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  Beside it a handful of men in combat fatigues lounged in the shade. Their leader was a beefy dude with small, close-set eyes and crew-cut sandy hair.

  After the hazards of the past two days, Bolan and Ruth had at last overcome all the obstacles and made it across the border into a country where, for political reasons, the South African security forces could no longer pursue them… only to find that they were still facing the threat of Hanson and his hired killers!

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ruth Elias awoke beneath a flowering bush on a barren hillside many miles inside Botswana. At the foot of the hill, an immense plain stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see. The plain was totally flat. No rise or fall in the landscape varied its even surface; no river curled through it; no mountains showed above the haze veiling the horizon.

  Sand and shingle covered the plain, which in that vast area could support no more than a sparse covering of thorn trees and scrub. Two or three miles away, primitive fences looped around conical thatched huts where a native village broke the monotony of the plain.

  Goats were tethered outside the largest of the huts. Nearby, a group of men in combat fatigues stood around a Humber half-track.

  Mack Bolan was already awake. "It's probably a Basuto village," he said. "They are simple people, not unlike the Masai farther north — warrior races still courageous but now basically farmers and herdsmen. Callous bastards like those…" he nodded toward the men around the Humber"…don't find it too hard to coax or force information from them. Or even trick them into helping."

  "You're telling me we dare not go to that village and ask for help — even after Hanson leaves?" Ruth asked.

  "Sure am. Those guys will stop at nothing. And as long as we stay alive they don't get paid. It's easy enough to terrorize tribesmen when you're prepared to shoot and kill, destroy livestock and crops if they refuse to cooperate." He shook his head. "Even if we did contact them, how are they supposed to know we're any different?"

  "So we're still outlaws? We can't check in anyplace?"

  "Not until we hit some reasonably sized town. I've been in this situation before," Bolan said dryly.

  "Did you have any town in mind? Sydney? Stockholm?"

  His eyebrows rose at her tone.

  "I'm sorry," she said at once. "It's not like me to be bitchy and sarcastic. But I'm beat, and I'm starving. I guess it's all a little too much."

  "Forget it," Bolan said. "I reckon we're about equal distance from Francistown and Gaborone. There's an airstrip at Francistown, but Gaborone, being the capital, has an international airfield. I figure on heading that way."

  "How many miles is equal?" she asked.

  "One hundred each way, give or take. But we could also take a train. We're on the fringe of the Kalahari Desert here, and there's kind of a trans-Kalahari line. We have a choice of railroad stations on the Francistown-Gaborone sector. If we make it that far out into the desert."

  They had walked throughout the whole of the previous day and most of the night.

  Eluding Hanson's team that first time by taking to the sugarcane plantation and bypassing the intersection, they had discovered when they regained the road that it led them farther toward the desert with no sign of any trail breaking the uniformity of dense woods on either side.

  The sun had been blazing down from a cloudless sky for three hours when the helicopter reappeared. It bore no markings and was painted a dun color, but it was the same NIS Lynx, invariably approaching from the east and returning, once the recon was completed, in the same direction.

  Bolan and Ruth took cover the moment they heard the rotors throb, but there was no way of knowing whether or not they had been seen before that. What was certain was that they heard the flailing of caterpillar tracks and saw the armored Humber lumbering along the trail perilously close soon after each run the chopper made. On more than one occasion it was only Bolan's quick reaction that enabled them to run for the bush or stop short before they rounded a bend on the far side of which the mercs were waiting.

  Between noon and dusk they passed several signposts indicating villages or game reserve stations ten, fifteen, and once only two miles away. But the Executioner was adamant that the risk of a detour was too great with Hanson's killers in the vicinity.

  Sweet potatoes stolen from a farmer's field and — best of all — three overripe pineapples overlooked during the harvest provided the only food they had. It was the juice of the latter, more than the starchier bulk of the potatoes, that helped most to still the pains clawing at their empty bellies.

  They went on walking after dark, but they could advance only with extreme caution; it was unlikely that Hanson would allow his mercs to relax when there was money at stake.

  Halfway through the afternoon, Bolan had begun to suspect that the enemy's plan — at least for the moment — was less to annihilate them than to force their flight in a particular direction. They were subtly being herded toward the desert. A move in any other direction would be blocked at once, whereas a run to the east could continue unchecked for some time.

  Perhaps the murder of two people wanted by the South African police would be potentially less embarrassing for Reinbecker and Vanderlee if it took place in the desert, as far away as possible from the frontier.

  As far as the Executioner was concerned, east was okay — as a direction. The railroad lay east. But it was at least twenty miles out in the desert. And a crossing of that barren plain under aerial surveillance, with the certainty that an armored vehicle could be called up by radio at any moment, was strictly no go.

  For this reason, Bolan had decided late the previous day to abandon any thought of keeping to well-traveled trails. They would take to the forest and then the bush, steer by the sun and to hell with how much time they lost.

  If they could lose their pursuers that way, then start out across the plain under cover of darkness, then they had a chance…

  By the time dusk thickened into night, he thought he had lost the hunters. But he and Ruth were still nowhere near the desert. It was just before daybreak when they emerged from the bush and saw the dark void of the plain stretching out before them.

