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  "I guess that's right," Ogano said. "Naturally I'll do anything I can. What do you have in mind?"

  "Azzid tells me your party can count on perhaps thirty or forty men. Is that right?"

  "In principle, yes. But getting them together, in the same place, at the same time, might be difficult. They don't all belong to the same unit."

  "Okay. How many could you rely on one hundred percent — I don't mean rely on their loyalty but on their availability."

  "Perhaps twenty. It would depend on the day and the time."

  "Tomorrow afternoon. Are any of your guys connected with the Leopard tank squadron?"

  Ogano shook his head. "Not one. They're all infantrymen. From the Yanga tribe, like me. Nothing but the more menial tasks, the gun-fodder role, for them. No higher than captain for me." The lieutenant sounded bitter. "Ononu takes very good care that nobody but the Oriwady gets within a mile of the tanks and artillery and missiles. He dare not."

  "Too bad," Bolan said. "And the choppers?"

  "Choppers?"

  "The helicopters. Are the pilots Oriwady, too?"

  "The men who fly the missile gunships certainly are. I could count on a couple of the Hind fellows, of course, but they don't have…"

  "I know. The civil version. Unarmed. Still, they could be useful. Do your guys have access to APCs — armored personnel carriers?"

  Ogano brushed the ends of his mustache outward with a forefinger. "We could lay our hands on maybe four mechanized infantry combat vehicles. They're good value — American XM-723s, only in service since 1980."

  "So we make it with four MICVs and a couple of civilian choppers. It's better than a foot patrol. Now here's the big question: are you, personally, in a position to order those MICVs out of base camp — and maybe raise the choppers too — without any awkward questions being asked? Is there any chance of them being within reasonable distance of the prison around three in the afternoon without some kind of alarm being raised?"

  The young officer thought for a moment. "I guess so," he said finally. "There's a cleanup campaign in progress — against the use of ganja and the hard stuff in the shantytowns. We act on information received. Like fast, to catch the pushers with the stuff on them. It's an infantry job — and if the tip-off comes from here or Kondani, well, we'd pass the jail on our way into town from the base camp at Oulad."

  Bolan clapped him on the shoulder. "We're in business!"

  * * *

  Fifteen hours ten. The heat of the sun, fiercer each minute, had metamorphosed an atmosphere already heavy with humidity into a haze that blanketed the forest trees and blotted out the ocean horizon. At the edge of the forest, half-hidden behind a screen of tropical undergrowth, Bolan's Land Rover faced the dirt road that skirted the dunes and passed the prison.

  The Executioner sat in the outside passenger seat. Cradled on his left shoulder and projecting from the open side of the utility was the stubby barrel of an RPG-7V rocket grenade launcher, most unwieldy of the weapons carried in the secret compartment below the floor.

  Bolan's big hands were wrapped around the RPG-7's two pistol grips. His right forefinger remained poised, ready to curl around the forward trigger, his eye pressed to the rubber shield in back of the optical sight. The skirt of the bulbous five-pound grenade was already in place over the launch tube's muzzle.

  The warrior's forehead furrowed in concentration. Was it the distant grinding of gears, the threshing of tracks driven by 280-horsepower diesel engines that he heard?

  Fifteen fifteen. There was a sudden puff of brown smoke above the prison's western wall. Two seconds later the thunderclap of an explosion.

  Before the cracking detonation died away, there was a vivid flash and another eruption of smoke billowed over the wall. Fragments of masonry spewed out from the center of the blast. The shock wave of sound rolled across the strip of sand.

  Bolan nodded in satisfaction. Through the RPG-7's optics he saw the shapes of men passing the firing slits in the battlements. They were running toward the sector where the delayed-action charges exploded. Sounds of confused shouting came to him from the western end of the compound.

  Bolan shifted his position, centering the sight's cross hairs on the parapet at the eastern extremity of the jail's outer wall. He could definitely hear the approach of tracked vehicles now.

  But he waited, fingertips tingling, every muscle in his body tense.

  Fifteen seventeen.

