"Give 'em an inch and they'll take a yard!" the wiseacres used to say. And in the next breath they would add: "Give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves!"
Like so many proverbs, these old saws, containing the equally proverbial grain of truth, are based on a shrewd knowledge of the frailties of human nature. For it is sadly true that our mores, the codes of behavior of our so-called civilization that are supposed to separate us from the beasts of the field, once ignored, slide more and more easily, more and more rapidly to the back of our consciousness. This may be, as the psychologists say, because the code is itself man-made, a convenient barricade to protect us from the worst of our own instincts; it may be because, being arbitrary and imposed rather than stemming from our deeper natures, there is that much more temptation to give in and evade the responsibilities inherent in the code. But wherever the truth lies, it is certainly true that after that first fateful step it becomes increasingly easy to "break the rules".
And this holds good in the vast majority of cases despite what may be perfectly genuine intention not to transgress. The road to hell to borrow a third proverb from the past is paved with such good intentions; the slope down from the Primrose Path (to paraphrase a fourth) becomes increasingly more slippery.
The Counterfeit Virgin is a modern cautionary tale exemplifying the truth of these age-old dicta. Its heroine, the voluptuous redhead Hannah Beardsley, has already transgressed one of society's rules by starting a turbid affair with the tough adventurer, Mark Randall. Although they are not married, they live together. When, to take Hannah's mind off the horrors of an air disaster they witness, Mark allows her to become involved with a beautiful airline stewardess, trouble is already in the air. But then Randall himself becomes innocently involved in the complexities of a Middle Eastern intrigue, and Hannah already adrift on a sea of moral uncertainty is very nearly lost.
Author Dan Campbell charts the course of their efforts to free themselves from the ensuing web of murder, rape, kidnapping, torture and spine-chilling chases through the desert with gripping intensity.
This is a tough book and a violent one but there is a lesson in it for everyone who imagines they can flout the rules of society with impunity.
-The Publishers
CHAPTER ONE
As Mark Randall twisted his key in the lock and swung open the door of his Paris apartment, the night exploded in a blast of searing agony. Glimpsed in the light from the fourth-floor corridor, the three squat figures lurking in his hallway hurled themselves upon him and jerked him savagely forward into the shadows. He saw the dull gleam of leather covering the blackjacks in their raised hands as the door was kicked shut, and then they were on him, clubbing viciously at his unprotected head and shoulders in the dark.
Randall was slightly drunk or he would have reacted more quickly. As it was, he was beaten to his knees under a hail of blows before his brain could telegraph his muscles to take evasive action and then hit back.
Fighting desperately to struggle free of the waves of pain that threatened to engulf him, he went limp, dropped face downwards on the carpeted floor and rolled to one side. Relieved for a moment from the paralyzing assault of the three blackjacks, his shoulders struck against legs, and one of the attackers staggered and fell heavily. A moment later Randall was hauling himself groggily upright in the blackness with his back to the wall.
For an instant there was complete silence. A car swished down the rain-swept street outside the apartment block towards the Champs Elysees. And warm breath played gently on Randall's cheek.
He tensed. Then, whirling to his left, he swung his right fist around in a murderous hook that sank into something soft. There was a gasping cry and someone folded forward across his body. Randall jerked up his knee and felt it connect sickeningly with flesh and bone. The cry was repeated, falling towards his feet. One of the intruders at least would have a smashed nose as a souvenir of the attack, he thought grimly.
But the noise had given away his position. As the two fallen men struggled upright, the third leaped forward and pain flamed up into Randall's skull as the cosh thudded brutally into the muscle at the base of his neck. Gasping, he kicked out, felt his heel jar against a moving obstacle, and ducked as the blackjack thwacked fiercely into the wall behind him. A savage blow numbed his forearm; another slammed like a bolt of lightning into his ribs.
Gritting his teeth, he lashed blindly into the dark with fists and feet as the three anonymous attackers moved in close and flailed remorselessly at his weaving body.
For awhile, as heavy feet tramped thunderously over the creaking boards beneath the carpet and harsh breathing gasped into the blackness, he held his own. But then, unbalanced by a looping, roundhouse left that only connected with air, he staggered away from the wall. . . and the world erupted in crimson fire as two coshes cracked simultaneously against his skull.
Striving frantically to battle clear of the suffocating agony hammering at his consciousness, Randall struck out again. His bruised knuckles scraped along a stubbled jaw. And then, as he pitched forward, steel-toed boots joined the blackjacks battering at his defenseless body, and the night cracked apart into a ringing red silence into which he fell, turning giddily over and over, without trace.
He regained consciousness with the grit in the pile of carpet harsh against his lacerated cheek. For a moment he lay panting, while the clamor in his head died down. Brakes squealed in the street outside and someone shouted something unintelligible. There was a cold draught chilling his shoulders. Shivering uncontrollably, he levered himself warily to his feet.
He stood swaying in the dark, his head turning blindly towards the source of the draught. Then he lurched into the living room. The French window was open and the drapes, bellying in with the breeze, gleamed in the dim light reflected up from the street. Below the narrow balcony, the wet iron of the fire escape zigzagged down to the area in back of the building. Evidently the intruders had escaped that way.
Randall dragged himself to the bathroom, switched on the light, vomited, and then, turning the faucet full on, plunged his head and shoulders beneath the spray over the tub.
Afterwards, still breathing heavily, he straightened up and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. Christ! he thought. What a mess! What a lousy goddamn mess!
Randall was six feet tall and his lean, hard-muscled body weighed 180 pounds. He still looked tough, but the rakish lines of his face were blurred with contusions and his lips were swollen. The skin of his temple was split and rivulets of blood, diluted by the spray, streaked the plane of one cheek. There were egg-sized lumps thrusting up the dark drenched hair matting his scalp. His left eye was half-closed and already turning purple. Below his ripped jacket, one knee of his pants was spattered with the blood of the man whose nose he had smashed.
He shook his head, wincing as pain throbbed through his skull. How long had he been out. . . and what had the intruders got away with?
Switching on all the lights, he checked the whole apartment. Five minutes later, slumped in a chair by the open window, he splashed four ounces of Rye whiskey into a tumbler and ran his fingers through his wet hair. The burglary didn't make sense!
His packed bags he was due to leave Paris later that evening had been emptied and the contents neatly piled on the floor. But there appeared to be nothing missing. The Hasselblad camera, still in its case, was on top of a pile of shirts. The Zeiss binoculars stood beside it. The movie camera was on the bed where he had left it. The drawers of the dressing table had not been opened, and the diamond cuff links and gold rings he had thrown carelessly on top before he went out were undisturbed. Yet as the intruders he had so obviously interrupted had managed to knock him out, why had they not stayed long enough to take whatever they had come for?
What had they come for anyway? It must have been a simple robbery. It wasn't after all as though Mark Randall was an undercover agent or anything romantic like that!
He had certainly knocked about the world a bit. An adventurer since high school in Seattle-he had skippered sail boats in the Caribbean, flown arms into central Africa, and run contraband east of the Iron Curtain. Once he had even been a bouncer at a dubious nightclub in Saigon. But now, at the age of 30, he had settled down a little. At present he was acting as advance production manager for an American movie company; he was to fly to Senegal that night to dope out locations and obtain the necessary permissions for a wartime epic to be shot there later in the year. It was not, therefore, as it might have been in the old days, when there could have been information of use to someone hidden in the apartment.
So the only motive anyone could have for breaking in must be robbery. Yet the mystery remained: Why, once they had effectively disposed of him, had they taken nothing?
He looked at his watch. It was over an hour since he had left the farewell party at Harry's Bar. He had gotten a cab at once and come straight home, so he must have been out cold for all of thirty minutes. They would have had plenty of time.
But Christ! he didn't have plenty of time . . . not if he was to re-pack and get to Orly airport in time to make that plane! He'd have to forget the puzzle for the moment and get going!
He swallowed the rest of the whiskey and got shakily to his feet, his head aching like hell. He'd have to change his clothes and have a shower before he left, make himself presentable enough to meet Hannah and he'd promised her faithfully that he wouldn't be late. Not this time.
Hannah was a doll . . . but like most redheads she had a fiery temper, and it wouldn't do to keep her waiting in the sterile wastes of Orly's check-in foyer!
First things first, though. He'd better get those goddamn bags re-packed before he thought about his appearance! He could always fix himself up at the airport if necessary, but he couldn't fix his baggage there. He stood swaying slightly in the bedroom, staring at the piles of clothing and wondering where to start.
If only he hadn't had that last drink with the boys, maybe his mind would have been a little clearer! But then he'd gone to Harry's Bar thinking he was all packed up and ready to go: For once he was ahead of schedule; all he had to do was collect the two suitcases and take off. He hadn't bargained on having to do the whole damned thing over!
Sighing, he began methodically to replace the stacks of clothing littering the floor. In a few minutes the Rye began working its wonders within him and he was back in top gear again.
He zipped up one bag and picked up the last item to go in the other a crimson silk bathrobe heavily embroidered in gold. It was one of his few sartorial extravagances, the trophy of a disreputable adventure with an ex-Geisha girl in Hong Kong, smothered in dragons and temples and Chinese characters . . . or maybe they were Japanese. He couldn't read the goddamn things anyway! This Geisha girl had told him, though, that the characters told of the fate of a young princess who had pretended to be a virgin. As a counterfeit virgin she had lost her head to the executioner.
Folding the garment against his chest, he paused. There was something not quite right about it; something that didn't jibe. Plunging his hand into the pocket of the robe he abruptly realized what it was.
Randall had a super-lightweight, battery-operated shaver that he'd bought in Tokyo. He always slipped it into the pocket of the robe when he packed. He remembered doing so earlier this evening. But now the shaver was gone.
Frowning, he checked the dressing-table, the bathroom, the other valise. There was no sign of the missing shaver and anyway he was certain he'd put it in its usual place in the pocket before he left for Harry's Bar. The bastards must have taken it!
Imagine that! Those bums had left jewelry, cameras, binoculars and expensive clothes untouched but they had stolen a plastic-covered gadget you could pick up anywhere in Tokyo for a few dollars! What kind of burglars were those, for God's sakes?
Dropping the robe into the bag, he closed the lid and shrugged. He'd pick up another shaver at the airport store and worry about it some other time. Right now he had better things to do!
* * *
like many tough men, Mark Randall liked his women fragile and feminine. Petite, 20 year old Hannah Beardsley was both of those things . . . and a hell of a lot else besides a voluptuous five feet three inches of female dynamite that was as well stacked as anything Mark had seen in his life. And he had seen plenty!
The concourse of the airport terminal at Orly was crowded, but he picked her out at once as he paid off the cab and walked through the sliding glass doors. She was wearing a mushroom-colored suede traveling suit with a short skirt and high boots. The pale, rich material was a perfect foil for the cascades of glossy red hair tumbling over her shoulders, and the tight-waisted jacket did nothing to conceal the taut fullness of the high-set breasts that swelled out so provocatively above her tiny waist. Jesus! Randall thought as he hurried towards her. I sure got myself something there!
Hannah was standing by the UTA check-in desk, tapping one slender foot impatiently as she stared up at the revolving clock beneath the high modernistic ceiling. There was still all of three minutes to go before the flight was closed and it was obvious that with each elapsing second her temper was growing shorter.
Mark approached her from behind, dropped his bags on the floor, and grabbed her slim shoulders to spin her around facing him.
"Mark!" she cried in her low throaty voice. "You scared me! D'you know what time it is? Your promised . . . Oh, my God, darling! What happened to you?" Her green eyes were staring at him in alarm.
For the first time since he had left the center of Paris, Randall remembered what a mess he must look. His hand rose defensively to touch his battered face and he grinned shamefacedly. "I got into a bit of a hassle with some guys who busted into the apartment. Sneak thieves, I guess. No problem though: They didn't take anything. Tell you all about it later."
"But Mark you're hurt!"
"It's nothing. C'mon, honey: Those planes don't wait for you!" Picking up Hannah's suitcase with his own bags, he strode across to the desk.
The blue-uniformed, enameled blonde looked up as he gave her his name. "Mr. Randall? Just a moment there's a telegram for you."
Frowning, Mark slipped the carrying strap of the movie camera from his shoulder and slit open the flimsy blue form. "Well how d'you like that!" he exclaimed, staring at the strips of teletyped lettering pasted to it. "If that isn't just like a movie company! I'll be damned!"
Hannah was holding onto his arm. "Is there something wrong?" she enquired.
Wordlessly, he handed her the telegram. She read :
SENEGAL OUT STOP SHOOTING SWITCHED TO SUDAN STOP PLEASE TAKE PLANE TO KHARTOUM STOP RESERVATION MADE FOR YOU HOTEL EXCELSIOR WILL CALL YOU THERE EXPLAIN STOP REGARDS-SOLOMONS.
"I don't understand," the redhead said. "Who's Solomons? Why do you have to go to the Sudan, of all places? What happened?"
"Search me!" Randall replied, shrugging. "It happens all the time in the movie business. Mervyn Solomons is the producer who hired me. I guess he ran up against some snag in Senegal. Maybe he couldn't get permission to make the movie unless he hired a percentage of local labor, something of that sort. But Merv likes to use American crews so he switched the whole scene some place else."
"But why the Sudan . . . ? "
"Don't ask me! That's show business! The story's supposed to take place in the western desert during the war. Could be there's scenery in the Sudan that matches the locations they'd chosen in Senegal. We'll find out when we get there." He turned back to the girl behind the desk. "Seems like there's no point in our checking in for that flight now," he smiled.
"D'you know if there's a flight to Khartoum tonight?"
"I think there's one just before midnight-but you'll have to check with Reservations, over by the Air France information desk," she said, handing him back the tickets.
There was a plane leaving at 2350, and there were seats available. Mark changed the tickets and checked their baggage into the cloakroom. They had almost two hours to wait. "We might as well go up to one of the lounges and sink a few," he suggested. The change of plan didn't bother him: He was used to being switched around at a moment's notice. And what the hell he was fiddling a free holiday for his girl on the company expense sheet, and Solomons had okayed the idea! What did it matter where the bed was, so long as Hannah was in it beside him!
He shivered with anticipation, visualizing the warmly clinging length of her naked voluptuousness straining against his body, and the material of his pants tightened against his thigh as the familiar tingling feeling invaded his belly and his penis involuntarily began to harden.
They found a table by the huge smoked glass windows in the first-floor V.I.P. lounge and sat nursing king-sized highballs as they stared out over the concrete apron at the dark wastes of the airfield beyond. It was still raining, and the lights of coaches, trucks and kerosene refuelers cast long wavering streamers of brilliance across the wet tarmac. To their right, the glistening silver shapes of the big jets were ranked like giant humming birds, their needle-like noses deep into the loading gates.
They watched a baggage train crawl away from beneath the wing of a DC8. As the huge jetliner was backed off by a tractor which finally released it so the plane could lumber slowly out towards the main runway, the PA speakers chimed and a honey-voiced announcer intoned in three languages: "UTA announces the departure of their Flight 903 for Nice and Dakar.. . I 'UTA announcent le depart du Vol Neuf Cent Zero Trois pour Nice et Dakar. . . "
"That must be ours," Randall said, jerking his head towards the four-jet plane as it dwindled in the dark. "Or at least it should have been ours if it hadn't been for dear Merv!"
"Never mind," Hannah said. "It's warmer in the Sudan and the liquor's good here!"
Idly, they gazed at the jet as it reached the perimeter, swung round to face south-west, and began to move smoothly down the runway. They could hear the scream of its motors clear through the double glass. The searchlights threw pools of brightness on the darkly speeding ground; the indentification beacon winked redly above the fuselage, rose to head steeply up into the night and then suddenly everyone in the lounge was on their feet screaming . . .
A monstrous ball of fire bloomed horribly above the runway, crimsoned at the center, and then exploded outwards in a shower of incandescent fragments that seemed to strew the entire horizon with flame. The main body of the blazing wreckage had already crashed to the ground in an inferno of white-hot metal before the thunderous detonation of the explosion stammered the big windows of the lounge in their frames.
Mark and Hannah stood stock still in the middle of the chaos of distraught relatives and friends, distressed observers of the catastrophe, and frantic officials milling around in the lounge. They were gaping through the glass at the urgently flashing blue and red beacons of the ambulances and fire trucks screaming towards the wreck, and the outer ring of tiny figures running, converging ant-like on the blaze straddling the runway.
Hannah was trembling. "Mark," she whispered. "I . . . we . . . we were supposed to have been on that plane; we could have been . . . have been in that . . . " She broke off, shuddering, and covered her face with her hands.
"You don't have to tell me," Mark said shakily, his eyes fixed on the giant billows of flame marbled with black smoke that flickered eerily across the racing firefighters.
"Will there be . . . ? Could anyone have . . . ? "
"Escaped? From that?" He shook his head. "Not a chance, honey. They were about two hundred and fifty feet up, on full boost, flying at a couple of hundred miles an hour, and . . . bang! She went up in one go. Disintegrated. They wouldn't have known what hit 'em."
"B-b-but what could have happened?"
He shrugged. "You tell me. Fuel leak. Sabotage. Electrical failure. A single spark in the wrong place can start a thing like that when you have a full load of fuel on board."
"Oh," she sobbed. "Oh, darling . . . it's awful!"
Randall patted her shoulder and said soberly. "There's nothing we can do. We'd better take on a fullish load ourselves give us a little Dutch courage for the flight we do take!"
The lounge had cleared. The crowd had either rushed out or lined the big windows to watch the fruitless salvage attempts around the inferno out there in the night. He carried their glasses across the deserted floor, went behind the untenanted bar, and splashed out generous measures of Rye. "Drink it up quick and I'll fix you another," he said as he returned to the table and sat down with his back to the windows. "We got to get this thing off our minds some way . . . "
Three drinks later, Mark looked at his watch and rose a little unsteadily to his feet. Behind them the panic had subsided and the conflagration had reduced itself to isolated areas of wreckage that glowed and flickered behind the dense ring of rescuers. "Time we checked in," he said thickly. "I'll go get the baggage and take it to the desk. See you down there?"
It was in the men's room that the second attack took place.
The long line of tiled washbasins was deserted. The place was silent except for the soft rumble of the air-conditioning inhaling and exhaling the scented warm air. Randall had filled a basin with hot water and was lowering his head towards the steaming surface when he saw from the corner of his eye a movement in the mirror.
Two men had entered the washroom. It was only when he had raised his hands to splash water on his face that his eyes telegraphed too late the information that there was something unusual about the new arrivals. For a split second of time he wondered what it was . . . and then, like a comedian executing a double-take, he realized: As they let the hydraulically closed door sigh shut, they had been pulling nylon stockings over their heads! But by this time a steel hand had gripped the back of his neck and forced his face remorselessly down into the soapy water.
For an instant Randall panicked. Taken by surprise, he had inadvertently sucked in his breath as his head was shoved beneath the surface. Now his mouth and nose and throat were flooded suffocatingly with the acrid water. His lungs, starved of air, were bursting. There was a red mist before his eyes and a thundering in his ears. His left hand was seized in a vise-like grip and twisted up behind his back; his right arm was imprisoned between the edge of the basin and the hip of the man holding him. He could feel the hands of the second man searching his pants pocket and the side pockets of his jacket. But his billfold, together with the tickets, passports and baggage checks, was in the inside breast pocket of the jacket and this was rammed against the basin by the pressure of his own chest as he was relentlessly held under the water.
He thought wildly of trying to move the disk that operated the soakaway with his head. But his nose and chin, thrust brutally down against the bottom of the basin, would stop the plug rising from the hole.
Frantically, he heaved and bucked, trying to force his head up and break the iron grip on his neck. The pounding in his temples was threatening to engulf him. It didn't take long to drown a man. In less than a minute he could be dead! And then suddenly the sobering effect of the water permitted his brain to function in ice-cold clarity. He pictured the lay-out of the washroom. He saw how the basins were fixed. Instead of standing on porcelain pedestals, they stuck straight out from the wall, each supported on two iron brackets screwed into the tiles.
With his remaining strength, he tried a last desperate effort. Instead of heaving himself fruitlessly upwards against the pressure on his neck, he changed tactics and went with it. Drawing up his knees, he lifted his feet from the floor and strained down with all his weight against the edge of the basin.
The effect was dramatic. The sudden extra load wrenched the screws retaining the brackets clear out of the wall; the brackets tilted towards the floor and, amidst the rending of plaster and the smashing of tiles, the basin canted forwards, spilling its contents over Randall's knees as he and his two attackers sprawled to the ground.
Taken completely unawares, the thugs were slower to react than the half-drowned movie man. He had stumbled to his feet and backed off against the closed doors of a row of toilets before they realized what had hit them. By the time they had scrambled up to face him, he had wheezed enough air into his heaving, tortured lungs to restore some of the strength he had lost.
Crouching menacingly, the two men advanced. Beneath the tightly stretched nylon of the stocking masks, their features were bulbous and unrecognizable, but he had a hunch that at least one of them had been among the attackers in his apartment.
The odds were different now though. Randall could see his adversaries moreover he was possessed of a cold fury that lent him both strength and determination. He didn't like being attacked by gangs of punks for no reason that he could see. And by Christ he was going to show the bastards that they couldn't get away with it a second time!
Leaping forward with the speed of a striking cobra, he seized the nearest man by the lapels and hauled him half off his feet. Then, bunching his other first, he drew back his arm and smashed a murderous blow with all his weight behind it full into the obscenely anonymous face. The thug hurtled back to slam against the tiled wall between two basins and then drop to the floor.
