At sundown the headman called a halt in a depression buttressed at one side by an outcrop of bare, flaking rock. The sky flared orange to the west; eastward, the hills were still visible as a low, dark line defining the horizon.
The men of the group at once started gathering dead wood for a fire. "They make a point of it; they don't try to hide the smoke," Bolan explained. "It tells other nomad bands to keep out! This is our territory right now."
Since this was only a brief halt, the women did not begin building the hemispherical, leaf-covered frame huts that customarily sheltered the Bushmen; tonight the most important thing was food. They buried spiny cucumbers, gathered during the day from a cactuslike plant, in the hot ashes. Locusts, dried in the sun, were ground to a powder between two flat stones, and these, added to root scrapings pounded into a crude meal, were cooked in a hollowed-out gourd to form a primitive cereal cake. A small animal like a prairie rat, and lizards caught during the trek by children and grilled on a spit, completed the dinner. Together with the contents of the ostrich eggs.
It was soon after dawn that they saw the springbok.
Perhaps it was the memory of the previous night's food that prompted Ruth to notice the African antelope first, about 250 yards upwind, somehow separated from the herd, standing alone by a thorn tree beside a dried-up water hole.
She tugged at one of the hides slung around Bolan's neck and held a finger to her lips. He looked up and saw the animal at once. In turn he touched the headman on the arm and pointed.
The nomad chief uttered a sibilant whisper and the whole tribe flattened themselves to the ground.
Bolan unleathered Big Thunder, unbuckled his belt and the shoulder rig holding the Beretta, either of which could scrape on the rock and become an alarm signal, and moved out.
He wormed out of the depression and, still lying flat on his stomach, inched his way around the rock on the side hidden from the animal.
The rock was perhaps fifty yards wide. If he could creep around it and still remain downwind, the range would be reduced to two hundred yards. But even with a muzzle velocity of 1640 feet per second it would be a long shot for a 240-grain boattail to make a decisive hit.
Bolan saw the water hole slide into view as he rounded the last shoulder of rock. The springbok was still there. The bobtail was up, the ears twitching. For a moment the hunter thought that the animal had gotten wind of the danger. He hoped not, because once the beast had taken off, no handgun on earth could bring it down.
In a prone firing position, supported on his two elbows, Bolan wrapped the fingers of his left hand around his right wrist. The barrel of the 11.5 inch fleshshredder lined up with the target. The springbok pawed the ground. The head turned left, right. Another flick of the tail.
The Executioner held his breath.
He squeezed the trigger.
The report of the wildcat cartridge was deafening. The four-pound gun jerked in Bolan's hand, the massive recoil jamming his right elbow painfully against the scaly rock.
From the far side of the rock he heard a ragged cheer. The springbok was down.
But it was not dead. Despite the Executioner's expertise, the heavy .44-caliber slug had climbed fractionally in flight and only creased the animal's skull. Instinctively, the effort no longer conscious, it struggled upright on its front feet, then the rear, and staggered a few steps.
Bolan was already running. The tribesmen with their spears, too.
At forty yards out Bolan fired again, the big gun bucking in his hands. The boattail cored home and the springbok fell once more; this time it was for keeps.
The Bushmen were overjoyed. They decided to make camp there; they would remain while the carcass was skinned, disjointed, part eaten and part preserved, the hide dried in the sun, and the hoofs and horns fashioned by the women into tools, ornaments and utensils.
It was while they were dragging the animal back to the depression that Bolan noticed the hole in the ground.
It was beyond the dried-up water hole, where the land sank between two shelves of bare rock. Clearly this had been the approach to the site — when there was water.
The hole was roughly square, about twelve feet by twelve, between eight and ten feet deep. It was evidently manmade. "Covered over, it's a trap for animals when they come at dusk to drink," Bolan said. "The hunters hide themselves among the rocks and shoot them down when they're immobilized in there, maybe with a broken leg."
Equally interesting was a discovery Ruth made in a patch of elephant grass at one side of the rocks.
