Sahara (55 page)

“Why not? No one is expecting us. If O’Bannion’s guards detect our approach, they’ll probably assume we’re a new batch of prisoners sent by Kazim and Massarde.”

Pitt eased the dune buggy forward. The personnel carriers fell behind the dune buggy in a column. He feathered the accelerator only when he began to lose traction in the sand. He traveled in third gear with the engine turning over at little more than idling speed. The column crawled around the base of the steep walls that were defined in crisp black shadows. The specially modified mufflers on the vehicles could not completely stifle the sound of the exhaust, and the beat of the engines drummed softly across the hard surfaces of the rock like the distant drone of a piston engine aircraft. The night air was cool and there was only a whisper of wind, but the canyon walls still radiated with the memory of the day’s heat.

The cave entrance suddenly yawned out of the darkness, and Pitt drove the dune buggy through the tight rock walls and into the main gallery as though it was the most natural thing to do. The interior was lit only by the lights that flooded from the office tunnel and stood empty except for one Renault truck and the expected security guard.

The heavily robed and turbaned Tuareg casually stared at the approaching vehicles more out of curiosity than wariness. Only when the dune buggy had pulled within a few meters did his eyes begin to widen in suspicion. He unslung his machine pistol from around his shoulder and was bringing it level when Levant shot him between the eyes with a silenced Beretta automatic.

“Nice shot,” Pitt commented dryly as he braked the attack vehicle to a stop.

Levant checked his watch. “Thank you, Mr. Pitt. You put us here twelve minutes ahead of schedule.”

“I aim to please.”

The Colonel swung from the dune buggy and made a series of hand signals. Quickly, silently the UN tactical team members jumped to the ground, immediately formed into their respective units, and began moving into the tunnel. Once into the corridor with the fluted walls and tile floor, Levant’s men began quietly entering the arched openings and rounding up O’Bannion’s startled engineering crew as Giordino led the other three tactical units toward the main freight elevator indicated on Fairweather’s map that dropped to the lower levels.

Four of O’Bannion’s rogue mining engineers were taken as they were seated around a table playing poker. Before the surprised card players could react to the sudden appearance of armed men in camouflaged combat gear, who surrounded them with gun muzzles aimed at their heads, they were bound and gagged and thrown in a storeroom.

Silently, with only the slightest of pressure, Levant eased open the door marked as security monitoring center. The room inside was lit only by the light coming from an array of television monitors displaying different locations throughout the mines. A European male sat in a swivel chair with his back to the door. He was wearing a designer shirt and Bermuda shorts. He smoked a thin cigar in leisurely unconcern as he scanned the monitors whose video cameras were sweeping the mine shafts.

It was the reflection in one monitor with a dead screen that betrayed them. Alerted by the images of men entering the room behind him, the man shifted slightly to his left as his fingers casually crawled toward a small console containing a row of red switches. Too late Levant leapt at the man, swinging his Heckler & Koch in a vicious chop downward. The security guard went limp in his chair, then slumped unconscious over the console. But not before an alarm system began whooping like an ambulance siren throughout the entire mine.

“Damn the luck!” Levant cursed bitterly. “All surprise is gone.” He shoved the guard aside and squeezed off ten rounds into the console. Electrical sparks and smoke erupted from the shattered switches and the whooping abruptly went silent.

Pitt ran down the corridor, throwing open doors until he kicked in the one to the communications room. The operator, a pretty Moorish-featured woman, was not intimidated by the abrupt intrusion and did not even look up from her radio equipment at Pitt’s approach. Alerted by the siren, she was shouting rapid French into the microphone of the headset perched on her flowing black hair. He quickly stepped forward and clubbed her with his fist on the back of the neck. But like Levant with the security monitor, he was too late. Before he cut her off and she crumpled to the stone floor, the alarm had been transmitted to General Kazim’s security forces.

“Not in time,” said Pitt as Levant rushed into the room. “She got off a message before I could stop her.”

Levant took in the situation with one quick glance. Then he turned and shouted a command. “Sergeant Chauvel!”

“Sir!” It was almost impossible to tell the Sergeant was a woman under her heavy combat suit.

