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  Bolan stopped the Land Rover when we were halfway around the perimeter track that circled the poppy fields. He toted a hidden compartment packed with arms and that was disguised as a second spare gas tank. Some of the stuff had been used up in the jail-break and the attack on Ononu's palace, but there was plenty left. He came up with a selection, replaced the floorboards and climbed back behind the wheel.

  He had. unscrewed the suppressor from an Ingram, which reduced the scattergun's length, with the wire stock retracted, to no more than eleven inches. Even with a 30-round magazine clipped in, the deadly little SMG could easily be concealed beneath the oversize cotton bush jacket that he wore. So could his holstered Beretta, the AutoMag and a selection of grenades.

  As he drove, he issued my instructions, the orders that were to coincide with his own planned assault schedule. The briefing was succinct: it could be encapsulated in five words.

  Stay put and do nothing.

  By the time we pulled up outside the gates it was almost dusk, and for the first time in two days there was color in the western sky — a pale reflection of the evil flowers filling the valley. Water from the sprinklers lay down and died. Two of the cattle trucks, loaded with emaciated tribesmen, had already passed us on their way back to the dead villages in the wasteland where the sweatshop workers lived.

  Overseers were herding the rest of the men out from among the rows of poppies and into the remaining trucks. Each man was searched before he left — in case he was trying to smuggle out a can of water, I guess. They packed fifty or sixty tribesmen into the rear of each truck.

  A third group stood in line outside the open door of a storehouse, handing in crop-spraying equipment, backpack reservoirs, flexible nozzled tubes and stuff like that. The overseers were shouting at them, and several times I heard the crack of a whip.

  It's not often that Bolan curses. But then he said in a barely audible voice: "By the time I leave, not one of the fucking bastards that ran this hellhole is going to be alive."

  He pulled up on the hand brake savagely and we slid to a final halt. The armed guards on duty were standing in a row with their submachine guns unslung — as ugly a group of heavies as I'd seen outside of a presidential motorcade or a waterfront bar in Marseille. They looked suspicious. I guess no more than thirty or forty Land Rovers registered in Montenegria pass that way in a normal day's work.

  Bolan waited for the last truck to pass through the gates and then he eased himself out from behind the wheel and walked casually toward the guards. A tall dude, clearly in shape, with eyes like chips of blue ice.

  "This is private property," the meanest of the guards growled.

  Bolan ignored him. "Don't close them, I'm coming in," he said politely enough to two guys dragging the gates closed.

  They stopped and stared at him.

  A fourth sentry hefted his SMG and snarled, "Who the fuck are you? Nobody gets in here."

  "On your way," the first man said.

  "I have a message from Emperor Ononu," said Bolan. He slid a hand between the edges of his jacket.

  "Oh, yeah? What kind of message?"

  "This kind," Bolan rasped. And then — it was the most extraordinary thing I ever saw — somehow he fired that Ingram from under his jacket. Half the magazine in one damn burst!

  The cyclic rate of that baby is 1,145 rounds per minute. It sounded like ripping calico with the volume increased a million percent. Bolan swiveled left, right, left, holding the Ingram hard against his hip, stitching a figure eight across and through those hoods before even the one with his weapon at the ready could clench his finger around the trigger.

  The sentries were spread all over the ground between the gates. I never saw such a lacework of scarlet sinking into Mother Earth, not even when I was on the crime beat.

  The engine of the Land Rover was still running. Bolan beat out the flame licking around the scorched edges of the hole in his jacket and made it back, cool as the ice in his eyes, to take the wheel. We gunned into the compound.

  There were guys running out of the blockhouse. To block us. Tough dudes in khaki shorts and safari jackets like the gatemen, each of them with some kind of shooter.

  Bolan lifted a hand from the controls and lobbed a grenade.

  A puff of smoke and an orange flash.

  When the smoke cleared there were more guys lying dead on the ground. Bolan then jumped down from the jalopy, kicked open the door of what looked like an HQ building and blazed his way in there with that Ingram, choking out the rest of the clip.

