Four hours later, halfway across the thorn tree desert, he saw the unmistakable outline of a Land Rover silhouetted against the glare of the sun.
It was parked about ten yards off the trail, apparently undamaged. Mettner slid the Blazer to a halt in a shower of gravel. He walked across to the vehicle, taking a notebook from his pocket. The registration numbers tallied; this was the vehicle Mack Bolan had rented. But there was no sign of the Executioner.
He leaned on the horn button. The two-tone blast died away beneath the thorn trees, but nobody came running; the shimmering desert floor stayed silent and empty beneath the pitiless sun.
The keys were still in the ignition, so he tried to start the engine.
Zero.
Okay, enough juice to sound the horn; electrical systems go... but a dead engine and a blocked starter. In other words, mechanical breakdown.
Where had Striker gone? Had he been picked up? Would he have been crazy enough to walk? Was he lying someplace nearby, a victim of the sun?
Mettner got back behind the wheel of his own vehicle. He turned up the air-conditioning and cruised around the stalled off-roader in widening circles for twenty minutes.
No Bolan.
Frowning, he returned to the trail.
Forty-five minutes later he stopped by the second Land Rover. Clearly there had been a storm recently in this part of the desert. Sand and gravel lay piled against the wheels on the western side, the seats were covered in stones, the soft top hung in tatters from the iron frame. Many of the trees were uprooted.
Once more Mettner clambered out into the heat, but he couldn't find a clue by the abandoned off-roader. For the second time he cruised.
He was maybe two-hundred yards away to the east when a flash of bright light caught his eye. The lid of an open tobacco can was reflecting the sun's rays. The can was empty.
Mettner shrugged. Maybe, maybe not. He made a more detailed search of the immediate area on foot. He found a tube of antihistamine tablets, unused, among the roots of an upended tree, a limp scrap of plastic sheeting impaled on a thorn, a broken button compass. They might signify Bolan, they might not. The compass, certainly, had not been lying long in the desert because the bright metal casing was untarnished.
The newspaperman decided to go on looking, limiting his search to the eastern side of the Land Rover. He got back in the Blazer and slammed it into first.
He was ready to call the whole thing off when he saw the clincher. It was caught in the branches of a thorn tree fifty yards away, a dark amorphous shape he figured at first for a dead bird. He was within ten yards before he tumbled.
Hanging from a thorny spike, he saw a formfitting blacksuit, a one-piece garment suitable for a man around six feet tall.
That did it!
Like Kilroy, Bolan had been here.
But where was he now? It didn't take the brainpower of a genius — a smartass foreign correspondent would do quite well — to work out that the items Mettner found had been carried there by the storm. It was reasonable to suppose that Bolan might have been sheltering by the second Land Rover when the storm broke.
So why wasn't he wearing this blacksuit at the time?
Well, he sure wasn't taking a shower before dressing for dinner, Mettner thought sourly, staring at the barren wilderness surrounding him. Maybe he was too hot; maybe he was resting and got hit by a daytime storm.
Maybe. But that didn't get him any closer to the Executioner's whereabouts right now. And there were no clues around the wreck itself from which he could make any kind of deduction.
The one thing he did see — a punctured condom, shriveled by the sun, half buried in a drift of fine gravel — left him puzzled, but none the wiser.
Sweating in the ferocious heat, he returned to the Blazer, lit a cigarette and continued his journey north along the desert trail.
It was dusk when he reached the water hole, stampeding a herd of gazelles, two prowling hyenas and a great cloud of birds. Where the track divided some way beyond, a pile of stones blocked the left-hand fork. He lifted his foot, shrugged and then swung the wheel to the right. When you were driving blind, one road was as good as another.
Like the geological expedition before him, he stopped for the night at the head of the steep-sided gorge that snaked through the jungle. The spring that issued there from a limestone outcrop had hollowed out a grotto that served as a natural shelter and a refuge from the attentions of monkeys, bats and other nocturnal denizens of the jungle.
