Anvil of Hell

by Don Pendleton

  "But today numbers are nothing. Efficiency is next to nothing. It is weapons that count, and the men who know how to use them. Soon, very soon, the Anya Nya will be as sixty thousand men, as six hundred thousand. And then the politicians in Khartoum will bewail their fate. We shall grind the oppressors into the dust and become masters of the whole Sudan!"

  For a moment Oxford University, England, went out the window and in its place pure African mission school showed through.

  "You are planning a coup, General?" The Executioner strove not to betray his interest, but the little Alert bells in back of his mind, actuated by a combat tactician's sixth sense, had started to ring.

  "Ah, it's early days, early days, old chap," General Halakaz said vaguely, conscious, perhaps, that he might have revealed too much. But he could not resist adding, "Now if you were a news photographer... But never mind, never mind. Just keep your eyes on the headlines in a few weeks' time, that's all. Meanwhile, we are still an underground army. I must be off."

  Bolan still retained the laissez-passer in his own name bought from Hamid el-Karim in Khartoum. It would be invaluable if he was questioned by Arab troops policing the region. But he figured it was safer for Mike Belasko to get at least a verbal okay from the guerrilla chief temporarily in the driving seat. "I have your permission to proceed?" he asked.

  "So far as I am concerned," the general said, "you may go ahead and shoot your pictures. But I can offer no guarantee for your safety. You would be wise to stay the minimum amount of time, and keep your eyes open very wide. Caveat emptor, old chap! Caveat emptor, don't you know!" The cane was switched from the right arm to the left, the right hand swept up in a crisp salute, and Halakaz strode smartly away.

  Bolan smiled, remembering the old Latin tag from the schoolroom. Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.

  Like, it's on your own head, man.

  But surely it would be naive to think there was no connection between thefts of nuclear material and a professional soldier with a chip who boasted about undreamed-of military power in the near future?

  The link was something the Executioner could buy all right.

  Right now, nevertheless, the number-one priority was to find where the fissile isotope was. Halakaz, in any case, would certainly clam up if more questions were fired at him.

  The guards had raised the pole. Bolan recovered his papers, climbed back into the Land Rover and drove on.

  For fifteen or twenty miles the rolling grassland continued. Then the clumps of trees grew farther and farther apart, the herds of antelope vanished, the grasses thinned, and soon the trail was twisting up into the desolate foothills of a range that had showed only as a blue smudge on the horizon at the border.

  Three times, Bolan passed the burned-out shells of African villages, only rings of scorched earth and a few crumbling mud walls remaining to show where they had been. Outside the last, on the edge of a mealie patch that had gone to seed, buzzards had picked clean the bones of a man who had been crucified on the lowest branch of a huge banyan tree.

  After that the route grew steeper, dipping from time to time into a rubble of stones and rocks flooring a dried-up riverbed, then rising again toward a saddle that pierced the cliffs of volcanic rock topping the ridge.

  Once through the pass, the warrior found himself descending yet again to one of those upland plains so characteristic of this part of Africa — a featureless wilderness of thorny scrub broken at intervals by piles of enormous boulders. He would have to make camp for the night soon; the sun had dropped out of sight behind the crest and the heat had already gone from the air. He pulled up and killed the Land Rover's engine.

  After the boom of the exhaust and the continuous whining of first gear it was very quiet. Wind rattled the spikes of thorn trees beside the road.

  He spread out a map. Two hundred miles farther on, the track ended at Wau, in Bahr el Ghazal province. Ninety miles before that there was a fork, where he would take the right-hand trail for Ouad Faturah. After that he was on his own, for there were no roads to the one-time forbidden city of Oloron, nor was it marked on the map.

  It was where he was headed just the same, for it had been in that direction the caravan with the canister had been going. It was as good a place to start as any, and he reckoned that if he kept on going he'd have to cross the caravan trail at some point.

  As long as he recognized the point when he got there.

