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  But there was a darker shadow above the veld — a shadow that moved, undulating swiftly over the scrub, gliding across rock and sand and areas of cracked, dried mud. The rotors were spinning too fast to register more than a blur, but the skeletal, mosquitolike body left a recognizable enough image as it sped over the parched terrain.

  The Volvo was grinding through a dried-up riverbed, so Bolan and Ruth failed to hear the whining clatter of the machine as it passed directly overhead at a height of less than five hundred feet. It was only when they saw that shadow — and then, as it turned to make another pass, a flash of light when the Plexiglas-bubble caught the sun — that the fugitives realized they had been spotted.

  "A helicopter," Ruth groaned. "That's all we need."

  "Not entirely unexpected," Bolan said grimly. The chopper had sunk lower on its second run. "It's a Lynx," he added. "French machine. They use them for surveying forest fires, searching for people swept out to sea — and tracking down fugitives."

  The helicopter passed overhead for the third time, and then swung away to hover level with them, fifty feet above the veld. They could see the helmet and phones of the pilot as he turned his head to stare at them. Beyond him, a second man had half risen to his feet to look over the pilot's shoulder. He was speaking into a microphone.

  "They're not armed?" Ruth asked.

  Bolan shook his head. "Strictly recon. But whoever they're calling up will be armed. My guess is that it'll be Hanson. If the cops catch up with us, they'll try and take us alive. Vanderlee and Reinbecker would much rather know we're dead. That's why they hired mercs in the first place."

  "Can't we shoot down the helicopter and stop them reporting our position?"

  "Not with an Ingram and two mini-Uzis." Bolan smiled. "And that's the heaviest firepower we have left."

  Bolan continued heading west between the clumps of scrub. After a while the helicopter wheeled away and flew off to the south.

  "NIS crew," Bolan said. "We'll have to ditch the car."

  "How long have we got?"

  "Depends how far away Hanson's killers are. And what transport they use. Whatever they have, it'll be better suited to the terrain than this."

  "Surely they could call up a flight of Mirages and blow us off the face of the earth with rockets," Ruth said, "in about four minutes flat?"

  "That's right, but they won't." The Executioner was definite. "They'll want visual evidence of some kind of fight — bodies, weapons, a burned-out car. That way they can say it was some underworld feud. A few smoking holes in the ground, especially if they could only have been made by government planes, won't be easily explained."

  "The foothills are still four or five miles away," Ruth said later. "Some of those valleys look like they have real trees in them. If we got there before they caught up with us, couldn't we stash the car and drive again at night?"

  Bolan was looking into the rearview mirror. "Not if you see what I see," he said.

  She turned and stared out the shattered rear window. A column of yellow dust hung above the veld. And it was moving on a course that would intercept their own some miles ahead.

  "A dust storm?" Ruth asked.

  "Uh-uh. We raise a cloud ourselves — but because we're in the center we don't notice it. It'll be visible for miles, to others. What we're seeing is raised by something on wheels that's traveling a hell of a lot faster than we are. Too bad the rain stopped before it reached here."

  "What is it?" she asked. "Another Range Rover? One of those jumbo-size superjeeps?"

  "I don't think so," Bolan said. "Not on this terrain, not going that fast."

  He floored the pedal. Bouncing and slithering, the Volvo hightailed it between the thornbushes toward the rising ground, trailing its dust cloud behind it like a banner.

  They made the lower slopes before the pursuers intercepted their route. Bolan was able to identify their tail after they had climbed a short distance from the veld but still not found a recognizable track.

  Hot wind had blown the dust clouds off to one side, and he could see in the mirror that the vehicle was in fact a half-track — a Humber FV-1612, capable of speeds up to forty mph over rough ground.

  "Basically it's an armored personnel carrier," he told his companion. "They were originally designed as radio command cars, but the models supplied to the South Africans have been modified to act as APCs for riot-control work and guerrilla fighting."

  He didn't tell her that the modifications included the installation of a 40 mm cannon in the half-track's turret.

