The outcrops carried no overhang and offered no cover from a watcher directly overhead. But they cast iron-hard bands of shadow across the foot of each step, and these could conceivably be used to screen a hunted man from pursuers at ground level.
More importantly, the overhead watcher might think the hunted man believed himself to be screened also from above...
Bolan dived for the bar of shadow nearest to him, the AutoMag in his right hand.
He wedged himself into the crevice between two steps.
The chopper was immediately above him, at a height of fifty feet, hovering with its Plexiglas bubble turned into the wind. The hatch slid back. A man stood in the open space, with one foot braced against a former, and an SMG with its telescopic stock extended cradled in his arms.
Bolan fired four shots from the AutoMag, the muzzle-flashes livid in the shadow. He didn't have a hope of crippling the chopper with single shots from a handgun, but he did hope the crew might believe he harbored such a fantasy.
The machine sank lower. The thorn trees on either side of the clearing rattled dry branches and dust swirled across the rocks, driven by the rotorwash. Bolan shifted his position and fired again.
Flame stabbed back from the muzzle of the SMG. The gunner hosed a deadly hail downward, stitching a figure-eight killstream over the slabs of rock. Bolan moved just ahead of it, his hands and face peppered with stone splinters.
Before the killer corrected his aim, he took the wildest gamble of his fighting career.
With the lethal .45-caliber submachine gun still menacing him, Bolan staggered out from the shadow into the full glare of the sunlight. He reeled, flung up his arms and collapsed on the ground beside the rocks.
The next few seconds were the most suspenseful of his life. He was motionless, out in the open, a perfect target. Would the gunman, making doubly sure, fire another annihilating burst into his inert body? Or would he be smug in the conviction that he had scored and simply have the pilot put him down and walk over to check the kill?
Mack Bolan's whole future was bet on the second choice.
The chopper remained above him. Waves of dust washed over the dry ground, threatening to make him choke or sneeze. Some kind of horned beetle, blown onto its back by the airstream, righted itself and began crawling up the side of his face.
Bolan tensed, his muscles anticipating the impact, the flail of the iron whip across his back that would pulverize his organs and sever his spine, the pain that would be the last thing he'd feel.
The whine of the rotors changed in pitch, the blades' chatter was slowing. The pilot was putting the helicopter down.
It settled fifty yards away at the edge of the clearing, bounced once on its shock absorbers, then stayed still. The rotors slowed, the turbojet groaned into silence. Bolan heard the thump as someone jumped to the ground. Footsteps crunched toward him.
The Executioner was lying half on his face, his right arm doubled beneath him. He had rolled his eyes so that only the whites showed between slitted lids. He took a deep breath and held it as the footsteps drew near.
He was cut and scratched in a dozen places, the results of his fall from the galloping horse and the storm of fragments gouged from the rock by the volleys from the Ingram. He reckoned there was enough blood staining his shirt to lend credence to his "death."
The beetle, pausing to wave its feelers when it was halfway across his left eyelid, added the finishing touch.
Bending over the recumbent body, the gunman took in the bloodstains, the stillness, the insect over the dulled eye.
Arrogant in his triumph, he failed to notice the small black opening beneath Bolan's left armpit, where the muzzle of the AutoMag was squeezed between biceps and ribs.
With the hand doubled under him, the warrior gripped the big autoloader's butt. His forefinger was curled around the trigger.
Hot breath played over his skin, and he smelled the odor of some cologne as the killer flicked away the beetle and thumbed open the eyelid.
He was staring death in the face.
The pupil of the eye contracted. Flame belched from the muzzle of the AutoMag, and Bolan yelled involuntarily as pain like a red-hot iron seared the flesh of his arm.
Hot blood spurted over him. The gunman's throat disintegrated under the terrible assault of the 240-grain boattail, flying apart in a cloud of cartilage and shredded flesh. He fell heavily on top of the Executioner, the Ingram skittering uselessly away over the shale.
