Hellfire Crusade

9

Danny awoke to find the very worst of the day's heat was over. The sun had dipped low enough to send a blinding shaft spearing down beneath the overhanging ledge that protected them. She lay there for a moment, her head resting on a folded blanket, staring up at the weathered pink rock above her.

She could still feel the effects of last night's drive in every bone of her body. Danny felt like one great big bruise. It had been a long pummeling ride across the moonlit desert.

They had reached the outskirts of town without further incident. Then Bolan had driven south, looping toward the junction with the coastal route to Haufari, but on a deserted stretch of the highway he abruptly plunged off into the scrub and circled wide around the back of the airfield. Using the shielded headlights only when absolutely necessary, he had tried to steer a course that would eventually intersect with the line of march he'd originally intended to take.

The going had been relatively easy at first.

They had kept up a good speed across the hard-baked mud flats — which were only softened once a year by spring rains, if they fell at all — but this featureless plain gave way all too soon to the rising slope of a bleached flintstone desert dotted here and there with low patches of coarse, brittle weeds.

Irregular bumps had gradually become treacherous ridges, which Bolan navigated in the darkness with some uncanny skill that had left Danny baffled.

They hadn't talked much. She knew he had been concentrating on putting as much distance as possible between them and the city by dawn. Twice they had ended in impassable gullies; patiently Bolan backtracked and tried another route. The almost-full moon cast a cold glow over this weird lunar landscape. And the ride got still rougher.

Bolan had woven cautiously between tortured spurs of rock as sunrise streaked the sky. The awesome beauty of it took Danny's breath away: at first it was merely a lilac blush, then smudges of rose and amethyst lit up, until finally a far-off bank of clouds was transformed into flaring banners of gold.

They had stopped more frequently then. Bolan double-checked the maps, until he found this dead-end fissure with its overhanging lip to shield them from watching eyes and the full glare of the daytime sun. The Hog was covered with camouflage netting.

Bolan was already up and about and seemed well rested. He had the maps spread out on a flat rock in front of him. He glanced back at her the moment she stirred.

"Stiff?"

She nodded, but even that small gesture hurt.

"Here." He poured out a careful measure of water for her. "That's your ration for this stop. I was only carrying enough for myself on the way in — and I even cut back on that to make room for an extra can of gas."

Gratefully Danny took a small sip, swilled it around slowly and then swallowed it.

"Where are we?" she asked, carefully balancing the rest of her water while crouching down to look at the map.

"I figure we've reached this spot here." He tapped a point about thirty miles or almost a third the length of the country, inland from the shore of the gulf.

"Is that all we've covered? I feel as if we drove about two hundred miles!"

"It was sixty-eight miles to be precise, following along this diagonal from the city. Those last three hours were slow going and we took more than one blind turn." Bolan waved his hand to the west of their present position. "We're still five or six miles off the track I had intended to take up from Haufari."

Danny glanced at the map. "That would take us dangerously close to the frontier. There are bound to be mine fields along there."

"Yeah, but not much other traffic, though."

"Maybe some patrols, even that far out."

"You're right. That's why we're going to lay low for a while yet. But we've got to risk moving while there's still some daylight left. I want to reach the Jebel Kharg before it's too dark to scout a way across."

Danny draped the blanket to provide a patch of shade and settled down to wait. She just lay there. Bolan sat propped against a rock. Both of them were conserving their energy for the arduous trek ahead.

"You know, in all that excitement, there was something I didn't tell you about."

"What's that?"

"About my day with Salim Zakir. I've never seen him like that before."

"How was he?"

"Nervous. Real edgy. Something was going on, I'm sure of it." Danny wanted to be more specific but could not quite put her finger on what it was that made her feel so suspicious. "Four times at the museum he was called away to the phone, not the one in the office; took all the calls on his car phone."

Bolan sensed it, too. Maybe it was all those cops on the street that bothered him.

Khurabi was a powder keg ready to blow.