  * * *

  Eddie Hanson crouched beside the APC's driver, his small eyes squinting against the sun glare as he stared at the Volvo zigzagging up the hillside among the trees ahead of them. The land was less barren on this side of the depression. A variety of vegetation dotted the slopes and here and there a clump of dry grasses stirred in the breeze.

  "Hell, man, push this goddamn thing!" Hanson growled. "We were overtaking them fast on the flat, and now they're keeping their bloody distance. With caterpillar tracks on the, rear wheels, you should be able to catch that Swedish tin can. What's the matter with you?"

  The driver was Irish, a renegade who had been chased out of the Provisional IRA for pocketing funds destined for the purchase of arms. "Sure it's the grade," he said. "She's steep enough for the weight of our armor to slow us down, but not so steep that they have to shift to a lower gear. When they hit rougher ground, then we shall gain on them."

  "I hope you're right," Hanson snarled. "I want them destroyed before they're over the crest. There's a stretch of high veld that goes almost all the way to the frontier on the far side of the ridge. We could lose them over there."

  "You want me to stop so the guys in back can fire?" the Irishman asked. Apart from himself, Hanson and two survivors of the Greystones engagement, half a dozen other mercs recruited by Hanson were crammed into the rear of the truck. Three were seasoned Vietnam vets, deserters from the U.S. Army, one was an Ethiopian, the remaining couple were Cuban.

  "For cryin' out loud," Hanson sneered. "They're half a mile ahead of us, on an upward slope. At that range, on a hill, with those goddamn trees in between, even the cannon could miss — and if we didn't zap them with the first shot or two, we'd be too far behind to catch them again. We could lose them altogether."

  "It's your money," the driver said sullenly. He banged the lever into second to negotiate a graveled depression and then shifted up once more as they hit harder ground.

  At the top of the slope the land dipped, then rose to a low escarpment that crowned the ridge. Along the foot of this weathered cliff, a dirt road ran north and south. The Volvo bumped across the last few yards of rough terrain, swung right and sped away along the track in another cloud of dust.

  The helicopter made its second pass as the Humber half-track slewed onto the trail and rocketed in pursuit. The sun was lower now, and the machine's shadow flitted over the exposed rock beside the station wagon.

  "Why the fuck don't they send a bloody gunship and blow them off the road?" the driver said.

  "Because they are only spotters," Hanson said. "They pinpoint the target, we make the hit. There's nothing illegal about an NIS spotter reporting fugitives, but they don't want to be officially connected with…" He chuckled. "Well, call it execution without trial."

  "They say Bolan's got a skirt with him," the driver said.

  "That's right. In which case the execution could be… delayed a little… while we have ourselves some fun." Hanson laughed again.

  Soon the rock strata forming the escarpment dipped downward, and the dirt road, playing switchback for a few hundred yards, plunged over the crest and looped down to where the landscape was gathered into wooded folds. Then it dropped to another expanse of veld beyond which, blue in the distance, rose the last mountain chain before the border.

  "Now!" Hanson grated as the Volvo ahead of them took the downward grade. "Close the gap man. We only need to get within three or four hundred yards.
"

  But the Humber — «borrowed» with Vanderlee's connivance from the motor pool of an army training unit — was unfamiliar to the driver. Although the weight of its armor should have been an advantage in a downhill situation, he found the tracked pairs of rear wheels acting as a brake. Before he had adapted his driving technique to the conditions, the old Volvo, battered and clogged with dust as it was, had actually gained several hundred yards.

  The trail arrowed across the plain. This was the high veld, a great swell of grassland, golden in the light of the setting sun, that rippled with waves like an inland sea as crosscurrents of wind stirred the surface.

  Apart from isolated black herdsmen with flocks of sheep or goats, pursuer and pursued passed nothing but a herd of zebra, startled into a mass gallop by the unfamiliar machines. Farther off, vultures circled above the carcass of some savanna creature.

