Sahara

DESERT SECRETS

The Air France Concorde touched down at Dulles Airport and taxied up to an unmarked U.S. government hangar near the cargo terminals. The sky was overcast, but the runway was dry and showed no sign of rain. Still clutching his backpack as if it was part of him, Gunn exited the sleek aircraft almost immediately and hurried down the mobile stairway to a waiting black Ford sedan driven by uniformed capital police. With flashing lights and screaming siren, he was whisked toward the NUMA headquarters building in the nation's capital.

Gunn felt like a captured felon, riding in the backseat of the speeding police car. He noticed that the Potomac River looked unusually green and leaden as they shot over the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge. The blur of pedestrians was too immune to revolving lights and sirens to bother looking up as the Ford shot past.

The driver did not pull up at the main entrance but swung around the west corner of the NUMA building, tires squealing, and flew down a ramp leading to a garage beneath the lobby floor. The Ford came to an abrupt stop in front of an elevator. Two security guards stepped forward, opened the door, and escorted Gunn into the elevator and up to the agency's fourth floor. A short distance down the hallway they stood back and opened the door to the NUMA's vast conference room with its sophisticated visual displays.

Several men and women were seated around a long mahogany table, their attention focused on Dr. Chapman, who was lecturing in front of a screen that depicted the middle Atlantic Ocean along the equator off West Africa.

The room abruptly hushed as Gunn walked in. Admiral Sandecker rose out of his chair, rushed forward, and greeted Gunn like a brother who had survived a liver transplant.

"Thank God, you got through," he said with unaccustomed emotion. "How was your flight from Paris?"

"Felt like an outcast sitting in a Concorde all by myself."

"No military planes were immediately available. Chartering a Concorde was the only expedient means of getting you here fast."

"Nice, so long as the taxpayers don't find out."

"If they knew their very existence was at stake, I doubt if they'd complain."

Sandecker introduced Gunn around the conference table. "With three exceptions I think you know most everyone here."

Dr. Chapman and Hiram Yaeger came over and shook hands, showing their obvious pleasure at seeing him. He was introduced to Dr. Muriel Hoag, NUMA's director of marine biology, and Dr. Evan Holland, the agency's environmental expert.

Muriel Hoag was quite tall and built like a starving fashion model. Her jet-black hair was brushed back in a neat bun and her brown eyes peered through round spectacles. She wore no makeup, which was just as well, Gunn thought. A complete makeover by Beverly Hills' top beauty salon would have been a wasted effort.

Evan Holland was an environmental chemist and looked like a basset hound contemplating a frog in his dish. His ears were two sizes too large for his head, and he had a long nose that rounded at the tip. His eyes stared at the world as if they were soaked in melancholy. Holland's appearance was deceiving. He was one of the most astute pollution investigators in the business.

The other two men, Chip Webster, satellite analyst for NUMA, and Keith Hodge, the agency's chief oceanographer, Gunn already knew.

He turned to Sandecker. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to evacuate me out of Mali."

"Hala Kamil personally gave her authorization to use a UN tactical team."

"The officer in charge of the operation, a Colonel Levant, acted none too happy to greet me."

"General Bock, his superior, and Colonel Levant both took a bit of persuading," Sandecker admitted. "But when they realized the urgency of your data they gave their full cooperation."

"They masterminded a very smooth operation," Gunn said "Incredible they could plan and carry it through overnight."

If Gunn thought Sandecker would fill him in on the details, he was to be disappointed. Impatience was etched in every crease in the Admiral's face. There was a tray with coffee and sweet rolls, but he didn't offer Gunn any. He grabbed him by one arm and hustled him to a chair at one end of the long conference table.

"Let's get to it," the Admiral said brusquely. "Everyone is anxious to hear about your discovery of the compound causing the red tide explosion."

Gunn sat down at the table, opened his knapsack, and began retrieving the contents. Very carefully, he unwrapped the glass vials of water samples and laid them on a cloth. Next he unpacked the data disks and set them to one side. Then he looked up.

"Here are the water samples and results as interpreted by my on-board instruments and computers. Through a bit of luck I was able to identify the stimulator of the red tide as a most unusual organometallic compound, a combination of a synthetic amino acid and cobalt. I also found traces of radiation in the water, but I do not believe it has any direct relation to the contaminant's impact on the red tide."

"Considering the hardships and obstacles thrown in your path by the West Africans," said Chapman, "it's a miracle you were able to get a grip on the cause."

"Fortunately, none of my instruments were damaged after our run-in with the Benin navy."

"I received an inquiry from the CIA," said Sandecker with a tight smile, "asking if we knew anything about a maverick operation in Mali after you destroyed half the Benin navy and a helicopter."

"What did you tell them?"

"I lied. Please go on."

"Fire from one Benin gunboat did, however, manage to destroy our data transmission system," Gunn continued, "making it impossible to telemeter my results to Hiram Yaeger's computer network."

"I'd like to retest your water samples while Hiram verifies your analysis data," said Chapman.

Yaeger stepped next to Gunn and tenderly picked up the computer disks. "Not much I can contribute to this meeting, so I'll get to work."

As soon as the computer wizard had left the room, Gunn stared at Chapman. "I double- and triple-checked my results. I'm confident your lab and Hiram will confirm my findings."

Chapman sensed the tension in Gunn's tone. "Believe me when I say I don't question your procedures or data for a minute. You, Pitt, and Giordino did one hell of a job. Thanks to your efforts we now know what we're dealing with. Now the President can use his clout to lean on Mali to shut off the contaminant at the source. This will buy us time to formulate ways to neutralize its effects and stop further expansion of the red tides."

"Don't break out the cake and ice cream just yet," Gunn warned seriously. "Though we tracked the compound to its entry point into the river and identified its properties, we were unable to discover the location of its source."

Sandecker drummed his fingers on the table. "Pitt gave me the bad news before he was cut off. I apologize for not passing along the information, but I was counting on a satellite survey to fill in the missing piece."

Muriel Hoag looked directly into Gunn's eyes. "I don't understand how you successfully pursued the compound through 1000 kilometers of water and then lost it on land."

"It was easy," Gunn shrugged wearily. "After we sailed beyond the point of highest concentration, our contaminant readings dropped off and the instruments began showing water with commonly known pollutants. We made several runs back and forth to confirm. We also took visual sightings in every direction. No hazardous waste dump site, no chemical storage or manufacturing facilities were visible along the river or inland. No buildings or construction, nothing. Only barren desert."

"Could a dump site have been buried over at some time in the past?" suggested Holland.

"We observed no evidence of excavation," replied Gunn.

"Any chance the toxin was brewed by mother nature?" asked Chip Webster.

Muriel Hoag smiled. "If tests bear out Mr. Gunn's analysis of a synthetic amino acid, it must have been produced by a biotech laboratory. Not mother nature. And somewhere, somehow, it was discarded along with chemicals containing cobalt. Not the first time accidental integration of chemicals produced a previously unknown compound."

"How in God's name could such an exotic compound suddenly appear in the middle of the Sahara?" wondered Chip Webster.

"And reach the ocean where it acts as steroids to dinoflagellates," added Holland.

Sandecker looked at Keith Hodge. "What's the latest report on the spread of the red tide?"

The oceanographer was in his sixties. Unblinking dark brown eyes gazed from a continually fixed expression on a lean, high-cheekboned face. With the correctly dated clothing he could have stepped from an eighteenth-century portrait.

"The spread has increased 30 percent in the past four days. I fear the growth rate is exceeding our most dire projections."

"But if Dr. Chapman can develop a compound to neutralize the contamination, and we find and cut it off at the source, can't we then control the tide's expansion?"

"Better make it soon," answered Hodge. "At the rate it's proliferating, another month and we should see the first evidence of it beginning to feed off itself without stimulation flowing from the Niger."

"That's three months early!" Muriel Hoag said sharply.

Hodge gave a helpless shrug. "When you're dealing with an unknown the only sure commodity is uncertainty."

Sandecker swung sideways in his chair and gazed at the blown-up satellite photo of Mali projected on one wall. "Where does the compound enter the river?" he asked Gunn.

Gunn stood and walked over to the enlarged photo. He picked up a grease pencil and circled a small area of the Niger River above Gao on the white backdrop reflecting the projection. "Right about here, off an old riverbed that once flowed into the Niger."

Chip Webster pressed the buttons of a small console sitting on the table, and enlarged the area around Gunn's marking. "No structures visible. No indication of population. Nor do I make out any sign of excavated dirt or a mound that would have to be in evidence if any type, of trench was dug to bury hazardous materials."

"This is an enigma, all right," muttered Chapman. "Where in the devil can the rotten stuff come from?"

"Pitt and Giordino are still out there searching for it," Gunn reminded them.

"Any late word of their condition or whereabouts?" asked Hodge.

"Nothing since Pitt's call aboard Yves Massarde's boat," replied Sandecker.

Hodge looked up from his notepad. "Yves Massarde? God, not that pond slime."

"You know him?"

Hodge nodded. "I crossed paths with him after a bad chemical spill in the Med off Spain four years ago. One of his ships that was carrying waste carcinogenic chemicals known as PCBs for disposal in Algeria broke up and sank in a storm. I personally think the ship was scuttled in a combination insurance scam and illegal dump. As it turned out, Algerian officials never had any intention of accepting the waste for disposal. Then Massarde lied and cheated and pulled every legal dodge on the books to evade responsibility for cleaning up the mess. You shake hands with that guy and you better count your fingers when you walk away."

Gunn turned to Webster. "Intelligence-gathering satellites can read newspapers from space. Why can't we orbit one over the desert north of Gao in search of Pitt and Giordino?"

Webster shook his head. "Negative. My contacts at the National Security Agency have their best eyes in the sky keeping tabs on the new Chinese rocket firings, the civil war going on in the Ukraine, and the border clashes with Syria and Iraq. They're not about to spare us time from their intelligence scans to find civilians in the Sahara Desert. I can go with the latest-model GeoSat. But it's questionable whether it can distinguish human forms against the uneven terrain of a desert like the Sahara."

"Wouldn't they show up against a sand dune?" asked Chapman.

Webster shook his head. "No one traveling the Sahara in their right mind would walk across the soft sand of dunes. Even the nomads skirt around them. Wandering in a sea of dunes means certain death. Pitt and Giordino are smart enough to avoid them like the plague."

"But you will do a search and survey," Sandecker insisted.

Webster nodded. He was quite bald with little indication of a neck. A round belly hung over his belt, and he might have posed as a "before" on a weight-loss commercial. "I've a good friend who's a top analyst over at the Pentagon and an expert on satellite desert reconnaissance. I think I can sweet-talk him into examining our GeoSat photos with his state-of-the-art enhancing computers."

"I'm grateful for your backup," Sandecker said sincerely.

"If they're out there, he can locate them if anyone can," Webster promised him.

"Has your satellite seen any sign of the plane carrying that team of disease investigators?" asked Muriel.

"Not yet I'm afraid. Nothing showed on our last pass across Mali except a small smudge of smoke faintly drifting in from one side of our camera path. Hopefully on the next orbit we can obtain a more detailed picture. It may prove to be nothing but a nomad bonfire."

"There isn't enough wood in that part of the Sahara for a bonfire," Sandecker said solemnly.

Gunn looked lost. "What disease investigation team are you talking about?"

"A group of scientists from the World Health Organization on a mission to Mali," explained Muriel. "They were searching for the cause behind an outbreak of strange afflictions reported in nomadic desert villages. Their plane disappeared somewhere between Mali and Cairo."

"Was there a woman on the team? A biochemist?"

"A Dr. Eva Rojas was the team biochemist," replied Muriel. "I once worked with her on a project in Haiti."

"Did you know her?" asked Sandecker of Gunn.

"Not me, but Pitt. He dated her in Cairo."

"Maybe it's just as well he doesn't know," Sandecker said. "He must have enough problems just staying alive without bad news to fog his mind."

"There's no confirmation of a crash yet," said Holland hopefully.

"Maybe they made a forced landing in the desert and survived," Muriel said hopefully.

Webster shook his head. "Wishful thinking I'm afraid. I fear General Zateb Kazim has his dirty hands in this business."

Gunn recalled, "Pitt and Giordino had a conversation with the General on our boat's radio shortly before I hit the river. I got the impression he's a nasty customer."

"As ruthless as any Middle East dictator," said Sandecker. "And twice as hard to deal with. He won't even meet or speak with our State Department diplomats unless they hand him a fat foreign aid check."

Added Muriel, "He ignores the United Nations and refuses any outside relief supplies to his people."

Webster nodded. "Any human rights activist dumb enough to enter Mali and protest, simply vanishes."

"He and Massarde are thick as thieves," said Hodge. "Between the two of them they've raped the country into total poverty."

Sandecker's face hardened. "Not our concern. There won't be a Mali, a West Africa, or anywhere else on earth if we don't stop the red tide. Right now, nothing else matters."

Chapman spoke up. "Now that we have data we can sink our teeth into, we can all focus our skills and work together to formulate a solution."

"Make it quick," said Sandecker, his eyes narrowing. "If you've failed thirty days from now, none of us will get a second chance."

A brisk breeze was quivering the leaves along the Palisades above the Hudson River as Ismail Yerli peered through binoculars at a small bluish-gray bird perched on a tree trunk upside down. He acted as if his full attention was on the little bird and failed to notice the appearance of a man behind him. Actually, he had been aware of the approaching intruder for nearly two minutes.

"A white-breasted' nuthatch," said the tall, rather handsome stranger who wore an expensive burgundy leather jacket. He sat down on a flat rock next to Yerli. His sandy hair was neatly slicked down with a razor-edge part on the left side. He stared indifferently at the bird through pale blue eyes.

"The duller black on the back of the head suggests a female," said Yerli without lowering his glasses.

"The male is probably nearby. Perhaps tending the nest."

"Good call, Bordeaux," said Yerli, using the other man's code name. "I didn't know you were a bird watcher."

"I'm not. What can I do for you, Pergamon?"

"It was you who requested this meeting."

"But not in the boondocks under a bone-chilling wind."

"Meeting in gourmet restaurants is not my idea of working undercover."

"I never took to the idea of operating in the shadows and living in slums," Bordeaux said dryly.

"Not wise to act flamboyant."

"My job is to protect the interests of a man who, I might add, pays me extremely well. The FBI isn't about to put me under surveillance unless they suspect me of espionage. And since our job— at least my job-is not to steal classified American secrets, I fail to see why I have to melt into the foul-smelling masses."

Bordeaux's contemptuous outlook toward intelligence did not sit well with Yerli. Although they had known each other and often worked together over the years on behalf of Yves Massarde, strangely neither man knew the other's real name and never made an effort to learn it. Bordeaux was head of Massarde Enterprises' commercial intelligence operations in the United States. Yerli, only known to him as Pergamon, often passed along information vital to Massarde's international projects. For this he was paid handsomely up and above his salary as a French intelligence agent. A situation tolerated by his superiors because of Massarde's strong connections with many of France's cabinet members.

"You're getting careless, my friend."

Bordeaux shrugged. "I am getting bored dealing with uncouth Americans. New York is a cesspool. The country is divided by racial and ethnic diversity and is disintegrating. Someday, the United States will repeat the economic and regional strife going on in Russia and the Commonwealth States today. I long to return to France, the only truly civilized nation in the world."

"I hear one of the NUMA people escaped from Mali," Yerli said, abruptly changing the subject.

"That idiot Kazim let him slip through his fingers," replied Bordeaux.

"Didn't you pass on my warning to Mr. Massarde?"

"Of course I warned him. And he in turn alerted General Kazim. Two other men were captured by Mr. Massarde on his houseboat, but Kazim, in all his dazzling brilliance, was too stupid to search for the third agent who escaped and was evacuated by the UN tactical team."

"What are Mr. Massarde's thoughts on the situation?"

"He's not happy, knowing there is a serious risk of an international investigation into his project at Fort Foureau."

"Not good, any threat to expose and close down Fort Foureau is a threat to our French nuclear program."

"Mr. Massarde is quite aware of the problem," said Bordeaux acidly.

"What of the World Health scientists? The morning newspapers said their plane is reported overdue and presumed missing."

"One of Kazim's better ideas," answered Bordeaux. "He faked the plane crash in an uninhabited part of the desert."

"Faked? I forewarned Hala Kamil of what I had conceived as a genuine bomb plot to destroy the aircraft and Hopper and his team."

"A slight change in your plan to frighten off any future inspections by World Health scientists," said Bordeaux. "The plane crashed all right, but the bodies on board were not those of Dr. Hopper and the rest."

"They're still alive?"

"They're as good as dead. Kazim sent them to Tebezza."

Yerli nodded. "Better they should have died quickly than in the mines of Tebezza as overworked and starved slaves." Yerli paused thoughtfully, then said, "I think Kazim has made a mistake."

"The secret of their true situation is safe," said Bordeaux indifferently. "No one escapes from Tebezza. They go into the mines and never come out."

Yerli took a Kleenex out of his coat pocket and began wiping the lenses of his binoculars. "Did Hopper discover any evidence that might prove damaging to Fort Foureau?"

"Enough to cause renewed interest and promote a deeper investigation if his report had been made public."

"What is known about the NUMA agent who escaped?"

"His name is Gunn, and he's the Deputy Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency."

"An influential man."

"Indeed."

"Where is he now?"

"We traced the aircraft that evacuated him to Paris, where he boarded a Concorde for Washington. From there, he was taken directly to NUMA headquarters. My sources say he was still inside the building as of forty minutes ago."

"Is it known if he smuggled vital information out of Mali?"

"Whatever information he obtained, if any, from the Niger River is a mystery to us. But Mr. Massarde feels confident nothing was discovered that could jeopardize the Fort Foureau operation."

"Kazim should have an easy time making the other two Americans talk."

"I received word just as I left to meet you. Unfortunately, they escaped too."

Yerli stared at Bordeaux in sudden irritation. "Who bungled?"

Bordeaux shrugged. "Makes no difference, who's to blame. Frankly, it's not our concern. What's important is that they are still inside the country. There is little hope of them escaping over the border. It's only a matter of hours before Kazim's search operation hunts them down."

"I should fly down to Washington and penetrate NUMA. With the right moves I might discover if there was more behind this than a cut-and-dried pollution investigation."

"Let that go for now," said Bordeaux coolly. "Mr. Massarde has other work for you."

"Did he clear it with my superiors at the National Defense Staff?"

"Your official release for outside duty will be conveyed to you within the hour."

Yerli said nothing but resumed peering through his glasses at the little nuthatch that was still perched bottom-side-up, pecking away at the bark of the tree trunk. "What does Massarde have in mind?"

"He wants you in Mali to act as liaison to General Kazim."

Yerli showed no reaction. He kept the glasses trained on the bird as he spoke. "I was assigned for eight months in the Sudan some years ago. A dreadful place. The people were quite friendly though."

"One of Massarde Enterprises' jets will be waiting at La Guardia Airport. You're to board at six o'clock this evening."

"So I'm to play nursemaid to Kazim to prevent him from making any further blunders."

Bordeaux nodded. "The stakes are too high to allow the madman to run amok."

Yerli reinserted his binoculars in their case and slung it over his shoulder. "I once dreamed I died in the desert," he said quietly. "I pray to Allah that it was just that… a dream."

In a typical windowless room somewhere in a little traveled part of the Pentagon building, Air Force Major Tom Greenwald put down the phone after notifying his wife he would be late for dinner. He relaxed for a long minute as he turned his thoughts from the satellite photo analysis of the fighting going on between Chinese army units and democratic rebel forces to the job at hand.

The film from the GeoSat cameras sent by courier from Chip Webster at NUMA was processed and loaded in the military's sophisticated display and enhancing equipment. When all was ready, Greenwald settled himself in a comfortable chair with a console installed in one arm. He opened a can of Diet Pepsi and began turning the dials and knobs on the console as he stared up at a television monitor the size of a small movie theater screen.

The GeoSat photos reminded him of the old spy-in-the-sky images of thirty years ago. Granted, the GeoSat was designed purely for space geological and water current survey, but it came nowhere close to the incredible imagery detail received by the latest intelligence-gathering Pyramider and Houdini satellites sent up by the space shuttles. Yet it was a vast improvement over the old LandSat that mapped the earth for over twenty years. The new model had cameras that could penetrate darkness and cloud cover, and even smoke.

Greenwald made adjustments and corrections with his console as each photo, showing different sections of the Malian northern desert, crossed the viewing screen and was computer-enhanced. He soon began to pick out tiny specks that were flying aircraft and a camel train winding across the desert floor from the salt mines of Taoudenni south to Timbuktu.

As the photo trail moved north from the Niger into the Azaouad, a barren region of dunes and nothingness that made up but one of the many areas of the Sahara, Greenwald found fewer and fewer signs of human presence. He could discern bones of animals, camels most likely, scattered around isolated wells, but a standing human was very difficult to detect, even for his exotic electronics systems.

After nearly an hour, Greenwald rubbed his tired eyes and massaged his temples. He had found nothing that indicated the slightest trace of the two men he had been asked to look for. The photos of the extreme northerly search grid that Webster thought they might have reached on foot were examined unsuccessfully and set aside.

Greenwald had done his bit for the cause and was about to call it a day and go home to his wife, but he decided to give it one final try. Years of experience had taught him that a target was never where he expected to find it. He sifted out the satellite photos revealing the deeper regions of the desolate Azaouad and gave them a fast scan.

The stark void appeared as empty as the Dead Sea.

He almost missed it, he would have missed it but for an indescribable feeling that a tiny object on the landscape did not fit its surroundings. It might have passed as a rock or a small dune, but the shape was not irregular like geology produced by nature. The lines were straight and well defined. His hand moved over a row of knobs, magnifying and enhancing the object.

Greenwald knew he was on to something. He was too much the expert to be fooled. During the war with Iraq, he became something of a legend for his uncanny knack at detecting the Iraqi army's hidden bunkers, tank and artillery emplacements.

