Bolan took back the transceiver and turned the pointer to Transmit. "Hello, Courtney," he said, his mouth close to the microphone grill, "this is Belasko. Hello, Courtney... Come in, please..."
He turned the pointer back to Receive, but only the bleeps continued. No voice answered from the tiny speaker, which was not surprising, as he had kept his thumb firmly on a small button set into one side of the casing. Unless the button was released, the radio would not transmit.
"Try again," Mtambole ordered.
Bolan repeated the procedure, and again the high-pitched bleeps provided his only reply. After a time they ceased.
"It must have been damaged, some wire disconnected while jolting over the rough roads," Bolan said, shaking the small plastic device. "I will take charge of it," the colonel said, holding out his hand.
"But it will be of no use to you. It can't be tuned to different frequencies. You can only use it in conjunction with similar sets that have been synchronized with it. By itself it is useless."
"Radios are always useful in guerrilla warfare."
"But it's broken."
"Then you will not be inconvenienced by the lack of it."
Mtambole took the transceiver and put it into his pocket. "I have decided," he said. "I will permit you to proceed and seek your friend, but only because of what you told me earlier — that you had received the personal accord of General Halakaz. This will be checked, and I must warn you that if it should prove untrue you will regret it."
"It is true."
"Good. Then apart from one small formality I need detain you no longer. As underground forces, you understand, we must not remain too long in the same place. However, the day of deliverance is at hand. Soon the Anya Nya will be marching openly, the acknowledged force for law and order throughout the land."
"And the formality"?
"We must search your effects, lest there might be something that could menace us. Or be of use to us."
Bolan shrugged angrily and gestured toward the Land Rover. There was no way he could stop them. He stood in the scorching sunlight, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead, as the soldiers expertly unrolled his baggage and handed over the contents for Mtambole to examine.
The mercurial colonel "requisitioned" — as the Executioner had feared — the Ingram and its magazine. He also took the binoculars, a commando knife, a weighted wire garrote and a bundle of phosphorus lock-destroyers, which had originally been in the pouch Bolan wore at his waist. "You appear. Monsieur Belasko, to anticipate hostile reactions from your subjects," he said dryly.
"The area is far from any human habitation and practically unexplored, as you know. A man has to be prepared for anything."
"You will be able to move the better without the excess weight," the officer said. "For you can't take the vehicle the whole way, you know. It's rare to see wheels at all around here. Which being so, we shall relieve you also of one of these." He pointed at a pair of fourteen-gallon jerricans of gasoline racked against the Land Rover's flat tail. He jerked his head, and one of the soldiers lifted a jerrican from the rack.
"But I won't be able to replace that," Bolan said angrily. "The tank will need refilling in another ten miles, and I have maybe two hundred to cover. Plus at least another four hundred before I find a gas station on the way back."
"As I said, you won't be able to drive the whole way to the forest. Shortage of fuel now will ensure that you do not stray into areas where you have no business, in any attempts to find an alternative route. Besides..." he favored the Executioner with a bland smile "...you have the pleasure of knowing that you are advancing the cause."
Bolan compressed his lips and said nothing.
There was no point arguing; they had the drop on him. And if he provoked Mtambole too far, the chunky little officer, with his alternations of blandness and menace, was quite capable of taking the vehicle itself and abandoning him in the wilderness.
At least they were leaving him the holstered AutoMag and the Hasselblad, which would support his Belasko cover if he was stopped again.
It was only after he had driven a few miles and decided to brew himself some coffee on the portable camp heater that he discovered the entire contents of the baggage roll, including all his supplies, had been taken.
Mastering his rage, he climbed back behind the wheel and continued. Three hours later he reached the junction where the trails for Wau and Ouad Faturah separated. There had once been a settlement here, but all that remained now was the familiar patch of blackened earth, pockmarked with jagged stumps of walls. The bodies of five hanged men dangled from a branch of a charred tree. They were naked and decomposing, their eyes plucked out by vultures. Bolan shuddered, swinging the Land Rover around the grisly sight to take the left-hand track toward Ouad Faturah.
