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  The second bird circled and sank from sight; the whine of the turbojet faded and died. Mettner scrambled to the top of a rocky knoll, found a sight line between the tree branches and raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

  It had been a bitch of a morning. After the Blazer had been machine-gunned and set on fire, he had stayed a long time beneath the rock overhang before he dared continue along the trail. Strangers, it was clear, were discouraged in this part of the forest. Logically, just the same, there was nowhere he could go but on. He was unarmed, and his maps had been in the gutted Chevrolet. At least he knew he was heading in the right direction; he was following in Bolan's footsteps. The Hasselblad proved that. What it didn't tell him was whether Bolan had been in the bedroll when it was riddled, whether he was wounded or in shape, dead or alive, a captive or free.

  Apart from the news angle, Mettner was man enough to check out all the options in an attempt to help a guy he knew and admired. But where did he start? He was not a warlike man; he recorded wars and disasters, he commented on them, but he was no participant. He knew nothing of unarmed combat, and the toughest fights he'd ever had were trying to stop smoking — he'd lost out on that one — and convincing himself he should say no to a fourth martini at the press club.

  After two hours in the sweltering, humid jungle heat, faced with a forest glade with three different trails leading away from it, he felt about ready to quit for the day. Or forever.

  Then the choppers arrived and relieved him of the decision. Two helicopters landing in the same place had to mean at least a helipad.

  And civilization?

  The binoculars focused on a ravine, a belt of trees beyond it and then an open space. He saw more trees, the two birds parked on what looked like a strip of concrete painted in different greens, a group of men. A turreted command car with a pennant fluttering at the end of a whippy radio antenna rolled into the shot. The men moved toward it.

  Mettner adjusted the focus wheel and saw a tall, thin European with graying hair, a dark guy wearing Arab robes and a distinguished-looking middle-aged man in a white suit. They were followed by the chopper pilot and an army officer, leaving a ring of black soldiers to guard the two helicopters. Mettner didn't recognize any of them, but he could see clearly that there were many rows of medal ribbons decorating the officer's chest.

  The command car stopped at the edge of the strip. A black officer wearing a red paratroop beret jumped down and shook hands all around. He ushered the visitors into the vehicle, which moved off and disappeared behind a row of trees.

  Mettner slid down to the foot of the knoll and began to make his way through the forest toward the ravine. If the mysterious airstrip had anything to do with Hal Brognola's nuclear thefts, then there sure was one hell of a story here!

  With boredom, indecision, even caution behind him, he was eager to follow up the trail again. Especially since he was pretty damn sure it was the same trail that would lead him to the Executioner.

  Ninety minutes later, he dragged himself over the far edge of the ravine and advanced warily through the trees.

  The helicopters still stood at the end of the runway, though the guards, now that the officers had gone, had split up into several groups and stood smoking and talking beneath the trees.

  Mettner found the metaled road and followed it on hands and knees behind the screen of bushes. He went beyond the twin tunnels and discovered that the continuation of the road passed close to the falls and eventually wound down a steep hillside to the valley in which Oloron was built.

  He pulled a notebook from his pocket, made rough sketches and scribbled some words. There was a blockhouse halfway down the loops of road that zigzagged into the valley, another outside the gates of the town. He returned to the tunnels and saw that each of these was guarded a little way inside the entrance.

  If he was going to penetrate whatever it was that lay below the ground, or find his way inside the fortresslike settlement in the valley, it was evident that a lot of legwork would have to be done first.

  And if he wasn't going to waste valuable time, he must find out which way the command car had taken the visitors. Were they underground or in the valley?

  Whichever, he was convinced that was where the action would be.

  He decided to go back to the airstrip and start over. Maybe if he could get near enough he could overhear the soldiers talking and find a lead there.

  While he was working his way back through the forest he happened on one of the silos. Whistling softly, Mettner took out his notebook once more.

  Later he pushed aside a tangle of undergrowth and walked several times around the circular opening. Surely there was room for a thin man to slide down between the gleaming skin of the missile and the shaft's concrete wall.

  He stole back between the trees and began pulling down strands of liana creeper.

  Mettner had read somewhere once that lianas had been known to grow as long as three hundred yards — almost one thousand feet. But here in Equatoria the longest he could make was no more than fifteen feet. He stripped off leaves and started plaiting the lengths together. When he reckoned he had enough, he started to join them in order to form a rope.

  Scouting expertise from long-forgotten summer camps came back into his mind. A fisherman's knot was best for vines, the sheet bend secured lengths of unequal thickness. Hell, he'd use them both, just to make sure: it was his own life he would be entrusting to them!

  By the time he had a rope long enough to reach the bottom of the silo, his hands were raw from handling the tough, woody fibers.

  A round turn and two half-hitches anchored the improvised rope to the nearest tree trunk, and then Mettner paid out the rest into the yawning depths of the silo. He tested the first knot with all his strength. It held. He nodded and lowered himself gingerly into the shaft.

  Gritting his teeth as the rope bit into his lacerated palms, he let himself down slowly hand over hand. Relief from the wet heat at the surface was immediate, but as he sank past the slender, pointed nose of the missile, the coolness of the air increased to a point where he was shivering.