"A car," he muttered aloud to himself. "A car covered over with sand to hide its presence."

After tighter study, he could distinguish two tiny specks alongside the car. Greenwald wished he was looking at images received from a military satellite. He could have read the time on the target's wristwatches. But the GeoSat was not built for fine detail. Even with careful tuning he could just make them out as two humans.

Greenwald took a moment to sit back and savor his discovery. Then he walked over to a nearby desk and dialed a phone. He waited patiently, hoping that a taped voice wouldn't come on with an announcement to leave a message. On the fifth ring, a man answered who sounded as if he was out of breath.

"Hello."

"Chip?"

"Yes. This Tom?"

"You been jogging?"

"The wife and I were out in the backyard talking to neighbors," explained Webster. "I ran like hell when I heard the phone ringing."

"I found something I think you'll be interested in."

"My two men, you pulled them from the GeoSat photos?"

"They're over 100 kilometers further north than you reckoned," said Greenwald.

There was a pause. "Sure you're not looking at a pair of nomads?" asked Webster. "No way my people could have walked that far across a burning desert in forty-eight hours."

"Not walked but drove."

"Like drove a car?" asked Webster in surprise.

"Difficult to make out details. Looks to me as though they cover it with sand during the day as camouflage from searching aircraft and drive by night. It has to be your two guys. Who else can be playing fugitive games where the grass don't grow."

"Can you tell if they're trying for the border?"

"Not unless they have a lousy sense of direction. They're smack in the center of northern Mali. The nearest border to another country is a good 350 kilometers."

Webster took a long moment to reply. "It must be Pitt and Giordino. But where in hell did they find a car?"

"Looks to me like they're resourceful men."

"They should have given up searching for the contamination source long ago. What madness has overtaken them?"

It was a question Greenwald could not answer. "Maybe they'll give you a call from Fort Foureau," he suggested, half serious, half in jest.

"They're heading for the French solar waste project?"

"They've only another 50 kilometers to go. And it's the only slice of Western civilization around."

"Thank you, Tom," said Webster sincerely. "The next favor is mine. How about me taking you and our wives to dinner?"

"Sounds good. Pick any restaurant and call me with day and time."

Greenwald dropped the receiver in its cradle and refocused his attention on the fuzzy object and the two tiny figures next to it.

"You guys have to be crazy," he said to the empty room.

Then he closed down the system and went home.

The dawn sun came up and cast a wave of heat across the desert like an oven door thrown open. The cool of the night vanished as quickly as the passing of a cloud. A pair of ravens flew across the oppressive sky, spied something that did not belong on the empty landscape, and began circling in hopes of finding a meal. On closer inspection they saw that a live human offered nothing of taste, and they slowly winged off to the north.

Pitt lay stretched out on the upper slope of a low dune, almost buried in the sand, and stared up at the birds for a few moments. Then he turned his attention back to the immense sprawl of the Fort Foureau solar detoxification project. It was an unreal place. Not simply a man-made edifice to technology but a thriving, productive facility surrounded by a land that had long since died under the onslaught of drought and heat.

Pitt twisted slightly as he heard the soft movement of sand behind him and saw Giordino approaching on his stomach, wiggling up the dune like a lizard.

"Enjoying the scenery?" asked Giordino.

"Come take a look. I guarantee you'll be impressed."

"The only thing that would impress me right now is a beach with nice cool surf."

"Don't let your curly locks show," said Pitt. "A black tuft of hair against the yellow-white sand stands out like a skunk on a fence post."

Giordino grinned like the village idiot as he poured a handful of sand into his hair. He moved alongside Pitt, peering over the summit of the dune. "My, my," he murmured in awe. "If I didn't know better, I'd say I was looking at a city on the moon."

"The sterile landscape is there," Pitt admitted, "but there's no glass dome over the top."

"This place is almost as big as Disney World."

"I'd estimate 20 square kilometers."

"We have incoming freight," said Giordino, pointing to a long train of railroad cars drawn by four diesel engines. "Business must be booming."

"Massarde's toxic gravy train," Pitt mused. "I estimate about a hundred and twenty cars filled with poisonous garbage."

Giordino nodded toward a vast field covered with long trough-like basins with concave surfaces that bounced the sun's rays like a sea of mirrors. "Those look like solar reflectors."

"Concentrators," said Pitt. "They collect solar radiation and concentrate it into tremendous heat and proton intensities. The radiant energy is then focused inside a chemical reactor that completely destroys the hazardous waste."

"Aren't we the bright one," said Giordino. "When did you become an expert on sunlight?"

"I used to date a lady who was an engineer with the Solar Energy Institute. She took me on a guided tour of their research facilities. That was several years ago when they were still in the test stages of developing solar thermal technology for eliminating industrial toxic wastes. It appears Massarde has mastered the techniques."

"I've missed something," said Giordino.

"Like what?"

"This whole setup. Why go to the added expense and effort to erect this cathedral to sanitation in the middle of the world's biggest sandbox. Me, I'd have built it closer to a major industrial center. Must cost a bundle just to transport the stuff across half an ocean and 1600 kilometers of desert."

"A most astute consideration," Pitt admitted. "I'm curious too. If Fort Foureau is such a masterpiece of toxic waste destruction, and is judged by hazardous waste experts to be a safe, blue-ribbon operation, it doesn't make sense not to set it in a more convenient location."

"You still think it's responsible for the contamination leak into the Niger?" Giordino asked.

"We found no other source."

"That old prospector's story about an underground river may well be the solution."

"Except there's a flaw," said Pitt.

"You never were the trusting type," Giordino muttered.

"Nothing wrong with the underground flow theory. What I don't buy is leaking contamination."

"I'm with you," Giordino nodded. "What's to leak if they're supposed to be incinerating the crap?"

"Exactly."

"Then Fort Foureau isn't what it's advertised?"

"Not to my way of thinking."

Giordino turned and looked at him suspiciously. "I hope you're not thinking of strolling around down there as if we were a couple of visiting firemen."

"I had cat burglars more in mind."

"How do you propose we get in? Drive up to the gate and ask for a visitor's pass?"

Pitt nodded at the line of freight cars rolling over a siding that paralleled a long loading dock inside the facility. "We hop the train."

"And for a getaway?" Giordino asked suspiciously.

"With the Voisin's fuel gauge knocking on empty, bidding a fond farewell to Mali and driving off into the sunset was the last thing on my agenda. We catch the outward bound express for Mauritania."

Giordino made a glum face. "You expect me to ride first class in freight cars that have carried tons of toxic chemicals? I'm too young to melt into sludge."

Pitt shrugged and smiled. "You'll just have to be careful not to touch anything."

Giordino shook his head in exasperation. "Did you consider the obstacles involved?"

"Obstacles are made to be hurdled," Pitt answered pontifically.

"Like the electrified fence, the guards with Doberman pinschers, the patrol cars bristling with automatic cannon, the overhead lamps that light up the place like a baseball stadium?"

"Yes, now that you had to go and remind me."

"Mighty strange," Giordino reflected, "that a toxic waste incinerator has to be guarded like a nuclear bomb arsenal."

"All the more reason to inspect the premises," said Pitt calmly.

"You won't change your mind and head for home while we're still a team."

"Seek and ye shall find."

Giordino threw up his hands. "You're crazier than that old prospector and his cockamamy story of a Confederate ironclad with Abe Lincoln at the helm that's buried in the desert."

"We do have much in common," Pitt said easily. He rolled on his side and gestured toward a structure about 6 kilometers to the east a short walk from the railroad tracks. "See that old abandoned fort?"

Giordino nodded. "The one with Beau Geste, Gary Cooper, and the French Foreign Legion written all over it. Yes, I see it."

"Where Fort Foureau got its name," said Pitt. "No more than 100 meters separates its walls from the railroad. As soon as it's dark we'll use it for cover until we can hop an incoming train."

"I've already noticed they whip over the rails too fast for even a professional hobo to board."

"Prudence and patience," said Pitt. "The locomotives begin to slow just before they reach the old fort. Then they come to a crawl when they pull into what looks like a security station."

Giordino studied the station the train had to pass through to enter the heart of the project. "A dime to a dollar an army of guards checks out every freight car."

"They can't be too overzealous. Examining over a hundred freight cars filled with drums of toxic waste is not exactly a job a sane man would throw his heart and soul into. Besides, who would be dumb enough to stow away in one?"

"You're the only one who comes to mind," Giordino said dryly.

"I'm always open to more practical suggestions for sneaking past your electrified fence, Dobermans, floodlights, and patrol cars."

Giordino was in the middle of giving Pitt a long solemn look of exasperation when he tensed and twisted his head at the sky in the direction of the oncoming thump of an approaching helicopter.

Pitt looked up too. It was coming from the south and heading directly over them. It was not a military craft but a beautifully streamlined civilian version that was easily identified by the Massarde Enterprises name along the fuselage.

"Damn!" cursed Giordino. He looked back at the mound of sand they had thrown over the Voisin. "Any lower and he'll blow the sand right off the car."

"Only if he passes directly over it," Pitt said. "Burrow down and don't move."

An alert eye might have caught them, noticed the suspicious sand dune with its strange shape, but the pilot was concentrating on the landing pad near the Project's main office building and did not glance down at the disturbed sands or the forms hugging the dune. The helicopter's sole passenger was occupied with studying a financial report and did not glance out a window.

It swept right over them, banked slightly, sank down toward the pad, hovered for a few moments, and then settled to the concrete. A few seconds later the rotor stopped, the passenger door opened, and a man climbed down to the pad. Even at half a kilometer without binoculars, Pitt correctly guessed the identity of the figure who vigorously strode toward the office complex.

"I think our friend has returned to haunt us," he said.

Giordino cupped his hands around his eyes and squinted. "Too far to tell for sure, but I do believe you're right. A shame he didn't bring the piano player from the houseboat."

"Can't you get her out of your mind?"

Giordino looked at Pitt with a hurt expression. "Why would I want to?"

"You don't even know her name."

"Love will conquer all," Giordino said moodily.

"Then conquer your amorous thoughts and let's rest up until nightfall. Then we've got a train to catch."

They had bypassed the well described by the old prospector when the Oued Zarit's former riverbed meandered in a different direction. The soft drinks were gone and their supply of water was down to 2 liters, slightly more than 2 quarts. But they divided and drank it all to avoid dehydration, trusting in finding a source near the project.

They parked the Voisin in a small ravine a kilometer south of the abandoned fort that sat beside the railroad, then burrowed into the sand under the car, achieving a small measure of shelter from the sweltering heat. Giordino dropped off quickly, but Pitt's mind was too restless for sleep.

The night sweeps across the desert quickly. The dusk is short before the darkness. There was a strange stillness, the only sound coming from the faint tick of the Voisin's engine as it cooled. The dry desert air became cleansed from the heat and blowing sand of the day and magnified the great storm of stars that gleamed in an obsidian sky. They were so sharp and distinct Pitt could actually separate the red stars from the blue and green. He had never seen such a cosmic display, even on the open sea.

They covered the car in the gulch for the last time and hiked under the stars to the fort, careful to sweep their tracks with a palm frond as they proceeded. They passed by the old Legion graveyard and scouted around the 10-meter high walls until they came to the main gate. The giant wooden doors, solid and bleached white by the sun, stood slightly ajar. They entered and found themselves on the dark and deserted parade ground.

It took little for their imaginations to see a ghostly formation of French Foreign Legion footsloggers standing at attention in their blue tunics, baggy white trousers, and white kepi caps, before marching out onto the burning sands to fight a horde of Tuaregs.

The actual size of the former outpost was small by most Foreign Legion standards. The walls, each 30 meters in length, were formed in a perfect square. They were a good 3 meters thick at the base with staggered bastions at the top to protect the defenders. The entire structure could have easily been manned by no more than fifty men.

The interior showed the usual signs of neglect. Debris left by the departing French troops and bits of trash left by desert wanderers who took advantage of the fort's walls during sandstorms lay scattered on the ground and in the barracks quarters. Materials left over by construction workers during the building of the railroad were stacked against one wall: concrete railroad ties, various tools, several drums of diesel oil, and a forklift that looked in surprisingly good condition.

"How'd you like to be stationed in this place for a year?" muttered Giordino.

"Not for a week," said Pitt, surveying the fort.

While they waited for a train, time dragged by with tormenting slowness. The odds were good to excellent that the chemical compound Gunn had discovered as the cause of the exploding red tide was filtering out of the solar detoxification plant. After their run-in with Massarde, Pitt knew that a knock on the door and a cheery request to inspect the property would not be met with open arms and a hearty handshake. They had to worm their way in and find positive evidence.

There was something far more sinister going on at Fort Foureau. To all appearances it was contributing to the battle against the world's millions of tons of toxic waste. But scratch the surface, Pitt thought, and we shall see what we shall see.

He was calculating their chances of passing through the security station and getting out again as extremely bleak, when his ears picked up a sound in the distance. Giordino came out of alight sleep and heard it too.

They looked at each other wordlessly and came to their feet.

"An inbound train," said Giordino.

Pitt held up his Doxa dive watch and studied the luminous hands. "Eleven-twenty. Plenty of time to do our inspection act and get out before daylight."

"Providing there's a scheduled outbound," Giordino cautioned.

"So far they've been tooting by like clockwork every three hours. Like Mussolini, Massarde keeps them running on time." Pitt stood and brushed off the sand. "Off we go. I don't want to be left standing on an empty track."

"I wouldn't mind."

"Keep low," Pitt warned. "The desert reflects starlight, and the ground is open between the fort and the tracks."

"I'll flit through the night like a bat," Giordino assured him. "But if a drooling dog with big fangs or beady-eyed guard with an automatic weapon has other ideas?"

"We prove our suspicions that Fort Foureau is a facade."

Pitt said firmly, "One of us has to escape and alert Sandecker, even if it means sacrificing one for the other."

A thoughtful expression crossed Giordino's face and he stared at Pitt without saying anything. Then the air horn on the lead diesel locomotive sounded to announce its impending arrival at the security station. He nodded at the tracks. "We'd better hurry."

Pitt nodded silently. Then they stepped through the fort's big gate and ran toward the tracks.

An abandoned Renault truck sat forlornly about halfway between the fort and the railroad tracks. Everything that could be stripped from the body and chassis was long gone. Tires and wheels, engine, transmission and differential, even the windshield and doors were removed for parts or sold for scrap, hauled off by camel to Gao or Timbuktu by an enterprising merchant.

To Pitt and Giordino, as they huddled behind the truck to avoid being caught in the glare of the light on the forward diesel engine, the deserted loneliness of an object used by man and then forgotten and discarded was overwhelming. But it made for the perfect cover as the long freight train approached.

The revolving, light above the engine swept across the desert and illuminated every rock and every blade of sparse grass for almost a kilometer. They crouched out of the beam until the engines thundered past at what Pitt estimated as nearly 50 kilometers an hour. The engineers were braking now as they prepared to enter the security station. Pitt waited patiently as the train's speed tapered off. By the time the last cars in line reached the abandoned truck, he estimated, the train's momentum would be down to about I S kilometers, a speed slow enough for them to run alongside and board.

They left the safety of the scrapped truck and dashed the final few meters to the roadbed, hunching down and observing the flatbed cars that carried huge removable cargo containers as they rumbled toward Fort Foureau. The end car was in sight now, not an ordinary-type caboose for the train crew, but an armored car with turreted heavy machine guns manned by corporate security guards. Massarde ran a tight operation, Pitt thought. The escorts were probably professional mercenaries hired out at above average wages.

Why the ironbound security? Most governments looked upon chemical waste as a nuisance. Sabotage or an accidental spill in the middle of the desert would go almost unnoticed in the international media or environmentalist circles. Who were they guarding it from? Certainly not the occasional bandit or terrorist.

If Pitt had formed any character analysis of Yves Massarde, he'd have predicted the French tycoon played both sides against the middle, paying off the Malian rebels at the same time he pumped cash to Kazim.

"Let's go for the second cargo container forward of the armored car," he said to Giordino. "Boarding the first might be cutting it too fine if an alert guard was looking down along the track."

Giordino nodded. "I'm with you. The cars closest to the guards won't be as thoroughly searched as the ones further forward." '

They rose swiftly to their feet and began sprinting along the roadbed. Pitt had misjudged the speed: The train was moving nearly twice as fast as either of them could run. There was no thought of stopping or dropping out. If they veered away, the guards would likely spot them under the lights that flashed from the rear of the armored car, spilling in a semicircle around the wheels and gleaming on the rails.

They gave it everything they had. Pitt was taller and had longer arms. He caught a ladder rung, was jerked forward and, using the momentum, swung aboard.

Giordino reached out and missed the rear ladder of the car by only a few centimeters. The roadbed was gravel and difficult to run on. He turned his head for a backward glance. After missing his intended ride, his only hope now was to risk boarding the car directly in front of the one carrying the guards.

The ladder that extended from the flatbed railroad car to the top of the cargo container was approaching at what seemed to Giordino as Mach speed. He glanced down at the steel wheels rolling over the tracks uncomfortably close. This would be his last chance. Miss and fall under the wheels or be shot by the guards. Neither prospect excited him.

He grabbed one rung of the ladder with both hands as it rushed by and was pulled off his feet by the forward motion of the train. He held on desperately, his legs flailing as they struggled to catch up. Releasing his left hand, Giordino used it to grab the next rung. Then his right hand joined it, and he could bend his knees and lift his feet in the air and find them a hold on the lower rung.

Pitt had paused a few seconds to catch his breath before clambering to the top of the cargo container. Not until he turned around did he realize that Giordino wasn't where he should have been-climbing the ladder of the same car. He looked down, saw the dark form clinging to the side of the car behind his, and the white blur of Giordino's grim and determined face.

Pitt watched in helpless frustration as Giordino hung there motionless for several seconds, clutching the ladder of the container as the flatbed car rattled and swayed. He twisted his head and stared down the length of the train. The lead engine was only a kilometer from the security station. Then a tingling sixth sense made Pitt look sharply backward and he froze.

A guard was standing on a small platform that extended out from the rear of the armored car. He was standing with his hands spread on the railing, staring down over the desert flashing past below his feet. He looked to Pitt to be lost in thought, perhaps thinking of something far away or maybe a girl somewhere. He had only to turn and gaze down the length of the train and Giordino was finished.

The guard straightened, then turned and walked back into the cool comfort of his car.

Giordino wasted no more time and scrambled up the ladder to the top of the container where he lay down and pressed his body against the roof. He lay there breathing heavily. The air was still hot and mixed with the exhaust from the diesel engines. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked onto the next car for Pitt.

"Come on across," Pitt shouted above the noise of the moving freight train.

Cautiously crawling on his hands and knees, Giordino peered down at the blur of concrete ties and rails as they rushed under the cars below. He waited a moment to build courage, and then he stood, took a short run, and then leaped forward. His feet touched down with half a meter to spare before he landed arms outstretched on the roof. When he looked around for a helping hand, there was none.

With utter confidence in his friend's athletic ability, Pitt was calmly studying an air conditioner installed on the top of the cargo container to keep highly combustible chemical waste from igniting under the extreme heat conditions during its journey across the desert. A heavy-duty model especially designed to combat scorching temperatures, its compressor was turned over by a small gas engine whose exhaust popped quietly through a silenced muffler.

As the lights of the security station loomed ahead, Pitt had turned his thoughts to evading detection. He didn't think it likely guards would walk the train in the manner of railroad police carrying clubs, who searched the yards and trains for hobos and bindle stiffs riding the rails during the 1930s depression. Nor would Massarde's security people rely on dogs. No way a hound with a sensitive nose could sniff out a man from the overpowering aroma of chemicals and diesel fumes.

TV cameras, Pitt determined. The train simply passed through and under an array of cameras that were monitored inside the building. No question that Yves Massarde would have relied on modern security technology.

"Have you something to turn screws?" he asked without acknowledging Giordino's approach.

"You're asking me for a screwdriver?" Giordino queried incredulously.

"I want to pull the screws out of this big panel on the side of the air conditioner."

Giordino reached into his pocket, mostly emptied after the search by Massarde's crewman on board the houseboat. But he found a nickel and a dime. He passed them to Pitt. "This is the best I can do on the spur of the moment."

Quickly running his hands over a large side panel on the air conditioner, Pitt found the screw heads that held it in place. There were ten of them, thankfully slotted and not Phillips heads. He wasn't at all sure he could unscrew them in time. The nickel was too large but the dime fit perfectly. He feverishly began removing the screws as fast as his fingers could turn the dime.

"You picked a strange time to repair an air conditioner," said Giordino curiously.

"I'm banking on the guards using TV cameras to inspect the train for transients like us. They'll spot us up here for sure. Our only chance to ride through without getting caught is to hide behind this panel. It's big enough to cover us both."

The train was down to a crawl now and half the container cars had passed into the project rail yard beyond the security station. "You'd better hurry," Giordino said anxiously.

The sweat trickled into Pitt's eyes, but he shook the drops off while he twisted the dime. Their car moved relentlessly closer to the TV cameras. Three quarters of the train was cleared when Pitt still had three screws to go.

He was down to two, then one. The next car was passing into the station. Out of sheer desperation he gripped the big panel with both hands and tore it from its slot, ripping the last screw from its threads.

"Quick, sit with your back against the air conditioner," he ordered Giordino.

They both shoved their backs as far into the air-conditioning housing as possible and then thrust the panel up in front of them like a shield.

"You think this will fool anybody?" Giordino asked dubiously.

"TV monitors are two-dimensional. So long as they're pointing at us head on, we'll present an illusion to any viewer."

The container car rolled slowly into a sterile white tunnel with TV cameras positioned to view the undercarriage, sides, and roof. Pitt gripped the panel with his fingertips rather than extending them around the edges where they might be seen by the security guard monitoring the train. The makeshift facade may not have reeked with finesse, but the best he could hope for was a guard bored with the monotony of staring at a seemingly endless line of cargo containers on an array of television monitors. Like being forced to watch a hundred reruns of the same program on ten different screens, the mind would soon go into a drugged state and begin to wander.