  Like another kind of vulture, the helicopter hovered above them until the Volvo reached the range of hills fifteen miles away on the far side of the veld. It was there that Hanson got his chance… and the chopper, apparently satisfied that his men could complete their mission, tactfully withdrew so that the crew could witness nothing that contravened international law.

  The crunch came when the trail was passing an abandoned farm that lay in a pocket of the hills — a small upland valley covered in coarse grass with clumps of dwarf trees clustered on either side of a watercourse strewed with pale stones.

  The pursuers saw Bolan's station wagon hesitate and almost halt at the nearer edge of the valley. It seemed to bounce once or twice on its springs as if the occupants were jumping up and down in their seats… rolled slowly down the slope… stopped finally at the foot of the grade climbing the far side.

  Hanson was triumphant. "Got them!" he exclaimed. "They must be out of gas!"

  The Irishman braked the half-track on the rim of the depression. Five hundred yards away, the doors of the Volvo opened. Two people piled out, each wearing dark clothes, one much taller than the other. Sunlight glinted on the steel of weapons as they ran for the farm buildings. The tall one was carrying some kind of suitcase.

  Hanson focused his binoculars on a long, low building attached to a hollow square of stables and barns. The farm looked as though it had been uninhabited for some time. The roofs of the outbuildings had fallen in, the ten-bar gate at the entrance to the stockade leaned drunkenly on one hinge, the vanes of the windmill no longer turned. Scorch marks blackened the walls above some of the unglazed windows as if at some time the main building had been torched. Perhaps the farmer and his family had been victims of a guerrilla raid by antiapartheid rebels from across the border.

  Hanson jumped to the ground, ready for a whirlwind assault on the farm. "They'll have nothing but SMGs and handguns, maybe even a grenade or two," he said. "We're way out of their range here; we can blast them any time we want."

  From past experience, however, he knew it would be crazy to underestimate the Executioner or underrate his powers of recovery. The mercenary lifted the binoculars again and studied the terrain.

  Behind the farm buildings what had once been neat rectangles of cultivation had run wild. The dusty track that twisted between neglected fields of maize was overgrown with weeds. Bolan and the woman had remained inside the stockade. The merc leader could make out gun barrels still glinting in the rays of the sinking sun at two of the windows.

  "Making a stand," he said. "Great. We'll soften them up from here and then go in and finish it."

  A quarter of a mile away, to one side of and a little behind the abandoned farm, the swell of land was broken by a bare rock outcrop that rose through the grass like a boil blemishing a smooth area of skin. It was the perfect place for an enfilade.

  Hanson sent a two-man mortar crew — the Cubans — and two of the Vietnam vets, armed with M-16s, to position themselves in clefts amid the rock. "Set fire to the place if you can," he told the Cubans. "And you two guys…" he turned to the vets"…mow down anyone who tries to escape the back way."

  As the four men set off along the lip of the valley, he positioned the remaining members of his ten-man team.

  The third vet was stationed with his M-16 behind a clump of bushes at one side of the track. The two Greystones survivors were dispatched with their shorter-range SMGs toward the farm, with orders to make use of whatever cover they could find as they traversed the valley. Hanson and the driver were to stay with the Humber.

  The Ethiopian was odd man out. A tall, thin guy with a shaved skull and skin the color of a ripe fig, he was a specialist. He had perfected the skill of firing an XM-174 automatic grenade launcher from the hip. And when the self-powered launcher's 12-round magazine was loaded with rocket-assisted projectiles, he was an accurate one-man artillery barrage at anything up to one thousand yards.

  He stood now with the cumbersome twenty-five-pound weapon held loosely in his hands, a little to one side of the armored truck. At that distance there was no need for him to take cover. "Choose whichever part of the building you like, Abu," Hanson told him, "but wait until the car is destroyed. I want to do that myself."

  He took a final look around. There was no sign of movement from the deserted farm. He clambered back into the half-track and squeezed his burly frame into the turret behind the 40 mm cannon. He adjusted the sights, checked the automatic loader and squinted out through the slit in the armor.

  The stranded Volvo, its doors gaping open, lay at the bottom of the depression like a wounded bird.

