by Gar Wilson
Annotation
Jeremiah Blackwell had a dream. He was going to be King of Africa. But first he had to amass the money and tactical support. That was where the Communists came in.
They were prepared to pay a fortune for an act of destruction that would plunge the Middle East into chaos. Blackwell had just such an act already planned. He would destroy Egypt's Aswan High Dam.
The mighty structure, one of the wonders of the modern world, was horrifyingly vulnerable to Blackwell's rockets and his 300 fanatical assault troops.
But the free world has shock troops of its own — Phoenix Force! Only unspeakable catastrophe can stop America's five-man army... Had the fire-blazing force finally met its match?
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Gar Wilson
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About the Author
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Gar Wilson
Aswan Hellbox
First edition November 1983
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Thomas P. Ramirez and Sergeant Rex Swenson for their contributions to this work.
1
The Black Cobras, two hundred eighty men strong, came upon the woebegone village of Abu Darash at roughly 0900 hours. They were hungry, weary, thirsty. And mean.
On the run since shortly after midnight, fleeing the scene of a firefight just inside the Chad border — where they had left behind at least forty dead — they were in no mood for the usual amenities. Vicious and surly, they would casually cut down anyone who so much as crossed their path.
Already the blazing April sun was turning the desert into a blistering hell. The sky was shimmering, suggesting far-off rivers, lakes, oceans stretching in everlasting taunt where absolutely no water existed. The searing wind, the heat — temperatures would easily reach one hundred ten degrees by midafternoon — the mirages' empty promise infuriated the sullen black mercenaries, darkening their mood to a dangerous flashpoint.
All this was to the misfortune of the hundred twenty-two inhabitants of Abu Darash.
Most of the village's men and boys were in the fields, tending to what grains grew in the desert; or they were driving goat herds to sparse vegetation. Only the old men, women and children remained behind to face the initial wrath of General Jeremiah Blackwell and the scum composing his army.
The troops had been seen a long way off, their military convoy throwing up high clouds of dust on the horizon. When the first dozen of the Unimog armored trucks came into view, the villagers remained more curious than frightened. After all, Abu Darash was isolated, at the end of the world. Nothing ever happened here.
But as the armored Land Rover swept around the convoy's right flank, screeched to a stop in the village's main square, the villagers became nervous. Naked children scuttled back inside the primitive stick-and-mud huts or cowered behind their mothers' long skirts. Some of the women slowly edged back, becoming lost in the maze of rude fences.
It was the man himself who struck the most jarring note. A tall, thin black man, dressed entirely in black, a gaudy dress cap jauntily placed atop his head, he stood stiff as a ramrod in his staff car, his eyes coldly surveying the villagers lining the street. There was a psychotic emptiness in his eyes, a hint of cruelty in his contemptuous half smile that immediately chilled those villagers perceptive enough to sniff trouble before it happened.
The men who sat aboard the Unimog personnel carriers — a dozen khaki-uniformed soldiers to a truck — were armed to the teeth, festooned with bandoliers, cartridge cases, each sporting a new Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle. They regarded the Kababish tribesmen with matching contempt, a sadistic anticipation glowing dully in their eyes.
Little by little more vehicles drew into Abu Darash, among them ten-ton trucks loaded with more troops. An odd-lot assortment of command cars, even a vintage German half-track, continued to wedge themselves into the cramped opening. These transported Blackwell's officer cadre, subordinates who were apparently eager to be as near to their leader as possible. Their expressions were full of rapt, mesmerized adoration for the hard-faced American — Africa's self-proclaimed new savior.
It was imperative to Blackwell that Major Chilufia Ochogilo, the Black Cobra's second-in-command, be close by. Though Blackwell had learned to speak a bastardized version of the Arabic dialect spoken in north Sudan, his vocabulary was limited. Once his opening greetings were delivered he generally lapsed into English. It was Ochogilo's place to translate.
