Sahara (Dirk Pitt 11)

"How many women and children all told are down here?" Giordino asked with an expression clouded with wrath.

"The current count is nine women with four small children," Fairweather answered.

"Don't you see," Eva said softly. "The sooner you get free and bring help, the more people you'll save."

Pitt didn't need any further convincing. He turned back to face Hopper and Fairweather. "Okay, let's hear your plan."

It was a plan shot full of holes, the scheme of desperate men with little or no resources, incredibly oversimplified, but just crazy enough to work.

An hour later, Melika and her guards walked through the cavern dungeon and forced the slave laborers into the main chamber where they were assembled in work gangs before moving toward their assigned stations in the mines. It seemed to Pitt as if she took devious delight in wielding her thong right and left against the sea of unprotected flesh, cursing and beating men and women alike who looked as if they belonged in coffins.

"The witch never tires of adding sears to the helpless," Hopper seethed.

"Melika means queen, a name she gave herself," Grimes said to Pitt and Giordino. "But we call her the wicked witch of the west because she was a matron in a women's prison in the United States."

"You think she's rotten now," Pitt muttered. "Wait until she finds the ore cars Al and I covered with a facade of rock."

Giordino and Hopper hovered beside Pitt as he circled his arm around Eva's waist and guided her outside. Melika spied Pitt and moved toward him, stopped, and then stared at Eva menacingly. She grinned, knowing she could enrage Pitt not by striking him but laying the thong on Eva.

She swung but Giordino stepped between them and the thong made a sickening slapping sound as it met and bounced off his flexed biceps.

Except for an angry red welt that formed and began to ooze blood, Giordino showed no ill effects from a blow that would have left any normal man clutching his arm and groaning in agony. Without so much as a tic, he gave her a cold stare and said, "Is that the best you can do?"

The mob went dead still. They all halted in mid-stride, holding their breath for the storm that would surely come. Five seconds passed as if time was frozen in ice. Melika stood numb from the unexpected show of boldness, and then she quickly turned crimson with crazed anger. She reacted as though she couldn't cope with ridicule, snarling like a wounded bear and lashing out at Giordino with the thong.

"Restrain yourself!" came a commanding voice at the gate.

Melika spun around. Selig O'Bannion was standing just outside the dungeon, a giant amid munchkins. She held the thong poised in mid-air for a few moments before lowering it, glaring at O'Bannion in humiliation, her eyes coals of bitter resentment, like a neighborhood bully chastised in front of her victims by the cop on the beat.

"Do not injure Pitt and Giordino," ordered O'Bannion. "I want them to live the longest so they can carry the others into the burial chamber."

"Where's the sport in that?" said Pitt.

O'Bannion laughed softly and nodded at Melika. "Breaking Pitt physically will give me little enjoyment. Breaking his mind into quivering mush will be a happy experience for both of us. See that they have a light work load for the next ten shifts."

Melika begrudgingly nodded her head in compliance as O'Bannion mounted a locomotive and rode into one of the shafts for an inspection tour. "Out, you stinking scum," she growled, waving the blood-stained thong above her grotesque head and barrel-like body.

Eva stumbled, barely able to keep on her feet, as Pitt helped her to where the laborers assembled. "Al and I will get through," he promised her. "But you've got to hang on until we return with an armed force to rescue you and these other poor souls."

"Now I have a reason for living," she said softly. "I'll be waiting."

He kissed her on the lips and the bruises on her face lightly. Then he turned to Hopper, Grimes, and Fairweather, who were standing around them in a protective ring. "Take care of her."

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"We will," Hopper nodded in assurance.

"I wish you wouldn't deviate from our original plan," said Fairweather. "Hiding you in one of the ore cars going up to the crusher is safer than your idea."

Pitt shook his head. "We'd still have to move through the ore-crushing level, then the refining and recovery areas before reaching the surface. I don't like the odds. Taking the direct route up the executive elevator and through the engineering offices has more appeal."

"If there's a choice between sneaking out the back door or strutting out the front," said Giordino plaintively, "he'll go for style every time."

"Do you have a rough guess as to the number of armed guards?" Pitt directed his question to Fairweather because the safari leader had endured the mines longer than Hopper and his people.

"A rough guess?" Fairweather thought a moment. "Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. The engineers are armed too. I've counted about six of them besides 0'Bannion."