What they wanted to know, of course, was who he worked for. How did he know about the U-235 in the caravan? Who were his immediate contacts and how did the rest of the outfit work?
Bolan's problem was special to this one particular mission.
It turned the usual script upside down. Instead of holding out at all costs, hanging in there to keep details of a network secret until its members had time to split, he must at all costs avoid revealing that there was in fact no network.
Because once they knew for sure that he was a loner, all they had to do was kill him. End of story.
But as long as they believed he was part of an organization, however small, there was hope that they would keep him alive in the certainty that he would eventually break. And talk.
He was therefore in the unenviable position of a man determined to prolong his own suffering as many hours as he could.
For the longer he agonized, the longer he lived.
Like the old saying had it, while there was life there was hope.
The Executioner never gave up on hope.
There was one thing in favor of a successful deception. There had to be a connection because of the homer... but they hadn't tumbled to the fact that Mack Bolan, heavily armed mineralogist, and the Arab spy who had tried to join up with the "wrong" caravan were one and the same person.
Bolan thanked his lucky stars that he had buried the robes and the incriminating ID papers before he took up the chase again.
He hoped those lucky stars would continue to shine.
"A heavy-caliber automatic designed to take a wildcat cartridge, a Walther PPK and a modern delayed-blowback submachine gun complete with silencer — that's a heavy arsenal for a simple prospector," the black officer said. "Add a professional spy bug, its directional counterpart, a shortwave radio transceiver, a one-piece burglar's suit and several ... unusual instruments in a waterproof pouch, and we arrive, I think, at a number of questions that require answers."
Bolan said nothing.
"Who, for example, do you contact on that radio?"
"I told you — the government department that employs me."
"What government?"
"Make a guess."
"You refuse, nevertheless, to call them up and prove your point."
"I told you again," Bolan said. "They're way out of range. The transceiver's designed for use in Europe."
"Then why bring it here?"
"I came in a hurry. It's part of my normal kit. I have to report back sometimes and..."
"Bullshit!" the African interrupted. "You have a confederate who planted that bug beside a lead canister carried by a pack camel in the caravan. You knew what that canister contained. You must have done because you were following it when we jumped you."
Again the Executioner remained silent. There was nothing to say.
"I want to know where that confederate is now. I want to know how you knew about the canister. I want to know who your principals are and why they are interested in us." The officer paused. "Clearly you were put in to check out the canister's final destination. But supposing you had found it, through a more skillful use of the bug your associate planted — what then? What are you going to do about the shipment of an admittedly stolen consignment of fissile material when so many highly placed persons are involved in its safe delivery?"
Bolan lay with his eyes still closed, breathing as deeply as he could, in an effort to prepare himself for the coming ordeal. He remained silent.
"Very well." The black man exhaled exasperatedly through his nose. "You are the one to suffer needlessly the rigors of what we call sharpened interrogation. If you are resolved to make us force the information from you, let us get on with it."
This time the Executioner opened his eyes. Mahmoud and his companion were back in the room. Bolan caught his breath as the officer took two lengths of electric supply cord from one of them and attached the wires to his scrotum and nipples with miniature bulldog clips. The steel teeth bit painfully into his exhausted flesh.
Mahmoud was holding a cast-iron generator with a crank attached to the armature spindle. The officer jerked his head at the table. "Put it down there."
When the generator was clamped to the tabletop, he screwed the free ends of the wires to its terminals. He took hold of the handle. "For the last time," he grated, "who sent you here and where is your confederate?"
Bolan nerved himself for the agony, trying to imagine the pain so that he would be readier to meet it when it came. It was not the first time he had been tortured with electricity. "I have nothing to add to what I told you already — the truth," he whispered through set teeth.
At a survival course with Britain's crack SAS antiterrorist squad once, he had been taught sophisticated techniques of self-hypnosis to overcome situations like this. He could remember none of them. The pressure of the powerful steel clips alone was exceedingly uncomfortable.
