It was coming from the direction of the small window high up in the wall.
The warrior had already manhandled the table across, stood the chair on it and checked out the window. He knew the room was on the second or third floor of the house, and that there was a sentry squatting in the patio below with a rifle across his knees. There were no pipes, projections or decorations on the outer wall. Now he rose silently to his feet and climbed up onto the chair again.
It was dark outside, but in the diffused light reflected upward from the courtyard below he could see a length of rope dangling in front of the opening.
It was a thick rope, hanging down almost to the window-sill, and it terminated in a double knot the size of his fist. Every now and then the rope twirled and lowered itself a few inches so that the knot bumped against the rough sandstone of the embrasure. As he watched in amazement, the rope swung slowly back and forth, scraping that knot along the sill, producing the sounds he had heard.
Someone, somewhere above, was trying to attract his attention!
He seized the rope, tugging it once. Immediately the swinging motion stopped and the rope hung still.
Bolan clambered up and hauled himself cautiously onto the sill. He leaned out into the night. The window was just wide enough to take his powerful shoulders.
The guard was still below. Bolan twisted his head and looked up. He knew already that between the window and the roof parapet there was a ten-foot stretch of rough sandstone unbroken by any projection. But now the line of the parapet was broken by a head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars.
The rope twitched impatiently several times. The knot rose upward for twelve inches in a series of small jerks.
The message couldn't have been clearer if it had been sung by a Western union boy in a Hollywood movie. Climb up. Escape.
Bolan pulled hard on the rope. It was rock solid. The unknown rescuer must have wrapped it around a chimney or some other stable feature on the roof.
The soldier below was still nodding over his rifle. Bolan was barefoot. If he could make those few yards of sandstone without a single sound, without dislodging the smallest fragment, before the torturers returned to the room...
If he couldn't, he would be a sitting duck. But what the hell. Anything was better than what lay in store for him below. This was the break he had been waiting for. Wrapping both hands around the rope, he swung out over the void, braced his feet against the wall and began dragging himself hand over hand toward the parapet.
The ascent took him seven minutes and nine seconds. Every silent inch was an achievement, a triumph of determination and muscular effort over fatigue and the laws of gravity.
It was the vital need for a silence that was absolute, a delicacy of touch that would not permit the tiniest morsel of frangible sandstone to fall and alert the sentry, that made it rugged. Without that qualification, Bolan could have made the climb in thirty seconds flat and eased himself over the parapet.
As it was, by the time he swung a leg over and subsided, panting, on the roof, his shoulder muscles were shrieking for relief and his feet were raw.
Once the thundering behind his eyes had quietened, he raised his head and stared at his rescuer. There was no Western Union cap, but it was certainly a boy.
The slight figure coiling up the rope was that of an Arab child no more than twelve years old. "What the?" Bolan whispered.
The boy laid a finger across his lips. Jerking his small head imperiously, he stole away to the far side of the roof. Bolan got up and limped after him. The kid was paying out the rope over another parapet. Below, the Executioner could just make out a huddle of smaller buildings, more flat roofs, and then a raised walkway edged with battlements.
"I'm obliged," Bolan murmured. "You'll never know just how much I'm obliged, kid. But who are...?
"Shh!" the boy hissed. "Very dangerous." He waved a hand at the walkway. "Soldiers come here on patrol, yes? We wait until they pass. Then we go down."
"Okay, okay. But what are you doing here? Who are you?"
"I come from Wadi Djarzireh," the boy said in a low voice.
"Yeah, but how did you know that I was here? And why should you help me?"
"My sister tell me I shall look after you."
"Your sister?"
"Yemanja."
"Yemanja!" Bolan was thunderstruck.
"I am in same caravan with the effendi," the boy explained. "I see what happens when they capture him again after the fire. So. Small boy can go many places, hear many things. They bring always prisoners to this village, so I help because the effendi is friend of my sister."
"As simple as that," Bolan mused. "Well..." He broke off as the boy grasped his shoulder and forced him to duck down behind the parapet. From over the wall they heard the tramp of feet and the clink of equipment as an army detail marched along the battlement. When the noises had died away in the distance, the boy rose to his feet. "We go," he said.
Bolan swarmed down the rope and found himself on the roof of a mud-walled shack overlooking a narrow alley. The sweet stench of vegetable refuse wafted to his nostrils. As the boy joined him at the edge of the roof, a confused hubbub broke out above and behind them. Voices shouted: feet clattered on a stone stairway. The officer and his torturers must have returned to find that the bird had flown.
It gave the Executioner some pleasure to imagine their bewilderment, finding the prisoner had vanished from a locked room with guards posted at the window and door. But he didn't have long to relish the thought.
"Quick!" his young rescuer urged. "They call back that patrol from the other side of the village. Very soon they guess how you escape. We go again, yes?"
"We go," Bolan agreed hastily. Together they dropped down into the alley. Already they could hear footsteps of the returning patrol racing along the battlements at the far end of the lane. "There is just one thing," he added doubtfully. "In that house there are things that belong to me. Important things. If there was any way, while they are out searching...?"