  He was aware of the monstrous power of the fissile material in the warhead separated from him only by a thin shell of... what? Titanium? Manganese steel?

  Passing the thickest section of the IRBM, just before it tapered slightly toward the finned tail, his shoulders touched the cold greasy surface of the metal and a rash of sweat broke out all over him. He had to drop the last five feet, landing among the network of cables and tubing that fed into the rocket motor.

  Mettner looked up past the swelling, menacing shape that towered above him to the thin rim of daylight circling the nose cone. When was he going to feel that humid jungle warmth on his skin again?

  He shrugged. What the hell. The die was cast now.

  A steel inspection hatch about three feet wide ran in oiled grooves above a nest of brass pipes. It was not locked in place. Mettner eased it up very slowly and stepped through into the passageway carved from the rock beyond.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  "I want this first one, the warning, to be dead on time and dead accurate," Don Giovanni said. "There's a lot of guys who put up a lot of money on this deal, and we can't afford any more screwups."

  "Your own technicians wrote the programs and installed the guidance systems," General Halakaz replied, glancing at the row of cathode ray screens that stood on either side of the computer console in back of the operations room.

  "My men scheduled the last U-235 run," the Mafia boss returned. "But that didn't stop screwups all along the line — in both the outfits we hired to move it." He walked across to the wide control room window and scowled down at the main cavern, where Broken-nose, Joe and the man with his arm in a sling were organizing a search for the Executioner. "And it didn't stop this Bolan from horning in," he said.

  "Maybe it was because you did hire two separate teams," Colonel Mtambole offered. "The confusion, I mean. This need-to-know approac
h works fine maybe in intelligence, but militarily, man, the right hand's got to know what the left is doing."

  "Shit," Mancini said, "we got one crew to handle the transport and another to keep the road clear for them, look after the law and take care of people who ask too many questions. They're supposed to work in cahoots. And Bolan penetrates one and ducks the other all the way? He pulls this off although the security team knew, ever since Marseilles, that the bastard was on the trail?" He raised his arms and let them fall to his sides. "What kind of operation are you guys running, for God's sake?"

  "We took him as soon as we knew someone was following up on the caravan," Ogada said.

  "Oh, sure. And then you blew it. You let him go before you had him sing."

  Giovanni swung away from the window. "You blew it four times," he accused. "When he was trying to locate the beeper, when he tried to rejoin the caravan, in that goddamn hill village and again right here in this base. You let him travel right up through the country, you lay hands on him here and he's still free!"

  "Pretty smart work, leaving that door unlocked," Mancini said sourly.

  "He was wired up tightly," Ogada said. "They used a mechanical packer to twist those ends. What I mean is, it proves first of all that he does have an accomplice, and second of all that the accomplice is here. If we catch them both, we won't even need to squeeze Bolan to find out who..."

  "We've got to know who hired him," Giovanni snarled. "If you punks figure you can hold him long enough for me to work him over."

  "Your own men didn't do much better, did they?" Mtambole retorted. "When we called up your helicopter, I mean. The man wasted both the soldiers crewing her, then used the machine to leave the country!"

  "That's another thing the bastard has to pay for." Giovanni ignored the criticism. "The pilot was an egghead, one of the best brains the family had on this nuclear scene."

  "Gentlemen," Halakaz interrupted, "could we change the disk? All these problems will sort themselves out once these chaps have been caught. And time is short: the ultimatum goes on the air at midnight. Wouldn't it be better if we..."

  "That's right," Giovanni cut in. "A final rundown before we press the button. The second chopper should be setting down any time. While we wait for the others, why don't you guys take a look around, check out your end and see that you got all systems go?"

  Halakaz nodded, snapped his silver-knobbed cane under his arm, and led the two colonels out of the room.

  Giovanni and his sidekick exchanged glances. "When do we give them the bad news?" Mancini asked.

  "Not until we're ready to take them out. We need their help right up to the last minute, Lou. We have to have the workers, and we need these creeps to keep the workers in line."

  "You don't think they'll get wise when we start the countdown?"

  "Nah. If they were smart enough to get wise, they'd have gotten wise long before now. Listen, the tape with the ultimatum punched into it runs through the transmitter at midnight, okay? One time each for Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, Bahrein, Abu Dhabi and Rotterdam. The general's bringing those tapes with him in the second chopper, right? Halakaz and his boys won't get a chance to give them the once-over because we're keeping them under wraps until H-hour. And the warning nuke, the small warhead targeted on the Gulf refinery to prove we can do what we say, is scheduled for blast-off ten minutes later."

  Mancini nodded. "Time enough for the messages to those countries to be received, but too soon for any interception shit if the defenses are alerted. You don't think there's any chance they might tune in to the transmissions?"

  "They saw the script of a message they believe will be beamed to Khartoum. For my money, Lou, they'll be on such a high, waiting for that first nuke to take out a military airfield at Omdurman, that they won't be listening to any goddamn radio! Any case, we'll have guys covering the radio room."

