Anvil of Hell

by Don Pendleton

  He dived away, careful to avoid the nettle trees with their hairy, poisonous fruit, and hit a combat crouch. The blast — he figured it for an M-16 assault rifle — had come from behind him. And, as he expected, from above.

  The sniper was someplace up among that tangle of branches, with a sight line clear to the rock shelf. Bolan edged silently through the undergrowth, alert for a sign of movement up there. Birds were screeching all over; the light grew brighter with every minute.

  Three single shots cracked out still from behind him. Bolan swiveled, facing the rock once more. So there were two of them.

  He heard a rasp of metal, a tinkle of glass as one of the bullets pulverized the Hasselblad. He figured this second gun was a big-bore sporting rifle. A Mannlicher? A Husqvarna? He tried to put the thought from his mind. He hoped not. In any case, if the enigmatic Fraulein Finnemann and her entourage had wanted to eliminate him for some reason, they could have done so while he was leaping the fissure or even earlier while he was in their care. They could have left him in the desert.

  It was now light enough for the riflemen to see that there was no bloodied body between the smashed camera and the shredded remains of the bedroll.

  The warrior bellied down beneath a broad-leaved jungle succulent with sickly yellow flowers. He waited.

  Crazy situation, he thought. Kind of a civil war, in which he felt no particular allegiance to either side. And yet each side, independently, was after his hide.

  Why? Because everyone concerned was desperate to keep secrets; whichever way he turned, it seemed, there were interests prepared to go to any lengths to stop him continuing his mission.

  Because the mission was to track down the stolen consignments of uranium 235, it figured that the secrets and the deadly isotope were intimately connected. Any other explanation would be crazier still.

  But why were both sides on the same kick?

  In terms of any warlike use of the fissile material, it made no sense.

  Bolan sighed. Interpret them any way you wanted; those were the facts. Before he drew his own conclusions, he wanted more of them.

  The warrior heard a noise behind him and to his right. Maybe fifty yards away. A faint slithering sound. A swish of leaves.

  He held his breath, peering through the leafy screen, alert for any movement among the complexity of tropical stalks and stems. He reckoned the sniper had shinned down his tree, was now prowling the undergrowth, finger on the trigger, covered by his companion's hunting rifle. Or maybe, like the Executioner himself, he was just waiting.

  The bird song had ceased. The monkeys no longer chattered. All at once the forest was deadly quiet.

  In the vibrating silence, Bolan heard a tiny ticking noise. He glanced briefly down. Six inches away from his gun hand, a sawtooth beetle was burrowing into a deadwood stump: it was the trickle of sawdust, pattering onto a dry leaf, that he had heard.

  The rifleman was an expert tracker: he didn't even make that much noise. Bolan saw the bare feet first, a blur of movement on the far side of a tangle of giant ferns.

  He focused his eyes on that sector of the forest.

  More movement. A branch swaying. Still no sound. And then, so swiftly that it could have been his imagination, a figure glided across a gap between the ferns and a clump of agave.

  The M-16 was no figment of his imagination.

  The sniper who carried it at the ready was a Dinka tribesman. Bolan knew that many of these South Sudanese warriors were seven feet high. This one must have been pretty close to the maximum. His lithe ebony body was oiled. Tribal marks were incised on his cheeks and shoulders. The loincloth he wore was a bright yellow.

  Bolan had no choice. It was either kill or be killed. He hadn't declared the war. If it hadn't been for his battle-bred sixth sense, his body would have been the one staining the forest floor. And there was still a second killer hidden up among the branches someplace.

  He raised his gun arm.

  Big Thunder roared.

  One, two, three, four times, and then Bolan was rolling frenziedly away as the hunting rifle up ahead returned fire and heavy slugs tore through the leaves where he had been.

  Behind the ferns there was a threshing of branches and the sound of a heavy fall. He had stitched the AutoMag's .44 deathstream through an arc covering perhaps six or seven yards, hoping that at least one of the rounds might score on his invisible target.

