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  "Blood Doctor," he finished, his voice ragged with misery, "he take her. Torture, rape, kill her, too, I know. I never see her alive."

  "I am very sorry to hear that," Katzenelenbogen said lamely, not knowing how to respond to Salibogo's grief.

  "Sorrow not enough," he replied gruffly, near-accusation in his tone. "Must give Salibogo a chance to become man again."

  Katz paused in his slicing, bone-paring chores. "Yes? And how would I do that?"

  "You let Salibogo come with you. I see guns. You fighting men, I know. You look for Blood Doctor?"

  "Yes, we are looking for him," Katz replied.

  "I help. I know countryside. I know language. I know customs of people. Teach me to shoot. I have gun. Hidden. I can kill Black Cobra soldiers. I avenge wife, sons. I avenge for evil he do Nemtala. Please? You take Salibogo?"

  The rest of the Phoenix Force members were taken aback. Though deeply touched by the vehemence of the native's request, they recognized the complications involved. They all looked toward their headman where he worked so concentratedly — a one-armed man acting as savior to another one-armed man — waited on his reply.

  "I don't know, Salibogo," Yakov said softly. "I don't know if it would work."

  "We try?" the man pleaded, his eyes blazing with eagerness. "I make mistake, I fail you... you leave me. I ready die. If Salibogo fail, he die trying to avenge what evil Blood Doctor do to his family."

  The pronouncement touched a sympathetic nerve. And how long, in this self-seeking world, had it been since they had heard someone offer to put his life on the line, risk all for those noble values closest to the human heart? Most people granted mere lip service to the tenets of freedom and justice. But how many lifted a finger to apply these lofty ideals? Again they hung on Katz's reply.

  "Let me be, Salibogo," he snapped, his eyes angry. "I will think about it. That's all I can tell you now."

  The old man fell silent, a grateful, small smile twisting his lips. He edged away.

  Little by little the stubborn bones were chipped and snipped away. Millimeter by millimeter the necessary flaps of skin presented themselves. And now, thirty minutes later, Katzenelenbogen began to close up, using the suture thread from the medical kit. "He needs a transfusion in the worst way," he said, tying the final knot. "But how? We don't know his blood type. We don't have the equipment, anyway. I feel so helpless."

  They made the amputee swallow some penicillin tablets; the stump was dusted heavily with sulfa powder, wrapped carefully in gauze. Very groggy now, barely able to stand, the man was helped into the back of the fast attack vehicle, arranged as comfortably as possible. Looking from the amputee to Katz, the men of Phoenix Force could not recall ever being more proud of their leader.

  "Good job, Katz," McCarter said, forcing brusqueness into his tone. "Better than some hospitals I know."

  "Hardly," Katz smiled, accepting the heartfelt compliment for what it was. "But we did our best. The poor man will go crazy with pain once the morphine wears off. We'll give him what we can spare, but when that runs out..."

  Salibogo Mugunga, a small bundle of clothing and personal effects in his hand, an Arabian musket dating back a hundred years in the other, reappeared. "We go now?" he asked with a shy grin.

  "Get in," Katz said grumpily, his pinched smile betraying his real mood.

  3

  For the next two hours, with Salibogo, the injured villager and Keio in the FAV, the rest in the Land Rover, they proceeded slowly through the Libyan desert, trying to make the passage as easy as possible for their patient. Salibogo had informed them that the amputee had family in Alliat, a Kababish village located about fifty miles to the northeast; they hoped relatives there would take him off their hands.

  They paused for lunch in midafternoon, the awesome heat at full fury. Sitting on the shady side of the vehicles, they slapped the pumice-fine dust from their clothes, scrubbed their faces with bandannas pulled from around their necks. Again they forced the amputee to drink as much water as he could take; it was crucial to his condition. They tried to make him eat, but with the pain building, he refused. Quickly they began breaking out the Army C rations that they had found already loaded in the LR when it had been dropped in Africa.

  Salibogo talked of religious taboos when Keio shoved his food packet in front of him. Yakov cut him short. "You eat what we eat, understand? Otherwise we leave you in Alliat with your friend."

  Salibogo sulked briefly. "No eat. No go?" he repeated.

  "You bet your sweet ass," McCarter intervened.

