Anvil of Hell

by Don Pendleton

  "And signal your interest to possible rivals? Do not worry, Monsieur Bolan. Discretion is assured. If you could go this evening to the regional military directorate at this address..." he moved back to his desk and scribbled a few lines on a sheet from an ivory-framed memo pad "...the necessary documents will be waiting for you. Please take your passport to identify yourself. The staff will themselves take care of photographs and attach a copy to the papers — just to make sure there is no mistake, you understand. And you should also present this..."

  He wrote something on a second memo sheet, tore both sheets from the pad and handed them to the Executioner.

  "You are very kind."

  "It is a pleasure. Oh..." Hamid el-Karim paused as if struck by a sudden thought. "There is one thing. Such extramural activities regrettably involve the participant in certain expenses. There are, I am afraid, various charges, payable to the official departments concerned, inseparable from the issue of such papers." He shrugged. "You know how it is."

  Bolan knew exactly. Most governments had their fair share of corrupt money grabbers.

  Bolan replied, "I quite understand. It's to be expected. I have already trespassed too much on your generosity. But since it's already after office hours and I have no other way of paying these charges, would it be too much of an imposition if I was to entrust these monies to you for disbursement in the right quarters?"

  "In the circumstances," the Sudanese said suavely, "I would be prepared to waive protocol and perform this service for you."

  Bolan reached for his wallet.

  An hour later, back in his hotel, he unloaded the spool of film from the tiny camera built into the bronze cigarette lighter and developed it in the bathroom. Two of the shots he had taken were too blurred to be usable; the other three were as clear as a bell — two profiles of el-Karim pointing at the map of the Sudan; one full face of him standing by the flag and tapping his teeth with the gold pencil.

  Bolan dismantled the miniature lapel mike and the fine wire linking it to the cigarette-pack tape recorder in his breast pocket. Playing back the recording of his interview, he found to his annoyance that the tape had run out in the middle of el-Karim's sentence explaining that "such extramural activities" cost money.

  Without the part where he agreed to take the cash himself — and the actual amount, which was specified later — the tape wouldn't be much use as a lever, if ever Bolan needed one. On the face of it, the recording showed no more than an official going out of his way to accommodate a foreign prospector.

  He sealed it carefully just the same, and he made postcard-size prints of the three photos. In a country where bribery was a way of life and blackmail a way up the ladder of success, there was no way of knowing when they might be of help.

  The next morning Courtney came by the hotel to report that one of his spies had discovered the caravan was headed for Wadi Djarzireh, beyond the Nouba Mountains, where the pilgrims were to leave the main body and head west.

  "There's only one other trail out of Djarzireh," the Englishman said. "Due south to Ouad Faturah and Oloron. So the other lot must be heading there. You'll have to find out which party the stuffs with before you get there, so you'll know whether to stick with the religiosos or shadow the others south at a distance."

  "How long will I have?"

  "Before they make Wadi Djarzireh? Several days. They don't exactly aim to break speed records. If you ask me, it will be with the other lot, the traders and suchlike. Pilgrims travel light. It'd be easier to conceal a heavy lead canister among bundles of merchandise on pack camels than it would be between a rider and his bedroll."

  "Isn't Oloron one of the so-called Forbidden Cities?" Bolan asked suddenly.

  "Was, old chap. Was. It's in the middle of the rebel country now. If the canister leads you that way, you're heading for a hotbed of trouble."

  "I'm not really into the situation in the south," Bolan admitted. "Just how strong are the rebels?"

  "Strong enough, actually. Of course they play it down, here. This is the Mohammedan part of the country, where the money is, and the power. They don't want to know about the blacks in the south, and all this self-determination crap."

  Bolan was determined to reveal nothing of his meeting with Hamid el-Karim, and that official's dismissal of the southerners' claims. Nor had he told Courtney about the imposing document he had collected from the military the previous evening. "What do you mean by self-determination? I thought the southern provinces had been granted some form of autonomy fifteen years ago."