"I think Hassan is getting ready to strike against his brother," he said, "and anyone in a position of power is going to have to choose sides."

"Then Salim will back Harun. You can bet on that. His youngest sister is one of Sheikh Zayoud's wives, a favorite of the king. Those two are very close. Salim was off to see him again when he dropped me at the hotel. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I gave him that tape."

"Well, if Harun doesn't know what his brother is up to by now, he soon will..." Bolan motioned for her to be absolutely still.

Danny had no idea what had suddenly alerted him, but something out there in the wasteland had triggered an inner alarm.

The warrior quietly levered himself up between the boulders on the far side of the shallow cut.

He signaled for Danny to follow him, reaching back to give her a hand tip. "See them?"

"Where?" Danny saw nothing but mile upon mile of sand and rock.

"Way over there — they're heading south."

Now she could pick out the small dark blobs, seeming to be swimming slowly through the shimmering haze that hovered above the desert floor. How on earth did he know they were out there? "Who are they... a border patrol?"

"I don't think so. Looks like four, maybe five men with camels; a small caravan of some sort."

Danny shaded her eyes and studied the moving figures. "Bedu. A tiny group of nomads still sticking to the traditional ways."

Bolan nodded. In a way he admired them.

Wandering warriors who had made no compromise.

He could understand that, although to most people, even to other more "progressive" Arabs, it was madness. To Bolan it was a madness worthy of respect. "They must know of ancient paths across the mountains. They're too far west to have skirted the Jebel Kharg."

"I thought this was on the edge of the Forbidden Zone."

"I guess those guys don't read signs or maps. They don't need to, they know where they are. Probably heading down to the fishing villages on the coast to do a little trading," said Bolan. He checked his watch and studied the position of the sun for a moment. "Let's get going. If we stick to that old wadi down there, we can go for a couple of miles before we have to break cover."

"Won't they see us?"

"Yes," admitted Bolan. "But if I sensed their presence, then I expect they already know we're here, too."

Danny knew he was right; no one knows the desert better than the nomads. They repacked the Hog and moved cautiously down the wadi, its sides long since worn down to little more than weak crumbling shoulders. There had been no flash floods here for many seasons.

Bolan drove with care, slowing down on the softer patches so as not to churn up a telltale plume of dust. The foothills of the jebel rose sharply in front of them, and the jagged wall of the main escarpment lay just beyond, its granite cliffs streaked with broad black bands of igneous rock. Several times Danny checked over her shoulder, searching for any sign of the desert tribesmen. They had vanished into the desolate landscape back there as silently as they had appeared.

Sometimes glancing at the map folded in a transparent case on Danny's knee, but more often relying on the aerial surveys he had corrunitted to memory and an intuitive feel for the lay of the land, Bolan navigated the sturdy Hog up the unseen trail toward the brooding heights.

Danny wanted to find out more about this man who exerted such a powerful attraction for her. It wasn't that she needed to rehash stale memories of Nam or even to learn his side of the story she'd first heard from Leo Cameron. If you hadn't been there, then there was no point in talking about it; if you had survived that hell, there was little to say, either. You couldn't add glory to it. You couldn't take away the pain.

They had both been there — in it up to their necks.

And that was that. No, she was more interested in what had happened to him after it was all over — although, as was becoming apparent, it was not all over for him. And likely never would be.

But this was not the time or place for personal poking about into the past. They would be lucky simply to survive the present. And wasn't that the way it had been back in Nam? Besides, Mack would tell her what he wanted her to know, when he wanted her to know it... She sensed they had much to share together.

"Which way now?" Bolan posed the problem aloud.

A wedge of' reddish rock split the way ahead into a fork.

"Whichever we pick, you'd better get us under cover fast," replied Danny. "There's a..."

"A spotter plane back there," Bolan calmly finished her observation. "I've had my eye on it for ten minutes. Right now I think they're more interested in those camel riders."

