Dead Easy

by Don Pendleton

  The crossing had taxed neither his courage nor his skill. There were few frontier posts, and travelers were more likely to be refugees wanting out than visitors wanting in.

  There was an additional advantage, for Bolan, to this route. Since the Tunis-Monrovia attracted the world's top rallymen, there was international interest in the event and big-deal media coverage. Customs and immigration formalities in the countries traversed were therefore minimal.

  That suited the Executioner just fine. Like all the other vehicles, his Land Rover carried extra tires, jerricans of fuel, provisions and spare parts. Unlike them it concealed beneath its floorboards a quantity of specialized equipment and weaponry supplied by Bozuffi at Bolan's request.

  Once safely in Montenegria, he had stripped off rally license plates, destroyed check forms and paperwork and substituted local plates. Bolan himself was provided with papers identifying him as a consultant mining engineer employed by the Montemines Corporation with duties that required him to commute between the mines in the north and the dockside installations owned by the company at Port-Doulas. The Land Rover was certified as one of a fleet owned by Negrimin International.

  The cover would be useful later, when he was overtly moving around the country. It gave him no reason to be where he was now, east of the palace and the lake. But that wasn't a problem he was going to waste any time on: with only the unreal vision provided by his goggles, it was all he could do to hold the Land Rover on the stony track, alternating between the brake pedal and clutch, and his hands moving from gear lever to steering wheel on each hair-raising corner.

  Soon the odor of overheated brake linings wafted into the cab. The squeal of overtaxed disks was audible over the scrabbling of tires on the loose surface. The breakneck descent continued through a dozen hairpin curves, up a slight rise, slowing now as the trail slanted upward, then accelerating again until perhaps one mile and a half had been covered. Here the route flattened out. The Land Rover gradually lost speed, approaching another grade that preceded the final plunge to the valley floor.

  Bolan bucked and swayed in the driver's seat, trying to urge the utility up to the crest and gain another few hundred yards on the far side. But the vehicle's inertia and the rolling resistance of tires and running gear to the rough surface of the track remorselessly braked his advance. The crest was still seventy yards away when the Land Rover lost momentum entirely and began to roll back down the slope.

  Bolan turned the wheel and steered it off the trail between two outcrops of rock. He climbed out, lifted the floorboards and prepared himself for a scouting expedition on foot.

  First the skintight combat blacksuit, then black cosmetic to mask the pale glimmer of his face. From the neatly packed arsenal in the special hidden compartment he withdrew and unwrapped Big Thunder — his stainless steel AutoMag — a pulverizing flesh-shredder with wildcat .44 cartridges. He shrugged into military-style webbing, holstered the gun low on his right hip, drew on thin black gloves and picked up a pair of heavy-duty 105 NVD binoculars. He started to walk.

  He had perhaps another mile of rocky hillside to negotiate. After that the land flattened into a series of mild undulations that gradually descended to the lake. The trail twisted between orchards and patches of corn and groundnuts, past plantations of coffee and avocado pears. The savannah beyond was lush, with long grass punctuated by clumps of acacia and the occasional thorn tree.

  Twice Bolan had to make a wide detour through fields head-high with sunflowers to avoid a village. But although dogs started a frenzied barking in one, nobody challenged him and he made the twelve miles to the lake in just over two hours.

  Crouched on a huge granite outcrop projecting over the still water, he unslung the field glasses from around his neck and scanned the far shore, looking for the bridge and the islet on which the palace was built. As soon as he had the place in focus, he knew that any single-handed attempt to rescue the four kidnapped girls was foredoomed to failure. All the outer walls of the extraordinary building plunged straight into the water; the bridge, at a slight angle to the shore, led straight to the rectangular entrance court. And each of the two guard houses, he had been told, was staffed with a thirty-six man permanent garrison, twelve of whom, armed with Uzi submachine guns, were on alert at any time during the day or night.

