The attacks on him in Marseilles and Alexandria, and the murder of Ibrahim — unless that, too, had really been intended for Bolan — must have been organized by Hartley.
The corrupt atomic expert would have tipped off Courtney that they had failed, that there was a spy checking on the U-235 still at large. Yet, astonishingly, he had failed to quote the warrior's name.
So that Courtney accepted him as a CIA field agent and made no connection with the supposed spy tracking the isotope.
And then?
Courtney, knowing Bolan as Bolan, also knew he was hoping to travel with the caravan under an Arab alias.
El-Karim — who also knew Bolan as Bolan but believed him to be a Russian prospector — did not know he was intending to latch on to the camel train, or that he had fake Arab papers as well as the laissez-passer he himself had provided.
The key was that Courtney didn't know Bolan knew el-Karim.
And the Sudanese wasn't going to let on that he had lined his own pocket, accepting a bribe to supply bogus papers to a foreigner.
The way it stacked up, then, was that human error — carelessness, inefficiency, greed — compounded by Bolan's own prudence in refusing to confide in Courtney had allowed him to slip through the net.
Just the same, he thought, he should have gotten wise to the Englishman long ago. He had even been suspicious of the richly appointed apartment, the pricey clothes. But he hadn't realized that Courtney's failure even to go through the motions of alerting Langley to a situation he could himself control was symptomatic of a slackness, a slapdash approach that marked everything he handled.
He should have faked some reply to Bolan's radio messages, from the intel he had, instead of ignoring them completely.
He should have invented an explanation for the nonarrival of the gear Bolan ordered from Brognola.
He should in any case have been smart enough to deduce from the text of the messages that Bolan was getting warm, even if he was too dumb to connect the "CIA field agent" with Hartley's spy.
Above all he should have liaised with Hamid el-Karim, so that Ogada and the others escorting the caravan would have known earlier just who they were dealing with.
The giveaway, however, had been right at the beginning, only the warrior hadn't seen it then. Offering Bolan a rundown on the situation in the South, he had shown far too much knowledge of Oloron — a place that wasn't even on the maps.
El-Karim and the mafiosi obviously shared some kind of distrust of Courtney, because a heated argument had broken out in the control room. "You left trailblazers a mile high all over Africa," Giovanni raged. "Paying that cow who worked for the cable office in Zemio to go home to Uganda, for starters. You think that was smart?"
"I wanted to get that bloody newspaperman off our backs," Courtney said sullenly. "He called me in Khartoum and said he wanted to trace Bolan. I'd sent him down to Zaire on a wild-goose chase, just to get him out of the way. Then I figured he might stay there longer, hoping Bolan might turn up, if there was a reservation in his name. So I called Bukama and made one."
"Yeah. From a public hotel in Zemio," Giovanni growled.
"Look, I was in Zemio anyway. Bolan had been there. I'd tracked the helicopter there. I found out he'd bought a bloody Land Rover, so I slipped a spot of cash to the garage chap to let me know if there was any follow-up."
"Of course there was a goddamn follow-up... after you left signs all over that a ten-year-old kid could have followed."
"I thought I covered my tracks pretty well, actually," Courtney returned.
"So well that this muckrakin' scribbler sticks his nose in every place you went in Zemio and finds out enough to track Bolan right up through Western Equatoria until Halakaz's boys fire his heap and we lose him in the forest."
"At least the garage fellow told us he'd be coming."
"He wouldn't have been coming if you'd kept your mouth shut. If you'd just said you didn't know the hell where Bolan was."
The Executioner was making mental notes, taking stock of the situation. There was one thing that still puzzled him.
Why hadn't Courtney, as chief of the Mafia's security, ordered Bolan's elimination once he knew the warrior was determined to join the vital caravan?
There could only be one answer. Believing Bolan to be a high-ranking CIA operative, Courtney wanted at all costs to keep his nose clean with Langley. He had therefore left it to Ogada and the caravan escort to finger the spy and take any action they thought necessary.