By now the other man was within striking distance. Randall winced and staggered as a vicious blow seared across his kidneys. He swiveled on his heels and lashed out with one foot to catch the attacker on the shin. As the man howled with pain and involuntarily drew up his knee, the furious movie man stepped in and hammered a pile-driving left to his heart. The masked thug fell back gasping. But he was strong and he was spunky. Moving forward with a rush, he butted Randall with his head and sent him crashing back against a toilet door. The door burst open and Randall reeled off balance into the cubicle beyond.
Recovering himself as the backs of his knees came up against the pedestal, he put up his hands and prepared for the next assault . . . but the attackers had had enough. Instead of following up his advantage, the thug called out something in a guttural language the movie man couldn't identify and made for the exit!
The second man was on his hands and knees between the basins, shaking his head like a dog coming out of the water. Before Randall could reach him, he had scrambled groggily to his feet and splashed through the flood on the floor to jerk open the exit door and disappear after his companion.
The movie man was left gaping at the wrecked basin hanging drunkenly away from the wall supported only by the distorted lead water pipes twisted beneath it.
He ran to the door and dragged it open. The long passageway leading to the men's room was deserted.
He shrugged and went back inside. There was no point in trying to follow them: They could have escaped in any one of a dozen directions in the warren of the terminal building. Cleaning himself up as best as he could, he went to collect the baggage and rejoined Hannah.
His hair was drenched again, and the pants of his tan gabardine suit were dark with moisture from the knee down. The astonished redhead gasped with surprise when she saw him. "Mark, what on earth has happened now?" she exclaimed.
As they checked in the baggage and moved up to the departure lounge, he told her.
"But I don't understand," the girl said. "Why would anyone want to attack you especially twice in the same evening, if you're right and it was the same people? What were they after? Your money? And even if it was, why take the risk and follow you all the way here to try again? It doesn't make sense! I mean, it's not as if you were carrying diamonds or something, is it?"
"Search me!" Randall said for the second time. "Number one, I don't have a lot of money on me. Number two, if they wanted what I do have, they could have taken it when I was out for the count in the apartment and they didn't."
"Then . . . ? "
"Your guess is as good as mine," he said, adding with a crooked smile: "Two attempted muggings and an air crash in one evening that's not bad going for the beginning of a holiday, is it!"
CHAPTER TWO
The plane was almost empty. A large party of elderly tourists on their way to Khartoum, Karnak, and the Pyramids had canceled their bookings after seeing the DC-8 disaster earlier in the evening. The other passengers, only a handful of them, were grouped near the galley in the forepart of the huge 140 seat cabin. Randall and Hannah sat in the very last row, almost hidden by the high backs of the five empty seats in front of them.
A stewardess emerged from the door leading to the rear toilets and baggage racks. She was tall and blonde, with a bee-stung lower lip, steady gray eyes, and ripely swelling breasts whose wide-set fullness thrust out the stuff of her navy-blue uniform jacket above the belt tightly cinched around her slender waist.
She glanced at Randall's seat-belt to check that it was properly fixed and then leaned across to test the tightness of Hannah's. "You have that twisted," she said with a wide smile. "Let me do it for you."
As she unfastened and then re-buckled the webbing strap, the backs of her hands brushed more than once against the curve of velvety suede outlining the voluptuous redhead's breasts. To her surprise and dismay, Hannah felt a tingle of erotic sensation flicker through her flesh at the girl's touch. She averted her eyes and then looked back to meet the blonde's level stare.
"I think she fancies you!" Randall said with a grin, as the girl walked away down the aisle between the seats.
"Mark! Don't say things like that!" Hannah said hotly, blushing to the roots of her red hair. And then she giggled. "Much more-likely to be you, my darling, battered as you are!" she said. "I wouldn't be surprised if she asked to help you unfasten your belt after we've taken off!" They were both rather drunk.
Later, after the plane had reached its operational height and they had consumed coffee, sandwiches and a bottle of champagne, Randall switched off the light above the seat and settled Hannah in the crook of his arm. She nestled her head on his shoulder and rubbed her forehead against his chin like a kitten. "Mmmmmmm," she breathed tipsily. "I feel so goooooood!"
The movie man's hand was cupped around the taut bulge of her breast beneath the suede jacket. "You can say that again, honey!" he grinned. "You feel marvelous!" The pressure of his palm increased slightly against the weight of her flesh, and his thumb began rotating gently around the bud of her nipple where it spiked out the material.
"Mark!" she protested sleepily. "Don't! You mustn't! Remember where we are!"
"I know just where we are," Randall said, craning his neck to see over the row of empty seats in front of them. "Alone in the sky with the crew and all the other passengers forty feet away at the other end of the plane . . . and most of them look like they were asleep anyway!"
"You mustn't!" Hannah murmured again-but her hand, lying along the top of his thigh, began almost of its own volition to stir. One of her slender red-tipped fingers started to make tiny arabesques, caressing the tightly-stretched gabardine sheathing his leg. Under the heel of her hand she felt a sudden pressure as his long thick penis, trapped between the cloth and his flesh, began to jerk into hardness. Thirty thousand feet beneath them, the lights of Lyon slid past in the dark.
Mark was breathing heavily. Reaching across his free hand, he unbuttoned the stiff material of her jacket and slipped his fingers inside. The smooth curve of the lushly ripened breast encased in its satin cup was warm to his touch. Gently, he stroked his palm up and down across the fleshy prominence of Hannah's now erect nipple, bringing soft mewls of pleasure from her open mouth. In reflex action, the heel of her hand on his thigh began a rhythmic gyrating motion, rolling the hardness of his penis from side to side under the material of his pants as the fingers increased the tempo of their caresses. Randall's long thick cock stiffened into still greater rigidity, throbbing beneath the aroused redhead's lust-provoking manipulation. A darkly spreading spot of seminal fluid stained the light gabardine under her hand.
Mark tightened his arm around her waist, thrusting up his palm to shove the ripely swelling mound of her breast harder against the exploring fingers inside Hannah's jacket. His hand found the deep cleft of softly trembling flesh between the twin cups of her brassiere, lingered there for a moment, and then insinuated itself under the taut strap, to slide tantalizingly down inside the satin and fondle the warmly quivering skin straining against it.
Hannah gasped as he rolled and tweaked the tight rubbery bud of her nipple between his fingers, sending maddening patterns of indecent sensation trailing through her aroused young body. Her breath quickened, her chest began to rise and fall convulsively, and her luscious mouth dropped open. Her own fingers started rolling over the hard bulge of Randall's massively pulsating penis now outlined through his pants, feeling the long rigid stiffness of the shaft and then tightening over the bulbous fleshiness of the wetly seeping head.
The erotically inflamed movie man moaned in lewd delight, "Oh . . . Hannah, baby."
Twisting his head around and down, he clamped his lips over her wetly parted lips and speared his tongue into her warm open mouth.
Hannah's breath blew out through her nose in a shuddering sigh. She squirmed ecstatically against the rough cloth covering the seat, her veins afire with the lewdly dancing demons of lust. As their tongues fought avidly in the scalding cavern of her mouth, her hand darted up to the fly of Randall's pants and jerked down the zipper. A moment later, crooning in muffled abandon beneath his kisses, she had dragged aside his shirt, hauled down the elastic waistband of his shorts, and thrust her hand past the wiriness of his pubic hair to grope for his eagerly throbbing cock.
As her fingers closed around the muscled rigidity of the shaft, Randall groaned deep in his throat and smashed his mouth down even harder on her trembling wet lips. She jerked his hotly throbbing instrument free of his shorts and mewled again with lustful delight as it sprang quiveringly erect into the air and stood up from the open fly of the movie man's pants like the shaft of a heavy blunt spear.
Gradually at first, and then with increasing speed, she began to milk his long rigid thickness, skimming the loose foreskin up and down the iron-hard shaft as his tongue probed ever more deeply towards her throat and the maddening touch of his fingers on her nipple sent shock after shock of desire tingling towards her belly. Writhing in abandon on the aircraft seat, she became aware with an excitement tinged by shame that she was drenched up between her legs. She could feel the moist nylon of her panties cool against her throbbing vaginal lips as her thighs involuntarily spread apart and the air-conditioned atmosphere of the cabin played on her secret inner flesh.
And then, with a smothered groan of passion, she wrenched her mouth free of Randall's clinging lips and leaned forward across his body so that her face was posed just above the wetly glistening head of his lustfully pulsating cock. He could feel the hot caress of her breath blowing slowly against the distended tip.
The movie man sucked in his breath as a reverberation of lewd delight flamed through his body towards his loins. The trembling redhead's mouth was only an inch away from his eagerly pulsing penis, which now gleamed whitely along its rigid length. A thread of saliva swayed down from Hannah's slack lips to mingle with the seminal fluid exuding in pearly drops from the slit in its bulbous head as she took her hand from the shaft and felt for his desire-tautened balls, squeezing them softly as she pulled his cum-filled testicles free of the garments sheathing his hips.
Randall groaned and gritted his teeth as the girl fondled and kneaded his sperm-bloated glands. He was panting with desire, his chest heaving up and down and his head thrown back against the head rest of the seat. He felt her other hand reach for the shaft of his cock, guiding it towards her ovaled young mouth-and then he gasped and thrust his loins involuntarily upwards as the warm moistness of her open lips closed tight as a rubber band over the throbbing sensitive head.
His lungs were bursting and excitement blazed through every trembling nerve in his body as she slowly lowered her head taking almost half of his cock into her wetly heated mouth while her tongue licked against his lust-swollen cock-head. He jerked his own head forward and stared down at the fiery cascade of glossy hair tumbling about his hips. Jesus! He thought wildly. What a woman! What a girl! Just wait until I get her alone in a bed . . . !
His heart thumped frenziedly in his chest as Hannah pulled his foreskin back as far as it would go, tightening the flesh of his penis until it felt as though the head would burst. Her hot lips were sucking now at the inflated tip, and her tongue had begun to flicker wickedly around and around the glistening shaft. Still keeping the skin pulled agonizingly back, she started bobbing her head up and down, at the same time increasing the twirling of her tongue around the moist stickiness of the blood-gorged tip.
Randall surrendered himself to the lewd sensations boiling through his loins. Leaning back, he gazed mesmerized at the profile view of her lust-contorted face with the thickness of his cock buried between her sucking lips. Excitement rose within him as he watched his wetly glistening penis begin to piston rhythmically in and out of her ovaled mouth in time with the flexing and relaxing of his hips. The sight erotically stimulated him still further; his pelvis tensed and jerked up into the slavering face of the abandoned redhead until he thought his wildly throbbing penis was sinking its entire length all the way down her throat. With each hard thrust he made, more and more of his thick hardness disappeared until finally only a small section was visible, dark and gleaming in the dim light reflected from the far end of the cabin, protruding from between Hannah's moistly distended lips.
Her tongue, still with that wantonly nerve-tingling lick on the upstroke, was making the acorned cock-head throb and jerk as though a second heart beat wildly within it. He watched, hypnotized, as the flesh of her lips pulled out grotesquely, clinging to the hard shaft of his manhood as she sucked hungrily, her mind and all her concentration excluding everything but the lewdly thrilling task in hand.
Easing out his intruding hand from her opened jacket where her pumping torso squashed her breasts against his knee, he tangled his fingers in her hair, guiding Hannah's greedily clasping lips up and down the hot throbbing length of his fleshy staff. By God, he'd give it to her as soon as they were within reach of that hotel bed! He'd ram it into her tight little pussy so far that it would reach her throat from the other end! He'd pump his scalding sperm so far up her belly that her heart would be coated with cum. Closing his eyes, he groaned half in anticipation and half in ecstasy.
"My goodness, you two certainly know how to pass the time on a night flight! Can anyone join in?"
The voice had come from just above Hannah's head. Randall's eyes flew open . . . and he stared straight into the amused and mocking gaze of the blonde stewardess. She was kneeling on the row of seats in front, peering over the high backs at them with her full lower lip shining wetly and her gray eyes widened in excitement. She had taken off her uniform cap and her short hair, cut in a thick bang on her forehead, hung about her head like a golden bell.
Hannah had jerked her head away from Randall's cock and blushed scarlet at the sound of the girl's voice. Now, her open mouth glistening with saliva and seminal fluid, she stared up at the stewardess, still absent-mindedly grasping the rigidly pulsing shaft, a picture of guilt and dismay. "Oh my God!" she whispered in an agony of humiliation and shame. "How awful.. . I"
Randall momentarily was at a loss of words. Not at being caught. To hell with that! But at the expression on the stewardess's face.
The blonde gave a low throaty laugh. "Don't get me wrong," she said softly. "Nobody's making any complaints! I said can anyone join in?"
That did it! Randall recovered his usual poise. He laughed in his turn. "Be our guest!" he said recklessly. "Darling, move over and make room for the lady!"
"Mark Randall, how can you be so . . . oh God! Darling, we can't!" Hannah squealed. "It's . . . it's indecent! It's wicked! We . . . no, we can't!"
"Come on, honey," the stewardess pleaded urgently. "You know you're all turned on; you were just getting going only the way these seats are laid out you can't both make it at once with two. With three, you get to have a good time as well as the boy friend!"
The embarrassed redhead began to protest again . . . but the stewardess, with a hasty glance over her shoulder, slipped around to their side of the seats and dropped to her knees between the rows, as invisible from the other end of the cabin as Mark and Hannah themselves.
"Keep your eyes open this time," she impudently ordered Randall. Deftly, she pushed up the arms of the empty seats and then, seizing
Hannah's ankles, swung them up and over so that the astonished redhead found herself suddenly lying full length along the row with her head in Randall's lap and her cheek resting against the gleaming, veined hardness of his cock. Randall grinned, catching on to the idea, and shifted his position so that his weight was on one hip and his penis now jutted horizontally from his gaping fly, pointing straight at her wetly parted lips.
Hannah's mind was in a whirl. She knew that it was wrong to fall in with the blonde's obscene and lewd suggestion. It was perverted and debased and immoral. It was unthinkable. She knew that it was. Yet why did the very thought of it send wild ripples of guilty excitement surging through her like so many electric shocks? Why did the touch of the girl's hands induce in her a wanton excitement surpassing even the guilty thrill she had felt while she was sucking Mark's big hard penis only a few minutes ago? Why was her heart thumping so furiously? It was bad enough sleeping with Mark when they weren't married. Even to consider another person touching her and a girl at that-was outrageous. Yet the flickers of lustful desire lancing through her loins were increasing with every second! And Mark did seem to approve. Maybe it was all right after all.
She gasped aloud and her whole body jerked as the stewardess reached swiftly up under the tiny suede skirt and yanked her white nylon panties down to the tops of her boots in a single practiced gesture.
Her mouth flew open to protest but the movement had displaced her head so that now it was resting on the seat and her lips brushed against the wet velvety tip of Mark's cock! Almost of its own volition her mouth opened wider, and before she knew what she was doing she had raised an automatic hand to guide the thick throbbing instrument back between her avidly parted lips.
At the same time the kneeling blonde, staring with passionate and salacious intensity at the silkily curling pussy hairs mantling Hannah's trembling loins, placed the palms of her hands against the girl's trembling inner thighs and spread them gently apart as far as the panties turned down over her boots would allow.
Hannah shivered and moaned past the thick pole of flesh invading her mouth, a slave to the lewd and intolerable tremors of anticipation threatening her wetly throbbing cunt. Forgotten for the moment were the doubts and hesitations assailing her a few seconds before. Feeling her nipples iron-hard against the stretched satin of her brassiere, she abandoned herself to the waves of indecent pleasure that whirled through her alcohol-fogged mind and overcame all desire to resist.
Gently stroking the tender flesh of Hannah's inner thighs, the excited blonde stewardess placed her thumbs on the pulsating hair-lined lips of the squirming girl's pussy as she feasted her eyes on the moistly gleaming pink slit nestling in its furrow of damp hair. Then, spreading the wetly quivering vaginal lips apart with a teasing and remorseless pressure of her thumbs, she lowered her face towards the smoothly glistening, interfolded cuntal flesh exposed to her lustful gaze.
Hannah moaned again and increased the intensity of her furious sucking on Randall's cock, bringing up one hand to seize the thick base of the shaft and pull the rigidly throbbing stalk of flesh even harder into her contorted face. The wildly aroused movie man snaked his hands beneath her arched back to unsnap the fastener of her brassiere and then began frenziedly to caress her naked breasts, squeezing and scrabbling at the sensitive flesh as the two full mounds with their bud-like nipples erect sprang quiveringly free. At the same time the kneeling stewardess uttered an animal groan and flickered her tongue deep into the hot velvety depths of Hannah's splayed little cunt.
The young redhead jerked and quivered as she felt the tantalizing wetness of the quivering tongue spear into her tight little vagina, and she thrashed her naked buttocks from side to side as she began a frenzied milking movement with her fingers along the section of Randall's cock that was not engulfed by her tightly ovaled mouth.
Panting lustfully, the blonde stewardess licked gently at the swollen pink bud of Hannah's clitoris, snuggled just above the wide-stretched entrance to her cunt, pressing her thumbs further apart to gape the hair-fringed edges of the quivering wet slit wider still. Her tongue traced a salacious path between the layers of succulent flesh, probing the moist hidden crevices up between the girl's softly trembling thighs.
And then suddenly the kneeling blonde raised her head and shifted her grip. Grasping the underside of Hannah's thighs, she pushed them up, so that her booted legs, linked together by the wide-stretched white panties, rose high into the air and the whole flat plane of her genital region was shamelessly exposed to the stewardess's wanton gaze.
The golden head sank down again and then the stewardess's ravishing tongue was darting lizard-like into the wet pink flesh of Hannah's tight little cunt. From this position she could penetrate much further, and soon, with her own lips clamped lasciviously to the swollen, hair-fringed folds of the writhing redhead's pussy, her tongue was stabbing far up into the delicious depths of Hannah's secret flesh.
The redheaded girl's voluptuously squirming body almost jackknifed from the sudden erotic contact of the tongue spearing so far up into her trembling belly. A choked cry burst from her wildly sucking mouth, her fingers fell away from Randall's cock, and then her loins began a slow, eager grinding against the blonde stewardess's face.
Thrusting her hands between her raised and spread thighs, Hannah tangled her fingers in the golden hair she could see between her legs as the lust-inflamed airline employee lapped voraciously at her cunt. Groaning in an ecstasy of abandon behind the gagging mass of Randall's thick invading cock, she locked her booted calves behind the stewardess' neck and pulled the hotly sucking mouth harder still against her seething cunt, trapping the blonde's face between her thighs.
Over the monotonous roar of the jetliner's engines, obscene wet sluicing noises rhythmically sounded in the still air of the cabin as Hannah sucked ever more frenziedly on the movie man's penis and the blonde lapped slavishly at her gyrating cunt.
The shamelessly abandoned redhead was out of her mind now with lustful desire. Rolling from side to side on the seat in a paroxysm of erotic delight, she thrust her quivering breasts hard up against Randall's mauling fingers as her mouth slid frantically up and down the saliva-coated shaft of his throbbing penis and her thighs tightened about the golden head plundering her loins. The shudders of forbidden pleasure raging in her belly were increasing in urgency. Nothing mattered now but the delicious shafts of delight piercing her flesh with each savage thrust of the stewardess's knowledgeable tongue into the involuntarily dilating walls of her cunt; nothing mattered but the torturing agony of the gorgeous swirling sensations rippling over every inch of her half-naked body. There was nothing else in the whole universe, and, as she writhed and bucked and twisted under the blonde's expert oral impalement, she began to suck harder still on the bloated head of Randall's long hard cock, her cheeks hollowing with effort as though she would draw out the last drop of moisture in his body through the wetly seeping slit in the glans.
As her fingers tangled ever deeper in the stewardess's hair, the kneeling blonde slid her arms under Hannah's naked hips and reached her hands up and over the trembling white flatness of the redhead's belly, hauling the soft flesh up and under the suede skirt so that the cuntal lips were tightened and pulled up against the hungrily devouring mouth.
Hannah was at the point of complete subjugation to the whims of the wildly licking tongue fucking in and out of the searing little hole in the center of her loins. Her back arched convulsively off the seat as her hips began to shudder in a series of involuntary spasms. At the same time Randall dropped his head heavily back against the cushioned rest and surrendered himself to the sensations boiling through his own loins. "Go on, baby, go on!" he hissed through set teeth. "Suck it harder! . . . Faster, faster!"
Mark knew it wouldn't be long now. He could feel the familiar pressure mounting in his sperm-laden balls. His wildly pulsing cock felt like a balloon blown up to its fullest stretch . . . and then inflated still further, ready to burst at any moment and spew its contents to the four corners of the earth!
He thrust his pelvis hard up against Hannah's face, ignoring her protesting mumble as he strove for the final release of this unbearable tension that was building . . . building . . . building . . . And then, suddenly, every nerve in his body drained away to his genitals, and he felt the white-hot current surge deep in his testicles and race steam-like the length of his wetly plunging shaft of flesh. He gave a strangled cry and his teeth showed white in the gloom of the airline cabin as his lips writhed back in a grimace of ecstasy.
As his hips arched away from the seat back, his penis began a mad staccato jerking that flooded the avidly sucking redhead's mouth with gust after gust of scalding sperm, bloating her cheeks outward with each cannonball spurt until she swallowed to keep from choking, mewling and crooning through gagged lips at his pumping loins.
