The Executioner®
Carnage Code
Don Pendleton’s

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Jerry VanCook for his contribution to this work.

Prologue

Khartoum. For Ron Cassetti, the very word had always held adventure. And a lust for adventure had been in his blood for as long as he could remember.

Cassetti, a Washington Post reporter, walked along the cobbled stones toward the White Nile Bridge, where the White and Blue Niles met and the colored waters meshed with the clarity of bright blue and white paint being splashed together.

The young man on the bridge thought back over his twenty-one years of life. For most of those years, he had concentrated on his schoolwork and martial arts, with only an occasional date, here and there. But within a week of the day he’d left Oklahoma for Georgetown University, he had met Margerete. And they had dated ever since.

He had finally graduated with a double major in journalism and English literature and acquired his third-degree black belt in karate at roughly the same time. Rather than open his own dojo in the D.C. area, he had instead accepted a job in Khartoum where he would report on both Sudan’s rumored nuclear-weapons program and the civil war raging in Ethiopia, next door. There, in this ancient country bordering the Red Sea, the violence between the Ethiopian government and the Coalition for Unity and Democracy continued to spill over into Sudan.

The problem, as it pertained to Sudan, was that both CUD and out-of-control Ethiopian regulars” had begun attacking installations and villages in Ethiopia, then fleeing to safety across the Sudanese border. Both sides wore unmarked green fatigues to avoid being recognized and, for that reason, they had all come to be called “greenies.” Certain elements within the Sudanese government wanted to declare war on Ethiopia and wipe out the invaders entirely.

Cassetti’s mind drifted away from Sudan and Ethiopia and back to his own problem, and he felt as if his heart was being ripped from his chest. For a brief moment, he thought again about Margerete. Then the picture in his mind turned quickly to Fran.

He had never been true to Margerete, he realized, and the guilt increased even more. He had almost always had someone “on the side” during their four years at Georgetown. But in the three months he and Fran had been together, he had never even considered cheating on her. After Fran had entered Cassetti’s life, he had lost all desire for other women.

Cassetti wiped his face with his hand, telling himself it was water that had blown up from under the bridge rather than tears. Margerete would have returned to Washington by the time he returned from Sudan. And a decision would have to be made. A decision, he knew, that would affect the rest of his life.

The bottom line, as Ronnie Cassetti saw it, was that he owed Margerete. But he wanted Fran.

Cassetti’s tormented thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sounds of running footsteps and huffs and puffs approaching from his right. Turning back toward the direction from which he’d come, he saw an elderly man wearing a striped robe and matching headdress shoving people to the side as he ran and limped toward the top of the bridge. A second commotion of some kind was occurring farther down the bridge, past the old man, with other people sprawling on the ground.

Cassetti squinted but was unable to make out the source of the problem.

As the elderly man reached the top of the bridge, Cassetti could see that he held a white envelope in his left hand. With his right, he clutched his chest, as if he might be about to have a heart attack. Cassetti was surprised further when the old man stopped next to him against the railing.

“I have…seen you,” the old man gasped out. “American?”

Cassetti nodded.

“Writer?” came another gasp. “American writer?”

Cassetti nodded again.

The old man grabbed Cassetti’s hands and pushed the envelope between them. “You take,” he said in heavily accented English. “Go—” He never finished the sentence.

Two shots rang out almost simultaneously, and the old man in the robe folded at the waist. A second later, he was on the ground, his open eyes staring sightlessly up at the clear blue North African sky.

Ronnie Cassetti stared down at him, confused, but another shot brought him out of his trance.

Now Cassetti could see what had caused the second disturbance behind the old man. Two equally dark complected figures—both dressed in lightweight tropical suits—were pushing their way along the crowded footpath toward him. Both held pistols in their hands, and more shots exploded as the men raced toward him.

Ronnie Cassetti was no fool. These shots were meant for him.

The envelope still clamped in his hand, Cassetti turned and sprinted down the other side of the White Nile Bridge. He didn’t have the slightest idea what the envelope contained or why men were willing to kill for it. But he had no doubt that the envelope was what this was all about.

Cassetti held the advantage, running downhill while his pursuers still climbed to the crest of the bridge. So he put as much distance between him and the gunmen as he could, while he could. In a matter of seconds his downhill advantage would be lost, and when that happened, if he hadn’t made full use of it, he had no doubt he’d be as dead as the old man.

Cassetti continued to run, pushing men, women and children unashamedly out of his way as he reached the bottom of the bridge. Loud shrieks of terror and what he suspected were curses in Arabic shot out at him with as much venom as the bullets. He didn’t care. He wanted out of this. Now.

Not far from bridge, Cassetti saw the beginning of a large shopping area. If he could make it to the first shop door, then race through it and get out the back, he had a chance of losing his pursuers in the maze of streets behind it. A final gunshot whizzed past Cassetti’s head as he ducked inside the first door to which he came.

To the proprietor’s dismay and anger, Cassetti knocked over a shelf containing religious statuettes as he lumbered through the shop. Another misstep sent a case of colorful glass bottles and vases shattering to the floor, and brought on more unintelligible curses. Finally, he burst blindly through a violet-colored curtain and out the back door.

Behind the shop, Ronnie Cassetti saw the confusing, winding streets he’d hoped for. Picking one at random, he raced past the wrinkled faces of old men and women and groups of playing children. He didn’t stop running for five more minutes.

When Cassetti finally slowed to a walk he was breathing hard. It took another five minutes to find his way out of the labyrinth of small streets and emerge onto one of Khartoum’s main streets. A second later, he flagged a cab and rode it back to his hotel. With his Swiss Army knife, he slit open the envelope. He was surprised to find that the single page inside was written in English. But what shocked him even more was that it was a poem. Not just a poem, but a limerick.

Cassetti closed his eyes and leaned back against the seat. Something valuable had to be hidden within these rhyming words. The old man had made sure he was an American before giving him the envelope, so it was his duty as an American to find out what the limerick actually meant. Which meant he’d have to get into bed with men most journalists considered the enemy.

The United States Central Intelligence Agency.

1

Mack Bolan had just stepped out of the plane onto the tarmac in Khartoum when the first shot exploded to his right. The bullet missed the Executioner’s head by half an inch as it drilled a hole through the window of the still-open cockpit door.

“Take off, Jack!” Bolan yelled as he rolled to the ground away from the plane and drew the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle.

“Like hell I’ll take off!” Jack Grimaldi shouted back through the doorway. The pilot reached behind him, grabbed a German-made Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun and tossed it to Bolan.

The Executioner reholstered the Desert Eagle as he caught the subgun with his left hand. Twirling it in his hands to grab the pistol grip and fore end, he turned it in the direction from which the shot had come.

As he did, a barrage of rifle fire came from his left.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bolan saw that Grimaldi had pulled another MP-5 from behind his seat in the cockpit and was deplaning on the other side of the aircraft.

Flipping the selector switch to 3-round-burst mode, Bolan cut loose with a trio of 9 mm soft-point RBCD “total fragmentation” rounds. The bullets in the brass casings looked like simple soft-points, but were hardly simple in the way they worked. While the RBCDs would penetrate most substances—like glass, thin wood or plaster—they literally exploded in any water-based material.

Such as a human body.

As he held back the trigger, the Executioner saw three men dressed in olive-drab BDUs racing his way. They continued to fire as they ran, but their rounds flew wide of Bolan’s.

The Executioner’s return fire did not.

The first set of rounds from the big man’s MP-5 caught a dark-skinned, bearded man within a two-inch group—all in the heart. He dropped like a cow hit over the head with a sledgehammer as it walked through the slaughter gate.

Shifting the German weapon slightly to the side, the Executioner fired a 3-round burst into the throat of the next man in green. A geyser of blood erupted from the man’s carotid arteries as he staggered backward, dropping his AK and holding his neck with both hands. A split second later he, too, was on the tarmac, dead.

On the other side of the Learjet that had brought him to Khartoum, Bolan heard Jack Grimaldi firing at the men who approached from the other end of the runway. But he didn’t have time to look that way. The third man in green was still running forward, an Uzi gripped in his fists.

The Uzi fired 9 mm rounds just like Bolan’s MP-5, and had been created for the same reason—to serve as a midrange submachine gun and lay down a lot of fire, fast. But it had one distinct disadvantage from the H&K. It fired from an open bolt, meaning that the bolt didn’t slam shut until the trigger was pulled and the weapon fired. This often threw off the first round.

And now was no exception.

The man with the Uzi had been smarter than his friends—he had waited until he got closer to begin shooting. But now, as he neared, Bolan saw his index finger move rearward. The jar of the bolt sent the first 9 mm hardball round to Bolan’s left, but before the full-auto weapon could fire again the big American had swung the MP-5 on target. Another trio of RBCD rounds struck the man with the Uzi squarely in the face, practically decapitating him.

