Chapter Twenty-One
Bolan knew that without headlights they'd think twice about pursuing him and the girl in the dark, even though the rear entrance to Greystones was less than two hundred yards from Bolan's Volvo. He raced to the end of the lane before Hanson's commandos could climb the wall and identify the car, turning left to take the highway leading north to Warmbad.
"They can't follow but they'll radio ahead," Ruth Elias said. "The good news is that they won't know about this particular vehicle — and they won't know your companion is female."
"And the bad news?"
She held up a small, powerful shortwave and FM radio receiver. "I'm tuned in to the police transmissions. They're looking for you all over the country. Murder while engaged in a criminal act. Dangerous. Shoot on sight. The whole works."
He smiled crookedly. "I think I heard the song before."
"Which way are you heading? Where do you want to go?"
"Out," Bolan said. "I already got what I came for."
"Any special route?"
"When I changed cars, I intended to go north, and then east after Pietersburg — bypass the Venda reserve and cross the Limpopo into Zimbabwe, then take a plane from Harare. Either that or go due east through the tail of the Drakensberg and then the Murchison range, making Mozambique on minor roads through New Agatha, Leydsdorp and Phalaborwa. Depending on the pressure."
"And now?"
"With this kind of heat…" he nodded toward the radio"…Mozambique and a boat from Laurenco Marques are out. So is Zimbabwe. I guess the only thing to do now is go west, and cross into Botswana."
"You're a long way from any airport there," the girl said.
"I'll worry about that when I get there."
"You better cut through the Blouberg," she said. "That's wild country but it's the quickest way to the border. The only thing is, we have to pass by Warmbad, Nylstroom and Pietersburg before we make the turnoff. It'd be wise to let me take the wheel first."
"How come?"
She pulled up the telescopic antenna on the radio and pressed a switch. "Listen," she said.
Through a fish fry of static, Bolan heard the voice of a police controller: "All stations west of Area Seven and north of Nine. This man is armed and he's dangerous. Repeat dangerous. He is more than six feet tall, dark, with blue eyes. Thought to be driving a pale blue 1968 Plymouth sedan with a companion as yet unidentified. Murder, armed robbery and malicious wounding of a state official are the charges so far…"
Ruth killed the transmission.
Bolan nodded. "Okay. If they're on the lookout for a blue Plymouth with two guys…"
"They may not be so anxious to flag down a Volvo if it's driven by a woman on her own."
"On her own?"
"It was smart of you to load all that garden stuff," she said. "As long as they don't stop and search, you can hide among that and leave me alone at the wheel."
"Good thinking," Bolan agreed. "We'll stop soon and change over."
The rain was falling more heavily now, gusting like blown smoke across the tunnel of light carved out by the headlights as squalls of wind shook the thorn trees beside the road.
They crossed a barren area of bush veld, passed through a region of scattered farms and stopped southeast of Warmbad, where the pale waste dumps from tin mines bulked dimly against somber hills to the left. Bolan steered the Volvo off the road, where it was partially sheltered by a huge tree, and cut the lights.
"Plymouth or whatever," he said, "they'll be expecting us to go like a bat out of hell. So the longer we wait, the less chance there is that they'll be suspicious of a woman alone in a Volvo full of plants."
"Whatever you say."
"I say thanks for getting me out of there," Bolan returned. "Now I think it's time to lay a few cards on the table."
For a moment Ruth was silent. Over the splatter of rain on the pavement, they could hear the ticking of hot metal as the engine cooled, the momentary hiss of steam each time a drop fell through the broad leaves of the tree onto the hood. Finally she said, "Okay."
"Just fill me in," Bolan said. "Who are you? Who do you work for? What's your angle on this whole deal?"
"You know my name." She paused again, and then said, "I work for Mossad."
"Mossad! What does the Israeli intelligence service have to do with Vanderlee and Reinbecker and their stinking drug racket? Why didn't you tell me before?"
