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.