As though he were an objective observer watching a movie, Bolan saw the officer start to turn the generator handle.
For a moment there was only a fierce tingling in the area of the clips, and then, as the handle turned faster, he suddenly gasped.
His chest felt as if it had been ripped open; fire flamed through his loins and seared his belly. A cold sweat broke out all over his body and his breath began to sob. Some time later, his spasming muscles convulsed, and his bladder and bowels evacuated themselves.
One of the Sudanese giggled. The black officer laughed aloud. "He thinks that is it," he said. "Think again, friend."
The grinding of the handle rose to a screech.
* * *
"How the hell did you know I was here?" Jason Mettner asked Hal Brognola. "Who are you? And what exactly do you want, that's so urgent I have to get out of bed in the middle of the night?"
"It's almost 7:00 a.m.," the Fed said mildly. "A more interesting question would be why the hell are you here?"
They were sitting on the terrace of a hotel overlooking the Upemba National Park in rhe Shaba region of southern Zaire. It was already very hot.
"If you have to know, I'm following up a lead," Meaner said shortly. He hated to get out of his bed early when it wasn't strictly necessary. "My editor wants me to contact a guy, and according to my information he should be someplace around here."
"I know about the lead," Brognola said. "Allard Fielding's a buddy of mine. He sent that service message at my request."
"At your request? But I never heard your name before. I mean, you're not part of the publisher's..."
"I am part of the Administration," Brognola interrupted gently.
The newspaperman paused with his coffee cup halfway to his lips, staring out beyond the tropical trees to a stretch of savannah where a herd of animals browsed in the heat. "I get it," he said at last. "And Bolan is...?"
"Checking out something for me, yeah. But we lost touch and I figured that you, being already in the area, might be the quickest way to regain contact."
"Why me? Some newspaper guys put in overtime contributing intel for the NSA or the Company. I don't."
"I know it. I also know," the Fed explained, "that you've ran up against Striker before. And I know from what you didn't publish that you're regular, a man who can be trusted."
Frowning, Mettner lit a cigarette. "Thanks for the compliment. If you were coming here in person, why ask me?"
"Because there's something screwy going on. How did you get yourself here, ten miles from the railroad station at Bukama?"
"My legman told me there was a chance Bolan would be here. How did you know /was here?" Mettner countered.
"Like you say, guys here and there put in overtime keeping the Company informed," Brognola said evasively. "Who's this legman of yours then?"
"Guy in Khartoum. A Brit by the name of Courtney."
"Exactly." Brognola breathed heavily. He was wearing a lightweight seersucker suit, but it was creased and he was sweating. He mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. "Damned heat in
this country," he said. "Why I came. I heard you'd moved this way and I guessed it must be on account of a tip-off — yet this same Courtney is also a CIA legman in Khartoum. He's supposed to channel Bolan's reports back to me through Langley, but he hasn't filed, and his control hasn't been able to raise him in more than a week."
"Screwy is right," Mettner said slowly. "Why would he pass on intel to one agency that's paying him and hold out on another?" He shook a second cigarette from his pack and lit it from the butt of the first.
"You smoke too much," Brognola observed.
"How do you know?"
"It's in your file," the Fed retorted.
Mettner laughed. "So that's why you came. But how did you come? First train from Lumbumbashi doesn't hit town until ten. And the Kananga flyer is an hour later."
"I have a contact in Kenya who let me have the use of a chopper," Brognola told him.
The newspaperman's eyebrows rose. "Whatever it is, your man's mission must be important."
"It's damned important. I have to warn you that you might not be able to publish. But since I trust you — and since I need your help — I can tell you it has to do with thefts of uranium 235."
Meaner whistled. "And Mack Bolan's on the trail?"
"When last heard of, he was tracking a consignment that passed through Khartoum, supposedly heading this way. Tell me. Did you talk with this legman in person?"