The scrub had been replaced by squat trees separated by dried-up undergrowth as the road wound upward. Now the trees thickened and the angle of incline grew more steep. Soon the Land Rover was laboring in first gear up what appeared to be a channel carved in solid bedrock.
Several miles later the trail flattened out, though it grew no smoother, and the warrior saw that he was about to cross a plateau of bare volcanic lava surrounded on ail sides by steep, sugarloaf hills covered in dense vegetation.
He wrestled with the wheel, striving to identify the route in the stony waste. The tires scattered fragments of basalt, and the vehicle's progress was reduced to a jolting crawl.
Beyond the hills was another thorn tree desert, flat and featureless, stretching as far as the eye could see until it was swallowed up in the trembling heat haze.
Bolan drove on, his bush shirt dark with sweat, his wet fingers sliding on the oven-hot wheel. Dust penetrating the floorboards clogged his throat. The air he breathed seared his lungs.
He was almost twenty-five miles into the desert when the engine's pitch grew harsh. In the sweltering cabin the odors of burned gasoline mingled with exhaust fumes were swamped by the acid stench of overheated metal. He braked, killed the engine and checked the radiator. The rusty water was near the boiling point, but the header tank was still full.
He shrugged, slid back into the driver's seat and twisted the key. The engine was reluctant to restart. When finally it did, the beat was harsher still. He lifted his foot. Should he stop and allow it to cool?
Cool? Beneath the blazing sun? On a flat shadeless plain where the earth was so hot it burned his foot through his combat boot?
In that temperature, there was more chance of the engine cooling if he went on driving, even speeded up. If he stopped there was a risk it would get even hotter, and he himself would go crazy under the hammering assault of that harsh sun.
He trod the pedal and coaxed the scrabbling, bucking Land Rover up to fifteen miles an hour.
Ten minutes later clouds of steam burst from beneath the hood. There was a sudden hollow rumble followed at once by a shriek of tortured metal, and the Land Rover slewed across the track and ground to a halt. The engine was dead.
Cursing, Bolan jumped to the ground. When he managed to pry open the blistered hood, his nostrils were burned by the stench that filled the engine compartment.
It didn't take him long to find out what happened. Someplace along the worst parts of the route, the oil pan had bottomed on solid rock, tearing a hole in the metal sheeting. Backtracking down the rough trail, it was easy enough to find confirmation in blackened grass clumps and occasional stains on the dusty surface.
The engine oil had gradually leaked out. No longer lubricated, one of the main bearings had run in the extreme heat, and the engine had then seized up.
Bolan stared at the stricken vehicle. He was surrounded by total silence, which was broken only by the diminishing hiss of steam and the ticking of cooling metal.
Without an expert mechanic, hydraulic hoists and the correct spares, the old Land Rover was as dead as a headless rattler. And here in the center of southern Equatoria it was going to stay that way.
Without food, water or
other supplies, the Executioner was marooned in the wastes of the thorn tree desert.
Chapter Nineteen
The sun flamed out of a sky the color of molten lead. At two o'clock the heat was even less supportable than it had been at noon.
Bolan lay sweating beneath the blistered wreck of the Land Rover, breathing in dust and the odor of melted grease and gasoline fumes from the fuel vaporizing through the breathing hole in the tank filler cap. He knew that he must remain there at least another four hours before it would be safe to move.
He was rated a survival expert, but his training and his particular skills were based more on the steaming jungle conditions of the Far East than those in the arid and desolate wastes of Central Africa. He had, nevertheless, attended that course at the "survivor's school" in Hereford, England, organized by Britain's crack antiterrorist unit. And the lessons on desert conditions spelled out by the SAS lecturers had stayed in his mind as part of his mental armory.