The fact that he hadn't tipped them off posed an interesting question.
Was it conceivable that Giovanni, el-Karim and the other conspirators didn't know that Courtney was on Langley's payroll? That they had hired him believing he was no more than a corruptible newspaperman with underworld connections? That the Englishman was, as he himself would put it, playing both ends against the middle?
If that was true, it could be a useful lever in any confrontation Bolan could engineer in the next few hours.
Time was running out. Decisions had to be made, plans had to be worked out. First, however, now that his card was marked, the Executioner decided to take an objective look at the runners, to see what the score was.
Louis Mancini and his boss were dangerous men, ruthless, brutal and callous enough to rise to the top of the Mafia slimebucket. Powerful and persuasive enough to talk most of the other Mob leaders into underwriting their crazy scheme. Men you couldn't talk to because for them the end always justified the means — and the end was money, the means murder.
The man who had been in charge of the caravan — his name, Bolan gathered, was Azziz Habibi — was an unknown quantity.
Halakaz and Mtambole, honorable men by their own standards, were nevertheless so much under the Mafia thumb, so besotted by the conviction that they were being helped to overcome their enemies in Khartoum, that they could not be counted on to listen to reason.
Ogada was something else. As Bolan knew from his treatment at the colonel's hands in the torture chamber back in the hill village, this, too, was a ruthless character and a tough one. He had visited the mafiosi in Florida; he could probably be relied on to stick by the men who had promised him so much.
Courtney and el-Karim were birds of a feather. Each was greedy, rapacious, probably ready to fight viciously in a tight corner if he figured his profits were threatened.
That left Mahmoud and the other heavies, plus the technicians owing allegiance to Giovanni. Bolan had no idea how many of them there were: they had seemed to him liberally seeded through the native work force in the short time he had been able to check out the caverns. In any case, like the torpedoes, they would obey orders; like them they would probably be expert infighters.
Whichever way you looked at it, Bolan thought, this was too heavy a team to be bested by one guy with an M-16 automatic rifle.
Even if the guy was known as the Executioner.
What were the alternatives?
There was only one.
Contact General Halakaz and the Anya Nya. Persuade them somehow that they were being duped and prove to them that they were being taken for the biggest ride of all time. Ask them to run up a different flag, fight with Bolan against the men who had so cruelly used them.
The warrior sighed. Whatever the odds, it was time to start to do what he could.
On hands and knees, he backed down the tunnel to the unused cave where he was to rendezvous with Yemanja.
She was waiting there, but although she held Bolan's backpack she didn't have the M-16.
That was in the hands of a man.
For a moment Bolan wondered if he was dreaming. The guy was tall, saturnine... and he was covered from head to toe in a formfitting combat blacksuit.
"Figured you might need this, so I wore it under my own clothes," the apparition drawled.
The Executioner continued to stare. It was a while before he recognized the man in black.
Jason Mettner.
He had been puzzled by Cou
rtney's references to "that bloody newspaperman"; he had asked himself how the mysterious scribe came to be following in his own footsteps. But somehow it had never crossed his mind that it might be the ace reporter from the Chicago Globe.
"Mettner! How did you get here?" Bolan held out his hand.
"A man called Brognola asked me to locate you," Mettner responded, shaking the outstretched hand. "Took me some time to find the right frequency, but I finally homed in."
"Welcome home!" Bolan said. "But you might find it a damned sight harder to get away again."
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Bolan's plan, like all long-odds undercover operations, relied for its success on two things: surprise and audacity. With the assets he had — one M-16 rifle, a courageous but untrained newspaperman and a woman who knew the layout of the base — they were the only other weapons available to him.
He had donned the blacksuit and now followed Yemanja through a warren of narrow passages that led to a staircase cut into the rock. Mettner, entrusted with the M-16, had been left with a specific briefing in the maze behind them.
At the foot of the staircase there was an antechamber connecting with the lofty cavern where the atomic furnace and the cyclotron were being built.
