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  If he waited for the relieved detail to muster in their quarters, he risked being spotted by the compound patrol or the men up on the parapet when he made his bid to scale the outer wall.

  If he tried to make it before they turned the corner of the central block and drew level with him, on the other hand, there was a chance he wouldn't be fast enough… they would hear him move… he would be seen by the battlement patrol… gunned down from the towers while he was helpless, halfway up the wall.

  The hell with it. Bolan hated inaction. He'd make it now, before the detail came his way. He flip-jerked the rope to free the grappling hook.

  The hook didn't move.

  He tried again. And a third time.

  One of the prongs was caught fast in a crevice between two of the sandstone blocks. Try as he would, he was unable to free the rope.

  Bolan started to run. Silently he sped around the ancient fortress ahead of the advancing detail. But some slight sound as the rope slapped against the wall had alerted a soldier in one of the towers.

  There was a warning shout. Dazzlingly bright, a searchlight on the tower scythed apart the darkness and exposed the sandstone rampart in its cold brilliance.

  And the rope dangling from the top of the wall.

  There were more shouts. A whistle blew. Somewhere above, a deep toned alarm bell began to jangle.

  The returning detail broke into a run. On the far side of the prison the two patrols about-faced and hurried toward the tower that had sounded the alarm.

  Bolan unleathered both guns as he ran. He kept close in to the rampart, passed the laundry and an armory, then dodged around the admin block.

  Lights were springing up there and in other buildings around the compound. A second searchlight blazed to life. So far they hadn't picked up the fleeing warrior; they were still concentrating on the area near the cook house where the rope was visible.

  But the Executioner would be sandwiched between the compound patrol and the returning detail at any moment. He had made almost an entire circuit of the central redoubt. Panting, he leaped for the flight of stone stairs leading up to the battlements.

  He was almost below the first watchtower, in the darkness below the searchlight beam.

  But it was not quite dark enough. He heard a triumphant cry from one of the approaching soldiers at the far end of the parapet. Flame pierced the night, and heavy slugs chipped fragments from the stonework as the stutter of an SMG echoed between the prison walls.

  Bolan flung himself flat. Big Thunder roared. Fifty yards along the wall there was a scream of agony. A body pitched over and clattered down into the compound.

  Now the men of the detail had arrived at the foot of the stone stairway.

  They carried only handguns on watch in the towers, the guards were armed with swivel-mounted machine guns.

  Eight soldiers toting heavy-caliber revolvers — those odds were a bit high even for the Executioner.

  Left-handed, with the Beretta, he pumped out three lethal, almost soundless rounds. A trio of black soldiers, incautiously deployed too near the pool of radiance cast by the searchlight, slumped to the ground. One rolled into brilliance, twitched, raising a small cloud of dust, and then lay still as the earth around him darkened.

  Bolan rolled over on the stone ledge — slugs were splatting against the wall on either side — and fired two more thunderous shots from the AutoMag. He followed up with a 3-round burst from the silenced Beretta.

  All hell was breaking loose. The guys on the parapet were now firing from behind the collapsed bodies of dead comrades. The alarm bell continued to jangle. Officers shouted orders from the far side of the compound. The second searchlight was swinging slowly around to pinpoint the warrior in its merciless glare.

  He was in dead ground for the machine gun in the watchtower immediately above him, but he would be a sitting duck for the crew in the second tower once they had him in their sights.

  The soft probe had gone hard. Very hard.

  Scrambling to his feet, he triggered the remaining rounds from his two deathbringers and leaped for the outer wall of the battlements.

  For an instant he stood in one of the firing slits, a night dark shape poised hawklike over the cliff.

  With no choice but straight down.

  Chapter Ten

  Mack Bolan knew the risks. He knew, too, that there was no other way out. In the hellgrounds where his life was spent, a false step, a moment of inattention, an instant of extra concentration on the part of an enemy could bridge the gap between life and death. The tightrope across that gap was a path the Executioner trod every moment of his waking life.