  Brown smoke drifted over the battlements. Two more detonations, muffled this time, reached him from within the prison. They were followed by a volley of revolver shots and the deeper stammer of a submachine gun — abruptly cut short by two thudding bangs, quite different in quality from the explosive charges.

  The Executioner imagined the scene being played out in the high-security wing: Azzid knifing the guard due to escort him to the exercise yard, freeing his companions and using the plastique to blow his way out of the block and into the passageway that led to the cook house, then using two of the stun grenades to put any guards blocking his escape out of action.

  Holding his breath, Bolan squeezed the launcher's trigger.

  A roar of flame belched out from the rear of the tube, exiting on the far side of the Land Rover's cab. The grenade leaped from the launcher at a speed of more than one hundred yards per second; four stabilizer fins unfolded, then the rocket motor cut in to increase the speed to three hundred yards per second. The fiery warhead streaked over the road and the sandy strip to burst with a shattering crash and a gush of orange flame just below the parapet.

  Fifteen twenty. Bolan reached down to the floor of the Land Rover and picked up a second rocket grenade. He fitted it over the tube. Through the sight he could see a breach in the battlement perhaps seven or eight feet across and four deep. Rock dust and fumes from the explosion hung over the gap.

  Four hundred yards away along the dirt road, four MICVs, each carrying half a dozen armed men in uniform, materialized beneath a miniature sandstorm raised by their tracks. The machine gunners in the watchtowers hesitated, unsure if the carriers were enemies or reinforcements.

  Bolan fired the second grenade. This time he aimed a few feet below the breach. Solid blocks of stone tumbled to the sand. Smoke tinged with flame boiled out and up as the blast enlarged the gap in the wall.

  Beyond the western end of the jail, Bolan watched as the MICVs left the dirt road and rumbled across the sand toward the battlements. From the open turrets, 7.62 mm PKT machine guns spit flame.

  Some of the watchtower guards fired at the armored vehicles, some shot down into the compound. The concussion of the last stun grenade… a rattle of small-arms fire. By now, Bolan reasoned, Azzid and his companions would have seized weapons from the fallen wardens and be blasting their way toward the breach.

  The Executioner aimed his third grenade some way below the hole in the wall. When the dust cleared he saw that although the explosion had not pierced the rampart, it had pulverized the stonework enough for the section above to collapse. The jagged, wedge-shaped opening in the wall now reached halfway from the parapet to the ground.

  A pall of smoke hovered above the prison. Bolan had agreed with Azzid that the escapers would make it through the gap immediately after the third HEAT missile exploded. Still, he decided to cover them now with a fourth from his total stock of half a dozen. The gunners on the watchtower nearest the break sprayed death in the direction of the breach. The warrior angled the barrel of the bazookalike launcher upward.

  The rush of flame. The screech of the rocket engine.

  A direct hit. Platform, railing, gun mounting and roof disintegrated in a holocaust of flame. The girdered pylon supporting the platform buckled and tilted, showering blazing debris into the compound. Red-hot metal trailing spirals of smoke jetted skyward, and a threshing shape licked by tongues of fire dropped screaming to the sand outside the wall.

  Fifteen twenty-seven.

  Bolan slid behind the wheel, started the engine and drove
the Land Rover out, across the road and toward the prison. The tracked MICVs were churning around in front of the breached wall, hosing lead at the remaining watchtowers.

  Emaciated figures in drab prison uniform, some of them with SMGs, some without, appeared in the gap, jumping down ten feet to run in the direction of the rescuers. The Executioner counted seven.

  But there was a hail of fire raining down from the battlements now. Two men fell. A third staggered, almost pitched full-length, but was picked up and dragged to the nearest carrier by two companions.

  Bolan could see Lieutenant Ogano in the turret of the leading MICV, gesticulating urgently.

  Finally all the escaped prisoners had been hauled aboard except one tall, sinewy man with cropped gray hair and a seamed face. The Executioner assumed correctly that this was Colonel Azzid; he was down on one knee, coolly covering his men with short bursts from an Uzi. Bolan gunned the Land Rover's engine and swooped across in a shower of sand to pick him up.

