He rode on down the track, now clearly marked and in more constant use than most of the route he had traveled.
The warrior was within sight of the open space where he had last located the caravan when he noticed that the bleeps on the homer were growing fainter.
Puzzled, he reined in the horse. He knew the train had come this way because he had seen it with his own eyes; and he knew, furthermore, for the same reason, that the camel had still been with it when it crossed the clearing.
They could not possibly have put on speed and gotten so far away that they were out of range. So why should the signal have lost strength if he was on the right track?
He rode on. The bleeps grew fainter still.
Had the camel carrying the canister broken away from the column? He halted again and swung the homer questioningly around. There was no sign of the signal strengthening in any direction tangential to the trail. In any case, he had already seen the camel farther ahead than this...
It was only when he wheeled completely around that he stumbled on the answer.
The bleeps increased in volume when he was facing back the way he had come.
Although the camel itself was still with the caravan, the canister — or at least the homing device he had secreted beside it — had been left someplace along the route!
Bolan cantered back along the trail, his pulses quickening at the thought of action at last.
Action he got... but not the kind he expected.
It was simple enough to follow the signals — they became stronger as he went along. It looked, in fact, as if the canister was now stationary.
The homer finally led him off the track and in among the trees. As the woods grew more dense, the bleeps got louder. When the signals were registering their maximum, he dismounted, unslung the MP-5 and stole cautiously through the undergrowth as the device directed him.
Bolan was puzzled. He knew he must be almost there, yet there were no signs of the buildings or installations he expected; nothing but the vibrating hum of insects in the steamy shade beneath the forest trees.
At last he walked out into a small glade with a sandy pit in the center — and in the middle of the pit was the lead canister. No camel, no bedroll, no wicker cage. Just the heavy cylindrical container on its own.
It was open, Bolan saw with a momentary thrill of alarm, but the narrow core in the heart of the lead shield was empty.
Except for the homer placed neatly inside it.
The Executioner's scalp prickled. Something smelled. The deserted glade, the canister so conveniently displayed in the sand pit, the absence of buildings... it was a setup.
"You had better drop your weapon. There are automatic rifles covering you on every side," a voice said quietly.
Bolan whirled. A ring of soldiers with AKMs at the hip stood in the shadows of the tree trunks enclosing the glade. He pitched the submachine gun away from him and stood waiting.
A squat, powerfully built African wearing a French paratroop beret and the insignia of a colonel on the shoulder straps of his bush shirt stepped forward and picked up the gun.
"We were expecting you to show, so that you could collect your electronic toy," he said affably. "What kept you? We have been waiting more than an hour."
Chapter Thirteen
Jason Mettner II was a tall, lanky man with a prematurely lined face and jackets that looked as if they had been tailored for a heavier man.
He sat on the porch of a ramshackle hotel in El Da'ein, sipping a warm Coke and scanning for the third time a cable that had been relayed by train from Nyala, in southern Darfur province. The porch railing was blistered and peeling. Below it, scrawny fowls scuffed the dust between two beat-up off-roaders parked in the sunbaked yard.
Mettner eased the collar of his shirt away from his perspiring neck with a forefinger. Fans stirred the stale air beneath the porch roof, but it was still intolerably hot. The sweat dripped from his arm to smear the ink on the handwritten blue cable form as he read:
URGENTEST PROMETTNER HOTEL NASSER EL DAEIN DARFUR SUDAN STOP ESSENTIAL YOU LOCATE CONTACT STRIKER ANOTHER NON-PUB EXCLUSIVE STOP LAST HEARD ALEX PROBABLY SOUTHWARDING SUDANWARD TRAIL HIJACKED CHEMICAL SEE MY LAST STOP CHECK IN SOONEST
GLOBE
Mettner lit a cigarette and stared at the cable. It was the first time in his life he'd had a service message brought to him by train. Why had it been ferried by the train returning from the railhead at Nyala, which was farther from civilization than even he was? Probably because there was a two-bit airfield at Nyala and the cable had been flown there from whatever town in the armpit of Africa had the nearest telex that worked.
Characteristically the time and date of filing — and even the town of origin — had been lost in transit.
But it wasn't this that fazed the Globe's ace foreign correspondent. In a stormy relationship with Allard Fielding that reached back ten years or more, Mettner had received some zany messages. But this was the first time he'd been genuinely stumped by the text. He didn't know how to interpret the damned cable.
He read it again, squinting one eye to keep out the smoke that spiraled up from the cigarette that drooped from his mouth.
No problem deciphering Fielding's opening order. And it was clear from the tone of the message as a whole that the editor was being guarded. Guarded? Shit, he was being cagey as hell! Which meant the contents were to be treated as secret, either to fool rival newspapermen or to keep them from the law. But in any case the word Striker could have only one meaning for Mettner. One meaning, one man.
Mack Bolan, a.k.a. The Executioner.
Okay, so he was to locate and then contact Bolan.
But what the hell was Fielding talking about, saying that it was for the purpose of a nonpubitshable exclusive? Christ, that was exclusive all right, something that couldn't be shared even with your own readers! Big deal.
