Mettner reckoned it would interest him to the tune of twenty bucks.
The buddy worked at an auto repair shop behind the town's one gas station. "Got himself a deal there," the Watusi said, stuffing the bills in his pocket. "Hey! You won't forget to put in my name when you write your story, huh?"
Mettner said he'd do his best. The grease monkey at the gas station said yeah, sure, he'd fixed up a deal for the guy with blue eyes, put him in touch with a connection had a good-condition Land Rover for sale. Two more ten-spots bought Mettner the registration number of the vehicle.
"You wouldn't have any papers relating to the deal?" the newspaperman asked. "I mean like receipts or warranties and suchlike?"
"Papers?" The mechanic was at once defensive. "Heck, no. What are you, mister, a cop or something?"
"No way," Mettner said. "I just wanted to check if it was the right guy. Nobody seems to know his name. That's all."
"He had money cabled from Switzerland, I know. It happens that I, uh, I have a girlfriend who works the post office. Could be, in certain conditions, she would be able to check out the name."
Mettner sighed. He knew what the conditions would be. He reached for his billfold.
It was worth the money. The name was Bolan.
But the mechanic's other friend — the guy who'd tanked up the Land Rover and given the driver directions how to make the road to Niangara, in Zaire — just happened to have seen the new owner's ID.
Mike Belasko, photographer.
Mettner groaned. He had beaten his brains out trying to establish some firm connection relating the clues he dug up in Zemio with the Executioner.
Now he had three of them: Bolan, Belasko and the mystery man in the Mercedes who reserved rooms in Bolan's name...
But the only hard lead he had was the Land Rover and its destination. He decided to follow up that lead. Reducing still further his depleted store of dollars, he bribed another friend of the gas station attendant to drive him out to the Beechcraft.
Once airborne, he radioed the controller at Isiro, Zaire, for permission to land. The field was less than fifty miles from Niangara.
The gas station attendant heard the plane pass overhead. He went to check with the mechanic, who took time off to go see the girl in the post office. He put through a long-distance call, collect.
"Mister," he said when the connection was made, "you promised to see me if I came up with any additional information on this Bolan character, okay? Well, there's this foreigner who's been asking questions all over town the past two days... That's right. An American named Mettner. Claims to be a newspaperman..."
Chapter Twenty-One
Mack Bolan sat on the graveled floor of the desert and forced himself to stare out between his laced fingers.
Navigating by the stars, checking every half hour with a compass, how could he possibly have made such a gigantic mistake? Given the exhaustion, given the mental fatigue, allowing for the physical damage wreaked by hunger and thirst, how could he unknowingly have the physical damage wreaked by hunger and thirst, how could he unknowingly have walked in a huge circle and returned to his starting point like some fictional castaway in a desert romance?
Even if the working of the compass had been affected — perhaps by a heavy iron lode beneath the floor of the plain — how could he? How could he have continually misread a skyful of stars?
Worse, how was it that he was approaching the vehicle the wrong way — because, the way it was facing, the sun, too, was in the wrong place, rising in the west instead of the east? Or was it in fact setting, and he had lost a whole day? For a moment he felt his reason slipping away. Then the panic was over.
This was not the same Land Rover.
This one had clearly been involved in some desert skirmish — the windshield was starred, bullet holes peppered the tattered canvas top and punctured the hood. The action had occurred some time ago, Bolan guessed, because human scavengers had removed wheels, tires, headlights, anything that could be dismantled or wrenched off the rusted chassis. A thin coating of sand was sifted over the seats.
He rose to his feet, staggered the last few yards and cast himself down in the shade beneath the wreck. He slept.
Bolan awoke with dust clogging his nostrils. A hot wind stirred the dry twigs strewing the sun-scorched surface of the thorn tree desert. His whole body was bathed in sweat.
He looked at his watch. It was well after midday. He struggled out from his refuge below the vehicle. The heat struck him like a hammer blow. Shading his sore eyes with one hand, he looked around.