Half-hidden among the man-high stalks, roped down beneath a sheet of tarpaulin, was a small dump of half a dozen five-gallon jerricans full of gasoline.
"Very efficient," Bolan said acidly. "To make quite sure they get home safely after this perilous safari, the hunters have established a refueling dump for themselves!"
"Right now I'd like anything with a tank that this would fill," Ruth said.
Bolan was caressing the stubble on his jaw. "We'll get something," he said. "I'm sick of being chased. We need that damned helicopter one more time."
Ruth looked puzzled. "But I thought…" she began.
"We hated it," Bolan said. "And now we need it. This time I want them to find us."
* * *
"There's two characters out in the desert," the Lynx observer reported on his radio. "I figure they're the ones you're after."
"A man and a woman?" Vanderlee inquired.
"That's right. The guy's tall. The woman's dark and… well, just a woman. It's hard to say, they look dead beat."
"Are they armed?"
"Not that I can see. We'll go lower and… no. It looks like they got nothing but the rags they're wearing. The guy is waving a white cloth at us, like he wants to surrender or something."
"Excellent," Vanderlee said. "Is there any sign of the monkey men, the bush Indians?"
"I don't see any. I think they'd be father out to the west by now. You want me to pass on the map coordinates to the guys in that half-track?"
"You don't know anything about any half-track," Vanderlee said testily. "Report the coordinates to me. Stay in the area until… until other parties locate the fugitives. What happens after that does not concern you. Once contact is made, you fly home. Is that clear?"
"Whatever you say, Colonel," the observer replied.
Half an hour later, Eddie Hanson, compass in hand, steered his driver out into the desert. It was midday and the sun's heat turned the Humber's steel body into an oven. Hanson didn't mind the discomfort — his prize was in the bag! He had known all along that the bastard and his whore must be out there someplace. Trying to make the railroad probably.
Hanson grinned. They'd had enough, now they were offering to surrender. Well, if they thought they were going to be shown any leniency, they had another think coming!
He wouldn't shoot them down right away, though. There would be no witnesses. He didn't like Bolan, had never liked the soft-shell, holier-than-thou son of a bitch. It would be fun to watch him squirm while the boys had their fun with the skirt. He'd let Abu Fekhrouh finish her off. What that Ethiopian could do with a knife…
Soon Hanson saw the Lynx, a dark speck motionless against the aching blue of the sky some miles ahead.
Approaching the chopper, he waved his arms as soon as he could distinguish the figures in the bubble, and the pilot signaled a thumbs-up before he flew away.
The Humber roared on across the plain in a cloud of yellow dust. Bolan and the woman were standing on the cracked earth of a dried-up water hole. And, right enough, the big American was waving something white, a torn shirt or something. Behind them, bare, peeling branches of ilex and wattle and some kind of eucalyptus surrounded the one-time oasis. Hanson supposed it was as good a place as any to die.
There were also some dead trees on either side of a slight grade where the approach to the water hole sank between outcrops of flaky rock. Many of the branches had broken off and dropped across the track.
The Humber's caterpillars crunched over dead wood.
Suddenly the Irish driver gave a cry of alarm. Hanson saw Bolan, the woman and the water hole shoot upward into the air. He received a violent blow on the head.
Half-stunned, he was aware of shouts and cries all around him, of the truck engine screaming and then dying. He stared dazedly around.
The driver was slumped over the wheel, knocked out when his head crashed against the windshield. In front of him was darkness and what looked like a wall of sand. The other mercs, inexplicably, were in a heap on the floor beneath the turret.
The half-track had plowed through a thin screen of branches and leaves to plunge into the game trap.
The rear half of the sixteen-foot truck was still in the open air, canted skyward at an angle of forty-five degrees, but the front wheels and the radiator were buried in soft sand at the bottom of the trap, and hood, turret and half the body were below the surface of the desert.
Hanson swore. That bastard Bolan would pay for this!
Shouting to his men, he clambered to the tail of the truck and jumped to the ground. The cannon and the coaxial machine gun were useless — they could only fire downward into the sand. But he and the mercs still had their handguns, their SMGs, their M-16s.