They huddled there, waiting for the bells and sirens, but no alarm was given. The container car rolled out under the night sky again and was pulled onto a siding next to a long concrete loading dock with large overhead derricks that moved on parallel tracks.

"Oh brother." Giordino mopped his brow again. "I don't look forward to that little scam again."

Pitt grinned, gave Giordino a friendly punch on the shoulder, and turned to the rear of the train. "Don't get carried away just yet. Our friends are still with us."

They remained motionless there on the roof of the container, holding the air-conditioning panel as the guards' armored car was uncoupled and pulled away by a small electric switch engine. The four diesels' locomotives also dropped their rear coupling and chugged off toward a siding where a long row of empty cars was waiting to be hauled back to the port in Mauritania.

Safe for the moment, Pitt and Giordino stayed where they were and calmly waited for something to happen. The dock was lit with big overhead arc lamps and appeared deserted of life. A long line of strange-looking vehicles sat like squat bugs on the loading dock. They each had four wheels with no tires, flat, level cargo beds, and little else except a small box-like unit that extended from the front and contained lights and a bug-eyed lens aimed forward.

Pitt was about to reattach the air-conditioner panel when he caught a movement above his head. Fortunately, he saw the TV camera mounted on a pole by the dock before it swung through its full arc and found them. A quick look around the dock, and he spotted four more cameras.

"Stay put," he alerted Giordino. "They've got remote sensing equipment everywhere."

They ducked back behind the panel and were figuring the next move when the lights on the derricks suddenly flashed on and their electric motors began to hum. None had a cabin for an operator. They were all operated by remote control from a command center somewhere within the project. They moved along the train and dropped horizontal metal shafts that slid into slots on the top edges of the containers. Then a short blast from a horn sounded and the derricks hoisted the big containers from their rail cars, swung over the dock, and lowered them onto one of the flatbed trucks. The lifting shafts were removed and the derricks went on to the next container.

For the next few minutes they remained behind the panel, not moving as the nearest derrick poised directly above them, eased in the shafts, and picked up their container. Pitt was impressed the entire operation went so smoothly without human presence. Once the container was firmly settled on the truck, there was a buzz and it began to silently roll along the dock and then down a long ramp that led into an open shaft that corkscrewed underground.

"Who's driving?" Giordino murmured.

"A robotic transporter," answered Pitt. "Controlled from a command center somewhere in the project."

They quickly replaced the panel and tightened it with just a couple of screws. Next they crawled to the forward edge of the container and studied the scene unfolding around them.

"I've got to admit," said Giordino softly, "I've never seen efficiency like this anywhere."

Pitt had to agree, it was an intriguing sight. The curving ramp, a marvel of engineering, went deep, deep into the bowels of the desert. Already, he reasoned, the transporter and its cargo had traveled over 100 meters straight down, passing four different levels that traveled beyond view into the earth.

Pitt studied the large signs above the passages. They were identified with symbols as well as terminology in French. The upper levels were designated for biological waste, the lower levels for chemical waste. Pitt began to wonder what the container they were riding on carried inside.

He found the mystery intensifying. Why would a reactor that burned waste be buried so deep underground? To his way of thinking it should have been above the surface near the solar concentrators.

At last the ramp straightened out into an immense cavern that seemed to stretch on forever. The ceiling was a good four stories high with rock-hewn side tunnels spreading in all directions like spokes on a wheel. It looked to Pitt that a work of nature had been expanded by an enormous excavation project.

Pitt's senses were probing ahead of him like antennae. He was continually surprised to still see no people, no workers or machine operators. Every movement in what he perceived to be a storage cavern was controlled by automation. The electrically powered transporter, like a drone ant, followed the one ahead and turned into one of the side tunnels that was marked by a red sign with a black diagonal slash that hung from the ceiling. Up ahead came various sounds and echoes.

"A land office business," said Giordino, pointing to a number of transporters moving in the opposite direction, the doors of their cargo containers open and revealing empty interiors.

After moving almost a full kilometer the truck began to slow as the noises grew louder. Around a bend it moved into a vast chamber, filled and stacked floor to roof with thousands of box-shaped containers built from concrete, all painted yellow with black markings. A robotic machine was off-loading the barrels from the cargo containers and stacking them with a sea of other containers that rose toward the roof of the cavern.

Pitt's teeth ground softly together. He stared in growing shock and suddenly wished he was somewhere else, any place but in that underground chamber of deadly horror.

The barrels were marked with the symbol for radioactivity. He and Giordino had stumbled on Fort Foureau's secret, an underground dumping ground for nuclear waste on an unheard-of colossal scale.

Massarde took one long comprehensive look at the TV monitor and shook his head in wonderment. Then he turned to his aide, Felix Verenne.

"Those men are incredible," he murmured.

"How did they get through security?" mused Verenne.

"By the same method they escaped my houseboat, stole General Kazim's car, and drove halfway across the Sahara. Cunning and dogged persistence."

"Should we prevent their escape from the storage chamber?" asked Verenne. "Keep them trapped in there until they die of radiation sickness?"

Massarde thought for a moment, and then shook his head. "No, send security to apprehend them. Give them a good scrubbing to remove any contamination and bring them here. I'd like to talk with Mr. Pitt again before I have him disposed of."

Massarde's security guards captured them twenty minutes later, after they rode inside an empty container car up to the surface from the waste storage cavern. They had dropped from the roof of the container and into the emptied interior. A concealed TV camera had caught them in an unguarded moment before they could slip inside.

The door was thrown open moments before the container was to be lifted onto a railroad car. They had no chance of putting up any fight or making an attempt to escape. The surprise was well coordinated and complete.

Ten, Pitt counted them, ten men standing with menacing steadiness, pointing machine guns at the two unarmed men inside the cargo container. Pitt felt the stinging bitterness of failure cut through him like a knife. He could taste the bitterness of defeat on his tongue. To be trapped and caught once by Massarde was a miscalculation. To be caught twice was damned stupid. He stared at the guards feeling no fear, only anger for getting snared. He cursed himself for not being more alert.

They could do nothing now but bide their time and hope they weren't executed before another chance at escape, no matter how slim, appeared. Pitt and Giordino slowly raised their hands and clasped them behind their heads.

"I hope you'll forgive the intrusion," Pitt said quietly. "But we were looking for a bathroom."

"You wouldn't want us to have an accident," Giordino added.

"Still! Both of you!" A voice erupted from a security officer in a smartly creased uniform, a red pillbox cap of the French military perched on his head. The tone was harsh and cold in English with almost no trace of French. "I'm told you are dangerous men. Push all thoughts of escape from your minds. My men are not trained to wound resisting captives."

"What's the big deal?" asked Giordino with an innocent look. "You act like we stole a drum of used dioxin."

The officer ignored Giordino's remark. "Identify yourselves."

Pitt stared at him. "I'm Rocky and my friend is—"

"Bullwinkle," Giordino finished.

A tight smile curled the officer's lips. "No doubt more appropriate than Dirk Pitt and Albert Giordino."

"So if you know, why ask?" said Pitt.

"Mr. Massarde was expecting you."

"The last place they'd expect us to cut and run is the middle of the desert," said Giordino, mimicking Pitt's words in Bourem. "Kind of misguessed, didn't we?"

Pitt lightly shrugged his shoulders. "I read the wrong script."

"How did you men penetrate our security?" asked the officer.

"We took the train," answered Pitt easily, making no attempt to hide the truth.

"The doors to the cargo containers are locked with combinations after loading. You could not have forced your way inside while the train was moving."

"You should tell whoever monitors your television cameras to study the air conditioners on the roofs. A simple matter to remove a panel and use it as a screen."

"Indeed?" Captain Brunone was highly interested. "Most clever. I'll see that your means of entry is added to our security manual."

"I'm deeply flattered," Pitt grinned.

The officer's eyes narrowed. "You won't be for long, rest assured." He paused and spoke into a portable radio. "Mr. Massarde?"

"I'm here," Massarde's voice rasped through the speaker.

"Captain Charles Brunone, sir, Chief of Security."

"Pitt and Giordino?"

"In my hands."

"Did they resist?"

"No, sir, they gave up quietly."

"Please bring them to my office, Captain."

"Yes, sir, as soon as they've been decontaminated."

Pitt said to Brunone, "Would it help if we said we were sorry?"

"It seems American humor never stops," said Brunone coldly. "You can offer your apologies to Mr. Massarde in person, but since you destroyed his helicopter, I wouldn't expect any pity if I were you."

Yves Massarde didn't smile often, but he was smiling now as Pitt and Giordino were escorted into his vast office. Leaning back in his expensive leather executive's chair, elbows parked on the armrests, fingers entwined under his chin, he smiled benignly like a mortician after a typhoid epidemic.

Felix Verenne stood by a window overlooking the facility. His eyes stared expressionless, like camera apertures, the lines in his face grim, his mouth tight in contempt. A marked contrast to his superior's bemused stare.

"Splendid work, Captain Brunone," Massarde purred. "You collected them uninjured and unmarked." He gazed speculatively at the two men standing before him in clean, white coveralls, at their tanned faces and excellent physical condition, took note of their seemingly unconcerned expressions, and remembered encountering the same indifference on his houseboat. "So they proved cooperative."

"Like schoolchildren beckoned to class," Brunone said formally. "They did as they were ordered."

"Very wise of them," Massarde murmured approvingly. He pushed back his chair and came around the desk and faced Pitt. "I compliment you on your passage across the desert. General Kazim doubted you would last two days. A remarkable accomplishment to have come so far over hostile ground so fast."

"General Kazim is the last man I'd rely on for a prediction," said Pitt pleasantly.

"You stole my helicopter and crashed it in the river, Mr. Pitt. That will cost you dearly."

"You treated us shabbily aboard your houseboat, so we repaid you in kind."

"And General Kazim's valuable old car?"

"The engine seized up so we burned it," Pitt lied.

"You seemed to have developed a nasty habit for destroying other people's expensive possessions."

"I broke all my toys when I was a kid," Pitt said casually. "Drove my Dad up the walls."

"I can always purchase another helicopter, but General Kazim cannot replace his Avions Voisin. Enjoy what time you have left before his sadists work you over in his torture chambers."

"Lucky for me I'm a masochist," Giordino said, unruffled.

Just for a second Massarde looked amused, then his face turned curious. "What did you find that was so interesting that you drove halfway across the Sahara to Fort Foureau?" he demanded.

"We enjoyed your company so much on your houseboat, we thought we'd pay you another social visit—"

Massarde's hand lashed out as he viciously backhanded Pitt across the face, a large diamond ring cutting a path through the right cheek. Pitt's head twisted from the blow, but his feet remained firmly rooted to the carpet. "Does this mean you're challenging me to a duel?" he muttered through a taut grin.

"No, it means I am going to have you slowly lowered in a drum of nitric acid until you talk."

Pitt looked at Giordino, then back to Massarde, and shrugged. "All right, Massarde, you've got a leak."

Massarde frowned. "Be specific."

"Your hazardous waste, the chemicals you're supposed to be burning, are seeping into groundwater that flows under an ancient riverbed and is polluting every well between here and the Niger. From there it flows to the Atlantic where it's causing a catastrophic disaster that will eventually destroy all sea life. And that's just for starters. We followed the old riverbed and discovered it once flowed directly beneath Fort Foureau."

"We are almost 400 kilometers from the Niger," said Verenne. "Impossible for water to flow that far under the desert's surface."

"How do you know?" asked Pitt. "Fort Foureau is the only project or plant within Mali that receives chemical and biological waste. The compound responsible for the problem can only come from here, the only possible source. There's no question in my mind now that I know that you're hiding waste instead of burning it."

Irritation flickered at the edge of Massarde's mouth. "You're not entirely correct, Mr. Pitt. We do burn waste at Fort Foureau. A considerable amount as a matter of fact. Come into the next room, and I'll show you."

Captain Brunone stood back and gestured for Pitt and Giordino to follow Massarde.

He led them across a hall into a room whose center was filled by a three-dimensional scale, cutaway model of the Fort Foureau hazardous waste disposal project. The layout was elaborate, the detail so meticulous it was like looking at the real thing from a helicopter.

"Is this mock-up true to life or a fantasyland?" asked Pitt.

"What you see is an exact representation," Massarde assured him.

"And you're about to give us a no-frills, fact-filled lecture on its operation."

"A lecture you can take with you to the grave," Massarde said reproachfully. He picked up a long ivory pointer and aimed its tip at a large field on the south side of the project covered with huge flat modules slanted toward the sun. "We are completely energy sufficient," Massarde began. "We produce our own electricity with this photovoltaic grid system of flat-plate solar cell modules made from polycrystalline silicon that covers 4 square kilometers. Are yon: familiar with photovoltaics?"

"I know that it's rapidly becoming the world's most economical energy source," answered Pitt. "As I understand it, photovoltaics is a solar technology that converts the sun's power into direct current electrical energy."

"Quite right," said Massarde. "When sunlight, or what scientists refer to as solar photon energy, strikes the surface of these cells after its 115-million-kilometer journey from the sun, a flow of electricity is produced, enough to operate a project three times this size should we wish to expand." He paused and aimed the pointer at a structure near the array of modules. "This building houses the generators powered by the energy converted from the modular field and the battery subsystem where the energy is stored for nighttime use or for days when the sun does not shine, which is a rarity in this part of the Sahara."

"Efficient," said Pitt. "An efficient power system. But your array of solar concentrators, they do not operate with the same degree of effectiveness?"

Massarde looked thoughtfully at Pitt. He wondered why this man always seemed a step ahead of him. He swung the pointer toward a field next to the solar cells that held the array of parabolic trough collectors Pitt had observed the day before.

"They do," he replied icily. "My solar thermal technology for the destruction of hazardous wastes is the most advanced program of any industrial nation. This field of superconcentrators delivers solar concentrations higher than the normal light of eighty thousand suns. This high intensity sunlight, or photon energy, is then focused into the first of two quartz reactors." Massarde paused to touch the pointer against a miniature building. "The first breaks the toxic waste down into harmless chemicals at a temperature of 950 degrees Celsius. The second reactor, at temperatures around 1200 degrees Celsius, incinerates any remaining infinitesimal residue. The destruction of every known manmade toxic chemical is total and complete."

Pitt looked at Massarde with respect mixed with doubt. "This all sounds very thorough and final. But if your detoxification operation is a state-of-the-art wonder of utility, why are you hiding millions of tons of waste underground?"

"Very few people are aware of the staggering number of chemicals that are spread around the globe. There are over seven million known man-made chemical compounds. And each week chemists create ten thousand new ones. At current rates, over two billion tons of waste are accumulating around the world every year. Three hundred million alone in the United States. Twice that in Europe and Russia More than double that amount when you throw in South America, Africa, Japan, and China. Some is burned by incinerators; most is illegally dumped in landfills or discharged in water supplies. There is no place for it to go. Here in the Sahara, far from the crowded cities and farmlands, I have provided a safe place for international industries to send their toxic waste. At the moment Fort Foureau can destroy over four hundred million tons of hazardous waste a year. But I cannot destroy it all, not until my solar thermal detoxification projects in the Gobi Desert and Australia are completed to handle waste from China and nations of the Far East. For your interest, I also have a facility only two weeks away from start-up in the United States."

"Very commendable, but that doesn't excuse you from burying what you can't destroy and charging for it."

Massarde nodded. "Cost efficiency, Mr. Pitt. It's cheaper to hide toxic waste than destroy it."

"And you follow the same line of logic for nuclear waste," said Pitt accusingly.

"Waste is waste. As far as humans are concerned, the only basic difference between nuclear and toxic is that one kills with radioactivity and the other with poison."

"Dump and forget it, and to hell with the consequences."

Massarde gave an indifferent shrug. "It has to go somewhere. My country has the largest nuclear energy program in the world second only to the United States in number of reactors in operation to generate electricity. Two radioactive waste repositories are already in operation. One at Soulaines, the other at La Manche. Unfortunately, neither, was designed to dispose of long-life or high-level nuclear waste. Plutonium 239, for example, has a half-life of twenty-four thousand years. There are other radioactive nuclides that have half-lives a hundred times longer. No containment system will last more than ten or twenty years. As you have discovered on your uninvited expedition into our storage cavern, we receive and dispose of the high-level waste here."

"Then despite your holier-than-thou speech on hazardous waste management, your solar detoxification project is a front."

Massarde smiled thinly. "In a sense, yes. But as I've explained, we actually destroy a high amount of waste."

"Mostly for appearance's sake," Pitt said, his voice cold and compelling. "I give you credit, Massarde, building this phony project without international intelligence agencies getting wind of it. How did you fool spy satellites while you excavated your storage caverns?"

"Nothing really," Massarde said arrogantly. "After I built the railroad to bring in construction workers and materials, the excavation began under the first building erected. The soil was secretly removed and loaded in the empty railroad containers returning to Mauritania and used for a landfill in the nation's port city, a profitable ongoing project I might add."

"Very shrewd. You get paid for the waste coming in and for the sand and rock going out."

"I never stop at seeking merely one advantage," Massarde said philosophically.

"No one is the wiser, and no one complains," said Pitt. "No environmental protection agencies threatening to close you down, no international uproar over polluting underground water systems. No one questions your methods of operation, particularly the corporations that produce the waste, and who are only too glad to get rid of it for a price."

Verenne's expressionless gaze rested on Pitt. "There are few saints who practice what they preach when it comes to saving the environment," he said coldly. "Everyone is guilty, Mr. Pitt. Everyone who enjoys the benefits of chemical compounds from gasoline to plastics to water purification and food preservatives. It is a case of the jury secretly agreeing with the guilty. No one man or organization can control and destroy the monster. It is a self-propagating Frankenstein that is too late to kill."

"So you make it worse by feeding on it in the name of profit. Instead of a solution, you've created a hoax."

"Hoax?"

"Yes, by reneging on the expense of building long-lasting waste canisters and excavating deep deposit chambers several kilometers underground, in geologically stable rock formations far beneath existing water tables." Pitt turned from Verenne to Massarde. "You're nothing more than a shyster contractor who charges exorbitant prices for inferior construction that endangers lives."

Massarde's face went red, but he was a master at controlling anger. "The threat of waste leakage fifty or a hundred years from now killing off a few sand beggars matters little."

"That's easy for you to say," said Pitt, his face hardened in scorn. "But the leakage is occurring today, and desert nomads are dying as we talk. And lest we forget that, what you've caused here could affect every living life form on earth."

The threat of guilt for killing off the world made no impression. But the reference to dying nomads triggered something in Massarde's mind. "Are you working in concert with Dr. Frank Hopper and his World Health inspection team?"

"No, Giordino and I are strictly on our own."

"But you are aware of them."

Pitt nodded. "I'm acquainted with his biochemist if that makes you happy."

"Dr. Eva Rojas," said Massarde slowly, watching for the effect.

Pitt saw the trap, but with nothing to lose he decided to string along. "Good guess."

Massarde didn't become brilliantly successful by winning a lottery. He was a master of deception and intrigue, but his greatest asset was insight. "I'll make another guess. You were the man who saved her from General Kazim's assassins outside of Cairo."

"I happened to be in the neighborhood, yes. You're in the wrong business, Massarde. You missed your calling by not becoming a palm reader."

To Massarde the novelty of the confrontation was wearing off. He was not used to being talked down to. For a man who controlled a vast financial empire on a day-to-day basis, wasting time with a pair of unwelcome interlopers was merely an annoyance to be pushed aside and handled by employees.

He nodded at Verenne. "Our little talk has ended. Please arrange for General Kazim to take these men into custody."

Verenne's statue face finally broke into a python grin. "With pleasure."

Captain Brunone did not come from the same mold as Massarde or Verenne. A product of the French military establishment, he may have resigned for triple wages but he still retained a level of honor. "Begging your pardon, Mr. Massarde, I wouldn't turn a rabid dog over to General Kazim. These men may be guilty of trespassing, but they certainly don't deserve to be tortured to death by ignorant barbarians."

Massarde considered Brunone's comment for a moment. "Quite right, quite right," he said, strangely agreeable. "We can't lower ourselves to the level of the General and his butchers." A gleam came to his eyes as he stared at Pitt and Giordino. "'Transport them to the gold mines at Tebezza. He and Dr. Rojas can enjoy each other's company while they dig in the pits."

"What about Kazim?" asked Verenne. "Won't he feel cheated out of making them pay for destroying his car?"

"No matter," Massarde said with utter unconcern. "By the time he discovers their whereabouts they'll be dead."

The President looked across his desk in the oval office at Sandecker. "Why wasn't I briefed on this earlier?"

"I was informed that it was a low-priority item that did not warrant interrupting your busy schedule of appointments."

The President shifted his gaze toward the White House Chief of Staff, Earl Willover. "Is this true?"

A balding, bespectacled man about fifty with a large red moustache shifted in his chair, leaned forward, and glared at Sandecker. "I ran the red tide theory by our national science board. They didn't agree that it was a worldwide threat"

"Then how do they explain the incredible growth that's sweeping the middle Atlantic Ocean?"

Willover returned the President's gaze impassively. "Respected ocean scientists believe the growth is temporary and the tide will soon begin to dissipate as it has in the past."

Willover ran the Executive Branch like Horatius standing against the entire Etruscan army defending the bridge to Rome. Few got across to the oval office, and few escaped Willover's wrath if they overstayed their visit or had the audacity to disagree with the President and argue over policy. It went without saying, almost every member of Congress hated his intestines.

The President looked down at the satellite photos of the Atlantic spread on his desk. "It seems pretty obvious to me this is not a phenomenon to ignore."

"Left to its own resources the red tide would normally fade away," explained Sandecker. "But off the west coast of Africa it is being nursed by a synthetic amino acid and cobalt that stimulate the tide's growth to incredible proportions."

