mine, occasionally stepping around the body of a Tuareg guard who had made the mistake of resisting Levant’s assault force. When they came to the cavern of the dead, O’Bannion hesitated, but Pitt coldly pushed him inside.

O’Bannion turned and faced Pitt, his eyes still contemptuous. “Why did you bring me here, to lecture me on cruelty to my fellow man before you execute me?”

“Not at all,” Pitt replied quietly. “The lesson is obvious without a lecture, and no, I’m not going to execute you. That would be too quick, too clean. A quick flash of pain and then darkness. No, I think you deserve a more appropriate end.”

For the first time a flicker of fear danced in O’Bannion’s eyes. “What do you have in mind?”

Pitt swung the muzzle of his weapon around the stacks of cadavers. “I’m going to give you time to contemplate your brutality and greed.”

O’Bannion looked confused. “Why? You’re badly mistaken if you expect me to cry for forgiveness and beg for leniency.”

Pitt looked over at a pile of bodies, at the frail, starved frame and open unstaring eyes of a girl no more than ten years old. Anger flamed and seethed within him and he fought desperately to control his emotions.

“You’re going to die, O’Bannion, but very slowly, suffering the agony of thirst and hunger you imposed on these pitiful dead around you. By the time your friends Kazim and Massarde find you, providing they even bother to search, you’ll have joined the rest of your victims.”

“Shoot me, kill me now!” O’Bannion savagely demanded.

Pitt smiled a smile as cold as dry ice and said nothing. He jabbed his gun at O’Bannion, forcing him to retreat to the end of the cavern. Then Pitt stepped into the entrance tunnel, placed the plastic explosives at different intervals, and set the timers on the igniters. He gave O’Bannion one final callous wave and ran out into the shaft, crouching behind a train of ore cars.

Four loud, booming detonations, each fractionally following the other, hurled dust and splintered support timbers from the crypt’s entrance tunnel into the main shaft. The explosions echoed through the mines for several moments before an eerie silence took over. Pitt wondered in dumb anger if he had placed the explosives in the wrong positions. But then he heard a faint reverberating sound that amplified into a great rumble as the roof of the tunnel collapsed under hundreds of tons of rock and sealed the entrance to the burial chamber.

Pitt waited until the dust began to settle before he casually shouldered his gun and began walking back to the evacuation area, along the ore car rails, whistling
“I’ve been working on the railroad.”

Giordino heard a sound and then saw a movement in a crosscut shaft to his left. He stepped along the train rails until he came to a solitary, empty ore car. Silently edging along the wall, careful his boots did not strike any loose rock, he crept closer. Quick as a cat, he leaped over the rails and rammed the muzzle into the ore car.

“Throw out your gun,” he said sharply.

Caught by surprise, the Tuareg guard slowly rose from the empty bucket of the ore car, his machine gun held high over his head. He could not speak English and did not fully comprehend Giordino’s command, but he quickly recognized a lost cause. His eyes followed Giordino’s gun as it jabbed at him and moved off to the side. He caught the message and dropped his weapon over the edge of the ore car.

“Melika!” Giordino snapped.

The guard shook his head, but Giordino read the look of abject fear in the eyes. He pressed his gun muzzle against the guard’s lips and pushed it into his mouth while flexing his finger on the trigger.

“Melika!” the guard mumbled around the steel barrel jammed halfway down his throat, frantically nodding through the pain.

Giordino pulled back the gun. “Where’s Melika?” he demanded in a threatening tone.

The guard appeared as frightened of Melika as he did of Giordino. With widened eyes he silently nodded his head into the depths of the shaft. Giordino motioned for him to move out of the crosscut and into the central shaft. Then he pointed.

“Go back to the main cavern. You understand?”

The Tuareg bowed with his hands over his head and backed out of the crosscut, stumbling and falling across the ore car rails in his haste to comply. Giordino turned and cautiously continued into the dark tunnel that stretched ahead of him, expecting a burst of gunfire with each step.