  Beneath the sandy crew cut, Hanson's face creased into an anticipatory smile. Moving the barrel fractionally, he thumbed the cannon's firing button.

  The Humber rocked on its springs as the coughing detonations of the cannon shells spit flame from the front of the turret. The weapon fired alternate high-explosive and incendiary rounds at a rate of 320 per minute. The interior of the vehicle vibrated with the clamor of the first burst.

  The charger belt leaped and jerked as the shells fed through the breech. Powder fumes swirled in the flat shaft of sunlight slanting through the slit in the armored windshield.

  Small, bright explosions and mushrooms of dust blossomed from the hard ground fifty yards short of the Volvo. "Make it five-fifty," Hanson shouted to the Ethiopian. On the second burst he got the range right. Shells ripped into the rear of the Volvo, tearing open the roof, setting fire to the tires and showering leaves and stalks from the plants inside across the trail.

  The third burst hurled the wrecked car over onto its side, and the incendiaries, each burning for one-seventieth of a second at a temperature of two thousand degrees centigrade, ignited the engine and the oil pan.

  Black smoke streaked with red boiled up into the evening sky.

  An instant later fumes from the two gas tanks exploded with a dull roar and the remains of the Volvo flared into an incandescent torch.

  Hanson erupted from the turret of the Humber and waved his arms. The Ethiopian, then the mortar crew and the men with the M-16s opened fire.

  The thudding concussions of the mortar on the rock outcrop and the crackle of automatic bursts were drowned in the belching roar of the XM-174. Flame seared the atmosphere as the RAP rounds streaked for the farmhouse, towing fiery tails.

  Mortar shells pulverized the stonework in back as the Ethiopian's rocket grenades exploded against door and window frames, dropped through the sagging roof and ignited the wooden rafters. Flames and smoke streamed up through the jagged holes in the building and then, teased out by the breeze, leaned away to mingle with the oily smoke cloud rising from the blazing Volvo.

  "Okay, back into the truck!" Hanson yelled. "Now we're going in to get them."

  The men on the rock increased their rate of fire.

  The Ethiopian and the third vet joined Hanson and the Irish driver aboard the half-track, which careered down toward the stockade, spitting cannon shells from its turret and a stream of 7.62 mm lead from a coaxially mounted machine gun.

  Nearer the farm, the two guys wit
h the SMGs emerged from their cover and advanced, shooting as they came.

  The cannon pumped a stream of shells into the farmhouse, blasting still larger holes in the walls, setting fire to the interior. It was only when the Humber dipped below the stockade and approached the broken gate that Hanson realized there was no answering fire.

  He pushed himself up from the turret and shouted orders, yelling at the more distant men through a bullhorn. Once through the gateway he leaped from the half-track, a Walther PPK in his hand, and led the rest of the mercs into the attack.

  The assault was a model of its kind — a small, limited force softening up a target and then rushing it from two sides, with a flanker behind, to cut off any attempt to escape.

  Hanson and his men lobbed hand grenades and then rushed into the shell-torn house. But when they got there, they found nobody to attack.

  Bolan and the woman had disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Strategically, Mack Bolan's thinking was good. If their position was to be pinpointed by NIS helicopters, clearly it would be impossible to shake off their pursuers. It was equally clear that with the armaments they had the two of them could not hope to outmaneuver Hanson and his mercs in a straight combat. The answer, therefore, must be to delay the enemy while they themselves escaped.

  The best way to do this, Bolan figured, was to fool the opposition into thinking they had been cornered. And for this — although there was still plenty of gas in the tanks — it was necessary to sacrifice the Volvo.

  Tactically the ploy worked well. It was the ancient principle of surprise and the unexpected; the warrior and his companion had in fact fled without the slightest attempt to make a stand.

  Pausing only to position a couple of metal rods in the window in the hope they would be mistaken for gun barrels, they had run straight through the farmhouse and dodged behind a stone barn in back. Hidden by the stockade, they ran to a wall behind that, and then crept along on all fours until they were opposite the nearest patch of high grass.