The President, a former senator from Montana, looked more at home in the saddle than behind a desk. He was long and lean, spoke in a soft drawl, and stared through bright blue eyes. He addressed every man as sir and every woman as ma'am. Whenever he escaped from Washington, he headed for his ranch located not far from the Custer battlefield on the Yellowstone River. "If this threat is as serious as you say, the whole world is at risk."

"If anything, we've probably underestimated the potential danger," said Sandecker. "Our computer experts have updated the rate of expansion. Unless we stop the spread, all life as we know it on earth will die from lack of oxygen in the atmosphere by late next year, probably sooner. The oceans will be dead before spring."

"That's ridiculous," Willover scoffed. "I'm sorry, Admiral, but this is a classic case of Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling."

Sandecker gave Willover a look equal to a jab with a spear.

"I am not Chicken Little, and the coming annihilation is very real. We're not talking about the potential risks of ozone depletion and its effects on skin cancer two centuries from now. No geological upheavals or unknown plague, no nuclear Armageddon with ensuing darkness, no meteor striking the planet in a raging cataclysm. Unless the scourge of the red tide is stopped, and stopped quickly, it will suck up the oxygen from the atmosphere, causing the total destruction of every living thing on the face of the earth."

"You paint a grim picture, sir," said the President. "This is all but impossible for me to visualize."

"Let me put it this way, Mr. President. If you are reelected, the odds are you won't be around at the end of your term. Nor will you have a successor because there will be no one left to vote for him."

Willover wasn't buying any of it. "Come now, Admiral, why don't you put on a sheet and walk around holding a sign saying the world ends at midnight? To think we'll see complete extinction of mankind by this time next year because of oversexed behavior by some microscopic organisms is too farfetched."

"The facts speak for themselves," said Sandecker patiently.

"Your deadline sounds like nothing more than a scare tactic," replied Willover. "Even if you're correct, our scientists still have ample time to invent a solution."

"Time we don't have. Let me give you a little illustration in simplified terms. Imagine that the red tide could double itself in size every week. If allowed to spread unhindered, it would cover every square kilometer of the earth's oceans in one hundred weeks. If history repeats itself, world governments will decide to shove aside the problem until the oceans are half covered. Only then do they institute a crash program to eliminate the red tide. My question to you, Mr. President, and you too, Mr. Willover, is what week will the oceans be covered by the tide, and how much time until the world can prevent disaster?"

The President exchanged confused looks with Willover. "I have no idea."

"Nor I," said Willover.

"The answer is the oceans will be half covered in ninety-nine weeks, and you would have only one week to act."

The President recognized the horrendous possibility with renewed respect. "I think we both get your point, Admiral."

"The red tide shows no sign of dying," Sandecker continued. "We now know the cause. That's a step in the right direction. The next problem is to cut off the contamination at the source, and then seek out another compound that will either stop or at least hinder the growth."

"Excuse me, Mr. President, but we must cut this short. You're supposed to have lunch with the Senate majority and minority leaders."

"Let them wait," the President said irritably. "Do you have a handle on where this stuff is coming from, Admiral?"

Sandecker shook his head. "Not yet, but we suspect it flows through an underground stream to the Niger River from the French solar detoxification project in the Sahara."

"How can we be certain?"

"My Special Projects Director and his right arm are inside Fort Foureau now."

"You are in contact with them."

Sandecker hesitated. "No, not exactly."

"Then how do you know this?" Willover pushed him.

"Intelligence satellite photos identified them penetrating the facility on board an incoming trail of hazardous material."

"Your Special Projects Director," mused the President. "Would that be Dirk Pitt?"

"Yes, and Al Giordino."

The President stared across the room, unseeing for a moment as he remembered. Then he smiled. "Pitt was the man who saved us from the Kaiten nuclear car bomb menace."

"One and the same."

"Is he by chance responsible for that debacle with the Benin navy on the Niger River?" asked Willover.

"Yes, but the blame is mine," said Sandecker. "Since my warnings went unheard, and I could get no cooperation from your staff or the Pentagon, I sent Pitt and two of NUMA's best men up the Niger to track the source of the compound."

"You ordered an unauthorized operation without permission into a foreign nation," Willover exploded furiously.

"I also persuaded Hala Kamil to lend me a UN tactical team to go into Mali and get my chief scientist and his data safely out of the country."

"You could have jeopardized our entire African policy."

"I didn't know you had one," Sandecker tossed back, completely unafraid of Willover, his eyes blazing with animosity.

"You're stepping over your bounds, Admiral. This could have serious repercussions on your career."

Sandecker was not one to shrink from a fight. "My duty is to my God, my country, and my President, Willover. You and my career come about eighty-sixth on my list."

"Gentlemen," interrupted the President, "gentlemen." The frown on his face was more for theatrics than a show of anger. Secretly, he enjoyed seeing his aides and cabinet members slug it out with words. "I don't want to see any further friction between you. I'm convinced we're faced with a grim reality, and we'd better damn well work together for a solution."

Willover let out a sigh of exasperation. "I will, of course, follow your instructions."

"As long as I'm no longer shouting to be heard in a hurricane," said Sandecker calmly, "and can obtain the backup to stop the scourge, you won't have any problems with me."

"What do you advise we do?" asked the President.

"My NUMA scientists are already working round the clock on a counteractive chemical that will either neutralize or kill the red tide without upsetting the balance of marine ecology. If Pitt proves the contamination is indeed originating from Fort Foureau, I leave it up to you, Mr. President, to use whatever means in your power to shut the site down."

There was a pause, then Willover said slowly; "Despite the awesome prospects, assuming for a moment the Admiral is on the beam, it won't be a simple matter to unilaterally close a multimillion-dollar installation owned by French business interests in a sovereign nation such as Mali."

"We'd have some hard explaining to do," the President acknowledged, "if I ordered in the air force to level the project."

"Tread cautiously, Mr. President," said Willover. "I see nothing but quicksand in this for your administration."

The President looked at Sandecker. "What about scientists in other countries? Are they aware of the problem too?"

"Not to its full extent," answered the Admiral, "not yet."

"What showed you the trail?"

"Only twelve days ago, one of NUMA's ocean current experts noticed the unusually large area of the red tide in photos taken by our SeaSat cameras and began plotting its growth. Stunned by the incredible speed by which it multiplied, he quickly brought it to my attention. After careful study I made the decision not to go public until we can bring this thing under control."

"You had no right to take matters into your own hands," snapped Willover.

Sandecker shrugged idly. "Official Washington turned a deaf ear to my warnings. I felt I had no option but to act on my own."

"What steps do you propose for immediate action?" asked the President.

"For the moment, we can do little but continue collecting data. Secretary General Hala Kamil has consented to call a special closed-door meeting of leading world oceanographers at UN headquarters in New York. She's invited me to reveal the situation and set up an international committee of marine scientists to coordinate efforts and share data while searching for a solution."

"I'm giving you a free hand, Admiral. Please update me on all new developments any time of the day or night." Then the President turned his attention to Willover. "You'd better alert Doug Oates over at the State Department and my National Security Council. If Fort Foureau proves to be the culprit, and if no cooperation is forthcoming from concerned nations, we'll have to go in and take the place out ourselves."

Willover came to his feet. "Mr. President, I strongly advise we exercise patience. I'm convinced this sea plague, or whatever it is you want to call it, will blow over, as do scientists whose opinions I respect."

"I trust Admiral Sandecker's counsel," said the President, his eyes locked on Willover. "In all my years in Washington, I've never known him to make a bad call."

"Thank you, Mr. President," said Sandecker. "There is one other matter that requires our attention."

"Yes."

"As I mentioned, Pitt and his backup, Al Giordino, have penetrated Fort Foureau. Should they be seized by the Malians or French security, it will be essential that they be rescued for any information they might have obtained."

"Please, Mr. President," Willover persisted. "There can be a nasty political backlash by risking Army Special Forces or a Delta Team in a desert rescue mission if it fails and word leaks to the news media."

The President nodded thoughtfully. "I agree with Earl on this one. I'm sorry, Admiral, but we'll have to think of another option to save your people."

"You say a UN force rescued your man who accumulated the data on the Niger River contamination?" asked Willover.

"Hala Kamil was most helpful by ordering the UN Critical Response and Tactical Team to carry out the mission."

"Then you'll have to prevail upon her to use them again if Pitt and Giordino are caught."

"God knows I'll be crucified," said the President, "if I send in American men to strew the desert with French nationals."

Sandecker's face reflected disappointment. "I doubt if 1 can convince her to send them back in a second time."

"I'll make the request myself," the President promised.

Willover was curt. "You can't have it all your way, Admiral."

Sandecker gave a tired sigh. The horrible consequences of the mushrooming red tide had not totally sunk in. His mission was becoming more grueling, oppressive, and frustrating with every passing hour. He stood up and looked down on the President and Willover. His voice came like the arctic cold.

"Be prepared for the very worst, because if we can't stop the red tide before it reaches the North Atlantic and spreads into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, our extinction will surely come."

Then Sandecker turned and quietly left the room.

Tom Greenwald sat in his office and computer enhanced the images received by a Pyramider spy satellite. Through ground command he had shifted its orbit slightly to pass over the section of the Sahara where he discerned the car and figures of Pitt and Giordino on the old GeoSat photos. No one above him had given him permission, but so long as he could send the satellite back over the Ukrainian civil war in another couple of passes, nobody would be the wiser. Besides, the fighting had fizzled to a few rebel ambushes and only the Vice-President seemed to find the intelligence images interesting. The President's National Security Council had their minds focused elsewhere, like the secret nuclear arms buildup of Japan.

Greenwald flew against orders purely out of curiosity. He wanted to examine sharper pictures of the two men he had discovered earlier as they boarded the train to enter the project. Using the Pyramider he could now make a positive identification. Now his analysis revealed a tragic reversal of events.

The images of the two men being led under guard to a helicopter were little short of astounding. Greenwald could easily compare them to identification photos given him by Chip Webster from NUMA files. The images taken from hundreds of kilometers out in space clearly showed the capture of Pitt and Giordino.

He moved from the viewing monitor to his desk and dialed the phone. After two rings, Chip Webster over at NUMA answered.

"Hello."

"Chip? This is Tom Greenwald."

"What have you got for me, Tom?"

"Bad news. Your men were captured."

"Not what I wanted to hear," Webster said. "Damn!"

"I have excellent images of them being loaded into a helicopter, in chains, and surrounded by a dozen armed security guards."

"Determine a heading for the copter?" asked Webster.

"My satellite had passed out of view only a minute after it lifted off. My guess is that it was heading to the northeast."

"Further into the desert?"

"Looks that way," answered Greenwald. "The pilot might have made a wide swing in a different direction, but I have no way of knowing."

"Admiral Sandecker isn't going to like this turn."

"I'll stay on it," said Greenwald. "If I turn up anything new, I'll call immediately."

"Thank you, Tom. I owe you a big favor for this one."

Greenwald hung up and stared at the image on the monitor. "Poor bastards," he muttered to himself. "I wouldn't want to be in their shoes."

The welcoming committee at Tebezza stayed home. Pitt and Giordino clearly didn't rate a reception by the local dignitaries. Two Tuaregs greeted them silently from behind automatic rifles as a third locked iron shackles around their hands and ankles. The worn condition of the chains and cuffs gave the impression they had passed through several owners.

Pitt and Giordino were shoved roughly into the back of a small Renault truck. One Tuareg drove while the other two climbed in the back, held their rifles across their thighs, and kept wary eyes on the prisoners through the slit in their indigo litham headdresses.

Pitt paid the guards only the slightest attention as the engine was started and the truck moved away from the landing field. The helicopter that had flown them from Fort Foureau quickly lifted into the furnace-baked sir for its return flight. Already Pitt was weighing chances for escape. His eyes were studying the surrounding landscape. No fences stretched anywhere, no guard houses rising from the sand. Any attempt to cross 400 kilometers of open desert while restrained by manacles made security obstacles entirely unnecessary. Successful escape seemed impossible, but he quickly thrust aside thoughts of total hopelessness. Prospects of escape were dim, but not totally gone.

This was pure desert with not a growing thing in sight. Low brown dunes rose like warts as far as Pitt could see, separated by small valleys of brilliant white sand. Only toward the west did a high plateau of rock rise above the desert floor. It was treacherous country, and yet there was a beauty about it that was difficult to describe. It reminded Pitt of the background scenery in the old motion picture, Song of the Desert.

Sitting with his back against the side of the truck bed, he tilted his head and peered forward around the cab. The road, if it could be called that, was only tire tracks leading toward the plateau. No structures stood on the barren land; no equipment or vehicles were in evidence. No sign of ore tailings. He began to wonder if mining operations at Tebezza were a myth.

Within twenty minutes the truck slowed, then turned into a narrow ravine cut into the plateau. So soft was the sand that had drifted into the deep-walled crack that prisoners and guards together had to get out and help push the truck to firmer ground. After nearly a kilometer the driver swung into a cave just large enough for the truck to pass through. Then it entered a long gallery excavated in the rock.

The driver braked the truck in front of a brightly lighted tunnel. The guards jumped out to the ground. Obeying the silent gestures of the gun muzzles, Pitt and Giordino awkwardly climbed down in their restricting shackles. The guards motioned them into the tunnel and they shuffled off, thankful to be out of the sun and in a cool underground atmosphere.

The gallery became a corridor with fluted walls and a tile-glazed floor. They were marched past a series of arched openings cut into the rock and fitted with antique carved doors. The guards stopped at a large double door at the end of the corridor, opened it, and pushed them inside. Both men were surprised to find themselves standing on thick blue carpet in a reception room as luxurious as any inside a New York, Fifth Avenue corporate executive's office. The walls were painted in a light blue to match the carpet and were decorated with photographs of breathtaking desert sunrises and sunsets. The lighting came from tall chrome lamps with soft gray shades.

Directly in the center was an acacia desk with matching sofa and chairs in gray leather. In the rear corners, as though guarding a door to the sanctum sanctorum, stood two bronze sculptures of a Tuareg man and woman in proud poses. The air in the room was cool but not dank smelling. Pitt was sure he detected a slight aroma of orange blossom.

A woman sat behind the desk, quite beautiful with glowing purple-gray eyes and long black hair that fell to her buttocks behind the backrest of her chair. Her facial features were Mediterranean, of exactly what national origin, Pitt was unable to tell. She looked up and studied the two men for a moment as nonchalantly as if she was classifying salesmen. Then she rose from a chair, revealing an hourglass body wrapped in a garment draped like an Indian sari, opened the door between the sculptures, and silently held out her hand for them to enter.

They stepped into a large chamber with high-domed ceiling, lined on all four sides with bookshelves that were niched into solid rock. The entire room was one giant sculpture, chiseled as it was excavated. A huge, horseshoe shaped desk rose from the rock as if it was part of the floor, its top strewn with engineering diagrams and papers. The desk faced two long stone benches separated by an intricately sculpted coffee table. Besides the books and desk litter, the only object not cut from rock was a wooden scale model of a mine gallery shored up with timbers that stood off to one side of the unusual room.

An extremely tall man was standing in the far corner, absorbed in a book he had pulled from a shelf. He stood in a purple robe of the nomads with a white litham bound around his head. Beneath his robe, a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots protruded incongruously. Pitt and Giordino stood there several moments before he turned and acknowledged their presence with a scant glance. Then his eyes flicked back to the pages of the book as if his visitors had turned around and departed.

"Nice place you've got here," Giordino opened loudly, his voice echoing off the stone. "Must have cost you a bundle."

"Could use some windows," Pitt said, surveying the bookcases. Then he looked up. "A stained-glass skylight might help brighten up things a bit."

O'Bannion casually inserted the book between two volumes and stared at them with bemused curiosity. "You'd have to drill 120 meters through solid rock to reach the surface and sunlight. Not exactly worth the expense. I have more practical projects for my workers."

"Don't you mean slaves," said Pitt.

O'Bannion gave a slight lift to his shoulders. "Slaves, laborers, prisoners, they're all the same at Tebezza." He slid the book back on its shelf and approached them.

Pitt had never stood that close to someone who stood almost two heads above him. He had to tilt his head sharply backward to stare up into his captor's eyes.

"And we're the latest edition to your army of drones."

"As Mr. Massarde no doubt informed you, digging in t' w mines is a less painful option than being tortured by General Kazim's thugs. You should consider yourselves thankful."

"I don't suppose there's any chance for parole, Mr…"

"My name is Selig O'Bannion. I manage the operation of the mine. And no, there is no parole. Once you go down into the pits, you will not come out."

"Even for burial?" asked Giordino without a hint of fear.

"We have an underground vault for those who succumb." answered O'Bannion.

"You're as murderous as Kazim," said Pitt. "Maybe worse."

"I've read of your undersea exploits, Mr. Pits," 0'Bannion said, brushing off Pitt's insult. "It will be most enjoyable having another party whose intellect is on a level with mine. I found your reports on deep-sea mining of particuiar interest. You must dine with me from time to lime and tell me of your underwater engineering Operations."

Pitt's face turned to ice. "Privileges so soon after incarceration? No thanks. I'd rather eat with a camel."

O'Bannion's lips bent minutely downward "Suit yourself, Mr. Pitt. Perhaps you'll change your mind after a few days of working under Melika."

"Who?"

"My overseer. She has an uncommon cruel streak. You two are in good physical condition. So I'd estimate that when we next meet, she will have turned you into a pair of subdued vermin."

"A woman?" asked Giordino curiously.

"Like no woman you'll ever meet again."

Pitt said nothing. The world knew of the notorious salt mines of the Sahara. They had become a byword for blue and white-collar workers everywhere as a job description. But a gold mine manned by slaves that was virtually unknown was a new twist. General Kazim no doubt had his hands in the profits, but the operation smelled like another venture of Yves Massarde. The quasi-solar detoxification project and the gold mine, and God only knew what else. This was a big game, a game that stretched in all directions like octopus tentacles, an international game that spelled more than just money, but inconceivable power.

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. Gordino glanced at Pitt, searching for a sign, a nod or 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." 0'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 neverending. 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 dock 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, backbreaking 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."

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. Whey 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 lugs"

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 Moorea. 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."

Once into the main tunnel, they followed the narrow set of rails up a long sloping grade cut in the bowels of the plateau. An ore train with a guard driving the locomotive rumbled into view, and they had to press their backs against the side of the hewn wall to allow it to pass. A short distance later they reached a hollowed-out cavern where the rails from other cross shafts congregated at a large elevator that could hold four ore cars at one time.

"Where are they taking the ore?" asked Giordino.

"Must go to an upper level where it's crushed to powder and the gold is recovered and refined."

The guards led them to a massive iron gate mounted on equally massive hinges and weighing close to half a ton. It was designed to keep more than chickens cooped up. Two other Tuaregs waited on the other side. They nodded and exerted every muscle in pulling open the gate, then silently motioned for Pitt and Giordino to move inside. One guard handed them dirty tin cups half filled with brackish water.

Pitt gazed into the cup, then at the guard. "How creative, water garnished with bat's vomit."

The guard couldn't understand the words but he easily read the savage look in Pitt's eyes. He snatched back the cup and threw the water in the dirt and kicked Pitt into the chamber.

"That'll teach you to look a gift horse in the mouth," Giordino said, smiling broadly as he emptied his cup on the ground too.

Their new home was 10 meters wide by 30 long and lit by four tiny light bulbs. Four-tiered wooden bunks were arranged the length of both walls. The dungeon, for that's what it was, had no ventilation and the stench of crowded living conditions was ghastly. The only sanitary conveniences were several holes sunk in the rock along the rear wall. In the center were two long eating tables with crude wooden benches. There had to be, Pitt guessed, more than three hundred human beings crammed in the nauseating area.

The bodies slumped in the nearest bunks looked to Pitt as if they were comatose. Their faces looked as expressionless as cabbages. Twenty men were huddled around the table using their hands to eat out of a community pot like starving maggots. None of the faces looked frightened or worried; they were far beyond showing ordinary emotion; they were drawn and haggard from lack of food and exhaustion. They moved mechanically like living cadavers, staring through eyes dead with defeat and submission. None of them gave Pitt and Giordino so much as a glance as they made their way through the sea of human misery.

"Not exactly a carnival atmosphere," muttered Giordino.

"Humanitarian principles don't count for much around here," Pitt said in disgust. "It's worse than I ever imagined."

"Much worse," agreed Giordino, cupping a hand over his nose in a futile effort to ward off the smell "The Black Hole of Calcutta had nothing on this dump."

"Feel like eating?"

Giordino winced as he stared at the remains of the slop clinging to the sides of the pot. "My appetite just filed for bankruptcy."

The nearly unbreathable air and lack of ventilation in the dungeon-like cavern raised the heat and humidity from the packed bodies to unbearable levels. But Pitt suddenly felt himself turn as cold as if he'd stepped onto an iceberg. For a moment all the defiance and anger left him and the horror and suffering seemed to dissolve and fade as he recognized a figure bending over a bunk in a lower tier against the right wall of the cave. He rushed over and knelt beside a woman who was tending a sick child.

"Eva," he said gently.

She was bone weary from forced labor and lack of food, and her face was pale and marked by welts and bruises, but she turned and stared at him through eyes that gleamed with courage.

"What do you want?"

"Eva, it's Dirk."

It didn't sink in. "Leave me alone," she muttered. "This little girl is terribly sick."

He took her hand between his and leaned closer. "Look at me. I'm Dirk Pitt."

Then her eyes widened in recognition. "Oh Dirk, is it really you?"

He kissed her and gently touched the bruises on her face. "If I'm not, someone is playing a cruel trick on us both."

Giordino appeared at Pitt's shoulder. "A friend of yours?"

Pitt nodded. "Dr. Eva Rojas, the lady I met in Cairo."

"How did she get here?" he asked in surprise.

"How did you?" Pitt asked her.

"General Kazim hijacked our plane and sent us here to work in the mines."

"But why?" queried Pitt. "What threat were you to him?"