Mettner had no idea where he was going. He was following the only clue he had.
The man at the Niangara general store who had tanked up the Land Rover with gas and loaded the supplies had been precise enough with his description — and sufficiently observant — to convince the newspaperman that Bolan and Belasko were one and the same. He knew that the Land Rover was heading north for the Zaire-Sudan frontier because Bolan-Belasko had asked his advice on the best routes to take.
He wouldn't have known that the Executioner had already quit the Sudanese southwest via the Central African Republic, or wondered why he should have detoured south through Zaire before he went back there. Mettner himself could supply the answer to that one: Striker had escaped via helicopter into the CAR; if he reentered the Sudan from that direction, there was more risk that they would be waiting for him someplace along the route.
Whoever "they" were.
What the storekeeper did know was that the driver of the Land Rover had asked a pesky lot of questions about some armpit shantytown called Oloron, and that he was as mad as hell because it wasn't shown on his map.
"Maps!" the storekeeper told Meaner. "We keep the best maps you can get around here. But we're not trying to provide a yard-by-yard survey of the whole equatorial jungle. That's guerilla country up there in the Sudan. They burn the towns soon as they build them! How can you expect to find places on a map where nobody has ever been?"
Mettner didn't know, but he was convinced that was where the Executioner would be. He had bought the best map the storekeeper could provide and followed in Bolan's footsteps.
But it was not until he found the blacksuit that he had any indication this was something more than a newsman's hunch.
He took the one-piece combat garment along with him. The material was dusty but undamaged except for one place where a thorn had ripped the shoulder.
Mettner left the grotto at dawn, easing the Blazer slowly along the narrow jungle track. Within a half hour briars and spines and whippy branches had scratched the paint from both sides of the vehicle. He had to wait three times that long before he received further proof that he was on the right track.
It wasn't the kind of proof he expected. He saw a baboon sitting in the center of the trail, playing with what looked like a camera.
The Chevy rocked to a halt, and Mettner got out. The baboon, screaming with rage, swung away into the tree-tops.
The camera was left lying on the trail. It was broken, the case deformed, the lens missing, the minor controls wrenched off. But it was a Hasselblad.
Mike Belasko, photographer.
Mettner made short forays into the dense undergrowth on either side of the trail. Soon he found the rock shelf and a bullet-riddled bedroll beneath it.
He hesitated. Things didn't look too good.
It was then that he heard the whistle, a shouted exchange in a dialect he was unfamiliar with, a stammer of shots from a submachine gun on the trail. Glass tinkled from the direction in which he had left the Blazer. A moment later there was the whoomp of a gasoline explosion, a blast of hot air and a view through the close-packed leaves of flames boiling around the forest trees.
Mettner dived beneath the rock shelf and pulled the damaged bedroll over himself.
Chapter Twenty-Five
"It would be easier for everybody, old chap, if you would just come across and spill the beans," General Halakaz said to Bolan. They were sitting in a small office off the corridor that led to the reactor. Papers covere
d the flat-topped desk that separated them. The rock walls were hung with production charts and graphs, and there was a plaster relief map of the Sudan and surrounding countries on one side of the door. The general's Combat Magnum lay heavily among the papers by his right hand.
"There's not much to tell, really," Bolan replied. "I guess I have to plead guilty to being inquisitive. I was trying to locate my partner, Courtney — I explained this to one of your colonels who I ran into earlier — and I came across an airstrip and then a road... Well, I got real curious when I discovered these in the middle of an unexplored forest."
"I am listening."
"Yeah. Well, the next thing I discovered was a silo. With a missile." Bolan turned down the corners of his mouth in a grimace, and contrived a shrug. "Not that I was spying, but I damn near fell into it. I mean, can you blame a guy for looking around some, after that?"
"But I found you in here, old chap. In here. The place is closely guarded, you know. Very closely guarded."