Yemanja stopped on the final step, peered into the room then laid a finger to her lips. Bolan soft-footed down behind her and peered over her shoulder. There was a guard posted ten feet away from the staircase, an Ingram cradled in his arms. Bolan recognized Mahmoud, the camel master.
The warrior didn't hesitate. He whispered an instruction in Yemanja's ear, sidled around her, waited until the camel master was looking toward the outer cavern and then launched himself forward.
He landed on Mahmoud's back, one knee crashing with agonizing force against the base of the man's spine, and a forearm snaking around and crushing his windpipe. Bolan's other hand clamped over the mouth to stifle a cry of alarm.
The camel master's arms flew wide, and the Ingram dropped from his hands. Yemanja swooped forward, as she had been told, and caught the weapon before it clattered to the ground.
There was no question of using it: Mahmoud would know they wouldn't dare when a single shot blast in the big cave would bring scores of workers, running to investigate.
The Executioner was unarmed. He was relying on superior skill and — again — surprise in his bid to subdue the guard. But Mahmoud was tough and he was strong.
Balling both fists, he swung his arms backward to punch Bolan hard on each side of the groin, bending double at the same time to throw the warrior forward over his head with a heave of his powerful shoulders.
Bolan landed on his back on the rock floor with a shock that drove the breath from his body. Before he could recover, Mahmoud was on top of him, callused fingers scrabbling for his throat. Pinned down by the weight of the muscular Nubian, he thrashed and rolled, fighting to claw away the fingers tightening around his neck, trying to place a nerve hold beneath his adversary's ear with his other hand.
Grunting with effort, Mahmoud increased the pressure. He shook off the hold with an angry toss of his head. Bolan felt the breath strangled in his throat; the noise made by the construction crew faded; the light started to dim. He clenched both hands on the murderous wrists, tried frenziedly to pry the fingers loose. He knew that if he couldn't get out from under within the next few seconds he was finished.
Yemanja entered the fray with a vengeance. She swung the loaded Ingram by the muzzle and cracked the lead-weighted sheet steel overhung bolt against her master's head. The blow, fueled by years of resentment, humiliation and disgust, zeroed in just above his ear. It wasn't hard enough to knock him cold, but it shook him, it angered him — and it caused him involuntarily to turn his head.
That was all Bolan needed.
The guy's chin was raised enough for him to jam an elbow beneath it. The head jerked back, and the grip on his throat loosened. Bolan snatched a hand away and jabbed his fingers into the Nubian's eye sockets.
Mahmoud gasped, shaking his head like a wounded bull. His thumbs swiveled upward, gouging for the warrior's own eyes. But Bolan raised his shoulders with a superhuman effort and butted his adversary hard in the face.
Blood spurted from the Nubian's mashed nose. In the second that his eyes were momentarily blinded by tears, Bolan thrust him to one side, lifted the upper half of his body and clubbed the steely edge of one hand repeatedly down on Mahmoud's neck.
He took two punishing blows on the ribs, but a final deadly chop on the carotid artery ended the fight. The Nubian subsided like a deflated balloon.
Bolan dragged himself out from beneath the deadweight. Panting, he managed to grin at Yemanja. "Thanks. That was just in time. Now help me strip him."
Like most of the work force, Mahmoud was wearing blue coveralls with the initials AN worked into the breast pocket. Anya Nya, Bolan reckoned. Nothing like some kind of uniform for promoting loyalty to an idea.
The one-piece garment was long enough — Mahmoud was a big man — but voluminous around the chest and hips. Bolan dragged it on over the blacksuit anyway. He had no choice.
They dragged the body to the top of the stairway. Bolan showed Yemanja how to work the Ingram and left her standing guard. He returned to the antechamber, walked through into the main cavern and strode boldly past the construction gangs on their scaffolding. Broken-nose, Joe and the rest of the search party, Yemanja had told him, were combing the series of smaller caves between the falls and the generators.
