The youngest girl was tapping an impatient foot and looking out the window at the continuous flashes of lightning illuminating the torrential rain.
Seventeen-year-old Palomar Varzi.
To Bolan's surprise there was a fifth young woman in the room — white joggers with padded ankles, fawn corduroy jeans and an orange shirt that did nothing to hide the swell of splendid breasts. She, too, was dark-haired, with a wide, sensuous mouth and brown eyes beneath straight black brows. She looked a little, maybe five years, older than the others.
Ruth Elias, she said in answer to Bolan's question. She had been taken at night from a hotel room in Milan.
"Does your father have anything to do with the mining corporation in this country?" he asked.
She frowned, shook her head. "My father died ten years ago," she said. "He was an academic, a professor of French history."
"My mistake," Bolan said. "So why did Ononu snatch you?"
Ruth Elias shrugged. "Maybe it was just because I was white, because I was there, because he wanted to show how… well, how big he was."
"Maybe," Bolan said. He turned to the other four girls.
Azzid, Ogano and the other officers, outraged by their story, had already made soothing noises. Bolan feeling a little embarrassed, added his voice.
One curious thing emerged from their tactful questioning: the youngest hostage, Palomar Varzi, had been neither raped nor tortured.
"Why do you figure you were passed over?" Bolan inquired. "It sure wasn't kindness on Ononu's part, or consideration for your age. Were you the last in line or something?"
The seventeen-year-old shrugged. "I don't know. I was in the same room as the others. We had the same food, the same attention. Look, when are we going to get out of here?"
"It can't have been that, anyway," Ruth Elias put in before Bolan could answer. "He… he abused the rest of us several times. In no particular order. He seemed to have a special hate for Suzy and me. We… well, I think we got the worst of it. More often than the others, too."
"I guess you were just lucky," Bolan said to the Varzi girl. "We'll get you out of here as soon as we can, probably early tomorrow morning, once we arrange transport to the airport."
Colonel Azzid then drew Bolan aside to report total success of the takeover. The Yanga tribesmen whom Ogano had not been able to recruit in time had neutralized the second AH-1G chopper and talked the army units at Oulad into supporting the coup. The radio announcement had been well received. Police had rounded up the few Oriwady extremists who might have caused trouble. There was dancing in the streets of Kondani and Halakaz. All that remained, once the palace had been cleaned up and the wounded attended to, was to contact the girls' fathers, the press and diplomatic circles in the capitals where Montenegria was represented.
All that remained for the Montenegrians.
For the Executioner it was only the start of a long road.
Departure point was a stray remark, a word of sympathy for Ruth Elias, with whom Bolan found himself by chance alone in the reception hall the following morning, in the center of all that frenzied activity. Having no anxious father waiting, she had tactfully drawn back while arrangements to repatriate the four other girls were rushed through.
"I guess you'll want to go someplace," Bolan said. "I don't think this country will hold too much attraction for you, even with new rulers."
"I'll go back to Milan," she said.
"You work there?"
"I work all over. Milan this week, maybe Caracas next."
"What do you do?"
"The current term is market research," she said.
"Who buys what, and why?"
She smiled. "In my line, it's more who does what, and why?"
"I get it. Career girl! Still, even for a sophisticated woman of the world, even if you hadn't led a sheltered life like the others, what happened here…" Bolan hesitated. Then he said awkwardly, "I mean it must have been… well, pretty tough."
"It was bad." She folded her arms and hugged herself across the orange-shirted bosom. "It was real bad, and that's for sure. But it was just personal, for each one of us a private hell. What that son of a bitch was doing over in the Ogodishu and Gabotomi was hell for a whole people."
"The Ogodishu?"
"It's not a country, it's a region. Thirty thousand square miles of nothing, east and a bit south of here. I'm not even sure where the boundaries run, but it's located like somewhere between Chad, Cameroon and the Central African Republic."
"And what's happening there?"
"Nothing. That's just the point."
Bolan's eyebrows rose.
"It's a famine area," Ruth Elias explained. "Mile after mile of cracked earth, no grass, no living tree, only the skeletons of animals that have died of thirst. And the people, dying of hunger and thirst as well."
The Executioner nodded. "I don't mean to be callous, but that kind of thing is happening in many parts of the world. What's so…"
"You don't understand," the brunette interrupted. "This drought has been deliberately engineered; the famine is man-made, for a specific purpose."
Bolan stared at her. "Man-made?"
"Two rivers ran through the area. They didn't amount to much but they carried enough water for irrigation ditches to be run off here and there, for the tribal population to grow a few patches of corn, maybe raise a few animals. It was a wretched existence, but it was life."
"So what happened?"
"Three years ago, when the forecasts promised extra low rainfall for some while, the rivers were diverted. One was dammed and the outfall directed away from the region; the other was simply channeled into a different course, through a gulch that had been blasted in a bluff originally containing the flow. Result: the vegetation died."
"But why?"
"Slave labor. People dying of hunger will work twenty hours a day for peanuts."
"Why didn't the people move where the water had gone?"