“Get on the radio,” Levant ordered in French, “and tell the Malians that the alarm was a short circuit. Relieve any suggestion of an emergency. And for God’s sake talk them out of taking any responsive action.”

“Yes sir,” Chauvel snapped purposefully before kicking the former radio operator out of the way and sitting down at the radio.

“O’Bannion’s office is at the end of the corridor,” said Pitt, pushing by Levant and running down the corridor. He didn’t stop until he put his shoulder down and collided with the door. It was unlocked and he barreled into the reception chamber like a defensive tackle blitzing a quarterback.

The receptionist with the purple-gray eyes and buttocks-length hair sat calmly at her desk, gripping a wicked-looking automatic pistol in both hands. Pitt’s momentum carried him across the room and over the top of the desk, crashing into the woman and taking them both to the blue-carpeted floor in a tangled heap. But not before she ripped off two shots into Pitt’s bulletproof assault vest.

Pitt’s chest felt as though someone had struck it twice with a hammer. The blows had temporarily knocked the wind out of him but in no way slowed him down. The receptionist tried to extricate herself while shouting what Pitt was certain were obscenities in a language unknown to him. She fired off another shot that went over his shoulder, ricocheting off the rock ceiling into a painting, before he snatched the gun from her hand. Then he jerked her to her feet and flung her onto a couch.

He turned away and stepped between the two bronze sculptures of the Tuaregs and tried the handle to the door of O’Bannion’s office. It was locked. He lifted the gun taken from the receptionist, placed it against the lock, and pulled the trigger three times. The gunfire was deafening in the rock room, but there was no longer any need for stealth. He stood around the wall and shoved the door open with his toe.

O’Bannion was leaning with his back against the desk, hands outstretched on the surface. He looked as though he was expecting to greet the corporate executive of a rival company. The eyes that showed through his litham bore a haughty expression without a trace of fear. But they quickly turned to astonishment when Pitt walked into the room and pulled off his helmet.

“I hope I’m not late for dinner, O’Bannion. As I recall, you expressed a wish to dine with me.”

“You!” O’Bannion hissed, the color ebbing from the skin showing around his eyes.

“Back to haunt you,” Pitt said with a half smile. “And I brought a few friends who don’t take kindly to sadists who enslave and murder women and children.”

“You should be dead. No one could have crossed the desert without water and lived.”

“Neither Giordino nor I died.”

“One of General Kazim’s search aircraft found the truck overturned in a wadi far to the west of the Trans-Saharan Track. You couldn’t have reached the track on foot.”

“And the guard we left tied at the wheel.”

“Alive, but he was soon shot for allowing you to escape.”

“Life is certainly cheap in these parts.”

The shock was slowly fading from O’Bannion’s eyes, but there was still no fear. “Have you come to rescue your people? Or to steal gold?”

Pitt stared at him. “Right on the first, wrong on the second. We also intend to put you and your scum out of business, permanently.”

“Your force has invaded a sovereign nation. You have no rights in Mali or jurisdiction over me and the mine.”

“My God! You’re lecturing me on jurisdiction? What about the rights of all the people you enslaved and murdered?”

O’Bannion shrugged. “General Kazim would have executed most of them anyway.”

“What stopped you from providing them with humane treatment?” Pitt demanded.

“Tebezza is not a resort or a spa. We are here to mine gold.”

“For the profit of you, Massarde, and Kazim.”

“Yes,” O’Bannion nodded. “Our aims are mercenary. So what?”

O’Bannion’s cold and ruthless character threw open a floodgate of anger in Pitt, released a series of mental pictures of the suffering endured by countless men, women, and children, pictures of the corpses stacked in the underground crypt, memories of Melika beating the helpless laborers with her bloodstained thong, the conviction that three men sick with greed were responsible for untold slaughter. He walked over to O’Bannion and smashed the shoulder stock of his machine gun into the part of the indigo litham covering O’Bannion’s mouth.

For a long moment Pitt stared down at the nomad-robed Irish mining engineer who now lay stretched on the carpet, blood spreading through the cloth of his headdress, swore in maddened fury, and then slung the unconscious man over his shoulder. He met Levant in the corridor.

“O’Bannion?” asked the Colonel.

