He crawled farther along, parting wild grasses so that he could see a greater distance inside the curving tunnel.
A little way around the bend, the sandbags and slits of a blockhouse broke the even surface of the wall. He nodded. As he had expected, direct entry was out of the question.
But he was going to get in there somehow.
The sun was nearing its zenith and the heat was becoming too much. The hell with it: he would prospect in the other direction, where the trees offered some protection from the direct rays. He rose warily to his feet and sped across the roadway. If he cut through the woods, inside the wide curve of the blacktop, he could make the airstrip more quickly and more safely.
He began to work his way through the undergrowth.
When he was perhaps halfway there, he pushed through a tangle of thorny bushes... and froze.
The ground opened beneath his feet. Half concealed by leaves and branches, the mouth of a concrete-walled shaft yawned before him.
He peered over the lip.
The breeze died away. Over the hum of insects he could hear the thumping of his own heart.
In the shadowed depths of the shaft, reflected sunlight gleamed momentarily on the metal sheathing the slim, tapered nose of a missile.
Chapter Twenty-Three
During the next half hour, Bolan found three more underground silos of the same pattern, each with a missile in place.
No prizes now for guessing where the stolen uranium 235 ended up. He didn't like to think of the nuclear ramifications that might be going on somewhere below his feet.
No prizes either for guessing why General Halakaz and his sidekick were so confident of victory in their struggle against the rulers in Khartoum.
But who was helping them... and why?
Because this was a worldwide operation. This was no crazy plan dreamed up by a few hundred guerrilla irregulars, however efficient their parade-ground drill might be, however much their families learned about the splitting of the atom in school. An organization that could mastermind thefts from heavily guarded reactors in Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, and activate blocking tactics smart enough to outwit investigators all along the line, had to have almost unlimited funds available... and a network of ruthless operators on the payroll way beyond anything the South Sudanese rebel leader could conceive.
The Executioner was thoughtful indeed as he arrived back at the edge of the airstrip. There was a lot more legwork to be done before he decided what action to take, if any.
Maybe he should simply report his findings, refer the matter back to Brognola at Stony Man and let the Fed take it from there.
He was staring into the heat haze shimmering over the concrete strip when he became aware of a persistent, low roaring noise that had for some time been forcing its way into his consciousness. It had nothing to do with the faint mechanical sound he had sensed with his ear to the ground during his recon of the roadway.
He looked up. Above the forest trees away to his left, another kind of haze hung in the air, halfway between a mist and a cloud of thin smoke. He decided to check it out.
The noise increased in volume as he approached. The undergrowth became denser and more luxuriant. The mist resolved itself into a curtain of spume hanging above a waterfall.
Bolan fought his way closer. It was in any case too hot now to venture out into the full glare of the sun by the runway.
That was some waterfall!
The breadth and scale of it amazed him. The river, shallow and fast moving, was much wider than he would have expected. It flowed across a plateau whose existence he had not suspected, divided around a number of islets on the lip of the falls and then twisted away down a steep-sided canyon — perhaps to vanish underground and reappear lower down the valley in which Oloron was built?
The falls were staggering: a semicircle of separate cascades that roared over a fifty-foot ledge between the islands, coalesced in a turbulent pool and then leaped in a single great waterspout over a sheer cliff fully one hundred feet high.
For some minutes Bolan remained fascinated by the grandeur of the scene, his senses battered into quiescence by the volume of sound. Then, as his mind automatically began accepting, rejecting, sifting the evidence offered to his eyes and ears, he noticed a discrepancy.
Surely the flow of water frothing away from the foot of that last waterfall was appreciably... no, markedly less than the amount arriving at the top?
The more he looked, the more obvious it became. Maybe this was one of the places quoted by Trudi Finnemann, where the greater part of the river did vanish underground into a subterranean channel hollowed from the limestone. He scanned the falls, searching for some trace of a sinkhole. It must be someplace in that seething basin that separated the cascades and the final, single fall over the cliff.
Behind several of the initial cascades he could make out dark openings breaching the hollowed rock.
There was something else, too.
Unmistakably he could see patches of concrete among the glistening rock faces. Somewhere behind those deafening cascades, man had been improving on the works of nature!
Concealing the M-16, the binoculars and his rucksack in a clump of bushes, Bolan scrambled down a narrow path zigzagging the steep bank above the pool. In two minutes he was drenched to the skin. But after the fierce heat of the day, the dank, ferny atmosphere of the ravine and the moisture of the spray were as refreshing as a cool drink. Slipping and sliding on the wet moss covering the rocks lower down, he reached the level of the basin.
The surface of the water was in a tumult, shading from acid green near the foaming impact of the cascades to a deep violet in the center of the pool. And once he approached he could see at once that his reasoning was correct. The water spilling over the lip and falling one hundred feet to the gorge below was nothing more than an overflow; by far the greater part swirled back from the bottom of the pool to go racing down a series of conduits slanting into the rock behind the cascades.