"Wound the motherfuckers, that's all," he yelled. "I want them both alive."
But the woman and the Executioner had vanished.
Hanson gazed furiously left and right. There was only one place they could be, the fifty-yard patch of elephant grass.
"Come on," he shouted. "Spread out and comb that damned grass. We'll have them out of there in two minutes."
With his Walther PPK in his right hand, he led the way, thrusting aside the six-foot stems and stamping them flat as he penetrated the patch.
* * *
But Mack Bolan and Ruth Elias had not gone into the grass; they fled around the outside and waited there. When the strung-out mercs were halfway through, Bolan set the grass afire.
It took only a single match. A sheet of flame shot upward, crackled sideways, leaned away from the wind and set neighboring clumps ablaze. Within seconds the whole fifty-yard width of the patch was a seething furnace.
As the conflagration scorched toward them, the mercs cried out in terror and turned to beat their way back to the safety of the open desert.
But there were worse horrors to come. Bolan had left five of the six jerricans of gasoline, with the screw caps removed, in strategic places among the grasses.
One by one they erupted into blazing hellbursts as the heat from the advancing wall of fire blasted the volatile vapor into flame.
Black smoke boiled up into the sky. Flaming figures screamed out from the inferno, beating at the tongues of fire licking their combat fatigues. Within the fiercely burning area ammunition from guns dropped by the fleeing mercs detonated in firecracker profusion.
One of the Vietnam vets, a Cuban and a guy carrying an SMG had been killed by the exploding jerricans. For the others it was over almost as quickly.
Bolan and Ruth were firing from among the rocks on the far side of the flaming grass. Two of the enemy — Hanson himself and one of the men with an M-16 — were thrashing frenziedly on the sand, trying to extinguish the flames devouring them. That left the third vet with an M-16, the remaining Cuban and the other SMG gunner on foot and fighting. But within minutes their cover had been consumed; there was nothing left of the elephant grass but an area of blackened and smoking ruin, with three incinerated bodies crisped among the charred embers.
And now there was a silent circle of small, copper-colored men armed with bamboo spears surrounding the site of the fire.
The soldier with the SMG lost his cool. Cursing, he spun on his heel, spraying death from his hammering weapon. Two of the nomads fell. A third flung his spear with such accuracy that the tip pierced the merc's throat at the same time as a short burst from one of Ruth's mini-Uzis split open his back. He dropped face upward, the shaft of the spear still quivering above the spreading pool of scarlet that stained the sand.
Meanwhile the vet dropped to one knee and opened fire at the M-16's full 950 rpm cyclic rate. Ruth ducked behind a rock shelf to avoid the high-velocity 5.56 mm killstream. Bolan dropped, too, as the ricochets screeched into the burning sky and the flaming muzzle swung his way.
He had hated like hell to resort to fire, but they had pathetically few rounds between them — and with Hanson, he knew, they had to win or they were dead meat.
Half crouching, the merc sprang sideways to get a better line on Ruth behind her shallow shelter. He was covered by the Cuban, who was armed only with a six-shot Colt Cobra revolver. The .38 caliber, 200-grain slugs hummed Bolan's way, but as the distinctive reports cracked out, the Executioner found a fissure between two boulders through which he could sight the vet.
He triggered a single round from the AutoMag in the general direction of the Cuban and then, shifting position slightly, emptied the Beretta's magazine at the vet.
Caught off balance by the heavy parabellum rounds, the guy was hurled upward and sideways for several feet before he crashed lifeless to the ground with the dark blood pouring from half a dozen holes drilled between his hip and his shoulder.
Bolan rose menacingly from behind the rock, Big Thunder in his right hand. There were only three rounds left in the clip, but the Cuban didn't know that. Besides, his own revolver was empty.
He threw the gun onto the ground and raised his hands.
One of the two men on fire had been killed by the Bushmen. His sprawled body, transfixed by three spears, lay smoldering on the edge of the ashes. Hanson was still alive, moaning as he beat with blistered hands at his blazing garments.