"Don't stop, honey! Suck, suck, suck!" he gasped, ramming his madly jerking cock deeper and deeper into her throat as his hands almost frantically kneaded the quivering mounds of her naked breasts. Hannah continued frenziedly sucking as he went on spewing his white hot cum far back into her mouth . . . and then, with a final groan, he emptied the last of his sperm between her lips and subsided against the seat, exhausted.
As soon as she felt the first bulge and heave of the iron-hard penis stuffing her mouth, at the first acrid taste of Randall's hot sperm jetting against the back of her throat, Hannah sensed the overpowering surge of her own orgasm rearing up deep within her.
Then, as she swallowed convulsively, the final warm drops of his load, the climax became an irresistible flood, a tidal wave of sensation carrying her helplessly along on its boiling crest, to break with a thunderous impact in the very center of her being and send her spiraling up amongst the stars spangling the dark night above the plane. She gave a sudden throaty cry, wrenching her cum-smeared lips away from Randall's deflating penis as her head flailed from side to side in his lap and she moaned in a shuddering whisper:
Her thighs tightened vise-like against the kneeling blonde's ears as her liquid passion seethed from her tongue-plundered pussy to stream down the trembling crevice between her naked ass-cheeks and flood the slavering chin of the frantically sucking stewardess.
The airline girl, insanely excited by the electric effect of her depraved attack on the redhead's genitals, dropped one hand to haul up her skirt and finger-fucked herself in time with Hannah's passionately thrusting loins. Out of her mind with wanton desire at the lewd sounds of the twin orgasms continuing on the seat above her, she clawed furiously at her own wetly throbbing cunt for a few seconds, thrusting fingers savagely in under the elastic leg band of her panties to massage the blood-engorged, swollen shaft of her clitoris.
And, abruptly, she, too, was twitching and shuddering in the throes of a climax, all the while her lips continued to suck hungrily at the sweet quivering flesh of Hannah's pussy.
But at last it was over. The kneeling blonde lowered the up-thrust legs of the sated girl gently to the seat and laid her golden head against Hannah's passion-damp thighs. The redhead herself uttered a deep contented sigh and subsided against Randall's hips. Later, maybe, there would be remorse and self-criticism perhaps even self-disgust at the shameless debasement in which she had so mindlessly acquiesced aboard this airplane. But for the moment she was happy to relax. She had never felt so good!
Randall, lying back in a euphoric haze of utter contentment, was staring idly at the porthole on the far side of the cabin. "I don't know if it's because you two girls are so marvelous," he murmured drowsily, "but those stars out there sure look bigger and brighter than I ever saw them before!"
As he finished speaking there was a muffled click and a crackling of static from the PA speaker above the door leading to the toilets. A man's voice suddenly intoned: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have just passed St. Raphael. Beyond the Esterel mountains on the port side of the aircraft, you can see the bay of Cannes . . . "
The blonde stewardess knelt up with a panic-stricken look, her hands automatically patting at the tumbled locks of her hair.
"Cannes?" she almost screamed. "Stars? Those are the lights of the coast you can see! We're coming in to land for the stopover at Nice!"
Rising hastily to her feet, she smoothed down her crumpled skirt and added sweetly: "May I help you to fasten your safety belts? . . . "
CHAPTER THREE
Hannah Beardsley opened her eyes and rolled over onto her back. The early morning sun was slanting in through the slats in the shutters over the French windows of their hotel room, streaking the marble floor with bands of gold and striking fugitive gleams from the lens of Mark's camera on the dressing table. She allowed herself to waken gradually, stretching luxuriously between the soft sheets as the room assembled itself in the half light. One by one, she became aware of the sounds and sensations around her: The ticking of her watch on the night table, a grinding of gears as a truck negotiated the narrow native street below their windows, the muffled pulse of air-conditioning plant, the quiet, even breathing of Mark beside her, a subdued clatter from somewhere along the corridor outside their room as the Arab hotel servants prepared the breakfast trays.
The Sudan day was already airless and hot, the same clammy, breathless heat that had hung over the city the previous day and left her limp and exhausted long before they had returned to the hotel to change for Mark's promised tour of the night-spots of Khartoum.
She didn't remember too much about the tour. They had gotten rather drunk and anyway night clubs were the same the world over: too much drink, too much money, not enough value in return! But she did remember the sightseeing session that had preceded it. . . the extraordinary contrast of Khartoum's modern steel and concrete and glass towers with the mud-walled huddle of twisting streets and open markets in the poorer quarters of the old city; the exotic orientalism of the mosques with their minarets and domes, blinding white under the blue sky; the visit to the confluence of the White and Blue Nile in Khartoum North, with the stilt-legged cranes and egrets rising in flocks to flap away like white confetti across the featureless spur of flat land.
And she remembered Mark's ardent lovemaking after they had fallen into bed in the early hours of the morning. Half smiling to herself, she moved one hand under the sheets to touch the springy curls of pubic hair softly mantling her loins beneath the flimsy nightgown she wore. She was still quite sore from the violence of his attentions!
But the raptures of sex in bed had served to dispel from her troubled mind the doubts and worries and recriminations she had suffered ever since their arrival over that outrageous scene with the blonde stewardess in the airplane. She had forgotten in the ecstasies of the previous night all the shame and guilt and self-criticism she had been directing at herself because she had wantonly succumbed to the girl's lewd and obscene suggestions.
And yet . . . and yet. . . there had been moments, even in the midst of Mark's most thrilling caresses, when she had recalled with a shiver of forbidden delight, a shamefaced tremor of excited recollection, the electric effect of the airline blonde's hot kisses on her eagerly pulsing pussy.
If she was brutally honest with herself (she reflected, listening idly to the see-saw call of a muezzin rising and falling over the noise of a nearby street market), she had to admit that the experience had showed her that her own sexual inclinations might be a little less normal than she had realized! There must be hidden fires of lust lurking within her that even Hannah herself had never suspected!
She didn't want to think about it now, though. It was too upsetting and anyway they had a busy day ahead of them.
There had been a long cable from Mervyn Solomons waiting for them when they returned to the hotel last night, a cable apologizing for the sudden switch in plans, briefing Mark on his assignment in the Sudan, and congratulating them on having escaped the disaster that had befallen the plane on which they had originally been booked.
They had read all about that in the paper. She could still see it on the bureau if she turned her head. But she didn't need to look to refresh her memory: The headlines were etched into her mind. 118 PERISH IN ORLY JET CRASH, the banner had screamed. And then, underneath, the sinister sub-heading: French Officials Suspect Sabotage.
Hannah sighed. You never knew. Yesterday-or, rather, the day before must have been their lucky day, that was all. Their names just weren't written on that one!
She turned her head and stared at the window. The bars of sunlight thrown by the shutters had shortened slightly and changed their position. They had moved from the floor to the dressing table, silvering the mirror and casting a fan of reflected brilliance on the white ceiling.
Sleepily, she recalled a line from a radio play she had once heard. It had a funny title. Under Milk Wood, wasn't it? She had no idea what it meant but she remembered the line. A boarding-house owner who had a passion for cleanliness had said, "Before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its boots!" That was cute! Looking at the shutters, she wondered did the sun in the Sudan wear boots too or was it barefoot like the Arabs she could hear yelling at each other in the market?
Smiling to herself, she let her gaze wander away from the bars of brightness at the window . . . and then tensed suddenly as she found herself staring straight into the open brown eyes of Mark. She'd thought he was still asleep, but he had been secretly watching her all the time! It was a good thing he couldn't read her thoughts . . . especially her thoughts about that girl on the plane!
The flesh beneath the stubble bluing Mark's chin and upper lip creased open and his white teeth gleamed in a smile. The bruises and lacerations on his face were not so noticeable today. "Hey, baby!" he said lazily. "I guess I must finally have passed out on you last night. I must have been plastered!"
"You can say that again!" Hannah said severely. "But then so was I!"
"Say . . . " Mark suddenly looked alarmed. "I didn't . . . I mean it wasn't before I . . . before we'd . . . ? "
"You did all right," Hannah said primly. 'Though I'm not very flattered that you don't seem to be able to remember!"
Randall chuckled. "There's an easy way to fix that, honey," he said meaningly. He turned to face her, and the voluptuous redhead suddenly drew in her breath as she felt the hem of her nightgown ride up to her hips and his fingers came into contact with her naked flesh.
An electrifying shock rippled through her loins as she felt him stroke gently up towards the top of her thighs. A moment later, he raised himself on one elbow and leaned over her to cup the full mound of one swelling breast through the thin material of the flimsy garment.
"Mark . . . ? " she murmured questioningly. "Surely you can't be . . . ? "
He grinned down at her in the dim light of the bedroom. "Can't be what? Can't be getting hot pants for you this early in the morning? Just try me, baby!"
Removing his fingers from her thigh, he reached for one of her hands under the sheets and guided it towards his own loins. She felt the hard rubbery head of his cock nosing wetly against her skin. As the hotly throbbing shaft grazed rigidly into her palm, she gasped and protested, "But darling we can't. . . not now! They'll be bringing our coffee and orange juice at any minute. Look at the time!"
"I am looking," Mark said. "We'll tell 'em to come back later. As to the time it seems I wasted some last night if I can't remember what we did! So I guess there's only one thing to do."
"W-w-w-what do you mean?"
"Have a repeat performance!" he said triumphantly. "Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for the second performance is about to begin!"
"Mark Randall . . . "
Hannah's squeal of protest changed in mid-sentence to a moan of pleasure as he moved the palm of his hand softly over the shifting mound of her firm young breast, teasing the transparent material of the nightgown against the nipple so that the tender bud of flesh hardened and stood up stiffly erect under his rotating caress.
Releasing the trembling girl's hand, he began to stroke her thigh again. She uttered a small mewl of delight as the tip of his outstretched middle finger found the narrow sensitive slit of her vagina, hesitated, and then gently thrust into the wetly throbbing flesh. Her hips arched involuntarily up from the mattress as his probing digit parted her softly curling pussy hairs and. made sudden tantalizing contact with the quivering little button of her clitoris.
The tiny shaft of flesh was already wet and slippery from the unexpected and unbidden desire that was now rippling through her veins, and she sucked in her breath to hold back the groan of helpless ecstasy she felt building deep in her rapidly rising and falling chest.
Mark shifted the hand on her breast, slipping his fingers inside the low neck of the nightgown to roll and tweak the erect nipples as he massaged the whole hairy length of her desire-soaked vaginal furrow with the other. Maddeningly, he stroked the wetly throbbing inner lips of her tight young cunt, circling his middle finger around the swelling head of her clitoris as she squirmed and writhed with lustful abandon beneath him.
Almost unconsciously, her own fingers clasped themselves around the hardened shaft of his penis, rolling the loose sheath of the foreskin up and down the massively rigid pole of flesh.
"God, that feels good!" Mark panted. "Oooooh, my darling! Oh, Hannah, my love!"
Suddenly he moved again. Raising his head, he took his hand away from her breast, reached behind him, and tore the single sheet from the bed. Then, dragging the length of his lean muscular body over her until he was staring directly into her passion-widened eyes, he eased his hips across her pelvis so that her fingers, and the hot rigidity of his cock within them were jammed in the crease of her thigh.
His penis felt enormous this morning, as though her slender fingers could only just meet around the ridged, sinewy hardness of the blood-gorged shaft. The bulbous head was now squashed wetly in her clenched palm, seeping its seminal fluid between her fingers to glide lasciviously across her softly trembling belly. Automatically, she smoothed the greasy liquid around the glans, into the stretched folds of the foreskin and up and down the long veined rod until the whole stiff length of it was as slippery as a well-oiled piston.
Above her, Mark groaned urgently in lustful desire and smashed his mouth down on her wetly parted lips to plunge his tongue deep into Hannah's throat. Forcing his hands between her shoulders and the mattress, he ran them over the pliant curves of her back and hips, feeling the raised ridges of her spine ripple as she undulated her voluptuous body up against him in a dazedly hypnotic motion. like the legs of a puppet pulled on invisible wires, her thighs spread of their own accord and he sank down between them, the tautness of the tendons hard against the outside of his hips. He knew how they were going to feel later, when he had buried the excruciating hardness of his cock far up in her quivering little belly . . .
Panting hoarsely, the inflamed movie man shoved his hands further down beneath her, cupping the firm fullness of her buttocks in his palms and pulling her hotly open loins up tighter against him. Slowly, he began to move up and down, sliding his lubricated shaft in and out of her feverishly clutching fingers, feeling it grow wetter and wetter with every thrust. In the hot, close atmosphere of the shuttered room, streams of perspiration coursed down the crinkled skin of his balls to mingle with the dampness seeping from her wetly gaping cunt.
The erotically aroused redhead began a more urgent rotating movement of her ass-cheeks, grinding her cock-hungry little cunt up against
Randall's hips and then suddenly her legs, snaking wide on either side of him, locked him to her. Her heels hooked over the backs of his knees and her calves, sweating now in the humid air, pinioned his shuddering thighs and pulled him tighter still into her.
"Ooooooh, Mark darling! Do it to me now! Put it in me now! Fuck me . . . " she gasped into his open mouth, her eyes tightly shut and her pelvis writhing uncontrollably beneath his weight.
Moaning with desire, Randall began to shift his hips, dragging a hand out from under Hannah's quivering ass-cheeks to reach for his hotly throbbing penis. But the passion-crazed girl was too quick for him, and she pulled the slippery shaft of hardened flesh across her belly, rolling his thick rigid penis towards her cunt. Their fingers met stickily around the iron-hard instrument, sending waves of shivering excitement through each of them as together they guided the hot pulsating head between the fevered lips of her passionately trembling vagina.
Randall panted wildly as she slid his penis up and down between her legs, teasing it damply against the drenched hairs of her pussy, forcing the blood-gorged pole of flesh into even greater hardness until it ached intolerably from the agonizing pressure within the veins. Then the young redhead reached down with her other hand and used thumb and forefinger to spread her vaginal lips apart.
When Mark felt her tight little pussy unfolding the sensitive head of his cock, he groaned, knowing he couldn't hold back another second! Ramming his hips down with a sudden cruel thrust, he drove the thick bursting tip of his penis with a flesh-splitting surge into the gaping hot mouth of Hannah's trembling little cunt.
"Aaaaaagggggggh!" she whimpered beneath him as he felt the warm elastic-like sheath of her vagina slide wetly over his lust-hardened thickness. "Oooooooooh!"
He rammed in further and she moaned again, louder and with more feeling, "Aaaaaaaaagggggghh!! "
Mark levered himself up on his hands to give greater power to his loins, and thrust again. His relentlessly invading rod of flesh forced its way another inch into the warmly clasping tunnel of her cunt.
"Ooooooooooh! Oh darling! Ohhhhhhh!"
And another inch . . .
"Aaaaaah, Mark! Oooooogh!"
And yet another inch and then abruptly it stopped. Randall's lust-swollen penis had bored all the way to the hilt into her pussy, tight and hot at first, aching the full length of the rigidly pulsating shaft, then more easily as the warm wetness of Hannah's cuntal passage lubricated the way . . . and now his cock-head nosed jarringly against her cervix as his sperm-bloated balls slapped wetly into the wide-split crevice between her ass-cheeks.
Hannah gave a low animal cry. She was skewered like a bird on a spit, and the muscular movie man lay still for a moment with his long hard penis embedded to the hilt in her moistly clasping vagina, waiting for the shock of his entry to subside. Then, far up in the trembling redhead's soft white belly, he flexed the inflated head. Hannah groaned, her teeth clenching behind her drawn-back lips. He flexed the head once more . . . and she groaned again, more soothingly this time as her hot passage grew accustomed to the thick pulsing length of male flesh within it.
Then Randall began a slow revolving motion of his pelvis, grinding his massive hardness tightly down into her naked loins, expanding the wetly clasping walls of her vagina until her cunt fitted his pulsating shaft like a well-tailored glove. Hannah squirmed from side to side as she strained under his weight, arching up her hips to lift them both momentarily off the bed. Crooning ceaselessly with wanton desire under his pounding body, the lust-inflamed redhead began to open and close her legs scissor-like around him as she thrust upwards to meet him on each spearing plunge.
Her mouth gaped wide. Her head flailed from side to side on the pillow in wild abandon. As Randall drove his penis rhythmically into the hot wetness of her pussy, a stream of warm moisture ran down the widespread cuntal crevice between her legs to saturate his fingers where he could feel his own hard rod of flesh sawing into the hairy lips of her tight young cunt.
He massaged the warm softness of her buttocks, and he felt his cock growing and expanding still further inside her clasping little pussy until it felt as though it would burst from the exquisite pleasure mounting in his balls as they slapped wetly against her nakedly rotating ass-cheeks below. It wouldn't be long now, he thought, listening to the hammering of his own blood in his ears. He hoped Hannah was ready too, for he couldn't hold back a moment longer!
He began ramming his penis into her with long, hard strokes, striving to excite her to completion. Their undulating bodies were steamy with sweat as they ground frantically against one another. Her swelling breasts scraped voluptuously against the matted hair of his pounding chest; their bellies slapped and squelched in the damp heat of the room; their thighs were gliding one over the other as easily as the long greased shaft of his cock pistoning in and out of her cunt.
Randall could tell the passion-crazed redhead was near her own climax as she gripped him frenziedly with her ankles and knees, opening and closing them around him in time with his surging thrusts into her hotly palpitating pussy. She gurgled beneath him, the sound bubbling up from deep in her throat as though she had no conscious control over it. He knew it couldn't be long now . . . and he accelerated the tempo of his merciless lunges with all his strength.
"Aaaaaaaagh! Fuck me, Mark! Fuck me hard, darling!" Hannah chanted, spurring him on with the pounding of her heels high on his muscular back. She had jackknifed her legs up towards her shoulders, pulling her knees back savagely to offer him the widest possible opening of her upraised loins. Her body was white-hot. She clasped him with the backs of her calves, winding her tapered legs around his nakedly pumping buttocks as her eyes rolled uncontrollably in her head. Her ankles locked tightly together high above his hips then as she spiraled her ravenous young cunt up and down on the full length of his pulsating shaft as it fucked into her like a pile-driver gone mad.
Her face was contorted and straining for the final explosion of sensual delight that was so near . . . so near . . . so near . . . just a fraction of a second away . . .
And then it happened.
The accelerated friction of her moist elastic sheath sucking at his throbbing cock proved too much for Randall! An irresistible flood of feeling built up in the nerve-ends deep in his sperm-filled balls and surged relentlessly outwards a towering wave of white hot passion that hurled him forward on its seething crest and then broke thunderously about his ears!
He was experienced enough to go with it. With luck the force of his own spurting climax would push Hannah over the edge and she would cum too! He gasped shudderingly. His mouth clamped voraciously down on hers and he uttered a long low groan that swelled to a cry of triumph as his lust-hardened penis began jerking uncontrollably and he spewed his hot sperm far up into her wildly dilating vagina. She could feel it jetting against her cervix in great gushing torrents, forcing her nearer to her own orgasm with each scalding spurt . . . and as the movie man had hoped, the fury of his ejaculation triggered off Hannah's own climax.
Wrenching her lips away from his, she opened her mouth and screamed:
Her naked heels drummed furiously on his pumping ass-cheeks, pounding at his sweating flesh as she sobbed her ecstasy into his widely gaping mouth. She squeezed the cheeks of her buttocks up against his now deflating penis to keep it trapped within her. Her seething belly ground frantically against the tenseness of his loins. For both of them there was a timeless moment of oblivion when they floated clear of reality and the present on a tide of lustful delight.
And then it was over. With an expiring sigh, Randall collapsed limply between Hannah's lowered thighs, his softening cock slipping from the wet clasp of her well-fucked pussy with a lewd sucking sound. His lips nibbled gently at the soft skin of her neck where it disappeared beneath the damply curling tendrils of red hair, and he closed his eyes.
Hannah lay quietly on her back listening to his breathing and feeling the gradual slowing of her pulse. She was drowsy and contented, filled with the calm of complete sexual satisfaction. Tenderly, she glanced through slitted eyelids at the man's head cradled on her shoulder. She was lucky to have him! Why then, unbidden and unwanted, did the vision of that other head, that golden bell that had tolled so beguilingly between her legs on the airplane swim disturbingly into her mind again?
With an impatient sigh, she opened her eyes wide and stared at the ceiling. The chattering of excited Arab voices from the street market was louder now. A motor horn blared noisily. Above the bed, the fan of reflected light from the mirror had altered shape again: One of the bright bars was much wider than the others, almost as though somebody had opened a shutter.
Swiveling her eyes sideways, Hannah glanced at the French windows. How very odd! One of the shutters was open, and the glass door to the balcony was standing ajar! Yet she could have sworn . . .
"MARK!" she screamed wildly. "Look out!. . . "
Desperately, she tried to lever the inert body of her lover away from her, away from the wickedly gleaming knife blades held above the bed by the two Arabs in red tarbooshes who must have stolen into the room through the window while they were making love.
Randall was spent and exhausted . . . but he was sober and his mind was back to its usual razor-sharp alertness. In the split second before Hannah screamed he had sensed the sudden stiffening of her muscles, flicked his eyes sideways and observed the alien legs beside the bed. By the time her cry burst into the silence of the room his brain had already telegraphed its frantic warning to his muscles and his nerve-ends were poised for action.
As always, he took the unexpected course. Instead of trying fruitlessly to roll away from the murderous knives, he went towards them.
