Dead Easy

by Don Pendleton

  It could, of course, be no more than a coincidence. The guy might have nothing whatever to do with Vanderlee's unofficial connections — or with the state of Florida. But it had to be followed up; it was the only lead Bolan had.

  Ruth Elias appeared to have none at all.

  She was kneeling on the floor now, surrounded by open files from the Suspicion cabinet. Bolan had flipped through them earlier — surveillance reports on students, journalists, union organizers, petty crooks; hour-by-hour notes on stakeouts; transcriptions of tapped phone calls. Some of them were cross-referenced to Cases Pending, in the Subversion drawers.

  Bolan looked over her shoulder. The sheets she had removed all dealt with suspected drug dealers, pushers, importers. The material was thin; such people only interested the National Intelligence Service archivists insofar as they might be security risks.

  "I can't find the damned connection!" she said angrily.

  "If I knew what you were looking for…" Bolan said.

  "Distribution. The spiderweb. It was a long shot anyway, coming here. But I hoped I might find proof of a link between the Ogodishu farm and…" She shrugged. "Wherever."

  Bolan frowned. "You're working for the narcotics squad?"

  Ruth Elias shook her head. "I am not American."

  "Then who…"

  She ignored the question. Rising to her feet, she picked up the metal box. "I guess it was too much to hope that he'd keep records here," she said. "I'll have to try his home. Unless of course…" She moved toward the wall safe. "I don't think the magnets are strong enough for this, but…"

  She clamped the box to the steel door next the combination dial and reached for the handle.

  "Don't…" Bolan began urgently.

  The warning was too late. Outside in the passageway, alarm bells jangled a deafening alert.

  Ruth sprang to her feet with an exclamation and snatched away the box.

  "That's what I was afraid of," Bolan said. "The alarm's actuated the moment that lock's tampered with. We have to get out. Fast."

  "But nobody can get in here. Vanderlee said the door was electronically…"

  "Under normal conditions," Bolan rapped. "I'd guess the safe alarm automatically disconnects the other circuit to let the security people in. No point in the alarm otherwise."

  She looked helplessly around the littered floor, at the opened files, the empty cabinets. "But won't they know? How can we…"

  "We can't. Out the window, back the way we came. Move!" He shoved her toward the opening. "I'll cover you until you make the corner by the stack pipe."

  Already there were shouts from the floor below, footsteps in the passage outside punctuating the trilling alarm.

  Ruth squeezed through the hole in the glass and balanced herself on the ledge outside. Bolan followed her through as she moved away.

  Clinging to the edge of the window frame with one hand, he unleathered his silenced Beretta with the other.

  The door of the office burst open. Two men in uniform leaped in with Browning automatics fisted and ready to fire.

  The Beretta sneezed out a 3-round burst before they had taken in the scene.

  One of the security men was slammed back against the wall with a scarlet stream pumping through the breast pocket of his safari jacket. He slid to the floor.

  The second guy had dived for the desk. Crouched in the kneehole, he blasted off three shots, then ducked out of the Executioner's field of fire.

  Wood splinters flew from the window frame. Glass shattered and fell.

  Still holding the frame, Bolan had ducked to avoid the deathstream. Now he rose upright to drill a single shot into the desk and then glanced swiftly to his left.

  At the far end of the ledge, Ruth Elias was maneuvering herself around the corner. The slender bulk of her body vanished, and he could see, beyond the condominium towers that had been financed with Witwatersrand gold, the mine dumps east of the city gilded by a late-rising moon.

  Bolan jerked up a second time to trigger another round at the desk.

  The security man had moved. His return shot blazed out from behind the leather-and-chrome armchair. The slug streaked dangerously close to Bolan's ear and gouged a channel in the wood near his hand.

  Down once more, he glanced again at the corner of the building, wondering how far away it was.

  Crouched as he was, could he move far enough from the frame to stand upright and grab the coping without presenting the gunman inside with a target he couldn't miss?

