"Sixteen guards have been rounded up, Colonel. One or two escaped into the mine shafts. Seven made the mistake of resisting and are dead. We only have two men wounded, neither seriously."
"We have to speed things up a bit," said Levant. "I fear they transmitted an alert before we could cut off communications."
Pitt stepped beside Giordino and added his muscle into heaving open the gate. Giordino turned and looked at him.
"Well, it's about time you made an appearance."
"I paused for a brief chat with O'Bannion."
"Does he need a doctor or a mortician?"
"A dentist actually," Pitt answered.
"Have you seen Melika?"
"No sign of her in the engineering offices."
"I'll find her," said Giordino, a biting fierceness in his voice. "She's mine."
The gate was manhandled against its stops, and the tactical team stepped into the cavern. Through firsthand experience Pitt and Giordino knew what to expect, but they were still sickened at the sight. The commandos froze, their faces gone white at the overpowering stench and the incredible degree of suffering before their eyes. Even Levant and Pembroke-Smythe stood shocked before mustering up the effort to enter.
"Good lord," Smythe mumbled, "this looks as bad as Auschwitz and Dachau."
Pitt rushed through the mass of packed captives who were numbed beyond desperation by the monotonous existence and starved into barely walking skeletons. He found Dr. Hopper sitting on a bunk staring blankly through dazed eyes, his filthy clothes hanging loosely on a body decimated by overwork and lack of food. He broke into a broad smile, lifted himself weakly to his feet, and embraced Pitt.
"Thank God, you and AI made it. It's a miracle."
"I'm sorry we took so long," said Pitt.
"Eva never gave up` on you," said Hopper, his voice choking. "She knew you'd come through."
Pitt looked around. "Where is she?"
Hopper nodded toward a bunk. "You didn't get here a minute too soon. She's in a bad way."
Pitt walked over and knelt beside a statue-like form in a lower bunk. Sadness showed in every line of his face. He couldn't believe how wasted she had become in a week's time. He gently took hold of her shoulders and gave her a light shake. "Eva, I've come back for you."
Slowly she stirred, her eyes fluttered open, and she vaguely stared up at him. "Please let me sleep a little longer," she murmured.
"You're safe now. I'm taking you out of this place."
She recognized him then and her vision became blurred with tears. "I knew you would come for me… for us all."
"We came within a hair of not making it:"
She looked into his eyes and smiled gamely. "I never doubted for a moment."
Then he kissed her, long, soft, and tenderly.
Levant's medical team went to work immediately, treating the captives while the combat units began evacuating those who could walk to the upper level where they were loaded aboard the personnel carriers. Initial fears proved true as the operation went slowly because many were too weak to move on their own and had to be carried out.
After seeing that Eva and the other women and children were cared for and on their way to the surface, Pitt borrowed a satchel of plastic explosives from Levant's demolition expert and then returned to a now conscious O'Bannion who sat beside an ore car under the watchful eye of a tough lady commando.
"Come along, O'Bannion," Pitt ordered. "We're going for a stroll."
O'Bannion's litham had unraveled and fallen away and now revealed a face heavily scarred and disfigured from a premature dynamite explosion during his younger mining days in Brazil. His ugly features were heightened by a mouth leaking blood and the lack of two front teeth, knocked out by the blow from Pitt's gun butt.
"Where?" he asked abruptly through swollen lips.
"To pay our respects to the dead."
The guard stood aside as Pitt roughly pulled O'Bannion to his feet and prodded him along the ore car tracks toward the burial crypt. Neither man spoke as they walked through, the mine, occasionally stepping around the body of a Tuareg guard who had made the mistake of resisting Levant's assault force. When they came to the cavern of the dead, O'Bannion hesitated, but Pitt coldly pushed him inside.
O'Bannion turned and faced Pitt, his eyes still contemptuous. "Why did you bring me here, to lecture me on cruelty to my fellow man before you execute me?"
"Not at all," Pitt replied quietly. "The lesson is obvious without a lecture, and no, I'm not going to execute you. That would be too quick, too clean. A quick flash of pain and then darkness. No, I think you deserve a more appropriate end."
For the first time a flicker of fear danced in O'Bannion's eyes. "What do you have in mind?"
Pitt swung the muzzle of his weapon around the stacks of cadavers. "I'm going to give you time to contemplate your brutality and greed."
O'Bannion looked confused. "Why? You're badly mistaken if you expect me to cry for forgiveness and beg for leniency."
Pitt looked over at a pile of bodies, at the frail, starved frame and open unstaring eyes of a girl no more than ten years old. Anger flamed and seethed within him and he fought desperately to control his emotions.
"You're going to die, O'Bannion, but very slowly, suffering the agony of thirst and hunger you imposed on these pitiful dead around you. By the time your friends Kazim and Massarde find you, providing they even bother to search, you'll have joined the rest of your victims."
"Shoot me, kill me now!" O'Bannion savagely demanded.
Pitt smiled a smile as cold as dry ice and said nothing. He jabbed his gun at O'Bannion, forcing him to retreat to the end of the cavern. Then Pitt stepped into the entrance tunnel, placed the plastic explosives at different intervals, and set the timers on the igniters. He gave O'Bannion one final callous wave and ran out into the shaft, crouching behind a train of ore cars.
Four loud, booming detonations, each fractionally following the other, hurled dust and splintered support timbers from the crypt's entrance tunnel into the main shaft. The explosions echoed through the mines for several moments before an eerie silence took over. Pitt wondered in dumb anger if he had placed the explosives in the wrong positions. But then he heard a faint reverberating sound that amplified into a great rumble as the roof of the tunnel collapsed under hundreds of tons of rock and sealed the entrance to the burial chamber.
Pitt waited until the dust began to settle before he casually shouldered his gun and began walking back to the evacuation area, along the ore car rails, whistling "I've been working on the railroad."
Giordino heard a sound and then saw a movement in a crosscut shaft to his left. He stepped along the train rails until he came to a solitary, empty ore car. Silently edging along the wall, careful his boots did not strike any loose rock, he crept closer. Quick as a cat, he leaped over the rails and rammed the muzzle into the ore car.
"Throw out your gun," he said sharply.
Caught by surprise, the Tuareg guard slowly rose from the empty bucket of the ore car, his machine gun held high over his head. He could not speak English and did not fully comprehend Giordino's command, but he quickly recognized a lost cause. His eyes followed Giordino's gun as it, jabbed at him and moved off to the side. He caught the message and dropped his weapon over the edge of the ore car.
"Melika!" Giordino snapped.
The guard shook his head, but Giordino read the look of abject fear in the eyes. He pressed his gun muzzle against the guard's lips and pushed it into his mouth while flexing his finger on the trigger: