Because nobody could kid him the plot had anything to do with freedom fighters or political clout or military advantage: he knew the Mob too well for that. They didn't help people out; they didn't give a damn for causes. If Giovanni was concerned, there had to be a shakedown someplace in the scenario. And the end product would inevitably be money. Give, brother... or else.
How the Executioner was going to react if he did find out those things, and what means he had available for wrecking the plan... He'd attend to that when the time came.
Right now there were more immediate problems.
Like how to stay alive with Giovanni on the scene.
The capo had stopped dead the moment he laid eyes on the warrior. His flinty expression hardened, and his mouth twisted into a snarl. "It's him, all right," he said through clenched teeth. "I'd know those ice eyes anywhere, Lou. I only saw him behind a shooter before, but this time it's going be different. This time I'm in the driving seat!"
"So you know Mr. Belasko already?" General Halakaz asked.
"Belasko? I don't know any damn Belasko. The name of that man there in the chair is Bolan, and I got good reason..."
"It says Belasko on his papers."
"I don't give a damn what it says on his papers. Haven't you heard of phony ID? Look, I'm telling you I know this man, and the first thing I'm going to do down here is find out who the hell put him up to this, then get the other creeps who are working with him."
"You still want to handle this yourself, Don Carlo?" Mancini queried. "I mean, we got work to do. Maybe we should hand it over..."
"Shut up, Lou. If I need your advice, I'll ask for it. Damn right I'm going to handle it myself, and it'll be a pleasure." Giovanni turned to the blue-chinned gorilla. "Go fetch me some tools to work with, Joe. I'll want a whip made with fine wires, an electric cattle prod, a bench vise, a strong pair of tweezers, a box of matches and a cutthroat razor."
The hood nodded and left the office.
While the door was still open two black officers in uniform entered the room. Bolan recognized Colonel Mtambole and the man who had captured and then tortured him after he had been decoyed by the fake canister in the camel train.
"So you got him back?" this last man said. "That's good. Maybe we can find out a little more about his... prospecting now."
"You should have found out everything the first time," Giovanni growled. "When you came to my place in Miami, you promised me results. All I got was a name...and the good news that the bastard had split. Big deal."
"Colonel Ogada was unfortunate," Halakaz soothed. "Bolan had an accomplice. He lowered a rope outside the window of his cell. It couldn't have been foreseen, old chap."
"Of course he had an accomplice! Or two or three!" the Mafia boss shouted. "The punk stowed the beeper on that camel for one. That was what you was supposed to squeeze out of this bastard — who, how many and where. But you had to let him fly before you made him sing."
"A business is properly run, nothing is unforeseen," Mancini said. "You couldn't spare a soldier to guard the roof? You didn't think to tie the guy up so he couldn't make the damn window?"
Bolan kept his eyes fixed on the floor. He was learning all the time. Like there was already tension between the mafiosi and the Africans. Like it wasn't exactly smart of Giovanni to treat Halakaz and his men like dirt. Not yet, anyway. He wondered what they would say if they knew his "accomplice" was a teenage Arab kid who'd helped out as a favor to his sister!
"What's this prospector thing, then?" Mtambole asked. "Man here is the picture-snatcher, Belasko. The animal photo guy."
"Bullshit!" Ogada retorted. "Bolan. A Russki. He had some kind of Iaissez-passer from Khartoum. It was signed..."
"I know what I'm saying, man!" Mtambole snatched off his beret and thwacked it against his thigh. "Hell, didn't I spend half a morning trying to talk him out of this crazy trip? He could be the accomplice you're talking about, for all I know. But..."
"For Chrissake!" Giovanni yelled. "Can't you get it into your skulls that Bolan and Belasko are one and the same? Jesus, what do I have to do to knock sense into your heads? It's the other guy we want to know about, the one with the damn caravan. And me, I'm going to choke everything there is to know out of this creep right now."