  Reaction positive. But the marksman wasn't dead. Bolan could hear movement along the jungle floor, labored breathing and a metallic click. From his new position he scanned the thickly overgrown terrain.

  His vision homed in on the wounded tribesman just in time. Beneath the spiked arms of the agave, he saw white markings on a dark, contorted face. One eye was squinted shut — and the other eye stared coldly behind the notched back sight of an M-16.

  Bolan squeezed Big Thunder's trigger once more.

  The assault rifle spit flame skyward, and the face vanished in a cloud of blood and bone.

  The hunting rifle boomed immediately, but the Executioner had already leaped away. Leaves ripped off by the heavy-caliber slugs fluttered down over him as he dived behind cover.

  By now he had a fairly good idea where the second killer was — about twenty-five feet above ground in a group of acajou that formed a solid tower among a collection of taller, thinner jungle trees.

  He figured he could identify the rifie, too.

  There were not many that coughed out such a thunderous report. From the quality of the sound, his experience told him to put his money on a Weatherby Mark V, a .460 Magnum monster that was almost four feet long and shot 500-grain bullets that flew faster than any slug on earth.

  A round from a Weatherby, developing more than eight thousand foot-pounds' energy at the muzzle, would stop an elephant or a charging rhino. But the gun had one disadvantage for a marksman whose prey was armed too: the magazine held only two rounds.

  For the warrior, that disadvantage could be an asset.

  If his calculations were correct, and if it was a Weatherby, he could safely use the few seconds it took the killer to reload to make his own moves.

  In the initial attack on the bedroll, the hunting rifle had fired three times. Assume the guy had topped up the box so that it was full again... and then fired three times when Bolan opened fire on the Dinka, and twice again when he finished that sniper off.

  There would be a single round left in the rifle. And now that Bolan had shown himself, the guy would be unwilling to take time off to reload until he knew what the score was.

  If the Executioner could tempt the man to fire that round, he could use the reload time to get beneath the branches of the acajou — the only place from which he would have a chance of wasting the killer, since the branches themselves would make it hard for him to maneuver the twenty-six-inch barrel of the big gun and take aim.

  The way things worked out, it was a piece of cake.

  Bolan knew he would have been placed, in his refuge behind the bamboo. Beyond the screen on his left was another fern clump. As there was nothing else heavy enough within reach, he tossed the AutoMag into the center of it.

  The ferns swayed wildly as the four-pound handgun crashed down among the fronds.

  Right on cue, the big hunting rifle blasted out the remaining round.

  Bolan was already on his feet, grateful that the second sniper was less smart than his companion. Snatching up the AutoMag as he passed the ferns, he sprinted for the acajou stand, zigzagging among the undergrowth until he was directly below the broad branches.

  From there, looking up toward the rare patches of blue sky among the treetops, he could see the body of the killer bulked against the crisscross of branches. The guy had seen him coming; he had reloaded and fired again. Neither of the bullets came anywhere near the Executioner.

  Sighting on the silhouetted shape above, Bolan fired.

  The rifle dropped, clattering from branch to branch on its way to the forest floor. Blood sp
attered the broad leaves of the acajou and dripped to the ground.

  Bolan squeezed the trigger again.

  A strangled cry pierced the echoes of the report. The bulky shape extended, leaned outward from the tree fork and finally folded forward to plummet down on the carpet of moss and dead leaves below.

  This one needed no extra rounds. The warrior's first shot had drilled his right shoulder; the second had smashed open his chest.

  Bolan took stock of the armory that had been ranged against him. The second marksman — a Dinka like his partner — had indeed been armed with a Weatherby hunting rifle. There was also a pair of infrared binoculars slung around his neck.

  No sweat now to work out how they had located Bolan's hideout by the rock shelf... or, thankfully, to know why they hadn't fired on him before dawn: a man perched in a tree cannot hold binoculars to his eyes and accurately aim an eleven-pound rifle at the same time. If, instead, the sniper had been equipped with an IR nightscope...