  Even if he was able to get in there, Bolan realized, he wouldn't have a chance in hell of getting out with a quartet of helpless, possibly sick or drugged females.

  He would have to rely on his backup plan, which he favored less because it involved third parties. But he had no choice. The only solution was an armed assault on the palace. And for this he had to recruit professionals opposed to the dictator.

  There was only one place he could get them.

  Twenty-four hours later he was studying it through the same binoculars from a distance of two miles.

  Ononu's jail for political prisoners was on the coast. Ten miles east of Port-Doulas, the strip of dunes separating the equatorial forest from the shore rose into a low bluff. And this in turn was overlaid by a shelf of rock rising to a cliff on whose highest point the prison was perched.

  The dictator's enemies were usually butchered by the palace guard and their remains hacked up and added to the pig food processed in a factory at Assano. It was said that the heads were preserved in a custom-built refrigerator in his private suite at the palace.

  But for a group of army officers who had narrowly failed to overthrow him in a military coup some weeks before, Ononu was reserving a special fate, involving a show trial and public executions. It was these men — there were eleven of them, now in a high-security wing of the jail — whose help Bolan hoped to enlist.

  Logistically and operationally, there were three separate problems involved.

  First, the Executioner knew he had to contact the dissident officers and confirm that they would be prepared to go along with him. For this, he had to somehow smuggle himself into the jail… and out again.

  Secondly, he would have to organize a jailbreak to free these men and their supporters.

  Finally, using their specialized knowledge, a successful attack on the palace had to be planned and carried out.

  It could be, Bolan thought, refocusing the binoculars, that phase one would prove the toughest.

  The prison's central core was an ancient coastal fortress built by Arab slave traders in the seventeenth century. Within this rectangle of massive sandstone cubes quarried from the horizontal strata of the cliff, four concrete cell blocks had been constructed in the form of an X. Outside it a wall with four watchtowers enclosed a compound that included cook houses, a laundry, storerooms, an administration block and sleeping quarters for the guards.

  Since the land inside the compound sloped toward the cliff, Bolan could see over the wall and estimate the possibilities.

  It was not an encouraging sight.

  The walls of the old Arab fortress — pierced in one place only by tall iron-studded gates — rose to a height of twenty feet or more and looked impregnable to anything less than a marine commando with boarding nets.

  The outer compound, too, had only a single entrance: behind a wall at the end of a curving approach track guarded by a gate house with a sandbagged machine gun emplacement outside it.

  The ledge behind the battlements was patrolled regularly, and in any case there was a hundred-yard strip, bare of any vegetation, surrounding the compound wall on three sides.

  The fourth side rose sheer from the cliff.

  Since any clandestine entry or exit there looked impossible, that was exactly where the Executioner decided to try. He reasoned that the guards patrolling that sector would be less alert.

  For the rest of that night Bolan charted, timed and noted the frequency of patrols, the changing of guards, the activity of the men in the watchtowers.

  It was clear that however tough it would be getting inside the prison, making it out again would be even more difficult. He'd be in the same position as a pr
isoner trying to escape; and the whole place was designed to prevent just that.

  There was a single advantage. Ononu's jail was run by the military. And Bolan knew from experience that efficient military administration depended upon precision. Personnel movements were regimented; Bolan had discovered already that the activities of the guards were as well regulated as a clock mechanism. The life of the prisoners would be equally well-drilled. They would take their exercise at the same time every day, in the same way, in the same place. The movements of the men watching over them would be equally predictable.

  Bolan spent the daylight hours in Negrimin's dock-side offices, reinforcing his cover as a mining engineer, digesting intel on the prison and the captive officers as far as Bozuffi's local superintendent was able to hand it out.

  He was stopped three times by military police on his way into Port-Doulas, but the papers and visas supplied by his old Vietnam buddy were evidently in order, because each time the sour-faced cops waved him on after only a perfunctory examination. Just as well they didn't search the Land Rover, Bolan thought.