Bolan turned his back to the three men he had just killed and spotted six more running toward the Learjet from the other side. Behind them, on the tarmac, he could see that Grimaldi had already downed two of the men. But the remaining six still sprinted toward the plane, firing on the run.

More fire from the Learjet’s pilot dropped another man in green as the Executioner dumped two more of their assailants. Bolan’s soft-point bullets caught the first gunner in the chest, and a pink mist burst forth as if someone had just sprayed it from a bottle of window cleaner. He opened his eyes wide in awe, not knowing what had happened, then fell forward onto his face.

Bolan’s second target was trying to run and fire another of the AK-47s. He, too, wore a sidearm, as well as carrying the assault rifle, but his short gun of choice appeared to be a revolver of some kind.

Bolan directed a trio of RBCDs at the running target. The first round caught the attacker in the pelvis, the second in the gut and the third in the heart.

In the meantime, Grimaldi downed yet another of the yet-to-be-identified assailants with a triburst into the chest.

Only two men remained now, but they showed no signs of giving up peacefully. Bolan shifted his front sight toward a slightly overweight man who looked to be of mixed African and Arabic descent. Holding the MP-5s trigger back again, the Executioner sent three more soft-point slugs into the man’s rib cage. When they exploded, sharp white slivers of bone came shooting out along with the same pink mist Bolan had created a second earlier.

Almost simultaneously, Grimaldi downed the final man approaching the tail of the Learjet with three more 9 mm bullets.

For a moment, it appeared the unexpected attack was over.

It wasn’t.

Suddenly, the tarmac around the Executioner’s sides was torn to flying pieces of tar. Bolan turned to his left and saw that more men in green were approaching from the area of the terminal itself.

He briefly wondered again who these men were and how they had known he was arriving. None of their attackers’ OD green fatigues bore any markings.

But this was still not the time to worry about such things. First he had to stay alive. And make sure that Grimaldi did, too.

“Jack!” Bolan cried out. “You okay?”

The pilot’s voice came back to him. “If you don’t count these guys who just popped their heads up behind that berm to the side of the runway!”

Bolan nodded as he watched three more rounds take out another man in fatigues. So, a second wave was mounting on Grimaldi’s side of the Learjet, too.

A 7.62 mm round ripped across the top of the Executioner’s shoulder, ruining his sport coat and shirt. Beneath the shredded material, the Executioner felt the heat. It was much like a bad sunburn.

Bolan didn’t let the close call slow him. Rolling to his side, he came up on his belly with the MP-5 gripped in his right hand. Using his left to raise his chest off the ground and give the 30-round magazine room for clearance, he fired again.

Three more RBCD slugs took out another dark man with a beard.

Bolan rolled again as more AK rounds struck the tarmac where he had been a second earlier. These new attackers were better shots. He’d have to keep moving.

Squeezing the trigger once more, the Executioner dropped yet another shooter. This time, the Executioner rolled back the other way, to the spot where he’d fired first toward the terminal. Using the same one-handed grip, he downed another pair of gunners before the MP-5 bolt locked back, empty.

Dropping the dry subgun, Bolan drew his .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. The roar of the big handgun was thunderous.

Bolan watched the force of the huge hollowpoint round knock an oncoming attacker back two steps, then throw him to the ground on his back. Another squeeze of the trigger blew off the top half of another man’s head. Then, suddenly, gunfire sounded from behind the men running toward him.

And the attackers started falling to the ground without the Executioner even pulling the trigger.

Bolan looked past the men in green and saw that finally the airport police had intervened. He downed the final man coming from the terminal with another .44 Magnum slug, then rose to his feet, sprinting toward the Learjet.

If his MP-5 had run dry, Grimaldi’s was bound to have done the same by now. And the pilot—whose primary job was to fly airplanes rather than get into gunfights—usually carried only a Smith & Wesson Model 66 with a two-and-a-half-inch barrel.

And six .357 Magnum bullets weren’t going to last long in a fight like this one.

Dropping to the ground as soon as he reached the Learjet, Bolan rolled under the plane in time to see Grimaldi swing the cylinder out of his wheelgun, reach into the pocket of his faded leather bomber jacket and produce a speedloader. Bolan fired at a man not ten yards away as the pilot calmly and steadily refreshed his revolver with another six rounds.

The Executioner’s .44 Magnum round caught the man in the chest, just left of center, and squarely in the heart. He twirled a full circle, then dropped his AK-47 and fell to the ground.

Only three men were left now, but they were close. Swinging the Desert Eagle to the side, Bolan pulled back on the trigger and sent another 240-grain .44 Magnum slug into the skull of the nearest man.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bolan saw a deadly grin on the face of his pilot as Grimaldi shot the next man in the gut with his S&W. The knees of the man in green buckled, and the attacker knelt on the tarmac, one hand pushing against his lower abdomen in an attempt to keep his intestines inside.

Grimaldi fired again, and this time his Magnum hollowpoint round struck higher. The kneeling man flew backward as the 125-grain bullet expanded inside him.

Only one gunner remained, and Bolan watched him drop his rifle and throw up his hands as he realized he was alone. Fear fell across his face like a suddenly raging rainstorm.

Bolan was pleased. It would be good to have at least one man still alive to question. He wanted to know who these men were.

Just as importantly, he wanted to know how they knew he was coming. And when.

But it was not to be.

The fear on their adversary’s face suddenly disappeared. He reached behind his back and seized a Russian Tokarev pistol. He raised the weapon, aiming it at the Executioner.

Bolan and Grimaldi fired simultaneously.

Both rounds struck within an inch of each other, destroying the man’s heart, as well as their chances of finding out who he was. And who he represented.

By now, several airport security officers had arrived at the plane, and one had squirmed under the Learjet’s belly to join them.

Bolan turned his head and looked at the man with contempt. What had taken them so long to enter the foray? Cowardliness? Laziness? A lack of discipline, perhaps?

Whatever the reason, the airport cops had been of little help. Bolan and Grimaldi had taken out ninety percent of the attackers themselves. But there was another possibility. Could the Khartoum airport cops have been in league with these men, whoever they were? It would help explain how all of the men had gotten their AK-47s, Uzis, pistols and other weapons through the metal detectors and other security controls around the airport’s perimeter.

The Executioner made a mental note not to trust the police—at least not the ones at the airport. Maybe none of the Sudanese National Police, for that matter.

Now, with the battle finally over for real, Bolan, Grimaldi and the security cop all rose to their feet.

“I am Captain Makkah,” the man in the blue uniform said. “You are the American we were told was coming?”

Bolan nodded.

“Then please accept my apology for the way you were welcomed. As well as my apology for the fact that these men somehow got onto the premises. And the tardiness of my men in coming to your aid.”

“Who are they?” the Executioner asked.

Makkah shrugged. “My guess is that they are Ethiopians. Either regular army or CUD rebels. Both wear these unmarked fatigues when they illegally enter our country.”

Bolan frowned. “But we’re in Khartoum,” he said. “I was told the civil war in Ethiopia had crossed into Sudan. But this far away from the border?”

Makkah shrugged again. “With these greenies, which is what we call both sides since they remain unmarked, you never know.” He coughed into a closed fist, then said, “Please, then.” He turned back toward the Learjet. “I think your craft will need some repair work.”

The Executioner took a step back and looked at the plane. The wild shots of the attacking greenies had left holes up and down the plane. He looked at Grimaldi.

The pilot nodded sadly.

Makkah leaned down, yelling under the plane. “Sergeant Hara!” he shouted. “Come forward!”

A chubby black man with sergeant’s stripes on the upper arms of his blue uniform blouse crawled awkwardly under the plane, then rose to his feet. “Yes, sir!” he said, offering a stiff salute.

“See to it that this plane is checked out completely.” Makkah turned toward Grimaldi. “You are the pilot, I assume.”

Grimaldi had already started walking the length of the plane, checking the damage. He nodded.

“Please feel free to accompany the sergeant and assist our mechanics in evaluating and repairing the damage,” the captain said. “And, of course, all work will be paid for by the airport.”

Bolan studied the man closely. He still didn’t trust him. “What’s CUD stand for?” he asked.

Makkah looked his way. “The Coalition for Unity and Democracy. But do not let the democracy part fool you. They are everything but democratic in their thinking. As you seem to already know, both they and the Ethiopian government troops themselves commit atrocities such as this unwarranted assassination attempt on you and your pilot. But as you said, it is usually closer to the border. In any case, both wear unmarked clothing when they operate in our country.” He shook his head in disgust. “But come with me, please, if you would. We must talk, and then I am to take you to the main station downtown.”

Bolan holstered the Desert Eagle, then followed the captain toward the terminal.

No, he decided, he wouldn’t trust this man as far as he could throw the damaged Learjet.