  "Well, technically of course, that's true," Courtney said. "Gafaar al Nimayri, the general who seized power in 1969, put an end to the full-scale rebellion down there by promising the blacks some kind of autonomy, as you say. But they're never satisfied, are they? They always want more."

  "I'm listening," Bolan prompted.

  "Well, autonomy in a country that's vaguely socialist-oriented, but where the Arabs up here, down in the Nile Valley, even in the desert, control all the raw materials, all the means of production... It doesn't mean very much, does it? And remember the blacks are all missionary Christians — juju men, witch doctors, that kind of thing. Add the resentment they still feel over the old race war and you can see why the Arabs are still not too popular down there, why there's still unrest in some of the provinces."

  "Race war?" Bolan repeated.

  "Your actual genocide. As soon as the Raj pulled out after World War II, the Arab military then in power started a systematic campaign of extermination. Sent down squadrons of cavalry to wipe out whole villages at a time — massacre the people, destroy the buildings, fire the crops. Like the death squads in South America."

  "I didn't know it was that bad. So the blacks fought back?"

  "As much as they could. But they had no weapons to speak of, and no centralized command. A population of five million was halved in fifteen years."

  Bolan whistled. "Not the ideal background for a stable society."

  "You can say that again. Once you know the form, you can see why your Arab pilgrims ride with a trade caravan that has a military escort. An Arab on his own down there is a dead man. If you have to leave that camel train, Mr. Bolan, I should junk the old borrowed robes pretty damned quick! Can't trust those customers an inch you know."

  "It's no sweat guessing where your own sympathies lie."

  "With the Arabs, you mean? Well, of course. That is to say... Well, dash it, you can talk to them, can't you?"

  In this town? Only if you had money in your hand, Bolan thought.

  * * *

  After dark, when the fierce heat of the day had cooled, Bolan traveled to a poor quarter on the riverbank where a man named Nessim stained his skin and bearded him, hair by hair, along the jawline. His teeth were discolored.

  "According to the papers I shall give you, effendi," Nessim said, standing back to admire his handiwork, "you have journeyed all the way from Al Khureiba in Saudi Arabia to join the pilgrimage to this shrine. Let us hope this will be considered sufficient excuse for any inconsistencies of accent should you be required to speak Arabic."

  Beneath the heavy, hooded burnoose, the Executioner slung the waist and shoulder rig holstering his AutoMag and the PPK. Next to the skin, he wore a Chubb-locked money belt and a waterproof pouch containing basic survival kit, a miniature transmitter-receiver and spare clips of ammunition.

  Later that evening he drove the Buick to the underground parking lot and stole up eleven floors of emergency stairs to David Courtney's apartment.

  "I'm going to keep in touch by radio," he told the Englishman. "If there are any developments, I might ask you to forward messages stateside."

  "You think there will be?"

  "Developments? Probably. This stolen nuclear material has to be going someplace! If they're building a reactor, or an atomic plant, or some kind of hydrogen bomb, something must be there to see. Somebody must have noticed. Those installations spread over a lot of ground."

  "Who will
the messages be for?"

  "You can send them to Langley in the normal way, using your normal code techniques. But there'll be a prefix drawing attention to the fact that they're destined for a man named Brognola. And an access code that will allow Langley to program them straight into the data banks at his operational headquarters in Virginia."

  "Brognola?" Courtney repeated. "Don't think I've run across the chap. Is he on the strength at Langley?"

  "Just pass on the messages," Bolan said, then left the apartment.

  Back in the basement lot, he crept between the rows of vehicles, hoping to make the Buick unseen. It wasn't unusual to see cars driven by men wearing Arab robes, but the burnoose disguising the Executioner wasn't classy enough to justify the Electra, and he didn't want to risk a brush with the law on suspicion of being a car thief.

  He ducked behind the trunk of a Mercedes 190 as a sedan rolled down the ramp and slid into a vacant space on the far side of the lot. Two men and a woman climbed out of the sedan, doors slammed and the three of them strolled, laughing, toward the elevator bank.

