He was right on the first count, wrong on the second. As they crested the last dune, he saw a dark- skinned man holding a burning newspaper in one hand that was rolled up in a torch. The intruder was absorbed in kicking out the windshield in preparation of incinerating the interior of the Jeep. This one was not dressed like the others. He wore an intricate white headdress that was swathed in such a way that only his eyes showed. His body was draped in a flowing caftan-like robe that swirled around his sandaled ankles. He failed to notice Pitt bearing down on him with Eva in tow.
Pitt halted and breathed the words into Eva's ear. 'If I screw up, run like hell for the road and stop a passing car.' Aloud he shouted, 'Freeze!'
Startled, the man twisted around, his eyes wide but menacing. In the same breath as his shout, Pitt lowered his head and charged. The man thrust the burning paper in front of him, but Pitt's head had already driven into his chest, breaking the sternum with the accompanying sharp snap of cracking ribs. At the same time, Pitt's right fist swung up into the man's crotch.
The menace in the man's eyes bulged into a look of shock. Then a strangling, tortured gasp escaped his gaping mouth as the wind burst from his lungs. He was thrust backward, and his feet left the sand as Pitt's wild attack lifted him in the air.
The lighted torch flew over Pitt's back and landed in the sand. The man's expression went from shock to pain and terror. His face congested and flushed crimson as he was thrown backward and collapsed. Pitt quickly knelt over him and searched his pockets. There was nothing, no weapons, no identification. Not even a few loose coins or a comb.
'Who sent you, pal?' Pitt demanded, grabbing the man by the neck and shaking him like a Doberman with a rat.
The reaction was not what Pitt expected. Through the torment and agony; the man gave Pitt a sinister stare-a stare, Pitt thought, curiously like a man who had gotten the last laugh. Then the dark-skinned man grinned, showing a set of white teeth with one missing. His jaw dropped open slightly, and then appeared to clamp down. Too late Pitt realized that his adversary had bitten into a lethal rubbercoated cyanide pill. It had been concealed in the man's mouth as a false tooth.
Foam seeped from the man's lips. The poisonous pill was very powerful and death came quickly. Pitt and Eva watched helplessly as the strength melted from the man's body. The eyes remained open, blank and glazed in death.
'Is he--?' Eva broke off and then tried again. 'Is he dead?'
'I think it's safe to say he's expired,' Pitt said without a shred of remorse.
Eva held Pitt's arm for support. Her hands felt cold under the African heat and she was shivering from shock. Her eyes were stricken. She had never watched anyone die before. She began to feel sick but somehow managed to control her stomach.
'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