West, south and east, the atmosphere trembled above the limitless expanse of spiked deadwood, but ahead, clear enough even though they were still blue with distance, a line of low hills undulated against the burnished sky.
As the Executioner heaved a long sigh of relief, the hot wind blew again, a hell breath of desiccated air, dry as dead leaves. Thorny branches rose and fell, clattering their spines.
How far away were those hills? Fifteen miles? Ten? Was there a chance they could be less than that? It was impossible to estimate: details blurred in the superheated air dancing over the plain. But one thing, he saw now with a surge of relief, was crystal clear. Less than fifty yards from the wrecked vehicle, faint but still discernible among the graveled wastes, the desert trail arrowed toward those hills.
At last he was back on the right track.
After nightfall, he would make the far fringe of the interminable plain or die in the attempt.
If he didn't make it during those precious hours of darkness, he thought soberly, he would die. Less than half his supply of water remained. Statistically the third twenty-four-hour period without food and with insufficient water was his limit. In these climatic conditions the human organism, even one as tough as Bolan's, could take no more.
He crawled back beneath the Land Rover, stripped off his drenched blacksuit and pushed it out in the sun to dry. He wet his parched lips and tried to masticate a fragment of the tallow candle in his survival kit in the hope that the fat would provide protein for his starved metabolism. But tallow does not keep well in hot climates. The candle had melted into a glutinous mass and the tallow was rancid. He vomited at once, making his raw throat dryer than ever.
He took a second sip of tepid water, was reknotting the condom when the third gust of wind — much stronger this time — rocked the vehicle's body. A loose fragment of metal, displaced from somewhere in the engine compartment, tinkled to the ground.
Bolan realized the light was fading. He looked out from his shelter. The sun was partially obscured by the outer fringe of a dark cloud that had blown up from the west, an iron-gray curtain drawn over half the sky.
As he watched, the incandescent brilliance dimmed, faded to an orange fireball, a silver disk... and then vanished behind the advancing cloud.
The wind blew harder. The thorn trees leaned.
Bolan knew the signs. A dust storm was approaching, fast.
He was still half-naked. Hastily he drew on pants and bush shirt, fumbled with the clasp of his belt. The wind was now moaning through the dry branches of the trees.
Above his head, the dust cloud was tumbling, roiling, racing across the sky. And a quarter of a mile away to the west he saw with mounting apprehension an approaching dust devil — a miniature tornado similar to those that occasionally ravage the American Midwest.
Linking the earth with the lowering sky, the dun-colored corkscrew shape spiraled at frightening speed toward the Land Rover, uprooting trees and whirling stones aside in its crazy course across the desert.
The moan of the wind increased to a howl, a roar. Bolan scrambled out from beneath the vehicle and ducked behind the bodywork on the side away from the blast. A moment later, the storm engulfed him.
The tail of the pint-size tornado whipped across the off-roader with frenzied force. Stones rattled like shrapnel against the rusted steel and lacerated the lower half of the Executioner's legs.
His mout
h, ears, eyes, nostrils, every square inch of his frame between skin and clothes, were invaded by the choking dust. It was pitch-dark in the center of the shrieking whirlwind, and for a time he was afraid he would be buffeted into unconsciousness.
When at last it was over, he lay on his face, gagging and retching, some yards away from the battered Land Rover. It was the fierce heat of the sun beating on his back that convinced him the tornado had really passed.
He struggled to his feet and saw the sinister spiral dwindling away toward the east.
It took him a long time to rid himself of the worst of the dust, and he was obliged to use a few drops of the water to clear his eyes. Only then did he get wise to the full extent of the damage wrought by the storm.
The blacksuit had gone, whisked away into the unknown. The AutoMag would be useless until it was entirely stripped down and reoiled. Both tobacco cans with their irreplaceable contents had been blown away. His map, sucked into the air by the violence of the storm, had flapped away like a wounded bird.
