“And the Admiral?” Giordino asked succinctly. “What will he pin on us?”

Gunn turned from the monitor and looked at them, his face suddenly turned dead serious. “A dirty, rotten job, I suspect.”

“Didn’t he drop a hint?” Pitt pressed.

“Nothing that made any sense.” Gunn stared at the ceiling, recalling. “When I asked him why the urgency, he quoted a verse. I don’t remember the exact words. Something about a ship’s shadow and charmed water being red.”

Pitt quoted:

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,

Like April hoarfrost spread;

But where the ship’s huge shadow lay,

The charmed water burned away,

a still and awful red.

“A verse from `The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”

Gunn looked at Pitt with new respect. “I didn’t know you could quote poetry.”

Pitt laughed. “I memorized a few verses, that’s all.”

“I wonder what Sandecker has on his evil mind?” said Giordino. “Not like the old buzzard to get cryptic.”

“No,” Pitt said with uneasy trepidation, “not like him at all.”

<<8>>

The pilot of the Massarde Enterprises helicopter flew north and eastward from the capital city of Bamako. For two and a half hours the vast desolation unrolled below like miniature scenery pasted on a scroll. After two hours, he spotted the sun’s glint off steel rails in the distance. He banked and began following the tracks that seemingly traveled to nowhere.

The railroad, only completed the month before, ended at the immense solar waste detoxification project in the heart of the Malian desert. The facility was called Fort Foureau after a long-abandoned French Foreign Legion fort several miles away. From the project site the tracks ran 1600 kilometers in a nearly straight line across the border into Mauritania before finally terminating at the manmade port of Cape Tafarit on the Atlantic Ocean.

General Kazim peered from the lush comfort of the executive helicopter as the pilot caught and passed a long train of sealed, hazardous waste container cars pulled by two diesel locomotives. The train was outbound to Mauritania, having emptied its deadly cargo and turned around.

He smiled craftily as he turned his stare from the waste cars and nodded to the steward, who refreshed his glass of champagne and offered a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

The French, Kazim mused, they never seemed out of reach of champagne, truffles, and pate. He considered them an insular race who only halfheartedly tried to build and maintain an empire. How the general citizenry must have sighed with collective relief, he thought, when they were forced to give up their outposts in Africa and the Far East. Deep down it angered him that the French had not disappeared entirely from Mali. Though they severed their colonial leash in 1960, the French had maintained their influence and a taut grip on the economy, exercising strong control over most all of the nation’s mining, transportation, industrial and energy development. Many French businessmen saw investment opportunity and bought heavily into Malian ventures. But none had dug their money shovel deeper into the Sahara sands than Yves Massarde.