He plunged a hand into the side pocket of the white jacket and drew out a set of brass knuckles. "You guys..." he nodded at Mancini and Broken-nose "...hold him good while I read the first part of the lesson."
The two hoods stepped swiftly in, pinioned Bolan's arms and jerked him to his feet.
Bolan tensed, watching the black hairs on the backs of Giovanni's fingers slide through the openings in the knucks.
"Be proud of your partners, General..." the warrior began. And then doubled up choking as one of the two-tone shoes slammed into his crotch.
As his head came forward, the capo hauled off and crashed a murderous roundarm blow to the side of his jaw. Bolan felt the blood warm on his face as his cheek split open. Then a second punch, an uppercut with all Giovanni's weight behind it, exploded beneath his chin and snapped his head back. He sagged, and for a moment the room went dark.
"Okay, take him away," the Mafia boss said. "Maybe we'll stick a meat hook under his shoulder blade later on, and hang him up smeared with honey for the ants. But today I want him laid out nice and tidy, like a fish on a slab. You dig?"
Mancini nodded, and the Executioner was dragged from the room. When he was near the doorway he saw a smirk on the face of the hood whose arm was in a sling, and realized suddenly why the brutish face with its hairline mustache was familiar. This was the guy who had murdered Ahmed Ibrahim in Marseilles, the guy Bolan had winged after the car chase in Alexandria.
The clans were gathering.
Two minutes later Bolan was thrown violently into a chamber cut from the solid rock... and found himself sprawled at the feet of Mahmoud, the camel master.
The man's lips split into a smile, showing yellowed tombstone teeth. "Welcome home," Mahmoud said. "Last time you walked out before the party was over. Maybe now we can persuade you to stay a while longer?"
Bolan said nothing. Mahmoud was the only person there who could tie in the bogus Russian prospector with the "Arab" spy he had caught prowling around the camel train at Wadi Djarzireh. Admittedly he'd assumed the spy was searching for the homer rather than putting it in place, but it didn't take a genius to make the connection once the subject of a missing accomplice was raised.
How come he'd never gotten around to it?
Probably, Bolan reckoned, because nobody had thought to ask him. Also there was the question of language. The camel master spoke French but he had no English and Colonel Ogada had conducted his interrogation in English. Intent about his job as torturer, Mahmoud must have missed out on the drift of the officer's questions; perhaps he thought Ogada was concentrating on the question of Bolan* s supposed employers.
One thing was certain: as long as the bosses didn't get wise to the fact that the accomplice was a myth, Bolan would be kept alive.
It wouldn't be the good life, just the same.
"Get this one ready for a session with the patron," Mancini said in heavily accented French.
"Pick him up then, and let me put him in the right state of mind," Mahmoud growled.
The two hoods dragged Bolan to his feet and held him while the camel master flattened his hand and rabbit-punched the warrior into unconsciousness.
He regained his senses in total darkness. His head ached like hell, he had been stripped again and he was spread-eagled with his wrists and ankles wired to the four corners of a flat wooden surface, probably a table. A cool draft played over the surface of his body, and the darkness vibrated with the hum of nearby machinery.
Bolan shuddered, listening to the hoarse rasp of his own breathing. He knew that the things Giovanni would do could be much worse than any tortures he had suffered so far, because the hood's aim would be to destroy him psychologically; and he would be enjoying it whil
e he did it, exulting over each new twist of cruelty as the idea came to him. Bolan hoped he would be able to hold out long enough without breaking... long enough, anyway, for unconsciousness to save him again.
Somebody was in the room.
He closed his eyes against the blackness, nerving himself for the unexpected assault, tensing his muscles in anticipation of pain, the searing bolt of agony that would flame through him... where?
Was this Giovanni's first line of attack, the mental anguish of waiting, sightless, dreading the blow, the stab, the jolt of electricity that might come anytime, anywhere?
He could hear breathing above and behind him.
He was unable to repress a start as fingers touched his skin, testing the wire that cut into his left wrist. Prepare for the first blow now? In the belly? The genitals?