Nobody took any notice of the tali man in regulation blue. They would have been warned to watch out for a fugitive wearing a sweat-stained bush shirt. At one point Bolan had to turn hastily aside into a feeder passage: he had seen the torpedo with the wounded arm standing guard at the foot of the ramp leading down from the airstrip.
Later, he found his way back into the cavern behind the half-tracks, and gained the corridor he was looking for walking on the far side of a mobile forklift delivering steel formers to the gang working on the cyclotron.
The corridor was wide and brightly lit. Halfway along there was a heavy wooden door set into an arch, and behind the door Bolan could hear a hum of voices. He crouched and peered through the keyhole.
General Halakaz was sitting behind his desk and staring at the four men grouped beneath the Sudanese relief map on the wall of his office. "You are telling me, old chap," he said to Don Giovanni, "that you want me to withdraw all of my people from the control center and the main cavern one hour before blast-off?"
"That's what I'm telling you," Giovanni agreed.
"And assemble the entire work force in the empty chamber behind the generator cave?"
"You got it."
Halakaz leaned back in his chair and frowned. "May I ask why? Plenty of my people would like — I might say have the right — to be present during the countdown. The gang bosses and overseers in particular, after three years' back-breaking work, have earned a ringside seat. Surely they cannot be excluded from the ceremony we have awaited so long, the moment of truth when the tyrants of Khartoum will at last be called to account for their sins?"
"I want the whole damned lot in that empty cave."
"Don Giovanni figures," Mancini said smoothly, "that it would be kind of unfair to single out individuals when all of them have worked so hard. We're, uh, patching in TV on a closed circuit... a giant screen in that empty cave where everybody, but everybody, can share the excitement in the control room as the hour of, uh, triumph approaches, okay?"
Hamid el-Karim nodded.
"Splendid idea," Courtney drawled. "Most democratic."
"Well, old chap, I don't know about that..." Halakaz began.
The door slammed open and Mack Bolan walked into the room.
"Don't believe a damned word of it," he told the general. "It's after eight already. Less than four hours to go. Did you see any TV cameras in that control room? Have you noticed any cables, any sign of a screen, in or out of that cave?"
Halakaz ha
lf rose to his feet behind his desk, his mouth open in astonishment. El-Karim stood wide-eyed. David Courtney drew a 9 mm Beretta and leveled it at the Executioner's chest.
"They want all of you together in that cave so it'll be easier to gun you down," Bolan explained. "Unless they plan to seal it off and use chemical exterminators. They're making a fool of you. General. You've been tricked all along the line."
The four conspirators all yelled at once.
"How the hell did you..."
"Shut your goddamn mouth!"
"What does a Russian mineralogist..."
"Shut up or I'll drill you."
Halakaz held up one hand. "Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Order, please. There is no need for panic. Our friend Courtney has Mr. Bolan covered, and he appears to be unarmed. And as for you, old chap," he said, turning toward the Executioner, "I see no point in your making such wild statements."
"They're true," Bolan pressed. "I'm afraid you've been used. Now that the missiles are ready to be fired, you'll be... executed. In that cave. Because I promise you they have no intention of using those rockets to help you take Khartoum or any other city in the Sudan."
"That is ridiculous, old chap," Halakaz said, stemming the chorus of fury exploding from Giovanni and his companions.
"Are you a missile expert, General?"
"No, but..."
"Then how can you explain the fact that these weapons are not short-range tactical missiles suitable for such an operation, but intermediate rockets capable of delivering atomic warheads all over Europe and the Middle East?"
"Bull!" Unexpectedly Halakaz lapsed into the vernacular. "How can you possibly know that? How could a photographer..."
"I have to plead guilty to another deception there, General. I can't tell you who I work for..."
"He's a mercenary! Works for anyone who pays," Giovanni stormed.
"But I am an expert on modern warfare. And what I tell you is true."
Bolan's even voice carried conviction, and for the first time Halakaz hesitated. "What's more," Bolan continued, "if they were really going to help you conquer the Arabs in the north, would there really be such a highly placed Khartoum official working for them?"
Anvil of Hell Page 26