  Salibogo ate. Sullenly at first, then with gusto as his hunger overcame his need to observe Muslim ritual.

  And as they ate, as they downed water and salt pills, their strength and enthusiasm returned.

  "Well, señor?" Encizo sent a mischievous sidelong glance to McCarter. "How do you like Africa so far? Do you find it as romantic and colorful as the travel brochures promised?"

  "North Africa is the shits," McCarter grumbled, "and you damn well know it."

  "Hotter than the hinges of hell," Rafael agreed.

  There was silence then, the men chewing mechanically, staring into space, batting away the swarming sarcophaga flesh flies that constantly buzzed, persistently fought to land in their eyes, tried to crawl up their nostrils. The wail of the wind, the buzz of the insects, the muffled moans from the back of the FAV gave the impression that they had reached the end of the world. Perhaps they had.

  Their mouths and noses felt as if they were stuffed with cotton, and they hawked up spit constantly. Their faces were scabbed, peeling, where the combination of wind and sand-reflected sunlight had already done its work despite all the sunscreen ointment they had plastered on their skin. Keio's ears were badly blistered because he had made light of wearing his hat until it was too late. Their noses were peeling, McCarter's especially. Katzenelenbogen, lightest-skinned of them all, had a forehead that resembled Death Valley in August.

  Looking to the west, the towering dunes in prominent outline against the muted, shimmering profile of Jebel Basira, they saw constant, blowing scrim of sand, the Sahara continuing its relentless southward advance on Chad and Sudan. To the east, in a waterless, snake-winding wadi they made out three withered acacias, the only sign of life the godforsaken landscape boasted. "And we've got eight hundred miles of this ahead of us?" Keio broke the silence.

  The sound of a slap carried as McCarter fought the sarcophaga and sand gnats. "Bugger off, you bloody bastards," he growled.

  Salibogo's head jerked up.

  "Not you, mate," McCarter waved placatingly. "These bugs I'm talking about."

  Salibogo nodded, a grin curving his lips.

  "What about him?" McCarter whispered to Yakov. "Are we really taking him along?"

  "Why not?" Yakov replied. "He's a good man. He means well. He might even save our lives one of these days. Lord knows my Arabic isn't all that sharp."

  "Fine with me," McCarter, who had taken a quick shine to the tough old man, readily agreed.

  "Same here," Rafael added. "He'll make a damned good scout. Loyal, that's for sure. He can ask questions we can't ask. We're gonna need all the help we can get in finding our tenderhearted friend, Blackwell."

  The others continued to stare into the distance.

  Hal Brognola had given a clear picture of just what kind of psycho Jeremiah Blackwell was during the Stony Man briefings four days ago. But he had not prepared them for the stomach-turning realities of the discovery at Abu Darash. His Marquis de Sade charisma, the blood-drinking — anything that might appeal to the superstitious African mentality they were apprised of. But the impalements, the destruction of an entire village...

  The grandiose adventure Blackwell had embarked upon also took some getting used to. To conquer all of Africa? To become the continent's new messiah?

  "Hey..." Gary Manning, the normally taciturn Canadian, had interrupted Brognola's briefing "...you're putting us on. Conquer Africa? Blow up the Aswan Dam?"
r />   But Brognola had not been kidding. Not at all. Even more eerie was that before he finished the comprehensive rundown, he had nearly convinced Phoenix Force that the Blood Doctor had a damned good chance of pulling the caper off. The Aswan Dam part of it anyway.

  That was where Phoenix Force came in.

  They had to find Blackwell's army, stop them short of the High Dam.

  Brognola had provided a fix on Jeremiah Blackwell, age thirty-five, former paratrooper captain, 82nd Airborne Division, a product of Caxton, Alabama, who had been a renegade ever since his first exposure to "White Man's Justice." Each new injustice and slight had been stored away, left to fester in his subconscious, brewing into a murderous dementia, an implacable hatred for "Whitey."

  When his father disappeared during the 1965 Selma, Alabama, freedom demonstrations and was later found in a stream bed just outside the city, his head literally shotgunned away, the seventeen-year-old learned a lesson that would remain with him until the day he died. The man with the gun is the man with the power. So he set out to get himself a gun. Many guns.

