Sahara (39 page)

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.