  I followed my orders. I stayed in the passenger seat. Over the knocking of my knees, I heard several more separate shots from inside, deeper toned, from more than one gun. From more than Bolan's two. Finally he came out alone.

  Suddenly, from the cook house, the stores, the mess hall, there was a clatter of the inhabitants running away from us.

  The big guy had a light in his eye. He motioned me to take the wheel, then slammed a fresh magazine into the Ingram.

  "I aim to make this quick and I'll make it merciful," he told me, "but I'm sure as hell aiming to make it final. If there's any more shooting back at us," he said, "get down, the bulkhead's bulletproof."

  I swallowed twice, but again I followed my orders. He followed the escapers.

  I'm not going to detail the hits, Al. You'll find the count itemized in my story, anyway.

  All I'll say is that by the time we left, Bolan had made good his word. There must have been twenty or thirty drug traffickers, technicians or enforcement men strewed around whose eyes were never going to open on tomorrow — many of whose guts were already open on today.

  All of it due to surprise, quick decisions, action. And, of course, guts.

  One way or another.

  If the big guy had hesitated during that first eye-balling at the gates, he'd have been drilled a dozen times over before I could scream, "No, not me!" We won't even mention the time it took to make the blockhouse. As it was, he had them on the run from the start and gave yours truly a lesson on what one single guy with no fear and plenty of determination can do.

  Correction. I said he made good his word. He'd promised there wouldn't be one man left alive. In the end there was one.

  It could have been two if Bolan wasn't such a good shot.

  Cleaning up, we saw them on the outside of the chain fence, two heavyset characters running like crazy toward a Chevy Blazer 4×4. One of them carried a canvas bag; the other wore a city hat.

  Bolan dropped the guy in the hat with a single shot from the Beretta.

  The one with the bag made it to the 4×4 and roared off on the far side of the Piper Cherokee in a cloud of dust.

  "Are you going after him?" I asked.

  Bolan shook his head. "By the time we turned this buggy around and made it back to the gates, he'd be long gone. Let him take the money or the shit or whatever he has, and tell the tale. It's more important to finish what we came here to do."

  What we'd come to do was wreck the joint so thoroughly that it could never again be used as a horse factory. Bolan already had fixed ideas about the way to do this.

  He went through those buildings, jerking out drawers, ravaging shelves, piling papers and files on floors. There were drums of kerosene in the stores, there was a gasoline dump and there were acid carboys in the labs. Bolan was going to torch the place.

  To make quite sure, he placed several small packages of C-4, which he produced from his private arsenal in the Land Rover, in certain strategic places.

  "What about the truck drivers when they fly back to the nest?" I asked. "And these patrols you say are out there discouraging the tribesmen from leaving their reserve?"

  "If they show before we're through, they get zapped," he said with a shrug he must have learned while he was in Italy. "If not… well, there'll be no reason for them to stick around here."

  The way things turned out, it was not.

  I didn't get to see the inside of the labs. Bolan had found other duties
for me by then. But I know he happened on one of the top men holed up in an office there, that Bolan leaned on him until he came across with certain intel, that the guy tried to soft-talk Bolan but he wasn't having any.

  "He tried to buy me off by saying he was unarmed," Bolan told me afterward.

  I'd heard a single shot from the AutoMag before Bolan finally came out. I figured it was his business; it was better to stay quiet as ordered.

  Before I could have gotten out a question, in any case, the laboratory went up into the air like a volcano. It was quite dark by then, but the flames lent us enough light to set off the other Independence Day celebrations we'd arranged.

  It didn't take long.

  You heard about hell on earth? Well, by the time we'd got it all going, this was the blueprint.

  The sky-high blaze was reflected in the dark surface of the water flowing out across the dry earth from the fractured pipes.

  Bolan used the light to hang a final Indian sign on the traffickers' operation.

  There were crop-spraying tanks fitted each side of the Cherokee's modified fuselage. Bolan knocked out the stoppers and allowed the contents to gurgle away.