"One of the things about an intelligence service," she reminded him gently, "is that it's supposed to be secret. But I guess I can't hold out on you any longer."
"And the Mossad angle?"
"As you say, drugs."
"Drugs?"
"Specifically, this opium farm and its refinery. Most of the hard stuff coming from there finds its way into Israel. Shipped in through Haifa, smuggled past the airport customs at Tel Aviv, or sent direct — overland across Africa and through the Sinai desert."
He nodded. "And your briefing?"
"Originally, to trace the source. Now we want to find out whether the operation is just a normal underworld racket, with our country up front as a largely unexploited market. Or whether there's a more sinister, possibly political, motive — a deliberate attempt to destabilize Israeli society by subverting the young, possibly financed by hostile Arab or Soviet elements."
"How come you were snatched by Ononu and… well, and maltreated like the other kids there?"
"I wasn't snatched in the sense of kidnapped. That Milan number I sold you was a phony. I was following the trail and I got too close. I guess I was careless. His security men jumped me when I was checking out his palace. The beatings and the rape were…" She shrugged. "Revenge, I suppose. He was going to have me killed if you hadn't shown."
"What were you looking for in Vanderlee's office?"
"Evidence. Some indication of who was behind the drug operation. Some kind of lead to the motivation. Anything. Because it was already clear that Ononu was not the Mr. Big — whatever he himself thought."
Bolan nodded again. "Like you, I drew a blank. But I think the operation is part of something bigger. I found that out from Reinbecker. It has something to do with terrorist activity, but I don't think it's particularly directed against your country."
"You're not certain?"
"It was only a hint. He didn't know for sure himself. I have to find out more," Bolan said evasively. Cards on the table were fine, but he liked to keep one or two up his sleeve.
"Where do you aim to look?"
"You were on the ledge outside the window, too. You heard what I heard. Florida." He did not say that he already had a name and address.
"Okay," Ruth said. "Your turn. Who do you work for? And why?"
"First of all," Bolan replied, "I was helping out a buddy. He's hospitalized, and one of Onunu's hostages was his daughter. Also, I don't go for the kind of trash we're dealing with here, and I figure they should be stopped. Permanently. But that's personal. I don't work for anyone!"
"So what are you going to do now?"
"Try to complete the puzzle. Find out who's behind Reinbecker and company, find out what they're financing with the dough from the drug operation, and why. Then stamp the whole dirty deal into the ground if I can."
Bolan stopped speaking as headlight beams appeared over the brow of a hill behind them, swept past to illuminate the driving rain, vanished around a curve in the road. He said, "You haven't told me yet how come you were outside Greystones just when I needed you?"
"I followed you," she said simply.
He stared at her blankly through the darkness. "Followed me? From where? From Montenegria?"
"No, no," she said laughing. "From Jo'burg. I knew about Vanderlee, I'd been out to the opium farm and turned over their files before Ononu's men jumped me. It was a coincidence we happened to make that ledge at the same time. The rest was… well, quite logical.
"I heard the shooting as I came down that stack pipe. I saw you saved by that tree and… I couldn't b
elieve it. Anyway, I followed you back to your hotel. I saw you buy the Plymouth and tailed you to Baarmbeek — that was the big surprise, I did not know about Reinbecker. Then I saw you change the Plymouth for this Volvo. After that there was no problem."
"I never knew I was being tailed!" Bolan was shocked with himself. "What were you driving?"
"A taxi when you were on foot in the city. A panel truck to Pretoria, and then a pickup. In Baarmbeek it was a motorbike."
"A bike!" Suddenly he remembered. "The boy in oilskins delivering some package while I was waiting for Reinbecker — that was you?"
"That was me."
"But how did you make it with so many different…"
Ruth tapped the radio. "I'm not the only Mossad agent in South Africa," she said. "Now I guess it's time you hid in the shrubbery and we got moving."
"Right," Bolan said.
Two rows of the potted plants were ranged on slatted wooden supports in back of the station wagon. The supports stood nine inches off the floor. Beneath these, with a tarp covering his body and the taller shrubs crowded around, the Executioner was invisible to anyone glancing through the Volvo's windows.