B OLAN DID HIS BEST to keep his face turned away from the passenger’s window as Makkah drove him from the airport toward Khartoum’s downtown area. While he had never planned to enter Sudan undercover, he had not counted on the gunfight at the airport to announce his arrival with such fanfare.

Then again, he reminded himself, this was Khartoum. This was Sudan. The country might be experiencing a brief period of relative peace at the moment, but it had a history of violence that would relegate his and Jack Grimaldi’s shootout beside the Learjet to the back pages of the local newspapers.

Still on the outskirts of the city, the Executioner could readily see why Khartoum had been given the nickname “City of Ten Thousand Trees.” They grew everywhere around this oasis on the edge of the Baiyuda Desert, and here and there he saw high chain-link fences where exotic cats and other animals roamed within the confines of outdoor zoos. The city was famous for creating habitats for such animals that were as close to natural as could be made by human hands.

As they grew closer to the center of town, both pedestrian and auto traffic thickened to an almost maddening density. Not to mention the many camels, donkeys, horses and other animals pulling carts and wagons mixed in with the more modern means of transportation. The Executioner sat back against the front seat of the airport police car and tried to remember all he could about both the city of Khartoum and Sudan in general.

Sudan’s ivory, ebony, gold and myrrh had been sought by men from other regions of Africa and the Middle East for more than four thousand years. Indeed, some Bible scholars suspected that the wise men from the east who had followed the star in the sky to visit the baby Jesus had picked up their incenses and sweet-smelling gums in the Sudan.

Here and there, Bolan saw stalls along the sidewalks selling panther and other animal skins. Sudan was home to more than sixty different exotic high jungle and plains animals, as well as the exotic herbs and fragrances, and the hides of giant elands, bushbucks, yellow-backed duikers and hippopotami could be purchased on almost any block of any commercial street.

Sudan was composed of wide-ranging deserts and steppes north of Khartoum, and tropical jungle just below the twelfth parallel to the south. Its coastline ran along the Red Sea, with Saudi Arabia just across the water. Northern Sudan was rumored to be one of he hottest areas in the world during the summer, with temperatures rising to 125 degrees and higher.

At least two-thirds of Sudan’s eighteen million inhabitants were of mixed Arab and African blood, which had been superimposed over more ancient ancestors who were Hamitic. Such racial mixing was to be expected considering Sudan’s geographic location, especially from Khartoum northward. The southern three provinces of the country were inhabited by true Africans, mostly of the Dinka tribe.

Bolan opened his eyes as soon as Makkah said, “We are here.” He saw that the man was trying to turn down an alleyway behind a more modern building. Leaning on the horn, the airport police captain waved his other hand wildly through the open window to his side, trying to coax the pedestrians crossing the alley on the sidewalk to break up and let him through. When this didn’t work, Makkah let out a long string of what the Executioner had to believe were curses in some Arabic dialect he didn’t understand. When hitting the red lights and siren proved no more effective, the captain drew his .357 Magnum Taurus revolver from his shiny Sam Browne belt, transferred it to his left hand, then stuck it out the window and fired two shots into the air.

This demonstration of firepower produced the desired break in the crowd, and Makkah turned into the alley. Bolan did his best to lower himself farther in his seat and reached up, ostensibly rubbing his forehead with both hands but in reality trying to shield his face.

The Executioner had already had far more exposure to the public than he felt comfortable with. And he made a snap decision to make some major changes to his appearance as soon as he was finished inside this building.

Makkah pulled the car into a parking spot that read Police Only. “You are ready?” the captain asked as he pulled the keys from the ignition.

Bolan nodded and opened the door to his side. What he was about to do was simple. At least simple in theory.

A Washington Post journalist named Ronnie Cassetti had somehow gotten between a CIA informant and his U.S. handler. The two men who had murdered the informant in Cassetti’s presence—and tried to kill the American writer—had been taken into custody by Sudanese police. Fearful for his own life, Cassetti had turned a white envelope over to a CIA officer stationed at the American Embassy. The envelope contained some kind of mysterious limerick, which the CIA operative suspected contained important encrypted information.

Unfortunately, the snitch’s handler had been an older man, about to retire. Since his last encounter with the informant, he had suddenly keeled over with a heart attack and died.

And the limerick code was not known by anyone else in Khartoum, Washington or anywhere else in the world.

The CIA had opened a case. The President had caught wind of the details and ordered the Agency to take its cues from a man named Brandon Stone who would be taking charge of the investigation.

Bolan closed the car door and followed Makkah through a back door into the building. It seemed to him sometimes that he had more names than a heavyweight boxing champion. Mack Bolan, the Executioner, Matt Cooper and Brandon Stone were only a few of the appellations under which he sometimes went.

This time he would be Special Agent Brandon Stone.

T HE BUILDING THAT HOUSED the Khartoum office of the Sudan National Police might have been of more recent structure than many of the ancient wood-and-clay edifices the Executioner had seen on his drive with Captain Makkah. But the inside was every bit as dirty and unkempt as downtown Khartoum itself. Trash littered the hallway down which Makkah now led Bolan. And the walls were a dingy, begrimed gray from cigarette, cigar and pipe smoke. And from somewhere in the building, Bolan’s well-trained nostrils picked up the faint scent of burning marijuana.

Someone, somewhere behind one of the closed doors, was smoking dope, maybe on duty.

The Executioner didn’t let that bother him. He hadn’t come to Khartoum to make piddling little arrests of marijuana users, even if they were cops. He had far bigger fish to fry, and he was about to begin cooking by stepping right into the middle of the pan.

Makkah led him through several turns before stopping at a paint-chipped door at the end of a short side hall. The airport captain seemed to hesitate for a moment as he raised his fist, the collar of his uniform blouse suddenly becoming too tight. Pulling it away from his throat with his other hand, he finally rapped lightly on the wood.

Words in Arabic came from the other side of the door, and Makkah reached out and tried to twist the knob. When it wouldn’t budge, he knocked again, speaking in Arabic himself this time.

A second later a click sounded, then the door swung wildly open, and a burly man with coffee-colored skin and wearing a uniform similar to Makkah’s glared out at the captain. Though the man was bald on the top of his head, a thick matt of black hair grew over his ears and on the back of his head.

Makkah visibly shrank, and the Executioner noted that instead of captain’s bars on the collar of the burly man’s shirt, he wore the markings of a colonel.

The bald-pated colonel glowered at Makkah for another second, then turned his attention to Bolan. Immediately his composure changed. He smiled widely, his lips seeming to stretch across his entire face. “So,” he said with the formal English indicative of a British public-school education, “may I assume that you are Special Agent Stone?” He stuck out his hand.

Bolan felt the firmness in the man’s handshake and, for reasons as mysterious at this juncture as those behind his dislike of Makkah, suddenly felt as if he was finally meeting a man who could be trusted. While he couldn’t always explain his own instincts—even to himself—he had learned to trust them over the years.

The Executioner couldn’t discount one other fact that probably played a role in his instant trust. The colonel obviously shared Bolan’s contempt for Makkah.

“I’m Stone,” the Executioner said as he dropped the strong hand. “But there’s no need for formalities here. Just call me Brandon.”

This seemed to please the colonel. “Then I will be known to you as Abdul,” he said. “Although for future reference, should you need this information, my official title is Colonel Urgoma.”

Bolan nodded.

Urgoma stepped back and waved for Bolan to enter. But when Makkah tried to cross the threshold, a stocky forearm shot out and a big palm rammed against the captain’s chest. “Thank you for your assistance, Captain Makkah,” the colonel said, “but your services are no longer required. You may return to the airport.”

Makkah’s caramel-colored skin took on a slight tinge of gray. He saluted, turned on his heel and walked off without saying another word.

Urgoma closed the door and the Executioner found that they were in some kind of outer office. One desk and one desk chair was all he could see in the room. There was probably a presently absent secretary who worked there.

“Did you speak much with the captain?” Urgoma asked in a low voice.

Makkah was long gone by now, so the Executioner had to assume there were other men in adjacent offices whom Urgoma didn’t want to hear the question.

“No,” Bolan said in the same low voice. “Not a lot. We were too busy shooting men wearing unmarked green fatigues to grow real close.”

Urgoma nodded. “Ah, yes, the greenies,” he said. “So I heard. Please accept my sincere apology. Bullets are hardly the way to welcome a guest into the country. Particularly a guest who has come, at our request, to help us.”

Bolan stared deeply into the man’s eyes. Unlike the phoniness that Makkah generated, Urgoma appeared sincerely sorry for what had happened at the airport. “Well,” he said in response, “even without the distraction of all the firepower whizzing past us, I wouldn’t have gotten to know Makkah very well.” He paused, taking in a breath as he watched Urgoma’s forehead furrow into a frown. “He and his men didn’t even show up until most of the fight was over.”