He checked over his mental list. He was left with his belt and pouch, containing the penlight, mess tin, condom and a few rounds of ammunition; the gun and the parang at his waist; and the towel. Even the plastic sheet had disappeared.
He risked the heat to make a one-hundred-yard recon in the lee of the vehicle. Many of the thorn trees had been uprooted in the gale; dead branches lay everywhere; dust had piled up in the smallest depressions to form miniature dunes. He found part of the map impaled on a thorn. The plastic sheet was lodged at the top of one of the taller trees, but it was ripped to pieces, not worth the effort of a climb. Of the rest of his missing kit there was no sign.
He trudged wearily back to the Land Rover, trying to ignore the agony in his belly.
Kicking aside a pile of dust that had gathered beneath one of the wheel-less brake drums, he stepped on a hidden stone, turned his ankle and fell heavily.
A sudden gurgle. A rush of warmth over his crotch and thighs, a clamminess of the pants clinging to his legs.
Bolan couldn't even curse.
As he went down, the parang clipped to his belt had twisted, the razor-sharp tip of its blade sliding beneath the unfastened pouch flap to puncture the condom.
Frenziedly he pushed himself upright as warm water gushed from the open pouch. He struggled to wrench the sac upright, to keep at least some of the precious liquid in its waterproof depths. But he could save no more than a few spoonfuls in the mess tin. And even these could not be reserved for the remainder of his nightmare journey: the second condom had been in the basic survival kit carried away by the whirlwind.
Bolan crawled back beneath the chassis and drank the water. If he hadn't, in a shallow open tin in that heat, it would have evaporated in a half hour.
Now he had to make the most difficult decision of all.
In his present state of exhaustion, with no food and no more water, he could only expect to last a certain amount of time. If he waited until nightfall and started the final leg of his odyssey then, there was a chance time might run out on him before he made the hills on the far side of the desert.
If he started now, the sun could destroy him.
Apart from the question of time, there were other considerations.
Now that the plastic was gone, he had nothing but the towel to protect him against the onslaught of the sun. Equally, with no plastic sheet and no more blacksuit, he had nothing to insulate his body from the cold of the desert night.
The compass was gone with the wind. If he traveled in daylight, he could simply follow the trail. If he waited until it was dark, he could use the stars again — unless the weather was bad and clouds blacked out the night sky.
He looked at the western horizon. The sky was stormy.
Final point: without wheels or tires, the Land Rover's chassis was very close to the ground. It was damned uncomfortable under there in this heat.
The hell with it. He would walk now.
It was after four o'clock when he finally left, but the sun, scarcely started on its slide down toward the west, was still hammering the desert with blinding power.
Bolan was a scarecrow figure, his eyes staring, his cracked lips moistened with no saliva. Thick stubble blued his jaw.
He lurched along the trail in the direction of the distant hills, the padded handkerchief on top of his head, the towel draped over that and the two bound in place with the strip of cloth torn from his shirttail. In his weakened state they were not much protection.
In less than a quarter mile he was limping badly. His ankle had swollen and there were blisters on both feet. Only his iron will kept him going; he was past logical thinking now. Because he hadn't a hope in hell of making those hills before dark — of keeping on the right track after dark — of surviving the night to try again the following day...
Yet somewhere at the center of that zero threatening to engulf him a single spark of brightness, the will to survive, refused to be dimmed. Doggedly he would continue to place one painful foot before the other... one foot before the other... one foot...
Whatever the odds.
In the heat that rose in numbing waves from the shaley desert floor he lost all sense of time. Lying on his back among the thorn trees — he must have fallen — crazy! — he gazed sightlessly at the sky and listened to the music of an organ.
At some other time that blinding afternoon, swaying, he stood with his arms wrapped around a tree trunk, staring over a great field of grass rippling in the wind.