Ruth started the vehicle and drove on.
There was a police roadblock outside Warmbad and another in Nylstroom. In each case the Volvo was flagged down by two armed cops swinging flashlights… and in each case it was waved on without being stopped when they saw a woman alone at the wheel.
It was at a village called Moorddrift that the trouble started.
Another roadblock. A flashing white-on-blue Police sign below the revolving amber light on the roof of a patrol car. Two cops with Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine guns waving flashlights.
This time the Volvo was required to halt. There were several cars in front of it, lined up along the lamplit street. It was still five minutes short of eight o'clock.
One of the cops approached the driver's window, the other began a slow circuit of the battered station wagon.
Ruth rolled down the glass. "What seems to be the trouble, officer?"
"Routine check, miss. Your license and papers, please."
She unzipped her purse and handed them over. The second cop flashed his light over leaves and fronds behind her. Highway patrolmen were also checking out the cars lined up ahead. Three local police stood by the open door of the patrol car listening to the garbled voice of the dispatcher broadcasting messages over the radio.
Facedown beneath his tarp, Bolan heard it all.
"What have you got in back there, miss?" the first cop asked.
"Oh, only some plants for a new house in Pietersburg," Ruth replied.
Then another policeman spoke. "You want me to take a look in there?" he asked the first cop. "Yeah, maybe you better. Where are you taking them, miss?"
"I told you. Pietersburg. My brother-in-law's place," Ruth said, beginning to get a bit edgy now.
Bolan felt a cold draft of air as the rear doors were jerked open. His head was toward those doors, his right hand, gripping the Beretta, near the edge of the tarp. Light seeped in beneath the heavy proofed material. "Like she says," the second cop reported, "garden plants." He began to close the doors.
"How come you're delivering way out here, when you're driving on Pretoria plates?" the officer near the driver's window asked.
And then they all heard it, suddenly clear of static, the radio voice: "Attention all cars! Attention all cars! Correction on the Bolan murder case intel. The two fugitives are not, repeat not, driving a blue Plymouth sedan. This vehicle was traded in at Baarmbeek earlier today. The criminals are now believed to be using a pale-colored 1977 Volvo station wagon. Any officer sighting this vehicle is ordered…"
The rest of the sentence was lost in a blur of sound and movement.
Ruth gunned the engine. The Volvo rocketed forward. The cops by the patrol wagon yelled. The guy holding Ruth's papers fell back as the spinning wheels sprayed roadside gravel against his legs. The man closing the rear doors swore as one of them, reacting to the sudden forward movement, swung wide and knocked his gun arm aside.
Among the plants, Bolan threw off the tarp and rose to his knees. It would be no good trying to bluff now. If the police knew about the Volvo they must have visited the used-car dump and questioned the Asian who sold it. They would know the license number, Bolan's description, the fact that there was an auxiliary fuel tank, the whole works.
He fired the Beretta, shattering the rear window glass. He had no wish to kill members of the police force, but he had to make them keep their heads down to stop them wasting him. He loosed off another trio burst — through the swinging doors, above the stumbling cop's head.
The Volvo snaked into the center of the road and shot away.
Behind them, cops ran into the road and fired automatics and SMGs. Their movements were hampered by the line of civilian cars halted ahead of the Volvo, and by the risk of hitting bystanders on the sidewalks.
By the time the policemen had reacted and leaped out to give themselves a clear field of fire, the station wagon was two hundred yards away, accelerating fast. More glass erupted from the rear windows and the steel body echoed to the impact of 9 mm slugs, but otherwise the vehicle was undamaged.
The Volvo howled past an intersection at the exit from the village as the patrol car was maneuvered past the stalled vehicles and launched in pursuit.
Bolan climbed over the seats and dropped down beside the woman. "They won't know we have the radio, so we can keep ahead of them until sunrise," he said. "But after that the choppers will be out and the going will be tough. You must take the first left turn, cut the lights and head for that border.