Wait a minute, though. There was another word, maybe even more out of line than that "nonpub."
The word "another," in fact.
Another nonpublishable exclusive?
That meant that there must have been others before.
Mettner saw some light. He fished a leather-covered flask of tepid bourbon from his hip pocket and poured a shot into the remains of the Coke.
Repressing a shudder, he remembered. Twice before — once in West Africa, once in Hong Kong — he had run up against this guy Bolan. Each time there had been one hell of an undercover story. Each of them had terrorist overtones. In both cases, Bolan had destroyed the opposition.
And in both cases there had been one hundred percent, unanswerable, surefire reasons — reasons of state, of national security, of world peace, of a promise given and respected — why Mettner had been unable to publish the full story.
But that wasn't why he remembered the Executioner so well. Mettner's father had been a crime reporter during the Windy City gang wars in the Roaring Twenties, and many of Bolan's victories had been won against the scum descendants of Mafia torpedoes he had written up.
So where did that leave the goddamn cable? As a tip-off, surely, that the big guy was on the warpath again. That it was top-secret stuff. And maybe that Mettner could help as he had done before. If he could lay hands on the elusive warrior.
And there the clues in the cable were less than helpful.
Last heard Alex probably southwarding Sudan ward.
Did that mean that Alex, whoever he or she might be, was expected in this godforsaken country? And if so, what had it to do with Bolan?
Or did it mean Bolan had been in Alexandria, Egypt, and was expected to head south? Leave that in the Pending tray.
Whichever, it related to Allard Fielding's last service message, which Mettner had received in Khartoum a week previously.
He killed his cigarette in a cup of cold coffee and tapped another from the pack. Beneath it was a crumpled cable form. He smoothed it out and read for the fifth time:
COMING YOUR WAY QUERYMARK STOP MAYBE STOP BUT
KEEP EYE AND EAR WIDE OPEN PRONUKEM STOLEN CALDERHALL LIKELY DESTINATIONS MEAST OR CENTRAF STOP SHIPMENT DASH ONE MANY DASH ALREADY CARGOED EXMARSEILLES STOP REGARDS FIELDING
Nukem was press cablese for nuclear chemicals, a current euphemism for fissile material. Meast and Centraf were contractions, respectively, for Middle East and Central Africa. As far as the Mettner eye and ear were concerned, this hot rumor had scored zero until today. But if Bolan was concerned with the theft...?
Mettner lit the cigarette and walked out into the heat. Beyond the yard the blackened spars of a gutted railroad observation car — in which thirty-five black refugees had been burned alive by militiamen — lay gaunt against the leaden sky.
Mettner hurried to the nearest of the off-roaders. It was a Toyota Land Cruiser, and the metal of the hood and roof supports too hot to touch. He eased himself into the driving seat and drew on a pair of thin leather gloves. The unwary could end up with seared hands from grasping the wheel of a parked car in El Da'ein.
The tall, knob-tired 4x4 coughed its way past the stained and cracked stucco of apartment buildings, over a bridge spanning the freight yard, along a wide strip of pavement bordering a sinuous oued, a dried-up watercourse that turned into rapids when it rained.
Rain? the newspaperman thought. In this furnace where even the camels wear asbestos humps? Don't make me laugh.
He braked the Toyota in a large square flanked by a plantation of dusty palms. Arab women swathed in black walked toward a street market behind the trees. An armored personnel carrier loaded with steel-helmeted soldiers in camous rocketed past on flailing tracks. Otherwise there was no movement to disturb the glare shimmering off the hardtop.
Mettner waved away a cloud of bluebottle flies that had been buzzing over the corpse of a dead dog and went into a flat-roofed brick building that housed the post office and telephone exchange.
Fans whirred above, but it was no cooler in front of the wire mesh grille topping the counter that sealed off one end of the shuttered room. The place smelled of sweat.
He pushed money beneath the grille and waited for the clerk to secrete it before making his request. In this part of Africa, you laid it on the line for openers if you wanted any service — and paid for what you actually had afterward.
It was a far cry from the glittering white high rises and the air-conditioned lounges of Khartoum. Mettner wished like hell that he was back in the capital right now. Since he wasn't — and since he had about as much chance of locating Bolan from El Da'ein as he had of winning the French national lottery — he would follow his own golden rule and hand over the tough part to a legman on the spot.
That was one of the rewards of being an ace: you got the local stringer to handle the research and dope out the background to a story before you even arrived to order your first shot of Jack Daniel's. The Globe had a stringer in Khartoum, too, a news agency man who filled in on the side for several British and American dailies.
The post office clerk was an Indian. He was looking at Mettner with raised eyebrows.
"I want to put through a call to Khartoum," Mettner said. "Press. Priority. In care of the Madison Agency: a person-to-person call to a Mr. David Courtney."
Chapter Fourteen
Mack Bolan choked back to consciousness. He was strapped naked to a ten-foot wooden plank. His ankles were bound and attached to an iron ring at one end of the plank; his arms, stretched above his head, were tied at the wrist and fastened to the other. The two ends rested on a tabletop and the seat of a chair, so that his head was lower than his feet.