"Tradition. They're not nomads. Warlike tribes who'd keep them out. Plus a deliberate policy by the crooks who stole the rivers, shooting them down if they transgressed. A kind of controlled genocide."
"You're right. I still don't understand," Bolan said. "Who are these people? Why do they need slave labor?"
"I only know what I've been told. It seems there's a particular valley on the fringe of this region that can be watered from the dam… and the climatic conditions in this valley, with the unlimited water relieving the natural dryness, make it ideal for ultraintensive cultivation of a certain crop.
"What crop?"
"Opium poppies."
Bolan whistled. "And the slave labor…?"
"Grown this way, the bumper crop requires a lot of attention. And the cheaper the labor, the higher the profit."
"Okay. But why would they bother? In the middle of Africa?"
"Two reasons. Stuff originating in the Golden Triangle — Laos, Cambodia, Burma, up in that corner — it's becoming more and more difficult to shift it without problems. The routes are too well-known, security in most countries is tightening all the time, so it costs more and more to keep clear of the narcotics squads. Nobody had found this particular route yet."
"Which is?"
Ruth Elias shrugged. "I guess they pass the refined product out through Angola or one of these Communist states — the comrades would be only too pleased if the whole of the West was to get hooked and stoned out of its mind. They'd help all they could. After that it'd be shipped to one of the old Portuguese Atlantic islands — Madeira or even Tenerife — and flown from there to Europe."
"You mentioned refined product. You mean the extraction is done right there in that valley?"
"That's the second reason," the girl told him. "You see, the normal alkaloid yield from opium — basically morphine and its derivatives — is between eight and twelve percent by weight. Well, with their system, the poppy seeds swell bigger with a more severe desiccation and the yield climbs to fifteen, maybe sixteen percent."
"But refining the morphine base into heroin is a delicate and dangerous process. You need highly qualified chemists to get away with it."
"Highly qualified chemists they've got. And the most up-to-date laboratories and equipment. All out in the open. Who's going to start police raids in the Ogodishu?"
"The entire crop's turned into heroin?"
"I would think. Because they have an extra advantage there, too. Weight for weight, heroin's normally three times less active than morphine. Theirs is half as active — two times less, if you like. So they're coining more money per square yard of cultivation down the line."
Bolan nodded. "Cheaper labor, higher yields, safer routes. Something smells to high heaven here. What did Ononu have to do with it?"
"He was interested financially… both ways. He put up some of the original capital; the bastard organized the famine, it was his idea. And now that it's all systems go… well, the kind of money he'd have gotten from renegotiated mining rights here would be chicken feed compared with the profit from the Ogodishu connection."
"That's some crazy market research you're into," Bolan said. "How come you know about all of this?"
"I'm a good listener. It's part of my job. I heard Ononu and that General Shagari talking a couple of times."
Bolan stared at the woman thoughtfully. The drug industry and the evil it entrained, the young lives it ruined, the crime its enormous profits bred, these had always been high on his list of targets, even when the Mafia was not involved.
"How far away is this valley from here?"
"I don't know exactly. It must be more than a thousand miles."
Bolan pursed his lips. "If Ononu had a stake in it, then it must be part of this operation here in a way. I mean part of the cleaning-up routine. I think I'll take a look at the place."
"Good idea!" an unexpected voice drawled. "Let me drive you there."
Bolan and the girl swung around. A tall, thin man with a cigarette drooping from one corner of his mouth was leaning indolently against a marble pillar on one side of the hall's entrance doors.
It was the newspaperman, Jason Mettner.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Bolan demanded.
Mettner grinned. "Working. I'm following up a story."
"How long have you been here?"
"Long enough."
"How did you get here?"
"Funny you should ask that. Soon as I heard about the jailbreak, I figured it might have something to do with this dump, so I rented a jalopy and headed this way. In the middle of the night, along one of those forest trails, I happened on an abandoned Land Rover. According to the license on the steering column it belonged to some Montemines consulting engineer. Guess whose face was on the license card?"
"You drove my Land Rover here?"
"Out of the kindness of my news hawk's heart," Mettner said. "I thought you might need it, and now I see you do. So how about making me your co-driver on the road to the east?"
Bolan frowned. He liked to work alone. On the other hand, a co-driver would halve the driving time. He had been impressed by the tactful way Mettner had handled the Rinaldi affair, contriving a sensational scoop without once mentioning Bolan or his part in it. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad, having a professional along who would print a firsthand expose of this latest drug scourge.
Apart from which, he liked the guy!
"Okay, Mettner," he said. "You got yourself a job."
Chapter Fifteen
At the desk in his hotel room, Jason Mettner began to reread his story before sending it to Allard Fielding. He planted his feet on the desktop, and slid back his chair as his eyes scanned the first page.
Believe me, Al, Mettner read, the trip we just made was unbelievable. You've heard the word desolation? Forget it and invent a new one. Overpopulation? The number of frontiers we passed outnumbered the people we saw by around seventy to one. The ones who were still alive, that is.
We had mountains, forests, desert and jungle, canyons and plains. But twelve hundred miles in a straight line? It felt more like twelve thousand by the time we arrived. Whoever heard of a straight line in Africa, for crying out loud.