  He'd saved a couple of containers of sulfuric acid from the labs. The steaming liquid went into one of the empty tanks. He filled the other from a drum of herbicide he found up by the filtration plant. Then he climbed into the Cherokee's cockpit and fired up the plane's engine.

  He leaned out from the cabin before he closed the door. "The wind's blowing away from the compound," he yelled down at me, "but you better find a length of cloth, dip it in the water that's going to waste over there and tie it over your mouth and nose. You don't want a lungful of the stuff I'll be laying down here."

  You know me, Al, I did what I was told.

  By this time Bolan had taken off, circled the valley a couple of times and made an approach run, low down over the flaming outpost. The Cherokee zoomed over the fence at around twenty feet and flew out across the sea of poppies.

  Once clear of the compound, Bolan pulled whatever you pull to feed the stuff in the tanks to the spray nozzles. For the first few hundred yards, I could see a pale mist, pulsating in the light of the fires, roll out on either side of the airplane and settle slowly on the close-packed blooms. After that there was just the diminishing drone of the engine until the aircraft made the far end of the valley, climbed, banked and came in for a return run. He made three double runs, six passes in all, over those opium poppies until the two tanks were dry.

  With that noxious mixture on the plants, like he said, nobody was going to refine any heroin from that crop again!

  He taxied back to the end of the strip, switched off and walked across to the Land Rover. We'd refueled before we sent up the gasoline dump. "Okay," he told me, "that's it. We'll be on our way. We can camp for the night someplace near this famous dam."

  "On our way where?" I asked.

  "Out."

  "Do you need the Rover that bad? Why don't we take the plane? It'd be much quicker."

  "Uh-uh," he said. "It's already night, and that crate has no navigation lights. I have no flight plan, no aerial charts, no means of knowing which way the airfields that interest me lie. Apart from which the fuel tanks are close to dry."

  "That isn't the real reason, is it?"

  He looked at me, the flickering light making his hawk face more enigmatic than usual. "Maybe not," he said. "This isn't the end of the road. The scum running this place were only the hired help. They had — still have — very powerful connections. Okay, we killed their operation here. But there will be others. Meanwhile, the connections are going to be mad. The patrols, when they come back, are going to radio out a report. If we took this plane, it would be marked for destruction all over Africa. If we didn't run into a mountain or get shot down by frontier guards, there'd be pursuit planes, missiles maybe, homing on us before we'd made fifty miles."

  "Connections that powerful?" I queried.

  He nodded. "I'm not joking. This is big time stuff. The only living person who knows we travel in a Land Rover, on the other hand, is the guy in that Chevy. And he isn't going to stop running until morning. By which time we'll have made other arrangements."

  "You learned something from the guy in the lab, didn't you?" I accused him. "Something you're keeping from me."

  " Maybe, maybe not."

  "You're not going to let me in on it? I thought we were on a share-and-share deal?"

  "We were until now," Bolan said. "I kept my end of the bargain. You got an exclusive, on an illegal drug ring smashed. Be happy with that and don't push your luck."

  I sighed. "Okay, where do we go from here?"

  "I'll tell you exactly," he said. "We're heading south to Berberati and Libenge, and then we cross over into Zaire and drive southeast to Lisala. After that we follow the Zaire River to Kisangani — which I still prefer to call Stanleyville. There's an international airport there, and we're both going to need it."

  "Whatever you say," I said. "And from the airport?"

  "You take a plane to wherever you want. I have my own route mapped out."

  "I get it," I said. "End of story."

  "That's right," he said, climbing behind the wheel and starting the engine. "And until we get to Stanleyville, we travel by night…"

  And that, Jason Mettner read on the last page of his letter to Allard Fielding, really was the end of that particular story. I'm writing this in the Palm Lounge of the Kisangani Hilton. Or is it the Stanleyville Holiday Inn? You never know these days. Tomorrow I take a UTA Boeing to Paris, France.