  He did this by enlisting in the army at eighteen, turning himself into a model soldier — gung ho, by the book in every way. Somehow, he wormed his way into one of the army's most elite substructures — the paratroopers. There had been much made, at that time, of the lack of black officers in the military. So Blackwell exploited that angle and entered officers' training. By 1978, at age thirty, he had achieved a captaincy. His superior officers had all marveled at his total dedication, his intense preoccupation with weaponry, his complete immersion in the study of tactics.

  He was a soldier's soldier.

  When, in 1979, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, of the Ghana Air Force, seized control of Ghana in a brilliant coup, Captain Jeremiah Blackwell found his role model; a new obsession was sparked in his psyche. But with important difference: where Rawlings fought an idealistic battle against wholesale corruption, Blackwell would battle for a power base alone. He would fight for ultimate power to force his warped will upon others, upon the whole world if possible.

  By then, of course, he had gone around the bend.

  Blackwell had resigned his commission in 1980. He had gone to Africa to begin establishment of his new kingdom on earth. He had received baptism of fire as a merc during the Angola-Zaire border conflicts. The experience served him well, honed his insights into African psychology. Rawlings's persuasive skills paled into insignificance when compared to Blackwell's mesmerizing approach.

  Blackwell knew how to rally the black man. His siren call was based on trading on terror for terror's sake — he promised opportunity to practice cruelty beyond all bounds of human decency. Revenge, endless bloodshed were all theirs if they enlisted in the Black Cobras, if they joined his infamous crusade.

  Vindictive, exploited blacks bought it sight unseen. They flocked to his cause in droves.

  There are ghouls who will sell their souls for that kind of cane blanche.

  These ghouls soon formed the nucleus of Blackwell's officer cadre. And they, in turn, were shortly seduced by other truly professional ghouls, recruiters for Cuba's Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI), infiltrating Africa in force to foment mischief for Russia's KGB. Blackwell and his officers had been dispatched to a terrorist-guerrilla university at Hauf, in South Yemen.

  Even here Blackwell had managed to turn the tables on the Cubanos; he became exploiter, not exploitee. And where they intended to dispatch him on DGI missions in the Middle East, Blackwell had ideas of his own. One day he was in Yemen, the next he was back in Africa, deep inside Nigeria and Chad, regathering his forces.

  Not only did he return with weapons, with the latest guerrilla techniques, he also returned with inside lines to the various African networks. He knew just which buttons to press to get the ear of the Rejection Front, the Polisarios, even top officials in Moammar Khaddafi's far-flung network. He would play one against the other, like pawns on Satan's chessboard. But he was not finished with the Cubans; they would also return to dance to his tune when he said so.

  "The incredible thing..." Hal Brognola had finished that segment of their briefing "...is that Khaddafi, all those other guys bought it, lock, stock and barrel. They actually put up five million dollars for that bag of smoke. Not to mention weapons, ammo, vehicles for his campaign."

  "Un-bloody-believable," McCarter gasped. "What in hell do Khaddafi and all the rest think they're going to gain by it?"

  There was, Brognola went on, certainly no love lost between Khaddafi and Jaafar al-Nemery, president of Sudan. As they well knew. Nor between Khaddafi and Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president. Both had gone against Libya with their continuing support of the Israeli peace offensive as signed by Anwar Sadat back in 1978. "We all know what the Rejection Front did to Sadat."

  Nemery and Mubarak, though their nations were joined in a mutual defense pact, were very restless bedfellows. Each president had reasons for distrusting the other. Khaddafi had been increasingly itchy for invasion of Sudan of late; only the presence of U.S. AWACS in Egypt, the naval power standing off the Gulf of Sidra was holding him in check.

  And so, to kill two birds with one stone...

  Blackwell's troops would infiltrate Sudan, stage an attack across Egypt's border, smash the Aswan. The destruction of the dam would cause disaster to the Egyptian economy, render the nation totally vulnerable to wholesale Rejection Front uprisings. Mubarak and his government would fall.

  At the same time the desired Egypt-Sudan conflict would take place, and Khaddafi and company would come out of it with clean hands. The Egyptians, assuming that Blackwell had deliberately been given asylum in Sudan, or even that the treacherous al-Nemery had hired Blackwell himself, would declare war on Sudan.

  "And just how does Blackwell propose to destroy the Aswan?" Manning had interjected. "That is one immense hunk of engineering. The biggest rock-fill dam in the world."