Now Urgoma’s frown became one of disgust. “I am not surprised,” he said. “The man is assigned to be in charge of the airport. But he must spend much time here, as well. He is a coward. Nor do I trust him. He is what you Americans call—” the burly colonel frowned once more, this time looking up at the ceiling for the right word before he brought his eyes back down “—a slumbag?”

Bolan smiled at the man’s attempt. “You’re close,” he said. “The term’s actually scumbag. ”

“Ah, yes,” the colonel said, clasping his hands together. “I have heard that many times in your American movies.

“Now, if you would please, Brandon, we have captured the two men who killed your government’s informant by shooting him in the back.”

The Executioner stiffened for a moment. Such open discussion of one government working clandestinely within the borders of another country was all but unheard-of.

Urgoma was, indeed, honest. Maybe too honest for his own good.

“The two men are being interrogated even as we speak,” Urgoma went on. “One of your CIA officers is also here.” The smile he gave Bolan held both mirth and a tinge of sadism. “He is observing.”

Bolan started to speak but Urgoma cut him off. “Please,” the colonel said, holding up a hand. “I have always been a good judge of character, and my intuition about you tells me you are a realist like myself. And between men like us, there is no reason to play games. So let us lay our cards on the table, so to speak. Everyone knows that CIA agents work out of your American Embassy. It is that way all over the world. We accept that fact.” He paused and laughed. “And as I am sure you are aware yourself, we have our men who do the same spy-work using the Sudanese Embassy in Washington.”

Bolan smiled. Yes, Captain Abdul Urgoma was a realist, and obviously didn’t like wasting time any more than the Executioner did.

Bolan was liking this stocky man more and more as he got to know him.

‘So,” Urgoma said, “let us go see if my men have learned anything new since I left the room to answer this door.” He nodded toward the splintered wood where Makkah had exited, then turned and started down another short hallway.

Bolan followed. “That last statement,” he said as they walked. “It implies that you’ve already learned something. Care to share it with me?”

Urgoma continued to walk but twisted his head as he did. “I am afraid we have not learned a great deal,” he said. “And my men have been extremely…well, shall we say, persuasive? ”

The Executioner knew exactly what that meant. Beatings. Or other torture. Or both.

When Bolan didn’t respond, Urgoma went on. “But what we have learned, I sincerely believe, is of the most extreme importance.”

“And that would be…?” Bolan asked, letting the sentence trail off to become a question.

Colonel Abdul Urgoma stopped in his tracks. He was several inches shorter than Bolan, so to look him in the eye he had to tilt his chin upward. He did so now. Then, taking a deep breath, he said, “We have learned that someone is about to ship a large amount of plutonium into Sudan.”

The Executioner stared back down into the dark brown eyes. So that was why he’d been sent by the President to Sudan.

Urgoma had been right.

Suddenly, the investigation had taken on a whole new level of importance and urgency.

2

Bolan heard a sharp cracking sound as Urgoma opened the door, stepped back and ushered him into the interrogation room. As he walked through the opening, he saw the head of a man wearing a lightweight tropical suit snap backward. The suit was white.

Or at least it had been at one time.

As he entered the room, the Executioner saw the bloodstains covering the light material of the man’s jacket. It looked almost as if it had been tie-dyed. So did his head, for that matter. Bumps and bruises of every color and description covered his face, and a good deal of once-red blood had already dried into dark brown crusts, telling Bolan that the beating had been going on for some time.

The Executioner stopped just inside the door. The room was even more grungy than the rest of the building, with candy wrappers and other papers littering the floor. Cobwebs grew in every corner, and from the ceiling a spider was working its web down toward the table behind which the bloody man sat.

But the man the Executioner had just seen punched wasn’t alone. Next to him sat another, equally beaten face. In contrast to his clean-shaved partner, this man wore a thin, carefully manicured mustache. But it was due for a shampoo. Blood had seeped from the nostrils above it and matted it wetly against his upper lip until it looked as if it had been soaked in some sort of setting gel. And this man’s lightweight suit—similar to his partner’s—was in no better shape, either.

Two uniformed Sudan National Police officers were in the room, and they both turned toward the door as it opened. One, a tall, lanky man exhibiting more Arabic than African heritage, wore black leather gloves. It had been he who had just delivered the punch, and now he smiled at Urgoma as the colonel closed the door behind them.

The other SNP officer’s hands were bare. But from the fingers of his right extended the weighted end of a leather-covered sap. The black leather was as shiny with blood, mucus and other body fluids as the bloody mustache.

A third man, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, stood in the corner next to a table that held an old black rotary telephone. Like the beaten men at the table he, too, wore a suit of light color and material. But it was spotless, and the man wearing it smiled as if he were enjoying a good movie, stage play or opera.

The CIA man, Bolan had to figure. For a moment, a rush of anger flooded over the Executioner. The anger was directed at the Sudanese National Police but even more so at the CIA operative who stood by, excitedly watching this torture, and knowing he would never be held responsible because the Sudanese were the actual torturers.

If for nothing but pragmatic reasons, the agent should have learned through his training that torture was never called for. First and foremost, physical torture wasn’t a reliable way to obtain the truth. Men being beaten told those beating them whatever they thought was most likely to halt the beating. Sometimes that was the truth. Other times it wasn’t.

Bolan turned to Urgoma. “Can I see you in the hall for a moment?” he asked.

“Certainly.”

“You, too, my friend,” the Executioner added, turning toward the CIA agent.

The CIA man dropped the butt of his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with the heel of his shoe.

Bolan opened the door. “Tell your men to take a brief break, will you, Colonel?”

Urgoma nodded, turned toward the table and said something in Arabic. The other two uniformed men nodded, then walked to the wall and leaned against it, both pulling their own cigarettes from shirt pockets.

When they were in the hallway with the door closed again, the Executioner turned toward the CIA man. “What’s your name?” he demanded.

“Sims,” the man said, still grinning. “Bill Sims.” He paused for a moment, the smile staying on his face but turning more sarcastic than happy. “And you must be the hotshot superagent we got the call about from our director. The one who’s so damn good we’re supposed to just follow him around like puppy dogs.”

“It sounds like you have a smart director,” Bolan said. “One who listens to the President.”

Sims snorted. “What was your name again?” the CIA man asked.

“Brandon Stone. And I’ve got just one question for you.”

“Shoot,” Sims said.

Bolan stepped forward and shot a hard right fist into the CIA operative’s belly.

Sims doubled over as if he’d been cut in two.

The Executioner slammed the CIA man against the wall, straightened him back up and said, “What did you say your name was?”

Sims was red-faced and choking, trying to catch his breath. “Sims,” he finally sputtered.

“No, it isn’t,” Bolan said, and hit him in the abdomen again. “It’s Cash. Johnny Cash.” Grabbing a handful of the man’s hair, he forced Sims’s shoulder blades against the wall again. “Let me hear you say, ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.’”

“But my name’s—”

A third punch, this time in the sternum, caused the last remaining air to rush from Sims’s lungs. The Executioner’s fists were painful, and would probably leave Sims with some sore abdominal muscles the next day. But none of the Executioner’s blows would do any permanent harm.

Bolan waited while the vacuum in the man’s chest cleared, then repeated himself. “Say it. ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.’”

“Hello,” Sims said in a faint whisper. “I’m…John…ny…Cash.”

The Executioner stepped back a pace, then turned to Urgoma. “Do you get my point?” he said.

The colonel nodded. “I do,” he said. “Torture can make a man say anything you want him to say.” His face reflected no sign that he had taken the demonstration as an insult. Instead, he looked slightly embarrassed. And as if he had just learned a valuable lesson that he would put it to good use in the future.

Bolan reached forward and straightened Sims back up yet again. “Get lost,” he told the red-faced CIA man. “And don’t get in my way. I don’t want to see you again while I’m here in Sudan. Understand?”

Sims nodded, then staggered off down the hall.

“You are a very direct person,” Urgoma said, chuckling.

The Executioner nodded. “Do me a favor, will you?”

“Anything you like,” Urgoma said.

“Assign a couple of men to Sims. Make sure he doesn’t burn me.” Bolan paused for a moment, then said, “You understand the term burn? ”

“Expose you,” Urgoma said.

“Exactly,” the Executioner said. “I’ve already had too much exposure.”

“I will tell the men inside this room,” Urgoma said, nodding toward the door, “to change into plainclothes and tail Sims. That way, we will keep the number of my own men who know you are here down to a minimum.”

“Good thinking,” the Executioner said. “But is there some particular reason—some suspicion you have—to make you want to play this close to the vest?”

Urgoma lowered his eyes to the floor for a moment, then raised them again. “I have, for some time now,” he said, “suspected that there is a rogue element operating within the law-enforcement community and other governmental offices in Sudan. And I suspect they have a mole right here. In my own Sudan National Police.” He paused a moment, then said, “That is why our government called your President for help. We do not know exactly who can be trusted and who can’t.”