  I'll telex you from the Paris bureau.

  Jason Mettner folded the pages and slipped them into an envelope. Then he drummed his fingers on the desk, wondering where Mack Bolan was at that moment.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Four thousand feet above sea level, four floors up from the street, Mack Bolan clung to a ledge outside the open window of a police office on John Vorster Square in Johannesburg.

  It was dark. Inside the office two men sat on opposite sides of a desk illuminated by a green-shaded lamp pulled low down over the papers littering the surface.

  "This fellow Bolan," the older man said, "must be located with the least possible delay. And eliminated. That is imperative."

  "No sweat," the other drawled. "Give me the backup I need. And the tools. After that you can leave it to me and go back to your golf at the country club."

  "You can have all the backup you need. All the weapons. All the police looking the other way. But it's unofficial. You have to remember that. I'm talking to you as a private individual; you're being paid by a private organization. Step out of line or fuck up and we never heard of you. Is that clear?"

  "Sure, sure," the second man said.

  He was a large man, bullnecked and muscular, with crew-cut red hair and mean eyes. His name was Eddie Hanson, and he was a mercenary — a Swedish-American deserter whose skills had been for hire ever since he was chased out of Vietnam for running a chain of GI whorehouses and drug dens in and around Saigon.

  Hanson had fought in Mozambique, in Biafra, in Lebanon, in Chad, Katanga, Central America and Angola — anyplace that was long on money and short on ideals. He had all Bolan's skills and none of his humanity. For Eddie Hanson, those at the receiving end of the hollowpoint, the missile, the grenade, were of no more interest than the cardboard targets at a shooting gallery.

  And now his target was to be the Executioner himself!

  Bolan had, in fact, run across the guy once or twice in his combat career, usually on the opposite side of the firing line. He knew the man by reputation, and he didn't like what he knew.

  Merging with the gloom in his blacksuit, Bolan was stretched out at one side of the window, toes on the ledge, fingers gripping a concrete lip that ran above the window frame. He could easily have shifted one hand, drawn the Beretta from its shoulder rig and wasted both men in the office. But he wanted to learn a hell of a lot more about the guy who was hiri
ng the mercenary.

  The two of them couldn't have been more different physically. Hanson, in jeans, sneakers and a turtle-neck sweater, was lounging against the back of his chair. The man behind the desk was small, spry, with white hair, a clipped mustache and penetrating blue eyes. He wore an immaculate uniform; in the harsh light from the lowered lamp his belt and buttons shone, the gold teeth that showed when he spoke looked as though they had just been polished. Even behind a desk in a swivel chair he gave the impression of being at attention.

  Julius Vanderlee was a colonel in the South African National Intelligence Service — the security organization that used to be known by the acronym BOSS.

  The administrative headquarters of the service were in a tall building beyond the gardens on the far side of the square. It was there, on the tenth floor, that the secret police customarily punched, slapped and kicked their prisoners, making them undress and attacking their genitals, forcing them to do strenuous physical exercise, threatening them with death, and using hooding, electric shocks and prolonged sleep deprivation to stimulate the confessions desired.

  Colonel Vanderlee did not look the kind of officer who would sully his manicured hands with anything as crude as that. It was hard, Bolan thought, to imagine him attacking anyone's genitals. Less difficult to swallow was the idea of his signing an order authorizing someone else to do it.

  Still, here he was, coolly organizing Bolan's own extinction. Strictly unofficially, of course.

  The Executioner had choked Vanderlee's name from the laboratory boss before he killed him. But the guy had not known in what exact way the security chief was concerned with the opium farm or Ononu's Montenegria blackmail routines — only that there was a connection. And that all orders affecting the farm were funneled through the colonel from some person or persons higher up.

  What was evident already was that the whole operation had high-level protection. Partly, according to the lab boss, from certain wildcat sectors of the old BOSS field agency owing allegiance to Vanderlee, partly from quasi-military bodies in neighboring countries, working like Vanderlee himself without the knowledge of their governments.