Bolan steered the Jeep to the left, drove for about four hundred yards and stopped in the lee of a huge sandstone block. Within moments they had the vehicle draped with the camouflage mesh, which would give nothing away to a plane flying over.

From this elevation they could look down on the vast plain of the Khurabian desert. A couple of swirling yellow columns — dust devils, several hundred feet high — were moving majestically before the wind, drifting toward the distant coast.

"They'll obliterate any tracks we might have left out there," he commented. "Might even force that plane to return to base."

It was little more than a faintly buzzing speck, dipping and twisting above the plain, like a drowsy summer insect. He checked it through the glasses.

"Must be one of the three spotter planes operated by the KDP, the Khurabian Desert Police. Zayoud's only got a handful of jets in his so-called air force. And his personal Boeing, of course."

"How do you know all this?"

"A friend gave me a rundown on all the forces and hardware at the sheikh's disposal before we left."

"But you talked about choosing sides when the showdown came... so which side are the KDP on right now? Are they staying loyal to Harun, or are they throwing their lot in with Hassan?"

"Good question. We must assume they've gone over to Hassan. I'm not going to wave them down to find out."

Danny still glanced nervously back at the observation craft, trying to keep track of it as it dwindled into the distance, while Bolan fixed his attention on the barrier that loomed in front of them. This giant uplift, the tilted shelf of the Jebel Kharg, almost cut the tiny oil kingdom in two. Aeons ago it had been a solid, continuous obstruction, but over thousands of years it had been scoured by the abrasive sand, split and blistered by the pitiless sun, buffeted by storms, creased by the wind and washed away in places by the infrequent rains.

Bolan scanned the high ground. Somewhere between those contorted ridges was a track through to the sand sea and the Fortress of the Rock. But would the traditional paths, those centuries-old routes of the slaver caravans, still be safe? Would any of them still be open?

Hassan Zayoud had used his viceregal powers to declare this whole corner of the country, from the jebel to the disputed fringes of Khurabi, a militarized zone, off-limits to everyone except duly authorized personnel. The tracks across it were probably blocked with barbed wire, mined or obliterated entirely by detonated landslides... and yet the bedu still knew of a secret way through these hills.

He spotted a movement across the backdrop of the topmost cliff. Had Hassan posted lookouts up there? Bolan swept the peaks with the binoculars.

"What is it?" asked Danny.

"Birds. Small vultures of some kind," Bolan told her. They had seen few signs of life on the trek in: some tracks, droppings, but not the desert creatures that had made them.

Dusty shrubbery and yellowed grass grew in isolated patches along the face of the jebel, sure signs of deep wellsprings and stagnant puddles among the rocks, and where there was water there was life.

"Not much out here," said Danny. "Jerboas, sand hares, the odd snake... maybe a fox or some oryx on the top slopes."

"That's all they need," said Bolan, still watching the patient raptors circling on the updrafts. "Over there, see that swayback ridge? Looks like there might be a trail that doglegs up behind it." He handed the binoculars over to Danny.

"Yes, that looks like our best bet. What's the plan?" There was still an hour of daylight left.

"Let's drive up there. Must be about three miles. If things look clear, we'll try to slip over the top at dawn."

It was better than four miles of hard punishment before they reached the hollowed slopes behind the ridge. In the debris-strewn gully they were well covered from any watchful eyes on the plains far below; in fact, they could only be spotted by someone on the cliffs directly above their position.

The final elevation still appeared daunting. In places the rock face was formidably sheer, but here and there it was scarred deeply by falls and erosion.

One of those clefts held the key to the Jebel Kharg. "This is a good spot to make camp. I think we can risk a small fire. It'll be another cold night, particularly at this elevation." Bolan parked the Hog but did not cover it this time.

Danny set up their camp between the Jeep and the cliff, then cast around for some smaller slabs of rock to build a sheltered fireplace. He removed what dead bushes he could find between the cracks and crevices, hacking off the tougher ones with his Teflon-coated blade. He slid the knife back into its ankle sheath, gathered the bundle of precious kindling together and brought it back to the dell.