Negative.
There was something strange here. The fingers were soft. The wire was loosened; his wrist was free. He smelled a cloying, exotic perfume.
Opening his eyes, Bolan saw the darkness dissolved in the faint illumination cast by a penlight. "You are very pretty like that," a voice murmured in his ear, "but I could admire you better in another place at another time. Come, do you wish to stay here until they return?"
His arms were free. He brought them down to his sides and pushed himself into a sitting position. In the dim light he saw an Arab woman crouched beside the table, her eyes glittering at him over a veil as she untwisted the wires at his feet with a pair of pincers. He recognized her at once.
"Yemanja!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here? How did you get here?"
"Talk later," she said urgently. "Help me unwind this one. There. I saw them carrying you in here, and I knew what would happen."
Painfully Bolan swung his feet to the floor, his limbs agonizing as the blood coursed back through the veins. He took two steps toward his clothes, where they had been dropped in a corner, and almost fell. There was a thundering behind his eyes, and his head was spinning. Yemanja darted across and snatched up bush shirt, pants and money belt. Big Thunder and the quick-draw rig were presumably in the general's office. "Quick!" she whispered, climbing onto the table. "They will be back any minute now."
In a daze, the warrior watched as she leaned forward and reached up to push at a grating set high in the rock wall. The grille swung away with a metallic scrape. She tossed clotnes and belt into the dark opening beyond and hauled herself up after them.
Bolan picked up the penlight and followed, clambering stiffly onto the table and grasping the hands held out to him. He made the climb with difficulty and lay gasping for breath while Yemanja lowered the grating back in place.
They were in a tunnel hollowed out of the rock. It was about three feet high, and there was a moist breeze blowing from somewhere ahead. "Air-conditioning!" the woman murmured. "Very up-to-date, no? Put your things on and follow me."
Bolan squirmed into the pants and shirt after he had buckled on the belt, crawling after her along the damp, rough floor. The tiny light he still held in one hand sent grotesque shadows leaping ahead of them as he moved, and struck gleams of color from the crystals embedded in the rock.
After a while, the passage joined another, wider tunnel, and they were able to raise themselves into a crouch and advance more quickly. Judging by the drafts he felt occasionally against his feet, Bolan guessed there were a number of small subsidiary galleries running into this main one. From someplace in the distance behind them, he heard the muffled sound of voices raised in argument. His absence must have been discovered.
Soon he saw a dim radiance ahead. Five minutes later they were standing upright at last in a cave illuminated by reflected light from a series of radiating tunnels. "Now we stop for a minute and talk," Yemanja said. "But quietly, for sound carries far in the rock."
"Okay," Bolan whispered. "For starters, you tell me a thing or two. Like what is, or was, this place before they started making an atomic power station out of it? How did you get here, and how do you know all about these underground passages?"
"This is the mountain headquarters of the Anya Nya. The caves and passages have been the secret retreat of my people for many hundreds of years. But now their friends from America have built many new things inside the mountain: factories and bombs and places to make electricity. Airplanes come and bring much for this building, but although my people help with the new things they keep secret some of the old. The Americans know nothing of these ancient passages that bring air to the rooms, for example."
"But how do you know, Yemanja?"
"I was born in Oloron," she replied. "My father was Assyrian, but my mother she was an Oloron woman. I lived here as a child, before it stopped being a town and became a soldiers' camp, and we had to come into the mountain sometime to escape the Arabs."
"What are you doing here now?"
"Mahmoud has bring me to entertain troops and workers here, along with some other girls. But I know more than others. See — I will show you all parts of the factory."
She took the Executioner's hand and drew him along one of the passages leading from the cave. The light grew brighter as they advanced; the noises of the base increased in volume. He could hear the humming of generators, voices, a truck engine gunned, a whole complex of tapping and hammering. When they passed a row of grilles set low in the rock he saw it was through these that the light was reflected. Below the metal gratings he glimpsed offices, lecture rooms, stores busy with uniformed clerks.