He knew that he was hallucinating. "Can't fool me," he mumbled. "I know that's no mirage...mirage is...optical illusion. Actual impression on retina. This is all in... my mind." He laughed weakly. "Even a camera could record... mirage."
Camera?
Where the hell was the Hasselblad?
He knew he should have a camera. He did have a camera. Suddenly he was terribly worried about the camera. If he was a photographer he had to have a goddamn camera.
And then he remembered. Of course. The Hasselblad was in the Land Rover. It was stowed in back, behind the front seats. No sweat... He could pick it up when he made the Land Rover. He should reach it soon. All he had to do was keep on walking...
The organ music was louder now. Could it really be the pounding of blood through his own veins? He put a hand into the pouch at his waist. No water. Screwing up his eyes against the glaring light he looked beyond whitecapped waves and watched the blue hills shiver in the sun. Brognola was shouting in the cab and the Land Rover's brakes were squealing.
* * *
At first Bolan was irresistibly reminded of General Halakaz, for the accoutrements glinted and gleamed from the toes of the knee-high leather boots to the lenses of the sunglasses that masked the eyes. But there the resemblance ended.
Although deeply bronzed, his rescuer was white. And a woman.
She was blond, small-waisted, about thirty-five years old, wearing whipcord breeches and a polished military belt with crossed shoulder straps. She wore lipstick, and her hair was gathered on her nape in a black velvet bow.
Bolan didn't believe her.
He moved his head and looked around. He was lying on his back on a camp bed in a forest glade. Tall trees arched overhead to screen out the sky. On the far side of the glade three tents with mosquito nets had been pitched between a Range Rover and a fat-tired Toyota Land Cruiser. Several men, black and white, were busy around a wood fire, and the aroma of roasting meat drifted on the cool evening air.
Bolan cut his gaze to a close-up. The woman was still there.
"Aren't you hot, wearing all that stuff?" was the first thing he said. His voice was weak, not much more than a croak.
She smiled. Even, very white teeth. "It can be uncomfortable in the desert," she said. "But both the vehicles are air-conditioned and the clothes are really designed for forest conditions, as a protection against stings, bites and scratches." Her voice was deep, husky, overlaid with a trace of accent — Swiss? — that he couldn't place.<
br />
"How did I get here?" he asked.
"We picked you up at dusk, the day before yesterday. You were lying beside the trail halfway across the desert."
"The day before yesterday?"
"You were pretty far gone. We've been pumping you full of glucose and vitamins and concentrated protein." She smiled again. "And knockout drops to allow your body to heal itself without any interference from your mind."
"I don't know how to thank you," Bolan said awkwardly. "But I... How far did I have to go? Before the end of the desert?"
She shrugged. "Ten miles. Twelve. Something like that."
"You were heading north? We're north of the desert now? Okay... You would have passed two Land Rovers, both abandoned. How far was I from the first one, the one with wheels?"
Blond eyebrows were raised. "About fifteen miles. Why?"
Bolan bit his lip. He had walked through several hells and that was all the distance he had made.
He tried to sit up. There was an intravenous drip in his left arm; an inverted bottle of saline solution suspended from a stand beside the camp bed. She pushed him down again. "You are still very weak," she said. "You must rest."
He stared around the glade once more. The black bearers were setting canvas stools around a trestle table. Between the tents, bales and crates of stores were stacked neatly. Among them, he saw, was a theodolite on a tripod.
"This is an expedition?" he asked. "And you're the boss?"
She nodded.
"You're on safari?"
"Not quite," she said. "We'll feed you some broth and then you must sleep. Tomorrow will be soon enough for the questions."
She strode away toward the fire.
When she returned with the broth in a waxed paper cup, she saw that he was sleeping already.
* * *
Her name, she told Bolan the next day, was Trudi Finnemann. She was a geomorphologist, surveying and mapping the great triangle of uncharted forest that lay between Ouad Faturah, Wau and the thorn-tree desert on behalf of a German development corporation, which she did not name.
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