As he expected, the falls over the centuries had hollowed out an overhang in the cliff, and it was possible to walk along a shelf between the curtain of falling water and the rock face. Treading with infinite care, he edged along the slimed ledge behind the first cascade, slithered across an open space and ducked behind the second.
Here were two of the conduits — giant ferroconcrete tubes ducting the water into the bowels of the earth at an angle of sixty degrees. Crossing the deep channels that led the twin torrents from basin to conduit were small arched bridges with single guardrails.
Behind the third falls, Bolan found three conduits, similarly linked by concrete bridges. But here the one in the center was larger, a vaulted tunnel with the water thundering down a course laid in its floor. At the far end of the tunnel he could see light, the curved corners of huge turbines, the base of a generator.
He had clearly come across a vast underground power station, the source, he imagined, of the electricity lighting the road tunnel and of the vibrations he had sensed nearby.
Soaked as he was, the warrior found himself shivering in the chill, moist semidarkness behind the falls. He never knew what it was that made him look up at that moment. Certainly no sound could have penetrated the ever-present roar of falling water. But he did look up, up and out over the empty cliff face separating the third and fourth cascades.
They were farther apart than the others, these two, and a guardrail snaked across the wet rock at the side of the pathway linking them.
A black soldier in uniform leaned his hips against the rail. There was a submachine gun in his hands and it was trained, from a distance of about thirty feet, on Bolan.
He whipped Big Thunder from its leather and triggered two 240-grain boattails across the space. The soldier's face split open in an O of astonishment, the gun dropping from his hands and slithering down the rock into the pool. For a moment he teetered against the rail, then slowly slumped over it and fell.
One of the E
xecutioner's skullbusters had fisted through the guy's abdomen; the other severed the carotid artery in his neck, and bright blood jetted far out into the cascade as he dropped.
The body sank at once, for the briefest instant staining the foam crimson. Thirty seconds later it reappeared, bobbing like a cork, in the center of the maelstrom.
Bolan expected it to be sucked toward the conduits, but after a while some undercurrent tugged it toward the side of the pool, where it snagged on a branch, freed itself, spun slowly in an eddy and then started to move, remorselessly and with increasing speed, in the direction of the lip and the hundred-foot drop beyond.
He lost sight of it again then, but the dead man made a final horrifying appearance, rearing grotesquely up from the water on the very brink of the chasm before he plunged from sight.
The warrior heaved a sigh of relief. It would be a long time now before his body was recovered, if it ever was. On the other hand, his absence from his post could be noticed at any time. Maybe it would be wiser to leave after all.
Bolan recovered his gear and resumed his route through the forest to the strip.
He became aware of the change when he was still a couple of hundred yards away. The roar of the falls had drowned the engine noise, but a ship had landed while he was checking out the conduits. As he drew nearer he could hear shouted orders, the whine of machinery.
Peering through a screen of creepers, he saw a twin-engined cargo plane parked near the roadway. A squad of soldiers were unloading the cargo into a convoy of halftracks drawn up on the concrete.
With his wet clothes steaming in the tropic heat, Bolan lay beneath a bush and watched them through his glasses. Most of the cargo was crated, and judging from the way it was manhandled onto the forklifts, the stuff inside was delicate.
Thirty minutes later the transshipment was completed. The freighter trundled back to the far end of the runway, turned and took off. The convoy had already formed and was heading toward the road and the tunnel before the drone of the plane's two engines died away over the forest.
The trucks passed quite close to the Executioner's hiding place. There were six of them — half-tonners with canvas tops painted in drab camouflage — but so far as he could see, only the first three carried guards: tall men with AKMs, one standing on each side of the cab. On an impulse, Bolan rose to his feet and ran through the long grass to intercept them.
He reached the blacktop just as the last truck slowed to turn off the landing strip. Once it was past him, he ran out onto the pavement. In three quick strides he was level with the tailgate. As the vehicle accelerated, he grabbed the hinged panel, pushed aside the canvas flap and hauled himself up and over into the interior. So far, so good!
Two outsized crates filled most of the space inside, stoutly built containers of half-inch boards reinforced with strips of wood on all sides. There were no contents specifications or delivery instructions stenciled on the wood.
Other than these crates, the truck was empty. And Bolan was thankful that there was no window between the back and the driver's cab. He settled down behind the crates to wait.
He had no idea of what he was going to do when the truck stopped, but he wanted in. He wanted action at close quarters; he was tired, however hectic it had been, of operating on the fringe of the mystery.
Identify, infiltrate, destroy. Okay, he was past the first hurdle created by that guerrilla's creed: identification completed.
The time had come to infiltrate.
And the truck was one way of getting past the guards at the tunnel mouth.
After that?
Well, it was unlikely they would search their own vehicles after such a short trip. He was gambling that he would find an opportunity to slip out unnoticed before the cargo was unloaded.
Soon the floor tilted as the truck began to sink below ground level. The beat of the exhaust and the rattle of the caterpillar half-tracks echoed back from the stone walls dipping toward the tunnel.