Urgoma was regaining Bolan’s respect quickly with his fast thinking, and the honesty he displayed even when it was embarrassing to him personally. And as far as the beatings of the men inside the next room went, the Executioner had to remind himself that he was in a part of the world where torture had been used, and accepted as just another part of life, since the dawn of time. Urgoma might be Western-educated but he had been born, and had grown up, here in North Africa. It was impractical to think that the man would have vaulted, head-first, into the twenty-first century in every area of life.

“Tell me one thing before we go back inside,” Bolan said, leaning an elbow against the wall next to the door.

“I will be happy to do so,” Urgoma said. “What do you wish to know?”

“Did you learn anything from Sims? Anything the CIA might have found out that you, yourself, weren’t aware of?”

Urgoma frowned and the wrinkles in his forehead extended up onto his bald pate. “He did let one thing slip,” the colonel said.

“And that was…?” Bolan asked.

“I cannot remember exactly how it came up,” Urgoma said. “But I gather that the CIA has been following the progress of Sudan’s nuclear program closely.”

Bolan nodded. Every Third World country on the planet seemed to have a nuclear program in progress these days. Although they all claimed it was to harness energy for nonviolent purposes, in many cases, Sudan being one of them, it was the equivalent of cocking a loaded gun and then handing it to a child. But there was no point in saying anything more on the subject at this time. So he simply filed the information away in the back of his mind for future use. Somehow—he didn’t know in exactly what way yet—this so-called passive nuclear-energy program was linked to the two men in the interrogation room and the shipment of plutonium coming into Sudan to which they’d already admitted.

“Tell me more about this rogue operation,” the Executioner said.

“I would if I knew more,” Urgoma said, “but they are very secretive. Also, very violent in the way they view the Ethiopians who are encroaching on our borders. They would not be against just sending in troops and killing everyone who stepped over the line from Ethiopia to Sudan, I do not believe.”

“Do you think they’re tied into this plutonium shipment in any way?” Bolan asked.

Urgoma shrugged. “I cannot say,” he told the Executioner. “But it is hard for me to imagine that any group of my own fellow countrymen—regardless of how unhappy they are with the current Ethiopian government of the CUD rebels—would go to such extremes.”

“I’ve seen far worse extremes in my time,” Bolan said. “I think it’s a possibility we need to keep in mind. This plutonium is most likely going one of three places. The Ethiopian army, the CUD rebels or to this rogue element within Sudan.”

Urgoma just looked at him. The expression on the colonel’s face told Bolan he still hated to believe it was a possibility.

“And, I think,” the Executioner went on, “the answer to that secret—the who, why, where, when and how—lay somewhere in the limerick which the Sudanese CIA informant handed off to the young American reporter. Now. Let’s go back inside and try a new line of questioning, shall we?”

The colonel opened the door and again ushered Bolan in first. The look on his officers’ faces showed confusion as he gave them their orders to follow Sims in Arabic. But they nodded and quickly left.

Bolan sat down across the table from the two blood-soaked men. Quickly, he surveyed the damage to both faces. It wasn’t as bad as it had looked at first—certainly nothing permanent. “Colonel,” he said over his shoulder, “do you have someone who can get these men some towels? They’ll need a little medical attention, too.”

Urgoma lifted the phone receiver from the table and spoke into it. A few minutes later, another officer carrying a first-aid kit entered the room. The Executioner and the colonel waited silently as the officer slid rubber gloves over his hands, then dotted and dabbed at the cuts and bruises on both faces with cotton balls soaked in rubbing alcohol. Both men winced as the alcohol stung their wounds.

After applying several small bandages here and there, the man with the first-aid kit turned to Urgoma, nodded and left the room again.

The “good cop, bad cop” technique was the oldest trick in the book, the Executioner knew. But the stage had already been set so he decided to take advantage of it. “Do either of you speak English?” he asked the two men wearing the bandages.

Both heads nodded. “A little,” the man with the mustache said.

“Good,” Bolan said. “Then we’ll speak English. If there’s any misunderstanding, Colonel Urgoma can translate and help us out.”

The heads nodded again.

“I’ve got a few questions for you,” the Executioner said. “And I’d like you to answer them. But even if you don’t, you’re not going to get hit anymore. Do you understand that? Is that clear?”

The two men turned to look at each other in confusion. They obviously weren’t used to such kind treatment, and couldn’t quite figure out what Bolan was up to.

Then the clean-shaved man turned back to the Executioner. “If we do not answer, and you do not hit us, then what do you plan to do?”

Bolan shrugged. “Just get up and leave, I guess,” he said. He glanced at the door. “You’ll both be held on murder charges, so I’ll know where to find you if I decide I need to come back.”

The two men in the bloody suits turned to each other yet again. They suspected that more officers with leather gloves and saps might take this big American’s place if he left unsatisfied, and it showed on their faces.

“What do you wish to know?” the man with the mustache asked.

“First, why did you kill the old man?”

“To get the envelope, of course,” the clean-shaved man answered. One of his bandages covered part of his upper lip, and it caused his words to come out with a slight lisp and a slur that sounded as if he’d been drinking.

“What did the envelope contain?” Bolan asked. He knew about the limerick, of course. But he wanted to know if they did. And there was always a chance that if they did, they’d also know the code to break down the words and make sense out of them.

“We did not know what was in the envelope,” the man with the mustache replied. “And we still do not know. We had only just learned that the man who was carrying it was an informant, working for your CIA.” He glanced toward the corner where Bill Sims had stood earlier, then back to the Executioner. “May I ask you a question?” he said.

“Certainly,” Bolan said.

“Are you CIA, too?”

“No,” Bolan said promptly.

The answer seemed to satisfy the man, and he visibly relaxed.

“What happened to the envelope?” Bolan asked. Again, he knew. But he wanted to know if they did.

“Just before we shot him, the old man gave it to a very young man,” the clean-shaved man said. “He was American. Or maybe European. But somehow, I did not get the impression that he was a CIA man. Perhaps that was because of his age.”

“Why didn’t you go after this younger man?” the Executioner asked. “Like you did the older one?”

“We did,” the man with the mustache said. “But, like has already been said, he was very young. And fast on his feet. He escaped.”

Bolan turned to where Urgoma stood against the wall. “Do you have the death penalty here in Sudan?” he asked.

“Indeed, we do,” the colonel said, quickly picking up on the Executioner’s direction. “And these men will likely receive it for the murder they have committed.”

“No,” the man with the mustache said. “You cannot do that to us.” The clean-shaved man was shaking his head in agreement.

“And why can’t he?” Bolan asked.

“Because we were only doing our jobs,” hissed the man with the bandage half-covering his lip.

The Executioner frowned. “What jobs?” he asked. “What do you mean you were just doing your jobs?”

The two prisoners looked at each other again, whispering in Arabic.

“We are,” the man with the mustache said slowly and hesitantly, “both agents with the Department of Defense.”

For a second, silence reigned over the room. Then Urgoma said, “What Department of Defense?”

“The Sudan Department of Defense, of course,” the man with the bandaged lips replied.

The Executioner looked up from his chair as Urgoma straightened.

The colonel looked surprised, but not as surprised as he might have.

The Executioner nodded toward the door, opened it and they went out into the hall. “Where’s this reporter who turned the limerick over to Sims in the first place?” he asked.

“Just down the hall in a holding cell,” Urgoma said.

“You jailed him?” Bolan frowned.

“At Sims’s request.” Urgoma nodded. “Besides, he is a material witness to a murder. And we could not be certain he would stay in the country. Particularly considering the fact that we were afraid another attempt would be made on his life.”

Bolan nodded. It might not have been the way things would have been handled in the United States but it made sense. “Did Sims run any kind of background check on him?” he asked. “Anything that might lead us to believe he’s reliable or isn’t? And make him understand that we can get any information we need? Coax him into helping us?” The young man appeared to be a journalist, and journalists by nature seemed to almost always be uncooperative with police and government-intelligence agents.

Urgoma nodded. “Sims may be a prick, but he is still a very thorough agent for your country. He did, indeed, check into this man’s background, and it appears he was able to learn a lot about him in a very short period of time.”

Bolan nodded. “Let’s go talk to him,” he said. “You can fill me in on the details on the way.”

Colonel Urgoma reached back, locked the door to imprison the two murderers still in the interrogation room and started off down the hall. As they walked, he briefed the Executioner on what Sims’s background investigation had turned up.

R ONNIE C ASSETTI SAT on the hard steel platform that served as a bed in the holding cell. Leaning back, he felt the cold concrete wall through the thin material of his tank top and especially on his arms and shoulders where the shirt didn’t cover his skin. His life had been turned upside down, and he had yet to have time to really sit down and make any sense of it.

But he had time to do that now. Plenty of time. More time than he needed or even wanted.