  Bolan decided they should rest for the whole of that day. Then, maybe, if there had been no further sign of the mercenaries or their helicopter, they could attempt a night crossing in the direction of the railroad.

  It was therefore with a sick feeling of dismay that he saw the Humber parked in the desert village below.

  Since the hillside bushes hid them from watchers both on the plain and in the air, he determined to take the much-needed sleep nevertheless. After that he would be playing it by ear.

  He awoke late in the afternoon to find their shelter surrounded by a group of silent figures.

  There were twenty or thirty of them, men, women, a few children, all a coppery bronze in color, with tribal marks striping their faces and primitive clothing made from hides or strips of sacking. Some of the men carried bamboo spears, but their attitude was not hostile, merely curious.

  Bolan rolled over and sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Ruth was lying on her back, eyes wide with fear, trying not to move. "Relax," he said. "The natives are friendly. These are no Basutos or Masai. We've been discovered by a band of Bushmen."

  "Bushmen?"

  "Desert people. Nomads called San or Bushmen."

  Hearing their voices, the women — some of them carrying babies strapped to them with a kind of sarong, leaving their arms and breasts free — moved nervously back a few paces. "Once their ancestors inhabited the whole of central and southern Africa," Bolan told the woman. "But when the Bantu came this way they were driven even farther south, where the white colonists damned near exterminated them. There are only a few thousand left now, mostly here in the Kalahari."

  "They are real nomads, moving all the time?"

  "They live a Spartan existence," Bolan said. "They stick around in one area until they've used up all the roots and berries and l
ocusts and lizards and other things they can eat. Then they move on, maybe to a place where they know water can be found, maybe following game migrations in the hope of killing an antelope or something."

  "Are they on the move now?"

  "I think so. They don't usually stay in the hills."

  "Can you communicate with them? If they are heading east into the desert, do you think you could persuade them to take on a couple of passengers?"

  Bolan's brows rose. "You mean…"

  "I mean two white fugitives trying to cross that wilderness would stick out like a sore thumb to a chopper pilot. But a group of Bushmen might not attract attention. If the pilot is used to seeing nomads."

  "It's worth a try anyway."

  Bolan rose slowly to his feet, spread his arms to indicate that he was not aggressive and drew aside a wizened little man who seemed to be the chief. He gesticulated and drew pictures on the sand for what seemed an eternity.

  Finally he returned after his long and animated conference with the headman.

  "It's okay. I think they'll play ball. On one condition. They hate the game wardens, who try and chase them off the reserves; they hate the armchair hunters who go on safari in helicopters and shoot their game from the air; they hate the black pressure groups, who try to force them into a rebellion that doesn't interest them. Once I made him understand most of those guys were chasing us, too, he agreed to help."

  "What's the condition?" Ruth asked.

  "They will help us, provided we promise to kill them something — a gnu, a wildebeest, an antelope, whatever — with our fire-spears, our guns. That will keep the whole band in food for weeks."

  "Supposing we can't find one?"

  "They'll find one, all right. The problem is to get near enough with a bamboo spear, especially in flat country like this."

  "The effective range of the Uzis is only 150 yards," she said dubiously.

  "Big Thunder's a little more than that — and I have spare rounds in a waterproof pocket on this belt. But we'll worry about that later. Right now we have to move."

  "I thought you said…"

  "The farther we are out into that desert when the chopper reappears, the less chance there is of making the crew suspicious. We won't leave any tracks down there — there's only sand between the scrub, and sometimes gravel. And they must already have spotted the nomads, yesterday and maybe the day before. They don't travel very fast."

  Ruth took a closer look at the nomads. All of them, especially the women, had extremely close-cropped heads. All wore armlets and anklets of elephant hair, sometimes decorated with red and yellow beads. Three teenage boys held coarse-grained spherical objects about half the size of a football.

  "Ostrich eggs," Bolan explained, "With a hole in the top. They use them to carry water. Those and the stomachs of eland."

  She looked out over the arid desert. "Water?"

  "They're smart," he told her. "Where there is no well or water hole, they look for a certain kind of briar whose roots go down to wherever the water hides under the surface. The water moves up the plant by capillary action. And they simply break off the thorns, suck it out and then spit it into the ostrich eggs for use later."

  "I think I lost my thirst," she said.

  "Wait until you're out in that desert when the sun's high," Bolan said. "You'll be glad to drink anything, wherever it comes from."

  The headman was surprisingly smart. He refused to move into the open until Bolan and the woman bore at least a distant resemblance to his own people. Outer clothing was removed, some of it exchanged with the Bushmen; one or two wore ragged jackets picked up nobody knew where. Shoes and weapons were bundled up in hides and carried by the women, along with their own poor possessions — tools, utensils and camp requirements they customarily moved from place to place.

  Finally, there was the vital question of skin color. Giggling, the teenage boys ran to a kind of sand pit at the foot of the slope and carried back handfuls of a thick dust that was half ocher and half bauxite. Rubbed liberally into their exposed skin this lent the fugitives, from the height at which the helicopter normally flew, a tint that would not seem too different from the Bushmen.