The newspaperman shook his head. "Uh-uh. Called him from some hick town in Darfur. He called me back pretty soon, like the intel hadn't been too hard to get."
"Would you know his voice?"
"Nope. Never spoke to the man before."
"You're a foreign specialist, Mettner. How would you read shipments of nuclear material directed to this area? Would you rate it a possible destination for stolen stuff? Are there elements here who might want to go nuclear in secret?"
"Anything is possible in this neck of the woods," Mettner said. "Since I960 you've got Lumumba, Kasavubu, Mobutu, Adoula, Tchombe in power at different times. There are tribal jealousies. The French had to send in paras in 1978 when rebels massacred Europeans in Kolwezi, and that's less than one hundred miles from here." He shook his head. "But for my money it'd be crazy to hump it all the way down through Egypt and the Sudan. Shit, you could fly it in from the Atlantic coast in a couple hours. You could use the Congo and the Kasai and float it upriver from Brazzaville in less than a week."
"That's what I thought. When's Striker due to show?"
"I was told he'd check in to a Bukama hotel around noon, traveling south from Bukavu in a Land Rover. He was to contact a man, an Indian named Devananda Anand, this afternoon."
"What would you say if he didn't show?"
"I'd say your Brit was playing a double game. Either that, or he's out of circulation and the man I spoke to on the phone wasn't Courtney at all. Whichever, I'd guess I was sent off on a false trail — believable but false — to get me out of the way."
"I wouldn't argue with that."
A telephone reservation in the name of Bolan had been made at the hotel in Bukama, but nobody checked in.
Police patrols reported that no European traveling south from Bukava in a Land Rover had been sighted.
And no Indian, named Anand or anything else, showed at the Nation Park hotel that afternoon.
"As our Brit himself might say," Brognola announced when nothing had happened by nightfall, "there's something rum going on here, Mettner. Something very rum indeed."
* * *
"Bolan? That son of a bitch?" Don Giovanni spit out the words as if they hurt his mouth. Maybe they did. "The bastard wasted Battaglia, Jesse Lobato and Manny Mandone as well as crippling half the families from Vegas to Miami Beach," he snarled.
"If it's the same guy," Mancini said.
"Be your age, Lou. Of course it's the same guy. You figure there's room in the world for two meddlesome bastards who operate like that?"
"They said this one was Russian," Mancini objected. Cotton wool tufts of altocumulus whipped past the window as the Cessna executive jet sliced through the rarefied atmosphere thirty thousand feet above the southern Atlantic.
"Russian my ass," Giovanni said. "The ID was Russian. He's using a cover he figures will appeal to the wogs in Khartoum. For some reason he decided to keep on his own name. That's not to say it's a different operator." He bit the end off a cigar, spit it into a cuspidor and clamped the cigar between his teeth. "Wish I'd never heard of the bastard," he growled.
Mancini flamed a gold Cartier lighter. "You said you wanted results," he reminded the capo.
"Yes, results. But all I got is a name." He leaned the cigar into the flame and puffed smoke. "What I don't understand is why we didn't get this name before. We have enough guys working on this deal. We've been with him all the way. Why in hell didn't our man in Khartoum tip us off who it was?"
Mancini was chewing gum. He shifted the wad. "Maybe it wasn't such a good idea, using two different organizations to move the stuff and to cover it in transit," he offered.
"All my ideas are good."
"Sure they are, Don Giovanni. What I mean is, maybe the two don't liaise the way they should."
The don ignored the remark. "Okay," he said, "the monkey man fingers the guy. He lays hands on him. But he doesn't make him sing. We don't find out who the others are, and where. So, I have to go all the way to the Sudan to take charge myself. I ask you, Lou, do I have time to waste?"