I said when we arrived. But arrived where? It was like someone pulled the chain to let the sand and the shale out of the Sahara and this was where most of it had touched down.
"You'll be getting a color piece on this journey by separate mail. But I want you to read this as background to the drug story, Taking the H out of the Sahara. It's strictly For-Your-Eyes-Only material, but it should explain how a nameless one-man army flying no flags could do what it did.
Bolan won't be mentioned by name. That was the deal.
We spent several lifetimes bumping across a stretch of country that God must have had left on his hands when He was through with Nevada and Arizona. You know: sagebrush, thorn trees, a line of hills that was never closer than eighty miles.
Without really paying attention, we'd been climbing some, and suddenly the land fell away: we were on the crest of a ridge… and below us there was this colossal saucer-shaped depression, the Ogodishu.
As far as the eye could see in every direction there was this dust bowl that looked like every cracked-earth, PBS-television documentary on drought that you ever switched off.
Nothing moved. No place. Dry sticks instead of trees, brown straw where once there might have been crops, bones and skulls by the dried-up water holes, dead villages where the people looked like black skin draped over the skeletons of thorn bushes.
In that region, even the buzzards were thirsty. We had a crate of beer with us. Every time we stopped the Land Rover, I expected to get knocked down in the rush.
Iron rations, cans of beer, a dull drive across interminable wastelands — naturally two guys in a red-hot oven with wheels, stinking of gas fumes and sweat, get to talking. Bolan didn't talk much but I felt I got to know the guy a little on this trip. Because of what I found out, I'm writing this, like I say, to fill you in. Because for my money the guy himself is at least as interesting as the story.
You see, Al, this is no flat-eyed, coldhearted killing machine. Ruthless the man is, yeah. But not callous. He's a deadly fighter but he does have a conscience. Plus, despite his kill score, a load of compassion.
The way he sees it, Uncle Sam trained him to be a soldier; it's the only skill he has, so he stays with it. But since Nam the enemy has changed, that's all. The battalions he fights now are no longer Indochinese guerrillas but what he calls the mercenaries of evil, the legions of animal man.
The key to this warrior's character is Justice — and you should leave that J in caps. "My targets are soldiers, too," he told me one time while I was at the wheel and it was his turn to breathe in the dust cloud from the passenger seat. "They chose to serve in the ranks of organized crime or the international terrorist conspiracy, people whose lust for power blinds them to how much innocent blood they spill. I don't aim to pass judgment on this scum. In my book they are already condemned by their own actions. All I do is hand out the sentence they deserve."
You see what I mean, Al? In Jason Mettner's book, on the other hand, this guy was only doing what governments, law enforcement agencies and the armies of the world were too scared, too corrupt or too hemmed in by bureaucracy to do themselves: the dirty work they themselves trained him to carry out.
He lays his life on the line each hour of every day in a personal battle to preserve what he believes in — the values these others are so quick to promote and so slow to defend.
I'm telling you this because it goes some way to explain the guy's actions when we reached the far side of the new desert.
Finally there was a far side. Lack of vegetation had allowed the wind to do its worst. We passed through erosion of all kinds. Baked mud, powdered earth, dunes, places where the land had already been stripped to naked rock. But at last we thumped over another low ridge and there was this incredible sight.
Some way off, Bolan had told me, there was a dam
, and away to the south a river had been diverted through another ridge. Even so the vision was one hundred percent unexpected.
A winding valley maybe one mile across and several miles long, brimming with vibrant color!
Amid this desolation of gray was a shimmering sea of candy pink, washing rose-tinted waves against the walls of the valley in the evening wind:
Opium poppy — a gold mine above the ground, given continuous care and the right specialized fertilizers. The bulbous, flat-capped seeds, when properly dried, are worth a fortune.
The higher yield, Bolan told me, was due to the particular conditions, climatic and otherwise, of the chosen site.
They sure were particular. Apart from the sight of a candy-colored ocean of flowers in the middle of a dead sea that only washed up the bones of extinct beasts, there was the question of the real water and the headquarters from which the creation of the dead sea had been cold-bloodedly planned.
The real water? Yeah, like on the Capitol lawns — thousands of sprinklers, each with its private rainbow, packed closely all along the countless rows of blooms, spiraling droplets into the hot air, and over the army of thin, drenched workers bent above the plants.
Beyond, low down along the horizon, our binoculars showed us stone-built huts, a wooden mess hall, warehouses, a drying plant, glass-roofed laboratories and something that looked very like a blockhouse behind a chain link fence.
We were approaching the place from the south west. Farther north in the manufactured desert, Bolan had been told, there would be vigilante patrols something like the notorious Selous Scouts in Rhodesia, their job to head off any of the starving tribesmen reckless enough to make a break for the country where the rivers flowed.
Right here, as our dust cloud drew nearer, we could see armed guards between the blockhouse and the gates in the chain fence. Outside the fence there was a fleet of ancient cattle trucks and, beyond, a strip with a Piper Cherokee tethered against the wind.
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