Best to avoid the trees entirely, if he could, and drop into a clearing when he found one. If he found one.
While Bolan looked for an LZ, he also watched for people on the ground below him. Beating radar scanners with his HALO drop didn’t mean he was free and clear, if someone saw him falling from the sky and passed word on to the army or MOPOL, the mobile police branch of Nigeria’s national police force.
Bolan wouldn’t fire on police—a self-imposed restriction he’d adopted at the onset of his one-man war against the Mafia a lifetime earlier—and he hadn’t dropped in from the blue to play tag in the jungle with a troop of soldiers who’d be pleased to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.
Better by far if he was left alone to go about his business unobstructed.
Bolan saw a clearing up ahead, two hundred yards and closing. He adjusted his direction and descent accordingly, hung on and watched the mossy earth come up to meet him in a rush.
GRIMALDI DIDN’T like the plan, but, hey, what else was new? Each time he ferried Bolan to another drop zone, he experienced the fear that this might be their last time out together, that he’d never see the warrior’s solemn face again.
And that he’d be to blame.
Not in the sense of taking out his oldest living friend, but rather serving Bolan up to those who would annihilate him without thinking twice. A kind of Meals on Wings for cannibals.
That was ridiculous, of course. Grimaldi knew it with the portion of his mind that processed rational, sequential thoughts. But knowing and believing were sometimes very different things.
Granted, he could have begged off, passed the job to someone else, but what would that accomplish? Nothing beyond handing Bolan to a stranger who would get him to the slaughterhouse on time, without a fare-thee-well. At least Grimaldi understood what had been asked of Bolan, every time his friend took on another mission that could be his last.
The morbid turn of thought left the ace pilot disgusted with himself. He tried to shake it off, whistled a snatch of something tuneless for a moment, then gave up on that and watched the Gulf of Guinea passing underneath him. Were the people in the boats craning their necks, tracking his engine sounds and following his progress overhead? Was one of them, perhaps, a watcher who had seen the Beechcraft earlier, reported it to other watchers on dry land, and now logged his return?
It was a possibility, of course, but there was nothing he could do about it. Radar would have marked his plane’s arrival in Nigerian airspace and tracked him to the inland point where he had turned. The natural assumption would be that he’d dropped something or someone; the mystery only began there.
Or, at least, so he was hoping.
Nigeria imported and exported drugs. According to reports Grimaldi had seen from the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Colombian cocaine and heroin from Afghanistan came in via South Africa, while home-grown marijuana was exported by the ton. Police, as usual, bagged ten percent or more of the illicit cargoes flowing back and forth across their borders, when they weren’t hired to protect the shipments.
So, they might think he had dropped a load of drugs.
And then what?
It was sixty-forty that they’d order someone to investigate the theoretical drop zone, which meant relaying orders from headquarters to some outpost in the field. Maybe the brass in Lagos would reach out to their subordinates in Warri, who in turn would form a squad to roll out, have a look around, then report on what they found.
Which should be nothing.
If they went looking for drugs, they’d check the area where Grimaldi had turned his plane, then backtrack for a while along his flight path, coming or going, to see if they’d missed anything. There were no drugs to find, so they’d go home empty-handed and pissed off at wasting their time.
But if they weren’t looking for drugs…
He knew the search might be conducted differently if the Nigerians went looking for intruders. Whether they were educated on HALO techniques or not, they had to know that men manipulating parachutes could travel farther than a bale of cargo dropping from the sky, and that the men, once having landed, wouldn’t wait around for searchers to locate them.
It would be a different game, then, with a different cast of players. MOPOL still might be involved, but it was also possible that Bolan could be up against the State Security Service, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the competing National Intelligence Agency. The SSS was Nigeria’s FBI, in effect, widely accused of domestic political repression, while the NIA was equivalent to America’s CIA, and the DIA handled military intelligence.
In the worst-case scenario, Grimaldi supposed that all three agencies might decide to investigate his drop-in, with MOPOL agents thrown in for variety. And how many hunters could Bolan evade before his luck ran out?
Grimaldi’s long experience with Bolan, starting as a kidnap “victim” and continuing thereafter as a friend and willing ally, had taught him not to underestimate the Executioner’s abilities. No matter what the odds arrayed against him, the Sarge had always managed to emerge victorious.
So far.
But he was only human, after all.
One hell of a human, for sure, but still human.
Grimaldi trusted Bolan to succeed, no matter the task he was assigned. But if he fell along the way, revenge was guaranteed.
The pilot swore it on his soul, whatever that was worth.
He didn’t know jackshit about Nigeria, beyond the obvious. It was a state in Africa, beset by poverty—yet oil rich—disease and chaos verging on the point of civil war, where he would stand out like a sore white thumb. But the official language was English, because of former colonial rule, so he wouldn’t be stranded completely.
And if Bolan didn’t make it out, Grimaldi would be going on a little hunting trip.
An African safari, right.
He owed the big guy that, at least.
And Jack Grimaldi always paid his debts.
TOUCHDOWN WAS better than Bolan had any right to expect after stepping out of an airplane and plummeting more than 24,000 feet to Earth. He bent his knees, tucked and rolled as they’d taught him at Green Beret jump school back in the old days, and came up with only a few minor bruises to show for the leap.
Only bruises so far.
Step two was covering his tracks and getting out of there before some hypothetical pursuer caught his scent and turned his drop into a suicide mission.
Bolan took it step by step, with all due haste. He shed the parachute harness first thing, along with his combat webbing and weapons. Next, he stripped off the jumpsuit that had saved him from frostbite while soaring, but which now felt like a baked potato’s foil wrapper underneath the Nigerian sun. That done, he donned the combat rigging once again and went to work.
Fourth step, reel in the parachute and all its lines, compacting same into the smallest bundle he could reasonably manage. That done, he unsheathed his folding shovel and began to dig.
It didn’t have to be a deep grave, necessarily. Just deep enough to hide his jumpsuit, helmet, bottled oxygen and mask, the chute and rigging. If some kind of nylon-eating scavenger he’d never heard of came along and dug it up that night, so be it. Bolan would be long gone by that time, his mission either a success or a resounding, fatal failure.
More than depth, he would require concealment for the burial, in case someone came sniffing after him within the next few hours. To that end, he dug his dump pit in the shadow of a looming mahogany some thirty paces from the clearing where he’d landed, and spent precious