Cassetti had gone to the American Embassy in Khartoum, the limerick safe in its envelope in the side pocket of the sport coat he’d thrown on over his tank top after the cab had returned him to his hotel. First, he’d had to talk the Marines on guard at the gate into escorting him inside. That hadn’t been an easy task to begin with, and now he wished it had failed altogether. But in any case, after he’d cleared the metal detector the Marines had taken him to an outer reception area where he’d asked to see a CIA representative.

By the look on the face of the woman behind the desk you’d have thought he’d just asked her to lie down and take off her clothes. She’d told him that no CIA agents worked out of the embassy, of course, and at that point he had suspected he was about to be thrown back out on the street again.

Instead, he’d been told that there was a “plainclothes Marine” who might be willing to talk to him.

That was when he’d met that son of a bitch Bill Sims.

Sims, he had quickly surmised after being led into one of the rear offices, was actually CIA. At least his stiff-necked attitude reminded Cassetti of all the spook supervisors he’d seen in a million movies. Maybe that was the way CIA operatives really acted. Or maybe Sims had just seen the same movies and believed that was how he was supposed to act.

Life was either imitating art or art was imitating life. Cassetti didn’t know which, and didn’t really care. He just wanted to be out of this cage and as far away from Sudan as possible.

Cassetti remembered that he had sat across the desk while Sims looked at the sheet of paper inside the envelope. And while the agent had done his best to keep his face deadpan, it was obvious that the limerick was having some kind of effect on him. But it was also evident that Sims didn’t fully understand what the words meant any more than Cassetti did.

The young journalist shifted uncomfortably on the steel ledge. The first thing Sims had done was looked at his passport, then gotten his home address and Social Security number from him. Then he’d made a call to Langley, where a background check on Cassetti would be conducted.

“Simply routine,” Sims had said. “You can understand. We have to weed out the nuts somehow. Not that I think you’re crazy—but it’s procedure.”

At this point, Cassetti had still been nodding and cooperating.

But before he and Sims had a chance to speak about the limerick, the CIA man’s phone had rung. He’d picked it up, listened for a moment, then said, “They have them in custody now?”

Then he’d hung up, looked at Cassetti and said, “You’re a good and patriotic American, son. Now, suppose we take a little ride together. The Sudanese cops have just picked up the two men who killed the old man and they need you to identify them.”

Cassetti’s mistake had been trusting Sims. On the ride to the SNP’s central station, the CIA man’s cell phone had rung and he’d done more listening than talking. The next thing the young American knew, he was at the headquarters of the Sudan National Police and in this jail cell sitting on the steel sleeping platform. And he still didn’t know what the hell was going on.

He had evidently stumbled onto something big, and for all he knew, the next trip he took might be out into the desert where Sims, or some Sudanese cop, would put a bullet in the back of his head.

Cassetti’s thoughts returned to the present as he heard two sets of footsteps coming down the run outside his cell.

“As I said, we booked him in as a material witness,” a heavily accented Sudanese voice said in English, “because we had no assurance he would not flee the country. Not to mention the fact that the men who killed the old man would probably find him and kill him, too. “

An American voice answered, but Cassetti could not make out the words.

“That, too,” the Sudanese said. “I find it funny that he is right down the hall from the two murderers, and they do not even know it.”

“I find it even funnier that they’re employees of your government and claim they were just following orders,” the American answered, still out of sight.

“Yes,” the Sudanese said. “I will check into that. But I will have to be very discreet.”

Now the two men came into view, stopping in front of Cassetti’s cell. It was easy to tell which was which. The uniformed man with the nearly bald head was built like a brick wall. But the American, taller and even broader in the shoulders, looked to be even more powerful.

Ronnie Cassetti wasn’t too sure his martial-arts expertise was going to work on either one of them.

The Sudanese man produced a huge key ring from somewhere behind his back and jammed one of the keys into the door. “Come on,” he said to Cassetti. “You’re being sprung, as you Americans say.”

“For what?” Cassetti answered, not moving. “So this big son of a bitch can kill me? He CIA, too?”

It looked as if the big American was trying not to laugh. The he said, “No, son, it’s because I need your help.”

“I’ve already given you all the help I can give anybody,” Cassetti said, not moving from the sleeping ledge. “I gave Sims the limerick.”

“Yes, but Sims is off the case now and I’m on it. And as I understand it, you’ve studied English literature.”

“How did you know that?” Cassetti asked.

“We may be a rather backward country with limited resources—” the Sudanese cop laughed “—but we have a rather good relationship with the local CIA. Mr. Sims checked into your background and shared that information with us. Your full name is Ronald Delbert Cassetti. You were born in Enid, Oklahoma. Until a few short weeks ago you were a college student at Georgetown. Then, through a friend, you lucked into a job with the Washington Post. ”

“You’ll have to excuse me,” Cassetti said with as much sarcasm as he could put into his tone of voice. “if I don’t exactly consider the Post job as a stroke of luck at the moment.” He pulled his feet up under him and sat cross-legged on the steel bench.

“The most interesting thing the CIA learned,” the big American added, “is that you’re quite a ladies’ man. But right now you’ve found your butt caught in a crack. You’ve fallen in love with a woman while your steady girlfriend is out of town and you’re trying to decide what to do when she gets back.” He paused, looked at his watch and Cassetti figured he must be checking the date, then finished with, “And you don’t have much time left to make that decision.”

“Dammit!” Cassetti yelled, uncrossing his legs and jumping to his feet. “That’s none of your damn business. You spook bastards ever heard of the right of privacy?”

Now the big man did laugh. “First off,” he said, “if by spook you mean CIA, I’ve already told you I’m not a spook. Second, whether or not I’m a bastard depends on which side of right and wrong you stand. But third, yes, the CIA does know about the right to privacy. They just don’t always pay a lot of attention to it when the safety of America, and sometimes the world, is at stake.”

Cassetti walked forward, ready to punch the big man out even if he got his own ass kicked in the process. “You are too with the CIA, you liar,” he said, clenching his fists.

“No, I told you I’m not, and I meant it. Just that they did run an investigation on you, which included your private life, and part of what they learned was about your problem with women.”

He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Cassetti lunged forward and snapped a fist at his face. A second later, the young man found that his arm had been blocked, caught, twisted behind his back, and that the big man had reached up with his other hand and grasped him by the hair.

“That’s not something you really want to try again, is it?” the big American asked.

Cassetti felt as if his shoulder was about to come out of the socket as his arm was pushed up and his head pulled down. He knew this technique. In fact, he taught it. But he had never seen it performed with the speed or fluidity this big American had just demonstrated.

“I guess not,” Ronnie Cassetti grunted.

The big man dropped his arm and hair and stepped back. “Then let’s go, kid,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

Cassetti turned to face the man. “What do I call you?”

“Brandon or Stone will do.”

“All right, then,” Cassetti said. “Brandon or Stone. I’ll come with you and I’ll help you. But I’ve got one demand.”

“You are not in any position to make demands,” the Sudanese police officer warned.

“Go ahead,” Bolan said. “Let’s hear it.’

“You call me Ron. My name’s not kid. ”

Bolan’s face was serious as he nodded. “All right, then, Ron,” he said. “Let’s go. Like I said, we’ve got work to do.”

B Y NOW , B OLAN KNEW the layout of the Sudan National Police headquarters building almost as well as Urgoma. So he led the way down the hall, with the colonel and Ron Cassetti close at his heels. He had already formed a quick impression of the young American journalist, and as was the case with most human beings, it contained both positive and negative aspects.

On the negative side, Cassetti was inexperienced, short-tempered and impatient. He was also royally pissed off that the CIA had pried into his private love life, and for that the Executioner wasn’t sure he could blame him.

Bolan continued to think about the young man as they neared the locked door where the two blood-soaked hit men still waited. Cassetti had some positive attributes, too. First, the same lack of age that made him somewhat immature gave him energy, and the Executioner knew a lot of energy was going to be expended before he got to the bottom of what was happening in Sudan. And Bolan sensed that even though he certainly had a tendency to lie to women—at his age, a young man often did more thinking with his hormones than brain cells—deep down, Ron Cassetti was an honest man.

Nor could the Executioner discount the kid’s education in writing and literature. To decipher the limerick, an in-depth understanding such as Cassetti’s might prove vital.

Bolan had intended to walk on past the door behind which the Sudanese Department of Defense men sat. He might find it useful to talk to them again later but for now he had learned all he could. Besides, they weren’t going anywhere.

But as he neared the room, Bolan suddenly heard a gagging sound from behind the wood. It was followed by yet another cough-wretch, and he stopped and turned quickly toward Urgoma.

The SNP colonel already had his key ring out.

A second later, the door was open and the Executioner saw that both the man with the mustache and his clean-shaved friend were lying on the floor, racked with convulsions. The corners of their mouths were drawn up and their faces fixed in eerie grins. The man with the mustache lay on his stomach but his spine was arched backward.