  Bolan put the thought from his mind. He made his way back to the first man. As he had thought, the gun was an M-16. This man carried regular Apollo binoculars in a leather case. He took the case and the assault rifle. The Weatherby was too cumbersome — and too slow — a weapon to appeal to him.

  After he had dragged the bodies out of sight behind the giant fern, he shouldered the rifle, slung the binoculars around his neck, clipped on his pouch and picked up the rucksack containing the supplies he had been given.

  The Hasselblad was broken beyond repair. He was examining the bullet-riddled bedroll when the rucksack was torn from his hand and hurled against the rock shelf.

  Bolan leaped to the top of the shelf and was lying prone beneath overhanging branches while the whipcrack of the shot was still ringing in his ears.

  He hadn't bargained on the possibility that the snipers might have a backup in the neighborhood. The guy must have been posted some distance away, heard the sound of gunfire and come running.

  He was much shorter than the Dinkas. And darker. And younger. He was an amateur.

  His second shot was fired from the same place as the first, slamming into the rock just below the Executioner and stinging his cheek with stone chips. But it enabled Bolan to get a make on the gunman's exact position.

  He was standing on the trail, his head and shoulders clearly visible between the branches of the undergrowth, the rifle still held to his shoulder, questing for a better line at the third attempt.

  Bolan pushed himself backward across the top of the shelf. He slid down a grassy slope, wormed his way beneath ten yards of brushwood choked in creeper and came out on [he trail.

  The young killer was sixty yards away, peering through the dense vegetation at the shelf his target had just vacated.

  It was quixotic, it was illogical, it was crazy — after all, the kid had twice tried to murder him — but Bolan couldn't bring himself to gun down the young man in cold blood, as if he was scoring just one more hit on a pop-up target at a fairground booth. He stepped boldly into the center of the trail.

  The killer whirled, the whites of his eyes staring in his face. He fired, almost in a reflex action, from the hip. The shot went wide.

  Bolan took one-tenth of a second longer, but the M-16 was at his shoulder and his aim was good. Before the backup gunner could trigger a second, three high-velocity 5.56 mm deathbringers had drilled the left side of his chest.

  He dropped, lifeless before he hit the ground.

  Bolan sighed. One more life wasted for the wrong reasons.

  He laid the body with the others, decided to leave the martyred bedroll with the remains of the camera, recovered the rest of his gear and resumed his trek toward the northeast.

  He moved warily, five yards away from the trail, in case those who had detailed the snipers had also thought to sow antipersonnel mines or Bouncing Betty gut-bursters along the way.

  If they had, he didn't see them. Two hours and fifteen minutes later, tough going all the way, he was wedged in a tree fork, focusing the binoculars on the forbidden city of Oloron from a ridge above and behind the ravine in which the place was built.

  Kraul the biologist had been right. It did look like an army camp. Between geometrically arranged buildings — constructed, astonishingly, of red brick in the European style — squads of men marched back and forth, most of them black Africans and all of them in uniform. Bolan could distinguish a parade ground with platoons performing classic drills, a carefully laid-out battle course, and several groups sitting cross-legged on the ground listening to open-air lectures complete with chalkboards and slides. A crackle of rifle fire drifted up from a line of butts just outside the settlement's entrance gates.

  If this was indeed the training base for the Anya Nya irregulars, Bolan could see why General Halakaz took pride in his force and why his colonel was so boastful. But was the Parris Island efficiency and the bull that went with it supported in some way by the promise of nuclear clout?

  Was it to this hidden bastion of black power that the stolen isotopes were finally directed?

  Or was this just one more coincidence? Was the precious radioactive material destined not for the vengeful military beneath the rooftops far below but for some other organization altogether in this most complex of countries? That was for Bolan to find out.

  The break came sooner than he expected, but it was not until he turned his back on the forbidden city that he was wise to it.