"Our UN health team, under the supervision of Dr. Frank Hopper, was close to identifying a toxic contaminant that was killing villagers all over the desert. We were on our way back to Cairo with biological samples for analysis."

Pitt looked up at Giordino. "Massarde asked us if we were working with Dr. Hopper and his group."

Giordino nodded. "I recall. He must have known Kazim had already imprisoned them here."

She dabbed a wet handkerchief on the little girl's forehead and suddenly leaned her head against Pitt's chest and sobbed. "Why did you come to Mali? Now you're going to die like the rest of us."

"We have a date, remember?"

Pitt was concentrating his attention on Eva and didn't see the three men cautiously moving in between the bunks and surrounding them. The leader was a big man with a red face and bushy beard. The other two looked haggard and worn out. They all bore lash marks on their naked backs and chests. The menacing expressions on their faces brought a grin from Giordino as he turned and faced them. Their physical conditions were so pathetic he was confident he could have laid out all three without breathing hard.

"These men bothering you?" the red-faced man said to Eva protectively.

"No, no, not at all," Eva murmured. "This is Dirk Pitt, the man who saved my life in Egypt."

"The man from NUMA?"

"The same," Pitt replied. He turned to Giordino. "This is my friend, Al Giordino."

"By God, a real pleasure. I'm Frank Hopper and this shabby fellow on my left is Warren Grimes."

"Eva told me a great deal about you in Cairo."

"Damned sorry we have to meet under such grim circumstances," Hopper stared at the deep cuts on both of Pitt's cheeks and touched the long scab that ran across his own face. "It seems we've both angered Melika."

"Only on the left side. The right one came from another source."

The third man stepped forward and held out his hand. "Major Ian Fairweather," he introduced himself.

Pitt shook the outstretched hand. "British?"

Fairweather nodded. "Liverpool."

"Why were you brought here?"

"I led tourist safaris across the Sahara until one was massacred by plague-crazed villagers. I barely escaped with my life, and after struggling across the desert, was rescued and hospitalized in Gao. General Zateb Kazim arrested me so I couldn't reveal what I'd seen and sent me here to Tebezza."

"We did pathology studies on the villagers Major Fairweather is referring to," explained Hopper. "All died from a mysterious chemical compound."

"Synthetic amino acid and cobalt," said Pitt.

Hopper and Grimes looked peculiarly stunned. "What, what did you say?" demanded Grimes.

"The toxic contamination causing death and sickness throughout Mali is an organometallic compound that's a combination of an altered synthetic amino acid and cobalt."

"How could you possibly know that?" asked Hopper.

"While your team was searching in the desert, mine was tracking it up the Niger River."

"And you identified the stuff," Hopper said with a look of optimism that wasn't there before.

Pitt briefly told of the red tide explosion, his expedition up the river, and the presumed flight by Rudi Gunn with their data.

"Thank God, you got your results out," muttered Hopper.

"The source," pressed Grimes. "Where is the source?"

"Fort Foureau," Giordino answered him.

"Not a chance-"Grimes stared dumbly. "Fort Foureau and the contamination sites are hundreds of kilometers apart."

"It's carried by underground water movement," Pitt clarified. "Al and I had a look around inside the project before we were captured. High-level nuclear waste, as well as ten times the hazardous waste that's being burned, is being buried in underground caverns where it leaks into the groundwater."

"The world environmental regulation organizations must be told of this," exclaimed Grimes. "The damage a toxic dump the size of Fort Foureau can produce is inestimable."

"Enough talk," said Hopper. "Time is precious. We have to move forward on the escape plan for these men."

"What about the rest of you?"

"We're in no shape to cross the desert. Our strength has been sapped and our bodies racked from slaving in the mines, too little sleep, and almost no food or water. No way we can make it. So we did the next best thing. Hoarded supplies and prayed for someone like you to arrive in good physical condition."

Pitt looked down at Eva. "I can't leave her."

"Then stay and die with the rest of us," Grimes said abruptly. "You're the only hope for everyone in this hellhole."

Eva clutched Pitt's hand. "You must go, and go quickly," she pleaded. "Before it's too late."

"She's right, you know," added Fairweather. "Forty-eight hours in the shafts and they break you. Look at us. We're washed out. None of us could cross 5 kilometers of desert before dropping."

Pitt stared at the dirt floor. "How far do you think Al and I'd get without water? Twenty, maybe 30 kilometers farther than you?"

"We've only hoarded enough for one man," said Hopper. "We'll leave it to you to decide who makes the attempt and who stays."

Pitt shook his head. "Al and I go together."

"Two will never get far enough for rescue."

"What kind of distance are we talking about?" asked Giordino.

"The Trans-Saharan Motor Track is close to 400 kilometers due east of here, across the border in Algeria," replied Fairweather. "After 300, you'll have to trust to luck to get you the rest of the way. Once you reach the track, you should be able to flag down a passing vehicle."

Pitt tilted his head as if he didn't hear Fairweather right. "Maybe I missed something. You neglected to explain how we breeze past the first 300 kilometers?"

"You steal one of O'Bannion's trucks once you reach the surface. It should carry you that far."

"A little optimistic, aren't we," said Pitt. "What if its fuel tank is empty?"

"No one ever keeps an empty petrol tank in the desert," Fairweather said firmly.

"Just walk out of here, punch an elevator button, ride to the surface, steal a truck, and roll merrily on our way," Giordino scowled. "Sure we will."

Hopper smiled. "Do you have a better plan?"

"To be honest," Pitt laughed, "we don't even have an outline."

"We'd hurry things up a bit," warned Fairweather. "Melika will be dragging everyone back to the mines within the hour."

Pitt looked around the prisoners' cave. "Do you all blast and load ore?"

"The political prisoners, which includes us," answered Grimes, "dig and load the ore after it's blasted from the rock. The criminal prisoners labor in the rock crusher and recovery levels. They also make up the blasting crew. Poor devils, none of them last long. If they don't blow themselves to bits with explosives they die from the mercury and cyanide used in the amalgamation and refining of the gold."

"How many foreign nationals are you?"

"There are five of us left from the original team of six. One was murdered by Melika, who beat her to death."

"A woman?"

Hopper nodded. "Dr. Marie Victor, a vivacious lady and one of the finest physiologists in Europe." Hopper's jovial expression had vanished. "She was the third since we arrived. Two of the wives of the French engineers from Fort Foureau were murdered by Melika too." He paused to look sadly at the wasted little girl in the bunk. "Their children suffer the worst, and there is nothing we can do."

Fairweather pointed to a group of people clustered around three of the tiered bunks. Four were women, eight were men. One of the women was holding a little boy about three against her body.

"My God!" Pitt whispered. "Of course, of course! Massarde couldn't allow the engineers who constructed his project to return to France and spill the truth."

"How many women and children all told are down here?" Giordino asked with an expression clouded with wrath.

"The current count is nine women with four small children," Fairweather answered.

"Don't you see," Eva said softly. "The sooner you get free and bring help, the more people you'll save."

Pitt didn't need any further convincing. He turned back to face Hopper and Fairweather. "Okay, let's hear your plan."

It was a plan shot full of holes, the scheme of desperate men with little or no resources, incredibly oversimplified, but just crazy enough to work.

An hour later, Melika and her guards walked through the cavern dungeon and forced the slave laborers into the main chamber where they were assembled in work gangs before moving toward their assigned stations in the mines. It seemed to Pitt as if she took devious delight in wielding her thong right and left against the sea of unprotected flesh, cursing and beating men and women alike who looked as if they belonged in coffins.

"The witch never tires of adding sears to the helpless," Hopper seethed.

"Melika means queen, a name she gave herself," Grimes said to Pitt and Giordino. "But we call her the wicked witch of the west because she was a matron in a women's prison in the United States."

"You think she's rotten now," Pitt muttered. "Wait until she finds the ore cars Al and I covered with a facade of rock."

Giordino and Hopper hovered beside Pitt as he circled his arm around Eva's waist and guided her outside. Melika spied Pitt and moved toward him, stopped, and then stared at Eva menacingly. She grinned, knowing she could enrage Pitt not by striking him but laying the thong on Eva.

She swung but Giordino stepped between them and the thong made a sickening slapping sound as it met and bounced off his flexed biceps.

Except for an angry red welt that formed and began to ooze blood, Giordino showed no ill effects from a blow that would have left any normal man clutching his arm and groaning in agony. Without so much as a tic, he gave her a cold stare and said, "Is that the best you can do?"

The mob went dead still. They all halted in mid-stride, holding their breath for the storm that would surely come. Five seconds passed as if time was frozen in ice. Melika stood numb from the unexpected show of boldness, and then she quickly turned crimson with crazed anger. She reacted as though she couldn't cope with ridicule, snarling like a wounded bear and lashing out at Giordino with the thong.

"Restrain yourself!" came a commanding voice at the gate.

Melika spun around. Selig O'Bannion was standing just outside the dungeon, a giant amid munchkins. She held the thong poised in mid-air for a few moments before lowering it, glaring at O'Bannion in humiliation, her eyes coals of bitter resentment, like a neighborhood bully chastised in front of her victims by the cop on the beat.

"Do not injure Pitt and Giordino," ordered O'Bannion. "I want them to live the longest so they can carry the others into the burial chamber."

"Where's the sport in that?" said Pitt.

O'Bannion laughed softly and nodded at Melika. "Breaking Pitt physically will give me little enjoyment. Breaking his mind into quivering mush will be a happy experience for both of us. See that they have a light work load for the next ten shifts."

Melika begrudgingly nodded her head in compliance as O'Bannion mounted a locomotive and rode into one of the shafts for an inspection tour. "Out, you stinking scum," she growled, waving the blood-stained thong above her grotesque head and barrel-like body.

Eva stumbled, barely able to keep on her feet, as Pitt helped her to where the laborers assembled. "Al and I will get through," he promised her. "But you've got to hang on until we return with an armed force to rescue you and these other poor souls."

"Now I have a reason for living," she said softly. "I'll be waiting."

He kissed her on the lips and the bruises on her face lightly. Then he turned to Hopper, Grimes, and Fairweather, who were standing around them in a protective ring. "Take care of her."

"We will," Hopper nodded in assurance.

"I wish you wouldn't deviate from our original plan," said Fairweather. "Hiding you in one of the ore cars going up to the crusher is safer than your idea."

Pitt shook his head. "We'd still have to move through the ore-crushing level, then the refining and recovery areas before reaching the surface. I don't like the odds. Taking the direct route up the executive elevator and through the engineering offices has more appeal."

"If there's a choice between sneaking out the back door or strutting out the front," said Giordino plaintively, "he'll go for style every time."

"Do you have a rough guess as to the number of armed guards?" Pitt directed his question to Fairweather because the safari leader had endured the mines longer than Hopper and his people.

"A rough guess?" Fairweather thought a moment. "Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. The engineers are armed too. I've counted about six of them besides 0'Bannion."

Grimes passed two small canisters to Giordino who hid them under his tattered shirt. "All the water we've been hoarding. Everyone contributed out of their ration. A little less than 2 liters is all we managed. I'm sorry there isn't more."

Giordino placed his hands on Grimes' shoulders, unusually touched by the sacrifice. "I'm aware of the cost, thank you."

"The dynamite?" Pitt queried Fairweather.

"I have it," answered Hopper, slipping Pitt a small stick of explosives with a detonation cap. "One of the blasting crew smuggled it out in his shoe."

"Two final items," said Fairweather. "A file to cut through your chains, stolen out of a locomotive toolbox by Grimes. And a diagram of the shafts that also shows the surveillance cameras. On the back, I've drawn a crude map of the country you have to cross before reaching the Trans-Saharan Track."

"If anybody knows the desert, Ian does," affirmed Hopper.

"I'm grateful," said Pitt. Uncharacteristically, his eyes began to water. "We'll do our best to return with help."

Hopper put a great bear-like arm around Pitt. "Our prayers and hearts go with you."

Fairweather shook his hand. "Remember to skirt the dunes. Don't attempt to cross them. You'll only get bogged down and die."

"Good luck," Grimes said simply.

A guard came over and prodded Pitt and Giordino away from the others with his gun butt. Pitt disregarded him, leaned down, and gave Eva a final light kiss.

"Don't forget," he said. "You and I and the bay of Monterey."

"I'll wear my most revealing dress," she smiled gamely.

Before he could say more, the guard shoved him away. As he reached the exit tunnel, he turned to wave a farewell, but she and the others were lost to view amid the milling mass of laborers and guards.

The guard led Pitt into the shaft where they'd loaded ore a few hours earlier and then left them. Another empty ore train was sitting on the track alongside a fresh pile of excavated rock.

"I'll make a show of competing for employee of the month while you work on your chains out of camera range," said Pitt. He began tossing rocks in the ore cars as Giordino attacked his shackles with the file Grimes had provided.

Fortunately, the iron was old and of poor quality. The file bit through the links quickly and Giordino pulled the broken chain through the loops in his manacles, freeing his hands and feet of restricted movement. "Your turn," he said.

Pitt draped his chain over the edge of an ore car for support and sliced through a link in less than ten minutes. "We'll have to work on the cuffs later, but at least now we can dance and jab."

Giordino casually swung his chain like an aircraft propeller. "Who takes the guard, you or me?"

"You," answered Pitt candidly as he reinserted the split chain through his manacles. "I'll fake him out."

A half an hour later, as the crunch of gravel announced the guard's approach, Pitt yanked the power supply cord from the TV camera. This time two guards appeared around the bend. Two Tuaregs moving on opposite sides of the ore train rails, guns leveled in an ever-constant firing position. Their unblinking eyes, barely visible through the slit in their lithams, seemed frozen in cold implacability.

"Two coming to visit," whispered Giordino. "And they don't look in the mood for a friendly social call."

The guard on the right approached and poked the muzzle of his gun in Pitt's ribs to hurt and harass him. A slightly raised eyebrow was all that indicated a surprised flinch. Pitt backed away and smiled disarmingly.

"Nice that you could drop by."

It was essential to make a lightning move before the guards realized they were about to be attacked. The words had hardly left his lips when Pitt snatched the gun with his left hand, twisted it away, and hurled a boulder with unerring aim. A strikeout pitch, the rock thudded against the guard's forehead. The guard arched over backward like a tightly strung bow and dropped flat across the rails.

For two seconds, though it seemed much longer, the second guard stared unbelievingly down at his fallen companion. No guard at Tebezza had ever been attacked by the slave labor, and the realization that it was happening momentarily stunned him. Then the awareness of possible death struck him and he shook off the spell. He lifted his weapon to shoot.

Pitt pivoted away from the gun muzzle, and threw himself to one side, grabbing desperately for the fallen guard's weapon. He had a fleeting glimpse of a chain being flipped over the Tuareg's head like a child's jump rope, and then of Giordino pulling and twisting the ends like a garrote. Giordino's great strength lifted the guard off the ground, feet kicking wildly in the air. The machine gun clattered onto the rails as the guard's hands released their grip and grabbed frantically at the chain biting into his throat.

When the thrashing settled to a feeble twitch, Giordino loosened the chain and allowed the guard to fail to the ground next to his unconscious partner only two gasps away from death. Then he swept up the gun and cradled it in his arms, the sights aiming down the mine shaft.

"How benevolent of us not to kill them," Giordino muttered.

"Only a temporary reprieve," said Pitt. "When Melika gets through with them for allowing us to escape, they'll find themselves working alongside the people they've beaten and tormented."

"Can't leave these guys laying around where they'll be found."

"Dump them in one of the ore cars and cover them with rock. They won't wake up for at least two hours. More than enough time for us to be well on our way across the desert."

"Providing a repairman doesn't rush to repair the camera."

As Giordino went to work disposing of the guards, Pitt consulted Fairweather's diagram of the mine shafts. There was no way he could retrace his steps to the engineer's private elevator by memory, not with a maze of mine shafts honeycombing in every direction, and without a compass, picking the correct course was all but impossible.

Giordino finished his chore and picked up the automatic rifles and studied them. "All plastic and fiberglass five-five-six-millimeter French-manufacture general military issue. Nice little piece."

"No shooting if we can help it," said Pitt. "We have to be discreet before Melika realizes we're missing."

Once outside their work shaft they went straight across the main tunnel into the opening directly opposite. Fifty meters later, carefully ducking the TV cameras marked on Fairweather's map, they had reached another cavern without seeing anyone. No one challenged them, no one attacked them. They were alone for the first part of their escape.

They followed the railroad track that had carried them into the mines from the elevator, stopping at cross tracks for Pitt to recheck the map. Those precious seconds wasted seemed like years.

"Got any idea where we are?" asked Giordino quietly.

"I wished I sprinkled bread crumbs when we came in," Pitt murmured, holding up the map to a light bulb coated with dust. Suddenly, the approaching metal scraping against metal sounds of an ore train reverberated some distance behind in the tunnel.

"Freight coming," said Giordino.

Pitt pointed to a natural fissure in the rock just 10 meters away on the far side of the tracks. "In there till it passes."

They darted into the fissure and stopped suddenly. A terrible sickly stench came through the crack in the rock, a putrid stench of nauseating vileness. Carefully, with great apprehension they moved through the fissure until it opened into a larger chamber. Pitt felt as if he was entering a dank catacomb. The chamber was pitch black, but the groping hand he ran along the wall touched an electrical switch. He pressed the switch upward and a vast cavern was illuminated in a ghostly light.

It was a catacomb, a subterranean cemetery for the dead. They had stumbled into the burial cave where O'Bannion and Melika stored the bodies of the laborers who were beaten and starved and overworked until death came as a welcome parole. The dead showed little sign of decomposition in the dry atmosphere. No ceremony here. The stiffened bodies were stacked crudely like timbers, nearly thirty to a pile. It was a ghastly, unnatural, and sorrowful sight.

"My God," Giordino gasped. "There must be over a thousand stiffs in here."

"Most convenient," Pitt said as a white flame of anger burnt within him. "O'Bannion and Melika don't have to bother with digging graves."

A chilling vision passed before Pitt's eyes, a vision of Eva, Dr. Hopper, and the rest heaped like all the other corpses, their sightless eyes staring at the rock ceiling. He closed his eyes, but the scene remained.

Only when the ore train clattered by the entrance to the crypt did he shake off the terrible image in his mind. When he spoke his voice came in a rasping whisper he scarcely recognized as his.

"Let's get to the surface."

The sound of the ore train faded into the distance as they paused and peered from the fissure leading to the catacomb, checking to see that there were no guards patrolling close by. The tunnel was clear and they ran into a side shaft that Fairweather's map indicated as a shortcut to the engineer's elevator. Then came an incredible piece of luck. This shaft was dripping damp and floored with duckboard.

Pitt tore up one of the duckboards and stared almost joyously at the puddle of water underneath. "Happy hour," he said. "Drink your gut full so we can save the canisters Hopper gave us."

"I don't have to be told," said Giordino, dropping to his knees and downing the cool water from cupped hands.

They had just taken their fill and were dropping the duckboard back in place when they heard the sound of voices at the rear end of the passage followed almost at once by the clank of chains.

"A work crew coming up behind us," Giordino murmured softly.

They hurried on, refreshed and with building optimism. Another minute and they reached the iron door leading to the elevator. They paused as Giordino shoved the small stick of dynamite in the keyhole and connected the cap. Then he moved back as Pitt picked up a rock and hurled it at the cap. He missed.

"Just pretend you're trying to drop a pretty girl into a water tank at a carnival," suggested Giordino wryly.

"Let's just hope the bang doesn't arouse the guards or alert the elevator operator," said Pitt, picking up another rock.

"They'll think it's only an echo from the blasting crew."

This time Pitt's throw was true and the cap burst, detonating the dynamite. The resulting detonation came as a sharp thud as the lock was blown apart. They rushed forward and pulled the iron door open, quickly entering the short passage to the elevator.

"What if there is a code for calling down the elevator?" asked Giordino.

"A little late to think of that now," Pitt grunted. "We'll just have to use our own code."

He stepped up to the elevator, thought for a moment, and then pressed the button beside the door once, twice, then three times, paused and pressed twice more.

Through the doors they could hear the switches click and the electric motor hummed to life as the elevator began its descent from a level above.

"You must have struck a chord," said Giordino, smiling.

"I trusted to luck that any combination might work just so long as it wasn't one long buzz."

In a half minute the hum stopped and the doors opened. The operator guard looked out and didn't see anyone. Curious, he stepped over the threshold and was knocked out by a quick thrust of Pitt's gun butt against the nape of his neck. Giordino quickly dragged the operator inside as Pitt closed the doors.

"All aboard for a nonstop run to the executive offices," said Pitt, pressing the upper button of the panel.

"No tours of the crusher or cyanide recovery floors?"

"Only if you insist."

"I'll pass," Giordino grunted as the elevator began rising.

They stood side-by-side in the small enclosure, watching the lights blink on the indicator above the switch panel, wondering if they'd be greeted by an army of Tuareg guards ready to shoot them full of holes. The hum ceased and the elevator eased to a stop so smoothly it was hardly sensed.

Pitt readied his gun and nodded to Giordino. "Get set."

The door opened and nobody pumped bullets into them. There was an engineer and a guard walking together in the corridor, it was true, but they were absorbed in conversation and walking away, their backs to the elevator.

"It's almost as if they want us to leave," Giordino mumbled.

"Don't tempt the gods," Pitt said curtly. "We're not out of here yet."

There was nowhere to hide the elevator operator, so Pitt pushed the button to the lowest level and sent him on his way. They tagged behind the guard and engineer, keeping out of sight, until O'Bannion's men turned and entered an office behind one of the antique carved doors.

The fluted wall corridor was as deserted as when the guards marched them through less than twenty-four hours previously. Guns poised and aimed ahead, they each ran along one wall of the corridor until it met the tunnel leading to the Gallery where the trucks were parked. A Tuareg, seated on a camp stool, guarded the entrance. Not expecting trouble from the engineering offices and living quarters behind him, he was sitting and smoking a pipe while reading the Koran.