Uncoiling his lean body like a steel spring, he tightened his arms around Hannah's shoulders and hurled the two of them locked together over the side of the bed and against the intruders' knees.
The would-be assassins were taken completely by surprise as the two naked bodies cannoned into them while the knives descended. One razor-like blade plunged into the warm, sweat-darkened depression in the mattress where Hannah and Mark had been lying an instant before; the other sliced through the outer layer of skin on Randall's biceps to clang against the metal bed-frame.
But by this time both the attackers were off balance and sprawling forward over the empty mattress.
As they sprang snarling to their feet, Randall thrust the terrified girl savagely behind him towards the door leading to the bathroom and scrambled upright, snatching the discarded sheet from the foot of the bed as he backed off.
Crouching, the two men advanced warily towards him short, wiry villains with swarthy faces and narrowed eyes glittering cruelly above their hairline mustaches. Their knives, which had been fisted for the downward plunge at the bed, were now held wickedly low, the blades slanting up for the disemboweling rip at the belly.
Naked and defenseless, with nothing that could serve as a weapon within reach, Randall retreated towards the wall, drawing them away from the frozen, horrified figure of Hannah.
Then, feinting suddenly towards the nearer man, he threw the sheet swiftly over the other, just as the assassin leaped forward, lunging for the movie man's naked belly with his knife.
The sheet, streaked with blood from the cut on Randall's arm, draped itself over the intruder's head and shoulders, temporarily blinding him so that the knife blade ripped through the material and the vicious stab wasted itself on empty air.
Randall whirled to one side as the second man attacked, twisting eel-like away from the murderous steel and slamming the edge of his hand brutally down on the intruder's forearm in a karate chop.
Cursing, the knife-man clapped his other hand to the arm and them moved in for a second thrust. But Randall had seized the struggling, sheet-muffled figure of his companion and sent him spinning towards the assassin. The two men crashed together and staggered against a wardrobe. By the time they had extricated themselves and gotten rid of the sheet, the movie man had skipped nimbly to the far side of the bed.
They were still between him and the door leading to the corridor and escape, however and Hannah, her lush young body trembling beneath the flimsy nightgown, her eyes wide with terror and her hand raised to her mouth, was still isolated at the other end of the room.
Randall's arm was hurting like hell. It was on fire from shoulder to elbow and there were spots and splashes of blood all over the floor and the walls. Suddenly he lost his temper. As the two crouched to circle around the end of the bed, he picked up a chair and flung it with all his strength at the nearest. Instinctively, the man raised his arms to protect his head. The knife blade jammed momentarily in the wicker seat, and the chair's impetus sent him crashing to the floor with a thump that shook the room.
At the same time the movie man, his lips thinned into a snarl of rage and his eyes blazing with fury, launched himself across the bed at the remaining attacker in a football tackle.
His shoulder caught the man full on the thigh and knocked him just enough off balance that his blade swung futilely in the air above Mark's head; then he fell to the floor. For a moment the two of them sprawled in a tangle of limbs on the marble floor and then Randall's steely fingers closed around the wrist of his knife-hand and forced it high above his head.
Panting hoarsely, they lay locked face to face, the clothed assassin and the naked victim, as though they were posing for a painting of some obscene and unnatural coupling. Gritting his teeth with the effort, Randall pinioned the man's free hand under his arm and used his superior weight to roll over on top. Then, every sinew in his body tensed with the attempt, he tried to bend back the hand grasping the murderous knife and force it to relinquish the weapon.
The muscles in the attacker's forearm corded like steel rods as he strove desperately to withstand the pressure. Beads of sweat started out on his swarthy forehead as he tried to break the movie man's grip and plunge the knife blade into his back. His lips bared back from his teeth like a maddened animal, and his foul breath played nauseatingly over Randall's contorted features.
At that moment, seeing the second man clambering to his feet, Hannah grabbed instinctively for an earthenware jug on a side table and brought it crashing down on his skull.
The vessel smashed into fragments, strewing the floor with broken shards. The man grunted and dropped onto his face. The knife fell from his nerveless hand and spun away underneath the bed.
And Randall, caught for a split second off guard by the sudden noise, infinitesimally relaxed his concentration.
It was enough for his adversary. Thrusting one foot against the movie man's ankle, he kicked Randall's leg wide and brought up his other knee to smash with sickening force into the naked American's testicles.
Randall gave a choked cry and doubled up, rolling off the attacker's stomach and letting go of his knife hand to claw in agony at his own savaged belly.
Hannah screamed wildly as the assassin rose to his knees with his features twisted into an evil smile. He raised the knife high into the air above Randall's nakedly writhing back . . . and then froze as there was a clatter and a rumble from outside the bedroom door. The sound of a key being turned in the lock was strangely loud in the silent room.
Stumbling hastily to his feet, the Arab called out something to his companion who was now on his hands and knees, shaking his bleeding head dazedly and made for the window. Before the terrified girl realized what was happening they had both rushed out onto the balcony and leaped over the iron railing to the street fifteen feet below.
By the time she got to the window herself, they had picked themselves up and melted into the throng jostling towards the market beyond the hotel.
She turned back into the room. Randall was sitting up on the floor groaning, the marble squares surrounding him punctuated by spots of blood from his injured arm and the two scarlet exclamation points of the intruders' abandoned tarbooshes.
Beyond him the door opened. A wheeled chromium trolley loaded with tall glasses of orange juice, copper pans of steaming coffee, and hot rolls wrapped in starched napkins rolled into the room. Behind it an Arab hotel servant in white robes smiled a dusky greeting. "Breakfuss, sah," he announced cheerfully.
CHAPTER FOUR
"Don't ask me!" Randall said for the third time to the big man across from him. "I don't have a goddamn idea why anyone should be after my blood!"
"But surely if they try three times in as many days . . . ? "
"It's more complicated than that: I figure there were two different groups at work. The guys in Paris were speaking some language I couldn't recognize, but the punks who got into my hotel room here were talking in Arabic."
"Maybe they were just local hired help. But why should they want to kill you?"
"They don't want to kill me," Randall said flatly. "That little shit in the hotel room could easily have plunged his knife into me after the room-service waiter interrupted . . . and still got away over the balcony. But he didn't. And it can't be robbery. The guys in Paris had plenty of time for that and they didn't either. No, they must be after something I've got. Something particular. And the hell of it is, I don't know what the fuck they want!"
The man on the far side of the desk sighed. He was a tall, coarse-featured man with a red freckled face and close-cropped hair. He was six feet two inches tall and the fact that he had a pot belly disguised the fact that most of his 240 lbs. was hard muscle. His name was Arthur Smollett and he was an occasional free-lance field agent for the CIA. Randall had met him some years before when he was running arms into Central Africa, and the two men had struck up a wary friendship. Now, knowing Smollett was based on Khartoum, the movie man was seeking his aid in an attempt to unravel the mystery surrounding the inexplicable attacks he was being subjected to.
"I'd like to make this clear, Smollett," Randall said awkwardly. "There's nothing remotely connected with the CIA or your own job in this deal. I want to retain you in a personal capacity . . . and of course I'll be glad to pay whatever the trade carries."
"Just what do you want me to do, Randall boy?"
"Let's say I'd like you to make with the private eye routine."
Smollett fished a cigar from his breast pocket and lit it. "Meaning?"
"Meaning I want you to find out who's behind this and why. I want to know what these guys are after. What have I got that's so valuable that I don't even know I have it? Meaning you have all the contacts here so you should be able to do it. And meaning most of all that I want you to look after my girl when I'm not there. Act as a bodyguard if you like. I've got work to do, and I don't have the time to find out for myself, even if I had the contacts, which I don't."
Smollett blew out a lungful of cigar smoke and stared at him through the blue cloud. "It'll cost you," he said.
"That's okay. I said I'm prepared to pay. Just find out, is all."
The big man heaved his great bulk out of their chair and walked to the window. The office was small and shabby, overlooking the loading yard of a cotton warehouse. "I can't guarantee results," he said at last. "It's a difficult country and they're devious bastards to deal with. But I'll try."
"That's my boy!" Randall said. He glanced at a newspaper lying open on the desk. DOOMED ORLY JETLINER DEFINITELY SABOTAGED SAY EXPERTS, the front-page headline announced. "Right now," he added, "I'm ready to believe that even the goddamn air crash was directed at me!"
Half an hour later, three miles away on the other side of the city, he was walking up the steps of a government building that stood in shuttered seclusion behind tall hedges of tamarisk. He had telephoned Hannah, telling her to store the majority of their baggage, move to a smaller hotel, and wait there for Smollett. Now he was about to make his first business call.
The man who eventually received him was lean and dark, a neat mustache emphasizing the chiseled planes of his mouth. Over Ii is glass-topped desk a large horizontal fan revolved slowly in the hot damp air. His name, according to an ebony plaque on the desk, was Colonel Gamal Nessim.
He read carefully through Randall's credentials and letters of introduction and then looked up with a smile. "We are always happy to welcome foreigners who wish to film in our country," he said. "And as you no doubt know, we make no demands that you should employ a certain proportion of Sudanese workers. To be frank, the money you bring in is of use to our economy."
Randall inclined his head and said nothing.
"I see from your proposed schedule, however, that you would like permission to prospect locations in the south of the country," Colonel Nessim added. "I should be interested to know why."
The movie man grinned. "like most things in our business," he replied, "it's one of those deals that just happened. The company happened to have acquired a whole lot of jeeps, half-tracks and obsolete tanks. There happened to be a story in the script department for which they could be used. And the story happened to be a World War II adventure set in the Western Desert."
"I see. Why not shoot it in the Western Desert then?"
"My principals thought the political situation north of the Sahara was too unstable. We'd found a stretch of similar terrain in Senegal, but there were difficulties there too. Apparently you have an equally suitable area in the south of your country."
Nessim rose gracefully from his chair and moved across to a wall map flanked by a coat of arms and the Sudanese flag. "I gather the areas in question would be, roughly, here . . . and here . . . and perhaps here?" he said, tapping the map with a manicured finger. "To the south and west of the El Marra massif?"
"Yes . . . about there, I'd say."
"Your company's choice of locale would not you will forgive me? would not have any connection with the supposed existence of mineral deposits, lignite and bauxite for example, in those areas?"
"Good God, no!" Randall exclaimed. "I'm not an undercover man for some sharp prospecting firm out for cheap concessions! You don't have to worry about that: I wouldn't know a quartz crystal from a diamond! We really do have a movie to make. I could show you the contracts."
"That will not be necessary. I can see you are astonished by my suggestion. But you must understand that, in my branch of the police service, there are certain formalities to be observed, certain questions to be asked."
"Naturally. That's why I'm here to answer them if I can."
Nessim smiled and sat down again. "In principle there should be no difficulty in acceding to your request," he said. "But in practice it is not as easy as you might think."
"Frankly, I can't see why," Randall objected. "I mean, it's not as though we wanted to set up rails and trundle dollies through the main streets and hold up all the traffic, is it? I gather the area's practically uninhabited."
"True. But it is an area of unrest just the same."
"Unrest? Really?" Randall was astonished. "I'd no idea."
"It is not a story that appears in the world's press, but it is dramatic enough for all that," Nessim said soberly. 'There is, I regret to say, a species of genocide being carried out in the region."
"Genocide!"
The policeman sighed. "I'm afraid there is no other word for it. The northern half of the country is peopled by Muslims Arabs if you like. But the three southern provinces are inhabited by Negroes, either Christian or pagan. And since the big cities such as Khartoum and Omdurman, and therefore the reins of government, are in Arab hands.. . " He shrugged. "Well, naturally, the peoples of the south feel that they are exploited. They wish to secede."
"And the government refuses?"
"Since the British left and the country became independent," Nessim said levelly, "there has been a systematic campaign of extermination in that region of the south. There are fifteen thousand Arab troops quartered in the area. Feeling runs so high that the officers go in fear of their lives and spend their time lounging about in the towns leaving their men free to ass and loot and murder as they will. Almost every day another village is destroyed razed to the ground and all its inhabitants killed."
"Good God!" Randall was profoundly shocked. "But what possible excuse . . . . "
"They are said to be rebels. Cut-throat bands of renegade blacks, they call them here. And they say they are simply eliminating agitators. But in reality it is a religious and race war that is being fought. More than a hundred and fifty villages have been destroyed completely eradicated in the southeast since the British left. Fifty thousand people have been massacred in those villages, leaving the survivors to wander in the bush and starve. Such murders, plus disease, starvation and a drain of refugees fleeing across the borders, have reduced the African population by over a million a third of the total black inhabitants in those provinces!"
"Are there in fact rebel bands?" Randall asked. "Or do they just suffer in silence?"
"Some of the dissidents have naturally formed themselves into armed groups, a kind of black underground. There are the Nya Nyerere in the southwest, and the Anya Nya, further east past the Sobat Lazzaro, who commands the Anya Nya, is a skilled guerilla leader but he has one bazooka and a handful of rifles among a few thousand irregulars. They fight in bowler hats and shorts! What can such groups do against fifteen thousand heavily armoured cavalry? Occasionally they ambush and wipe out an Arab squadron; sometimes they take and hold a frontier post for a few days. But they couldn't prevent the Juba massacre in the summer of 1965, when fourteen hundred people were killed in a single night! Most of the leaders have been forced to flee into exile either to Abyssinia or west to Chad, Mali, and Senegal."
"You seem if you don't mind my saying so extremely . . . uh . . . objective about this,"
Randall commented. "For a Khartoum official, I mean."
Nessim smiled faintly. "I have reason to be," he said. "I am a member of a minority myself. My family were Copts, part of a Christian sect based in Alexandria. We had to leave Egypt when Nasser took over from King Farouk. That is why, although I have found refuge here, I shall never rise higher than head of an unimportant administrative department that has nothing to do with politics. And that is why I have sympathy for the poor people of the south who cannot get proper representation because of the corruption here in Khartoum."
He sighed and shuffled together the papers on his desk. "But I must not weary you with our internal problems, Mr. Randall," he said. "I will try to get you your permission to film in the El Marra region though your company might be well advised to ask the government for a troop of cavalry to hold, as it were, a watching brief."
"We should probably be able to use them in the movie," Randall said. "And we should naturally expect to, shall we say, defray the necessary expenses."
"Just so." Gamal Nessim flashed him a smile of understanding. "But it may take some time to complete the necessary formalities. If you could call back some time later this afternoon . . . or tomorrow morning?"
"By all means. In any case I only want to look the place over in the beginning." Randall hesitated and then took a sudden decision. He had formed an instinctive and immediate liking for the elegant Egyptian. "Are you by any chance free to have lunch with me?" he asked.
Nessim raised his eyes and smiled broadly a warm smile that erased the lines from his face and made him look suddenly boyish and enthusiastic. "That would be most agreeable. I should be glad to," he said.
They went to a roof top restaurant surrounded by orange trees in tubs and shaded from the fierce heat of the sun by striped awnings. Beyond the parapet, the distant waters of the Nile showed blue and glittering over the massed palms of a small park between two glaring white apartment blocks.
For a time the conversation was general. And then, under the mellowing influence of a bottle of white Burgundy (for Nessim, as a non-Muslim, was evidently an amateur of fine wines), Randall began to speak more freely. Partly because the man was after all a policeman, but mainly because the more he saw of him the more he liked him, he began to relate the details of the inexplicable series of attacks he had suffered since he left Paris.
When he reached the events of that morning immediately preceding his visit to the police headquarters, Nessim looked up suddenly from his plate and raised enquiring eyebrows. "Did you say Smollett?" he echoed. "Arthur Smollett?"
"That's right," Randall replied. "I guess it's pretty well an open secret that he works for the CIA."
"A big man with a crude vocabulary and a red face? An American?"
'That's him!"
Nessim picked up a fork and slid the succulent meat cubes of a kebab delicately from their skewer. "I am afraid that you have your tenses wrong, my friend," he said.
"Come again?"
"It may have been no secret that Mr. Smollett worked for the Central Intelligence Agency," the Colonel said slowly. "What is perhaps less well known is that his contract was ah-terminated well over a year ago."
Randall stared at him with his glass half way to his lips. "Terminated? You mean he was thrown out? Fired?"
"Part of my work as arbiter of permits for foreigners," Nessim said carefully, "necessarily brings me into contact with my colleagues in the security police. That is the information I have been given."
"Good God! But why? What did he do?"
"I am afraid I am not at liberty to divulge the details. I can however tell you what he does now. " The Egyptian stared out over the roof at the multicolored mosaics of a mosque glinting in the sun. "He is the proprietor of a seedy tourist agency touting for the less salubrious places of entertainment in our city from all of which he receives a healthy kick-back," he said.
Randall stared at him.
"He publishes a shady guide to the Sudan which is neither more nor less than an advertising medium for the country's brothels," Nessim continued remorselessly. "He is himself an active supplier of women for those brothels. And he is thought although not known to have a considerable interest in the supply and sale of drugs here."
"Good God!" Randall said again. "Why don't you throw him out then?"
"He has friends in high places," the police official said evasively.
"You mean he has protection? He runs in women and drugs for the boys at the top? Is that it?"
Colonel Nessim drained his glass and took an Egyptian cigarette from a gold case. "I am not at liberty to tell you any more," he said. "I have perhaps spoken too freely already."
"But.. . but.. . I'd no idea! I thought I knew the man! . . . Jesus!" Randall sat staring, struck by a sudden thought. "You say he supplies the cat houses here?"
The policeman nodded. "So I believe."
"And this is the guy I hired to investigate . . . and to look after my girl! Jesus!"
Nessim lit his cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. "Believe me, Mr. Randall," he said earnestly. "You could not have chosen a worse person for either task . . . "
By now thoroughly alarmed, Randall called for the bill, agreed to meet Nessim the following morning at his office, and took a cab back to the Excelsior Hotel.
Yes, the Arab receptionist informed him, Madame had checked out and removed the baggage. She had returned later without it and waited in the patio for a visitor. A large, red-faced effendi with a loud voice. An American gentleman, he thought. They had left the hotel together.
Randall called another cab and raced across town to the smaller hotel where he had suggested Hannah should book them in.
The fat old Frenchwoman behind the desk in the cramped foyer remembered him from a previous visit three years before. She was very content to see Monsieur Randall once more, she enthused. It was always agreeable to welcome old and valued clients.
But no nobody had made a reservation in Monsieur Randall's name. Certainly no baggage had arrived. And she had seen no red-haired young lady with or without a large American gentleman. Of course, she would ask the staff-but had she not been behind her desk herself all morning? She would surely have remarked such a couple if they had come! She would have a look . . . but no, there were no messages.
Randall flung himself into the telephone kiosk and dialed Smollett's number. There was no reply.
Hannah and the crooked ex-CIA man had vanished into the complex warren of the city . . .
CHAPTER FIVE
Hannah Beardsley lay face downwards on the cushions of a low Arab divan and blinked her green eyes. Her mouth felt dry, nausea clawed at the pit of her stomach, and there was an ache behind her throbbing temples.
For a moment she stared at the unfamiliar oriental patterns of the covers, and then abruptly she pushed herself up on to her hands and knees and stared around her. Where was she?
The room was small and dimly lit, with only one small barred window high up under the arched ceiling. The dun-colored walls were hung with rugs and there was an intricately engraved brass coffee tray standing on wooden legs beside the divan. Otherwise the place was empty.
She swung one shapely leg off the bed and realized with a start of dismay that she was naked! And then suddenly, with mind-shattering clarity, it all came back to her . . .
She remembered Mark's telephone call. She remembered checking out of the hotel and taking away their baggage. She had gone back to the Excelsior and the man Smollett had arrived there instead of meeting her at the other place as Mark had arranged. She hadn't even had time to book them in to the new hotel. Smollett told her that Mark had changed his plans and they were all to meet for lunch on the outskirts of the city. She distrusted and disliked the big man from the moment she saw him, but Mark had said that he worked for the CIA and that he was all right. So she obediently got into the back of the chauffeur-driven Mercedes and gone off with him.
She remembered questioning Smollett when they seemed to be penetrating deeper and deeper into the congested Arab quarter of the old town, but he explained that it was a short-cut and allayed her fears. She remembered him turning towards her with a curiously knowing leer on his face . . . and then suddenly she remembered, too, the cotton-wool pad drenched in some sickly smelling stuff that he whipped out of his briefcase and clapped over her nose and mouth.
And that was all she did remember!
My God! She must have been drugged! It was ridiculous and melodramatic and unbelievable-like some absurd story in a cheap movie but she had been drugged and abducted, kidnapped in the kasbah! And now here she was, a naked prisoner . . . where?
In a sudden flood of panic, she jumped from the divan and threw herself towards an iron-hinged door filling an arch at the top of a short flight of steps at the far end of the room. The door was bolted on the outside.
Really frightened now, the redheaded American girl dragged the tray-table over to the wall and climbed tremblingly on to the brass top. Her eyes were still below the level of the window and all she could see beyond the bars set into the thick mud embrasure was a segment of blue sky over another mud wall. From somewhere nearby the plaintive quarter-tones of Arab music brayed into the air. Otherwise the building was surrounded by complete silence.
Going back to the divan, the terrified redhead gave way for a moment to despair. She was a naked captive in the native quarter of some Arab town . . . she didn't even know for sure that it was Khartoum, for she had no means of knowing how long she had been unconscious. How was Mark ever going to find her? How was she ever going to get out of this terrible predicament? And what could Arthur Smollett's motives have been, spiriting her away like this?