It was deathly quiet save for the light step of his boots over the rail ties. Twice he paused, every sense of his body warning him of danger. He came to a sharp bend in the shaft and stopped. There was a glimmer of light coming around from the other side. There was also a shadow and the sound of rock against rock. He slipped a tiny signal mirror from one of the many pockets in his combat suit and eased it slowly around a support timber.

Melika was working feverishly stacking ore rocks at the end of the shaft, raising a false wall to hide behind. Her back was to Giordino, but she was still a good 10 meters away, and a gun was propped against the tunnel wall within easy reach. She took no precautions as she worked, having placed her trust in the guard Giordino had already disarmed to warn her. Giordino could have stepped into the center of the shaft and shot her before she sensed his presence. But a quick kill was not in his mind.

Giordino stealthily moved around the bend in the shaft toward Melika, stepping quietly, any sounds of his approach covered by the crunch of the rock as her hiding place was rushed to completion. When he came close enough, he snatched her weapon and threw it over his shoulder into the shaft behind him.

She spun around, took in the situation within two seconds, and rushed Giordino, the deadly thong already in one hand whistling over her shoulder. Unfortunately for her the element of surprise did not exist. Giordino did not flinch. His face was a mask of cold implacability as he calmly pulled the trigger and shot away her kneecaps.

Revenge dominated all of Giordino’s emotions. Melika was as mad and vicious as a rabid pit bull. She had maimed and murdered for the pure enjoyment of it. Even now, as she lay twisted across the loose rock, legs grotesquely bent, she stared up at him with bared teeth and pure malignity glaring out of her black eyes. Her crazed sadism welled up from within and overcame the searing pain. She snarled at Giordino like a wounded beast and struggled to lash out at him with the thong while shouting the vilest of obscenities.

Giordino easily stepped back and bemusedly observed her futile assault. “It’s a violent, unrelenting world,” he said slowly, “but less so now that you’re leaving it.”

“You sawed-off little bastard,” she snarled. “What do you know about a violent world? You’ve never lived amid filth and suffered the torment and rottenness I have.”

Giordino’s expression was as hard as the rock in the mine shaft. “That didn’t give you a license to inflict agony on others. As judge and executioner, I’m not interested in your life’s problems. Maybe you have your reasons for becoming what you are. If you ask me, you were born sick. You’ve left a long road littered with innocent victims. There is no excuse for you to live.”

Melika did not beg. The black hatred and venomous malevolence poured out of her mouth in curses. With calculated efficiency, Giordino shot her in the stomach twice. The blazing eyes took their last look, seeing only Giordino’s indifferent expression, and then went vacant as her massive body seemed to shrivel into the rock floor of the shaft.

Giordino looked down at her for several moments before he finally spoke to an unhearing corpse.

“Ding dong,” he muttered, “the witch is dead.”

47

“Total count is twenty-five,” Pembroke-Smythe reported to Levant. “Fourteen men, eight women, and three children. All half dead from attrition.”

“That’s one woman and one child less than when Giordino and I left here,” said Pitt in solemn anger.

Levant stared at the personnel vehicles that were being loaded with the freed captives and then glanced at his watch. “We’re sixteen minutes over our deadline,” he said impatiently. “Hurry things along, will you, Captain. We must be on our way.”

“Ready to go in a jiff,” Pembroke-Smythe said cheerfully as he rushed around the vehicles, urging the tactical team members to speed up the loading effort.

“Where is your friend, Giordino?” Levant asked Pitt. “If he doesn’t show soon, he’ll be left behind.”

“He had a chore to do.”

“He’ll be lucky to make his way through the rioting on the lower levels. After the prisoners broke into the food stores and water supply, they began wreaking their vengeance on the guards. The last team to withdraw from the lower levels reported a massacre in progress.”

“They can hardly be blamed after the hell they’ve endured,” said Pitt thoughtfully.

“I feel bad having to abandon them,” admitted Levant. “But if we don’t leave soon they’ll come surging up the elevators, and we’ll have a devil of a time fighting them off our vehicles.”