  "We have to assume they will attack under cover of darkness," Brognola had responded. "Otherwise why the three hundred troopers? They'll seize the dam, rig high power explosives in crucial areas, and there she goes."

  "Could they bomb it? Use a missile perhaps?" Manning asked.

  "Highly unlikely," Brognola said. "They could, of course. But the question remains, why bother with the overland operation then? Why the miniarmy?"

  "Tidy, very tidy," Colonel Yakov Katzenelenbogen mused. "Perhaps it's a bit too tidy. Why don't we just warn the Egyptian government that a raid is imminent, let them handle it themselves?"

  "The term is tinderbox," Brognola had replied with a dour smile. "The CIA's intelligence has established that the roofs ready to blow off that part of Africa. All it will take is one small vibration."

  "Which is?"

  "Intelligence on either side that a secret force, read Jeremiah Blackwell, is in Sudan. Al-Nemery, in Sudan, will go off half-cocked against Khaddafi. Mubarak, in Egypt, will be at al-Nemery's throat. You can't begin to appreciate how precarious the situation is. One little explosion will set off a chain reaction that could easily trigger World War III. Undoubtedly America would be committed to maintain the status quo, and the moment that first Tomcat leaves the Nimitz, that's the moment the Soviets come in."

  "So?"

  "So it's a totally undercover operation. Once we drop you guys in Chad, you're absolutely on your own. End of communication. If you run out of supplies you live off the land. It's Phoenix Force and Phoenix Force alone. Only if Blackwell breaks out, closes in on the Aswan, will you be allowed to break radio silence, bounce a Mayday off one of our nearest satellites." His expression had become grave. "We are hoping that you get Blackwell first, that it doesn't get that close. How we'll salvage the operation if the dam does blow, I have no idea.

  "This is your most dangerous assignment thus far. Mack Bolan is counting on you."

  Six hours later Phoenix had lifted off from Stony Man's camouflaged airstrip, headed for Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. From there they had crossed th
e Atlantic in a Lockheed S-3A Viking, with a fueling stop at Lajes Field in the Azores. Thence on to Torrejon, a USAF-NATO base in Spain, where there had been a final briefing on the extra armor that Stony Man's armorer Andrzej Konzaki had designated for placement on their cross-country vehicles.

  And finally, almost twenty hours after leaving Colonel John Phoenix's hideaway outside of Washington, D.C., they were airlifted by Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk helicopter to a Chad drop site one hundred fifty miles northeast of Fada. Under cover of an ink-murky darkness, they had been dropped with pinpoint accuracy behind a monstrous sand dune. There, totally vulnerable and unprotected — delivered by a Boeing-Vertol CH-47 Chinook — the prestocked Land Rover and the FAV sat waiting for them.

  A half hour later, Phoenix Force's private arsenal unloaded from the Black Hawk, and they were on the prowl. Cautiously they had closed in on the area where the Black Cobras had last been spotted by local counteragents.

  A fruitless sweep had now brought them to this charming picnic grounds, where the men of Phoenix now finished lunch. Momentarily, as the last of their gear was packed, they paused to regard the FAV — a dune buggy actually, resembling a shallow bathtub on wheels — which they had dragged behind them for the past hundred ten miles.

  With jaundiced smiles they considered the canvas-shrouded Mark 19 MOD-3 40mm machine gun mounted on the fast attack vehicle. Newly developed by the MarineCorps, it would soon receive its baptism of fire.

  The 75.6-pound MG was capable of firing four hundred rounds of grenade cartridges per minute. With a sixteen-hundred-meter range, it could throw the most vicious flesh-shredders known to man. It had been chosen by Konzaki as the weapon to even out the sixty-to-one odds Phoenix faced against Blackwell's force.

  The fast attack vehicle was another innovative weapon Konzaki had insisted upon. Designed by Emerson Corporation and just off the testing grounds, it had a flatland speed of seventy-five miles per hour. Powered by high-charge batteries, it could approach a firebase in spooky silence and take the enemy by total surprise — a decided tactical bonus. The electronics wizards at Stony Man had seen that installation of a series of polycrystalline-celled solar panels — plus special booster circuits — had been made. If the Libyan desert had anything, it had sun; thus the batteries would always be at peak charge.