The problem, added to the unnerving attacks on Mark and the horrifying spectacle of the jet disaster, was too much for her. She was overcome by a fit of helpless weeping, the hot tears coursing down her trembling cheeks and splashing on to her quivering naked breasts as she sat dejectedly on the low divan.
She was still sunk in hopeless apathy when there was a rattling of chains and the heavy clunk of iron bolts being drawn. The door swung open, and Arthur Smollett strode into the room followed by two evilly smirking Arab servants.
Hannah gave a gasp of dismay, clamping her knees together and crossing her arms to hide her exposed breasts as the big man came to a halt towering over her. She had never felt so defenseless and naked in her life.
"W-w-w-what do you mean by this . . . this outrage?" she demanded in a voice shrill with fright. "Why have I been brought here? How dare you! Where are my clothes?"
Smollett chuckled coarsely. "Save it, baby," he rasped. "You are here and that's all there is to it. Calling names won't help you none. As to your clothes, you won't need any where you're goin'! "
"W-w-w-what do you mean? I don't understand."
"I gotta client who fancies Western broads," Smollett said. "Especially redheads with big tits. He placed an order and you happened to fill the bill. So I'm deliverin' the goods, is all."
"B-b-but that's . . . that's . . . " Hannah squeaked, a cold hand of fear clutching at her heart. "You can't do that! You'll never get away with it! Oh God, I thought you were supposed to be a friend of Mark's."
"That punk? He's a coupla years out of date. He thinks I still work for those shit-heads in Washington! I got better friends now."
"Well he'll find me. He won't rest until he does. He has friends in the p-p-police. He. . . ,he'll have every exit in the city watched," the weeping redhead said defiantly. "He'll find me and then you'd better watch out!"
Smollett laughed. "He doesn't have a hope in hell," he said. "In the first place you already left Khartoum yesterday afternoon!"
"That's what I said. You been out for over twenty-four hours, baby. You were already clear of the city limits before he even knew you were missing!"
"But . . . but . . . but I tell you, you can't do this sort of thing!"
"Shut up!" Smollett shouted, suddenly becoming impatient. "You can forget your creep boy friend and your goddamn clothes and everything else you ever had. I'm bein' paid good money for you, and you're goin' on out and keep my client company in his desert pad, and that's all there is to it. Squallin' won't get you no place, so you better keep that pretty little trap shut or I'll beat the shit outa you."
"You'll never get away with it, you loud-mouthed oaf," Hannah stormed again. "Do you think for a moment that Mark will accept.. . " She broke off with a cry of pain as the ex-CIA man raised his hand and viciously slapped her across the face. The blow was hard enough to send her reeling back on the divan with the marks of his fingers livid on her cheek.
"When I say shut up, I mean just that," Smollett said harshly. He turned to the two servants and barked a command in Arabic.
Before the cowering girl realized what was happening, the two men darted forward and seized her by the arms and legs. As she screamed wildly, they picked her up and flung her violently face downwards on the divan. One of them then threw himself across her frenziedly kicking legs while the other sat on her writhing shoulders, his sinewy knees under the striped Arab robe pinioning her arms to her sides, his swarthy face towards her feet.
Twisting her head desperately to one side under his muscular weight, the hysterically sobbing captive girl saw with a thrill of horror that Smollett was slowly undressing. "Ahmed," he said to the man across her legs, "get them pretty thighs spread good and wide, will ya? Hassan you know what you have to do?"
"Si, si, effendi!" the man astride Hannah's quivering shoulders replied with an evil grin.
"W-w-w-what are you going to do?" the nakedly pinioned girl quavered.
Smollett pulled his shirt over his head. He licked his thick lips. "like most of them desert chieftains, my client-likes his automobiles good and run in when he takes delivery," he said conversationally. "He don't want to run no Caddy a thousand miles over the sand at forty miles per hour. He wants to put his sonofabitch foot down and go! It's the same way with his women. We're just gonna do a little test-bed run, as you might say." He chuckled obscenely, delighted with his joke.
Hannah stared at him uncomprehendingly, her tear-stained face a mask of puzzlement.
The big American unzipped the fly of his pants, stripped them off, and stepped out of his shorts. Standing naked before her, he looked immense. His body, meaty and muscular, was tough all over except for the heavy paunch bulging out above the wiry tangle of his iron-gray pubic hair. Over the heavy, bloated pouch of his testicles, his penis, formidable as the trunk of some desert cactus, jerked slowly into massive erection.
"like I say," Smollett continued, "I'm gonna open up the road a little for him, so it won't be so much of a squeeze in there when he gets goin'. " He turned and nodded to the two Arabs.
Hannah gasped as she felt her legs suddenly freed of Ahmed's weight and then her ankles were grasped and wrenched brutally apart, so that she was held immovably spread-eagled face down on the divan. At the same time Hassan leaned forward with a sadistic chuckle and dug his hard fingers into the softly rounded half moons of her naked buttocks. Gripping her top half tightly between his splayed thighs, he pried the quivering mounds of smooth flesh slowly apart, exposing the entire length of her hairy vaginal furrow to Smollett's leering gaze. She felt the cool air on her genitals and she realized with a despairing sob that she had never in her whole life felt so utterly degraded and shamefully exposed. She shivered and jerked again, shuddering with disgust as Hassan worked a gob of spittle to the front of his mouth and allowed it to fall slowly on to the tightly clenched nether ring of her puckered little anus.
But even then she didn't fully grasp the vile humiliation she was to suffer. She was staring mesmerized at Smollett's huge cock. He was rubbing the loose foreskin expertly up and down the rigidly expanding staff, exposing the purplish, bulbously inflated head as he massaged the thick pole of flesh into even greater hardness. "W-w-what are you going to do?" she whispered fearfully again.
"Our Muslim friends don't go too much on cunt," Smollett said coarsely, "but they sure go a bundle on ass, so Daddy's comin' in the back way just to make it easier for the boss man." And then, seeing that the anguished redhead still didn't understand, he added brutally: "I'm goin' to fuck you in the asshole, baby."
"Oh, no!" the weeping captive wailed as the full implication of the bestial, indecent ravishment he was proposing sank in to her tortured mind. "You can't! . . . Not like that! Not there! Please don't do it to me there! You can't! . . . "
"Can't?" Smollett repeated. "Just try me, sweetie!" And stepping towards the divan he leaned down and thrust the tip of his outstretched middle finger against the tight entrance to her naked rectum, poking viciously at her defenseless anal hole.
Spread helplessly on the cushions with her legs cruelly forced apart by Ahmed and her hips jammed down by the pressure of Hassan's buttock-splaying hands, the weeping young redhead was powerless to resist. Frantically, she writhed her naked buttocks against the onslaught of the raping finger, thrashing them wildly from side to side and clenching her ass-cheek muscles desperately in a vain attempt to delay the brutal penetration she knew must come. She could hardly believe that even these merciless kidnappers and white-slavers would do such a vile thing to her. It was monstrous! It was the ultimate depth of degradation! Surely they must be doing it just to intimidate her, to make her beg for mercy and prepare her for the humiliations of the harem?
Smollett leaned down further and spat accurately on to the outer edges of the desperately contracted anal ring uptilted between the cruelly spread cheeks of her ass. Then, with a grunt of satisfaction, he plowed his finger deep into the warm velvety passage beyond.
"Asssssssgggggghhhh!" Hannah opened her mouth and screamed.
"By God, your asshole's so tight you must be a virgin back there." Smollett said, as the lewdly grinning American drilled his finger deeper and deeper, stretching and expanding the tightness of the frantic girl's rectum until she thought she would faint from the pain. Moans of impotent protest forced their way through her fearfully quivering lips as he moved the finger around inside the contracted little opening, sawing it in and out to stretch the clenched anus in preparation for the entry of the huge cock swaying obscenely between his thighs.
"Aaaaah, don't!" the helpless redhead screamed again as he jammed a second finger into her warm buttery depths. "Don't! You're hurting meeeeeeee!"
"You can holler as much as you like, girlie," Smollett panted. "Ain't nobody goin' to take any notice. They're used to women yelling around here!"
Abruptly, he plucked the raping digits away from Hannah's defensively puckered rectum. Forcing his hand between her fear-tautened belly and the cushions, he stroked his fingers lewdly back along the hairy length of her moist vaginal cleft and smeared the fluid up and around her plundered anus to lubricate the opening still further. A moment later she felt the divan sag as he climbed on and kneeled between her cruelly spread thighs . . . and then the hard rubbery tip of his huge, hotly pulsating cock was pressing against her tight hairless anal opening.
The spread-eagled naked girl held her breath as she felt the thickly rigid penis wedged into the crevice of her forced-open ass-cheeks begin to press remorselessly inwards. God, it was huge! It would split her! She would never be able to take such a shaft in her rectum without her belly being torn apart!
The muscles of Smollett's stomach contracted and then stood out as he strained forward. Hannah felt the soft probing between her buttocks grow into a hard relentless pressure against the tight rubbery ring of her anus.
"Ohhhhhhhh! God, no! Please-Aaaaaaaagggghhhh!" she shrieked suddenly as the interfolded nether ring suddenly gave way and the inflated head of the American's massive penis rammed inside with a surging rush.
A spasm of agony shot through the naked redhead's loins, a pain so unbearable that she screeched again and again, squirming with all her strength to evade the bestial impalement. Her naked buttocks writhed wildly under Hassan's splaying hands, but her anguished movements served only to wedge the thickly gleaming cock more securely into her tortured rectum. It was as though a monstrous battering-ram was being remorselessly thrust into the tiny opening of her virginal back passage!
Grinning cruelly, Smollett forced his long thick penis another inch, and then another, and still another into the screaming girl's nakedly thrashing body. And then his beefy loins smacked heavily into the softness of her lewdly spread ass-cheeks. She was hopelessly skewered on the brutally thick fleshiness of his raping penis! It was buried to the hilt in her tightly clenched anus!
Panting hoarsely with his exertions, the ex-CIA man began to fuck rhythmically in and out of the hot spongy depths of Hannah's back passage under the admiring and lustful gaze of the two Arabs.
As the helpless girl fought with wild desperation against the horror and degradation of the depraved attack on her defenseless anal passage, his pounding hips pumped faster and faster, thrusting the inflamed spear of his lustfully expanding rod again and again into the brutally ravished tightness of her rectum. She was impaled on the stone-hard cock as inexorably as an insect on a board!
The kidnapped redhead's burnished hair flailed among the cushions, her head twisting this way and that in helpless subjugation as the tempo of Smollett's pistoning hips increased and his huge penis plowed on and on up into her savagely stretched rectum. Her mind was adrift on a sea of degradation and misery. The flesh of her ripe young buttocks shuddered uncontrollably under the pressure of Hassan's fingers; the soft bulge of her belly trembled convulsively every time her agonizingly splayed thighs were buffeted by another fiercely thrusting plunge of the American's raping shaft. Her ankles, held painfully wide in Ahmed's brutal grasp, were aching intolerably, and her proud young breasts were squashed under the weight of evil Hassan.
Smollett's mind was an inferno of impatient lust, and the sensation of the naked captive's warm velvety rectum clasped so tightly around the base of his passion-inflamed cock was driving him on to even greater excesses. His eyes locked hypnotically on his sodomizing pole of iron-hard flesh buried between Hannah's upraised ass-cheeks, and he felt his heart pumping wildly in his chest. He had never seen a more exciting sight in his life! He was almost sorry he was selling the bitch to that dusky bastard in the interior! With bated breath, he eyed the tender ridges of her pink anal flesh pulling out with each withdrawal of his long thick staff and then disappearing once more as his inward thrust drove her little rectal ring back up into her belly. His breath jetted faster and faster through his nose as he fucked like a madman in and out of the piteously wailing redhead's puckering anal hole.
Pounded into total submission by the hot pulsing cock ramming into her cruelly distended anus, Hannah groaned afresh with every scalding plunge. Gradually, though, the agony and the humiliation were taking on a new and frightening dimension. Unwanted and unexpected, forbidden sensations of excitement were beginning to invade her tingling loins. The shame of lying helplessly on her face being sodomized by one man while another sat astride her back forcing her buttocks apart was joined by a strange masochistic emotion.. . an emotion not very far from actual pleasure! God, they were treating her like the white-slave she was to be, using her body like a whore's to satisfy their brutal male lust!
There was no doubt about it! Although twinges of pain still shot through her belly, the feeling of Smollett's huge spear of hard male flesh racing up into her vulnerably filled rectum was flooding her veins with a sensation of pleasure! She was actually enjoying it. . . pain and pleasure, shame and ecstasy, had become inextricably mingled in her reeling mind!
The violently fucking American plunging in and out of her anus called out something in Arabic. The insanely writhing redhead felt Hassan's splaying fingers removed from the stretched cheeks of her ass to be replaced instantly by Smollett's own hard hands. And then she gasped and jerked anew as the Arab's obscenely intruding digits forced themselves beneath her hip bones and crept lewdly through her drenched pussy hair to feel for the swollen lips of her wetly open cunt.
Abruptly all her defenses crumbled and the young redheaded girl began screaming again and again with abandoned passion as the raping fingers parted her throbbing vaginal lips and scrabbled at the tightly erect bud of her trembling clitoris. Oh God, Oh God! It was unendurable, it was intolerable, it was delicious.. . if the fingers continued their unbearable clawing at her secret inner flesh and Smollett's vast penis went on sawing into her hotly seething anus much longer she was going to cum . . . she knew she was! And she didn't want to; she resisted the thought with all her mind to cum would be an admission that her body craved the brutal subjection she was suffering!
Yet the tidal wave of erotic lust on which she was irresistibly borne swept her remorselessly onwards. She heard a girl's voice passionately shrieking, "Go on, do it to me! Fuck me! Harder, harder, harder!" And she realized with a thrill of horror that the words were formed by her own wantonly trembling lips!
Smollett felt the sweat stream from his every pore as he fucked into the widely distended hole between the captive American girl's buttocks. He stared down in fascination at her tightly clasping rectal mouth, pulling her softly rounded ass-cheeks even further apart as he fixed his staring eyes lasciviously on those pink ridges of anal flesh clinging to his raping cock on each withdrawal stroke.
She was pumping her ass insanely back against him now, meeting thrust with thrust as she screamed her lust aloud. The little bitch was going out of her mind! He couldn't remember when he'd seen a broad so hot! Jesus, it was as much as he could do to keep up with her! She was writhing so violently that she was almost throwing the straddled Hassan clean off of her back!
"Aaaahhhh! Aaaaahhh! Aaaaaahhhh!" Hannah cried wildly. Her tingling body was at the crest of the wave! It didn't matter what they did to her now; she was going to cum at any moment!
Sensing that the pinioned girl was about to peak, Smollett plunged his stone-hard cock into her fire-filled anus with redoubled fury, brutally splaying her lush white buttocks apart as his pistoning pelvis fucked faster and faster against her eagerly thrusting ass-cheeks. And suddenly he felt her stiffen and shudder.
"Aaaaaaaaaah? Oooooogh! Oh! Oh God, oh God, I'm cumming! I'm cumming!" Hannah screamed in a demented wail and then her lushly ripened young body bucked and jerked and threshed in a crescendo of intolerable delight as her orgasm tremored insanely through her with the force of a tropical tempest!
The wild churning of her lust-inflamed buttocks triggered off the sodomizing American's climax. He raised his head to bellow out a gasping cry of release. His hips arched convulsively forward, ramming his raping staff even deeper into the helpless girl's belly as the throbbing head of his cock exploded into a storm of powerful jerking in the tightly convulsing depths of her vise-like rectum. Scalding squirts of his semen jetted far up into the ravaged redhead's anal passage, and she shrieked in a mindless ecstasy with each fresh gush of his white-hot sperm.
For a long moment the men held her cruelly there, skewered helplessly on Smollett's spewing penis as he ejaculated his churning cum in forceful spurts up into her quivering rectum. Then he thrust violently down on her spread thighs and levered himself exhaustedly away from her, his deflating, cum-covered cock pulling free of her plundered anal hole with a sucking squelch.
"Jesus, that was good!" he panted, clambering off the divan to leave an opalescent trail of sticky sperm strung across her trembling buttocks. "But it's tight in there! I guess we better open her up some more before we make the delivery to Abd el Kerim! Be my guest, Hassan boy, and see what you can do!"
Crushed into abject subjugation by the debasing rape of her anus and the Arab's obscene handling of her clitoris and humiliated even more by her own lewd reaction to it Hannah lay sobbing into the cushions. She felt Hassan's weight lift from her shoulders. . . ,and then Ahmed had leaped nimbly into his place, releasing her ankles to straddle her back and arms as he leaned forward to pry apart the shuddering cheeks of her ass once more. Again her thighs were kneed excruciatingly wide as the exultant Hassan took up Smollett's old position between them and hauled up his striped robe to produce his darkly inflamed penis.
Oh God! the helpless redhead moaned to herself in the depths of her despair. They're going to do it to me again! Will this hell never end?
The lustfully excited Arab, his dark eyes glittering with triumph, took the rigidly throbbing shaft of his cock in one hand, rammed the wetly seeping head against the plundered hole that Ahmed was splaying wide before him, and plunged the hot pole of flesh two inches into Hannah's distended and sperm-wet anus with a single powerful thrust. As she screamed afresh in a combination of pain and shame and pure animal rapture, he rocked back on his heels and seized her hips to drag the tightly clasping ring of puckered flesh still further up the raping shaft of his penis.
Smollett was clambering back into his pants again. "Attaboy, Hassan!" he guffawed. "Fuck the shit outa that tight little hole! Ahmed can take his turn afterwards. Maybe it'll be wide enough then to take His Excellence!"
Stuffing the limply shining tube of his cock back into the bulging crotch of his shorts, he turned to the anguished redhead and added: "As for you, darling, we got a nice little hypo full of sleep drops. You're gonna take another trip and then you'll wake up all relaxed and ready for the boss man in his harem.
CHAPTER SIX
Mark Randall shielded his eyes against the blazing sun. Under the folds of his Arab gown, the heavy colt automatic lent to him by Colonel Nessim had worn a sore place on his hip and he shifted the belt supporting its holster for the hundredth time since he had left Khartoum. Beneath his aching thighs, the camel lurched and swayed, picking its way over the shale slanting up to a massive limestone bluff a thousand feet above them.
The caravan was quite small a score of camels and half a dozen pack horses but by now it had become strung out across the desolate plateau and snaked its way for nearly a quarter of a mile along the stony path. It had been almost five hours since they struggled up the steep valley from the last fortified village; five hours of torment for Randall as the sun rose giddily in the sky and as the caravan inexorably climbed towards the southeast through barren foothills pockmarked with patches of thin scrub, along a ridge of rock where nothing but thorn bushes broke the monotony of the scorched terrain, and now across this bleak upland slope beyond which he fervently hoped! the trail would at last tilt downwards again. Nessim had warned him that the desert wasn't all sand . . . but this, he thought ruefully, was ridiculous!
It was Nessim, of course, whom he had contacted as soon as he knew Hannah was missing and probably in the hands of Smollett. Nessim who had cautioned the raging movie man not to make a public outcry and advised him of the best course to take; Nessim who had used all his influence to help him take that course. For the handsome, dapper police official seemed to have for Randall an instinctive regard as warm and immediate as Mark's for him.
"Believe me my friend," Nessim had said seriously, "it would do you no good, no good at all, to contact embassies and newspapers and government officials. Everybody would be most courteous and helpful. They would be desolated to hear of the disappearance of your lady. They would promise to give you every assistance-and precisely nothing would happen. She would simply remain vanished. An unsolved mystery of the east."
"But where is she? Where has that bastard-" 'The man Smollett has too many highly placed persons on his side," Nessim interrupted. "There are certain ministers that he has, in your American phrase, in his pockets. Through his dubious activities he supplies their wants . . . and because thus he knows too much about them, he is virtually untouchable. His protection is absolute."
"But good God," Randall choked, still white-lipped with fury, "he can't just abduct a girl and get away with it! He-"
"The abduction is already a fact," Nessim interrupted again. "You must believe me that it will never be pinned on him. The only question now is how to get your lady back."
"How do you suggest I start?" Randall said, breathing hard.
"Remember where you are. You must meet deviousness with deviousness. The official view would be that no abduction has taken place at all. Miss Beardsley has simply chosen to go somewhere else. Remember she did check out of your hotel and she didn't book in to another."
"The clever bastard!" Randall said through set teeth.
"But since she had not been abducted," Nessim continued suavely, "clearly there could be no official come-back if she were to be, shall we say, liberated . . . , "
"You mean . . . ? "
"I mean that where an article officially does not exist, there can be no official complaint if it is stolen."
"In other words go on in and get her back myself? There's nothing I'd like better . . . and break that sonofabitch's neck into the bargain! But how the hell do I find out where she is, for God's sakes?"
"There," Nessim said carefully, "I may be able to help. I can do nothing officially, you understand. It is not my department indeed it would be more than my job . . . or my life . . . would be worth to attempt such a thing. But bribery and corruption works both ways. Those who can be paid to keep quiet can also be paid to talk providing the price is right."
"I have funds at my disposal," Randall said tightly. "How much will you need?"
The following day, meeting Nessim as if by chance at a sidewalk cafe, he had learned that Smollett's main client for European girls was a certain Abd el Kerim, a powerful chieftain who ruled as virtual war-lord over a remote region of the interior. "His stronghold is a small town called Wadi Elmira," the policeman said, "and according to my information it is to that place that Miss Beardsley will almost certainly have been taken."