  And there was no safety net below the rope.

  Nor, for the guy balanced up there, was there time for reflection, for indecision.

  With these thoughts in mind, the warrior launched himself off the wall.

  He felt a rush of cold air that was both endless and immediate. With both guns holstered and arms outstretched before him, he plummeted sixty feet toward the cold, black water of the ocean.

  He judged his approach perfectly.

  Fingertips broke the surface between two swells as he plunged into thirty feet of saltwater with scarcely a splash.

  It seemed an eternity before he rose gasping into the healing air. He could feel his heart thudding against his ribs; his blood tingled through every limb; seawater pressed cold against his skin.

  But he had suffered no damage.

  Bolan lay on his back and allowed the tide to carry him ashore east of the jail, facing the dunes. In the distance, over the swash of water, he could hear the faint trill of the prison alarm.

  For the moment he was safe. He'd let the military figure out how a prisoner escaped but nobody was missing when they called the muster. Let them worry how that nonexistent escapee came to be equipped with a climbing rope and two guns that fired real bullets.

  The Executioner hoped they would be so worried that the investigation inside would take their minds off normal security outside the jail. Because he had to approach the perimeter wall once more, unseen, before daylight.

  For the second time in one week he waded ashore out of the sea on potentially hostile territory. But this time it was with an even firmer determination to see this particular mission through to the bitter end.

  Yeah, okay, it was because of the women. And, yeah, he had personal reasons, compelling personal reasons, to feel bitter about the human savages who preyed on women.

  Maybe the Executioner was a killing machine. Maybe. But Mack Bolan, Sergeant Mercy — the names stood for a man of high ideals.

  The scumbags of the Mafia were responsible for the prostitution and ultimately for the death of his beloved kid sister, Cindy. Scumbags of a different color had killed April Rose, the love of his life, in a KGB-engineered raid on his antiterrorist headquarters when he was working secretly for Uncle Sam.

  They came in all colors, the savages of the underworld. And color had nothing to do with evil, Bolan knew. Not all white men were bad; not all black men were good. At this moment his target was a black African — a bloodthirsty tyrant whose inhuman excesses had not been paralleled since Idi Amin had been chased out of Uganda to seek refuge with the crazy Marxist fanatic, Khaddafi, in Libya.

  Releasing the women from this dictator's evil clutches, Bolan felt, would in some small way cancel a part of the debt.

  And help avenge the deaths of those ladies he had loved.

  Except that, if he had his way, there would be no free ticket to Libya for Emperor Ononu.

  With the help of Colonel Azzid and the men who remained faithful to him, Bolan hoped to erase the name of Ononu from the list of the ungodly who held high office in the world.

  But before Azzid could help, certain preparations had to be made, precautions taken, a number of arrangements set in motion, without which two men, one inside and one outside, could not hope to free up to a dozen prisoners from a high-security jail.

  Bolan's immediate imperativ
e was to secretly storm the outer walls of the prison and place delayed-action charges that would act as decoys when the time came for the break.

  He could not rely on a single massive charge to breach the wall. He had no idea about the structure and consistency of the stonework, and he sure as hell could not make a close examination. The plan he had worked out with Azzid, moreover, was based on a series of small shocks rather than one big one.

  The disadvantages lay in the timing. Bolan was using the old urban guerrilla technique involving wristwatches with the minute hands removed. Wired to a small battery with one terminal attached to the hour hand and the other to a pin piercing the watch face, the circuit was completed and the charge detonated when the hand touched the pin. All the saboteur had to do to set the device was back off the watch hand the number of hours corresponding to the planned delay.

  Theoretically, the maximum time lag possible was thus eleven hours and fifty-nine minutes, when the hand would be set fractionally ahead of the pin with an entire circuit of the dial to complete before the two were in contact. In practice, since it was difficult to place an hour hand as precisely as a minute hand, the delay was usually restricted to eleven hours and fifty minutes.