  Bolan straightened, walked around to the driver's door and slid the key into the lock.

  The low-ceilinged parking lot reverberated to the throb of another engine. Bolan cursed and squatted by the door. The vehicle drove down the curving ramp with a squeal of rubber and accelerated along the far side. It was an AMC Cherokee off-roader, and the driver seemed to be in a hurry. He backed into a spot with a squeal of brakes and cut the lights.

  Cautiously Bolan raised himself. His head was level with the windshield when the Cherokee's headlights blazed again. The driver gunned the engine, and the tires protested once more. He had seen a space that suited him better. The big Jeep swung around and rocked across the lot.

  Bolan hadn't time to duck, but in the instant that the headlight beams swept over the Buick, his eye was attracted by a faint, fugitive gleam below the steering wheel.

  Light reflected from something that shouldn't have been there.

  The driver switched off the ignition and hurried to the elevators. Bolan pressed his face to the glass of the Electra's window and squinted into its interior.

  In the dim light illuminating the parking lot, he saw a thin strand of wire that stretched from beneath the dashboard to the handle of the door.

  Very slowly, he withdrew the key and lowered himself to the ground. Lying on his back, he edged beneath the car.

  Even in that poor light he could make out the crudely rigged bomb hanging there — four sticks of explosives taped together at the end of another, thicker wire that led upward.

  Taking no chances, he unlocked the trunk, dislodged the back of the rear seat and crawled into the tonneau. He reached across the front seats and switched on the interior light.

  If the bomb itself was crude, the means of detonating it were ingenious enough. If the door had been opened, jerking the wire, a loop at the far end would have snapped a thin glass stem, allowing a weight to plunge down a tube onto a capsule of fulminate of mercury, which was itself attached by cord to the explosive.

  Bolan supported the plunger with one hand while he cut the wire, then removed it from the tube and disconnected the cord. Whoever had rigged the bomb must have worked fast; he must have been tailing the Executioner for some time, and he must have had all the components at hand. But he didn't trust the car's own electrical system as a means of detonating the bomb. That might be indicative of... what? Some kind of anomaly in the thinking of those sophisticated enough to mess with nuclear physics? He filed the fact away for later examination.

  Driving up the ramp and out into the wide, deserted nighttime street, he thought he heard the rasp of motorcycle exhausts. Two hundred yards from the apartment building, he glanced into his rearview mirror. Yeah, there were two of them, just emerging from the parking lot exit at the top of the ramp.

  They were riding without lights.

  Coincidence? Forgetfulness? Or backup men left to check that the bomb had done its work — and, if for any reason it hadn't, to follow up and finish the job themselves?

  Bolan favored the last explanation. The conviction grew after he had turned right at the first intersection. Swerving across the roadway and then back again, he saw that the bikes had closed up to station themselves in the Buick's blind spot between the side and rear windows. Suspicion became certainty after three more right turns, when he was passing in front of the building once more.

  The riders were still there.

  Bolan goosed the engine and drove toward the embankment where the White Nile and the Blue Nile rivers ran together, maneuvering the AutoMag from beneath his burnoose as he steered with one hand. Crossing a floodlit square flanked by imposing public buildings, he veered left and then right to check out the mirror a second time... and saw from a telltale gleam of metal that the nearer biker carried a short-barreled submachine gun across the machine's gas tank.

  In a split second he mentally listed the options.

  They were waiting until he was clear of the city center, where there would be less chance of a police presence, and they could ride up alongside and blast him as he drove.

  They had been ordered, if he survived the bomb, simply to tail him and report where he was staying, so that some alternative method of elimination could be used later.

  They had been told to wait for the right moment and then jump him, taking him prisoner so that he could be interrogated.

  This time number one got his vote. If they had wanted merely to question him or locate his hideout, they wouldn't have tried to waste him with explosives first.