But today there would be no sales pitch. "Where are your men?" Blackwell bullied them once the hubbub in the square died down. "Have the cowardly dogs gone to hide from the Blood Doctor?"
Though his Arabic was halting and faulty, his message was glaringly clear. The citizens of Abu Darash were immediately filled with terror. Slavers had long been a part of the Kababish heritage. And now the slavers were back.
The women, fear etched on their faces, began to mutter and wail among themselves.
"They are in the fields," a frightened female replied. "At work on the feddans." Her hand pointed east.
It was all Blackwell's thugs needed. Immediately orders were barked. Three Unimogs, a Goryonov SG34 medium machine gun mounted on each, peeled off and headed toward the fields. An unmarked gray-and-tan truck, its canopy stiff with dust, was swiftly emptied, sent to carry back the conscripts.
A few women and some of the old men made moves to escape, to run and warn their menfolk. But their decision came too late, and they quickly found themselves ringed by Black Cobra mercenaries. The AK-47s came up menacingly, and the women froze, waiting for what would come next. Terror twisted their faces as they read the hot, lustful glitter in the soldiers' eyes. Some began to weep, others pleaded to be spared.
While Blackwell waited for his thugs to return, there was time to attend to other needs. With more than seven hundred fifty miles of basically unplotted desert before them, oases and villages few and far between...
"Water," the boss man commanded. "Tell my men where the water is. We have come a long way, and our tanks are empty." Turning to Major Ochogilo, he said, "Get every reserve tank, every canteen filled. We have no idea when we'll find a well again."
The demand was almost worse than the dire threat already facing Abu Darash. The government had recently supplied them with a donkey-engine pump to bring up precious water from the village well, but they were nearing the end of the Dar Kababish dry season; the water level was precariously low. To share with greedy outsiders would be disastrous.
The women set up even louder protest, begging the invaders to go on without their water.
Ochogilo flung a torrent of Arabic orders at his underlings. They seized a white-bearded male and pulled him from the throng. One looping swing of a Kalashnikov butt and the old man was rolling on the hardscrabble road, his face gushing blood. "You will lead my men to the well," Blackwell's flunky stormed. "Any further delay and you die."
The man struggled to his feet and began staggering toward the far end of the village, a rifle-wielding merc close on his heels. Unimog engines growled; one by one they wheeled, headed down the road and formed a line, waiting their turn at the pump. The men cursed the building heat, sweat streaming down their faces as they sat in the blast-furnace sun. The sluggard pump only brought up a quart a minute, it seemed.
Tempers grew shorter by the minute. A half hour later, when the transport bearing the forty-odd men o
f the village arrived, the terrorist force was verging on mutiny.
Had they not earlier been challenged by the hotheaded Front for Chadian Liberation as they had emerged from their rocky Chad staging area near Djirkjik, had they not had their butts royally kicked by the wily, Tuareg-infested force, things might have been different.
The bloody defeat had become a grim omen. No way to begin a mission. Small wonder morale was at low ebb.
But, Blackwell mused, when one must deal with snarling dogs, throw them raw meat.
In his eyes, the women of Abu Darash were, for the most part, as ugly as a hatful of warts. But when young men have been in bivouac for nearly a month...
The village women would do. They would do very nicely.
Everything in due course, he concluded, letting his eyes slide over the females, taking a decided fancy to a young, lithe-bodied woman off to the right. Wearing a fresh blue taub, an enameled medallion in her right nostril, she was without a doubt the most beautiful in the village. Barely twenty, her skin a glowing coffee color, she was unmistakably virgin. Unveiled (as was the custom in this part of Sudan), disdaining any head covering, her lustrous black hair fell halfway down her back and was very appealing to Blackwell.
At that moment the female looked up at him, apprehension in her eyes, and the Black Cobra leader knew a great need. As their eyes locked, the girl dropped her gaze, furtively attempted to fade into the crowd.