They stopped to take a breath and looked back the way they had come. No one had appeared behind them. They fumed their attention to the final hurdle. It was open ground for a good 50 meters with no visible sign of surveillance cameras.

"I can run faster than you," Pitt whispered as he handed his gun to Giordino. "If he comes on to me before I reach him, take him out with a quick shot."

"Just don't get in my line of fire," Giordino warned him.

Pitt removed his shoes, then took a sprinter's start 'position, firmly gripped his feet on the rock floor, tensed, and then sprang forward, accelerating to a fast pace. He was, Pitt knew with sickening certainty, terribly exposed. Though his stocking feet were muffled, the acoustics in the rock-hewn tunnel were too acute. He had covered almost 40 meters before the guard, curious at the sound of thumping feet behind him, turned and stared dumbly at the slave laborer hurtling toward him. But Pitt's saving grace was the guard's slow reaction time. The machine gun's barrel was just beginning to rise as Pitt leaped and smashed into the guard.

Shock it was that showed in the guard's eyes, then quick, flashing pain as his head struck the rock wall and the eyes rolling into the head as he went limp under Pitt's weight. Pitt rolled off the guard, sucking in air to catch his breath. He lay on his back panting as Giordino approached and looked down.

"Not bad speed for an old man crowding forty," he said, extending his hand and helping Pitt to his feet.

"I'm not going to try that again. Not ever," Pitt shook his head in finality. On his feet again his gaze took in the long underground gallery. Two Renault trucks were parked side-by-side just next to the narrow tunnel leading out into the ravine. Then he stared at the crumpled form of the Tuareg. "You're a big strong boy," he said to Giordino. "Carry him over to the nearest truck and dump him in the bed. We'll take him with us. If anyone wanders by, they might think he got bored, left his post, and went for a joyride."

Giordino easily shouldered the guard and hoisted him over the tailgate of the first truck as Pitt stepped into the cab and checked the dashboard instruments. There was no ignition key but the switch turned off and on without one. As Fairweather had promised, the fuel gauge read "Full."

He flipped on the switch and pressed the starter button. The engine kicked over and started right up.

"Is there a clock on the dash?" inquired Giordino.

A quick scan and Pitt shook his head. "This is a cheap model with no options. Why do you want to know?"

"Those dirty Tuaregs took my watch. I've lost all track of time."

Pitt slipped off one sneaker and retrieved his Doxa dive watch where he'd hidden it under his sole. He slipped it back on his wrist and held it up in front of Giordino. "One-twenty in the morning."

"Nothing like an early start."

Pitt shifted into first gear and eased out the clutch, steering the truck into the exit tunnel, moving only slightly faster than idle so the sound of the exhaust wouldn't travel up the tunnel to suspicious ears.

The walls were so close they nearly touched the sides of the truck. Pitt cared little about scratching the paint. His main concern was scraping noises that might have drawn attention, but once they broke into the open and entered the narrow ravine, he shifted up, mashed the accelerator to the floor, and switched on the headlights. The Renault plunged through the tight ravine, bouncing crazily and trailing a swirling cloud of dust.

Pitt mentally recalled where the soft spots in the sand were located during the trip through the canyon. He had surveyed the nearby landmarks when he was required to push the truck to firmer ground. Now he threw the truck through the tight crack of the rocky plateau with reckless abandon, hurtling across the yielding sand patches that grabbed at the tires but failed to bog them down because of the truck's rapid momentum.

He took no notice of the smell of freedom, the cold night air of the desert, nor did he waste a quick look at the stars above. Each kilometer they put between them and pursuit was golden, every minute precious. He drove like a demon, pushing the truck to its limits.

Giordino made no complaints, no appeals to slow down. He put his implicit faith in Pitt, propped his fit against the dashboard, and gripped the bottom of his seat, teeth clenched against the jarring ride, eyes fixed on the barely distinct tire tracks looming in the darkness under the steep walls of the canyon.

Abruptly the headlights showed empty flatlands ahead as they sped out into flat desert. Only then did Pitt look up at the sky, pick out the north star, and aim the radiator cap of the truck toward the east.

They had crossed the point of no return in a suicidal attempt with odds so high that failure seemed inevitable. But Pitt wouldn't have had it any other way. There could be no stopping until they reached water or rescue.

Ahead lay 400 kilometers of desert, inviting, ominous, and deadly. The race for survival was on.

For the five hours of remaining darkness, Pitt spun the truck's wheels through the awesome wilderness of sand where time had little meaning. This was truly a land of no compromise that chilled with its cold mornings, choked with its fine sand, and baked with a sun that seemed magnified by a crystal atmosphere. He felt as if he had entered a world not of his universe.

They were moving through a section of the Sahara called the Tanezrouft, huge sprawling badlands with almost 200,000 square kilometers of bleak, grotesque wasteland broken only by a few rugged escarpments and an occasional sea of sand dunes that relentlessly moved across the flats like ghostly armies of veiled phantoms.

This was the desert primeval without a weed in sight.

And yet, there was life. Moths fluttered about the headlights. A pair of ravens, the desert's scavenging, cleaning service, disturbed by the approach of the truck took wing and squawked in annoyance. Large black scarabs scampered over the sand to escape the tires as did an occasional scorpion and tiny green lizard.

Pitt found it easy to become intimidated by the surrounding void, by the hundreds of kilometers they had yet to travel, the almost certain hunger, thirst, and privations that remained to be endured. His only solace was the steady roar of the Renault's engine. It hadn't skipped a beat since leaving the mines, and the four-wheel-drive performed flawlessly, surging through soft spots Pitt was sure would bog them down. On four occasions he was forced to drive into deep, narrow dry washes with sloping soft gravel banks, barely making it up and over the opposite edge in low gear. Often he found no way to dodge sudden drop-offs or boulders and having to risk going over seeming impossible barriers, but somehow the sturdy Renault pulled them through.

They took no time to stop, get out, and stretch their legs. They would get enough of walking later when they abandoned the truck. They even took calls of nature on the fly without braking.

"How far have we traveled?" asked Giordino.

Pitt glanced at the odometer. "A hundred and two kilometers."

Giordino looked at him. "You take the wrong short cut or are we going in circles? We should have covered almost 200 kilometers by now. Are we lost?"

"We're on course," said Pitt confidently. "Blame it on Fairweather's directions. He gave distances as the crow flies. No crow with half a brain would be flying around the desert if he could be attacking a scarecrow in an Iowa cornfield. Impossible to maintain a straight line when we've already had to detour 40 kilometers to avoid two deep ravines and a herd of sand dunes."

Giordino stirred uncomfortably. "Why do I get a sinking feeling we're about to hike a lot further than 100 kilometers across no-man's-land."

"Not a cheery thought," Pitt agreed.

"Be light soon. We'll lose the stars to navigate by."

"Don't need them. I finally remembered how to build a do-it-yourself compass straight out of the Army Field Manual."

"Glad to hear it," Giordino yawned. "What does the fuel gauge read?"

"Slightly over half a tank left."

Giordino turned and looked back at the Tuareg they had tied up in the truck bed. "Our friend looks about as happy as a shanghaied sailor."

"He doesn't know it yet, but he's our ticket to evade pursuit," answered Pitt.

"The devious mind again. It never stops churning."

Pitt briefly stared up at the sickle moon. He would have preferred a full phase, but he was thankful for what little light it sent down as he drove the truck across a terrain equal to a lunar landscape. He shifted gears and strained his eyes on the uneven ground revealed by the headlights. Then suddenly the desert smoothed out and began to sparkle like fireworks.

The Renault rolled onto a huge dry lake with crystal deposits that reflected the twin beams from the headlights like prisms in rainbow colors. Pitt opened the Renault up in high gear and felt exhilarated to be speeding over a firm, flat surface at nearly 90 kilometers an hour.

The desert floor seemed to reach into infinity, the early morning stars falling below the horizon line as if the great brink of a flat world abruptly fell away into space. The sky looked as if it was closing in all around them like the four walls and ceiling of a small room. An unnerving sense of disorientation gripped Pitt. Yet he was following nearly the same parallel as Havana, Cuba, so the big dipper was still above the horizon. He continually used Polaris as a base point to line up a star to the east and then steered toward it.

Hour passed upon monotonous hour as the crystal lake gave way to low, boulder-strewn hills. Pitt could not recall having experienced such a heavy shroud of monotony. His only respite was a small peak off his left to the north that rose like an island in the middle of a vast and sterile sea.

Giordino took over the driving chore as the sun burst from the horizon as if shot from a cannon. There it seemed to hang without moving throughout the day until suddenly falling like a rock shortly before sunset. Shadows stretched far into the distance or did not exist. There was no in-between.

An hour after daylight, Pitt stopped the truck and searched around the cargo bed until he found a loose pipe about a meter in length. Then he stepped to the ground and pushed the pipe into the sand until it stood vertical and cast a shadow. Picking up two small stones, he placed one at the tip of the shadow.

"Is this your poor man's compass?" asked Giordino, studying Pitt's actions from the shade of the truck.

"Observe the master at work." He joined Giordino and waited approximately twelve minutes before marking the distance the shadow had traveled with another stone. Next he drew a straight line from the first stone to the second and extended it about half a meter beyond. He then stood with the toe of his left foot at the first rock and toe of his right where the line ended. Lifting his left arm and pointing straight ahead, he said, "That's north." Then he extended his right arm to the side. "East to the Trans-Saharan Track."

Giordino sighted down Pitt's outstretched right arm and hand. "I see a dune in that direction we can use as a reference point."

They moved on, repeating the process every hour. At about nine o'clock the wind began to blow from the southeast, swirling the sand in clouds that cut visibility to less than 200 meters. By ten, the heated wind had increased and. was seeping into the cab of the truck despite the rolled-up windows. Swept up in small gusts, the sand rose and twisted' like whirling dervishes.

The mercury jumped and fell like a pogo stick. This day the temperature rose from 15 degrees C (60 degrees F) to 35 degrees C (95 degrees F) in three hours, topping off during the hottest part of the afternoon at 46 degrees C (114 degrees F). Pitt and Giordino felt as if they were driving into a furnace, the air hot and dry in their nostrils as they breathed in and exhaled. Their only relief came from the breeze generated by their speed over the stripped and barren land.

The needle on the temperature gauge wavered and hung a millimeter off the red boiling mark, but the radiator showed no sign of leaking steam. They stopped every half hour now, as Pitt sighted direction from what little sun shone through the dust cloud and allowed the pipe to cast a faint shadow.

He opened one of the canisters of water and offered it to Giordino. "Liquid refreshment time."

"How much?" asked Giordino.

"We'll split it. That will give us half a liter each with one in reserve for tomorrow."

Giordino steered with his knees as he gauged his share of the water and then drank. He passed the canister back to Pitt. "O'Bannion must have set his dogs on the trail by now."

"Driving the same make and model truck, they won't close the gap unless they've got a Formula One, Grand Prix champion driver at the wheel. Their only advantage is having extra fuel on board to continue the chase after we've run dry."

"Why didn't we think of loading on reserves?"

"There were no gas storage drums around the truck parking area. I looked. They must have stored them elsewhere, and we didn't have time to spare for a search."

"O'Bannion just might whistle up a whirlybird," Giordino said as he down-shifted to crawl over a low dune.

"Fort Foureau and the Malian military are his only sources for a helicopter. And my guess is the last people he'll call on for help are Kazim and Massarde. He knows damn well they wouldn't look kindly on his losing public enemies one and two only a few hours after we were placed in his tender and loving care."

"You don't think O'Bannion's posse can hunt us down before we cross into Algeria?"

"They can't follow us through a sandstorm any more than a Mountie can track his man through a blizzard." Pitt tilted a thumb over his shoulder out the rear window. "No tracks."

Giordino looked into a sideview mirror and saw the wind sweep the sand over the tire tracks as if the truck was a small boat on a vast sea that closed over its wake. He relaxed and slouched in his seat. "You don't know what a pleasure it is to travel with a Pollyanna."

"Don't write off O'Bannion just yet. If they reach the Trans-Saharan Track first and patrol back and forth until we appear, the show is over."

Pitt finished off the canister and tossed it in the back with the Tuareg guard who had become conscious and was sitting with his back against the tailgate of the truck, glaring at the men inside the cab.

"How's the gas?" Pitt asked.

"Almost on fumes."

"Time to throw out a red herring. Bring the truck around on a reverse heading toward the west. Then come to a stop."

Giordino dutifully did what he was ordered, twisted the wheel, and braked to a halt. "Now we walk?"

"Now we walk. But first, bring the guard up front and check the truck for any item that might prove useful, like cloth to wrap our heads to prevent sunstroke."

A strange combination of fear and menace burned in the guard's eyes as they propped him in the front seat, cut strips from his robe and headdress, and then bound him tightly so his hands and feet could not touch the steering wheel or floor pedals.

They foraged through the truck, finding a few oily rags and two wash towels that they fashioned into turbans. The guns were left behind, buried in the sand. Then Pitt tied the steering wheel so it couldn't turn and shifted the truck in to second gear and jumped from the cab. The faithful Renalt lurched forward carrying its trussed-up passenger and bounced back toward Tebezza until it became lost in the blowing sand.

"You're giving him a better chance to live than he'd have given us," Giordino protested.

"Maybe, maybe not," Pitt said mildly.

"How far do you figure we have to hike?"

"About 180 kilometers," Pitt answered as if it was a short jaunt.

"That's almost 112 miles on one liter of water that wouldn't grow cactus," Giordino complained. He stared critically into the turbulent wind-blown sand. "I just know my poor old tired bones are going to bleach in the sand."

"Look on the bright side," said Pitt, tucking in his crude turban. "You can breathe the pure, open air, bask in the silence, commune with nature. No smog, no traffic, no crowds. What can be more invigorating for the soul?"

"A bottle of cold beer, a hamburger, and a bath," Giordino sighed.

Pitt held up four fingers. "Four days, and you'll get your wish."

"How are you at desert survival?" Giordino asked hopefully.

"I went on a weekend camping trip with the Boy Scouts in the Mojave Desert when I was twelve."

Giordino shook his head sadly. "That certainly eases all thoughts of anxiety."

Pitt took another direction reading. Then using his compass pipe for a staff, he bent his head against the wind and sand and began walking toward what he determined was east. Giordino hooked a hand in Pitt's belt so they wouldn't lose each other in a sudden, blinding wall of sand and trudged along behind.

The closed-door meeting at the UN headquarters began at ten o'clock in the morning and lasted well past midnight. Twenty-five of the world's leading ocean and atmospheric scientists along with another thirty biologists, toxicologists, and contamination experts sat in rapt attention as Hala Kamil made a short opening address before turning over the secret conference to Admiral Sandecker who kicked off the proceedings by revealing the scope of the ecological disaster.

Sandecker then introduced Dr. Darcy Chapman who lectured the assembly on the chemistry of the prolific red tides. He was followed by Rudi Gunn with an update on the contamination data. Hiram Yaeger rounded out the briefing by displaying satellite photos of the spreading tide and providing statistics on its projected growth.

The information session lasted until two o'clock in the afternoon. When Yaeger sat down and Sandecker returned to the podium, there was a strange silence in place of the normal protests by scientists who seldom agreed with each other's theories and revelations. Fortunately, twelve of those in attendance were already aware of the extraordinary growth of the tides and had launched studies of their own. They elected a spokesperson who announced findings that supported the results accumulated by the men from NUMA. Those few who had refused to accept a catastrophic: disaster in the making now came around and endorsed Sandecker's dire warning.

The final program on the agenda was to form committee and research teams to commit their resources and cooperation in sharing information toward the goal of halting and reversing the threat of human extinction.

Though she knew it was a futile plea, Hala Kamil returned to the podium and begged the scientists to not speak to members of the news media until the situation had attained a measure of control. The last thing they needed, she implored, was worldwide panic.

Kamil closed the meeting with an announcement of the time for the next conference to assimilate new information and report on progress toward a solution. There was no polite applause. The scientists filed up the aisles in groups, talking in unusually quiet voices and motioning with their hands as they exchanged viewpoints in their respective areas of expertise.

Sandecker sank wearily in a chair on the rostrum. His face was lined and tired but splendidly etched with strength of will and determination. He felt at last that he had turned the corner and was no longer pleading a case before deaf and hostile ears.

"It was a magnificent presentation," said Hala Kamil.

Sandecker half rose from his chair as she sat down beside him. "I hope it did the job."

Hala nodded and smiled. "You've inspired the top minds in the ocean and environmental sciences to discover a solution before it's too late."

"Informed maybe, but hardly inspired."

She shook her head. "You're wrong, Admiral. They all grasped the urgency. The enthusiasm to tackle the threat was written in their faces."

"None of this would have happened if not for you. It took a woman's foresight to recognize the danger."

"What looked obvious to me, seemed absurd to others," she said quietly.

"I feel better now that the debate and controversy are over and we can concentrate our efforts to stop this thing."

"The next problem we face is keeping it a secret. The story will most certainly go public within forty-eight hours."

"An invasion by an army of reporters is almost inevitable," Sandecker nodded. "Scientists aren't exactly noted for keeping a tight lip."

Hala stared out over the now empty auditorium. The spirit of cooperation was far above anything she'd seen in the General Assembly. Maybe there was hope after all for a world divided by so many ethnic cultures and languages.

"What are your plans now?" she asked.

Sandecker shrugged. "Get Pitt and Giordino out of Mali."

"How long has it been since they were arrested at the solar waste project?"

"Four days."

"Any word of their fate?"

"None I'm afraid. Our intelligence is weak in that part of the world, and we have no idea where they were taken."

"If they've fallen into Kazim's hands I fear the worst."

Sandecker could not bring himself to accept Pitt and Giordino's loss. He changed the subject. "Have investigators found any sign of foul play in the deaths of your World Health inspection team?"

For a moment she did not answer. "They're still probing through the wreckage of the plane," she finally said. "But preliminary reports say there is no evidence the crash was caused by a bomb. So far it's a mystery."

"There were no survivors?"

"No, Dr. Hopper and his entire team were killed along with the flight crew."

"Hard to believe Kazim wasn't behind it."

"He is an evil man," Hala said, her face somber and thoughtful. "I too think he was responsible. Dr. Hopper must have discovered something about the plague that is sweeping Mali, something Kazim could not allow to be revealed, especially among foreign governments that provide him with aid."

"Hopefully, Pitt and Giordino will have the answers."

She looked at Sandecker, an expression of sympathy in her eyes. "You must face the very real possibility that they are already dead, executed on Kazim's orders."

The weariness seemed to fall off Sandecker like a discarded overcoat as a grim smile touched his lips. "No," he said slowly, "I'll never accept Pitt's death, not until I make a positive identification myself. He's come back from the dead on any number of occasions with uncanny regularity."

Hala took Sandecker's hand in hers. "Let us pray that he can do it again."

Felix Verenne was waiting at the Gao airport when Ismail Yerli came down the boarding stairs. "Welcome back to Mali," he said, extending a hand. "I hear you spent time here some years ago."

Yerli did not smile as he took the offered hand. "Sorry for arriving late, but the Massarde Enterprises plane you sent to pick me up in Paris had mechanical problems."

"So I heard. I would have ordered another plane, but you had already departed on an Air Afrique Bight."

"I was under the impression Mr. Massarde wanted me here as soon as possible."

Verenne nodded. "You were informed by Bordeaux as to your assignment?"

"I'm well aware, of course, of the unfortunate investigations by the United Nations and the National Underwater and Marine Agency, but Bordeaux only insinuated that my job was to become chummy with General Kazim and prevent him from interfering with Mr. Massarde's operations."

"The idiot has blundered this whole contamination inspection thing. It's a wonder the world news media hasn't gotten wind of it."

"Are Hopper and his team dead?"

"Might as well be. They're laboring as slaves in a secret gold mining operation of Mr. Massarde's in the deepest part of the Sahara."

"And the NUMA intruders?"

"They were also captured and sent to the mines."

"Then you and Mr. Massarde have everything under control."

"The reason Mr. Massarde sent for you. To prevent any more fiascos by Kazim."

"Where do I go from here?" asked Yerli.

"To Fort Foureau for instructions from Massarde himself. He'll arrange an introduction with Kazim, glorifying the horrifying little man with your intelligence accomplishments. Kazim has a fetish for spy novels. He'll leap at the opportunity to use your services, unknowing you will be reporting his every movement and action to Mr. Massarde."

"How far is Fort Foureau?"

"A two-hour flight by helicopter. Come along, we'll pick up your luggage and be on our way."

Like the Japanese who conducted their business without buying products manufactured by the nations they hustled, Massarde only hired French engineers and construction workers as well as using French-manufactured equipment and transportation. The French-built Ecureuil helicopter was a mate to the one Pitt crashed in the Niger River. Verenne had the copilot collect Yerli's bags and deposit them on board.

As he and the expressionless Turk settled in comfortable leather chairs, a steward served hors d'oeuvres and champagne.

A bit fancy aren't we?" asked Yerli. "Do you always throw out the red carpet for ordinary visitors?"

"Mr. Massarde's orders," replied Verenne stiffly. "He abhors the American practice of offering soft drinks, beer, and nuts. He insists that as Frenchmen we demonstrate refined taste in keeping with French culture, regardless of the status of our visitors."

Yerli held up his glass of champagne. "To Yves Massarde, may he never cease being generous."

"To our boss," said Verenne. "May he never stop his generosity to those who are loyal."

Yerli downed his glass with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders and held it out for a refill. "Any feedback on your operations at Fort Foureau from environmentalist groups?"

"Not really. They're in a bit of a quandary. They applaud our self-sufficient solar energy design, but they're scared to death of what burning toxic wastes will do to the desert air."

Yerli studied the bubbles in his champagne glass. "You are certain the secret of Fort Foureau is still safe? What if European and American governments get wind of the real operation?"