"Just tell me where it is," Randall said, "and I'll handle it."
"Beyond the El Marra massif in the very area, as it happens, where you wished to find locations for your film."
"Great," the movie man said with a mirthless laugh. "I can kill two birds with one stone then and one of the birds is going to take a long time dying! Tell me how I can get there."
"It would be impossible for you to do it on your own. The way lies through trackless desert. You will have to join a caravan heading in that direction . . . and you will have to adopt an Arab disguise."
"Couldn't I hire a plane? A helicopter, maybe and go as myself? After all, I do have a valid reason to be in that area."
Nessim shook his head. "Impossible. You would fall either among the Arab troops quartered there, the dissident Negroes of the south, or Kerim's own soldiers and each would take you for a spy working for one of the others. Your life would not be worth a piastre."
"But if I had papers? The permits we were discussing?"
"They would have been, contingent on your being accompanied by an official guard. And in the circumstances . . . " The policeman spread his hands and shrugged apologetically.
Seething with impatience, not daring to think what might be happening to the affectionate Hannah, Randall was forced to wait another day. He had finally received word that there was a small caravan leaving that night for Halakaz and Gabotomi, one of the Muslim "forbidden cities" in the south. He was to join it in the guise of a pilgrim on his way to Gabotomi . . . and Nessim could provide him with the necessary papers.
After an apparently endless succession of meetings with different contacts at coffee shops all over the city for Nessim himself could not be seen to be directly involved in the affair he suffered himself to be stained brown all over and bearded, hair by hair, along the edge of his jaw line. His teeth were discolored, his hands roughened, and his nails artificially cracked and grimed. With wax cunningly inserted inside his nostrils to alter the shape of his nose, even Hannah would never have recognized him! "According to your papers, effendi," the man leading him to the caravan rendezvous said, "You have come all the way from Al Khuraiba in Saudi Arabia to go on this pilgrimage. Let us hope that this will be considered sufficient explanation for your rather curious accent when you speak Arabic!"
Now, easing the borrowed revolver holster once more on his hip, Randall scanned the plateau with red-rimmed eyes and wondered how the hell he had ever come to think he could find Hannah in this God-forsaken country!
Below and behind them, the dead land dropped away in parallel ridges of clay-red and yellow. Above, some geological unconformity had placed a thin vein of richer rock between the weathered shale and the limestone above it, and her a streak of vegetation raised brownish leaves along the foot of the bluff. A few hundred yards further on, the line of stunted bushes followed the strate as they dipped towards a fault gashing the rock face. It was in the direction of the wedge of cobalt sky marking this defile that the caravan was now moving.
Once between the towering walls of the cleft, the relief from the hammering of the sun was immediate. It was still stiflingly hot in the darkly shadowed gorge, but in contrast to the direct assault of the scorching rays, the respite seemed as refreshing as a shower.
Randall moistened his lips with lukewarm water from a padded bottle slung over his shoulder, reflecting that it was still less than 48 hours since he had been sipping iced whiskey-sours with Nessim in Khartoum! The city, the Excelsior, Smollett's office, the attacks on him there and in Paris, seemed like dreams from another age. Only the intolerable heat and the gnawing ache in his guts at the thought of Hannah were real.
Never mind. They were supposed to arrive at Halakaz before dark and somewhere along the route from there to Gabotomi was the trail that led to Wadi Elmira. In the meantime, the ravine was at least a change from the gaunt perspectives of mountain across which they had so painfully been riding. After those open wastes, the rock walls of the pass seemed to amplify the incidental noises of the caravan, the beasts' stony footfalls, the creak and jingle of pack stays and harness, an occasional guttural murmur of conversation. As befitted a devout pilgrim, Randall kept silent and listened to the high, plaintive tones of the camel-master as he discussed the route at the head of the file.
As they rode out of the long gorge into the full glare of the sun again, he saw with relief that the trail now led downwards across an immense tract of bare gravel dotted with huge boulders. The sun was beginning to sink in the brassy bowl of the sky; the furnace-like quality of the early afternoon was now tempered with an occasional puff of dry hot wind.
Two hours later they breasted a rise and looked down on an ancient fortress town nestling in a deep valley whose sinuous course through the highlands was marked by a ribbon of palms. It was an extraordinary place a compact huddle of dun-colored battlements, walls, domes and watch-towers surrounded by terraced slopes of gravel on which nothing grew. With the life-giving belt of vegetation just below, it looked more like a single medieval castle than an open community, but as they rode slowly down towards the huge gateway with its fortified arch, Randall watched the town unfold and open out until the course of the narrow streets and lanes within could be charted by the bands of shadow slashing the age-old stone in the setting sun.
As the western sky drained through vermilion to limpid green above the rim of the wadi, plaintive quarter-tones of Arab strings and pipes rose into the rapidly cooling air. A few minutes later they passed beneath the arched gate. They had arrived at Halakaz.
There was a dramatic change in the country the following day. Beyond the town, their route led across a featureless wilderness of thorny scrub. By midday this had given way to a sun-scorched savannah gashed by dried-up river beds, and finally they rode through a pass in a range of low hills to find themselves facing a wide plain fringed by the tree-covered cones of a row of extinct volcanoes blue with distance. There were squares of cultivation here and there as they headed south, and vegetation covered the rolling contours more thickly. Twice they skirted villages no longer the mud-walled Arab variety but circles of round huts thatched in the African manner. Once the caravan traversed the burned-out shell of a village that had been sacked, only a ring of seared earth and a few crumbling mud walls remaining to show where it had been. In none of them did they see a single human being.
Two hours later they reached a fork where the roads for Gabotomi and Wau, in Bahr-el-Ghazal province, diverged. According to Nessim's instructions, this was where Randall had to "lose" the caravan, turning back towards Wau and Wadi Elmira on the northern leg while the others rode on towards the rolling, game-rich grasslands of the south.
There had once been a settlement at the junction, but all that remained now was the familiar patch of scorched ground and a ragged line of corn that had gone to seed by the roadside. From a horizontal branch that jutted out over the road, a blackened tree dangled the bodies of five hanged men naked and decomposing, the eyes plucked out by vultures.
Randall shuddered and reined back his camel to allow the rest of the caravan to ride out of sight around a bend in the trail. They must be right in the middle of the area of unrest that Nessim had mentioned.
Waiting for ten minutes to make sure that he had not been missed, the disguised movie man urged his shambling mount up the rough track-leading to Wau. The turn-off for Wadi Elmira was ten miles further on, in the center of an African village on the borderline of the Arab lands ruled by Abd el Kerim.
Soon the sparse vegetation thinned out again, and Randall was back in the interminable thorn-tree desert. He rode for an hour and then, as the camel breasted a rise, pulled up short and stared ahead down the trail. A column of smoke was rising into the leaden sky a mile ahead of him. Around it soared the sinister black specks of vultures.
Randall hesitated . . . and then, hearing the distant thunder of hooves on the hard ground, he kneed his mount out of sight behind a tangle of boulders off the road and dismounted.
It was unbearably hot beside the shimmering rock pile. The spikes of a thorn tree clattered in a sudden puff of wind. Above him, a family of baboons coughed uneasily as a jerboa, one of the desert rats which somehow eked out an existence in the wilderness, scuttled among the stones. Far off to the southwest, a long smudge of dust above the scrub marked the position of the caravan.
The sound of hooves rose to a crescendo and a squadron of Arab camel cavalry thundered past, raising a choking cloud from the trail. There were about thirty of them, shouting and laughing and waving their rifles above their heads as they rode. Two of them carried the bound and screaming figures of African women across their saddles; a third dragged behind his camel on a length of rope the lacerated lifeless body of a black man, bumping and twisting and turning as the flesh was stripped away by the razor-sharp gravel.
Randall crouched in his place of concealment until the dust had settled. Then, the hairs prickling on the nape of his neck, he led the dromedary cautiously towards the column of smoke.
The village was completely concealed in a shallow depression filled with stunted trees. The foliage was brownish-gray in color and could under no stretch of the imagination be called rich; but it was a welcome change from the eternal monotony of the thorn-tree desert.
As he trod warily down the slops, Randall's nostrils were assailed by the bitter stench of burning bodies sprawled in the dusty space enclosed by the ring of gutted huts. The flames had died down, although half a dozen burned dwellings still spiraled smoke into the heavy air. Tethering his nervous camel to a sapling, he advanced still further: somewhere in the midst of this desolation the track to Wadi Elmira led off through the trees.
Randall turned a corner formed by the scorched mud walls of two adjacent huts . . . and stopped dead in his tracks, frozen with horror.
Sprawled in the ashes at his feet, the naked body of a woman lay obscenely on her back with out-flung arms. Her teeth gleamed whitely in a mouth wide-stretched in the soundless scream of death. White severed tendons glistened too in the gaping red horror of her slit throat. There were two rough circles of raw flesh black with flies where her breasts had been hacked off, and between her splayed legs the jagged end of a peeled tree branch protruded from the distended lips of her swollen vagina.
Beyond the pool of congealed blood in which she lay, a seven-foot stake had been driven into the ground. On its sharpened tip a man, probably the village headman, had been horribly impaled through the anus. His hands were lashed together behind his back and to each of his ankles heavy stones had been tied. The weight of these, added to the poor wretch's death struggles had forced the point of the stake further and further up into his body until now it pierced him from his ruptured anus to his diaphragm, through which the tip of the spear shone palely in the sun. His penis and testicles, sliced off with a single cut, had been stuffed into his mouth and bulged grotesquely from between his gaping lips.
Averting his eyes from the blood-festooned stake and its ghastly burden, Randall saw beyond it the track he sought winding away through the trees. Choking down his rising nausea, he stumbled back through a cloud of angrily buzzing flies towards the tree to which he had tethered the dromedary.
He had taken only four steps before he stiffened!
There were half a dozen horses grazing near his camel now in the shade. Beside them, a Sudanese cavalry officer stood with two troopers whose rifles were trained on Randall's chest. A little further off, a tall European in riding breeches and a stained sun helmet waited with two unarmed Arabs.
"Come forward very slowly, my friend," the officer said. "And keep your hands high in the air unless you wish to join these rebel dogs in the dust."
Randall took half a dozen paces with his arms raised and then faltered in his stride as a cold hand of fear clutched at his heart.
The man in the helmet, a malicious grin twisting his coarse features, was Arthur Smollett!
CHAPTER SEVEN
The rank air of the hut was harsh with the sounds of labored breathing. Randall was strapped naked to a ten foot plank. His ankles were bound and attached to a ring at one end and his arms, stretched above his head, were tied at the wrist and fastened to the other. The ends of the plank rested on an oil drum and a low camp stool, so that his head was lower than his feet.
Helpless and undignified on his back in this position, he had endured the age-old water torture. It was quite simple and very effective. They had plugged his nostrils with cotton wool and wedged an iron ring into his mouth so that it was jammed open. One of Smollett's Arab servants had then draped a long strip of thin muslin over the movie man's disguised face and carefully almost lovingly poured water, gallons and gallons of water, into the open mouth through the cloth.
The point of the technique is that the victim, unable to turn his head because of his own bound arms on either side of it, can only get rid of the water by trying to swallow it . . . but before each mouthful is swallowed it is always replaced by another. And in the meantime the victim has to breathe; the laboring lungs heave and try to drag in air, but the attempt only draws in water and with the water comes the muslin, which is remorselessly sucked into the windpipe. In a very short time the victim, gagging and retching, is half drowned with the water in his lungs and half choked by the cloth.
Initially, the treatment had been ordered by the cavalry officer because Randall, as a supposed pilgrim who had failed to follow the prescribed route, was unable to give a convincing enough account of his movements and because his Arabic was simply not good enough to support his false identity. He must, therefore, be a spy, and the officer wanted to find out for whom he was spying. They had taken him to a small army post a few miles from the sacked village and gotten to work.
Initially too, Smollett had shown no more interest in him than the casual attention of the born sadist for the sufferer. But, by the time Randall had twice been reduced to a condition of sobbing, vomiting semi-consciousness, the combined effects of tears, mucus, vomit and water had dislodged the wax pads of his disguise and washed away half of the stain on his face and most of the false beard.
And, suddenly, Smollett's small cruel eyes had widened with recognition, and he had drawn the officer aside and murmured: "Look, Major: in your position as an honorable officer you can only go so far. I am under no such obligation. My two servants are expert at this kind of thing. If you could find some reason to absent yourself for half an hour.. . " He left the sentence unfinished and looked meaningly at the door.
The officer had hesitated, glanced at the helpless Randall and then nodded briskly. A moment later he had ordered the troopers out and left the helpless man alone with Smollett and his two minions.
The coarse-featured ex-CIA man walked slowly across to the plank and looked down at his captive. His red face was glistening with sweat in the stifling air of the hut. Reaching down with one hand, he pried out the iron ring wedging Randall's jaws agonizingly apart. "All right. Mister Pilgrim," he said softly, "you can start singin'. Later on, you can say your prayers."
Randall stared up into his gloating pig-like eyes. "What have you done with Hannah?" he croaked.
"Little Miss big tits with the red hair? You can forget her, buster. We fucked the ass off her and auctioned off what was left in the bazaar. Now she's long gone: you won't ever see her again, and that's for sure."
Randall writhed impotently against his bonds. "If I ever get out of this, Smollett.. . " he panted hoarsely.
The big man laughed. "Forget it! You won't. Even with the protection I got, I can't afford to let you. Not now. But there's things you can tell me before you go. First off, you can answer the questions our dusky friend was askin'. What the fuck are you doin' here got up like that?"
"I already told you. I came to look for Hannah."
"Don't give me that shit! Nobody takes that trouble over a broad!"
"You shouldn't judge the whole world by your own lousy standards," Randall said rashly.
Smollett bunched his ham-like fist and drove it with all his force into the naked man's unprotected belly. The cruel blow seared into Randall's guts, sending waves of agony flaming up into his skull. His body, prevented from the involuntary jackknifing reaction by the ropes lashing his hands and feet to the plank, jerked galvanically. He gave a choking cry and the hut. with Smollett's leering face framed against the wooden ceiling, swam away on a red mist of pain.
"Keep a civil tongue in your goddamn head and tell me why you're here," the big American repeated as Randall's tortured lungs gaspingly managed to draw in enough breath to restore him to consciousness.
". . . told you . . . look for Hannah . . . " the captive movie man groaned.
"And I tell you shit! like the Major said, you're a spy! You've come snooping around here spyin' for the niggers, ain't that it?"
"Spying for the . . . ? What are you talking about? What do you mean?" Sheer astonishment cleared Randall's mind and his eyes opened wide with surprise. The accusation seemed insane to him.
"You gotta be," Smollett rasped. "And talkin' of that, you can tell me another thing. Where's your baggage?"
"My . . . ? My . . . baggage? I don't have any baggage, only a bedroll on the dromedary."
"Not that, you jerk," Smollett snarled. "Your baggage in Khartoum."
The bound man stared at him again. These questions simply didn't make sense! "I haven't the slightest idea," he said truthfully.
Smollett clenched his fist threateningly. "I tell you I don't know," Randall said, tensing the muscles of his stomach. He flinched as the fist descended, but he was powerless to divert the blow, which thudded sickeningly once more into the vulnerable pit of his stomach. The world dissolved again in a crimson mist.
Smollett jerked his head and the two Arabs moved in and began slamming their fists with cold precision into Randall's defenseless body, punching his chest and belly and solar plexus and face with remorseless efficiency and ruthless force. For a time, as the helpless captive's pinioned form bucked and jerked and writhed under the fury of their attack, there was no sound but the smack of knuckles on flesh and bone and the gasping, choking groans forcing their way through Randall's bloody lips. Then
Smollett barked a command, the Arabs stopped and stood back as suddenly as they had started, and the big American grated: "Now . . . where is your fuckin' baggage?"
One of Randall's eyes was closed, his nose was swollen and spread over his face, his lips were split and the whole of his naked body was red and purple with the marks of their brutal attack. "I . . . told you . . . I . . . don't know," he panted desperately. "Why don't you . . . ask . . . Hannah? You know . . . where she is."
"Sure I know where she is. I know where you are too, buster. It happens I didn't know I needed this information when I last saw the broad. Now I do know . . . and you're right here. So where is it?"
"It was in . . . Hotel Excelsior in Khartoum . . . last time I saw it," the bound man said thickly. Behind his tortured eyes his mind was racing. Why in God's name should Smollett want to know where his baggage was? And what could that possibly have to do with the fact that the big man obviously thought he was mixed up in some way with the unrest in southern Sudan?
The ex-CIA man moved towards the higher end of the slanting plank. Randall sucked in his breath suddenly as Smollett's rough fingers reached down and seized his balls, grasping the sensitive glands in their crinkled hair-covered sac and pulling them roughly away from his aching body. "For the last time, where is that baggage?" he demanded.
Randall stared hopelessly up at his pitiless eyes and said nothing.
"All right," Smollett said, "we'll have to try a little real persuasion! You gotta know where that stuff is: the broad checked it in some place and it was you who called her and told her what to do!" Abruptly he clenched the fingers of his hand.
"Aaaaaaaggh!" Randall screamed as a bolt of agony so intense that it momentarily blacked out his mind seared through his loins and up through his belly.
"Where is it?" Smollett's fingers whitened with the pressure he was exerting as he squeezed mercilessly on the tortured man's testicles.
"Uuugh! Aaagh!. . . I don't know, I tell you!" Randall shouted through the waves of pain blazing through him. "How can I tell you what I don't Aiiiiiieeeee!" Secured by the hands and feet to each end of the plank, his body thrashed wildly up and down in the center, his hips arching up and then splatting down against the stained wood as Smollett's torturing fingers increased and relaxed, increased and relaxed the agonizing pressure on his balls. The world was an inferno of pain--pain whose clangor reverberated through and through him with a thunder so intense that finally his vision turned black at the edges and a roaring darkness swept mercifully inwards to engulf him.
Smollett let go the unconscious man's purplish, swollen, savagely inflamed testicles and stepped back. He wiped the back of his hand over his sweating brow. "I dunno," he muttered thickly. "I've never known that to fail before. The creep's got to know where the stuff is!"
One of the Arabs put down the jerry can of water he was carrying. "Perhaps, effendi, the man would react to electricity?" he suggested. "The soldiers have a powerful truck magneto with them. If we attached it with wires to his nipples and private parts and then spun the armature . . . "
"We ain't got time for all that crap," Smollett growled. "Try the water treatment once more." He leaned down and slapped Randall's bruised and lacerated face with his open hand. "Wake up, lover boy," he sneered. "We got more treats in store for you!"
Retching and gagging, Randall forced his way back to consciousness through a sea of agony convulsing his loins. Seeing one of the Arabs fixing the radiator hose through which the water was poured back in the jerry can, and the other approaching with the iron ring and the strip of muslin, he uttered a despairing cry despite himself: "Oh no . . . Jesus . . . Noooo!"
Smollett grinned sadistically. "This ain't nothin' to what you're gonna get if you don't come across this time," he leered. "If you don't talk, we're gonna give you to the Arab women and let them try. Have you heard about Arab women, Randall? Do you know what they do to prisoners? They bury you up to the neck in the sand and cut off your eyelids, and then they pour honey over your head and leave you to the sun and the ants! They stake you out on the sand and peel the skin off your prick like a banana they stick a thorn-tree spike up it and feed you water to make you pee! They slit open your balls and fill 'em with salt and then sow 'em up again. Sometimes they cut away the sac and leave the veins and the balls hangin' down raw, so they can beat 'em with "
He paused in the middle of his ghoulish recital and looked up towards the roof of the hut. For some time there had been a strange clattering roar in the air, distant at first but gradually increasing in volume. Now it resolved itself into the noise of an approaching helicopter.
"What in fuck's name's that?" Smollett shouted. "Ahmed go on out and see who in hell could be flyin' over this God-forsaken dump in a chopper!"
The swarthy Arab slipped outside and returned in less than a minute. His face had paled to a dirty greenish hue. "Effendi, effendi," he stammered, "it is a police airplane! It comes from Khartoum, from the capital!"
"Shit!" Smollett swore. "Are you sure, boy?"
"Si, si, effendi. I know the markings."
"Goddamnit!" the ex-CIA man raged. "Ain't that just my fuckin' luck! . . . Look, we gotta get outta here! I can't afford to be seen givin' the works to this punk not in this lousy rebel stronghold. I only got connections in certain departments, and I can't tell if those bastards up there are from the right one or not! Come on, let's get goin' . . . "
Without another look at the helpless figure of the tortured man, he snatched up his toupee and stormed out, followed by the two frightened Arabs. Randall heard their footsteps crashing away through the bush as the sound of the helicopter's rotors faded and died. Gathering all his strength, he filled his anguished lungs and began to shout for help.
Five minutes later, the door of the hut crashed open and Gamal Nessim strode into the room.
* * *
Twenty miles to the north, Hannah Beardsley lay on a gold-tasseled divan piled high with crimson cushions and stared through drug-dimmed eyes at the vaulted ceiling. There was to be a diffa, a ceremonial dinner, at Abd el Ke rim's palatial headquarters and Arab chieftains from all over the region had been arriving throughout the afternoon. The women of the harem were, of course, not to be present, but food had been brought to them in their quarters chickens cooked with olives, succulent roast lamb aromatic with spices, pitchers of milk flavored with rose leaves, tiny birds on beds of rice, and orange juice tasting of cinnamon. As a newcomer, Hannah had been left in a small room on her own: the latest arrivals were not dispatched to the harem proper until they had been duly "broken in" by the master.