  Bolan shivered and restarted the engine. He was unwilling to spend the night in this godforsaken place. But when night fell with tropical suddenness an hour later, he was still driving through the interminable scrub. To continue with headlights would make him visible for fifty miles. Reluctantly he turned off the trail and parked the vehicle out of sight behind a pile of rocks.

  He opened a baggage roll in back and ate. Then, wrapping himself in blankets, he settled down as comfortably as he could in the passenger seat and tried to sleep. The Ingram lay within reach on the Land Rover's central seat. Big Thunder was holstered on his hip.

  For a long time he huddled there in wakefulness, listening to a family of baboons coughing and chattering uneasily somewhere among the fiat rocks above him.

  He would have liked to call up Courtney on the transceiver, but it was the wrong time. He was wary — after his experiences with the caravan and the chopper — of alerting the enemy that he was back in the Sudan, and in any case, he thought he was still way out of range. A progress report, and the mystery of the inexplicable absence of news from Brognola, would have to wait.

  At last he fell into a fitful sleep... to awake later to the sounds of a stealthy scuttling noise behind the seats. Grabbing the Ingram, he switched on a pocket flashlight.

  A prowling jerboa, one of the desert rats that somehow eked out an existence in the wilderness, was trying to get at the food in his baggage roll. He chased the animal away and found that he was shivering with cold.

  After he had pulled another blanket from the roll, he looked at the illuminated face of his watch. It was still only a quarter after ten... By midnight he was asleep again.

  Bolan awoke finally before dawn and waited in a fury of impatience for the sun to rise. It was still extremely cold. Moisture had penetrated the perspex side windows, beading the instrument dials and controls, chilling him to the marrow.

  He flung off the blankets, clambered stiffly to the ground and stamped up and down the barren earth, trying to re- store his circulation and bring some warmth back into his body. The baboons chattered with anger and swung away over the rocks.

  The sky was becoming visible at last — a mud-colored expanse tinged with saffron above the scrub to the east. Slowly the mountains he had crossed the previous evening assembled themselves in undulations of purple and ultramarine. By the time the sun eventually blazed into sight above a dark cloud bank, Bolan was already in the driver's seat with the ignition key inserted.

  But the ancient Land Rover was reluctant to start. Extremes of heat and cold had made the engine temperamental. Afraid of draining the battery, he got out again and swung it with the handle.

  At the fifth attempt, the engine caught. He scrambled back inside and pumped the gas pedal for a few minutes to warm up the space beneath the hood and chase moisture from contacts and leads.

  Then, bumping over the stony ground, he steered slowly around the rock pile and back onto the dirt road.

  Braking suddenly, he stared left and right.

  Strung out across the trail in two lines, barring his escape in either direction, were a score of African soldiers armed with Belgian FN automatic rifles.

  * * *

  After two days without news, Jason Mettner decided to call it quits.

  Brognola had returned to his drug-busting conference in Istanbul twenty-four hours previously. "Like you say, I figure it for a bum steer," he told the newspaperman. "Hell, why not mix a couple metaphors and say it's a red herring! Something, anyway, to keep you out of circulation, to make sure you're nowhere near the action
. The interesting thing is, why tip you off? Why lay a false trail on you and not on the Company?"

  "Maybe because I'm here and the Company's in Langley, Virginia?" Mettner offered.

  "Could be. I'd like you to hang in a while, just in case," Brognola said. "Stick around maybe one more day, okay? It'd be tough if it really had been a regular tip and something simply happened to louse up both parties' travel arrangements."

  "Check." Mettner nodded. "Though I don't buy Bolan and this Indian running into travel trouble at the same time, for the same amount of time."

  "Unless the tip was genuine and a third party fixed the delays to stop them from getting here as they'd planned, fixed it in the hope that you'd read it as bogus and take off before they finally showed."

  "It's a thought. Except the only person who knew I would be here was the guy who tipped me off — our legman, or whoever took his place. I'll stick around, anyway. And if they don't show I'll do my best to nose out where the action is. I'll keep in touch, anyway."

