Sahara (Dirk Pitt 11)

"But why kill himself?" she murmured. "For what purpose?"

To protect others connected with your failed murder attempt," Pitt answered.

"He'd willingly take his own life to remain silent?" she asked with disbelief.

"A loyal fanatic to his boss," Pitt said quietly. "I suspect that if he hadn't taken cyanide on his own, he'd have had help."

Eva shook her head. "This is insane. You're talking a conspiracy."

"Face facts, lady, someone went to a lot of trouble to eliminate you." Pitt stared at Eva. She looked like a small girl who was lost in a department store. "You have an enemy who doesn't want you in Africa, and if you expect to go on living, I suggest you take the next plane back to the States."

She looked dazed. "No, not while people are dying."

"You're tough to convince," he said.

"Put yourself in my place."

"Better yet, your colleagues' shoes. They may be on a hit list too. We'd better get back to Cairo and warn them. If any of this is tied to your research and investigation, their lives are also in danger."

Eva looked down at the dead man. "What do you intend to do with him?"

Pitt shrugged. "Throw him in the Med with his friends." Then a devilish smile rode his craggy face. "I'd love to see the face of their ringleader when he learns his assassins have gone missing without a trace and you're still walking around as if nothing happened."

Company officials at the Backworld Expeditions offices in Cairo realized something was wrong when the desert safari group failed to arrive in the fabled city of Timbuktu on schedule. Twenty-four hours later, pilots of the aircraft that was chartered to return the tourists to Marrakech, Morocco, flew a search pattern to the north but saw no sign of the vehicles.

Fears intensified after three days passed and Major Fairweather had still failed to report in. Mali government authorities were alerted and they cooperated fully, sending out military air and motorized vehicle patrols to backtrack the safari's known route across the desert.

Panic began to reign after the Malians failed to find any sighting of people or the Land Rovers during a concentrated search lasting four days. An army helicopter flew over Asselar and reported seeing nothing but a dead and abandoned village.

Then on the seventh day, a French oil prospecting team, pushing south along the Trans-Saharan Motor Track, discovered Major Ian Fairweather. The sky over the flat, rock-strewn plain was open and empty. The sun burned down and baked the sand so that the heat waves shimmered and danced. The French geologists were astonished when a distorted apparition suddenly appeared through a wavering heat mirage. One moment the image seemed to float free, and then expand and retract to grotesque proportions in the hot, freakish air.

As the range closed they distinguished a figure waving his arms like a crazy man and stumbling directly toward them. Then he staggered to a stop, swayed like a small whirlwind, and slowly crumpled into the sand face first. The shocked driver of the Renault truck nearly braked too late and was forced to swerve around the fallen man, halting in a flurry of dust.

Fairweather was more dead than alive. He was badly dehydrated and the sweat on his body had crusted into a fine layer of white salt crystals. He soon regained consciousness as the French oilmen slowly trickled water past his swollen tongue. Four hours later, his body fluids restored after drinking almost 2 gallons of water, Fairweather thickly croaked out the story of his escape from the massacre at Asselar.

To the one Frenchman on the prospecting team who understood English, Fairweather's tale sounded like a drunken fabrication, but it also rang with urgent conviction. After a brief discussion, the rescuers carefully lifted Fairweather into the back of the truck and headed toward the city of Gao on the Niger River. They arrived just before dark and drove straight to the city hospital.

After kindly seeing that Fairweather was comfortably bedded down and attended by a doctor and nurse, the French thought it wise to inform the Chief of the local Malian Security Forces. They were asked to write a lengthy report while the Colonel in command of Gao headquarters apprised his superiors in the capital city of Bamako.

To the Frenchman's surprise and indignation they were detained and jailed. In the morning an interrogation team arrived from Bamako and grilled them separately about their discovery of Fairweather. Demands to contact their consulate were ignored. When the oil geologists refused to cooperate, the interrogation turned ugly.

The French were not the first men to enter the city's security building and not be seen again.

When supervisors at the oil company headquarters in Marseilles received no word from their oil exploration team, they became concerned and requested a search. The Malian Security Forces made a show of sweeping the desert again but claimed to have found nothing but the oil company's abandoned Renault truck.

The names of the French geologists and the missing tourists from Backworld Expeditions were simply added to the list of outsiders who disappeared and perished in the vast desert.

Dr. Haroun Madani stood on the steps of the Gao hospital, beneath the brick portico with its unfathomable designs running around the top of the walls. He stared nervously down the dusty street running between the seedy old colonial buildings and the single-story mud brick houses. A breeze from the north blew a light coating of sand over the city, once the capital of three great empires but now a decaying relic of French colonial days.

The call to evening prayers drifted over the city from the high-towered minarets that rose above the mosque. The faithful were no longer summoned to prayer by a Muslim holy man, or muezzin, who climbed the narrow steps inside the minarets and wailed from the balcony. Now the muezzin stayed on the ground and offered the prayers to Allah and the Prophet Mohammed through microphones and loudspeakers.

A short distance from the mosque, a -three-quarter moon reflected its beam on the Niger River. Wide, scenic, its current slow and gentle, the Niger is a mere shadow of its former course. Once mighty and deep, decades of drought had lowered it to a shallow stream, plied by fleets of small sailing ships called pinnaces. Its waters once lapped at the base of the mosque. Now they sluggishly flowed nearly two city blocks away.

The Malian people are a mixture of the lighter-skinned descendants of the French and Berbers, the dark brown of the desert Arabs and Moors, and the black Africans. Dr. Madani was coal black. His facial features were Negroid with deep-set ebony eyes and a wide flattened nose. He was a big bull of a man in his late forties, beefy around the middle, with a wide square jawed head.

His ancestors had been Mandingo slaves who were brought north by the Moroccans who overran the country in 1591. His parents had farmed the lush lands south of the Niger when he was a boy. He was raised by a major in the French Foreign Legion, educated and sent through medical school in Paris. Why or how this came about he was never told.