"That was unintentional. I didn't mean to come in here. How could I? I didn't know the place existed."
"Unintentional?"
"I was bushed. A convoy of trucks passed me and I... well, I stole a ride. I swung aboard the back of the last one just as it passed me."
"Just as it passed you. I see. You didn't know where the convoy was headed — you didn't know where you were going — but you stole a ride." Halakaz shook his head, shooting a shrewd glance at the Executioner from beneath his brows. "Mr. Belasko, you had a vehicle of your own when I met you. A Land Rover, as I recall."
"It died on me. In the middle of the desert. I had to decide whether to go on or go back. On foot. I decided to press on. I can show you the blisters if you want." For some reason Bolan was unwilling to involve Trudi Finnemann and her expedition in his cover story. Hell, it was his party; there was no reason to lay anything on them.
"We can do without the blisters, old chap." Halakaz picked up the AutoMag he had taken from Bolan, weighing it in his hand. "My people have strict orders to exclude all strangers from a forest area ten miles across — with this place, of course, as its center. What a coincidence that you should arrive just when we are missing a sentry from the cascades and three of our jungle guards are discovered shot!" He looked down at the AutoMag. "Shot, as I understand, with a large-bore handgun."
"I don't know anything about that," Bolan lied.
"Perhaps. This truck in which you, uh, stole a ride. What did you find inside it?"
"It was a half-track. It was carrying two unmarked crates."
"Yes?"
"When the truck stopped, I waited a minute and then I got out. I could see at once that I was somewhere I had no right to be, so naturally I figured I better leave as quickly as possible. I was trying to find the exit when you found me." The general turned the AutoMag over and over in his hands, as if he were examining it for hidden flaws. "You have indeed stumbled on something that does not concern you, Mr. Belasko," he said at last. "Although 'stumbled' is hardly the right word, is it? Because I do not for a moment believe your story. Nevertheless, we are ready to strike within the next few days. In a week, we shall be masters of the whole Sudan, probably the whole of Africa."
Bolan said nothing. The man's voice was tinged with pride. It was a good time to clam up, in the hope that he would start spilling secrets.
"Perhaps, therefore, your unwelcome arrival does not matter so much," the general continued. "But I have a feeling... Highly placed officials of the organization assisting us are due to show up shortly. The decision must be theirs. But I fear they may think you have learned more than is good for you. And even if your life is spared, you will have to stay here as our — shall we say guest? — until after the great day."
"It sounds intriguing," Bolan prompted.
"Intriguing? My dear fellow, if only you knew! Do you realize how much work, how much planning has gone into this?"
"Just building this underground complex must have presented enormous difficulties."
"But of course. There were the natural caverns to start with. We had the advantage of knowing about them. But our friends had to fly in vast quantities of material undetected, instruct the labor force we provided and supervise every stage of the construction. It was a fantastic task. For three years we have been slaving underground here. Three years, old chap. Because the place has to be invisible from the air, you see. The Arabs have reconnaissance planes that fly frequently over Oloron."
"There is certainly no sign of construction work on the surface," Bolan encouraged, "but what about the airstrip?"
"What about the airstrip?" Halakaz echoed. "You'd think it could be seen for miles, wouldn't you?" He was as boastful as a child with a new toy. "Undetectable from the air. Not a sign. From the ground it looks like any runway, but we had the greatest camouflage expert in Europe, an expatriate Russian. Since there are no buildings to cast shadows, you see, skillful variations of tone and texture in the cement mix can blend it perfectly with the surroundings."
"You've been very clever, General."
"Clever? This is only the beginning. We have a cyclotron, and we are building a synchrotron that will have an energy level of ten thousand million electron-volts! That has to wait until we enlarge the caverns still further, because the ring of tubing must be one hundred meters in diameter. But in a year we shall have completed a fast-breeding reactor using tamed plutonium and liquid sodium. Then we shall be able to dispense with the outdated hydroelectric plant, which always risks detection by people exploring the falls.
