"Storage for the gold bars arranged so that the weight would be equalized," he said finally. "Hell to fly, I'd guess."
"I suspect so," Tidyman said and nodded. "When it was discovered, there was a set of auxiliary fuel tanks in the bomb bay made from fifty-gallon drums. An extra five hundred gallons, which must have stretched their weight to the limit."
Rafi appeared beside them.
"You seem to know a great deal about it," said Holliday to the Egyptian.
"Indeed I do," answered Tidyman. "Not surprising since I was the one who discovered her."
"So you removed the gold, hid it away," said Holliday. As casually as he could he slipped his right hand into the pocket of his jacket.
"Oh, dear me, no." Tidyman laughed. "I'm nothing more than a toiler in the fields, a journeyman smuggling cigarettes and a few guns from time to time. A billion and a half dollars in gold would be a death sentence for a man like me. That sort of greed gets your throat cut in a Cairo back alley or the Bouhadema slums in Benghazi. No, no, Colonel Holliday, I put the bullion in much safer hands."
"You knew who we were right from the start, didn't you?" Holliday said.
"Of course, just as I know that you have a small pistol in the right-hand pocket of your jacket. Be so good as to remove it with your thumb and forefinger. Then drop it on the ground." Tidyman's own weapon, an old Helwan 9mm, appeared in his left hand and he put the muzzle up to Rafi's temple. "You have until the count of three before I blow your young friend's brains all over the nice clean sand."
"You traitorous son of a bitch," breathed Rafi hotly, his voice shaking with anger. "I never trusted you, not from the very beginning."
"The wise man doesn't insult he who has a gun to his head," said Tidyman. His eyes on Rafi, the Egyptian began to count aloud. "One… two…"
Holliday brought the palm-sized Hawg.45 out of his pocket and dropped it at his feet.
"Now kick it away," instructed Tidyman.
Holliday did as he was told. Tidyman stepped back three paces, well out of range of any foolish attack, the pistol in his hand still raised.
"So whose safe hands did you put the gold into?" Holliday asked.
Tidyman tilted his head to the left.
"Theirs," he said.
Holliday and Rafi turned to look.
A hundred feet away half a dozen men sat perched on camels. They were dressed in full Tuareg costume, long indigo robes, almost black robes, indigo turbans and veils worn like masks over the bottom half of their faces. Five of the men carried Chinese Norinco Type 86S automatic rifles, a Bullpup variant of the Russian AK-47. The sixth man carried a Norinco rocket-propelled grenade launcher strapped across his back. A long tether made from braided leather was snubbed around the high horn of his saddle, leading back to three pack camels behind them. Chain bridles were threaded through their wide nostrils to keep them in check. The camels had a uniformly sour expression on their faces, as though they were all chewing something foul-tasting.
"My brothers from the Brotherhood of the Temple of Isis, the men who kidnapped your friend."
13
Tidyman drove the Goat into the lee of the spine of rock, pulling it in as close to the sandstone wall as he could. It was easy enough to see why. The rock promontory ran almost exactly north-south. Left where it was, the sun rising over the length of rock in the morning would cast an enormous shadow running away from the truck and easily visible from an air patrol passing overhead.
The men in Tuareg dress spoke briefly to Tidyman, then gave him a bundle of robes from one of the pack camels. Fifteen minutes later the Egyptian, Holliday and Rafi, now dressed exactly like the six armed men, were aboard the trailing camels and moving west, away from the wreckage of the B-17. Ten minutes after that Your Heart's Desire had been swallowed up by the endless sand. To a distant observer on the ground or in the air, they would look no more ominous than a plodding caravan of nomads.
They rode for twelve long days, heading deeper and deeper into the Great Sand Sea. At night the camels would be rope hobbled and tied to simple picket lines to keep them from wandering off and the men would set up simple leather tents over bended "withies," skeletal supports of thin twigs. Tea was boiled on simple stoves made out of galvanized bowls placed over tin cans filled with dried camel dung. Meals usually consisted of goat meat jerky or nocturnal desert rat, fennec fox, and even surprisingly succulent sand vipers the men sometimes hunted in the late evenings.
At night Holliday and Rafi were inevitably bound with ropes and guarded by at least one of the men with automatic rifles. From the moment they had been captured, Tidyman kept well away from the two men, sleeping in his own tent. During the long, tedious days Tidyman rode the last pack animal, while Holliday rode the first. An armed guard rode in the rear.
Holliday had no idea where they were going. All he knew was that they were traveling south-west, the sun setting ahead of them and well away to his right-hand side. They were headed roughly in the direction of the Niger border, the same route that Your Heart's Desire had been taking when some long-ago disaster struck; perhaps a multiple engine failure, a control malfunction, or maybe a fuel leak. It didn't matter; whatever the problem, it had been enough to precipitate the desperate act of bailing out over the desert.
He tried to imagine what it would have been like for the bomber crew, most likely only four men since there would have been no need for gunners: pilot, copilot, engineer and navigator.
They would have hit the silk low because the aircraft would have been flying that way to conserve fuel. They would have hit the desert hard but close together, and then they would have taken stock of their situation. It couldn't have been good.
The men would almost certainly have had neither water nor food, and if by some chance they did, it wouldn't have been much-sandwiches perhaps, or a thermos or two of coffee. Four men, probably relatively small in stature, as most airmen were at the time, would last seventy-two hours at most and probably much less if they traveled in the heat of the day. They would have known that, but they would have tried anyway. But how far can a person walk in the shifting sands of a desert in the three or four days they had before they collapsed and died? Sixty miles, seventy, a hundred at most. Not enough.
Somewhere along the way they would have started stripping off their clothes, the worst thing they could do since it would only accelerate the evaporation of their sweat, hastening their dehydration. Their tongues would thicken, their lips would crack and their noses would begin to bleed.
Eventually they'd stop perspiring and fever would set in. As the cells in their brains dried out convulsions and hallucinations would begin. Trapped within the skull the cerebral fluid would actually begin to boil. Soon after that the kidneys and other major organs would begin to fail one after the other, leading quickly to toxemia, plasma loss, coma and eventually death.
It would be an inexorable, inevitable, excruciating way to die. Somewhere in the rolling sands around him, probably mummified, were the remains of those four men, anonymous and long forgotten, their mission lost to eternity.
Somehow, as Holliday plodded on hour after hour, it became terribly important that he find out the names of the crew of Your Heart's Desire, and he vowed to do just that if he somehow managed to get out of his own predicament. Failed or not, the mission and the men who flew it deserved their small place in history.
On the thirteenth day of their journey the landscape began to change; the rolling dunes gave way to smaller, more sculpted waves of sand, broken with hard crust desert and stretches of barren, hard, rocky plateaus with very little sand. They traveled faster on the plains and traveled longer, sometimes far into the numbingly cold nights. There was a tension in the air; Holliday had seen it often enough on forced marches-they were nearing their destination. It couldn't be soon enough for him; Peggy had been missing for more than three weeks now and Holliday was beginning to fear terribly for her safety. Rafi was almost frantic with worry.