Verenne laughed. "Are you joking? Most of the governments of the industrialized world are only too happy to go along with secretly getting rid of their hazardous garbage without public knowledge. Privately, bureaucratic officials and business executives of nuclear and chemical plants around the world have given us their blessing."

"They know?" Yerli asked in surprise.

Verenne looked at him with a bemused smile. "Who do you think are Massarde's clients?"

After leaving the truck, Pitt and Giordino walked through the heat of the afternoon and under the cold of the night, wanting to travel as far as possible while they were still reasonably fresh. When they finally stopped and rested, it was the following dawn. By burrowing m the sand and covering their bodies during the heat of the day, they shielded themselves from the blazing sun and reduced their water loss. The gentle pressure from the sand also gave some relief to their tired muscles.

They made 48 kilometers (30 miles) toward their goal the first trek. They actually walked further, meandering across the hard floor valleys between sand dunes. The second night they set out before sunset so Pitt could position the stake and set their course until the stars came out. By sunup the next morning the Trans-Saharan Track was another 42 kilometers closer. Before digging under their daily blanket of sand, they drained the last drops of water from the canister. From now on, until they found a new supply of water, their bodies would begin to wither and die.

The third night of their trek, they had to cross a barrier of dunes that stretched out of sight to the right and left. The dunes, though menacing, were things of beauty. Their delicate, smooth surfaces were sculptured into fragile, evermoving ripples by the restless wind. Pitt quickly learned their secrets. After a gentle slope, the dune usually dropped sharply on the other side. They traveled when practical on the razor-edged crests of the dunes to prevent slogging up and down the soft, giving sand. If this proved difficult, they meandered through the hollows where the sand was firmer beneath their feet.

On the fourth day the dunes gradually became lower and finally fell away onto a wide sandy plain, dreary and waterless. During the hottest part of the day the sun beat down on the parched flatland like a blacksmith's hammer against red hot iron. Though thankful to be crossing a level surface, they found the walking difficult. Two kinds of ripples covered the sandy ground. The first being small, shallow ridges, which presented no problem. But the other, large ripples spaced farther apart, crested at exactly the length of their strides, creating a tiring effect much like walking the ties of a railroad.

Their hiking time became shorter and the rest stops longer and more frequent. They plodded on, their heads down, silent. Talking only made their mouths drier. They were prisoners of the sand, held captive by a cage measured only by distance. There were few distinct landmarks except for the jagged peaks of a low range of rock that reminded Pitt of the vertebra of a dead monster. It was a land where each kilometer looked exactly like the last and time ran without meaning as if turning on a treadmill.

After 20 kilometers, the plains met a plateau. The new sun was about to rise when they put it to a vote and decided to climb the steep escarpment to the top before resting for the day. Four hours later, when they finally struggled over the edge, the sun had risen well above the horizon. The effort had taken what little reserves they had left. Their hearts pounded madly after the torturous strain of the strenuous ascent, leg muscles fiery with pain, chests heaving as starving lungs demanded more air.

Pitt was exhausted and afraid to sit down for fear he could never regain his feet again. He stood weakly, swaying on the ledge, and gazed around as if he was a captain on the bridge of a ship. If the plain below was a featureless wasteland, the surface of the plateau was a sun-blasted, grotesque nightmare. A sea of confused, twisted tumbles of scorched red and black rock, interspersed with rusting obelisk-like outcroppings of iron ore, spread out to the east directly in their path. It was like staring at a city destroyed centuries ago by a nuclear explosion.

"What part of Hades is this?" Giordino rasped.

Pitt pulled out Fairweather's map, now badly wrinkled and beginning to split apart, and flattened it across his knee. "He shows it on the map, but didn't write in a name."

"Then from this moment on, it shall be known as Giordino's hump."

Pitt's parched lips cracked into a smile. "If you want to register the name, all you have to do is apply with the International Geological Institute."

Giordino collapsed on the rocky ground and stared vacantly across the plateau. "How far have we come?"

"About 120 kilometers."

"Still 60 to go to the Trans-Saharan Track."

"Except that we ran up against a manifestation of Pitt's law."

"What law is that?"

"He who follows another man's map comes up 20 kilometers short."

"You sure we didn't take a wrong turn back there?"

Pitt shook his head. "We haven't traveled in a straight line."

"So how much farther?"

"I reckon another 80 kilometers."

Giordino looked at Pitt through sunken eyes that were reddened from fatigue and spoke through lips cracked and swollen. "That's another 50 miles. We've already come the last 70 without a drop of water."

"Seems more like a thousand," Pitt said hoarsely.

"Well," Giordino muttered. "I have to say the issue is in doubt. I don't think I can make it."

Pitt looked up from the map. "I never thought I'd hear that from you."

"I've never experienced total agonizing thirst before. I can remember when it was a daily sensation. Now it's become more of an obsession than a craving."

"Two more nights and we'll dance on the track."

Giordino slowly shook his head. "Wishful thinking. We don't have the stamina to walk another 50 miles without water in this heat, not as dehydrated as we are."

Pitt was haunted by the constant vision of Eva slaving in the mines, being beaten by Melika. "They'll all die if we don't get through."

"You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip," said Giordino. "It's a miracle we made it this far-" He sat up and shaded his eyes. Then he pointed excitedly toward a jumbled mass of huge rocks. "There, between those rocks, doesn't that look like the small entrance to a cave?"

Pitt's eyes followed his pointing hand. There was indeed a black opening amid the rocks. He took Giordino's hand and pulled him to his feet. "See, our luck's changing for the better already. Nothing like a nice, cool cave to while away the hottest time of the day."

Already the heat was suffocating as it reflected off the red-brown rocks and iron outcroppings. They felt as if they were walking through the cinders of a barbecue. Without sunglasses they screwed their eyes up and covered them with the cloth of their makeshift turbans, peering down through tiny slits, seeing only the ground a few meters in front of them.

They had to climb a pile of loose boulders to the entrance of the cave, careful not to touch the rock with their bare hands or they would be sorely burnt. A small wall of sand had drifted across the floor of the entrance and they knelt and scooped it away with their hands. Pitt had to duck under the overhanging rock to enter the cave while Giordino waded through the sand while standing fully erect.

They did not have to wait for their eyes to get used to the dim light. There was no dark zone. The cavern had not been carved by wind or water eroding their way through limestone. A huge mass of rocks had been stacked upon one another during a great Paleozoic upheaval of the earth, forming a hollow cavern. The center was lit by the sun's rays that passed through openings in the rocks above.

As Pitt moved deeper into the interior, two large human figures loomed over him in the shadows. Instinctively, be stepped back, colliding with Giordino.

"You just stepped on my foot," grunted Giordino.

"Sorry." Pitt gestured up at a smooth wall where a figure was about to throw a spear at a buffalo. "I didn't expect company."

Giordino looked over Pitt's shoulder at the spear thrower, stunned to face rock artwork in the most barren part of the world. He slowly peered around at a massive gallery of prehistoric and ancient art that displayed centuries of artistic styles of successive cultures.

"Is this real?" he muttered.

Pitt moved closer to the mysterious rock paintings and examined a 3-meter-high figure with a mask that sprouted flowers from its head and shoulders. The thirst and fatigue dropped away as he stared in awe. "The art is genuine all right. I wish I was an archaeologist and could interpret the various styles and cultures. The earliest paintings seem to begin at the back of the cave, and then the overlapping cultures work chronologically forward to more recent times."

"How can you tell?"

"Ten to twelve thousand years ago the Sahara had a moist and tropical climate. Plant life blossomed. It was far more livable than it is now." He nodded at a group of figures surrounding and thrusting spears at a giant, wounded buffalo with enormous horns. "This must be the earliest painting because it shows hunters killing a buffalo almost the size of an elephant that's been long extinct."

Pitt moved to another piece of artwork that covered several square meters. "Here you can see herders with cattle," he said, gesturing at the images with his hands. "The pastoral era began about 5000 B.C. This later-style art shows more creative composition and an eye for detail."

"A hippopotamus," said Giordino, staring at a colossal drawing that covered one entire side of a flattened rock. "This part of the Sahara can't have seen one of these for a while."

"Not in three thousand years anyway. Hard to visualize this area once was a vast grassland that supported life from ostrich to antelope to giraffe."

As they moved on, and the passage of time in the Sahara unrolled across the rock, Giordino observed, "About here it looks like the local artists stopped drawing cattle and the vegetation."

"Eventually the rains died away and the land began to dry out," lectured Pitt, recalling a long forgotten course in ancient history. "After four thousand years of uncontrolled grazing the vegetation was gone and the desert began to take over."

Giordino moved from the inner recesses of the cavern toward the entrance, stopping in front of another painting. "This one shows a chariot race."

"People from the Mediterranean introduced horses and chariots sometime before 1000 B.C.," explained Pitt. "But I had no idea they penetrated this deep into the desert."

"What comes next, teacher?"

"The camel period," answered Pitt, standing in front of a long painting of a caravan depicting nearly sixty camels strung out in an S shape. "They were brought into Egypt after the Persian conquest of 525 B.C. Using camels, the Roman caravans pushed clear across the desert from the coast to Timbuktu. Camels have been here ever since because of their incredible endurance."

In a more recent period in time the paintings with camels became more crude and rudimentary than earlier art styles. Pitt paused in front of another series of paintings in the rich gallery of ancient art, studying a finely drawn battle that was engraved into the rock and then painted in a magnificent red ocher color. Bearded warriors with square beards, lifting spears and shields in the air, rode in two-wheel chariots pulled by four horses, attacking an army of black archers whose arrows rained from the sky.

"Okay, Mr. smart guy," said Giordino, "explain this one."

Pitt stepped over, his eyes following Giordino's gaze. For a few seconds Pitt stared at the drawing on the rock, mystified. The image was drawn in a linear, child-like style. A boat rode on a river bounding with fish and crocodiles. It was hard to imagine the hell outside the cave was once a fertile region where crocodiles once swam in what were now dry riverbeds.

He moved closer, disbelief reflected in his eyes. It was not the crocodiles or the fish that gripped his concentration; it was the vessel floating in swirls that indicated the current of a river. The craft should have been a depiction of an Egyptian-style boat, but it was a totally different design, far more modern. The shape above the water was a truncated pyramid, a pyramid with the top chopped off and parallel to the base. Round tubes protruded from the sides. A number of small figures stood in various poses around the deck under what appeared to be a large flag stiffened by a breeze. The ship stretched nearly 4 meters across the coarse surface of the rock wall.

"An ironclad," Pitt said incredulously. "A Confederate States Navy ironclad."

"It can't be, not here," said Giordino, completely off balance.

"It can and it is," Pitt said flatly. "It must be the one the old prospector told us about."

"Then it isn't a myth."

"The local artists couldn't have painted something they'd never seen. It's even flying the correct Confederate battle ensign that was adopted near the end of the Civil War."

"Maybe a former rebel naval officer wandering the desert after the war painted it."

"He wouldn't have copied local art style," Pitt said thoughtfully. "There is nothing in this painting that reflects Western influence."

"What do you make of the two figures standing on the casemate?" asked Giordino.

"One obviously is a ship's officer. Probably the captain."

"And the other," Giordino whispered, his face set in disbelief.

Pitt examined the figure next to the captain from head to toe. "Who do you think it is?"

"I don't trust my sunburned eyes. I was hoping you'd tell me."

Pitt's mind struggled to adjust to a set of circumstances that was completely foreign to him. "Whoever the artist," Pitt murmured in bewildered fascination, "he certainly painted a remarkable likeness of Abraham Lincoln."

Resting all day in the cool of the cave rejuvenated Pitt and Giordino to the point that they felt physically able to attempt a go for broke, nonstop crossing of the naked and hostile land to the Trans-Saharan Track. All thoughts and conjectures over the legendary ironclad in the desert were shelved temporarily in the recesses of their minds as they mentally prepared themselves for the almost impossible ordeal.

Late in the afternoon Pitt stepped outside the cave into the unremitting fire from the sun to set up his pipe for another compass reading. Only a few minutes in that open oven and he felt as if he was melting like a wax candle. He picked out a large rock that protruded from the horizon about 5 kilometers due east as a goal for the first hour of walking.

When he returned to the cool comfort of the cave of murals he did not have to feel the exhaustion and suffering or realize how weak he had become. His misery was all reflected in Giordino's hollow eyes, the filthy clothes, and grizzled hair, but especially in the look of a man who had come to the end of his rope.

They had endured countless dangers together, but Pitt had never seen Giordino with the look of defeat before. The psychological stress was winning over physical toughness. Giordino was pragmatic to the core. He met setbacks and hard knocks with characteristic stubbornness, assaulting them head-on. Unlike Pitt, he could not use the power of his imagination to banish the torture of thirst and the screaming pain of a body begging to wind down from lack of food and water. He could not bring himself to sink into a dreamworld where torment and despair were substituted with swimming pools, tall tropical drinks, and endless buffet tables piled high with appetizing delicacies.

Pitt could see that tonight was the last. If they were to beat the desert at its deadly game, they would have to redouble their determination to survive. Another twenty-four hours without water would finish them off. No strength would be left to go on. He was grimly afraid that the Trans-Saharan Track was a good 50 kilometers too far.

He gave Giordino another hour of rest before prodding him out of a dead sleep. "We have to leave now if we want to make any distance before the next sun."

Giordino opened his eyes into mere slits and struggled to a sitting position. "Why not stay in here another day and just take it easy?"

"Too many men, women, and children are counting on us to save ourselves so we can return and save them. Every hour counts."

The fleeting thought of the suffering women and frightened children down in the Tebezza gold mines was enough to wake Giordino from the heavy fog of sleep and bring him dazedly to his feet. Then at Pitt's urging, they feebly managed a few minutes of stretching exercises to loosen their aching muscles and stiff joints. One last look at the astounding rock paintings, their eyes lingering on the image of the rebel ironclad, and they set out across the great, sloping plateau, Pitt leading off toward the rock he'd pinpointed to the east.

This was it. Except for short rest stops, they had to forge on until they reached the track and were found by a passing motorist, hopefully one with a hefty supply of water. Whatever happened, searing heat, sand driven by the wind that blasted skin, difficult terrain, they had to keep going until they dropped or found rescue.

After having done its damage for the day, the sun slipped away and a swollen half moon took its place. Not a breath of air stirred the sand and the desert went profoundly still and silent. The desolate landscape seemed to reach into infinity, and the rocks protruding from the plateau like dinosaur bones still gave off shimmering waves from the day's heat. Nothing moved except the shadows that crept and lengthened behind the rocks like wraiths coming to life in the evening's fading light.

They walked on for seven hours. The rock used as a compass point came and went as the night wore on and became colder. Dreadfully weak and wasted, they began to shiver uncontrollably. The extreme ups and downs in temperature made Pitt feel as if he was experiencing seasonal changes, with the heat of day as summer, the evening as fall, midnight as winter, morning as spring.

The change in terrain came so gradually, he didn't realize the rocks and iron outcroppings had grown smaller and vanished completely. Only when he stopped to glance up at the stars for a heading and then looked ahead did he see they had come off the gradual slope of the plateau onto a flat plain cut by a series of wadis, or dry streams, carved out by long dead water flows or forgotten flash floods.

Their progress slowed with fatigue and tapered to a plodding stumble. The weariness, the sheer exhaustion, were like weights they were forced to carry on their shoulders. They walked and kept on walking, their misery deepening. Yet they made slow and even progress toward the east on what little strength they could spare. They were so weak that after the rest stops they could hardly rise to their feet and take up the struggle again.

Pitt kept himself going with images of how O'Bannion and Melika were treating the women and children in that hell pit of a mine. He had visions of Melika's thong viciously striking helpless victims and slaves, sick from deprivation and overwork. How many had died in the days since he had escaped? Had Eva been carried to the chamber of corpses? He might have pushed aside such dire thoughts, but be let them linger since they only served to spur him to become a man beside himself, ignoring the suffering and continuing with the cold fortitude of a machine.

Pitt found it odd that he couldn't remember when he last spit. Though he sucked on small pebbles to relieve the relentless thirst, he could not even recall when he felt saliva in his mouth. His tongue had swelled like a dry sponge and felt as if it was dusted with alum, and yet he found he could still swallow.

They had lessened the loss of perspiration by walking in the cool of night and keeping their shirts on during the day to help control sweat evaporation without missing some of its cooling effects. But he realized that their bodies were badly desalinated, which contributed to their weakened condition.

Pitt tried every trick he could dredge up from his memory on desert survival, including breathing through his nose to prevent water loss and talking very little, and only then when they took a rest.

They came to a narrow river of sand that ran through a valley of boulder-strewn hills. They followed the riverbed until it turned north, and then climbed its bank and continued on their course. Another day was breaking, and Pitt paused to check Fairweather's map, holding up the tattered paper away from the brightening sky in the east. The rough drawing indicated a vast dry lake that stretched nearly unbroken to the Trans-Saharan Track. Though the level ground made for easier walking, Pitt saw a murderous environment, an open holocaust where shade did not exist.

There could be no resting during the fiery heat of the day. The ground was too gravelly firm to burrow under its surface. They would have to keep going and endure heat with the ferocity of an open flame. Already the sun was bursting into the sky and signaling another day of hideous torture.

The agony wore on and a few clouds appeared, hiding the sun, giving the men nearly two hours of grateful relief. And then the clouds drifted on and dissipated and the sun returned, hotter than ever. By noon Pitt and Giordino were barely clinging to life. If the heat of the day didn't conquer their agonized bodies the long night of intense cold surely would.

Then abruptly, they came to a deep ravine with steeply sloping banks that dropped 7 meters below the surface of the dry lake, slicing across it almost like a man-made canal. Because he was staring down at the ground Pitt nearly walked off the edge. He staggered to a halt, gazing despairingly at the unexpected barrier. There was simply not enough left in him to climb down into the bottom of the ravine and struggle up the other side. Giordino stumbled up beside him and collapsed, his body sagging limply before sinking to the ground, his head and arms hanging over the rim of the ravine.

As Pitt gazed across the crack in the dry lake at the vast nothingness ahead, he knew their epic struggle of endurance had come to an end. They had covered only 30 kilometers and there were another 50 to go.

Giordino slowly turned and looked up at Pitt, who was still on his feet, but swaying unsteadily, gazing at the eastern horizon as if seeing the goal that was tantalizingly near but impossible to reach.

Pitt, spent and played out as he was, appeared magnificent. His rugged, severe face, his full stature, his incisive piercing opaline eyes, his nose thrust forward like a bird of prey, his head enveloped by a dusty white towel through which straggled the strands of his wavy black hair-none gave him the appearance of a man suffering defeat and facing certain death.

His gaze swept the bottom of the ravine in both directions and stopped, a puzzled expression forming in the eyes that peered through the narrow opening in his toweled turban. "My sanity is gone," he whispered.

Giordino lifted his head. "I lost mine about 20 kilometers back on the trail."

"I swear I see…" Pitt shook his head slowly and rubbed his eyes. "It must be a mirage."

Giordino stared across the great empty furnace. Sheets of water shimmered in the distance under the heat waves. The imagined sight of what he so desperately craved was more than Giordino could bear. He turned away.

"Do you see it?" Pitt asked.

"With my eyes closed," Giordino rasped faintly. "I can see a saloon with dancing girls beckoning with huge mugs of ice cold beer."

"I'm serious."

"So am I, but if you mean that phony lake out there on the flats, forget it."

"No," Pitt said briefly. "I mean that airplane down there in the gully."

At first, Giordino thought his friend had lost it, but then he slowly rolled back on his stomach and stared downward in the direction Pitt was facing.

Nothing manufactured by man disintegrates or rots in the desert. The worst that can occur is the pitting of metal by the driving sand. There, resting against one bank of the sterile streambed like an alien aberration, scoured and rustless, with almost no erosion or coating of dust, sat a wrecked airplane. It appeared to be an old high-wing monoplane that had lain in crippled solitude for several decades.

"Do you see it?" Pitt repeated. "Or have T gone mad?"

"Not if I've gone mad too," said Giordino in abject astonishment. "It looks like a plane all right."

"Then it must be real."

Pitt helped Giordino to his feet, and they stumbled along the brink of the ravine until they were standing directly over the wreck. The fabric on the fuselage and wings was amazingly still intact, and they could plainly read the identification numbers. The aluminum propeller had shattered when it came in contact with the bank, and the radial engine with its exposed cylinders was partially shoved back into the cockpit and tilted upward in broken mountings. But for that, and the collapsed landing gear, the plane seemed little damaged. They saw, too, the indentations on the ground, made when the plane made contact before running off the edge into the bottom of the dry wash.

"How long do you think it's been here?" croaked Giordino.

"At least fifty, maybe sixty years," Pitt replied.

"The pilot must have survived and walked out."

"He didn't survive," said Pitt. "Under the port wing. The legs of a body are showing."

Giordino's stare moved beneath the left wing. One old fashioned lace-up leather boot and a section of tattered khaki pants protruded from under the shadow of the wing. "Think he'll mind if we join him? He's got the only shade in town."

"My thoughts precisely," said Pitt, stepping off the edge and sliding down the steep bank on his back, raising his knees and using his feet as brakes.

Giordino was right beside him, and together they dropped into the dry streambed in a shower of loose gravel and dust. As in their initial excitement during their discovery of the cave of the paintings, all cravings of thirst were temporarily deprived of stimulation as they staggered to their feet and approached the long-dead pilot.

Sand had drifted over the lower part of the figure that lay with its back resting against the fuselage of the airplane. A crude crutch fashioned from a wing strut lay near one exposed foot that was missing a boot. The aircraft's compass lay nearby, half embedded in the sand.

The pilot was amazingly well preserved. The fiery heat and the frigid cold had worked together to mummify the body so that any skin that showed was darkened and smoothly textured like tanned leather. There was a recognizable expression of tranquility and contentment on the face, and the hands, rigid from over sixty years of inertness, were clasped peacefully across the stomach. An early flier's leather helmet with goggles lay draped over one leg. Black hair, matted and stiff and filled with dust after weathering the elements for so long, fell below the shoulders.