"That woman there," he snapped to Major Ochogilo, "she's mine, Chilufia. No other man touches her, understand?"
The major smiled. "Of course, General," he replied in a nasal, rasping version of English. "You have decided then? To let the troops have their sport?"
Blackwell swallowed a smile of his own. "When it's time." He nodded in the beauty's direction again. "Orders, Major," he reminded.
"Yes, sir," the fat, perspiring man dressed in soiled khakis responded. Immediately he dispatched two men to collect the girl. He felt twinges of his own as he saw the troops pull her from the clutch of wailing matrons. The young woman fought like a wildcat.
Judging from past performances Ochogilo had witnessed, Blackwell had a particularly cruel, dominating way with his women. Perhaps, as had happened in the past, his boss would allow him to have seconds.
He nodded his approval as the soldiers dragged the screaming woman to his command car and pushed her roughly into the back seat. The other women set up an unholy chorus of sobs, but the Black Cobra regulars closed ranks, brandished their rifles, threatened them with similar treatment. The females quickly lost some of their fire.
Ail except for one female, the captured woman's mother, who kept trying to break through the cordon. An impatient trooper finally clubbed her on the side of the head with his fist. She sank to the ground with a moan, shook her head groggily, then let her neighbors draw her back inside the human corral.
Abruptly Jeremiah Blackwell became all business. They had country to cover — this stopover was consuming too much time. As the men of Abu Darash were roughly pushed from the back of the ten-ton truck and herded into an opening to the left of the women's place of confinement, Blackwell emerged from the Land Rover, paced wordlessly before them, his eyes hard, his finger darting. Each time he pointed. Black Cobra troops dragged a man aside and flung him into a separate line.
When thirty of the most rugged, ablebodied specimens were chosen, Blackwell ceased his prowling. Standing with his hands folded behind his back, he rocked on his heels and commenced his recruitment spiel.
There was time — there was always time — for a quick outline of his program for Africa. In essence: Africa for the black. He would not rest in his holy crusade until the last white man had been killed or driven from its shores.
The Black Cobras had lost many men in their last battle with the African oppressors, he told them. He needed dedicated men to replace the heroes who had so recently given their lives for the cause. Again he paced with dramatic slowness, regarded the candidates squarely. Were there any volunteers?
The reluctant prospects exchanged pained smiles, looked off into space. Still not appreciating the gravity of their situation, they thought to stonewall the whole thing. Just ignore the raving lunatic. He would go away and leave them alone.
But it was not that simple. And Blackwell — a strutting, paratroop-booted Napoleon with a Colt automatic strapped to his hip — smiled coldly, recognizing the need to capture the attention of these shuffling rustics. To this purpose he approached one of the lesser specimens, a Juba black, whose face was grotesquely scarred from a boyhood tsetse infection, one eyelid swollen permanently shut.
"Do you volunteer?" he boomed in his best Arabic, his tone friendly yet menacing at the same time. "Will you accept the honor of being the first man from Abu Darash to join the Black Cobras?"
The man, perhaps twenty-five, shrugged, smiled foolishly, but said nothing.
"I offer you a second chance," Blackwell said, his voice louder, cold fury barely suppressed. A strange, ominous silence closed in on the square. "Do you volunteer?"
The pitiful peasant, truly out of his depth, actually giggled. "No, effendi," he replied apologetically, hoping that politeness would suffice.
There was no warning. Moving with incredible speed, using a hip slap that had taken endless hours to perfect, he whipped the Colt .45 out of its holster, aimed and fired in one sweep. The automatic boomed once, the .45 slug blowing away the poor villager's nose, emerging from the back of his head with a volcanic gush of blood, gray matter and bone that splashed the astonished man behind him full in the face.
The farmer swayed on his feet and turned a slow half circle. His face registering bloody dismay, he staggered backward, forward, then made a move to fall.