  Upright and moving away, with only one hand to grip that coping, could he steady himself enough to zap the guy with the Browning if he realized the Executioner had changed position and leaned out the window to fire?

  The guy with the Browning was smarter than that.

  He knew Bolan was bent double on a narrow sandstone ledge just below the windowsill.

  He knew that even if he was one hundred percent in shape, this guy supporting himself with one hand on the frame was in a damned precarious position.

  He fired two shots in rapid succession at the upper, undamaged windowpane.

  The pane exploded outward, showering razor-sharp fragments of glass around the big guy on the ledge.

  Automatically, involuntarily, he jerked up an arm to protect his head from the lethal shards. His weight shifted; his center of gravity moved outward; a section of sandstone, cracking under the changed pressure, broke off and dropped into the void.

  Bolan fell.

  Chapter Eighteen

  For Mack Bolan the urban jungles of the West had always been, would always be, as perilous as the wooded hell of Indochina where he had first learned his deadly skills. All his adult life he had lived with and accepted the notion that there had to be an end… that sometime, someplace, the final blackness would descend on him.

  The roar of a grenade, the hammer blow of an assassin's bullet, the searing scorch of flame or the stupefying concussion of a booby-trapped automobile — all these were ever-present risks, the question marks on the daily calendar of his personal crusade.

  At times he had even wondered in a detached way whether, in that last instant, in that thousandth of a second before the brain was pulverized, the pumping of the heart stilled, he would be aware of the blossom of fire blooming at the tunnel mouth of an SMG, the disintegration of a windshield and the up-blast of a hood as he twisted the ignition key.

  What had not occurred to him was the possibility that he might die falling backward from a fourth-floor window.

  Easy as falling off a log.

  The childish phrase recurred with idiot insistency as he hurtled past the facade of the security police annex in John Vorster Square, Johannesburg.

  Easier, in fact.

  Because, dammit, he was getting used to it. Yeah, there had already been enough falls, too many falls, in this mission. He had jumped through a window of the police chief's office in Udine; he had plunged off a cliff at the wheel of an automobile; he had leaped out of Rinaldi's house in Laigueglia, into the sea from the ramparts of the prison in Montenegria, out of a chopper and down from the spiral stairway at Ononu's summer palace on Lake Gadrany.

  Now he was doing it again. But not, this time, because he wanted to.

  This time was different, too, because it would be the last time.

  In none of the other cases had it even occurred to him that he might not survive; here there was a certainty of death.

  Feeling the rush of cool air past his face, Bolan was aware of three separate reactions, a trio of distinct emotions.

  Regret, satisfaction, annoyance.

  Regret that now he would never know who Ruth Elias was working for or why Colonel Vanderlee had to contact Baarmbeek.

  Satisfaction that he had cheated the security guard, whose receding figure he saw leaning out of the lighted window above, of his chosen target — even though it was something of an extreme way to achieve that end!

  Annoyance — with himself — because of all the deaths he had envisaged, b
eing split open like a slaughtered beast on the pavement far below was the least dignified, and the one farthest down the list he had figured.

  But it didn't happen like that.

  Bolan had reached his ledge via a stack pipe spanning the facade on the other side of the building. He had made the pipe under cover of trees growing in the gardens of John Vorster Square. He had made no recon of the wall in back.

  He did not know that there were also some trees, of varying height, in front of the building.

  He had never looked down from the ledge. That was one of the rules: you never looked down.

  So he didn't know that one of the taller trees stood immediately below the window of Colonel Vanderlee's office.

  Automatically, following the experienced jumper's routine, he balled himself for a bad landing, even though it would be the last.

  He hit the younger and more slender branches at the top, which helped to slow his fall. At once he realized what was happening and he spread his arms and legs wide, hoping that some of the larger branches would slow his fall. They would, probably break his arms and legs, too. But at least he wouldn't splatter onto the pavement below.