"We have to take the second turnoff, not the first. I know this country and that road will take us up toward the Blouberg. It's hilly and it's slow — but although there are farms and native villages, we hit no towns between there and the frontier."
Bolan turned to look over his shoulder. The lights of the patrol car were no more than a misty glare above a line of treetops masking a bend in the road behind.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The rain stopped shortly before dawn. For more than nine hours it had been sucked in through the broken rear windows of the Volvo, soaking their arms and shoulders. Nine hours of low-gear driving through barren foothills blotched with patches of thin scrub, along a ridge of rock and sand where nothing but thorn bushes broke the monotony of scorched terrain on which the storm seemed to have made little or no impression. Nine hours that had finally brought them to this bleak upland plateau beyond which, Mack Bolan hoped, the dirt road would finally tilt down and lead them toward the distant border.
He braked the car to a halt, shaded his eyes with one hand against the dazzle of the rising sun and scanned a slope that slanted up to a bluff a thousand feet above them. Ruth Elias was asleep, her dark head lolling against the padded back of the passenger seat.
Below and behind them, the dead land dropped away in parallel crests of ocher and rust, an arid landscape rising from the high veld in which Bolan figured their pursuers must still be searching for them.
The woman had backtracked on their route constantly during the night, following narrow trails in the dark until finally she had eluded the pursuing headlights. But when Bolan relieved her sometime after midnight on the edge of the huge expanse of veld, they had no idea where they were. They had passed through no towns or villages; in the night these vast tracts of country could have been on an alien planet.
As daylight approached, Bolan had been forced to keep climbing or go back and risk running into the enemy again. He had been steering roughly west in the hope of finding some landmark that would indicate how far they were from the Botswana frontier. Now he figured it was time to make a more serious attempt at orientation.
He stepped out of the Volvo and stretched. The sky had been swept clear of clouds. His clothes were already steaming damply in the heat of the sun.
He took a western Transvaal map from the car and opene
d it. It was not very detailed, but as far as he could see from the scale, the high ground they were crossing should be someplace between Thabazimbi and Vaalwater, fifteen or twenty miles northeast of the Heystekrand Bantustan.
If he had guessed right — he peered at the map again, squinting against the fierce glare of the sun — they should be near the headwaters of a river called the Matlabas, which was a tributary of the Upper Limpopo. And once they located that, all they had to do was follow the valley until they arrived at the confluence, for in that region the Limpopo formed the frontier.
And the distance from their present position to that frontier, if Bolan had calculated correctly, was between forty-five and fifty-five miles.
"The longer we stick with the car," he said when Ruth awoke, "the nearer we can get to the border. And the less chance we have of being zapped by Hanson or the South African police. On the other hand, if they get anyplace near at all, a Volvo station wagon's much more easily identifiable than two guys on foot."
"I say we stay with it," Ruth said.
Bolan nodded. "We're on our way."
A mile farther on, the dirt road twisted through a pass, a narrow cleft in the bluff. On the far side, the land dropped away and the trail was lost in a wilderness of boulders. Beyond this, scrub covered the floor of a huge depression for miles in all directions.
"And this river valley we're looking for?" Ruth inquired.
Bolan took a hand from the wheel and gestured diagonally to the right, where the ridges of a distant mountain chain stood out crisply against the sky. "On the far side of that crest," he said. "The bush veld below stretches a long way north and south, but it's no more than fifteen miles across. We should make those foothills inside an hour."
He sent the car rolling down the slope. The air was clear and sparkling now; the sun cast iron-hard shadows behind the rocks. Even with the unbroken windows wound down, the air inside the station wagon became insufferably hot.
Steering between the boulders, bumping alarmingly over patches of shale and bedrock, Bolan reached the trackless veld below. "Not a square foot of shade in the whole damn valley," he complained. None of the stunted vegetation was tall enough to throw a shadow that reached even halfway up the wheels.
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