She remembered nothing of her journey there and the fumes of hashish with which she was surrounded, combined with the after-effects of the drug Smollett had administered to keep her quiet, made even the horror of the bestial rape she had suffered at the ex-CIA man's hands seem distant and somehow diluted.
Mark Randall and the carefree life they had led seemed very far away. Dazedly, she wondered if she would ever see him again, feel his lean practiced fingers on her flesh . . . and then suddenly she realized that she was naked now! She had just started up on the cushions with a gasp of alarm when the arched door to the room opened and three men came in.
The first, a tall Arab in a loose white robe, she had no difficulty in identifying as Abd el Kerim himself the arrogant expression on his cruel, hawk-like face, his erect bearing despite his fifty years, the imperious tilt of his head, all testified to the fact that this was the law-Hinto-himself sheikh to whose depraved demands the evil Smollett had sold her in sexual slavery.
The other two . . . Hannah recoiled involuntarily on the divan with a shudder of revulsion. Kerim was accompanied by two identical dwarves! Neither was more than three feet high; each had coarse features, a thick-lipped, slobbering mouth, and staring eyes in an outsized deformed head. And both of them were coal-black!
The terrified captive girl cringed back among the cushions, her green eyes wide with foreboding. What further horrors lay in store for her at the hands of the ruthless Arab chieftain and his monster assistants?
She had not long to wait. Kerim clapped his hands and the two black dwarves stripped off their shifts and approached the bed naked, their tongues lasciviously circling their thick lips. Hannah sucked in her breath with alarm. From the hairless "vee" above each pair of stunted legs, the biggest cocks she had ever seen in her life dangled grotesquely! Even as she watched, hypnotized, the two limp rods of dark flesh expanded and stiffened in obscene jerks, stretching the wrinkled skin until the twin shafts were gleaming with tautness and the prune-colored bulbous heads burst out of the foreskins to point rigidly at the ceiling and reveal the bull-like sacs of the dwarves' sperm-bloated testicles swinging below.
Hannah bit her lip to choke back the cry of fear that sprang to her lips. Those menacing black penises, spearing out so lewdly so threateningly! from the loins of each dwarf. . . they were the most hideous, the most horrifying, she had ever seen! She was edging back towards the wall when the dwarves, chuckling lustfully, threw themselves on her nakedly defenseless body and stretched her out helplessly on the divan.
Kneeling behind her, one of them seized her wrists and stretched her arms cruelly above her head while the other, sprawled over the foot of the divan, grasped her slender ankles and hauled her legs brutally apart. The petite captive girl lay voluptuously spread-eagled in abject humiliation before her sadistic captors, the whole red-curled length of her vaginal furrow, with its pinkly glistening pussy lips, spread open to their lewd gaze!
Shuddering with terror, she stared wild-eyed from face to pitiless face as they glanced approvingly at the quivering white mounds of her breasts, the softly trembling bulge of her young belly, and the russet triangle of curling pussy hair nestled between her obscenely splayed legs. Dear God, there was nothing she could do against three of them! Imprisoned in the depths of Kerim's desert fortress, she was utterly alone and at their mercy! The only victory she could hope for was a mental one; they could conquer her body as she knew they must, but it would be an empty triumph if her spirit remained unbeaten . . .
She gasped involuntarily as an alien touch sent shivers across her skin. Kerim was bending over her, pawing at the soft flesh of her belly with lean muscled fingers. "Veery nice!" the Arab chieftain said slowly in English. "The man Smollett has earned his money. This is just what I ordered!" His hand moved lewdly upwards, caressing the fullness of one firm white breast, rolling the tight rubbery nipple between his fingers. "Now understand this, my dear," he added harshly. "You belong to me now and you will remain my property. Your body is mine to do with it as I wish. You will never escape from here and what happens in the next few days is entirely a matter for you to decide. Either you can cooperate and we shall all perhaps experience an agreeable reaction. Or you can try to fight it, and we alone will have the enjoyment. It is up to you but, in any case, I assure you, within three days and nights you will be broken to my will!"
Hannah felt her skin crawl with horror as she strove desperately to find words that might appeal to whatever sense of honor this savage desert warlord might possess. But then she froze in terror as the long dark fingers raked teasingly down the trembling contours of her body to linger possessively among the silky hairs sparsely mantling her pubic mound.
Kerim clapped his hands again. "Prepare her!" he rasped.
The two dwarves leapt into action once more. One jumped onto the divan and straddled the helpless girl's naked chest, his wiry thighs pinioning her arms to her sides, her heaving breasts squashed beneath his buttocks and the heavy, sperm-bloated pouch of his balls resting in the deep cleft between them. The other sat astride her belly, forcing her knees brutally apart with his hands and leaned acrobatically downwards to lace his slobbering tongue snake-like into the moistly quivering slit of her vagina.
Hannah jerked convulsively, a whimpering moan escaping from deep in her throat. Her buttocks ground down hard among the cushions, seeking to escape the maddening oral assault by the repulsive black dwarf. She shivered uncontrollably as the little man drew the tiny bud of her clitoris wetly up into his hot mouth with a liquid suck.
It can't be happening to me! It can't! The cruelly pinioned young captive groaned over and over to herself as the dwarf's face rocked in greedy feast between her legs and his swollen tongue fucked in and out of her involuntarily dilating cunt. Yet in spite of her terror and revulsion at the depraved attack on her loins, tiny wisps of forbidden pleasure were beginning to purl deep in Hannah's belly and on her firm young breasts, suppressed as they were by the second dwarfs buttocks, the nipples had already spiked out taut and erect!
She gasped aloud as the whirlpools of sensation tearing out of control through her loins began to build and build . . . Dear God!
She must fight this enemy from within with all her strength! She must not succumb to the betrayal of hex body!
But suddenly the slavering dwarfs experienced tongue arrowed forward, burrowing far up into her now wetly straining cunt to send shock waves spiraling crazily up her spine to the base of her skull. like a Fourth of July rocket display, they burst there into a million stars, showering hot pinpoints of desire over her entire spread-eagled body. Fire was replacing fear as the practiced lips and tongue of her grotesque ravisher plundered her quivering young pussy! What could be happening to her? Her drug-dimmed mind reeled with shock. She had never felt so lewdly wanton in her life!
Spontaneously, under the expert ministrations of the wickedly teasing tongue of Kerim's repulsive henchman in her cunt, she had come erotically alive. Her nakedly rounded ass-cheeks arched convulsively up off the divan, frantically trying to quench the searing lashes of lustful flame destroying her sensibilities and her inhibitions!
She opened her mouth to groan aloud . . . and suddenly choked back a gasp of alarm. The dwarf sitting astride her chest, who had been watching her contorted features with a grimace of lustful glee, had nosed the huge rubbery tip of his hotly throbbing cock in between her wetly parted lips!
Almost without realizing it, Hannah began automatically to suck and nibble on the iron-hard shaft whose wetly seeping tip was invading the hot moist cavern of her mouth. God Almighty! her lust-crazed mind screamed. Instead of recoiling in disgust from the debased and unnatural intrusion of the thick-veined rod pole of black flesh between her trembling lips, she was actually welcoming it! The demons of unwanted lust were dancing with ever-increasing fury about the shuddering pink edges of her seething cunt! A cock in her mouth and a tongue in her vagina were no longer enough; she wanted something more substantial! She had to have it!
No sooner had the wish formed in her mind than it was granted!
The dwarf at her hips withdrew his tongue from her cunt and sprang aside. Grasping her flailing legs, he bent them savagely back towards her chest so that the midget whose penis was filling her gagging mouth could clamp them under his arms. She was bent double on the divan, jackknifed in abject humiliation, her arms and legs pinioned by the little man whose penis was sawing in and out of her distended lips, the whole stretched plane of her genitals wetly upturned beneath the leering gaze of Kerim and the other dwarf!
At a word from the Arab chieftain, the dwarf jumped nimbly astride the helpless redhead's bent-back thighs. Then, guiding the heatedly rigid shaft of his immense cock downwards with his forefinger and thumb, he plunged the bulbous blood-engorged head straight between the swollen lust-wet lips of Hannah's cunt.
The nakedly doubled redhead bucked and squirmed in unwanted ecstasy as the raping rod of black flesh speared up into the tight hot passage of her hungrily clasping pussy. Her ovaled lips opened around the thick shaft of the penis plowing wetly into her mouth as she mewled in shameless wanton delight. And then suddenly she screeched, half in agony, half in lustful passion. Kerim himself had torn off his robe, and climbed under the dwarf half-standing over her loins. Then, with the steely shaft of his long thin cock clutched in one hand, he rammed up brutally against the tight hairless opening of Hannah's tiny wrinkled anus.
With the whole area of her loins shamelessly distended and pulled back toward her chest, the tightly clenched nether ring could not for long withstand the punishing assault of the Arab's invading penis. The clasping rubbery folds suddenly gave way and the sperm-bloated head of Kerim's sodomizing penis arrowed far up into the scalding buttery depths of her vise-like rectum!
As the Arab began sawing viciously in and out of her dilated anus, the dwarf on her chest began an undulating movement of his hips so that the huge cock stuffing Hannah's mouth fucked in and out between her widely distended lips . . . and at the same time the third member of the trio, rising and falling in invisible stirrups, plowed the wetly gleaming length of his rigid staff ferociously up and down into the hungrily grasping passage of her cunt.
The helplessly pinioned redhead was being relentlessly skewered from three different directions at once! Every opening in her wantonly squirming body was filled with cock! There was cock in her mouth, cock in her anus, and cock in her seething cunt! The whole world was stuffed with hotly throbbing, rigidly expanding, wetly seeping, wonderful, wonderful cock! As they bucked and plunged and sawed and thrust, gasping hoarsely with animal lust as they buffeted her contorted body between them like a rag doll, Hannah sensed the quivering muscles of the brutal Arab and his two grotesque helpers tense and shudder. Thrashing wildly under the weight of their laboring, sweating bodies, she groaned her ecstasy aloud past the gagging bulk of the raping penis invading her mouth as her orgasm swept her up off the divan in a storm of shaking, shuddering erotic fury and sent her spinning among the stars.
At the same time, the massive cock in her lewdly sucking mouth bulged and heaved, squirting a hot stream of semen far back into her gasping throat, and the two penises battering into her plundered loins shuddered, jerked, and then spewed their white-hot loads of creamy sperm in powerful jetting spurts far up into the obscenely milking walls of her rectum and vagina.
For a long time after they had left her, she lay in the locked room in a sensual erotic daze, her drug-dimmed mind unable to cope with the unpalatable but undeniable fact that despite her horror and revulsion at the unspeakable and degrading ravishments she had suffered, despite the shame and humiliation and distress she felt her body had nevertheless responded in a way that both astounded and horrified her!
Why should she so wantonly react to the brutal assaults of the cruel Kerim? Why should she have welcomed even the repulsive dwarves when once the fires of her lust were kindled? Why should she respond to the sadistic rape of the unspeakable Smollett and his vile assistants?
And above all why should she have wished, even in the extremities of her frenzied passion, that the heads staring down at her debasement were crowned with a soundlessly tolling bell of golden hair? . . .
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wadi Elmira was a jumble of flat-roofed, mud-walled buildings spilling down the side of a valley gashed by a stony ravine. At the foot of the gorge a trickle of brown water, later to become a tributary of the Bahr-el-Ghazal river, slid among the rocks. Randall arrived at the arched gate in the outer wall at dusk, once again disguised as an Arab pilgrim from Saudi Arabia.
Nessim had flown him in the police helicopter to a secluded valley out of sight of the Arab town and promised to return and wait there for him at midnight. "You understand, my friend," the dapper police Colonel said, "that I cannot take any official action to help you. It is outside my jurisdiction and in any case a Khartoum official meddling in the affairs of a local chieftain could lead to a tribal war! But I will take you to the place, and if you should succeed in finding Miss Beardsley and getting away with her, then I shall be happy to take you back to the capital."
"I'm more than grateful," Randall said, shaking him warmly by the hand. "You are already risking much to help. What I can't understand is how you happened to arrive so opportunely when I was in Smollett's hands!"
"My duties happened to call me to the area," Nessim said vaguely.
"But I thought you said . . . ? "
"A foreigner sought permission to make a film," the policeman said with a bland smile. "Naturally I was obliged to visit the region to satisfy myself that it was suitable before I agreed to his request."
Randall touched his shoulder. "Thank you, my friend," he said appreciatively.
Now on foot, approaching the gates of the town, his pulses quickened at the thought that within its walls he might at last find the opportunity to rescue Hannah. His hand rose unconsciously to touch through his borrowed robes the comforting bulge of Nessim's revolver in its holster on his hip.
Through the wide archway, he saw with astonishment a scene of surprising bustle and activity. In a diminutive square incredibly fringed with olive trees men and women laughed, talked, exchanged news and gossip, bartered goods they had brought into the town as they applauded Bedouin tumblers, watched a snake charmer, had their heads shaved under the wicker canopy of an itinerant barber or ate hard-boiled eggs with couscous and mint tea. The maze of courts and alleyways beyond was thronged with armed tribesmen, Berbers from the high mountains, desert nomads, hill farmers, Tuaregs in exotic robes a dense crowd of figures in white and gray accented here and there by unexpected individualists dressed in brilliant orange, azure, citron or bitter green. In the shadowed gateway a Berber warrior was dictating a letter to a scribe exactly as his ancestors must have done two thousand years before.
There were soldiers with modern rifles on guard inside and outside. As Randall hurried through the arch behind a party of chattering nomads, one of them unslung his gun and stepped in his path. "Your papers," he demanded brusquely.
"Papers?" Randall assumed as haughty an expression as he could and hoped his accent would pass muster.
"The chief is entertaining many important people tonight," the soldier explained. "For security reasons all papers must be shown."
Shit! the disguised American thought forcefully. Just my luck to hit on an evening when they have goddamn police checks all over!
Reaching into his robes, he produced the papers he had been given. The sentry scanned them and looked up in surprise. "But these authorize you to visit Gabotomi! You should be a hundred miles to the south! How can you be here at Wadi Elmira . . . and on foot?"
"I did not like the company I was in. Also my camel was lamed."
"You speak with a very strange voice," the soldier said suspiciously. "I think you had better come with me and see the Captain of the Guard."
Randall's mind raced. If he meekly went with the man, it would at least get him further into the town; he might even be brought before the chief himself and therefore nearer Hannah. On the other hand, his Arabic simply wasn't good enough to stand a long cross-examination. He knew nothing, moreover, about the place he was supposed to have come from, nor did he have a prepared background or history to relate. In addition, the battered state of his face would be bound to raise suspicions once he was in a better light. They would probably throw him straight into prison and ask questions tomorrow . . . or the next day! No, there was nothing for it he would have to play it the hard way . . .
The soldier had slung his rifle over his shoulder and drawn a revolver. "Turn around and walk around the square to the left," he ordered.
"What is the trouble, Ali?" one of his companions called from the far side of the archway.
"I am taking this man to the Captain. He is a foreigner and I think perhaps a thief. I am not satisfied with his story." Prodding Randall in the small of the back with the barrel of his gun, he urged him across the square.
Randall made his break when they were almost at the far side. A veiled woman leading a donkey with bulging panniers had just emerged from a narrow alleyway. As he stepped aside to allow the beast to squeeze past, his hand streaked down behind him, knocking the soldier's gun arm aside.
The heavy caliber revolver roared as Randall whirled and seized the hand holding it in both of his own. He jerked the man's arm up and down, exerting a paralyzing judo hold on his wrist. When the barrel was pointing at the ground, the gun exploded again, the ricochet whining away among the olive trees from the stony ground.
The donkey brayed and reared up on its hind legs. The woman screamed and ran. The crowd in the square scattered with shouts of alarm. As the weapon finally dropped from his nerveless fingers, the soldier slammed the heel of his other hand under Randall's chin, pushing back his head with agonizing force. The disguised American went with the thrust, letting go the man's wrist and rolling backwards on to the ground. At the same time he brought up his knees, lodged his heels in the sentry's groin and then suddenly straightened his legs.
The man flew over his head and crashed to the ground behind him at the feet of two companions running up with drawn guns. As they staggered and tripped, Randall scrambled up in a flash and dashed into the twisting alleyway. A third shot rang out as he vanished into the shadows. The wind of the bullet fanned his left shoulder. Then he was around the first corner and pelting away.
The alley followed the line of the outer wall. Fifty yards along, a passageway led to the naphtha flares of a crowded bazaar. He raced towards the gabble of voices, stopped abruptly, and melted into the shadows of a doorway. Half a dozen soldiers with drawn pistols clattered into the passageway from the bazaar and ran past him towards the sounds of confused shouting in the square he had just left.
Once they had gone, he slid out of his hiding place and walked rapidly towards the bazaar. "But you must have seen him!" he could hear Ali calling furiously to the new arrivals. "You passed him! He ran down that lane only a few seconds before you arrived . . . "
Randall joined the throng eddying around the fringes of the bazaar and strove to conceal the fact that he was hurrying. Arab women veiled in black, fellaheen in striped shifts and tarbooshes, peasants in rags, and Bedouin in flowing white robes jostled against him as he walked. Somewhere behind him, he could sense, there was an unusual commotion as Ali and the soldiers ran back into the crowd. Faintly over the hubbub he could hear voices raised in argument and shouts of protest.
In the market place, the shuffling of feet was drowned in the cries of barkers and the traditional haggling of merchants and customers. Hands gesticulated, fingers wagged, palms were upraised in the suffocating press among the stalls of fruit, vegetables, cloth and hardware under the flares.
He had almost shouldered his way through to the far side when three shots rang out above the heads of the crowd. There was a screaming and a stampede as everybody fought to get away from the center of the market. A great stand of copper pots and pans near Randall careened over as half a dozen robed Arabs forced their way between the stalls.
". . . Stay where you are! Don't leave the bazaar!" a voice shouted over the clangor of falling hardware and the furious protests of the stallholder. "This is the military! There is a foreign thief here, and we want to find him. Stay where you are you have nothing to fear!"
Feeling as though he had suddenly been exposed in the glare of a searchlight, the fugitive movie man slunk around behind the stall and made for a lane twisting away into the shadows.
"Over there!" another voice was shouting. "Look on the far side of the bazaar! Quick! After him!"
He glanced fearfully over his shoulder. The owner of the hardware stall, his arms full of saucepans, was dancing up and down and pointing towards him. Beyond, advancing rapidly down an aisle between the striped awnings, Ah and the soldiers came running.
Randall himself broke into a run and plunged down the dark street. A fusillade of shots erupted behind him as he gained the shadows.
Bullets spurted the dust on either side of his pounding feet; another chipped plaster from the wall by his shoulder.
Panting wildly, he sprinted around the first bend in the lane. Ahead were the lights of another crowded square. He dashed into an unlit, evil-smelling entry choked with refuse, ran up a flight of stone stairs, crossed a wider street, and plunged through an archway into a maze of dark alleyways beyond. Behind him, the footsteps and voices of the hunters approached. There had been plenty of people in the street he had crossed to point out the way he had gone.
Pressing on, he skirted the bulk of a mosque, raced down a second flight of steps, and found himself in a narrow lane lit at intervals by dim street lamps. All around him a faint murmur of voices behind closed shutters stirred the warm air. It was quite dark now and he could hear music rising and falling in the distance.
He halted, the blood pounding in his temples.
"Why do you not come inside, stranger?" a soft voice intoned in Arabic at his ear.
Randall swung around. There was a click. In the upward-directed beam of a small electric flashlight, brown flesh quivered. The tiny circle of illumination revealed a woman's breast, the ripely swelling contours held towards him by silver-tipped fingers, the nipple and areola purple in the faint light. Below, a tight swathe of diaphanous material sheathed belly and hips; above, a gleam of white teeth, the highlight on a full lip, shone through the dark.
"Christ!" Randall exclaimed in English. He hesitated. The sounds of pursuit were only one corner away. Already, heavy feet were scrambling down the last flight of winding stairs.
"Very well," he said huskily, making up his mind. He stepped towards the doorway in which the girl was standing. The light vanished. A door creaked open into blackness.
Randall brushed hurriedly past her and stood waiting as she closed the door. In the airless dark of the passage, the perfume of some cloying, exotic cosmetic washed over him. Outside, footsteps scraped to a halt. He could hear the voice of Ali: "A foreigner . . . medium height, bearded, in white robes . . . "
Somebody mumbled a negative.
"But he must be here somewhere! He can't have got away. It's always the same when the chief has important guests: It attracts all kinds of undesirables to the town . . . "
"He could be anywhere here," another voice chimed in. "You know where we are? This is the secret of "
"It doesn't matter what street it is," Ali interrupted. "We'll post sentries at either end and search it house by house!" The footsteps moved decisively away.
The girl, whose breath had hissed in sharply the first time Ali spoke, now moved past Randall towards the back of the building. Soft flesh brushed the back of his hand. In a low voice she said: "This way."
Light stabbed the blackness as she switched on the torch and shone the beam at the floor behind her to light the way. Randall followed her up a flight of stone stairs. Apart from the clip-clop of the girl's slippers and the swish of garments against her naked hips, they mounted in silence. At the top of the stairs a dimly lit foyer appeared with a number of doors off it.