They drove straight past the guards. For some time the truck continued to descend in a series of tight curves, then the road flattened out and they drove straight ahead for what seemed about a quarter of a mile. Finally the halftrack made a right-hand turn, braked, backed up, stopped again. The driver cut the engine, and the truck rocked as he jumped out, a second time when his mate quit the cab. Two doors slammed.
Bolan's first impression was that of noise, a huge swell of sound that echoed back and forth between the walls of whatever underground fortress they had entered. He could identify the boots of the soldiers as they clambered down from the trucks, a distant hammering, the pervasive hum of machinery, a confusion of voices calling. Inching forward between the crates, he put his eye to the crack between the truck's tailgate and the canvas flap.
The vehicle was drawn up with the other five half-tracks in a bay off an immense cavern in the rock. Both the roof and the farther reaches of the vast chamber were lost in shadows. Nearer, a battery of arc lights blazed on workmen erecting some complicated apparatus from a scaffold.
Beyond a stack of crates similar to those in the truck, an arch in the limestone led to another cavern that was even bigger. In the bright light that shone through, Bolan could see figures in shiny decontamination suits and protective helmets busy around the spirals of great cooling tubes. On one side, a section of a gigantic silver sphere — a cyclotron? a synchrotron? — bulged into view.
The convoy drivers and the escorting guards were grouped around an officer issuing instructions, their backs turned toward the parking bay.
This was Bolan's chance.
Raising the flap as little as possible, he dropped to the ground and slid around to the front of the truck. Here, out of sight of the soldiers, he crouched between the radiator and the rock wall, looking for a place to hide.
A little way to his left, hidden from the men in the cavern by another truck, a six-foot archway had been cut into the wall. It was closed off by a steel door.
The warrior edged along to it, listened, reached out to try the handle. The door was unlocked. He turned the handle, ducked his head and slipped through into a long passage with closed doors on either side.
Electric bulbs glowed in the low roof. At the far end, an opening led to the dark reaches of another cave. The humming noise was much louder now. He had to be approaching part of the generating station he had seen from behind the falls.
The Executioner stole down the corridor and into the cave. It was empty and unlit, but through it was yet an- other chamber hollowed from the rock. And here, sure enough, reflected light gleamed on the squat shapes of turbines and transformers.
He hesitated. Should he hide in this empty cavern, or would it be better to risk discovery and return to the cave where the action was, hoping to find some place of concealment there?
Perhaps the latter. Because then he might be able to emerge and check the place out systematically when work had stopped for the day.
First, though, he had to hide, at least temporarily, his backpack and the M-16. It wouldn't be smart to try to steal through a heavily guarded fortress with a three-foot automatic rifle slung across his back.
Partway into the cave, he found a niche in the rock wall where he could lean the gun and stow the pack.
He turned and stole back to the lighted passageway.
General Halakaz stood just inside the entrance, a heavy Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum in his hand.
"Not many white rhino down here," he said mildly. "I think you and I had better have a little talk, old chap."
Part Three
Destruction
Chapter Twenty-Four
The black sergeant leaning against the barrier pole at the Sudanese frontier was dead.
The body, stiff with rigor mortis, had been fixed there with a loop of rope. The entrance wound was clean, and the little blood staining the khaki bush jacket was lost among the soldier's medal ribbons. The exit wound beneath the left shoulder blade was something else, but Jason Mettner
didn't find that out until later.
At first, bringing the Chevrolet Blazer to a stop ten yards from the pole, Mettner didn't make the connection. He was within a few feet of the corpse, his ID and accreditation held out, when realization hit him. With an exclamation, he ducked beneath the pole and hurried to the guard hut.
The stench of recent death met him at the door.
The five men in there among the overturned chairs and shattered table were all naked from the waist down. Each had been castrated. The newspaperman thought they had been killed by gunfire, but he didn't wait to find out. He lit a cigarette and went back outside.
The other huts had all been sacked. Everything in them was destroyed — bedding ripped, furniture hacked, mirrors smashed. Seven more black soldiers lay dead below the back wall of the last hut. White splinters pricked out of the dark wood showed where the execution squad's bullets had slammed into the wall.
Mettner shuddered and returned to the road. Should he pick up one of the rubber stamps from the guardhouse floor and frank his own passport?
Maybe not. If he ran into the murderers, a stamp originating apparently from their enemies could turn out to be a death warrant for him, too.
He shoved the papers back in his pocket, figuring the smartest thing he could do would be to get the hell out. The attack must have been very recent: the fact that the bodies were still locked in rigor mortis testified to that.
But there was no question of backing off.
He raised the barrier pole gingerly.
The body of the sergeant slid to the ground, bounced once in the dust and turned onto its face. Mettner averted his eyes from the cloud of flies that had been clustered over the raw wound in the man's back, and dragged the body into the guard hut with the others. There was nothing else he could do.
He climbed back into the Blazer, drove past the upraised pole and stepped hard on the accelerator to send the vehicle careering along the rough trail leading to the interior.
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