His clean-shaved partner was on his back. But his chest was raised high off the ground, and his arms and legs had been drawn stiffly together as he balanced oddly on the back of his head and his hips.

“What the—” Ron Cassetti started to say as the Executioner rushed into the room. “Hey, those are the guys who—”

He was cut off by Urgoma, who quickly said, “Shut up!”

Bolan dropped to one knee next to the man with the mustache, immediately seeing the symptoms and noting them for what they were. Both men had been poisoned. Probably by strychnine. The Executioner glanced up at the table where the two men had been seated earlier.

Two trays of food lay on the tabletop. It looked as if both men had taken only a few bites before ingesting enough poison to fall out of their chairs.

By the time he looked back down, the two men on the floor were dead.

“Damn,” Cassetti breathed out loud behind the Executioner. “That’s one hell of a way to go.”

Bolan rose to his feet and turned. “Who had access to this room while we were gone?” he asked Urgoma.

For the first time since they’d met, the colonel looked visibly shaken. Cassetti had been right—it had been one bad way to die.

“Any number of men could have brought in the food,” Urgoma finally said. “There are numerous keys to this room.”

“How long will it take to find out?” Bolan asked. It was a sure bet that the two men who had killed the old man for the encrypted limerick had in turn been killed to keep them from talking. The Executioner knew he was just lucky to have gotten the little he had out of the shooters before they became corpses.

Urgoma stepped forward and looked down at the top of the table. “It could take a long time,” he said. “These trays are from our cafeteria, but the food is not. It had to have been brought in from somewhere else where it was doctored.”

“Where are the trays located?” the Executioner demanded.

“Right next to the door. As soon as you come into the cafeteria.” Realizing the motive behind Bolan’s question, Urgoma added, “Someone could have simply reached though the door, grabbed two trays and been gone down the hall without anyone in the cafeteria seeing them.”

Bolan nodded. A man—or men—going through the cafeteria line, then taking two trays full of food out of the SNP cafeteria might have been noticed by the kitchen staff or other cops who were eating. But if the trays could simply be taken unnoticed, then filled with a poisoned lunch, it would have been easy. And the man with the mustache and his clean-shaved friend would not have recognized the food as being atypical of the cafeteria’s cuisine. They’d have eaten their deaths without suspecting a thing.

“Order an autopsy and see what you can find out,” the Executioner said. “You’re right about the fact that there’s got to be some renegade outfit operating in your government. These two men were part of it, knew too much and had to be silenced.” He paused. “But that’s the good news.”

“If that is the good news,” Urgoma said, “what could the bad news be?”

“The fact that you were right earlier when you said you thought they might even have a mole planted in your national police,” the Executioner said simply. “And we don’t have any idea who it is.”

Urgoma nodded. “I must be very careful as I try to determine who it is,” he said. “I will conduct this investigation personally. And discreetly.”

Bolan turned toward Cassetti.

The young man looked as if he might have been poisoned himself. His face had turned a pale shade of green, and he was holding his throat with one hand, trying not to vomit.

“You have an unmarked car we can use?” the Executioner asked Urgoma.

“Many,” the colonel said. “But if any of my officers—or anyone else with access to our files—runs the tag, they will find that the vehicle belongs to the SNP.”

Bolan shook his head. “That’s a problem I can take care of myself,” he said.

Urgoma frowned. “How?”

The soldier hesitated, then looked the man squarely in the eyes again. “It’s better that you don’t know,” he said bluntly.

Urgoma frowned deeper, then let a thin smile curl his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, the Executioner could see the death-grins of the two poisoned men on the floor. The colonel’s smile looked much friendlier.

“I understand,” he said. “If something should come up…” He paused for a moment, looking at the ceiling as he tried to decide exactly what words to use in English. “I do not want you suspecting me.”

“It’s nothing personal,” Bolan said. “It’s just a way of eliminating one of the officers who had access to the room—or could have ordered someone else who had access—to kill these guys.”

Urgoma nodded and his face relaxed. “I am certain I would handle it the same way if I was in your place.”

Cassetti was getting a grip on himself again now, and he said, “Would someone please tell me what the hell’s going on around here?”

Bolan turned to face him. “All in good time, Ron,” he said. “All in good time.” He stepped back out of the interrogation room and waited for Urgoma and the young American to follow. Then he said, “You and I are going to hit the streets in a minute. But first, there’s something we need to get.”

“What is that?” Urgoma asked.

“A couple of copies of the limerick,” the Executioner replied.

3

There once was a girl named Camille

Who fell madly in love with a seal.

She loved his warm nose,

And his soft fuzzy toes.

But his flipper was what made her squeal.

“So what in blazes is it supposed to mean?” Ronnie Cassetti asked as soon as he’d read the words out loud.

Bolan was backing one of the Sudan National Police’s unmarked units out of its parking space in the lot at the rear of the building. “You’re the English lit expert,” he told the young man next to him in the passenger’s seat. “You tell me.”

“I don’t know where to start,” Cassetti said. “I mean, it’s got to be symbolic in some way. But in order to understand the symbolism, you have to have some place to start. Some key to the whole imagery thing.”

“So find me that key,” Bolan said.

Cassetti cleared his throat in disgust. “I don’t guess I’m quite making myself clear,” he said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that we don’t have the key, and we don’t have any place to start looking for it.”

The Executioner drove slowly out of the parking lot. “Then we’re going to have to find a place to start,” he said simply. “But first, there’re a couple of other things we need to do.”

“What are they?” Cassetti asked. He folded the photocopy of the limerick and stuck it in the back pocket of his blue jeans.

“We made quite a stir out at the airport when I arrived,” the Executioner said. “My pilot and I got attacked by a bunch of those guys they’re calling greenies.”

“Yeah,” Cassetti said, “I heard about it. Lots of guns, bullets and dead green bodies. And I don’t mean dead little green spacemen.”

Bolan ignored the comment as irrelevant. Much of what Cassetti said, he had learned during the short few hours he’d known the young man, fell into that category. “In any case, I was seen. And there’s a good chance some of the bad guys in this mess have seen you around town during the last few days, too. We need to change our appearances.”

“Okay,” Cassetti said. “That’s one thing. You said a ‘couple’, which means two. What’s the other thing?”

“We need different wheels,” Bolan said as he started down the street. “Wheels whose licence plate doesn’t check back to the Sudan National Police.”

“I remember you telling Urgoma you’d take care of that yourself,” Cassetti said. “You don’t trust him?”

The Executioner shrugged. “I trust him as much as anybody I’ve met so far in Sudan. But it’s still early in the game. At this point, I can’t afford to trust anybody. ”

Out of the corner of his eye, Bolan saw Cassetti frown. “Does that include me?” he asked, sounding insulted.

Bolan let a low chuckle escape his lips. “I trust your honesty,” he said. “Maybe not with women, but with matters of U.S. security you seem trustworthy enough.” He cleared his throat, paused a moment, then said, “Look, Ron. I’m not trying to be hard on you. But I don’t think you quite understand the situation.” Guiding the SNP car toward the airport, he went on. “The way I see it, is that we’ve got three enemies—the Ethiopian regular army troops crossing the border, the CUD rebels doing the same thing and this rogue element within the Sudan government. And that means we’re more than likely going to confront a whole lot of men, far more experienced than you, who won’t think any more about blowing your head off than they would stepping on a centipede.”

“I saw that back at the police station,” Cassetti said. “I watched two men die agonizing deaths far worse than getting their heads blown off.”

The Executioner found a parking spot in the lot behind the main terminal and pulled into it. “Yes,” he said. “You did. And you looked a little green around the gills.” Killing the engine, he turned back to face the young man again. “When it hits the fan, Ron, am I going to be able to count on you helping me out, or am I going to have to play babysitter?”

The conviction in the young man’s eye might have been real. Then again, it could have just been an act. “You can count on me,” he said firmly.

“Let’s hope so,” Bolan replied as he opened the door and got out. He heard Cassetti do the same on the other side of the vehicle. “So now we do three things here.’

“What are they?” the young man asked.

“Check with my pilot on how the repairs are going on our plane. It got shot up pretty badly when we landed.” He started across the lot toward the rear of the terminal, Cassetti at his side. “Then we get a rental car to drive that won’t check back to the cops.”

“And…” Cassetti’s voice trailed off.

“We get some firepower for you,” the Executioner said. “There’s plenty of equipment to choose from onboard the Learjet.”

“I S IT TRUE BLONDES HAVE more fun?” Ronnie Cassetti asked in a humorous tone from his seat on the bed in room 307 of the Hotel Nubian.

Bolan stood just inside the bathroom, drying his hair with a towel. Hanging it back on the rack, he picked up a comb next to the sink and ran it through the damp, newly bleached strands. As long as he wore a completely different style of clothing—which he planned to do—the blond hair changed his looks just enough to keep him from being spotted as the guy who had wiped out the attackers at the airport.