Bolan exploded into action.
He was out from under the body before the echoes of the gun blast died away among the thorn trees. From the corner of his eye he saw the shape of a second man silhouetted in the hatch of the helicopter, frozen in astonishment by the speed of his companion's death.
Bolan had hurled the body onto the nearest rock shelf and flung himself facedown behind it before the pilot got it together enough to react.
There was no SMG this time; the guy was armed with a small-caliber automatic — Bolan figured it for a Browning — and he was using it like an amateur, firing from the hip as he jumped to the ground and sprinted for a screen of dried bushes beneath the trees.
Bolan felt the shock as the slugs thudded into the body of the dead gunner, jerking it on the rock.
Supporting his weight on both elbows, he steadied his right wrist with his left hand, sighting the stainless-steel .44 over the corpse's chest.
A second burst from the Browning smashed into dead flesh, and then Big Thunder roared.
Once, twice, three times the outsize pistol bellowed, bucking in his grasp to send waves of pain flaming through the seared muscles of his left arm where the first shot had burned him.
Number one plowed through the flesh of the chopper pilot's left upper arm, spinning him sideways. Because of this, number two went wide. But the third drilled the center of his chest, smashing a fist-size exit wound between his shoulder blades. Slammed backward by the savage impact, he lay with outflung arms, eyes staring at the sky.
The gun had flown out of his hand and lay ten yards away. Bolan rose to his feet and walked warily across the clearing, the AutoMag poised, alert to counter a knife thrust, a surprise shot from a second gun, a physical attack.
But the man on the ground this time wasn't playing possum.
Pink froth bubbled at the corners of his mouth. The blood welling out from beneath him flowed more quickly than the dead earth could absorb it. Already his eyes had begun to glaze.
The face contorted in a spasm of agony as the Executioner drew near.
"You want me to finish it, guy?" Bolan asked. "Okay, tell me who sent you, what outfit you're with, where your base is."
"Go to hell," the dying man rasped.
"Where's the uranium headed?"
"Drop dead."
"Another time," Bolan said. "Who's using the stuff and why?"
"Go fuck yourself."
Bolan sighed. The voice was now as faint as the whisper of dry leaves stirred by the wind. Once more the features convulsed. Experience among the mad wolves of the underworld told the warrior thai he was wasting his time. This man was one of the tough ones who would never speak.
In any case there was nothing anybody could do for him now.
Well, there was one thing. And only the Executioner could do it. He raised the AutoMag and fired the mercy shot.
Bolan was frowning as he dragged the bodies beneath the trees and piled stones over them. Neither of these men fitted the scenario as he read it. It was as if the director at Central Casting had sent heavies to the wrong studio.
The men were neither Arab nor African. Each wore a pale, sharp suit, a flowered necktie and two-tone shoes. There were wraparound shades in the pilot's breast pocket.
With their blue chins, heavy jaws and hairy wrists, they would have looked more at home in the Bronx or Chicago's Little Italy than here beneath the blistering sun in southern Sudan.
There was one additional anomaly. The pilot had died like the hardest of maf
iosi, yet he'd handled his gun like a beginner.
Bolan's hawk face was still creased in thought as he recovered the Ingram and walked slowly toward the dragonfly shape of the chopper.
There was a first-aid kit behind the pilot's seat. He dressed the gunshot burn under his left arm, swabbed disinfectant over the cuts and abrasions covering his body, stuck adhesive strips on the deeper cuts. Then he settled down behind the ship's radio.
It took him fifteen minutes to pinpoint the exact frequency to which his original transceiver had been tuned. "MB to DC," he said quietly. "MB calling DC. Zero speech, but if you receive me signal as before."
The three acknowledging bleeps came almost at once.
"Okay," Bolan said. "I don't know where the hell you've been, but try to stand by to receive at the right hours in future. Here is a message for Langley, to be relayed to Brognola with the usual access code..."
