Don Pendleton - Trial By Fire

Metard cast his eyes down.

Hudjak frowned. “So if there are no carriers in range, where did you come from?”

“Where do you think?”

“You parachuted in.”

“You think?”

“From where?”

Bolan gave the hulking cadet a pointed look.

“South Africa?”

Bolan nodded.

“Why were you in South Africa?”

“That’s three questions, Huge.”

Cadet Hudjak smiled. “Sorry, Sarge. I beg forgiveness and ask that my multiple questions not impose on Snake’s rights of inquiry.”

Shelby gave the guy a winning smile.

“Forgiven. You got a question, Snake?”

“So we’re walking out of here, Sarge?”

“That is the long and short of it.”

Visible alarm spread down the line. King almost raised his hand and stopped himself. “Sarge?”

“Donger?”

“What happened?”

“You tell me.”

King did some math. “Terrorists figured out that the son of a U.S. senator was on a private flight to an international military leadership seminar in South Africa. They decided to shoot us down.”

“Look at him go,” Bolan said.

“And those…guys—” King shuddered “—who found us are not them. Who were they?”

Shelby spoke quietly. “I did a paper on the Congo Wars last quarter. Those guys were tribal militia, rebels…or worse.”

“Last call.” Bolan looked up and down the group. “Anyone else?”

Rudipu perked up. “Sarge?”

“Rude?”

“Do you always answer a question with a question?”

The ghost of a smile passed across Bolan’s face. “No.”

A few nervous laughs broke out. “Cold camp tonight. I don’t want any fires giving us away. Divvy up the food from the plane. Sandwiches, power bars, whatever snacks you brought with you. Eat half now, save the rest for breakfast. Long day tomorrow, and we’re going to have to start catching whatever we eat real soon.”

Bolan turned before a new round of questions started and went over to the crew. The copilot was in bad shape. His broken legs were swollen and smelled. There was nothing to be done about the bullets in his guts. “How’s he doing?”

The flight attendant just managed to choke back a sob.

The copilot opened red-rimmed eyes. They were lucid as he surveyed Bolan. He spoke in about the thickest Australian drawl Bolan had ever heard. “Heard your palaver with the kids, then. Reckon you got a nickname for me, too?”

Bolan gave the dying man a grin. “You prefer Bullet-stop or Brittle-bones?”

The copilot grimaced good-naturedly as a rale passed through his lungs, “You know it hurts when I laugh, then.”

The flight attendant mopped the bloody spittle from the copilot’s mouth. “And me? Do I get a name, too?”

“What is your name?”

The woman looked steadily into Bolan’s eyes. “Roos von Kwakkenbos.”

“The Rudester has nothing on you, and you and Hudjak may be related.”

Von Kwakkenbos laughed. “And?”

“We’re just going to stick with Blondie.” Bolan turned his attention back to the copilot. “How you doing?”

The copilot turned to Von Kwakkenbos. “Reckon you should take a look at the kids, get some tucker while the getting is good.”

The woman gave the copilot a long look and went to join the cadets.

Copilot Pieter Llewellyn sighed, and there was a bad gurgle at the end of it. “Reckon I’m done, then. It’s at least 150 klicks to the border.”

“The cadets are willing to carry you. So am I.”

“Fine bunch of lads. ’Preciate it. But those dipsticks following us? You’re not going to beat them in a footrace, specially toting my carcass about. ’Sides, we both know I’m gonna cark it long before we ever reach Uganda. Guess there’s nothing to be done.”

“I could give you some more morphine,” Bolan countered.

The copilot perked up. “Aw, that’d be bonzer, mate!”

Bolan readied an injector from the plane’s kit. “You know, you’re the only Australian I know who actually uses that word.”

“Well, then, you’ve never been to Maralinga, then, have you? There’s an—” Pieter’s eyes just about rolled back in his head as the morphine flooded his veins. “Aww, beauty…”

“Would you believe me if I said I had?” Bolan asked.

“Believe almost anything you tell me at the moment.”

“You saw what they did to the pilot.”

Pieter’s eyes hardened through the morphine haze. “Bill was always a bit of an asshole, but he didn’t deserve that.”

“Listen, if we bury you, they’re most likely going to dig you up.”

“Well, that’ll waste a little of their time, then, won’t it?” Pieter asked.

“Yeah, but then they’ll probably eat you.”

“Hope they choke.” Pieter grinned past his bloody teeth. “Or at least get indigestion.”

Bolan smiled. The copilot was a brave man.

“Well, your choice, then, mate. Burn me, bury me, leave me for the dipsticks. Reckon I’m fine with any of it.”

“Mighty reasonable of you, Pieter.” Bolan nodded. “How would you feel about all three?”

Arua, Uganda

Alireza Rhage looked out of his office window across the sea of lights just outside Arua proper. The constellations of campfires were a cosmos of misery. The twinkling lights were the result of thousands of refugees burning whatever flammable garbage they could find. Arua was swollen with those who had fled the internecine fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan. The refugee camps were swiftly becoming suburban shantytowns rife with violence and despair.

They were fertile recruiting grounds.

Ostensibly Rhage was a businessman investing in Uganda’s northern tea cultivation. Years of corruption and warfare had turned that industry into a shadow of what it once was. In his year and a half as a tea exporter, agricultural attaché Rhage had never turned a dime of profit. That was of no consequence. In reality, Captain Rhage was an exporter, and what he exported had reaped untold dividends in blood and human misery.

Rhage turned to his personal secretary. “You say there has been no report of a crash, and Flight 499 never arrived at Wonderboom Airport in Pretoria?”

Sergeant Major Pakzad shook his head. “No, Captain.”

“Have there been any reported emergency landings?”

“There have been seven emergency landings by private planes reported in sub-Saharan Africa within Flight 499’s flight window, Captain, but none was reported by Flight 499.”

“Given the nature of the emergency, could they have landed under false identification?”

“That is possible, of course, but none of the emergency landings recorded in the last forty-eight hours were made within reasonable distance of Flight 499’s flight path.”

“Does it strike you as odd, Sergeant Major, that a private flight full of American military cadets, one of them the son of a United States senator, appears to have disappeared without a trace?”

Pakzad smiled with pride. “Well, Captain. We did shoot it down.”

Rhage smiled in return. It had been Sergeant Major Pakzad’s plan. He was a brilliant intelligence officer. He and his staff constantly processed information and devised scenarios. In the sergeant major’s fertile mind, Flight 499 and its passengers had gone from a nonactionable item of mild interest to an opportunity. “Yet, no international outcry. No rescue or salvage mission mounted that we know of. What does that tell you?”

“It says that perhaps the crash occurred in a place the United States cannot easily reach. A bad place, where they have no assets. So they are keeping the situation quiet.”

“Which implies that the cadets may be alive.”