  The remaining problem was the Executioner's height. The biggest of the Bushmen was no more than five feet six inches tall, and most of them were around five feet. To hide that extra fourteen inches Bolan was to be covered with skins, leaning forward and walking with bent knees any time the helicopter appeared.

  They had been walking for an hour when they saw it, flying low above the foothills. It made one pass over the plain. Ruth and Bolan looked down; most of the nomads looked up, either in anger or curiosity. Bolan felt the hairs on his neck prickle as the machine's shadow skimmed past. But the racket of the jet turbine soon diminished: the spotters seemed to think they had more chance of a strike if they kept a close watch on the higher ground.

  Bolan wondered where Hanson's half-track was at that moment. The warrior hoped that it would not occur to the mercs to check out the Bushmen, just to confirm the pilot's report.

  The dust raised by the rotors finally settled. The Lynx flew away, circled the foothills some way to the south, vanished, returned one hour later and hovered for several minutes fifty feet above the nomad band. The headman urged them to keep on walking, the younger men fanning out now ahead of the main group, circling around in search of anything moving, startled by the noise, that could be used as food.

  Eventually the chopper flew away once more.

  The Bushmen penetrated farther into the sparse bush covering the plain. The sun blazed down from an empty, leaden sky, raising shimmering heat waves over the sandy floor.

  The vegetation was not quite as scarce as it had appeared from the hillside. Here and there isolated trees that resembled gnarled and distorted caricatures of European olives rose above waist-high clumps of grass scorched brown in the heat. Dead brushwood bleached bone-white lay scattered beneath ilex bushes whose papery, withered leaves rustled dryly with every puff of wind. But the arid spaces between these tracts were wide.

  By midday, Bolan and Ruth found that their feet were being burned by the fissured earth they trod on. The sun's progress across the sky seemed as interminable as theirs across the plain. The dry air cracked their lips and hurt their lungs.

  At some time during the afternoon, occasional squalls of hot wind clattered the dried leaves and the thorn tree spikes. One of them brought with it a miniature whirlwind, a dust column nine or ten feet high that corkscrewed along above the overheated land.

  Soon afterward another column, taller and wider, moving more quickly, approached them from the east.

  Only this time there was no wind.

  The headman became excited, gesturing with his spear. "Damn," Bolan said, "Hanson! And I think he's going to check out the nomads!"

  The headman was prepared for the suspected threat.

  He issued orders rapidly in a flat, liquid monotone. Fifty yards away, a patch of yellowed elephant grass lay between two trees at the far end of a line of desiccated, thorny shrubs. The women hurried there and dumped the hide-covered bundles containing Ruth's SMGs, the radio and the telltale clothes. The woman herself, with Bolan, was to lie up in the grass and avoid moving in any way that could stir the tall, frilled stems above them.

  The Bushmen then crouched low and ran back the way they had come for two hundred yards, finally straightening up and resuming their slow pace at a tangent to their original direction.

  Smart again, Bolan thought. By locating themselves some way back of the position they had actually reached, and then altering their bearing, they minimized the chance of the elephant grass being considered as a possible hiding place.

  If they were questioned and denied seeing any strangers in the area, the mercs might check… but they would probably check in the immediate vicinity, perhaps behind it, not in places where the nomads had apparently yet to arrive.

  Lying motionless in the long grass with his finger curled aro
und the trigger of his Beretta, Bolan held his breath and fractionally moved two of the dry stems with his free hand.

  Between them he saw the Humber pull up in a shower of sand and small pebbles. The mercs jumped down and roughly began to handle the Bushmen. Bolan saw shaken heads, shrugs. Finally Hanson seized the headman by one arm, shaking him and shouting. The little man continued to protest, feigning ignorance and innocence. Finally the mercenary boss flung out an angry finger, indicating several clumps of grass and dry thickets nearby. The killers made no attempt to search them; they simply stood back and fired, a whole clip of ammunition into each clump.

  Bolan swallowed. Sweat ran down his sides and poured from behind his knees. The dry stalks had set up an uncontrollable irritation on his sunburned skin. He prepared to make the best possible use of his remaining rounds.

  But since no wounded man or woman thrashed among the grasses or writhed out from beneath the bushes, Eddie Hanson seemed satisfied. He ordered his men back into the half-track, which careered away in a wide circle toward the hills. The vehicle passed so close to Bolan's hiding place that the flailing tracks scattered sand over his half-nude body.

  As the nomads resumed their slow advance, Bolan called to Ruth to stay put. Hanson was no dumb muscle man. In his place, Bolan would have returned soon afterward to see if he had been tricked: he would have counted the number of nomads and then come back to make a second tally.

  Again Bolan was right. When the Bushmen were a quarter of a mile away, the Humber's dust cloud rose once more in the distance. The truck drove up fast, stopping a couple of hundred yards away from the band. Bolan saw Hanson standing up in the turret, scanning them through field glasses.

  Then, apparently satisfied once more that his quarry had not taken refuge with the primitives, he lowered the binoculars and settled down inside the hull. The Humber drove away: they did not see it again that day.