Helpless and undignified on his back, he had three times been put through the "liquid persuasion" interrogation — a torture as old as the walls of the Arab village where he was kept prisoner.
The technique is simple... and effective.
Plug the victim's nostrils, wedge an iron ring into his mouth so that it stays jammed open. Then drape a long strip of muslin over the face and pour water — gallons of water — through that and into the mouth.
The head cannot be turned because of the arms strapped on either side of it, so the only way to get rid of the water cascading into the mouth through the thin cloth is to swallow it. But as soon as each mouthful is swallowed it is replaced by another.
Meanwhile the victim has to breathe.
The lungs heave and try to drag in air, but the attempt only draws in water.
And with the water comes the muslin, which is remorselessly sucked into the windpipe...
In a very short time the victim, gagging and retching, is half drowned by the water in his lungs and half choked by the cloth.
The Executioner scored low marks as a victim because his iron will was strong enough to allow himself to be choked into unconsciousness before the spasms became violent enough to tip off the torturers that it was time to stop, remove the cloth, and then start again — if they wanted to keep their client alive.
The effectiveness of the treatment as a means of coercion relied not so much on pain as on the fact that it quickly reduced the victim to a gibbering, blubbering, vomiting wreck whose semiconscious mind had room for only one thought: the agonizing need to supply lungs and thundering heart with oxygen.
At any price.
Such as the disclosure of secret information.
Here again Bolan rated a low score.
The Executioner didn't blubber, he didn't plead, he refused to listen to the frantic cries for help relayed by his subconscious.
Sure, he could be made to yell, to howl in the extremity of scientifically applied pain. But indignity alone left his inner spirit, his will to win, unconquered. His reflexes could be controlled and his body made to void itself outside of his conscious will. But the physical domination of his functions left his mental defenses intact.
Put it another way. If his captors wanted results, they had chosen the wrong torture.
The two men administering the treatment had come to the same conclusion. After Bolan had blacked out for the third time, when the gargling groans had died away to a labored wheeze and the plank had stopped thumping from the threshing of his bound body, the Sudanese holding his head straightened up with a scowl.
"This is no good," he said. "We shall never get anywhere this way. The accursed infidel will simply continue to choke himself unconscious until finally his heart gives out."
Mahmoud put down the jerrican and attached hose he had been using to supply the water. "Very well," he said. "We will try something else."
Bolan heard the words as he swam reluctantly back to awareness through the waves of the nausea engulfing him. Mahmoud had helped along the treatment with vicious slaps and squeezes of the Executioner's genitals, and now his belly was on fire as well as the agony sandpapering his lungs and throat.
The first thing he saw was a blurred image of the black officer who had captured him. The man was leaning against a wall at the foot of the plank. Now he levered himself upright and spoke to the Sudanese. "You are right," he said. "The water was quite satisfactory at the time of the Inquisition. Time was not money in those days. You could continue all day and night. Even a will as strong as this man's would ultimately break. It had to. But today we have less time. Those helping us have a right to demand results. And civilization has, after all, progressed. Perhaps we should avail ourselves of one of its most priceless assets."
Mahmoud and his assistant stared at him.
"Electricity," the officer said gently. "The truck that brought us here is of an antique design, but it does have a magneto, a generator. If you were to take a wrench and loosen half a dozen screws..."
Mahmoud nodded. He and the other Sudanese left the room.
It was a small room with a single window set high in the baked mud wall. Apart from the table, the chair and the plank along which the Executioner was stretched, it was bare.
The village was smaller than Wadi Djarzireh, a compact eagle's nest of flat-roofed houses clustered high up in a canyon cutting through a barren range of hills that broke unex
pectedly through the wooded landscape where Bolan had been captured.
The officer and six of the soldiers had bundled him onto the floor in back of the worn-out half-track Berliet, which still bore traces on its rusted fenders of divisional insignia that had once identified a unit of the French army in Chad. Facedown, with their boots grinding into his back, he had been able to see nothing of the country they traversed during the thirty-minute drive.
He closed his eyes now. A man who's naked and manacled, and whose bodily functions are totally controlled by others has difficulty preserving his human dignity, not to mention a spirit of bravado.
When a uniform is involved, the situation becomes more acute.
The anonymity of extreme pain soon produces a humiliation so complete that the psychological distance between torturer and tortured becomes immense — the ringmaster and the lion, the scientist and the lab rat. It's no longer possible for the victim to reply to his tormentor's questions on the same "social level."
Bolan knew this. And he knew that if the torture continued long enough, this phase would be followed by a relationship almost sexual in its intimacy: the invasion of privacy is after all more comprehensive than anything achieved in a normal encounter between a man and a woman.
Anticipating the thunderbolts of agony that the electricity would bring, he had closed his eyes in an attempt at least to stave off this obscenity. They were the only organs still under his own control.
The African officer was talking. Bolan knew the script by heart. He was familiar with the scenario from books, from movies and even from real life. It was the one that ran "you're going to sing anyway. They always do... So why not save us all a load of embarrassment. Why not save yourself unnecessary discomfort and tell us what we want to know now?"
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