The most important, the most vital, were concerned with water. "Life expectancy in desert conditions depends on water," they told him. "If you want to stay whole, you must replace all the moisture you lose by sweating. So keep out of the sun to minimize perspiration. And eat as little as possible because water is used to break down the food in digestion."
Bolan remembered the grim statistics. Without water, a man will last about two and a half days at a temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit — provided he rests the entire time in the shade.
If he has to walk to safety, the distance he makes will relate directly to the water available. With none, in the same temperature conditions and moving only at night, he might cover twenty-five miles before collapse. If he attempted to walk by day, he would be lucky to cover five miles. At the same temperature, given a half gallon of water, he might last three days and cover as much as thirty-five miles.
In terms of those parameters, the Executioner's position was perilous in the extreme.
It was much hotter than 120 degrees; it was more like 140.
Digesting food posed no problem: all his had been stolen. But the only water he had was the coolant in the Land Rover's radiator. There might be half a gallon, but it would be rusty and contaminated. He'd have to distill it to make it drinkable. To do that he'd have to improvise a solar still.
A solar still required digging while the sun was still up, and this in turn would further deplete his bodily supply of moisture. It was a risk, just the same, that he would have to take.
The toughest decision he had to make was concerned with direction. A golden rule for travelers stranded in the desert has always been: don't wander off in the hope of reaching safety; stay with your vehicle until the people looking for you locate it.
Nobody was looking for Bolan.
Okay, so he had to get out. This involved balancing different sets of unknowns one against the other.
Most important, which way should he go? Forward or back?
Visually there were no clues to help him with this decision. The thorn tree desert stretched as far as he could see in every direction. But how far could he see? It was difficult to say. The last range of hills he had passed through — he reckoned the Land Rover had made twenty-five to thirty miles since then — had vanished in the heat haze; no change in the flat landscape was visible ahead or on either side. It was the same when he climbed onto the vehicle's hood and stood upright: 360 degrees of stunted thorn trees, motionless under the hammering of the sun.
The map he had was not precise. Making a rough estimate of his own position, he guessed the plain continued for another forty miles before the land rose into a series of ridges intersected by steep ravines that were probably wooded. But there was no indication of the vegetation to be found in the desert. It could become bare, like the lava plain he had crossed, more varied, with larger, greener trees — or stay with the thorns all the way.
He was, of course, following a trail. According to the map, it continued to the far side of the plain and then threaded its way between the hills to Ouad Faturah and the forest. But he had seen no indications that anyone had used the trail recently — or was likely to in the immediate future. No tire marks, cigarette packs, empty Coke cans; no signs of broken brushwood, extinguished camp fires or bivouac sites.
Allowing that he could distill two quarts of water from the radiator, he should be able to make the hills, back the way he had come. But what happened then?
The hills, the lava plain, another, steeper, range of hills... and another plateau covered with thorn trees. The colonel and his detail would be long gone. And apart from the jerboa and the baboons, he hadn't passed a single living creature, had seen no sign of human habitation since he crossed the frontier.
And the other way?
He was damn near halfway across the desert. With luck he might make the far side, and the unknown country beyond. Villages were marked on the map. They might have been destroyed, like those he had passed already, since the map was printed. But he knew the first group had gone; those ahead were an unknown quantity.
There was a fifty-fifty chance they would still be there. Or some of them, one of them, would.
What the hell. He would go ahead into the unknown.
He had taken chances before, and they had worked out. Any continuation of the mission lay ahead. Challenges were there to be met. The warrior had a gut reaction against any kind of retreat.
Come nightfall he would forge ahead on foot.
But first he had to make — and use — the solar still. For this the sun must be low enough in the sky not to knock him out while he worked, but with enough heat in it to promote condensation.