"There is a way through up there somewhere," announced Danny positively. "I went out to gather some fuel myself — look what I found!"

"Camel dung."

"Very old, very dry, but somebody else had passed this way, too."

"Okay, you get the fire going. The supplies are in that box there. It ain't exactly cordon bleu," said Bolan, his hopes recharged by Danny's sharp-eyed discovery. "I'm going to scout that trail up there."

With the Uzi slung on a shoulder strap, Bolan followed the twisting path that threaded through the tall boulders above their campsite. A withered thistle, which had bloomed briefly after a shower some seasons past, still held an errant strand of camel hair.

He searched the mottled mauve-and-brown rocks for signs of the trail the drovers must have taken. None of the clefts looked very promising.

A fan of loose shale, too treacherous even for the Hog, marked the one rift the traders might have come through. Bolan worked his way farther to the right, but found nothing passable. And it was getting darker by the moment. He began circling back toward the camp.

The velvet night sky was spangled with myriad stars. After the broiling heat of midday, it was amazing how cool it became once the sun had vanished.

What if he had to go the rest of the way on foot?

Bolan began to recalculate his timetable with half a mind, while the rest of him concentrated on keeping his footing among the tumbled rocks.

He got a tingling jolt from his internal warning system just as he approached the camp. He thought he saw two darkly bundled figures scrambling over the ridge above the Jeep. He unslung the Uzi in a flash. But it was too late.

A white-robed man with an evil gold-capped smile was already squatting by the fire. An ancient Lee Enfield was resting across his lap, his finger curled about the trigger. And the muzzle was only inches from Danny's heart.

In that small circle of flickering firelight the old man's leathery face looked even more like the mask of some evil djinn. With the hand that cradled the rifle he signaled for Bolan to come closer.

"No, sah'b... no touch gun! No need for gun." He made a small patting motion in the air to indicate that the big foreigner should lay down his weapon.

With Danny's life in the balance as a bargaining chip, Bolan had no choice but to comply.

The other two men — both younger, probably the rifleman's sons — jumped down onto the track.

They both wore khunjars, the curved and bejeweled daggers given to every male when he reached manhood. One had a cast to his eye that gave him a menacing, retarded look.

"Closer, sah'b!"

Bolan stepped forward, trying to figure the odds.

He could see the man was not quite as old as he'd first thought. These bedu wanderers were traditionalists if put to the test, where did their loyalties lie? He had to guess they would probably pick Hassan's fundamental fanaticism were they just being cautious about stumbling onto strangers in the middle of nowhere?

Or did they intend to kill them both right here and now? The rifle had not budged an inch. There was less than a hairbreadth between those two possibilities, and Bolan was not going to bet on the difference. Not yet.

He spread open his empty hands, palms showing, "Whatever we have is yours — please, share our meal."

The leader appreciated the courtesy, even though both he and Bolan knew the old-timer was in a position to take what he wanted. Yet he was still more curious about their mysterious presence here than eager for the coffee, which was boiling by the fire.

Danny glanced across at Bolan as he squatted on his haunches. Then she quickly looked away, ashamed and angry at herself for having been taken by surprise.

"What you do here, sah'b? Long way from city."

"Oil. We're looking for oil," Bolan lied easily. "Geologists. We're a search team for Allied Oil."

"Ah, you think you find oil up here?"

"No, not around here, old friend. We want to prospect on the far side of the jebel." Bolan's casual wave at the cliffs above them made one of the other men bring a British army service revolver to bear. They were very jumpy.

The man by the fire translated Bolan's explanation for his companions. None of them looked too convinced, and Bolan observed the puzzled looks on their faces, as they wondered, perhaps, why these Americans would be out here in the deep desert.

"Tell you what," suggested Bolan, appearing as affable as could be, "I could hire you guys as our local guides. The company gives me funds for that. I'm willing to pay You well if you'll show us a safe way across the top of the jebel. Will you do it? Here, let's have some coffee and discuss a fee."