  Green boughs whipped at his face as he slammed into the foliage, and all he could think of was that he had to protect his eyes.

  Bolan shut his eyes tight, then he heard a crack and felt a fire in his side. And he knew that he had shattered one or more of his ribs. His flexed knee caught on a branch and he hit the back of his head, jarring his teeth, but he had stopped falling. He shook his head to clear it, then groped awkwardly until his fingers closed around a limb. He unhooked his leg and swung his body upright, grimacing in agony from the blow to his diaphragm. Slowly, he eased himself down the remaining branches and dropped the few feet to the ground.

  For a moment he stood there, dazed, leaning against the trunk of the tree. He could not believe what had just happened, but as he took a step forward, the fierce throbbing in his side was a painful reminder of his ordeal. But battered as he was, he knew he had to get out of there.

  Around the corner of the police building, someone was shouting orders; there was a stamp of feet as the guard turned out.

  The alarm bell still jangled and blue lights flashed on the far side of the square.

  With every inch of his body aching now, Bolan ran.

  He dodged around some benches, cannoned into a big guy with a heavy mustache who sent him sprawling. He picked himself up with difficulty, clutching his side and biting his lower lip. Suddenly he found himself on the sidewalk of a street crowded with late-night traffic.

  Horns blared, brakes squealed, cabdrivers swore as he hobbled into the rush of vehicles. He made the far side of the street without further mishap — what was a mere stream of cars, trucks and buses to a guy who had just survived a fall from a fourth-floor window? — and only then had time to pause and thank the universe for his lucky escape.

  The flashing blue lights and the confusion were all across on the other side of the wide busy street. Already a crowd had gathered on Bolan's side, wondering what the hell was going on. He hoped the woman had gotten away before the commotion started.

  For himself, he relied on the notorious inability of witnesses to agree on descriptions, directions, anything. The great thing was not to attract attention. There were plenty of jaywalkers at this time of night.

  He limped slowly to the end of the street, flagged down a cab and returned to his hotel.

  But even though he had escaped, the situation in general had changed radically… for the worse.

  There would be no need now for Eddie Hanson to cook up a murder and pin it on the Executioner.

  He had killed a member of the security forces in the execution of his duty and had attempted to mow down another. Since he was engaged in a criminal act — the burglary of a government office — at the material time, any justifiable homicide claim or self-defense plea was out the window.

  Police forces all over the republic would be marshaled for a full-scale murder hunt.

  Colonel Vanderlee would be pleased. The entire weight of the justice machine would now be organized to track down the man he wanted out of the way — while Hanson lurked in the wings, waiting his chance to shoot once Bolan was located.

  And he needed medical attention. But there was no time for that. Holding one edge of a bed sheet between his teeth, he tore the cloth into a long strip, then wrapped it around his torso. Satisfied with the makeshift bandage, he went into the bathroom and washed his face. The water turned pink in the basin, and he looked in the mirror. He had sustained only minor scratches.

  There was a single bright spot, he thought as he left the bathroom; neither the colonel, Hanson nor the police would know of Bolan's interest in Baarmbeek.

  Because they had been interrupted by the alarm, the warrior and Ruth Elias had been obliged to leave drawers opened, files scattered over the floor, a mess of papers on the desk. But there was nothing to show which way their search had been directed; the minutest examination of the dossiers removed from the filing cabinets would give no indication of their interests — if only because they themselves had not known what they were looking for.

  And the address book that might have tipped off Vanderlee that Bolan was looking for a link, for names, for places — the book, thankfully, had been replaced beside the ballpoints in the desk drawer.

  So the quicker he could get out of town and make it to Baarmbeek the better; he would be in no more danger there than anyplace else.

  He packed his gear and checked out of the hotel. It would be too dangerous to stay there, because by now there would be an all-points alert out for him, complete with description and probably a computerized photo sent via satellite from Interpol — and the hotels would be the first places the police looked.

