"Oh brother." Giordino mopped his brow again. "I don't look forward to that little scam again."
Pitt grinned, gave Giordino a friendly punch on the shoulder, and turned to the rear of the train. "Don't get carried away just yet. Our friends are still with us."
They remained motionless there on the roof of the container, holding the air-conditioning panel as the guards' armored car was uncoupled and pulled away by a small electric switch engine. The four diesels' locomotives also dropped their rear coupling and chugged off toward a siding where a long row of empty cars was waiting to be hauled back to the port in Mauritania.
Safe for the moment, Pitt and Giordino stayed where they were and calmly waited for something to happen. The dock was lit with big overhead arc lamps and appeared deserted of life. A long line of strange-looking vehicles sat like squat bugs on the loading dock. They each had four wheels with no tires, flat, level cargo beds, and little else except a small box-like unit that extended from the front and contained lights and a bug-eyed lens aimed forward.
Pitt was about to reattach the air-conditioner panel when he caught a movement above his head. Fortunately, he saw the TV camera mounted on a pole by the dock before it swung through its full arc and found them. A quick look around the dock, and he spotted four more cameras.
"Stay put," he alerted Giordino. "They've got remote sensing equipment everywhere."
They ducked back behind the panel and were figuring the next move when the lights on the derricks suddenly flashed on and their electric motors began to hum. None had a cabin for an operator. They were all operated by remote control from a command center somewhere within the project. They moved along the train and dropped horizontal metal shafts that slid into slots on the top edges of the containers. Then a short blast from a horn sounded and the derricks hoisted the big containers from their rail cars, swung over the dock, and lowered them onto one of the flatbed trucks. The lifting shafts were removed and the derricks went on to the next container.
For the next few minutes they remained behind the panel, not moving as the nearest derrick poised directly above them, eased in the shafts, and
picked up their container. Pitt was impressed the entire operation went so smoothly without human presence. Once the container was firmly settled on the truck, there was a buzz and it began to silently roll along the dock and then down a long ramp that led into an open shaft that corkscrewed underground.
"Who's driving?" Giordino murmured.
"A robotic transporter," answered Pitt. "Controlled from a command center somewhere in the project."
They quickly replaced the panel and tightened it with just a couple of screws. Next they crawled to the forward edge of the container and studied the scene unfolding around them.
"I've got to admit," said Giordino softly, "I've never seen efficiency like this anywhere."
Pitt had to agree, it was an intriguing sight. The curving ramp, a marvel of engineering, went deep, deep into the bowels of the desert. Already, he reasoned, the transporter and its cargo had traveled over 100 meters straight down, passing four different levels that traveled beyond view into the earth.
Pitt studied the large signs above the passages. They were identified with symbols as well as terminology in French. The upper levels were designated for biological waste, the lower levels for chemical waste. Pitt began to wonder what the container they were riding on carried inside.
He found the mystery intensifying. Why would a reactor that burned waste be buried so deep underground? To his way of thinking it should have been above the surface near the solar concentrators.
At last the ramp straightened out into an immense cavern that seemed to stretch on forever. The ceiling was a good four stories high with rock-hewn side tunnels spreading in all directions like spokes on a wheel. It looked to Pitt that a work of nature had been expanded by an enormous excavation project.
Pitt's senses were probing ahead of him like antennae. He was continually surprised to still see no people, no workers or machine operators. Every movement in what he perceived to be a storage cavern was controlled by automation. The electrically powered transporter, like a drone ant, followed the one ahead and turned into one of the side tunnels that was marked by a red sign with a black diagonal slash that hung from the ceiling. Up ahead came various sounds and echoes.
"A land office business," said Giordino, pointing to a number of transporters moving in the opposite direction, the doors of their cargo containers open and revealing empty interiors.
After moving almost a full kilometer the truck began to slow as the noises grew louder. Around a bend it moved into a vast chamber, filled and stacked floor to roof with thousands of box-shaped containers built from concrete, all painted yellow with black markings. A robotic machine was off-loading the barrels from the cargo containers and stacking them with a sea of other containers that rose toward the roof of the cavern.
Pitt's teeth ground softly together. He stared in growing shock and suddenly wished he was somewhere else, any place but in that underground chamber of deadly horror.
The barrels were marked with the symbol for radioactivity. He and Giordino had stumbled on Fort Foureau's secret, an underground dumping ground for nuclear waste on an unheard-of colossal scale.
Massarde took one long comprehensive look at the TV monitor and shook his head in wonderment. Then he turned to his aide, Felix Verenne.
"Those men are incredible," he murmured.
"How did they get through security?" mused Verenne.
"By the same method they escaped my houseboat, stole General Kazim's car, and drove halfway across the Sahara. Cunning and dogged persistence."
"Should we prevent their escape from the storage chamber?" asked Verenne. "Keep them trapped in there until they die of radiation sickness?"
Massarde thought for a moment, and then shook his head. "No, send security to apprehend them. Give them a good scrubbing to remove any contamination and bring them here. I'd like to talk with Mr. Pitt again before I have him disposed of."
Massarde's security guards captured them twenty minutes later, after they rode inside an empty container car up to the surface from the waste storage cavern. They had dropped from the roof of the container and into the emptied interior. A concealed TV camera had caught them in an unguarded moment before they could slip inside.