The message was a long one. He repeated it twice. Once the single prolonged bleep had acknowledged its reception, he switched off the radio and moved to the pilot's seat.
He checked out the controls, studied dials, flipped levers and thumbed switches. No problem.
The turbojet whined to life. The rotors revolved. The thorn trees flattened.
As the helicopter lifted off, Bolan saw through the curved Plexiglas that vultures were already planing down out of the clear sky to keep watch over the two piles of stones.
Thirty minutes later he passed over El Glouai at five thousand feet and flew into Central African Republic airspace.
Part Two
Infiltration
Chapter Seventeen
The frontier was a collection of wooden huts straddling the dirt road; the border was defined by a barbed-wire fence interrupted by a striped pole with a counterweight at one end. Outside the hut nearest the highway, a squad of soldiers lounged by a trestle table, joking around with a handful of frontier guards. Soldiers and guards wore British-style khaki uniforms; all of them were African.
Mack Bolan slid the Land Rover to a halt in a cloud of dust and climbed out of the furnace heat. Something had gone badly wrong with the arrangements. There had been no message from Brognola at Zemio, the largest town in the Mbomou region of the Central African Republic; none of the personal items or equipment he had asked for in the message passed through Courtney had arrived; nobody knew anything about the turbocharged off-roader he was expecting.
He had wasted three days vainly trying to contact Courtney — out of range, now, for the transceiver — Langley or Brognola. But neither the clerks nor the post office facilities available seemed capable of raising a reply stateside or even from Khartoum.
Telephones, radio, cables relayed through half a dozen different countries were all equally ineffective. Fuming with impatience, the Executioner had finally telexed for money to be sent from an account of his own in Switzerland, then he had got what he needed as best he could from the local stores. The Land Rover was fifteen years old; it had cost him ninety dollars.
Sweat clogged his dark hair and trickled between his shoulder blades as he tramped across the scorched earth to the guard hut. It would be dark in three hours, yet it was still hotter than hell.
Bolan wished he still had the use of the helicopter he'd abandoned in the bush ten miles short of Zemio; he wished he'd made it across the Asa River into Zaire earlier, and waited out the three days in relative comfort in Niangara; he wished a cloud would blow up from someplace and blot out the sun for a half hour.
Now, reentering southwestern Sudan fifty miles north of Niangara, he also wished that he'd paid the bribes for his new ID in Zaire rather than the Central African Republic. Were the papers good enough to fool the tall African wearing the three stripes of a sergeant on his arm? The man had been deliberating over them for what seemed like an eternity.
Bolan was about to say something when the NCO glanced past him, stiffened and snapped out a parade ground salute.
The Executioner swung around. Although the face was dark, his first impression of the man he now faced was all brightness and light. His belt and the straps crossing his compact chest gleamed; the riding boots winked in the sun; the insignia of a major general shone from his shoulder tabs and from under his arm the silver-knobbed head of a cane glistened. Brilliantly white teeth flashed as the cane reached out to touch the papers on the trestle table.
"And what have we here, Sergeant?" he asked. "A foreigner seeking entry?" The voice was deep and mellifluous, overlaid with a caricature of British English.
"Yes, sir."
The smile vectored through sixty degrees and zeroed in on Bolan. "Ismael Halakaz," the voice continued. "Officer commanding troops rightfully in charge of this region. May one ask your reasons for wishing to enter the Sudan at this particular point?"
"One may. General," the warrior returned. "The answer is simple. I am a photographer of animals. Certain of the beasts I want to shoot can only be found around here."
"For example?"
"Certain types of white rhino, cave baboons, elephant, various members of the deer family." Bolan had done his homework over a bottle of bourbon shared with a big game hunter in Niangara.
"But all these, my dear fellow," the officer protested, "can be found in other parts of Africa. Rhinoceros, elephant, monkeys — we have no monopoly, you know."