Giordino came trotting out of the office corridor past a six-man commando team guarding the entrance to the equipment cavern. A very smug expression was settled on his face. He grinned at Pitt and Levant. “Glad to see you held up the show just for little old me.”

Levant was not amused. “You’re hardly the reason behind our delay.”

“Melika?” Pitt asked.

Giordino held up the thong he’d taken as a souvenir. “Signing the guest register in hell. And O’Bannion?”

“Managing the mortuary.”

“Ready to push off,” Smythe shouted from a personnel vehicle.

Levant nodded. “Mr. Pitt, if you will kindly lead us back to the airstrip.”

Pitt made a quick check on Eva, amazed at her rapid revival after drinking nearly a gallon of water and ravenously downing a quick meal provided by the UN medical team.

Hopper, Grimes, and Fairweather also looked as if they had been resurrected. Then he ran to the armed dune buggy and swung into the driver’s seat.

With only seconds to spare, the rear guard ran toward the last departing vehicle and was pulled aboard as the prisoners flooded out of the mines and rushed through the offices into the equipment cavern. They arrived too late and could only watch in cruel disappointment as the special force that had saved them from a brutal death sped off into the night, leaving them to an uncertain fate.

Pitt saw no need for caution as he accelerated through the canyon. He turned on the narrow-beamed headlights of the desert assault vehicle and kept his foot flat on the floorboard. At Colonel Levant’s urging he had left the personnel vehicles far in his wake as they rushed ahead to oversee the preparations for a hasty boarding and fast takeoff. Giordino was driving the lead carrier now and easily tracked the several sets of tire indentations once Pitt and his trailing dust cloud had pulled out of sight.

Levant was edgy on the return trip. Doggedly he checked his watch every few minutes with dire foreboding, disturbed that they were now a tardy twenty-two minutes behind his timetable. With only 5 kilometers to go, he began to feel more at ease. The sky was clear and there was no indication of aircraft. He began to feel a tinge of optimism. Perhaps Kazim’s security forces were lulled by Sergeant Chauvel’s deceptive excuse for the alert signal after all.

Disillusionment came quickly.

Above the hum of the dune buggy’s muted exhaust, they suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of jet engines and caught sight of aircraft navigation lights streaking across the dark sky. Levant was instantly giving orders over his helmet radio for the flight crew and security unit to scramble away from the airbus and take cover.

Pitt slammed on the brakes and threw the assault vehicle into a four-wheel drift sideways, an act that was as automatic as it was immediate, stopping in a swirl of dust behind a small sand dune. He relaxed his grip on the wheel and stared up at the intruding aircraft. “I think we’ve just attracted a whole lot of unwelcome attention.”

“Kazim must have sent a single reconnaissance plane as insurance to check any possibility that the alert was a genuine attack.” Levant’s voice was hard, but his expression reflected deep apprehension.

“The pilot may not suspect a problem, or he wouldn’t soar in here as nice as you please with his wing lights flashing.”

Levant stared grimly at the outline of the jet fighter as it circled the airbus on the end of the airstrip. “I fear he’s reporting an unidentified aircraft and requesting instructions to attack.”

They weren’t kept in suspense for long. The fighter, now recognized by Levant as a French Mirage, suddenly banked and swooped toward the airstrip, lining up its laser sights on the airbus that sat as helpless as a sleeping cow in front of a cannon.

“He’s beginning his run!” Pitt snapped.

“Open fire!” Levant shouted to the man sitting behind them who was hunched over the Vulcan multi-barreled machine gun. “Bring him down!”

The gunner visually tracked the Malian fighter over the lead-computing gun sight, and the instant he established the lead angle and distance he actuated the firing system. Like the Gatling guns of the nineteenth century, the six barrels on the Vulcan spun in a rotational blur as thousands of 20-millimeter rounds sliced the black sky. The shells homed in and began shredding the Mirage fighter at the exact moment in time that the pilot unleashed two missiles at the helpless airbus on the ground.