  Azzid's denim prison uniform was dark with sweat. He tossed the SMG into the back and sank gasping into the passenger seat. Ogano's MICVs were already back on the dirt road heading east.

  "Problems?" Bolan asked, wrenching the utility onto the trail and accelerating after them.

  "As expected," the colonel said, panting. "No more, no less. Without this it could have been difficult." He produced the commando knife. The blade was dark with congealed blood.

  "I used it to write off two wardens," Azzid continued. "So once I had freed the first of my fellow officers, we were able to use both sets of keys and liberate the rest twice as fast."

  "You got them all out?" Bolan asked.

  "The ten of us concerned in the failed coup, yes. By the time the first of the plastique charges you had given me blew the cell-block doors, we were ready to rush through and blast open the way to the kitchens with the second. But the guards in the exercise yard were quick off the mark: we lost two men killed and one wounded and recaptured." Azzid shook his head. "Poor bastard, I wouldn't like to be in his shoes."

  "Plus two more dead and another wounded between the wall and the carriers," Bolan added. "So effectively there's just yourself and three other officers, and of course Lieutenant Ogano, to lead the men?"

  "Correct. How many men has Ogano organized?"

  "Twenty-four including himself, I think. With another three who should be crewing one of the Hind helicopters."

  "Only one?"

  "Ogano wasn't sure he could rely on the second. In any case only one would be used in a genuine antidrug cleanup operation. So we figured it safer to avoid suspicion and base the plan on a single aircraft."

  "Very well." Colonel Azzid turned to look out the Land Rover's rear window. So far no pursuit vehicles had emerged from the jail. "What exactly is the plan?" he asked.

  Bolan told him. He had worked it out with Lieutenant Ogano.

  The first priority was to get across the idea that this was simply an escape, an attempt to flee the dictator's wrath, and not in any way the preliminary to a second coup. Accordingly, the convoy was to head east and north through the forest as if making for Halakaz and the Ivory Coast.

  But even on forest trails, four MICVs and a Land Rover were not likely to elude the vigilance of an enemy deploying four or five helicopters, two of them armed with missiles. So it had been decided to junk the wheeled transport and hide the vehicles beneath the trees once a direction — and by implication the flight to a neighboring country — had been established.

  The Hind that was theoretically on Ogano's imaginary cleanup mission would then pick up the entire company.

  Lake Gadrany and the summer palace were 162 miles away in a straight line. By road the distance was more than two hundred miles. The Executioner had decided, in view of this, to make the escape and the assault on Ononu's fortress a single operation. The quicker they were able to strike, the less chance there was that the dictator would realize they had no intention of crossing the frontier into the Ivory Coast — and the less time he would have to react and call up reinforcements loyal to him.

  But because the ungainly civil version of the Soviet helicopter was too easy a target for ground-to-air missiles and rockets fired from other aircraft, the small attacking force was to be divided before they reached the killzone.

  One of the escaped officers and three handpicked men were to be set down on the rooftop helipad of the Radio Montenegria tower in Bomiko-Kassi.

  The four men would be given orders to penetrate and take over the station's continuity control room, silence the armed guards, then force the broadcasting personnel to continue normal transmission until they received word from Azzid that Ononu had been overthrown. There would then be radio silence until the colonel himself went on the air from the dictator's own studio in the summer palace and announced the takeover.

  The most important part of the mission was the speed and precision with which it had to be carried out: the four men had to seize control of the radio station before anyone could raise an alarm.

  From the capital, the chopper would then fly northeast to the lake and set down Ogano, two more of the escaped officers and eighteen infantrymen with their weapons and certain elements of Bolan's arsenal from the Land Rover. Disembarkation would be behind a belt of woods half a mile from the lakeshore.

  Finally, Bolan, Azzid and the two remaining soldiers were to take a chance on the time it took for base control to figure out that the chopper was involved in the jailbreak and not with any antidrug swoop. They would stay aloft and make an airborne attack on the palace while Ogano's task force neutralized the gate house garrisons at either end of the bridge linking the islet with the shore.