There was also a likelihood that the SNP mole—who had poisoned the two Department of Defense shooters—had also seen him. He could only hope he didn’t encounter that man again because a simple change in hair color and dress style wouldn’t fool him. Cassetti had shaved both his head and beard, yet left a mustache and goatee. The change was remarkable.

The Executioner studied the young journalist as he slid a white T-shirt over his head and shoulders. Cassetti was young and, according to the CIA report, still letting his hormones get in the way of his judgment. He was also short-tempered, inwardly angry about the love triangle he didn’t know how to handle and completely inexperienced in real-world fighting. He had proved that inexperience when he’d tried to hit Bolan back at the SNP headquarters. He had telegraphed his standard karate lunge punch so far in advance that the Executioner could have sat down, had lunch and then stood back up before he had to block it.

But the longer the Executioner knew Cassetti, the more he had begun to see a lot of good in the young man, too. When he wasn’t angry about everything, he had a sense of humor, and was starting to calm down to a more even temperament than he’d demonstrated earlier. And if the brief discussion they’d had during the drive from the airport to the hotel after Bolan had rented the nondescript Buick Century Custom was any indication, Cassetti had gotten a good education during his college years.

The young man did know his literature, and the Executioner was hoping he’d be able to help decipher the messages hidden within the limerick.

Of course, there was one other route to deciphering the code he could try, too. And Bolan would take that route in a few minutes when he had the chance.

Sliding into the shoulder rig that carried his Beretta 93-R machine pistol with a sound suppresser threaded onto the barrel, the Executioner shrugged until the Concealex plastic holster fell in place under his left arm. He had not used the 9 mm pistol during the shootout at the airport, so there was no need to reload either the gun or the two extra 15-round magazines that rode at the other end of the rig, under his right arm.

Dropping just below the magazines was a Tanto-tipped knife with a four-and-one-half-inch blade. In the hands of an experienced blade man like the Executioner, it was a deadly weapon.

Last came the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. The big handgun was difficult to hide. But a man as tall, broad and muscular as the Executioner could pull it off, especially with the loose safari-style jacket, which he would leave unbuttoned for quick access to all of his weapons.

Bolan turned his attention back to Cassetti. At the Learjet—where Bolan had learned from Grimaldi that the repairs were almost finished—the young journalist had chosen a twin pair of Colt Commander .45s as his personal sidearms. The Commanders had slightly shorter barrels than the standard 1911s and now they lay on the bed next to him.

Bolan knew they had been a good choice for the thin, wiry-muscled, young man. They were flat and easy to conceal—even under the lightweight blue tank top Cassetti was wearing. Several extra 10-round magazines—which would extend from the butt of the guns when he inserted them but still work—had been dropped into the back pockets of his faded blue jeans. The tops stuck up and out of the pockets. But with the tail of the tank top untucked, they’d be covered, too.

The Executioner continued to watch Cassetti in his peripheral vision as he sat down on the bed and began tying on a pair of brown suede hiking boots. The young man was cleaning his fingernails with a knife he’d also chosen from the plane’s well-stocked armory. It was a good knife, with a wide four-and-one-half-inch reinforced blade that curved deeply along the belly. Bolan had used it himself on several occasions, and with its reinforced tip and sharpened back edge it could do anything from open an ammo can to take out a sentry by silently cutting his throat.

In the corner, disguised within two black garment bags complete with hangers sticking out of the tops, were the same Heckler & Koch submachine guns Bolan and Grimaldi had used at the airport. The ace pilot had given them a thorough cleaning while repairs were being made on the Learjet, reloaded their magazines with the same RBCD rounds they’d also used and packed them away in the disguised coverings.

Bolan straightened the tail of his safari jacket, then walked to the mirror above the desk and took a quick look to make sure he had no telltale bulges showing beneath the garment. When push came to shove, and their enemies’ goal was not only to hurt but kill them, would Cassetti have what it took to pull the trigger? The young man had learned how to break necks and kill men with his bare hands. But only in theory. When the time came to use those techniques for real, could he force himself to do so?

That had yet to be proved.

“Stand up,” the Executioner said, turning toward Cassetti. “Unload both .45s, then cock and lock them, and put them wherever you plan to carry them.”

The expression on Cassetti’s face told Bolan that the young man didn’t like being ordered around. But he followed the Executioner’s instructions just the same, dropping the 8-round magazines already in the weapons to the bed, then pulling back the slide to eject the chambered rounds.

Cassetti didn’t have an ounce of fat around his waist as he lifted his tank top with his left hand. But he sucked in his belly just the same as he jammed both .45s, grips pointing toward each other, into his jeans just in front of his hip bones before letting his tank top fall back over them.

“Now,” the Executioner said, “face the door.”

Again, Cassetti grimaced slightly at the order. It was obvious that he had the heart of a true antiauthoritarian. Such men could be trouble. But once you earned their respect, they would often follow you to hell and back. They were also, more often than not, self-reliant. Thinkers and innovators, problem solvers who did not have to have their hands held every step of the way during violent encounters.

“Now,” Bolan said, “when I give you the word, I want you to draw one of the .45s, disengage the safety and dry fire at the doorknob. Got it?’

“It’s pretty complicated,” Cassetti said sarcastically, “but I’ll do my best to keep up with you.”

“Then go.”

Quickly, Cassetti jerked his tank top up over his weapons and pulled the right-handed Commander out of his belt. He extended his arm out and downward at a forty-five-degree angle, then lifted it almost to eye level and pulled the trigger.

The clank of the firing pin hitting the empty chamber echoed through the hotel room.

Cassetti recocked the gun, flipped the safety back up and dropped it back into his pants.

The Executioner was slightly surprised at both the young man’s speed and efficiency. “All right,” he said. “Now do it left-handed.”

Cassetti did.

“You’re point-shooting, which is good,” the Executioner said as the tank top fell over Cassetti’s guns again. “Who taught you that?”

“My dad,” Cassetti said. “He was in the first Gulf War. Eighty-second Airborne.”

The Executioner frowned. The 1980s and 90s were a sad period for pistol shooting in the armed forces. They had switched their training from point-shooting, to what was called “front sight” shooting, in which the gunman always tried to look at the front sight when he pulled the trigger. That was a fine method for competing in gun games or practicing on the firing range. But it went against every human instinct in a real life-or-death situation when every fiber of a man’s body told him to focus on the threat rather than his front sight.

Point-shooting at close range—up to fifteen yards or so for most men—was faster and more natural. Because it came as instinctively as pointing your finger.

“Who taught your father?” Bolan asked.

“My grandpa.” Cassetti was frowning now, wondering what these questions were all about.

“And your grandfather was either in World War II or Korea, would be my guess,” the Executioner said.

“Both,” Cassetti told him, still frowning. “He was a lifer. OSS during World War II and a master sergeant when he retired shortly after Korea. He ended his career as a range instructor at Camp Perry.” The young man paused for a moment. “But what makes you ask all of this?”

“Because you’re shooting the right way,” the Executioner said. “And it surprised me.”

So Cassetti had a legacy of learning the best system of defensive shooting.

Bolan walked to the closet where he’d hung his sport coat. The shoulder had been ripped out by the bullet that had almost killed him during the initial fight, and he took the jacket down now, pulled his cell phone, his passport and several other items out of the pockets, then dropped the ruined jacket into the trash can next to the bathroom.

Taking a seat on the other bed, across from Cassetti, he tapped a series of numbers into the cell phone. Yes, he reminded himself, there was another possible avenue he could take to try to decipher the coded limerick. But his gut told him this was the one-in-a-million time it wouldn’t work. Still, it was worth a try.

When he had finished entering the number, Bolan leaned back on one arm, the phone still pressed to his ear. The instrument contained a scrambler that would turn his words into babble until they reached the party he was calling. And there was a scrambler on that end, too, in order to make sure the replies that came back to him in Sudan couldn’t be understood if captured, either.

But the security didn’t stop there, either. For additional protection against prying ears, the call would be bounced off three different dummy numbers on three continents before it finally reached Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorism headquarters and training grounds.

Ten seconds later, the call had gone from Sudan to Peru to Australia and then to America. Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, answered the call. “Hello, Striker,” she said, using Bolan’s mission appellation.

“Hi, Barb,” the Executioner said. “I need to talk to the Bear.”

“Ask and ye shall receive,” Price said.

Bolan heard a quick click as his call was transferred to Stony Man Farm’s Computer Room. As he waited, he thought about Price. He and the beautiful honey-blonde had an arrangement that seemed to suit them well. Both were totally dedicated to their work. But both were human, too. And on the rare occasions when the Executioner was between missions, and able to spend the night at the Farm, he usually wound up in Price’s bedroom.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.