Waiting for the right moment, he unfastened the pouch at his waist and checked the contents in the sweltering shade beneath the Land Rover. There was a penlight; twenty spare rounds of 240-grain boattails for the AutoMag; a miniature Malayan parang wrapped in his rolled-up blacksuit; an aluminum mess tin; a pack of solid fuel tablets; and two small tobacco cans sealed with adhesive tape. One of these contained a tiny medical kit, the other Bolan's basic survival package.
Bolan repacked everything carefully — the contents of the tobacco cans insulated with cotton wool — and started to construct his still.
He'd have to dig a hole in the ground two feet across and eighteen inches deep. Because he would eventually need the sun's heat, he could not dig it within the protection of the shadow the Land Rover was now casting.
It was one hell of a job.
The sun was about twenty degrees above the western horizon, but the temperature was still over 100 degrees. To break up the stony terrain, he used a screwdriver from the off-roader's tool kit, and a heavy wrench as a hammer. The earth could then be removed with the flat blade of the parang.
It took him one hour and twelve minutes to complete the chore, and his clothes were totally soaked in sweat after the first ten minutes.
He had placed a handkerchief on top of his head, covered it with a triangulated towel and tied it in place with a strip of cloth torn from the tail of his shirt. But the blood was thundering behind his eyes and he was reeling from the pain of a headache before the hole was half finished.
When he judged it was deep enough, he drained the water from the radiator into an empty two-liter oilcan he found in the rear of the Land Rover, built a small fire from dead brushwood and lit one of the solid fuel tablets beneath it. He placed the oilcan on top of the fire.
The next step was to fashion a length of hose to carry steam from the water when it boiled into the still. With the sharpest of the parang's three cutting edges he sliced up ducts from the utility's cooling system, hydraulics and wash-wipe apparatus, joining them up with adhesive tape from the medical kit.
One end of this complex tube was fitted to the radiator hose, which was suspended just above the surface of the water; the other end dipped into the hole in the ground.
Bolan put the mess tin at the bottom of the hole and then covered it with a four-foot-square sheet of plastic he
found beneath one of the seats. He fixed the plastic in place with stones laid around the edge, and then poked down the center of the sheet so that it formed an inverted pyramid with the apex above the mess tin.
With the heat remaining in the air and the relative coolness below the surface of the earth, the steam passing into the hole through the tube condensed on the underside of the plastic, ran down the slope to the point of the pyramid and dripped into the tin.
Bolan emptied the tin twice, but there was no airtight seal above the boiling water and more steam was lost between the different parts of the conduit. When the oilcan boiled dry, he was left with only enough distilled water to fill one of the condoms from his medical kit — a fraction more than two pints.
He shrugged. There was no question of choice now; he had to start walking — or stay with the Land Rover and die.
Folding the sheet of plastic as small as he could, he stuffed it in the pouch along with the wrapped parang, the spare ammunition, the penlight and the solid fuel tablets, lowering the bulging rubber carefully on top. The mess tin was now hooked to his belt, the tobacco cans in the pockets of his bush shin, the towel around his neck.
The sun at last sank behind a misted horizon, leaving a sky stained crimson in the west. Bolan began to walk.
He ran up against a major difficulty at once.
The trail was hard enough to follow in daylight. By night, since the distance between the thorn trees was greater than the width of the track, he soon lost it altogether.
He took out the luminous compass and, guided by the map, set a course twelve degrees west of true north. This should leave him, if he made it to the far side of the desert, fifty miles due south of Ouad Faturah. And after that? Whether he went that far or branched off earlier depended on whether his trail was crossed by a caravan track that could be a prolongation of the route taken by the train carrying the lead canister.
Play it by ear.
Trudging on between the silent thorns, he used the stars as a navigation aid. The Great Bear was not in sight, but as he was only six degrees north of the equator, Orion was almost directly overhead and he was able to see Mintaka in that constellation as a pointer to the Pole Star. Every half hour, he stopped for a five-minute rest, checking the correct deviation with map and compass and the penlight.
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