  Bolan's problem was that the break could not be organized before 1515 hours the following day, when Azzid was due for his five-minute exercise period. This meant that he dared not set the timers until 0325 hours.

  It was not yet two o'clock. He hoped the investigation inside the jail would be rigorous enough to keep the guards' attention for another ninety minutes.

  Back beside the Land Rover, Bolan checked through the specialized equipment he would have to use the next day, and then selected two packets of C-4 each weighing one pound. These, he reckoned, would create enough damage to persuade the prison authorities that something serious was on the way in the area of the explosions.

  He pushed detonators into the puttylike plastique, wired up batteries and watches, inserted the pins and moved the hands counterclockwise until they almost touched the metal shanks.

  At twenty after three he was standing at the edge of the forest on the western side of the prison. One hundred yards away across a pale blur of sand, the outer wall was silhouetted against a faint glare from the lights inside the compound. Bolan wound the two watches, checked that they were ticking and wrapped each timed charge in a strip of sacking. Slowly, he started to walk across the sandy strip.

  He was relying on the hope that the watchtower guards, as well as the battlement patrol, would be more than usually alert for any more signs of a break from within the prison… and that much less aware of movement beyond the walls. Normal duties in any case oriented their attention inward rather than outward.

  Nearing the dark bulk of the building, Bolan could hear raised voices still, both angry and sullen, from the interior. He knelt at the foot of the wall and scooped a shallow hole for the first charge, covering it with sand once he was satisfied it was hard against the foundations.

  Thirty yards nearer the cliff, he started a cautious manual exploration of the stonework at the height of his own shoulders. There were plenty of crevices, but most of them were too narrow for his purpose. Eventually his hands touched some thistlelike growth sprouting between two of the weathered blocks, and with a little digging he was able to dislodge the roots and pull the plant free. The opening revealed was four inches wide and deep enough to swallow his hand as far as the wrist.

  A thin trickle of earth, tiny pebbles and fragments of stone pattered to the sand. Bolan froze.

  The noise sounded alarmingly loud to him, but it provoked no outcry from the battlements high above. After a full minute of anguish, he expelled his breath in a long sigh of relief.

  Working with infinite care, he molded the package of plastique into the aperture, tamping it firmly into position and then checking that the wires were still attached.

  He laid his ear to the wall. The watch was ticking.

  Finally he picked up the plant and replaced it, packing sand around the roots until it would remain in place without his steadying hand. Unless there was a violent downpour during the next few hours it should stay there as long as he needed it. He looked up, above the dark mass of the wall. Stars shone brilliantly in a cloudless night sky.

  Satisfied, Bolan turned and made his way back across the strip to the forest — silent as a shadow on his avenging path.

  * * *

  At ten o'clock the following morning, once more playing the role of consultant mining engineer, he was in the Montemines office on the Quai Muhammad Khaddafi in Port-Doulas.

  The superintendent who represented Bozuffi and the other directors was a tall, spare man with close-cropped white hair and heavy horn-rimmed glasses. His name was McTavish.

  "Ononu's army," he was explaining to the Executioner, "lines up just one division of ten thousand men. But with the equipment they have, that's quite a force."

  "Modern equipment?" Bolan queried.

  "You can say that again!" McTavish replied. "They have a squadron of A-4 Leopard tanks, for starters."

  Bolan whistled. He knew that the A-4s sported 105 mm turret guns and ten-cylinder engines.

  "Right. And the Leopards are backed up with the same number of Roland missiles on trailers, plus half a dozen M-109 self-propelled howitzers. I mean like heavy stuff."

  "Air support?"

  "Limited," McTavish said. "Two AH-1G choppers armed with Rockwell hellfire missiles. There are four Soviet-built Hinds as well, but those are strictly ferries. They carry no armament."

  "That's quite a package," Bolan admitted. "But what about the guys who operate them? How do they rate?"