"Maybe it won't be so wasted when you get there," Mancini said. He looked up, scenting an odor of sweat mingled with after-shave. A blue-chinned torpedo wearing a white linen steward's jacket was standing in the aisle, proffering a silver tray loaded with two highballs. "Refueling stop in Casablanca in twenty minutes," he announced in a hoarse voice. "Then six-twenty to Khartoum."
"You want to wash under your arms, Joe," Mancini said.
The Cessna's twin contrails curved through the wisps of cloud over the Azores as the pilot followed the air traffic controller's instructions and veered ten degrees farther south when he was above the Sao Pedro beacon on Santa Maria Island.
"Damn right my time won't be wasted," Don Giovanni said. "It's going be my pleasure to finally get rid of Mack 'The Bastard' Bolan. I'll attend to him personally."
Chapter Fifteen
Bolan lay on the bare floor of his prison and watched the light fade outside the window. He was shivering.
His clothes had been taken away, along with the weapons, the shoulder rig and the rest of his gear, after his captors dragged him from the truck. But the plain white shift they had thrown into the room when the torturers left was not warm enough to neutralize the cold air of the night.
Unless, he thought tiredly, the shivers were simply a reaction to his ordeal. His throat felt as if he had swallowed molten lead, and every nerve, muscle and sinew in his lean, hard frame was aching. Yet he was astonished to find that, apart from a redness around the site of the bulldog clips, the interminable torture session had left no marks on him. So much pain and so little to show for it.
And the immediate future was no brighter. Right now, all he could look forward to was a repetition of the same treatment. Nobody knew where he was; nobody knew he had been taken prisoner; nobody who counted even knew he risked capture.
A character less battle-hardened than the Executioner might have settled at that point for the easy way — the way that was relatively easy — aiming for no more than the will to hold out until he had provoked them to an excess that would finish him.
But that was not the warrior's way. Negative thinking found no space on the shelves of his intellectual armory.
He would hold out until the situation changed in such a way that he could seize the opportunity and turn the tables.
What that change would be, he had no idea. There was no point inventing a scenario: it was a waste of mental energy. The important thing was to be ready for anything.
Because, whatever the odds, he was damned well going to get the
hell out. Somehow. He owed it to himself, to his unquenchable determination not only to find out who was ferrying the stolen uranium 235 and where it was going, but also to locate and unmask the mole close to Hal Brognola who must be responsible for all the obstacles stacked against him ever since he took on the mission.
So hold on was the watchword.
Hold on and remember — the only thing he had to hide was that there was nothing to hide.
For a fleeting second, recalling the indescribable agonies of the electric current, the thought that he might not make it flashed across his consciousness. He paid it no mind.
It wouldn't be long, in any case, before he put his resolution to the test. "Leave the foreign swine for an hour," the African officer had growled when at last they unstrapped him from the plank and dumped him on the floor. "Then we shall start over."
Fifty minutes of that hour had to have elapsed already.
Bolan pushed himself upright into a sitting position and surveyed the room. They had taken away everything but the table and chair. Could he possibly break a leg from the chair, wrench a length of wood from the tabletop and use them as a weapon? Against the officer's autoloader and a sentry with an assault rifle? No way.
Force open the door? It was fashioned from heavy beams of wood, ironbound, with metal hinges stretching three-fourths of the way across. There would be a sentry outside still, and he remembered hearing the rumble of stout bolts being shot home.
He cocked his head and listened.
Here in this house in the center of the hill village, the everyday noises of the community were muted. But he could make out the cries of barkers in a market, a jingling of harness as someone rode along a narrow street. Nearer, he heard the splashing of a fountain, a murmur of Arab voices.
And something else.
Bolan frowned. He had been subconsciously aware of those other sounds for some time, but now there was an extra component. What was it? How long had it been there? Where was it coming from?
For a moment he couldn't even separate it from the others. He just knew that an additional noise had manifested itself. Then suddenly he had it — a stealthy slithering sound punctuated by soft, barely discernible thumps. He concentrated on the noise, ignored all others.
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