The old man smiled greedily, his gold fillings glinting in the light of the campfire at this mention of money.

"There are ways through the hills," he conceded. "But this territory is forbidden, sah'b. Very dangerous to be here."

"Well, yeah, but the oil down there doesn't know that... and we have to go where the oil is," said Bolan, still playing the part of a modern-day prospector. Anyway, you're out here, too, aren't you?"

"My people have always been in these parts, long before soldiers come with their spiked wire and bombs in the ground. This is our land, sah'b."

"Then I insist on paying you to guide us." Bolan moved slowly — he did not want anyone to get the wrong idea — as he pulled a pouch from around his neck. He poured out the contents in his cupped hand. "See, gold coins... Now, let's have some of that coffee while we talk business, eh?"

Danny followed Bolan's signal and moved closer to the crackling fire. The older man stayed squatting where he was, the rifle still balanced across his knees, though no longer aimed directly at Danny's breast, as he rattled off the proposition to his sons.

One of them replied in the high-pitched guttural dialect of these nomads. Bolan wondered if they were already haggling over a suitable price to charge for their services, as his hand dropped slowly toward his ankle. His own smile was fixed, his eyes steady on the leader; but through peripheral vision he concentrated on Danny. It was up to her to make the next move. Danny lifted the coffeepot away from the flames. The man by the fire rebuked the guy with the lazy eye, obviously imposing his will, then suddenly nodded.

"Now!" shouted Danny, hurling the scalding contents of the pot straight into the leader's face. He tumbled backward with a scream and a spluttering curse.

Bolan pulled the knife from its hiding place and, throwing it underarm, struck the other gunman square in the throat. The revolver dropped from his grasp as he made a futile attempt to pluck out the sticky blade from under his chin. With one last soft gurgle he collapsed sideways on the rocks.

The third tribesman was pulling the dagger from his belt when Bolan hit him low with the full force of a shoulder charge. They slammed into the dirt, struggling like wild beasts for the advantage. Scooping up some dust, the nomad threw it at his attacker, but Bolan was no longer there to be blinded by that old trick. He'd slipped the man's hold, twisted around and was looping a forearm under the Arab's beard. He grabbed hair and head cloth all in one, jerking violently and hard. The man's neck was broken in an instant. He flopped on his back with one final spasmodic twitch, his hand splayed open, and the last grains of sand trickled out between his lifeless fingers.

When Bolan spun around to face the fire, Danny had already disarmed the startled headman and now had him well covered with his own rifle. "He told them we were to be killed," she explained. "They were going to steal our money and then take our bodies to Hassan Zayoud for a reward." The bedu held his head in his hands, sobbing from the pain of being burned as well as the remorse for causing the deaths of his sons. "Those two weren't so keen on the idea at first just in case we really were working for the oil company — but he ordered them to get on with it. He promised that one your gun... that's when I yelled."

"Thanks. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about." Bolan retrieved his Uzi, but Danny did not let the rifle waver even for a fraction. He patted her on the shoulder and she relaxed a little. Then he shook his head as he looked at the bedu bandit. The man was not in too bad shape; what a pity it had come to this. Bolan held nothing against these men. His only concern was to rescue Kevin from Zayoud's castle.

"You have killed my sons."

"Uh-huh, you called the play, old man, not me. You lost the gold. You lost your boys. And if you don't lead us safely over that mountain at dawn, then I'm going to track down the rest of your family and wipe them out, too!" Bolan had no idea how he could have executed this snarled threat even if he had meant it, but the menacing warning deflated the chieftain once and for all.

He had just seen this deadly warrior in action and it never occurred to him that the words might be only an angry bluff.

He did not offer the slightest resistance when Bolan shackled him to the Hog. The big foreigner frisked him for other weapons — he had none concealed on him — and then quite calmly, almost as if nothing had happened, this strange invader poured out the last of the coffee from the pot. They took turns standing watch.