  Bolan walked the dark streets and passed the rest of the night with the poor, at a bus station on the outskirts of the city.

  Early in the morning he was on the fringe of the Soweto slum township where black workers were segregated.

  Although they wouldn't know for sure that he planned to leave Johannesburg, he reckoned that the police would be heavily into identity checks at all railroad stations, airports and bus terminals.

  He dared not rent a car because the clerks at each agency would have received orders to report details of all clients to police headquarters.

  He went into a wrecker's yard and used car lot and spent the equivalent of fifty dollars on a beat-up Plymouth sedan with dented fenders and the chrome strip on one side missing.

  Throwing his gear into the trunk, he filled up the gas tank and drove the decrepit heap northward out of the city.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was thirty miles from Johannesburg to Pretoria. The early-morning traffic was heavy but it was mostly in the other direction — trucks bringing produce from the outback farms to the city, busloads of black workers for the mines. Even when the road ahead was clear, Bolan took it slow and easy, obeying the speed limit, carefully signaling each maneuver of the ancient sedan. He could ill afford, he knew, to attract the attention of the highway patrol.

  Besides, the poor suspension of the Plymouth made the car seem like a tank, causing Bolan a twinge of pain in his side each time the wheels hit a pothole.

  After the frantic commercial bustle of the gold and diamond city, the state capital was an oasis of calm, a city where it seemed permanently to be Sunday.

  If there were shantytowns like those surrounding the slums of Soweto, or sterile and regimented hut compounds similar to the artificial townships housing the African workers of the Rand, Bolan did not see them.

  Although more than eighty percent of the Transvaal population are of Bantu, Xhosa or Matabele origin, because Pretoria is mainly a government and diplomatic center, the number of black faces on the street is astonishingly small.

  Warmbad lay more than fifty miles to the north, on the principal highway linking Johannesburg and Pretoria with Salisbury and the old Rhodesia
n frontier. The route ran between two of the Bantustan tribal reserves, and the road to Baarmbeek branched off below the more easterly of these and skirted the lake at Penskop before climbing to the high ground on which the town was built.

  Away on his left Bolan occasionally saw the conical thatched roofs of a Ndebele village on the fringe of the reservation, the circular huts decorated with black, brown and blue architectural designs on the white mud walls.

  Soon the acreages of cotton, soya and corn that stretched between the low hills gave way to lush European farms planted with tobacco, pineapples, avocado pears, wheat and orchards of citrus fruit. Baarmbeek lay between this rich area and the treeless grasslands of the high veld.

  It was a small town of balconied brick buildings with half a dozen high-rise structures in concrete grouped around the railroad station.

  There was a Dutch Reformed church behind the gardens in the central square, a tall white edifice with a bell tower and a slate roof crowning the severe curves of the facade. The only hint of industrialization was an assembly plant for combine harvesters, crop-spraying machines and mechanical cultivators imported in crates from Europe and Japan.

  Bolan wondered what possible connection there could be between this sleepy, bourgeois backwater, a man-made famine fifteen hundred miles to the north and an opium crop financed by a small-time West African dictator.

  Surely they weren't growing the stuff around here, too!

  He put the thought from his mind: the agricultural machinery assembled in Baarmbeek was destined for the cultivation of less toxic crops than opium poppy.

  Whatever the connection was, he would force it out of the jail governor and then get the hell out of there.

  Unless, of course, he had jumped too quickly to conclusions, unless the whole deal was no more than a coincidence and Reinbecker's name was in Vanderlee's address book simply because he was a social acquaintance.

  Bolan put that thought from his mind, too. There had to be a connection.

  Low cloud building up over the Drakensberg Mountains far away to the east had moved nearer while the Plymouth was wheezing up the long grade leading to the town. As Bolan braked in the station yard to ask the way to Valley Road, it began to rain.