  "Omdurman!" Mancini laughed. It wasn't a pleasant sound. "I want to see their faces when we tell them. I want to see the expressions on their mugs when they know they're going to die."

  "There are a whole lot more damn faces I'd rather see in New York, Zurich, Rotterdam and Paris, when they take in that ultimatum and their experts tell them yeah, we can do it. They said they'd obliterate just this one isolated refinery, like as a demonstration, and they did it!"

  "You're a brilliant guy, Don Carlo!"

  "Ain't it the truth! The only thing is, I can't figure out why I never thought of it before. Hell, it's the only business worldwide we don't have a piece of already." Giovanni fished a cigar from his breast pocket, bit off the end and leaned toward Mancini's gold lighter.

  "But it's got to be right one hundred percent this end, Lou," he said between puffs. "So what do you say we run down the whole routine from the top?"

  * * *

  Flat on his face in the three-foot-high rock tunnel behind the grille in the operations room, Mack Bolan caught his breath as the enormity of the Mafia scheme dawned on him.

  He had just heard the blueprint for a conspiracy that was, in effect, an extension of the protection racket on a global scale — only instead of saloon keepers, club owners, truckers or amusement concessionaires, this time the bite was being put on an entire industry worldwide.

  The plotters were saying to the oil-producing countries of the Middle East, and to the port where the world's biggest oil auctions were held: give us a percentage, cut us in on your profits or we'll nuke you to hell. And here's the proof we can do it.

  A "small" H-bomb explosion in one of the Gulf states.

  Not more than, say, two thousand dead.

  Plus the radiation sickness spreading like a deadly cloud over the densely populated countries neighboring the Gulf.

  Plus the continuing threat once the deal had been finalized, for the Mob was insatiable and those IRBMs could be retargeted to put the bite on other victims, to lend clout to other forms of blackmail.

  Bolan thought that Giovanni had to be out of his mind, and the other Mafia bosses had to be insane to underwrite him. Did they think they could hold the world to ransom indefinitely? Didn't they realize they could be nuked out of existence themselves once Big Business pinpointed their base? They could start World War III if one of the big power watchdogs was a mite too hasty with a finger on the button.

  They could start it at eleven minutes past midnight.

  There was a clock on the control room wall. Through the mesh of the grating Bolan could see that it was a quarter to six.

  Six hours and fifteen minutes to avert catastrophe.

  How could it be done? Because it had to be done.

  By individual assassination of the leading conspirators?

  No way.

  Yemanja had left him, promising to return with the backpack and the M-16. Big Thunder was in the general's office. And even if they could get that back, there were three militarily trained black guerrillas, five mafiosi and an unknown number of white technicians put in by the Mob, all of whom would have to be eliminated. And Giovanni had said that "the others" were due to arrive from "the second chopper" at any minute.

  The warrior figured he'd wait where he was until they showed. He wasn't even going to consider alternatives until he knew just how long the odds against him were.

  Ten minutes later, the door of the operations room opened and Colonel Ogada ushered in four men.

  Bolan had seen them all before. He recognized the robed man as the distinguished stranger who had ridden at the head of the caravan — and ordered Mahmoud to call off the search after Bolan had been surprised in Wadi Djarzireh. That must have been because he knew about the lead canister, knew it was a decoy and knew arrangements had been made to locate the "spy" later.

  The white suit, Bolan saw with astonishment, was worn by Hamid el-Karim.

  He was less surprised to see General Hartley. There had to be a mole who was close to Hal Brognola. It had to be someone who was a party to the Fed's briefing of Bolan, who knew the Executioner was on his way to North Africa and
who knew enough of his movements to arrange the attempt on his life and tip-off Broken-nose and his companions when that failed.

  It was the last of the four big-shot arrivals who caused the Executioner to shake his head in amazement. At first, when talking to Ogada, who had remained in the doorway, the man had the back of his perfectly cut suit turned toward the grating. Then he swung around to face Giovanni and Mancini, and Bolan got a clear view of the too handsome features.

  It was David Courtney.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Once the Executioner had seen the strength of the opposition, more pieces of the puzzle fell into place, enough to persuade him that the picture was almost complete.

  It was clear, through listening to the conversation of the conspirators in the control room, that Courtney had been responsible for the "minders," and Hamid el-Karim, in association with the man in the djellaba, for the organization of the camel caravan.

  Bolan remembered the last words of Ibrahim, the informer who had been murdered in Alexandria. El-Karim, he had said, could supply any papers Bolan wanted, but the warrior was on no account to reveal that he intended to travel with the caravan. When Bolan had asked why not, Ibrahim had started to say "Because he is the man who..." And then the poisoned dart had ended his life.

  Evidently, if he had been allowed to complete the sentence, he would have said, "Because he is the man who organizes the caravan and the secret freight it will be transporting."

  The Brit, of course, with his CIA connection and his newspaper contacts, was a perfect choice to act as undercover boss of a team briefed to sniff out anyone too curious and eliminate those rash enough to interfere with the uranium transportation.

  But however hard they sniffed, they seemed to have lost the scent. For Bolan, apart from his talent for survival, owed his life to a stack of things that were at the same time related and unrelated.