  He opened the secret compartment beneath the floor soon after midnight.

  This time he took out the blacksuit, climbing boots, NVD goggles, army webbing and three weapons: Big Thunder in fast-draw leather on his hip, the silenced Beretta, holstered beneath his left arm and a commando knife strapped to one ankle. Three stun grenades were clipped to one side of his belt, and a coil of nylon rope with a grappling hook looped to the other. He carried no spare ammunition: unless something went very wrong this was to be a soft probe.

  The Land Rover was backed up among trees on the fringe of the rain forest in back of the coastal strip. Bolan walked across the dunes to the bluff at one side of the sandstone cliff.

  The rock face was vertical but not smooth. The horizontal beds were stacked like the pages of an uncut book, each leaf a thin slab of sandstone. It was therefore not difficult to make the climb, toes wedged in between two layers, fingers grasping a third higher up.

  It was not even too much of a problem when the cliff soared up to meet the prison wall. What brought the operation its special danger was the fact that sandstone is easily pulverized: the weathered face could crumble any time it was subjected to weight or pressure.

  That and the sound of waves breaking against the foot of the cliff fifty, sixty, seventy feet below.

  Bolan had several near escapes — once a narrow section broke away and he was left with his feet dangling in the void — but nothing as spine-chilling as his escape from the killers at the foreigners' university in Perugia. Finally he arrived beneath the outer wall of the jail and dragged himself up the last few feet until he was immediately below the stonework. He uncoiled the rope from his waist.

  The difficulty now was to find a strong enough single handhold that would allow him to lean outward and swing the rope with his other arm.

  He made it at the fourth attempt. The three-pronged hook, tossed high up toward the moonless sky, dropped down to clamp securely into one of the firing slits in the battlement.

  He tugged hard to check that the rope was firmly fixed, then he started to climb upward hand over hand. The rope was halfway between the two southern watch towers. The tropical night was dark and steamy. He had exactly two and one-quarter minutes before the next patrol passed this sector of the perimeter wall.

  Bolan made the battlements, glanced swiftly right and left, then dropped the rope on the far side and lowered himself into the compound.

  He raced across a narrow stretch of ground separating the wall from a storage building. Beyond this there was a cook house with a covered passageway leading through the sandstone rampart of the central redoubt to the cell blocks.

  Bolan hesitated, trying to decide if he should force an entry here and then use the corridor. He decided against it. The kitchen personnel would be long gone, but he had no clear picture of the wardens' movements; there would be too much risk of running into the enemy once he was inside the jail.

  He looked at the luminous digits on the face of his watch. Two and three-quarter minutes before the compound patrol passed on the far side of the storage building. Nine minutes after that the soldiers on the battlement parapet would pass in the other direction. One half hour before the guards on the watchtowers were changed.

  Bolan knew he had to make contact with the leader of the dissidents and be ready to leave the prison while that was happening. He uncoiled the rope again and swung the hook up to the top of the sandstone rampart.

  The rough sedimentary blocks were easier to climb than the stonework of the outer wall. Bolan was already on the ground outside the eastern cell block when he heard the footsteps of the first patrol.

  Each cell block was two stories high, but the soldier had been told that the lower floors, which housed the high-security, solitary-confinement prisoners, were four-fifths below ground. The barred windows, high up in the wall of each tiny cell, were level outside with the beaten earth surface of the exercise yards.

  In this eastern yard, if his information was correct, the window he wanted was seventh from the left. Dark as the night shadows within the walls, the warrior crept along at the foot of the concrete facade.

  At the seventh window he dropped to his hands and knees and then lay with his face against the close mesh of inch-thick iron grillwork. A fetid odor drifted up through the glassless aperture. He had heard that prisoners in this block were denied the most basic sanitary arrangements.

  "Colonel Azzid?" Bolan whispered.