"The clothes, the papers, the talking machine and the small sack you will find in a doorway at the end of the alley," the boy said. "I could only bring one gun, the large silver one."
"You are a good boy."
Bolan tore off the shift and shrugged hastily into the bush shirt and pants while the boy waited outside the doorway, gazing impatiently up and down the alley. He buckled the belt and shoved the AutoMag into its holster. "What's your name?" he asked.
"It is a long name, not of this region. Men here call me Ali."
"I guess I can make that myself." The Executioner grinned. He unbuttoned one of the shoulder straps on the shirt. The thin sheaf of bills wadded inside the double thickness of material had been overlooked by his captors. He peeled one off and held it out. "Ali," he said, "this American money is worth a great many piasters. If I give it to you, do you think you could rent, buy or steal a horse for me? I've got to get away from this place very quickly."
"Yes, effendi." The boy nodded eagerly. "Come this way and I will show you."
Bolan thrust his feet into his combat boots, clipped the pouch to his belt and followed him out the alley.
Ali led the way across a broader street, through a deserted courtyard and into another lane from where the flaring lights of the market were visible. Over the clamor of the crowd they heard an outburst of shouting behind them: the patrol must have discovered the rope.
"Quick," Ali said again. "You must go around the market. On the far side is the mosque and beside this there is a jacaranda tree. From the lower branches you can cross the wail without passing through the gate. Below is a wadi. I will bring the horse there in one hour."
"Ali," said the Executioner warmly, "I owe you!"
"It is nothing. I obey my sister." There was a gleam of teeth in the dark and the boy was gone.
The market was on a much smaller scale than the big fair at Wadi Djarzireh. The naphtha flares illuminating stalls of fruit, vegetables and sweet
meats in the center left pools of dark shadow all around the square. Bolan edged cautiously from shadow to shadow behind the crowd of fellahin and their black-veiled women, instead of continuing to the far side, he took the first lane he came to, figuring he could make the mosque on a cross street — because dressed as he was, in a hill village as remote as this, he couldn't afford to be seen by anyone. Not if he wanted to get out of the place alive.
Placing the rubber soles of his combat boots carefully among the dimly seen piles of garbage, he hurried away from the lights.
There was no cross street.
The lane led straight to an alleyway that circled the village immediately below the wall. And from the left, above him, he could hear the tramp of a second patrol approaching along the battlements.
Bolan turned right toward the mosque and ran, sprinting beneath a curved strip of sky spangled with stars. He passed two narrow openings, the curve of an onion-shaped dome shining faintly in the starlight. He dashed past a third alley — and cannoned into two Arab women walking out through an archway to head for the market.
One of the women was carrying a stone jar on her head; the other had looped an arm beneath the handle of a wicker basket full of fruit. The impact sent them both spinning.
The jar fell to the ground and smashed on the cobbles; the woman with the basket stumbled, sprawled and sent a cascade of dates and lemons rolling along the alley. Bolan tripped, skidded on a flood of oil from the broken jar, put his foot on a lemon and went down with a clatter that seemed to him to shake the ramparts.
Over the shrill protests and squawks of dismay from the two women, he heard a shout from the battlements and a rush of booted feet. The patrol, alerted by the noise, was running to investigate.
Bolan scrambled to his feet and dashed on. The mosque was two hundred yards away.
A man's voice called out a question. From the ululating screams and the rush of Arabic pouring from the women he was unable to say whether they were merely complaining about the behavior of a lout too brutish to stop and apologize for his clumsiness, or whether they had recognized a foreigner in the gloom and were reporting that.
He couldn't take any chances; he had to make that tree beside the mosque and disappear before the patrol gave chase.
For the right reason or the wrong, the army detail was after him. He heard guttural commands, acceleration in the running footsteps, a flashlight beam lanced the dark.
The AutoMag was in his right hand. Should he dive for cover, turn and shoot it out?
No way. He'd last as long as his ammunition, no more. He had to keep running and hope his luck held.
The square in front of the mosque was deserted. Bolan turned out of the alley, hared across and pulled himself frantically up among the branches of the giant jacaranda.
He lay there, holding his breath, as the patrol rounded a curve in the battlements, clattered beneath with the light beam probing the darkness of the alley and ran out of sight around the far end of the mosque. Ten minutes later he was slithering down the dried-up bed of the wadi.
It was an hour and thirty minutes before the boy showed. And even then — doubts were beginning to gnaw at the Executioner's mind — it took a faint whinny from the far side of a huge boulder to guide him to the rendezvous. The horse was saddled, and there was a djeilaba and burnoose flung across its back.
"Ali," Bolan said fervently, "thank you. Now tell me. Do you know of the oasis called El Glouai? It lies in a stretch of desert beyond Raga, not far from the frontier of the country they call the Central African Republic."
"I have heard men speak of it," said the boy, "but I have not been there. It is very far, beyond the tall mountain and the place where they make flame come from the earth."
"Flame from the earth?" Bolan's pulses quickened.
"It is a place where they suck out the liquid that they feed to trucks."
"Ah." False alarm, the Executioner thought. "That would be a well. For gasoline and oil. Now can you tell me how to get to the trail that leads to EI Glouai? I haven't done what I came here to do, but it is necessary now that I leave and return by another route."