"The Americans must know about these grilles," Bolan said. "They know there's air blowing through their offices. They must know where it comes from."
"Of course they know about them. But they do not know they are big enough for people to walk in. Many of our own people, even, do not know this."
"Can all the gratings be moved like the one we escaped through?"
Yemanja shook her head. "Only that one. The others are cemented in place, but we left that one in case any of our own men were tortured in the interrogation room and we wished to help them escape... Look! Now you can see!"
They had come to a wider opening that was set chest-high in the limestone wall. Fifty feet below it was the floor of the huge cavern Bolan had seen when he first penetrated the base. Once more he gazed at the cyclotron, the half-finished cooling tubes, the swarm of men working on the hundred-foot steel sphere of the atom furnace. He saw banks of dials winking with colored pilot lights and, far above, mobile cranes running on rails set in the roof of the cave. Forklifts whined here and there among the army of workmen; in the background, the sinister, streamlined fish-shape of a missile lay along the frame of a low-loader. Behind that, double doors barred entry to another chamber, each door carrying a red-lettered warning in French, Arabic and English:
DANGER! RADIATION HAZARD BEYOND THIS POINT!
Entry forbidden to personnel not wearing protective clothing.
Yemanja tugged at the Executioner's arm. "Come," she whispered. "There is more to see."
She led the way through a maze of passages continually branching and dividing, rising and falling in the rock. After a quarter of a mile, Bolan noticed that the limestone visible through the gloom was glistening with moisture, the air was much colder and a faint roaring noise vibrated all around them. A few minutes later they were looking over the edge of a rock gallery at the giant turbines of the power station.
"Yemanja," Bolan called over the thunder of the conduits, "why do you think these people are offering to help General Halakaz and the Anya Nya? What is all this great factory for?"
"They say it is to vanquish the Arab government in Khartoum," the woman replied, her lips close to the warrior's ear. "But they speak with lying voices, I think."
"You're right. These are evil men. Your people are being fooled. They're being conned into helping with a much larger conspiracy. As soon as the work is finished, the Americans will have no further use for them, and they'll be killed. The secret work of which I spoke is to try to foil this plan. Will you help me?"<
br />
"Am I not helping you already?" Yemanja said simply. "You are no longer in the interrogation room. That is why I show you all this."
"Of course you are. I owe you a lot. And I'm very grateful to you and your young brother."
For the first time Yemanja smiled. "He is a good boy, Ali," she said. "You know what he has done with the money you gave him? He has returned to Wadi Djarzireh and bought himself a place in the bazaar where he will sell small things of electricity..." she held up the penlight "...that he buys from a trader bringing a camel train each month from Zaire up to Omdurman."
"I hope he does well," Bolan said. "There are two more things I have to ask you, Yemanja. I've hidden a gun and a small backpack in a cave near the turbines. I have to get them back. But first, won't Mahmoud and the others guess that we escaped through the hinged grating and follow us? If they locked the door when they went out, there's no other way we could have gone."
She shrugged. "Perhaps. But you were securely tied. They might have left the door unlocked. Even if not, if they did open the grating, they could never find their way through these passages, for Mahmoud is not of our people and the others are nothing."
Yemanja paused, the light glistening on a moist lower lip, silhouetting the curve of one breast. White teeth glimmered through the dark. "There is a third question I would be happier to answer," she said, "but I know you will not ask it."
Warm breath played over Bolan's cheek. "Instead..." she sighed "...I will show you the rooms where the important ones, the chiefs of the organization talk."
Once again she led the Executioner down a narrow tunnel in the rock.
* * *
Mettner would probably have missed the airstrip if he hadn't seen the second helicopter land.
He had noticed the first, a big Sikorsky with civil markings, lower itself behind the jungle trees about a mile away, assuming it to be a fire prevention ship or maybe a recon chopper for some survey unit. It was only when the Dassault five-seater droned down from the northeast that he realized the Sikorsky had never taken off again.
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