  There was no reply. Somewhere in one of the other blocks, a voice cried something unintelligible. A shouted command, repeated, brought silence broken only by the distant crash of waves against the cliff below the jail.

  "Colonel Azzid!"

  There was movement in the blackness behind the bars. A creak of wood, a slithering noise. Then a sleepy murmur, barely audible.

  "Wha'…? Who's there?"

  "Azzid! This is a friend. Can you hear me?" Bolan dared not make his whisper any louder.

  A sudden rustling, a slap of bare feet on stone. Finally, higher up near the window, came the same voice, but stronger now. "I hear you. Who are you? What do you want?"

  "Colonel, I'll make this fast," Bolan replied, enunciating each whispered word as clearly as he could. "I'm going to crack the summer palace. Ononu's holding people there that I want out. I need soldiers and I need backup. If I bust open this jail tomorrow and free you and your friends, will you help me?"

  "Possibly." The voice was tinged with suspicion. "What would be in it for us?"

  "You get a second bite at the apple you lost."

  "What?"

  "To depose Ononu. The failed coup. You get a second chance. Are there still soldiers in the garrison you could count on, or have they all been liquidated?"

  "There are still some. Maybe thirty, forty. If we could get to them."

  "Enough. Would they command armor?"

  "How's that?"

  "Armor," Bolan repeated urgently. "Look, time's short. Could they lay their hands on tanks, APCs, mortars?"

  "Affirmative."

  "Okay. I'd make sure you got to them all right. Are you with me then?"

  "What's in it for you?"

  "I told you. I want these hostages free. End of story."

  "That's all? You don't want any part… that is, we can deal with Ononu any way we want? You're not concerned with the future running of the country?"

  "Not one little bit. So will you help?"

  There was a deep-voiced chuckle from within the cell. "What can we lose?" Colonel Hassani Azzid said. "We already know the sentences; there's only the trial to come."

  "Okay. Now what time are you exercised?"

  "Me personally? Fifteen hours fifteen."

  "What do you mean personally?"

  "While the other prisoners take their hour, we get five minutes each. But never two of us out at the same time. They like to keep just enough life in us to make the torture amusing."


  "Hell. That complicates things." Bolan stole a glance at his watch. "In less than fourteen minutes, I have to split. You'll have to waste a guard when the time comes, grab his keys, and free as many of your ten buddies as you can before I blow the outer wall."

  Again the chuckle. "With my bare hands?"

  "I can't do too much tonight," Bolan said, "but I can help some." He unzippered a section of the web belt that housed a small pocket. From this he removed two small sausage-shaped packets of C-4 plastic explosive, detonators, firing caps. He unclipped the stun grenades from the belt. Finally he reached up the commando knife from his ankle. "Take these," he whispered, passing the items one by one through the grillwork. "If you're never together in the exercise yard, is there any way you can contact your friends, to alert them?"

  "Only the guys on either side of this cell. We have a signal routine."

  "That'll have to do. If they can pass the message on, great. Now listen carefully, Colonel, here's what I'd like you to do…"

  Bolan talked rapidly and concisely for eleven minutes. Then, telling the captive officer goodbye, he rose to his feet and stole back to the wall sector where he had left the climbing rope hanging.

  He was on top of the rampart, paying out the rope on the other side, when he realized he had made a miscalculation that could be fatal. In his determination to wise up Azzid on every possible contingency in the planned jailbreak, he had delayed a fraction too long outside the seventh cell.

  The watchtower guard details had already changed over.

  The moment of inattention on which the Executioner had counted, perhaps a brief exchange as the reliefs arrived — that short but vital period was past. The soldiers who had been up in those towers were already filing down from the battlements, on their way to sleeping quarters on the far side of the compound.

  Bolan slid down the rope. He stood beside the cook house passageway. Six feet three inches of hellground black, he was invisible in the angle of the wall. But it wasn't enough to remain unseen: he had to get out.