  "You do that," Brognola said.

  While he was waiting, Mettner filled in his time with routine investigation.

  How was the reservation in the name of Bolan made at the hotel in Bukama? By telephone? Okay, was it possible to trace the origin of the call? What language did the caller speak? What kind of voice? Male or female? Had there been written confirmation, and if so where was the letter posted?

  Were there any Indians at all — or anyone with a name that might be Indian — booked into the Upemba National Park hotel in the next few days?

  The last question was easily answered. The answer was no.

  The desk clerk at the Bukama hotel was a Nigerian woman with big breasts, straightened hair and features that could have been copied from a Benin fertility carving. She was learning the hotel business, filling different jobs at different hotels in the chain. She thought Jason Mettner was kind of cute.

  "Why, sure I remember the call," she told him. "We don't get ail that many long-distance reservations. Mostly they come from our own central bureau in Lagos, or locally from Kinshasa or Kananga. You know, folks who want to do the game reserve."

  Mettner lit a cigarette. "You wouldn't by any chance be able to trace that call?" he asked. "Find out how long the distance was? Better still identify the town where it was made?"

  There was a possibility, the woman said. The call had been put through manually. Theoretically it should have been logged, and she had a girlfriend who worked at the telephone exchange.

  "Was it a guy or a gal speaking?" Mettner said.

  "A man."

  "An American?"

  "He had a cute voice. I liked it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a brother, but I don't think he was American. He spoke in English just the same."

  The reservation had been confirmed by letter. "It's a rule of the house," the receptionist said. "Otherwise folks could just call in from anyplace and then never show. You can't imagine how many rooms you have vacant that way." The cover had of course been thrown away, but the letter itself was on file.

  The headed paper was that of an international hotel in Khartoum. Mettner wouldn't know if the signature was genuine or not.

  "I'll check out the call with my friend when she comes off duty at four," the woman said. "Myself, I'm free after six."

  Mettner fielded that one. "Maybe we could get together over a drink someplace?" he suggested.

  The drink led to dinner in a smoochy Thai restaurant with red-shaded table lamps and samisen music on tape. While they were toying with their Kenya coffee and South African brandy, the friend left a message. If Mettner would care to call by the telegraph and cable office during the lunch break next day, she thought she could maybe help him.

  Mettner did not sleep at his hotel that night.

  Neither did Mack Bolan. When he hadn't shown by noon, the newspaperman decided to pack it in. Even if the call was traceable, what would it bring him? He would be no wiser as to whether Bolan himself had made it, had meant to come to Bukama and been prevented, or whether, as Brognola thought, it had been made by somebody else. Probably the latter, as the receptionist thought the caller wasn't American.

  In fact the call had been placed in Zemio, in the Central African Republic. The woman who dug out this intel for Mettner was tall and slender, with an Afro haircut, a miniskirt and a dozen necklaces carved from different woods. "If there's something else you want to ask," she said, "I quit at four."

  "Baby, I'll be long gone," Mettner said. "I decided to take the train to Kinshasa this afternoon. What you can do, if you want to do me one more favor, is file a cable for me to the United States. The addressee is Hal Brognola. I'll spell that..."

  He stopped. The woman was staring at him wide-eyed.

  "Well, they talk about the long arm of coincidence," she said, "but this really beats them all!"

  "Come again?" Mettner invited.

  "Zemio. A place nobody ever heard of in the CAR. You ask me to check out a telephoned hotel reservation that comes by chance from there. That's coincidence number one, because only a few days ago we have another call from Zemio. It seems they want to connect with someone stateside and they can't make it, so they try to route it through us. As it happens, neither can we. But — wait for it, here comes number two! — the person they wish to contact, it's the same name as the one on the cable you just gave me. Brognola. I remember it because it's... Well, it's not an African name. What do you know about that!"

  "Are you telling me..." Mettner leaned across the counter in his excitement and blew smoke in the woman's face "...are you telling me that, apart from this hotel reservation, someone in Zemio tried a few days ago to contact this guy Brognola in the U.S.A.?"