"My God," muttered Giordino dazedly. "It's a woman."

"In her early thirties," observed Pitt. "She must have been very pretty."

"I wonder who she was," Giordino panted curiously.

Pitt stepped around the body and untied a packet wrapped in oilskin that was attached to the cockpit door handle. He carefully pulled open the oilskin, which revealed a pilot's log book. He opened the cover and read the first page.

"Kitty Mannock," Pitt read the name aloud.

"Kitty, who?"

"Mannock, a famous lady flier, Australian as I recall. Her, disappearance became one of aviation's greatest mysteries, second only to that of Amelia Earhart."

"How did she come to be here?" asked Giordino, unable to take his eyes off her body.

"She was trying for a record-breaking flight from London, to Cape Town. After she vanished, the French military forces in the Sahara made a systematic search but found no trace of her or her plane."

"Too bad she came down in the only ravine within 1001 kilometers. She'd have easily been spotted from the air if she'd landed on the dry lake's surface."

Pitt thumbed through the pages in the logbook until they went blank. "She crashed on October 10, 1931. Her last' entry was written on October 20."

"She survived ten days," Giordino murmured in admiration. "Kitty Mannock must have been one tough lady." He stretched out under the shade of the wing and sighed wearily through his cracked and swollen lips. "After all this time she's finally going to have company."

Pitt wasn't listening. His attention was focused on a wild, thought. He slipped the logbook into his pants pocket and began examining the remains of the aircraft. He paid no regard to the engine, checking out the landing gear instead. Though the struts were flattened out from the impact, the t wheels were undamaged and the tires showed little sign of rot. The small tail wheel was also in good condition.

Next he studied the wings. The port wing had suffered E minor damage and it appeared that Kitty had cut a large; piece of fabric from it, but the right was still in surprisingly good shape. The fabric covering the spars and ribbing was t hard and brittle with thousands of cracks, but had not split under the extremes of heat and cold. Lost in thought, he laid a hand on an exposed metal panel in front of the cockpit and jerked his hand back in pain. The metal was as hot as a well-flamed frying pan. Inside the fuselage he found a small y toolbox that also included a small hacksaw and a tire repair kit with hand pump.

He stood there in contemplation, seemingly untouched by the sun's blasting heat. His face was gaunt, his body parched and wasted. He should have been immobilized in a hospital bed being pumped full of fluids. The old guy with the hood and scythe was centimeters away from laying a bony finger on his shoulder. But Pitt's mind still smoothly turned, balancing the pros and cons.

He decided then and there he wasn't going to die.

He moved around the tip of the right wing and approached Giordino. "You ever read The Flight of the. Phoenix by Elleston Trevor?" he asked.

Giordino squinted up at him. "No, but I saw the movie with Jimmy Stewart. Why? Your tires need rotating if you think you can make this wreck fly again."

"Not fly," Pitt replied quietly. "I've checked out the plane, and I think we can cannibalize enough parts to build a land yacht."

"Build a land yacht," Giordino echoed in exasperation. "Sure, and we can stock a bar and a dining room—"

"Like an ice boat, only it sails on wheels," Pitt continued, deaf to Giordino's sarcasm.

"What do you intend to use for a sail?"

"One wing of the aircraft. It's basically an elliptical airfoil. Stand it on end with the wing tip up and you've got a sail."

"We haven't enough left in us," Giordino protested. "A makeover like you're suggesting would take days."

"No, hours. The starboard wing is in good shape, the fabric still intact. We can use the center section of the fuselage between the cockpit and the tail for a hull. Using struts and spars, we can fabricate extended runners. With the two landing gear wheels and small tail wheel, we can work out a tricycle gear system. And we have more than enough control cable for rigging and a tiller setup."

"What about tools?"

"There's a tool kit in the cockpit. Not the best, but it should serve the purpose."

Giordino shook his head slowly, wonderingly, from side to side. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to cross Pitt's idea off to a hallucination, lie back on the ground, and let death peacefully carry him off to oblivion. The temptation was overwhelming. But deep inside him beat a heart that wouldn't quit and a brain that could not die without a fight. With the effort of a sick man lifting a heavy weight, he heaved himself to his feet and spoke, his words slurred from fatigue and overexposure to the heat.

"No sense in laying around here feeling sorry for ourselves. You remove the wing mounts and I'll disassemble the wheels."

In the shade of one wing Pitt outlined his concept for building a land yacht, using bits and pieces from the old aircraft. Incredibly simple in scope, it was a plan born in a desert crypt by men who were dead but refused to accept it. To construct the craft they would have to reach even deeper within themselves to find the strength they thought was long gone.

Land sailing was nothing new. The Chinese used it two thousand years ago. So did the Dutch who raised sails on lumbering wagons to move small armies. American railroaders often built small carts with sails to breeze along tracks across the prairies. The Europeans turned it into a sport on their resort beaches in the early 1900s, and then it was only a matter of time before Southern California hot-rodders, racing their souped-up cars across the Mojave Desert's dry lakes, picked up on the idea, eventually holding organized racing events that drew participants from around the world who attained speeds close to 145 kilometers or 90 miles an hour.

Using the tools Pitt found in the cockpit, he and Giordino tackled the easiest jobs during the broiling afternoon and took on the heavier tasks in the cool of the evening. For men whose favorite pastimes were restoring old classic cars and airplanes the work went smoothly and efficiently with little wasted motion to conserve what little energy they had left.

They remembered little about their efforts as they worked fervently toward a finality, driving themselves without rest, talking little because their swollen tongues and dust-dry mouths made it difficult. The moon lit their activities, casting their animated shadows against the bank of the ravine.

They reverently left Kitty Mannock's body untouched, working around her without any display of emotion, sometimes addressing her as if she was alive as their thirst-crazed minds wandered in and out of limbo.

Giordino removed the two large landing wheels and small tail wheel, cleaned the grit from the bearings, and relubricated them with sludge from the engine's oil filter. The old rubber tires were cracked and sun-hardened. They still retained their shape, but there was no hope of them holding air, so Giordino removed the brittle innertubes, filled the tire casings with sand, and remounted them on the wheels.

Next he constructed runner extensions for the wheels from ribs he disassembled from the damaged wing. When finished, he cut the longitudinal spars attaching the center fuselage to the bulkhead just behind the cockpit with the hacksaw. Then he did the same with the tail section. After the midsection came free he began fastening the wider cockpit end to the fabricated wing extensions to support the two main landing wheels. The wheels now stretched 2.5 meters from the bottom side of the fuselage at its largest end. The opposite end that had tapered to the tail section was now the front of the land yacht, giving it a primitive aerodynamic appearance. The final touch to what now became the hull of the craft was the building of a runner bolted to the small tail wheel that extended 3 meters out in front. The nearly completed product resembled, to anyone old enough to remember the Our Gang and Little Rascals comedies, a 1930s backyard soapbox racer.

While Giordino was knocking together the hull, Pitt concentrated on the sail. Once the wing had been detached from the plane's fuselage, he stiffened the ailerons and flaps and extended the heavier spar inside the leading edge so that it formed a mast. Together, he and Giordino lifted the wing into a vertical position, stepped the mast into the center of the hull and mounted it, a job made easy by the lightness of the desert-dried wooden spars and fabric covering of the old airfoil. What they had created was a pivoting wind sail. Next Pitt used the aircraft's control cables to attach guy wires from Giordino's side runners, and the bow to the mast as supports. He then fashioned a tiller steering apparatus from the interior of the hull to the front runner and wheel with the aircraft's control cables. Finally, he fitted out a rigging system for the wind sail.

The finishing touches were the removal of the pilot's seats and their placement in the land yacht's cockpit, installing them in tandem. Pitt removed the aircraft's compass from the sand beside Kitty's body and mounted it beside the tiller. The tube he had used as a compass to guide their path this far, he tied to the mast for a good luck souvenir.

They completed the job at three in the morning and then dropped like dead men in the sand. They lay there shivering in the bitter cold, staring at their masterpiece.

"It'll never fly," Giordino muttered, totally spent.

"She only has to move us across the flats."

"Have you figured out how we're going to get it out of the gulch?"

"About 50 meters down the valley, the incline of the east bank becomes gradual enough to pull it onto the surface of the dry lake."

"We'll be lucky to walk that far much less drag this thing up a slope. And at that, there's no guarantee it'll work."

"All we need is a light wind," said Pitt, scarcely audible. "And if the last six days are any indication, we don't have to worry on that score."

"Nothing like pursuing the impossible dream."

"She'll go," Pitt said resolutely.

"What do you think she weighs?"

"About 160 kilograms or 350 pounds."

"What are we going to call her?" asked Giordino.

"Call her?"

"A name, she's got to have a name."

Pitt nodded toward Kitty. "If we make it out of this pressure cooker, we'll owe it to her. How about the Kitty Mannock?"

"Good choice."

They babbled vaguely and sporadically, whispered voices in a great void of dead space, until they drifted off into a welcome sleep.

The bleaching sun was probing the bottom of the ravine when they finally awoke. Just rising to their feet was a monumental task of will. They bid a silent goodbye to Kitty and then staggered to the front of their improvised hope of survival. Pitt tied two lengths of cable to the front of the land yacht and handed one to Giordino.

"You feel up to it?"

"Hell no," Giordino spat out of a shriveled mouth.

Pitt grinned despite the pain from his cracked and bleeding lips. His eyes raked Giordino's, searching for the glow that would see them through. It was there, but very dim. "Race you to the top."

Giordino swayed as though like a drunk in a wind storm, but he winked and gamely said, "Eat my dust, sucker." And then he slung the cable over his shoulder, leaned forward to take up the strain, and promptly fell on his face.

The land yacht rolled as easily as a shopping cart across the tile floor of a supermarket and almost ran over him.

He looked up at Pitt through red eyes, surprise on his sunburned face. "By God she moves light as a feather."

"Of course, she had a pair of first-rate mechanics."

With no more talk they pulled their hand-built land yacht down the middle of the wash until they came to a slope that angled 30 degrees up to the surface of the dry lake.

The climb was only 7 meters, but to men who were staring in the grave only eighteen hours before, the top edge of the slope looked like the summit of Mount Everest. They had not expected to live through another night, and yet here they were confronting what they were certain was the final obstacle between rescue or death.

Pitt made the attempt first while Giordino rested. He clasped one of the tow cables around his waist and began crawling up the incline like a drunken ant, edging upward a few centimeters at a time. His body was but a terribly worn-out machine serving the demands of a mind that had only the thinnest grip on reality. His aching muscles protested with shooting agony. His arms and legs gave out early in the climb, but he forced them to carry on. His bloodshot eyes were almost closed from fatigue, his face deeply etched in suffering, lungs sucking in air with painful gasps, heart beating like a jackhammer under the inhuman strain.

Pitt could not let himself stop. If he and Giordino died, all the poor souls slaving their lives away at Tebezza would die too, their true fate unknown to the outside world. He could not give up, collapse, and expire, not now, not this close to beating the old guy with the scythe. He ground his teeth together in a rage of tenacity and kept climbing.

Giordino tried to shout words of encouragement, but all he could rasp out was an inaudible whisper.

And then mercifully, Pitt's hands groped over the edge and he summoned the will to pull his battered body onto the dry lake. He lay there a faint shadow away from unconsciousness, aware of only his hoarse gasping breathing and a heart that felt as if it was going to pound its way through his rib cage.

He wasn't sure how long he lay fully exposed under the baking sun until his breathing and heart slowed to something close to a regular pace. Finally, he pushed to his hands and knees and peered down the slope. Giordino was sitting comfortably in the shade of the wing sail, and managed a weak wave.

"Ready to come up?" Pitt asked.

Giordino wearily nodded, took hold of the tow cable, and pressed his body against the slope, feebly working his way upward. Pitt slung his end of the cable over his shoulder and used the leverage of his weight by leaning forward without exerting energy. Four minutes later, half crawling, half dragged by Pitt, Giordino rolled limply onto flat ground like a fish that had been reeled in after a long struggle against hook and line.

"Now comes the fun part," Pitt uttered weakly.

"I'm not up to it," Giordino gasped.

Pitt looked down at him. Giordino already looked dead. His eyes were closed, his face and ten-day beard powdered with white dust. If he could not help Pitt pull the land yacht out of the ravine both of them would die this day.

Pitt knelt down and struck him sharply across the face. "Don't quit on me now," he muttered harshly. "How do you expect to score with Massarde's gorgeous piano player if you don't get off your butt and pitch in."

Giordino's eyes fluttered open and he rubbed a hand across his dust-coated cheek. With a supreme effort of will, he hauled himself to his feet and tottered drunkenly. He stared at Pitt without any malice at all, and despite his misery, he managed a grin. "I hate myself for being so predictable."

"Good thing too."

Like a team of emaciated mules in harness, they took up the tow cables and pitched forward, their bodies too weak to do much more than take a few plodding steps as their combined weight slowly but immeasurably pulled the land yacht up the slope. Their heads were bowed, backs hunched over, minds lost in the delirium of thirst. Progress was heartbreakingly slow.

Soon they dropped to their knees and pitifully crawled forward. Giordino noticed that blood was dripping frog Pitt's hands where the cable had burned into his palms, but he was entirely oblivious to it. Then suddenly the cables slackened and the improvised land yacht was over the tore and had bumped into them. Fortunately Pitt had the foresight to tie down the rigging of the wind sail so its trailing edge was now pointing directly into a light wind and did not generate any driving force.

After unclasping the tow cables, Pitt helped Giordino it to the fuselage until he dropped like a sack of potatoes in the forward seat. Then Pitt looked up at the thin strip of tell-tale cloth he'd tied in the rigging and threw a handful of sand in the air to pinpoint the wind direction. It was blowing out of the northwest.

The moment of truth had arrived. He looked down at Giordino who made a listless forward gesture with one hand and spoke in a weak, husky whisper.

"Move it out."

Pitt leaned on the rear of the fuselage and pushed the craft from a standstill until it was moving slowly across the sand. After a few stumbling steps he fell limply into the rear seat. The wind was to the leeward behind his left shoulder, and he let out the sheet line and eased over the tiller so that he was carried on a downwind tack. He took in a little on the sheet line as the wind built up on the wing sail and the Kitty Mannock began to move on her own. Her speed picked up rapidly as Pitt took in a little more line.

He glanced down at the aircraft compass, took a reading, and set his course, exhaustion and exhilaration flooding through his seemingly dusty arteries at the same time. He trimmed the wing sail as it flexed under the wind and soon the land yacht was whipping across the dry lake, her wheels kicking up trails of dust, in glorious silence at nearly 60 kilometers an hour.

The thrill quickly reversed to near panic as Pitt overcorrected and suddenly there was daylight under the windward wheel. Higher it lifted in a condition known among land sailors as hiking. He had moved the sail too far into the wind, increasing power. Now he had to take corrective action to prevent the hike from capsizing the land yacht, a disaster in the making because neither he nor Giordino had the strength to right it again.

He was almost at the point of no return when he eased the sheet lines and gently swung the tiller, sending the craft luffing to windward. He held his course and the hike settled and shallowed until the wheel was barely touching the ground.

Pitt had sailed small boats when he was a boy growing up in Newport Beach, California, but certainly never at this speed. As he headed off the wind on a broad reach angle of 45 degrees, he began fine-trimming his huge wing sail with the sheet lines and small steering corrections. A quick check of his compass heading told him it was time to tack on a new zigzag course eastward.

As he began to feel more confident, he had to restrain himself from pushing and challenging the outside edge, the high speed line that divides control from an accident. He wasn't about to back off now, but discretion reminded him that the Kitty Mannock was not the most stable of land yachts, and she was held together with little more than sixty-year-old wire, cable, and spit.

He settled back and kept a wary eye on the dust devils that swirled across the desolate lake. A sudden puff or gust out of nowhere and over they'd go, never to continue. Pitt well knew they were riding on luck. Another ravine, unseen until it was too late, or a rock that could tear off a runner, any one of a dozen catastrophes could leap at them from the merciless desert.

She skidded and she yawed but the Kitty Mannock sped across the dry lake at speeds Pitt had not imagined the oddball craft was capable of. The head wind began driving sand into his face like buckshot. With a steadily increasing wind at his back he guessed they were reaching 85 kilometers an hour. After plodding across the desert wastes for days, it seemed as though they were skimming over the ground in a jet. He hoped against hope the Kitty Mannock would hang together.

After half an hour, his stinging eyes swept the unvaried landscape ahead in search of an object to rest upon. Pitt's new worry was passing over the Trans-Saharan Track without recognizing it. An easy proposition since it was only a vague trail in the sand that ran from north to south. Miss it and they would virtually head out into the miraged immensity of the desert and beyond until it was too late to return.

He saw no sign of vehicles, and the terrain became wanted again with rolling dunes. Had they crossed over the border into Algeria, he wondered. There was no way to tell. Any sign of the great caravans that had marched between the once lush Niger Valley and the Mediterranean with their cargos of gold, ivory, and slaves had long ago vanished into history without leaving debris of their passing. In their place, a few cars with tourists, trucks carrying parts and supplies, and the occasional army vehicle on patrol were all that sometimes rolled through the barren wilderness that God ignored.

If Pitt had known that in reality the neat red line indicating the track on maps did not exist as such, and was a figment of cartographers' imaginations, he would have been extremely frustrated. The only true indications, if he were lucky enough to spot them, were scattered bones of animals, a solitary stripped vehicle, tire tracks that had not been covered by wind-blown sand, and a string of old oil drums spaced 4 kilometers apart, providing the latter hadn't been borrowed by passing nomads for reuse or resale in Gao.

Then, near the horizon on his right, he saw a man-made object, a dark speck in a shimmering heat wave. Giordino saw it too and pointed toward it, the first sign of life from him since the land yacht was launched. The air was clear and transparent as glass. They had sailed off the dry lake, and no dust reared from the ground or swirled in the air. They distinguished the object now as the forsaken remains of a Volkswagen bus, stripped of every conceivable part that wasn't part of the body and frame. Only the shell was left, an ironic slogan sprayed on the side with a can of paint that read in English, "Where is Lawrence of Arabia when you need him?"

Satisfied they had reached the track, Pitt jibed on a new course and swung north, beating to windward. The terrain had turned sandy with stretches of gravel. Occasionally they struck a soft patch, but the land yacht was too light to sink in and gracefully skimmed right over with only a slight drop in momentum.

After ten minutes, Pitt spied an oil drum standing starkly on the horizon. Now he was positive they were speeding along the track, and he began a series of 2-kilometer tacks northward into Algeria.

There was no further movement from Giordino. Pitt reached forward and shook his shoulder, but the head slowly leaned to one side before dropping forward, chin on chest. Giordino had finally lost his grip on consciousness and was drifting away. Pitt tried to shout, roughly shake his friend, but he couldn't find the strength. He could see the blackness growing around the edge of his own vision and knew he was only minutes away from blacking out.

He heard what he thought was an engine off in the distance but saw nothing ahead and crossed it off to delirium. The sound grew louder and he vaguely recognized it as a diesel engine accompanied by the loud rumble of exhaust. Still there was no sign of the source. He was certain now oblivion was about to wash over him.

Then came the great blast from an air horn, and Pitt turned his head weakly to one side. A big British-built Bedford truck and trailer was pulling alongside, the Arab driver staring down on the two figures in the land yacht with curious eyes and a wide toothy smile. Unknown to Pitt, the truck had overhauled them from the rear.

The driver leaned out his window, cupped one hand to his mouth, and shouted, "Do you need help?"

Pitt could only nod faintly.

He had made no provisions for braking the boat to a stop. He made a languid attempt to pull the sheet line and bring the sail into the wind, but he only succeeded in turning the boat in a half circle. His senses weren't functioning properly and he badly misjudged a sudden gust. He let the sheet go but was too late. Wind and gravity took the craft away from him and it flipped over, tearing off runners and wind sail and throwing Pitt and Giordino's bodies out across the sand like limp, stuffed dolls in a cloud of dust and debris.

The Arab driver veered next to them and stopped his truck. He leaped down from the cab and rushed over to the mess and stooped over the unconscious men. He immediately recognized their signs of dehydration and hurried back to the truck, returning with four plastic bottles of water.

Pitt climbed from the hole of blackness almost immediately as he sensed liquid being splashed on his face and trickled through his half open mouth. The transformation was like a miracle: One minute he was dying and then after downing almost two gallons of water he became a reasonably fit, functioning human being again.

Giordino's bone-dry body had returned to life too. It seemed incredible they could bounce back from sure death so quickly after soaking up a healthy supply of liquid.

The Arab driver also offered them salt tablets and some dried dates. He had a dark and intelligent face and wore an unmarked baseball cap on his head. He sat on his haunches and watched the rejuvenation with great interest,

"You sail your machine from Gao?" he asked.

Pitt shook his head. "Fort Foureau," he lied. He still was not positive they were in Algeria. Nor could he trust the truck driver not to turn them into the nearest security police if he knew they had escaped from Tebezza. "Where exactly are we?"

"In the middle of the Tanezrouft wasteland."

"What country?"

"Why Algeria, of course. Where did you think you were?"

"Anywhere so long as it wasn't Mali."

The Arab made a sour expression. "Bad people live in Mali. Bad government. They kill many people."

"How far to the nearest telephone?" asked Pitt.

"Adrar is 350 kilometers north. They have communications."

"Is it a small village?"

"No, Adrar is a large town, much progress. They have an airfield with regular passenger service to Algiers."

"Are you heading in that direction?"

"Yes, I drove a load of canned goods to Gao, and now I'm deadheading back to Algiers."

"Can you give us a lift to Adrar?"

"I would be honored."

Pitt looked at the driver and smiled. "What is your name, my friend?"

"Ben Hadi."

Pitt shook the driver's hand warmly. "Ben Hadi," he said softly, "you don't know it, but by saving our lives you also saved the lives of a hundred others."