  "It's a crazy plan," Bolan said, "but it's got to work. With the main radio station in your hands, plus the linked studio at the palace, do you think you could swing the rest of the army your way?"

  The colonel nodded. "If General Shagari is at the palace — and he's Ononu's right-hand man so he usually is — then there should be no problem," he said.

  "But even with Shagari in your hands, too, won't the rest of the Oriwady officers at Oulad prove something of a headache?"

  "Once your hostages are out of the way," Azzid said grimly, "I have no doubt we can… persuade Ononu and the general to issue certain orders that will make our task easier."

  He turned again in his seat and looked back down the forest trail. There was no sign of pursuit. "In any case," he said for the second time, "what have we got to lose?"

  Chapter Eleven

  Emperor Anya Ononu was a large and powerful man. He was not particularly tall, but he was very wide, deep chested, long armed and packed with hard muscle. He weighed 210 pounds.

  At noon on the day Colonel Azzid escaped from jail, Ononu's face was devoid of its habitual sullen expression: the corners of his mouth turned up in an anticipatory smile and his small eyes, yellow flecked with red around a black iris, shone with eagerness.

  Each day at 1400 hours, ever since the industrialists' daughters had been delivered to him, he selected one to be ceremonially — and publicly — raped. While four soldiers held the young woman spread-eagled on a marble table in the summer palace's huge mirrored reception hall, Ononu would strip naked and violate her in front of an audience composed of servants, off-duty military and any sycophantic members of his entourage who happened to be around.

  Most of them made it a point to be around — no one wanted to rouse Ononu's temper, which was mercurial at best. He liked to show off his physique and his virility. It flattered his ego to hear the spectators gasp as he plunged into the unwilling flesh. But most of his satisfaction was mental; he could, if he wished, take his pleasure anywhere in Montenegria, at any time. It was the humiliation, the repeated subjugation of these haughty females — and with it the vicarious supremacy over their fathers — that slaked his thirst for revenge, for domination of the hated foreigners who had pillaged his land and cheated him out of his rightful share of the profits to be gained from
its exploitation.

  It helped, too, from the propaganda point of view, to keep his subjects persuaded that his power was unchallenged: the subjugation was a convenient — and agreeable — symbol of the emergence of black Africa and the final suppression of colonialist rule.

  Today, the emperor decided, he would take the Bozuffi girl again. He had personally tortured each of the kidnapped young women when they arrived, but she had been the toughest to break.

  Today he would make sure he broke her spirit, her will. There was great satisfaction to be gained when such a victim finally lost all self-control.

  Each beating and each rape had been filmed. It would be both amusing and flattering to his ego to run the movies later in front of other leaders who lusted for Western humiliation. The soundtracks of the films had been transferred to tape. There was almost enough material now. Suitably edited, copies of each girl's tape would be sent to her father — with the ultimatum that unless new terms for the mining concession were satisfactorily negotiated at once, arrangements would be made for the recording of further tapes.

  Ononu's carnal pleasures were not restricted to the domination of women. The «interrogations» of his enemies, which again he liked to oversee personally, were a constant source of joy.

  The rumor that he kept their heads in a refrigerator amused him. And he was careful to ensure that the rumor was never denied; subversives and upstarts from inferior tribes were less likely to challenge a ruler with that kind of reputation.

  The truth was in fact no less bizarre.

  Ononu was of that vile breed of men turned on by suffering. He liked to watch his enemies drown. There was a room in the subbasement of the summer palace that could be flooded from the lake, right up to the ceiling level. The room had one glass wall, with floodlights and a viewing cubicle on the far side.

  Better still, in the cellar he used for his torture sessions there was a row of hooks from which seven-foot-deep sacks in transparent heavy-duty plastic could be suspended. The victims were immured in these sacks with their arms bound, and the sacks were then filled with water. In this way, Ononu could watch the frantic jerkings of the water-filled bags and the contorted faces of the drowning men.