"Oh, sure." Bolan shrugged. "In game preserves. Shabby, half-tame creatures with threadbare hides. What I want are pictures of wild animals, not those stereotyped images of a blurred rhino charging or a lion hanging its head by a water hole. I'm prepared to wait for what I want. I'm a patient man. What I'm looking for is a pictorial record of animals believably behaving as animals in their natural state — as hunters, as beasts in fear, as family creatures — not just one more chapter for a child's geography book."
"It would be an approach overdue," the general admitted. "What camera are you proposing to use for these photographs, Monsieur...?"
"Belasko. Mike Belasko," Bolan replied. It was the name on his new papers, an alias he had used before. He snapped open the leather case at his side.
"Ah! A Hasselblad. With all the extras. Do you know, old chap, that the money that camera would bring could feed one of my villages in there for a month?" Halakaz stabbed the cane toward the rolling savannah across the frontier.
"I know things in this area are... difficult."
"Difficult! The Arabs in the north are stili engaged in a war of extermination down here in Equatoria. They're systematically killing my people off. Each week they descend on another village and... pouf!" He shouldered the cane like a rifle and shot down an imaginary adversary.
"I didn't know it was still that rugged. Just the same, I guess I was expecting Arab troops to be guarding the frontier."
"They were, old chap. They were. Until yesterday.'* The stick swung toward a row of freshly turned mounds of soil on the far side of the huts. "We show the flag occasionally, you know, just to emphasize our rights. These good fellows..." the general pointed at the guard hut "...will remain here until another troop descends on them. There will be another little skirmish, and another row of graves on our African soil. Then we will take another post..."
"What's the background to this?" Bolan asked.
"The two R's, old chap: rapacity and religion. My people here in the south are Christian or pagan. The people turning this into a police state are of the Mussulman faith — muscle men, that's good, eh? — and they want all infidels eliminated."
"And so you...?"
"We would have accepted some kind of federation, if only the 'autonomy' they offered involved genuine government of our own three provinces. But too many in Khartoum do nothing but line their own pockets and mouth promises they have no intention of keeping. We shall accept nothing less than secession after what they have done now."
"It's that bad, is it?"
"Bad?" Halakaz had a trick of repeating the last word uttered by the person he was speaking to. "So bad as to be unbelievable. It's n
ot an official policy, you see. But the Arab officers quartered here are in fear of their lives, so they lounge about in the towns and leave their troops to burn, loot and kill as they want. You think you have terrorists in Europe and the Middle East? Let me tell you, they have destroyed, completely eradicated, more than two hundred villages here and in southeastern Sudan. They have murdered more than one hundred thousand blacks, leaving the survivors to wander in the bush and starve. There were between five and six million of us, old chap, when the British pulled out. Murder, disease, starvation and a drain of refugees fleeing across the borders into Zaire, Chad and the CAR has reduced that population by fifty percent. Fifty percent, Monsieur Belasko. That's half our people gone!"
"Isn't there a strong underground movement?" Bolan asked. "And what about the SPLA?"
"The Sudan People's Liberation Army?" General Halakaz pronounced the words with distaste. "Too far off beam politically for us, old chap. They take their orders from outside, if you get my meaning. Then of course there's the Nya Nyerere, over to the east in the Dongotona Mountains. Lazzari is a skilled guerrilla leader, but he has two RPG-7 grenade launchers and a handful of automatic rifles among a few thousand irregulars. What can such groups do against the fifteen to twenty thousand heavily armed Arabs in the region? Could they prevent the Juba massacre, twenty years ago, when fourteen hundred Africans were slaughtered in a single night? They fight in derby hats and shorts." The general was contemptuous.
"And here in the southwest?"
"Here we order things better. A little better, old chap. The Anya Nya — the force I command — is six thousand strong. But armed, disciplined, efficient." The cane snapped back under the arm.
"I can see that," Bolan said admiringly glancing at the general's Sandhurst-style turnout.
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