Pitt nodded. “He had an accident.”

“So it would seem.”

“How do we stand?”

“Unit four has secured the ore recovery levels. Units two and three are meeting little resistance from the guards. It appears they’re better suited for beating helpless people than fighting hardened professionals.”

“The VIP elevator to the mine levels is this way,” said Pitt, setting off down a side corridor.

The carpeted and chromed-wall elevator had been abandoned by its operator as Pitt, Levant, and the members of unit one who were not guarding O’Bannion’s engineers and office workers dropped down to the main level. They exited and approached the iron door that was hanging askew on its hinges and whose lock was still shattered from the blast of dynamite.

“Someone beat us to it,” mused Levant.

“Giordino and I blew it when we escaped,” explained Pitt.

“Looks like they never got around to repairing it.”

The shaft reverberated with the sharp explosions of gunfire from somewhere within the bowels of the mine. Pitt hoisted O’Bannion’s still limp body onto the shoulder of a big, muscular commando and set off at a run down the shaft in the direction of the cavern holding the prisoners.

They reached the central chamber without meeting resistance and met up with members of unit two that were in the act of disarming a group of O’Bannion’s guards who stood fearfully with hands clutched behind their necks. Giordino and two of the tactical team had shot off the lock and were leaning against the great iron gate to the slave laborers’ dungeon cavern. Pembroke-Smythe spotted Levant, hurried over, and reported.

“Sixteen guards have been rounded up, Colonel. One or two escaped into the mine shafts. Seven made the mistake of resisting and are dead. We only have two men wounded, neither seriously.”

“We have to speed things up a bit,” said Levant. “I fear they transmitted an alert before we could cut off communications.”

Pitt stepped beside Giordino and added his muscle into heaving open the gate. Giordino turned and looked at him.

“Well, it’s about time you made an appearance.”

“I paused for a brief chat with O’Bannion.”

“Does he need a doctor or a mortician?”

“A dentist actually,” Pitt answered.

“Have you seen Melika?”

“No sign of her in the engineering offices.”

“I’ll find her,” said Giordino, a biting fierceness in his voice. “She’s mine.”

The gate was manhandled against its stops, and the tactical team stepped into the cavern. Through firsthand experience Pitt and Giordino knew what to expect, but they were still sickened at the sight. The commandos froze, their faces gone white at the overpowering stench and the incredible degree of suffering before their eyes. Even Levant and Pembroke-Smythe stood shocked before mustering up the effort to enter.

“Good lord,” Smythe mumbled, “this looks as bad as Auschwitz and Dachau.”

Pitt rushed through the mass of packed captives who were numbed beyond desperation by the monotonous existence and starved into barely walking skeletons. He found Dr. Hopper sitting on a bunk staring blankly through dazed eyes, his filthy clothes hanging loosely on a body decimated by overwork and lack of food. He broke into a broad smile, lifted himself weakly to his feet, and embraced Pitt.

“Thank God, you and Al made it. It’s a miracle.”

“I’m sorry we took so long,” said Pitt.

“Eva never gave up on you,” said Hopper, his voice choking. “She knew you’d come through.”

Pitt looked around. “Where is she?”

Hopper nodded toward a bunk. “You didn’t get here a minute too soon. She’s in a bad way.”

Pitt walked over and knelt beside a statue-like form in a lower bunk. Sadness showed in every line of his face. He couldn’t believe how wasted she had become in a week’s time. He gently took hold of her shoulders and gave her a light shake. “Eva, I’ve come back for you.”

Slowly she stirred, her eyes fluttered open, and she vaguely stared up at him. “Please let me sleep a little longer,” she murmured.

“You’re safe now. I’m taking you out of this place.”

She recognized him then and her vision became blurred with tears. “I knew you would come for me . . . for us all.”

“We came within a hair of not making it.”

She looked into his eyes and smiled gamely. “I never doubted for a moment.”

Then he kissed her, long, soft, and tenderly.

Levant’s medical team went to work immediately, treating the captives while the combat units began evacuating those who could walk to the upper level where they were loaded aboard the personnel carriers. Initial fears proved true as the operation went slowly because many were too weak to move on their own and had to be carried out.