  He had maneuvered himself around in the tree fork and was scanning the miles of wooded hills to the east with his binoculars when he almost exclaimed aloud in astonishment. For a moment he thought... Hell, yes! There it was again! In the magnified circle of terrain revealed by the lenses, he saw a section of modern, metaled highway...

  He lowered the binoculars and rubbed his eyes. The road was still there. Now he knew where to look, he could see it with his naked eye: a wide highway running along a treeless crest a couple of miles away that linked up with an undulating concrete swath that could only be an airstrip!

  As he watched, a vehicle came in sight. It was traveling fast — a square, blue Renault Espace minibus with a steeply slanted windshield covering the front. He followed its course along the road until it disappeared behind a belt of trees. Then, idly estimating its speed, he mentally traced its path behind the woods and waited for it to emerge on the far side. Promptly, as he had anticipated, the Renault reappeared and continued along the road at the same velocity.

  Only now it was red.

  For the second time, Bolan rubbed his eyes. What the hell? A blue bus, hitting forty, vanished momentarily behind a stand of trees and came out the far side at the right time, at the same speed, in a different color! What kind of trick was that?

  There was no other traffic on the road. The tree line wasn't long enough for a substitution to have been made: there wasn't enough distance behind the trees for a second car to make that speed before it was out in the open again. In any case, why would anyone do that?

  Bolan was reminded of the takeover in a track meet relay race, where the second runner gets going before he grabs the baton from the first. Except that there wasn't room for that here!

  Hell, he had to check this out. Before he did anything else he would solve the mystery of the Renaults that changed color...

  He slid to the ground and made it as fast as he could in the direction of the roadway.

  It took him more than three hours to traverse the two intervening valleys. The undergrowth was dense — often he had to hack his way through with the parang — and he had to watch the noise: there was, after all, what seemed to be a fully manned garrison in the neighborhood.

  And the natives — yeah, remembering the dawn attack — the natives were definitely hostile!

  But despite the proximity of Oloron he saw nobody on the way and finally emerged from a stand of acacia to find himself at the edge of the road.

  He reckoned the blacktop had been laid around six months ago. Twenty feet wide, it ran from an
airstrip in uncharted, unexplored country to... where? The runway was innocent of buildings. There wasn't even a shack in sight. Beyond it, the forest closed in again, and on the other side the road curved away toward the belt of trees where the metamorphosis of the Renault Espace had taken place.

  Bent double behind the bushes at the side of the road, he moved cautiously toward the woods.

  Like most conjuring tricks, the explanation was simple once you knew how it was done. In fact there was no trick. There had been two different Renaults. The optical illusion was possible because there were also two different roads.

  Behind the trees, the road Bolan was following dipped suddenly to run into a tunnel leading underground. Just beyond the tunnel mouth, a little way off to one side, was the exit from a second tunnel... and a strip of blacktop that curved away into the distance.

  It was like a city underpass. And it had happened, while he watched, that a vehicle had emerged from the exit tunnel at the same time that another, traveling at the same speed, had plunged into the entrance.

  Okay, mystery solved. But what kind of underground complex did these roads and the airstrip serve?

  Bolan lowered himself to the ground and wormed his way through the undergrowth until he could train the Apollo binoculars on the tunnel mouth.

  It was arched, tall enough to take a ten-ton truck, well engineered in blocks of limestone. The stonework continued out along the sides of the sunken road until it had risen to ground level. Inside the entrance, a row of electric lights in the tunnel roof paralleled the sweep of the roadway as it turned steeply aside and spiraled underground.

  The second tunnel, from which the red Renault had emerged, would doubtless mirror the arrangement in reverse.

  And the two roads would meet someplace below.

  Where?

  Why?

  And where did the exit road go?

  Bolan laid an ear to the ground. A slight breeze sighed through the treetops and creaked the branches, but otherwise this part of the forest was silent. Was it his imagination, or did he hear a faint but persistent thrumming, a constant vibration transmitted through the earth that could have been produced by the operation of heavy machinery?