Dirk Pitt 11 - Sahara by Cussler Clive

Author:Cussler, Clive [Clive, Cussler,]
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

Melika climbed onto the electric locomotive and nodded at a TV camera mounted on a cross beam. “Don't waste your time thinking of escape. You're under constant surveillance. Only two men made it out of the mines. Their bones were found by nomads.”

She gave off a witch's cackle and rode off down the mine shaft. They watched until she had disappeared and all sounds faded. Then Giordino raised his hands and let them drop to his sides. “I think we've been had,” he muttered as he sadly counted up to thirty-five empty ore cars.

Pitt lifted the chain attached between his hand and ankle manacles and hobbled over to a large stack of beams, waiting to shore up the tunnel as it was excavated. He paced off one beam and did the same with an ore car. Then he nodded.

“We should be able to wrap this up in six hours.”

Giordino gave him a very sour look indeed. “If you believe that, you'd better sign up for a course in elementary physics.”

“A little trick I learned picking raspberries one summer in high school,” said Pitt curtly.

“I hope it fools the surveillance camera,” Giordino groaned.

Pitt grinned insidiously. “Watch and learn.”

The guards came and went with irregularity as Melika promised. They seldom stayed but a minute, satisfying themselves that the two prisoners were feverishly loading ore cars as if attempting to set some kind of record. In six and a half hours all thirty-five cars appeared brimming over with ore.

“Giordino eased to a sitting position with his back against a timber. ”You load 16 tons and what do you get?" he said, quoting the song.

“Another day older and deeper in debt,” Pitt finished.

“So that's how you picked raspberries.”

Pitt settled next to Giordino and smiled. “During a trip around the states with a school buddy one summer, we stopped at a farm in Oregon that advertised for berry pickers. We thought it would be easy gas money and applied. Whey paid fifty cents a lug, which if I remember correctly, held about eight small boxes. What we didn't know is that raspberries are much smaller and softer than strawberries. Picking as fast as we could go it seemed forever to fill up a lugs”

So you loaded the bottoms with dirt and layered the tops with berries."

Pitt laughed. “At that, we only averaged thirty-six cents an hour.”

“What do you think will happen when the old bitch finds out we laid timbers as false floors in the ore cars and only piled a few rocks on top to make them look fully loaded?”

“She won't be happy.”

“Throwing a handful of dust on the lens of the TV camera to blur our images was a nice touch. The guards never caught on.”

“At least our little con job bought us some time without exhausting our reserves.”

“I'm so thirsty I could drink dust.”

“If we don't get water soon, we'll be in no shape to make a break.”

Giordino eyed the chains on his manacles and then the rails under the ore cars. “I wonder if we can cut our chains by laying them on the rails and running a car over them.

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