"After that, of course, we shall be masters, our own masters, at every stage of our weapons program. Right now we have to rely on, er, outside sources for certain isotopes."
Bolan said, "You mention a strike in the near future. If all this is to help you best your enemies in Khartoum, the... organization helping you must be altruistic. What do they get out of it?"
The sixty-four-dollar question. But did he know?
"I said 'organization,'" Halakaz replied. "I use the word loosely. It is, in fact, a consortium of powerful men. And of course, as you imply, it's a two-way deal. In return we provide free labor, a very discreet site in which certain researches can be carried out unhampered by official interference and — once we take over the country — the granting of invaluable mining concessions in what are at the moment still desert regions."
Bolan sighed. Mining concessions! "The missiles I saw," he began. "Your own men are in charge of targeting and ring?"
"Well, no, old chap. At the moment white technicians supplied by our friends look after them. We haven't yet acquired the know-how to man the computer room and the control dugouts. But we are training, we are training. Part of my force is seconded to a special course in Oloron, at the foot of the ravine beyond this plateau. There are supplementary courses for the nonmilitary in various outlying villages."
Bolan nodded, remembering the nuclear formulae in the gutted classroom, the burned-out huts and the impaled teacher.
"The accursed Arabs sacked one not too far from here some days ago," Halakaz said, as if reading his thoughts. "Purely by coincidence, I hope. But they will pay. The time will soon come..."
A telephone on the desk shrilled him into silence.
"You must forgive me," he said when he had listened for a few moments, made a comment in his native language and hung up the receiver. "The members of the consortium I mentioned have arrived, so I must leave you."
He holstered his revolver and picked up the AutoMag. "There are, as you see, no other doors, no means of exit from this office. The door through which I leave is solid and will be double-locked. Also there are two armed men on duty outside." He smiled. "My advice to you, old chap, is to make yourself comfortable and sit tight until I return." Covering the Executioner with his own automatic, Ismael Halakaz backed from the room.
Bolan began to say something and then thought better of it. If this somehow likable patriot had not yet realized that his poor little six-thousan
d-strong army, his labor force of refugees from the destroyed villages, his offer of mineral concessions, were factors of no importance in some immeasurably vaster project, his awakening would come soon enough.
For Bolan was enough of an expert in modern warfare to know already that Halakaz and his men were being duped.
The missiles whose sleek streamlined shapes he had seen in their silos were no tactical pieces of atomic artillery designed to obliterate Khartoum and its Arab rulers; they were IRBMs, intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of taking out London, Paris, Rome or Kiev.
Chapter Twenty-Six
If Bolan had any doubts concerning his reasoning, they were dispelled the moment he laid eyes on "the high-ranking members" of the consortium financing Halakaz and his nuclear arsenal.
Jazzy neckties, striped shirts, white vicuna jackets and two-tone shoes competed with the glitter of rings and the gleam of gold chains. Even the general's habitual spit and polish seemed dowdy in comparison.
They crowded into the office behind Halakaz — a blue-chinned torpedo, another with his arm in a sling, the broken-nose goon who had attacked Bolan in Marseilles and finally the hire-and-fire supremos.
Don Carlo Giovanni and Louis Mancini: the capo of capos and his sidekick; number one and number two of all the East Coast mobs, with controlling interests among the families running Detroit, Chicago, Vegas and the West.
If the bosses of the underworld were turning their backs on prostitution, dope, financial rackets and the protection game in order to go nuclear, Bolan knew that Brognola had been right: there was a situation here that could turn out as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis, a conspiracy so evil that it could be a potential threat to world peace.
Especially since the mobsters already had their nuclear "persuaders" in place.
Bolan wondered if he could provoke them into revealing the real targets programmed into the sleek and deadly missiles hidden in those silos. And if so, whether they would come across with the purpose of the blackmail operation, the details of what they hoped to gain.
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