"I think so," Ali said. "You must follow this wadi until it joins the river that flows on the other side of the town. You will have to lead the horse, for it is too rough to ride and would in any case make much noise. The river makes a ravine and after that it crosses a hamada with thorn trees. On the far side of this plateau you will find a caravan trail leading away and over the mountains. Beyond the pass you descend, and there you will see the track that goes toward El Glouai and the southwest,"
"How far is it to that track?"
"Perhaps one day's ride, perhaps a little less," Ali said. He hesitated. "Effendi... I did not have to pay for the horse. It will not be missed until tomorrow morning." Bolan felt a crumpled bill thrust into his hand.
"Keep it, Ali," he said. "Perhaps you can buy something for yourself that you really need." He smiled, taking the horse's bridle. "And maybe some gift for your sister!"
"Allah go with you," said the boy.
Chapter Sixteen
Wind, scorching hot and blowing hard out of the wastelands to the north, rolled a long cloud of dust across the hamada as Mack Bolan kneed his galloping horse between the thorn trees scattering the plateau.
The pilot of the helicopter saw the telltale cloud when he was still a long way off — it was the only moving thing in all that desolate tract of country that spread from horizon to horizon five hundred feet below his whirling rotors. He nudged the man sitting next to him and pointed ahead through the Plexiglas bubble. The second man nodded. He unhooked a microphone from the powerful shortwave transmitter at one side of the controls. "We got a contact, heading southwest by west," he reported. "Closing to check it out. Stand by for confirmation."
Replacing the mike, he picked a stubby Ingram MAC-10 from the floor and rammed a magazine loaded with thirty .45 ACP rounds into the butt. The chopper banked, floating sideways under the pressure of the wind, then settled down to overtake its ten-mile-distant objective.
More than half the distance had been covered before Bolan became aware of the rotor clatter above the thunder of his horse's hooves on the stony ground. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the helicopter, a speck in the molten sky that was rapidly growing larger, approaching crabwise as the pilot corrected the wind thrust.
Ahead, the range of hills between him and his oasis target had to be a good fifteen minutes' ride away. The lower slopes were densely wooded, but he didn't have a hope of making them before the bird overtook him.
Bolan was betting the chopper was on a recon mission with instructions to locate him. But was it? Wasn't there a chance that this could be no more than some routine flight? Police checking out the movement of nomads, a military patrol on the lookout for SPLA guerrillas, a TV team on their way to report the fighting in Chad?
Maybe, but it was a chance he couldn't afford to take. Because right now he had to get out of the Sudan. In every sense the country was too hot to hold him.
He had been strung along, fooled, led into a trap — all without gaining the slightest intel on his objective. He was no nearer solving the mystery of the stolen uranium than he had been when he left Alexandria.
But he would be back. You could lay your money on that. The Executioner didn't cry quits halfway through the first round. He would make it into a neighboring country and then reenter the Sudan from a different direction, playing another role. He would trace that isotope to its destination, and find out who it was for and why they wanted it — if it was the last thing he did. He would track the stuff down if he had to quarter the whole southwestern tip of the country, from top to bottom and from side to side.
The way the chopper had been quartering the area around the Arab village in search of the infidel who had escaped?
Probably. Because he was certain now the ship was following him. How many lone riders in Arab robes would there be galloping through this wilderness when the s
un was at its burning zenith?
Another swift glance behind enabled him to identify the craft. It was a two-man Dassault reconnaissance type, small, maneuverable, originally designed as a spotter for the French colonial army.
Only this ship carried no squadron insignia or military registration letters. Behind the bubble, the skeletal fuselage was painted matt black and it bore no identification.
Bolan dug his heels into the horse's flanks and coaxed the last ounce of energy from the willing animal. The surefooted Arab steed sped straight as an arrow between the thorn trees.
Bolan lay flat along the stretched neck, the burnoose billowing behind him above the animal's long tail, streaming in the wind. Beneath him he could feel the powerful muscles quiver, the blood pulsing with every herculean stride.
The helicopter was four hundred yards away. If he wanted out of the country in one piece, the men flying it had to be bested.
It wouldn't be enough — even if this was possible and the woods could be reached in time — just to make use of the shelter and hide; whether they had orders to capture or to kill, now that he was located the fliers could box him in and keep him cornered until reinforcements could be called up to finish the job.
So how could a horseman with a single automatic pistol dispose of a modern flying machine crewed by at least two men who could be heavily armed? In a landscape as bare of cover as the most barren wastes of Utah?
By playing it cool.
If the lucky cards came out of the shoe his way.
There was one chance, and it was a slim one. Bolan took it.
Fifty yards ahead, forty, thirty, flat slabs of rock thrust through the shaley crust of the plateau to form a series of long, shallow steps that dropped through a clearing between the thorn trees about the size of a baseball park.
The sound of the helicopter, almost directly overhead, was deafening. Bolan swung a leg over the saddle, sent the horse careering on its way with a thwack of his hand and launched himself into space. He hit the ground with a shock that blasted the breath from his body, shoulder-rolled and came up beside the nearest rock.
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