  In any case he had to get clear of the car. The bomb and its detonator were still on the passenger seat, and he wasn't too happy at the thought of bullets ripping through the sedan's bodywork. If he threw the explosive out the window, on the other hand, there was a chance the bikers could capture it and still use it against him.

  The street curved around a mosque with a dome and four minarets. Beyond it, at the foot of a slight grade, there was a glimmer of light on water. He gunned the engine and sent the Buick hurtling down the slope.

  When the vehicle hit the embankment, Bolan wrenched the wheel to the left and raced northward along the riverbank. There was a traffic circle four hundred yards ahead where another street fed in from the left. A grassy mound in the center of the circle was covered with bushes.

  Bolan floored the Buick, and the big sedan leaped forward; the seat back slammed his spine.

  For a moment the bikers trailed behind. The Buick gained the circle, lurched around with screaming tires and then, as the Executioner stamped the brake pedal flat, slewed across the road, hit the far sidewalk, reared up into the air and hit the parapet at the edge of the embankment.

  In a shower of fragmented masonry, the sedan burst through and toppled to the bank below. The crash of the impact was drowned by the thump of an explosion as gasoline spilled over the hot engine and ignited. A livid sheet of flame erupted beyond the shattered parapet, and this in turn was eclipsed by a gigantic detonation when the bomb in the car blasted the wreck apart.

  Flame licked redly at the underside of billowing black smoke, and burning debris clattered into the roadway. The bikers skidded to a halt and leaped from their saddles.

  Bolan was crouched behind a screen of bushes on the grassy knoll. He had flipped open the door, launched himself out and shoulder-rolled when the Buick first braked. Now he had the AutoMag lined up on the guy with the SMG — a dark leathered figure whose features were hidden behind a black-visored crash helmet.

  The big autoloader roared twice in the Executioner's two-fisted grip. The biker spun around and collapsed on the sidewalk, smashed backward by the lethal punch of the 240-grain boattails. Blood pulsed scarlet from the ruin of his chest in the flickering light from below the parapet. The SMG skittered away across the blacktop.

  The second man boasted a fast reaction time. He had darted into the roadway, snatched up the fallen weapon and dropped behind one of the pa
rked bikes before the echoes of Bolan's second shot had died away.

  The rasping calico stutter of the gun split the night apart as Bolan flattened himself against the ground beneath a shower of twigs and leaves.

  While the hellstream ripped through the bushes he sighted his own stainless-steel skullbuster beneath the lowest branch and calmly shot away the motorcycle's kickstand so that the heavy machine crashed onto its side and left the gunman exposed.

  He scrambled to his feet and ran for the broken parapet, twisting to fire from his hip as he sprinted across the sidewalk.

  But this time the hail of lead sprayed wide. Bolan stood and dropped the man with a single shot that drilled between his shoulder blades, blasting apart three vertebrae and pulverizing the pancreas and one lung before it tore a fist-size exit wound between his ribs. He dropped, lifeless, without a cry.

  The Executioner emerged from the bushes and walked across to check out the dead men. Without the helmets, they could have come from any Mediterranean country; each was sallow-faced, mustached, with dark hair and a hooked nose. Neither carried any ID. There were no labels on their clothes.

  Bolan remained as much in the dark as he had ever been.

  If the would-be assassins were part of the organization shifting the stolen uranium, the group, whoever they were, had to be on the ball. How else would they have gotten on to him as early as his visit to General Hartley?

  How had they fingered him at Mustapha Tufik's? How did they know that Tufik had supplied him with intel — and intel important enough to have signed the man's death warrant?

  How did they make the connection with Ibrahim in Alexandria... and organize themselves so well that they had time to murder him before he'd said everything he had to say?

  What tipped them off that Bolan was following the trail as far as Khartoum?

  How had they known he was driving to see David Courtney that evening?

  Whatever the answers, they would point to two inescapable facts: first, the organization was efficient, fast-moving and widespread; second, even allowing for that, they couldn't have done what they did without the help of someone on Bolan's side of the fence.