Ruth's face was a mask of horror and pity. She ran forward and seized the writhing man by the shoulders, rolling him in the sand to douse the flames.
Bolan shouted a warning.
The mercenary leader's features contorted into an expression mingling anguish, fury and hatred. As the woman leaned over him trying to ease his agony, he snatched a broad-bladed commando knife from his boot and stabbed viciously upward at her stomach.
Bolan fired the AutoMag twice.
The hand holding the knife vanished in a spray of blood and bones and shredded flesh. The knife spun away, the blade glinting in the sun.
The Executioner's second shot smashed Hanson's forehead.
Bolan straightened up and looked at Ruth. "Well, I guess that wraps it up," he said grimly. "This guy…" he gestured with the gun barrel at the Cuban"…has surrendered; the driver's unconscious in the cab of the truck, and the rest…" He glanced around the blackened hellground between the trap and the trees. "I think you could say the rest are taken care of."
He made a mental count, his brow suddenly furrowing.
There was one missing. Where the hell was the Ethiopian?
As the thought formed in his mind, the nomad headman called out a guttural warning.
Bolan swung around. Abu Fekhrouh had run back to the Humber for his XM-174. He was standing up on the rock with the grenade launcher at his hip, the stubby barrel aimed at Bolan. From a distance of fifty yards he couldn't miss — and the grenade was in position, he was about to fire.
The nomads flung spears. They fell short. Bolan had one shot left in the AutoMag.
The mouth of the launcher tube yawned in their direction.
Bolan steadied his hand, teeth clenched, eyes squinted against the glaring desert light. This was one time in his danger-filled career when everything, other people's lives as well as his own, yeah, the whole damned future, depended on a precise coordination of hand and eye.
Bolan fired.
The last boattail took Abu Fekhrouh full in the chest. He toppled forward while he was actuating the firing mechanism of the XM-174. The rocket motor ignited. But the grenade was unable to exit from the tube; the muzzle had plowed into the sand.
There was a muffled, thudding explosion… a blinding flash of light… a terrible shower o
f metal fragments, shreds of cloth, bone splinters and eviscerated flesh that pockmarked the desert floor within a radius of more than thirty yards. Ruth drew back with a small gasp of revulsion as a boot with a foot still inside it landed near her.
All that remained of the Ethiopian was a red stain that slid slowly down the rock, steaming in the heat of the sun.
Half an hour later the nomads, under Mack Bolan's direction, had manhandled the Humber halftrack out of the pit. Both front wheels had to be changed and the steering was erratic, but apart from buckled armor the vehicle had suffered no other damage. Bolan emptied the sixth jerrican of gasoline into the tank.
The dead had been buried, the Bushmen had taken what they wanted in the way of arms, ammunition… and the clothes and footwear of the Irish driver and the Cuban, who sat, naked and sullen, by the side of the truck.
"What are you going to do with them?" Ruth asked. "You can't kill them in cold blood."
"No," Bolan repeated. "But they don't want to stay here. I think I'll send them home."
"Home?"
"Sure. Back to South Africa. Stand," he said roughly to the two prisoners, "and start walking."
The Irishman looked at him. "What the hell d'you mean?"
"You heard me. You're going back where you came from. On foot."
"Hell, you can't do that! We have no clothes or shoes? It's inhuman, man! You wouldn't…"
"Shut up!" Bolan interrupted. "You were prepared to kill us for money. Consider yourselves damned lucky you're still alive and in a condition to walk — with or without clothes. In any case, it's no more than thirty miles before you make the trees."
The Irishman looked suspiciously at the impassive Bushmen. "Suppose these little bastards take it into their heads to follow us after you've gone?"
"We kept our bargain with them. As of now, they've no reason to feel bitter toward whites."
Bolan heaved the Irishman to his feet and ordered brusquely, "Move!"
The Cuban said nothing. He got up without being told and started toward the distant hills. The naked driver limped after him, pathetic in his nudity under the huge desert sky.
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