masonry nail and got his right hand free.
Deep hyperventilating gasps followed as he then used his teeth to extract the nail from his bloody right palm.
Clenched in his jaws, the nail came free and blood issued from the hole in his palm. Jack quickly unlooped his belt from his trousers and with his teeth created a tourniquet.
At which point, he promptly blacked out again, passing out for an entire hour this time.
He woke to the sounds of chanting, dancing, and drums.
“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”
Now he had to deal with the issue of the slab on top of him.
All he needed was one crack in it, and he found it near where his right hand had been nailed down.
Into this crack he jammed a chewing-gum-sized wad of C-2 plastic explosive—the high-impact low-radius explosive he kept in a compartment in his artificial arm for use in enemy door locks in case of capture.
The C-2 went off—the distant bang Pooh would hear—and a long fatal crack snaked up the length of the slab, breaking it perfectly in two. The partial slab to Jack’s right fell flush to the floor of the pit, providing a narrow aperture through which he could squeeze.
After some careful wriggling, he was all but out, save for his artificial left arm, which still held the other side of the slab off the ground.
A tough predicament—there was no way he could lift the half slab off his titanium arm. So he did the only thing he could.
He simply unlatched the forearm section of his false arm from the bicep section and rolled out.
And so Jack stood at the base of the pit, with one full arm and one half arm, to the sounds of chants and drumbeats—only now he was free.
Another wad of C-2 cracked the section of slab above his artificial forearm, releasing it, and Jack quickly reattached it and tied a rag tightly around his wounded right palm.
Then he climbed the ladder in the wall of the pit and commenced his own one-man war against the guards of his father’s mine.
JACK STOOD before the crowd of guards looking like Death incarnate.
His eyes were bloodshot and a ring of his own blood was caked around his mouth, blood from the masonry nail that he had wrenched from his own hand with his teeth.
But he was still just one man against thirty.
It was then that he brought his spare hand into view. In it was a fire extinguisher, grabbed from over by the gantry elevator.
With a sudden blast of white carbon dioxide, he fired the extinguisher into the burning cross, and it went out, plunging the mine into darkness.
Absolute black.
The guards panicked, started shouting. Then there came the sound of many feet shuffling, moving, and—
—Bam!—
—the mine’s dim emergency lights came on, revealing Jack standing in exactly the same position as before, beside the cross…
…only now an army stood behind him.
An army of several hundred slave miners that he had released from their underground quarters before confronting the guards.
The looks on the faces of the slaves said it all: hatred, anger,vengeance. This would be a battle without mercy to avenge their horrific treatment, to even the score for months, years of slavery.
With a piercing cry, the crowd of slave miners rushed forward, attacking the guards.
It was a slaughter.
Some of the guards tried to get their guns from a nearby rack, but they were intercepted on the way, crash- tackled to the ground, and stomped to death. Others were grabbed by many hands and hurled into the arsenic pool.
A few tried to flee for the gantry elevator—the only exit from the mine—but they were set upon by several dozen slave miners waiting there with nail-studded planks. They were clubbed to death.
Within minutes, all the guards were dead and the mine was eerily silent in the dim emergency lighting.
Jack quickly set about releasing Pooh Bear from his cage. Once he was free and standing on solid ground, Pooh gazed at Jack in horror.
“By Allah, Jack, you look like shit.”
Bloody and filthy and weary beyond all human endurance, Jack smiled a crooked smile. “Yeah—”
Then he fainted into Pooh Bear’s arms.
JACK AWOKE to the wonderful sensation of warm sunlight on his face.
He opened his eyes, to find himself lying on a cot in a guardhouse just inside the upper entrance to the mine, sunshine slanting in through the window.