Two of Blackwell's hardmen moved in and caught the man. Even as he was braced in a forty-five-degree incline, another man, carrying a gleaming silver bowl, hurried forward. Placing the pint container directly beneath the gaping wound, he collected the victim's blood until the bowl was half full.
A keening sigh went over the compound as the bowl was handed to Blackwell. Pausing for effect, his eyes defiantly sweeping the crowd, he lifted the bowl to his lips. With slow, savoring gulps he drank the hot blood, held the bowl at extreme cant to receive every last drop.
The unconsulted blood donor had been unceremoniously dropped to the ground, his blood forming a puddle in the sand. Already the hole in the back of his head was aswarm with hundreds of snarling flies.
Blackwell handed the empty bowl to a hardguy and turned toward the soidiers-to-be. They were struck dumb. It was high drama, exceedingly effective, touching raw nerves, exciting an ageless superstition and fear of the supernatural. Black Cobra troops fell to their knees, prostrated themselves.
Even though the ritual was now routine to them, most were still chilled, their belief in their headman's spooky omnipotence again reinforced. "Blood Doctor," they began to chant. "Blood Doctor, Blood Doctor..."
If the villagers had known terror before, then this new charade was beyond terror. They commenced falling to their knees, as well.
The chant built up. "Blood Doctor..."
But to some of the conscripts, the prospect of serving such a demonic master was altogether too frightening. Some tried to escape.
There was sudden outcry to the left as eight of the bolder men surged forward, tried to batter their way through Black Cobra lines. But their efforts were for nought. The brainwashed hardmen were anticipating such a breakout.
Rifle butts slashed and thudded viciously; the would-be runaways were stopped cold.
If something had snapped within the brains of these panicky conscripts, it was nothing compared to the explosion of psychotic outrage that their defiance ignited in Jeremiah Blackwell's brain. In that moment he came unglued.
"Bring those yellow bastards up here," he roared in English. "Now." Major Ochogilo instantly repeated the commands in Arabic. "They dare to reject the Blood Doctor?" His eyes flashed with a maniacal glitter. "
They must pay."
Each of the disobedient men was clubbed forward, thrown to his hands and knees before Blackwell. Though they struggled like madmen, they were no match for the Black Cobra troops. Then, as Blackwell approached, the guards went stiff, already wincing against the close-range thunder that would shortly jar their eardrums.
Blackwell's stride was rapid as he went from victim to victim. The coup de grace was swift, the .45 snugged tight to the base of the first five men's skulls. The automatic blasted, flinging each man to the ground.
With each shot, Blackwell's paranoia soared. He signaled that the other three rebels should be dragged toward a distant acacia stump that stood beside one of the mud-walled huts. The poor men began to scream and plead desperately as they saw the long, razor-sharp panga brought from Blackwell's Land Rover. And as the madman's stooges stretched the fingers of each man's left hand over the stump and held it fast, Blackwell raised the fearsome machete high over his head. The men screamed even more hideously. Even if they should survive the insane mutilation, it was still the most horrendous humiliation that could be inflicted upon a Muslim. In days ahead the missing left hand would render him an untouchable; he would be forever marked as a thief.
Blackwell knew full well what he was doing. He had long steeped himself in African culture; he knew how to hit these people where they lived. He actually laughed as he saw the men flopping on the ground, one jumping up, running around the compound like a spinning dervish, blood spurting from the stump in torrents.
More than likely all three would die from loss of blood, infection or worse. He did not care. It was the message he sought to convey to the other men, to those few villagers who might survive, that mattered. The Blood Doctor — so the legend would spread — was not a man to be taken lightly.
Yes, Biackwell understood the population's psychology well.
Biackwell strode to where the main group of men stood in rubber-kneed shock, abject fear glistening in their eyes. Arms akimbo, the bloody machete held in his right hand, he regarded them coldly. Then, in a threatening voice he said, "Do I have volunteers now?"