  "In combat? Who knows? But I can tell you they're certainly on the ball when it comes to mopping up tribesmen armed with muskets."

  "Apart from the Hinds, that's all GI or NATO equipment, isn't it?"

  McTavish nodded. "Bought through France — with money contributed by Khaddafi, the Syrians and possibly Moscow," he said dryly. "I know for a fact that the Hinds were a birthday present to the dear Emperor from the Politburo."

  "Bosom buddies. But I bet they're all looking over their shoulders," Bolan said. "Did you manage to contact the officer I called you about?"

  "He'll be sitting at the counter of the Palm Bar on the rooftop terrace of the Lido at eleven. He won't be in uniform. Look for white tennis shorts and a blue-and-white-striped sweatshirt."

  "Thanks," Bolan said. "Unfortunately I can't tell you what it's all about. But Mr. Bozuffi figured it would be better if you forgot this whole thing."

  McTavish nodded once more. "I guess he's right at that."

  "Before I see this guy," Bolan said, "tell me about Ononu. What makes him tick? Does he have some kind of chip or is he just naturally mean?"

  "He's an asshole," McTavish said. "An uncouth, sadistic, insensitive asshole."

  "I take it you don't like him," Bolan said, smiling.

  "Who could? He hates our guts."

  "Why? Surely the two companies are making him rich. Isn't he on a percentage, like the Arabs?"

  "He thinks the percentage is too low. He reckons the figure should be one hundred rather than fifteen."

  "He wants it all? Is he planning a takeover, some kind of nationalization?"

  "Nothing he'd like better, but there are certain considerations, other commercial and political interests, certain pressures, let us say, that tell him no. He wants to renegotiate."

  "At what figure?"

  "He says he'll accept nothing less than fifty-fifty."

  "And your directors disagree, right?"

  "Why the hell should they agree?" McTavish was indignant. "Shit, he'd never even know the bloody lodes were there if it wasn't for us. We prospected and discovered the goddamn minerals. We put up the cash to sink the bores, organize the surveys, exploit the mines. It's our money that pays for the extraction of ore, for processing and selling the product!"

  "What's his line on that?"

  "He's ma
d because he claims he was tricked into signing the original concession treaty. But there's nothing for him to bellyache about: he was guaranteed a fixed sum for ten years even if we discovered the lodes were unworkable. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain. As it is, he still risks nothing and rakes in plenty. He's just a greedy bastard and that's the truth of it."

  Bolan pursed his lips. Things were beginning to make sense. If you wanted to renegotiate a deal with four guys and they refused because they held all the cards… hell, it would sure strengthen your hand if you happened to have a reputation as a monster and you held their daughters hostage!

  Which was why, maybe, one of the guys was so damned anxious to have a certain antiterrorist warrior named Mack Bolan take up the case…

  Bolan left McTavish and went to the Lido.

  The day was heavy with damp heat. The sun glared brassily from a burnished sky. Around the Olympic-size pool, topless black girls wearing Western-style wigs oiled themselves on striped mattresses. From the rooftop terrace the Executioner looked out over a wide esplanade to the lines of surf rolling in from a leaden ocean.

  Shiny automobiles cruised the seafront and there were brightly colored umbrellas shading the tables of the beach cafes. If it weren't for the scrawny chickens pecking the dirt roads that led to the shantytowns on the city outskirts, an observer could have rated Port-Doulas as the symbol of a flourishing society.

  Lieutenant Edmond Ogano, in blue and white as advertised, was nursing a whiskey sour at the bar. Bolan slid onto a stool beside him and ordered the same.

  Ogano was a tall, lithe man with ebony-colored skin and a bushy mustache. Bolan liked him immediately.

  "Colonel Azzid regards you as a friend," he said, once the identification routines had been completed.

  The African sighed. "Maybe not friendly enough," he said. "If he'd had more support, he might not be in jail."

  "If your friendship had been too obvious," Bolan replied, "you'd be in jail with him. As it is, you can help get him out."