  "That's what I said."

  "You wouldn't...you don't have a record? You wouldn't know if it was the same person speaking?"

  The Afro shook from side to side. "That other call was a relay. It was the Zemio operator calling. But I remember the name of the sender. It was kind of unusual, too. It was Bolan, the same as the one on the hotel reservation. You don't think that was a crazy coincidence?"

  "Crazy!" Mettner echoed. "Sweetie, you put me in touch with someone can rent me a lightweight private plane and you got yourself a dinner date." He grinned. "As of four o'clock!"

  Chapter Eighteen

  The transceiver in Mack Bolan's pocket began to bleep after he had been arguing for more than an hour with the officer in charge of the detail that was preventing him from resuming his journey.

  Colonel Mtambole was short and bulky, with fierce, bright eyes in a very dark face. He was a volatile man, speaking in short, sharp bursts, constantly throwing out his arms to make a point before he smoothed the creases in his rumpled bush shirt. From time to time he snatched the French paratroop beret he wore from his head, only to jam it back on top of his close-cropped hair once the point had been made.

  The issue between them was simple. Bolan wanted to go on; the colonel wanted him to go back. Either that or be arrested, for he was not entirely satisfied with "Mike Belasko's" store-bought credentials.

  "What do you want to go on for, man? What for?" Mtambole said. "This is dangerous country. We got a civil war on our hands, man. You could say the whole place is under martial law. Okay, technically the province is still ruled by the Arabs." Off came the beret. "Technically, I say. But possession is nine-tenths of the law, even martial law. Specially martial law. And we're here, and we're in possession of you."

  "Sure, sure," Bolan soothed. "I see your point, Colonel. But for the tenth time, I have pictures to take. I have a contract. The way I see it, the only place I'm going to get those pictures is farther on in this..."

  "Where farther on? How far are you going? There's nothing to photograph around here — unless you want shots of the villagers murdered by the Arabs."

  "I told you. I take this trail as far as the bifurcation, where I keep left on the road for Ouad Faturah. According to my map, that road crosses a range of volcanic mountains and
then skirts a big forest before it makes the town ninety miles farther on. There are no roads through the forest. They tell me it's hardly explored, and certainly not by Europeans. And that's where I figure on getting the animal pictures I want."

  The colonel flung out his arms. "Pictures, animals, photographs!" he cried. wl tell you there's a race war going on here! You'd do better to shoot some of the atrocities..."

  At this moment the call sign on Bolan's radio began bleeping.

  "What's that?" Mtambole demanded suspiciously.

  "A transistor radio. I must have forgotten to switch..."

  "Give it to me."

  "But it's my personal property..."

  "There's no personal property in a war," the colonel shouted, dragging off the beret and slapping his thigh with it. "When will you Europeans realize this is Africa! Give it to me, I say."

  One of Mtambole's soldiers moved a step forward, jerking up the barrel of his automatic rifle. Reluctantly Bolan drew the transceiver from his pocket and handed it over. He was mystified by the call. By his calculations, they were still way out of range of Khartoum, and he was angry that he couldn't respond. Courtney might have invaluable intel to pass on.

  The African put the red beret on his head and examined the compact device, turning it over in his hands. As the bleeping continued, a hot, dry wind stirred eddies in the dust at their feet and agitated the stilettolike spikes of the thorn trees.

  "But this is not a music radio," Mtambole said at last. "This is a talking radio. Somebody is talking to you, calling you up. Who?"

  The Executioner contrived a sheepish look. "I guess I'll have to tell you after all," he said. "It's my partner."

  "Partner? What is his name? Where is he? What do you mean 'partner'?"

  "A journalist — the guy who's writing the story to go with my pictures," Bolan improvised. "Guy by the name of Courtney. He's supposed to be up there in the forest already. I guess he's calling me to say he found the right place for photographs."

  "Answer him, then."