The prostitute opened one and walked into a tiny room about eight feet square, furnished with nothing more than cushions and rugs on the floor. As she crossed to draw heavy drapes across an arched window embrasure, the panting fugitive closed the door silently and leaned against it. "I am sorry," he began, "I only want . . . "
The girl swung around to face him. She was voluptuously curved, her bare breasts heavy on her chest, her soft belly shadowed under the transparent shift. Her kohl-fringed eyes were wide and her full lips ripe and inviting. "Yes?" she said. "You only want . . . ? You are running away, are you not? It was you that Ali and the soldiers were chasing? But this is no concern of mine: I have no love for the police or the military. Especially that Ali of the Guard, who is a brutal man. But why do you not stay here with me? See am I not beautiful? Come . . . sit here beside me and I will send for some refreshment."
Whisking up the diaphanous skirts, she thrust her pelvis forward and smiled provocatively. Below the shaven triangle at her loins, her pink-fleshed cunt, from which the inner lips had been ritually circumcised in childhood, pouted outwards like an open mouth. "I am sorry Randall said again.
"But I wish it! You have a good face, effendi. In my life I have not met men like you. Do you not find me attractive?"
"You are beautiful," Randall said truthfully.
'Then why do you reject me?" Suddenly she was pressed against him, her hands, drawing aside the long robes, feeling for his genitals . . . her fingers caressing, crawling knowledgeably over his flesh, groping for the soft sac of his balls, massaging the shaft of his penis. In spite of himself, Randall felt his restlessly stirring cock stiffen and grow longer under her touch. "See!" she cried triumphantly. "You desire me! Your manhood arises "
Abruptly she tensed, breaking off in the middle of her sentence. From somewhere below a persistent hammering came echoing up the stairway. 'The soldiers!" she whispered. "They said they would search every house!"
Gently, Randall put her away from him. "I am sorry," he said again.
"No, you are right! You must come this way!" The girl ran to the window embrasure and pulled aside the drapes, her black eyes wide with alarm. "Nobody saw you come in. So far as they know, I have been here alone all the time. Out here is a flat roof. Beyond is an alley that leads back to the mosque without crossing the street in front."
Randall thrust money into her hand. "You are very kind. I will not forget you. Before I go, can you tell me how to find the house of Abe el Kerim?" The hammering had stopped and there was the sound of many voices from below. He swung a leg over the window-sill.
'The pasha? It is not a house but a palace! Take the lane to the left of the mosque and it is the one, two, three, four yes, fifth! turning on the right. At the end of the street. But be careful: There are many guards, and he is a suspicious man."
He turned back towards the girl. "You are very beautiful and very kind. I am grateful. If there is ever anything I can do . . . "
"You know what you can do," the girl said.
Randall grinned, leaning inwards to kiss her briefly on the lips. The next instant she was all over him, devouring him with kisses, her lushly ripened body pressed against his chest, her hands cradling the back of his head. Gently, he disengaged himself. "The soldiers!" he reminded her in a whisper.
"I had forgotten. But I will not forget you either. The next time you have an occasion to visit Wadi Elmira . . . "
"It'll be a pleasure!" Randall said. He jumped lightly on to the flat roof and ran to the edge.
The curtain dropped over the window.
The drop to the alley was about fifteen feet. Even in his rubber soled shoes he seemed to himself to make quite a noise when he landed. But nobody appeared to have heard; no voice questioned him and no footsteps advanced. After waiting a moment, listening, he ran off in the direction of the mosque.
The beaten earth road to the left of it was deserted. Just before he got to the fifth turning, he saw the back of a patrolling sentry silhouetted against the sky on top of the city wall. But he had reached the safety of the corner before the man turned at the end of his beat.
like all Muslims, Abd el Kerim followed the Koran, which instructs the faithful to keep the facades of their houses simple in order not to excite the envy of their fellow men. The outer wall of his palace was therefore nothing more than a line of sandstone blocks pierced by a central gateway and a few arrowhead windows at first-floor level. But inside as Randall was to discover the appointments were of an unbelievable richness.
Gaining an entry was surprisingly easy. A group of minor chieftains who had been bidden to the discussion after the diffa were waiting to be admitted. Randall simply stole up behind them and attached himself to the end of the queue as it filed through the gates. The idea that any Arab would have the effrontery to seek admittance to the pasha's house without having been invited obviously never occurred either to the Nubian servants or to the two soldiers standing guard in the outer courtyard.
As they shuffled through towards the inner patio waiting to be formally presented to the great man, the disguised American melted into the shadows of an empty passageway leading to the back of the building.
He hurried through a deserted anteroom hung with rich carpets and perfumed with spice burning in a brazier, followed a twisting, high-ceilinged corridor, and then paused as he found himself looking through heavy crimson drapes at a kind of cloister edged with delicate, highly-ornamented Moorish arches on slender pillars. Beyond this was the courtyard where the diffa was taking place.
Despite the urgency of his mission, Randall stopped and stared at the exotic sight. The moon had risen, flooding the place with pale brilliance, silvering the delicate tiles, throwing into sharp relief the orange trees and pomegranates masking the splashing of a fountain. Somewhere in the background there was a jangle of stringed instruments accompanying the strange alien yodel called the yoyo, which Arab women chant at times of great importance.
The checkerboard tiles of the courtyard were strewn with costly rugs and cushions, and on these about thirty men in ceremonial robes reclined around low tables set with an incredible profusion of hot dishes, fruits, and earthenware vessels decorated with blossom. Kerim himself sat on a divan covered with furs. He was dressed in plain white robes and a white turban. There were centuries of power implied in the curl of his lip, the droop of his eyelids, the arrogant flare of his nostrils. Rings flashed on his expressive fingers, but otherwise there was no external sign of his wealth or his importance. It was all, Randall reflected, in his mind . . .
Holding his breath, the intruder tiptoed away. The harem would undoubtedly be at the back of the house not far from the courtyard, Nessim had told him, so that the women could emerge and entertain the guests as soon as the formal discussions of the diffa were over. But as a new acquisition, Hannah would almost certainly be locked alone in a small guarded room on an upper floor.
Beyond another anteroom, Randall found a narrow stone stairway twisting upwards. The dark corridor on the first floor was lined with arches and recessed into each was a stout wooden door secured with heavy iron bolts locating in holes bored into the stonework. Stealing up to the first, he placed his ear to the wood and listened. Just audible from the far side of the door was the sound of muffled sobbing.
But whoever was weeping in that room, it wasn't Hannah; the voice was too deep and too guttural. He tiptoed to the next door.
Here, he could discern no sound at all.
Cautiously, he eased back the bolts and pushed open the door. As it creaked away from him, there was a flurry of movement from within. He poked his head around the widening crack and looked inside. A huge black girl with flashing eyes and enormous up-thrust breasts crowned with darkly purple nipples glared ferociously at him from a pile of cushions at the far side of the cell-like room. Hastily he shut and bolted the door and moved on to the next.
The third room was empty. In the fourth, he found a naked, light-skinned Arab girl face down on a divan in a drugged sleep. The tender flesh of her softly molded buttocks and back were crisscrossed with the red-ridged, angrily curling weals of a bull whip.
Biting his lip, Randall stole away. Beyond him, the corridor turned a right-angle. He paused to listen. He could still hear faintly the murmur of conversation and the thin whine of Arab music from below. Otherwise the house was silent.
He was just moving forward to peer around the corner when a man's cough sounded startlingly loud from just ahead. He froze and tried to draw back, but it was too late . . . his head-dress and the edge of his burnouse had caught the eye of a gigantic Nubian standing guard with a drawn sword before a barred door at the end of the passageway.
Randall darted back and ran. If the monstrous curved blade of that sword came within reach of him, he would be a dead man! The passage was far too narrow for him to attempt to maneuver around the Nubian and although the guard could not swing the weapon sideways for the same reason, with that blade sweeping in front of him, Randall would never have a chance to get to close quarters. He dare not use his revolver, moreover, because of the noise . . .
No if he was to achieve anything against such odds, he must have space. As he turned and fled, the Nubian, shouting ferociously, thundered in pursuit up the short corridor. His lungs bursting with the effort, the American raced past the stair head and on into a maze of twisting passages with the panting guard gaining all the time. He sped around a railed balcony circling a fountain in an empty patio on the floor below, feeling with a thrill of horror the wind on his neck as the Nubian aimed a blow at him on the run and the murderous blade whistled within an inch of his unprotected flesh.
Again the honed steel scimitar whooshed through the air and this time Randall felt a tug at his heels as the razor-sharp tip sliced through the tail of his robe and buried itself deep in the wooden floor.
As the cursing guard strove to draw it out, the fleeing man's brain raced despairingly. He must have more space . . . or contrive to come up on the man from behind! he thought with a flash of inspiration.
Using the distance he had gained while the
Nubian disengaged his blade, he doubled back and pelted down the corridor leading to the cells. The door of the empty room, he remembered, was still open . . .
Hurling himself inside, he took out his gun and reversed it in his shaking hand. Seconds later, the Nubian pounded past, chuckling with glee because he thought his quarry had unwittingly blundered into a cul-de-sac.
Randall sailed out from the open doorway to land on his huge back, clubbing viciously at the man's head with his revolver butt as his other arm tightened around the muscular throat.
They crashed to the floor together and the sword slid from the Nubian's grasp to skate away along the boards. As the huge black body writhed and threshed beneath him, Randall planted his knees between the man's shoulder blades, put his arm around the guard's throat, then grasped the wrist of his own arm and hauled up with all this strength against the pressure of his knees.
The muscles on the Nubian's back corded like iron bars, the veins on his forehead stood out like tree branches, as he exerted all his tremendous strength in an attempt to throw off the man crushing him to the ground and break the spine-cracking lock around his throat.
For a moment they remained frozen in gladiatorial combat. Sweat started on Randall's brow and coursed down his cheeks; the muscles of his arms shuddered with effort. The tortured gasps of the Nubian's choking breath bubbled in his paralyzed gullet. And then suddenly there was a dreadful dull snapping sound. The rigidly straining body subsided; the wooly head flopped limp and lifeless in Randall's murderous grasp. Scrambling to his feet, he snatched up the dead man's sword and ran for the door at the end of the passageway.
Shooting back the bolts, he flung open the door and raced inside. Hannah, her eyes wide with alarm, her red hair tumbling about her shoulders and her naked body trembling, stared at him from the pile of crimson cushions on the far side of the room.
Before he could triumphantly shout a greeting, some sixth sense warned the victorious American of danger. He whirled to his right to find himself facing the menacing figure of a second Nubian who had been standing guard inside the door.
Instinctively, Randall put up his sword as the man sprang at him with a snarl of fury. The two blades jarred together in a shower of sparks. And then the American's weapon was expertly twisted from his grasp, his feet were kicked from under him, and he crashed to the floor on his back.
Jamming a heavy foot on the fallen American's laboring chest, the guard grinned evilly and raised the deadly scimitar two-handed above his head.
There was only one thing to do. As Hannah screamed shrilly, Randall lifted the heavy caliber revolver and fired point-blank at the man's naked chest.
The explosion echoed thunderously in the tiny room. A scarlet flower bloomed horribly between the Nubian's papped nipples. His body hurtled back against the wall as the heavy nickel-jacketed slug plowed into his flesh with the impact of a battering ram, and he slid limply to the ground.
Randall pushed himself to his feet. He was trembling all over. "Hannah!" he cried huskily. "Hannah! You okay?"
She stared at him unbelievingly. She had not recognized him through the disguise. And then suddenly the tears came. She flung herself hysterically into his arms sobbing wildly. "Oh, Mark! . . . I thought . . . I'd never see you . . . again . . . "
"Later, honey," he said urgently. "Later you can cry. Come on. We've got to get out of here fast! That shot will bring the whole world upstairs after us!" The room was acrid with the stench of cordite.
There was a small window in one wall of the room, but it was heavily barred. He had noticed, however, that there was a similar embrasure unbarred in the corridor outside. Through it he could see the moonlit ravine and the bare hills beyond, for the house was built into the outer wall of the town. If they could somehow manage to let themselves down from that window . . .
Frenziedly, he began ripping the golden tasseled cords from the bed and the hangings above it. "It'll take them some time to discover where the shot came from," he panted, knotting lengths of the cord together. "If only we could manage to take the goddamn rope with us . . . "
"But, darling . . . I can't come like this! They took my clothes!" Hannah protested.
"Better no clothes than no head," Randall said tersely. "It's a warm night and I have a friend waiting with a helicopter a couple of miles up the valley. Come on let's go!"
It was less than forty feet to the sloping, rocky side of the ravine. They rolled the body of the Nubian under the window in the passage, tied one end of the improvised rope around his thigh, and threw the knotted cord out the window. It reached to within a few feet of the ground.
"Over you go," Randall ordered the nakedly trembling redhead. "And make it fast!" They could hear the sound of confused shouting and footsteps somewhere in the building behind them.
She swarmed over the windowsill and lowered herself, half sliding, half climbing, down the golden rope in the moonlight. Seconds later he followed her.
Randall stood beside her and stared up at the sandstone wall of the palace with the telltale rope snaking from the window. "He stayed firm when we came down," he said. "But that was a steady pull. Maybe if we jerked with enough force . . , "
like some macabre tug-o'-war team they seized the rope, the naked girl and the disguised American, and began hauling on it with all their strength, heaving and jerking spasmodically in a frantic attempt to dislodge the huge body wedged against the passage wall and hide the evidence of their escape route.
At last the rope lengthened in their hands. The Nubian's body had shifted. It was jammed against the embrasure now, resisting their efforts to dislodge it. Sweat streamed down their bodies as they pulled with all their combined strength. Then they relaxed the pressure, so that the corpse sank away towards the floor, hauled again, relaxed, jerked . . . and suddenly they were tumbling painfully backwards on to the rocky shale as the dead guard pulled free of the obstruction and came sailing out from the window with the rope snaking after him.
Black against the moonlit sky, the body flew over them like a great bird to crash sickeningly among the rocks further down the slope. Randall scrambled to his feet, coiled the rope and threw it after the dead man.
A minute later, as the sound of furious shouting broke out from behind the window through which they had escaped, they were picking their way among the shadowed rocks at the bottom of the ravine on their way towards Nessim and the waiting helicopter.
CHAPTER NINE
"Before I even think about that movie," Mark Randall said decisively, "there are two things I have to do: Number one, get that bastard Smollett; Number two, find out what the hell this crap about our baggage means!"
"Mark, darling do you have to go and risk your neck again?" Hannah protested. "Why don't you let it be? You've already done the impossible and rescued me from that dreadful man. That was fantastic! Why not forget the whole thing now? You'll never pin anything on Smollett he's too well protected. Do you have to go for the revenge bit too?"
"Sure I do," Randall said furiously. His anger had died down to a steady glow, fanned by his determination to even the score with the crooked ex-CIA man he had thought was his friend. Not only had Smollett betrayed that friendship by kidnapping Randall's girl and selling her as a white slave to an Arab chieftain in the interior; he had also savagely beaten and tortured Randall himself, reducing him to a whimpering wreck in front of the two servants in the army hut. He wasn't going to let the sonofabitch get away with that, however much protection he had!
They were sitting discussing the events of the past few days with Nessim. The dapper police Colonel had taken them to his own bachelor villa, a pleasant, flat-roofed building standing among oleanders and date palms on the outskirts of the city, and a good night's sleep had done much to restore them after their ordeals-although Mark's face and body still bore the swellings and scars of the beating inflicted by Smollett and his men.
"Anyway," Hannah said peaceably, "I suggest that, at the moment, Number two is more urgent than Number one. I checked the baggage into the cloakroom at the central station. Why don't you go get it now? I can't spend the rest of my life in Colonel Nessim's bathrobe!"
"Perhaps, when Number two has given up its secret, it may help you to deal with or at least understand Number one," Nessim suggested with a smile. "And maybe those other things puzzling you too."
"You mean . . . the attacks on me here and in Paris? The abduction of Hannah? Smollett's interest in our baggage? They're all connected in some way?"
"It seems a reasonable deduction," Nessim said. "Except for Miss Beardsley's part in it. That, I think, was simply a piece of opportunism: We know the man is a procurer for influential people here and in the desert. Finding himself in a position where he could kidnap a beautiful girl for whom he knew he had a client, I imagine he just couldn't resist it!"
"But . . . but the rest? How could Smollett possibly . . . ? He didn't know I was coming. I didn't know myself until two hours before I left!"
"Perhaps this so mysterious baggage will offer a clue!" Nessim said.
Randall agreed. He took a cab into the city center and brought back the camera cases, the binoculars, the valises and Hannah's holdall. They took them into Nessim's study and examined them. Perhaps somebody had planted a concealed packet of drugs on them? Perhaps they were the unknowing couriers of illicit gems? Maybe the suitcases had been switched and those they had now were furnished with false bottoms? Why else could it be so important for Smollett to know where they were? And the biggest mystery of all how could any of this stack up with the undeniable fact that he couldn't possibly have known they were coming to the Sudan?
Nessim tipped the contents onto a divan and scrutinized the holdall, the valises and the cases with professional expertise. None of them had any secrets to offer: There were no false bottoms, no slim packets in the linings, no hidden compartments. A minute search of their clothes and personal belongings was equally unproductive. The baggage appeared to be innocent of all deception; it was exactly as it had been when they packed!
Mark shook his head and ran agitated fingers through his hair. "I don't get it!" he said exasperatedly. "I just don't get it! I mean, why should that fat slob want to know where this stuff was? Why . . . ? "
Absently, he began piling his clothes back into one of the valises . . . shirts, socks, jerseys, suits, pajamas, the familiar crimson silk bathrobe. He paused suddenly. Was it so familiar? In the haste of re-packing in his Paris apartment, he hadn't noticed, but there was something what was it? that was different about the exotic garment. "Just a minute he said slowly.
He spread the robe out on the divan. It looked the same the same golden dragons and temples and Chinese (or was it Japanese?) characters. He stiffened, his eyes suddenly narrowing. They were neither Chinese nor Japanese: The ideographs scattered over the material between the buildings and beasts were Arabic!
It wasn't the same bathrobe . . .
And then suddenly Randall remembered the missing electric shaver. "Jesus!" he shouted. "Of course! How dumb of me! How stinking, goddamn, bone-headed dumb can you be?"
"Could we perhaps be let into the secret?" Hannah enquired.
"The robe!" Randall cried excitedly. "My goddamn robe! Only it isn't my robe at all, you see! They switched it on me! I should have known when I realized about the shaver! Because it was so light-"
"Darling! If you could begin at the beginning . . . "
"It looks like my robe," Randall explained. "But it isn't. Mine had Chinese or Japanese characters between the dragons and things. Now they're in some kind of Arabic. Now I see why those break-in guys in Paris didn't steal anything: They hadn't come to steal; they'd been sent to take my robe and leave this one in its place, so I'd be carrying some kind of message without knowing it. The only thing was, my shaver wasn't taken out of the pocket of my robe and replace it in this one; I guess it was so light they didn't notice it! If I hadn't happened to disturb them at it, everything would have been re-packed and I'd never have noticed a thing!"
"Yes, but what message?" Hannah asked practically. "For who?"
"Search me! I don't read Arabic."
"May I see that?" Nessim asked quietly. He scanned the golden marks on the robe and then stretched the material between his hands, holding it up to the light and squinting along the surface.
'Tresumably, whatever the message is, you were supposed to have taken it to Senegal," he said absently.
"I guess so. I'd forgotten that. The break-in took place before I knew my plans were switched and I was coming here."
"So it would be a reasonable assumption that the attack on you at the airport was because whoever had planted the robe had learned of the change in plan and wanted to get it back . . . so they could send it to Senegal some other way?"
"Of course! Those hoods were feeling my pockets! They wanted the baggage checks so they could take the valise out of the cloakroom at Orly!"
"And having failed there, they alerted accomplices here who tried to do the same thing at your hotel and failed again?"
"Yeah, that must be it," Randall said, nodding. "And perhaps after that Smollett . . . ? But what the hell is the goddamn message anyway?"
"I think Smollett's involvement may be more complicated than that," Nessim said. "Especially when you know what the characters mean. And there I think I can help you. Look at this." He held up the stretched skirt of the robe. Between the ideographs, cunningly woven into the silk so that they were invisible except when the light struck them from a certain direction, were a mass of lines and squares and circles.
"Gee, that looks just like some kind of map!" Hannah exclaimed.
"It is a kind of map," Nessim said soberly. "You were carrying with you the complete details of the arms and strength and disposition of all the government troops in the southern Sudan . . . "
* * *
Randall hurried up the steps of Nessim's house and pushed open the door. He had been back into the city center to check tax details at the American Embassy and make enquiries about transport of film equipment and camera crews to the south. "Hannah!" he called. "I got us booked into that hotel okay, but we have to check in before eight o'clock. Are you all ready?"
He paused in the hallway and listened. There was no answering cry from the bedroom Nessim had given them. He called again. "Hannah . . . ? "
There was no reply.
Randall walked into the sitting room. It was empty. "Honey?" he called for the third time. "We got to get a move on if we want to make that reservation: It's after seven now . . . Are you there, Gamal?"
Silence. Somewhere in the house a faucet dripped monotonously.
Frowning, Randall went back into the hall. Nessim was seated at his desk in the study with his back to the door. His spare, elegant body was attired in a spotless white sharkskin suit. His tie was beautifully tied. His shoes were polished and there was a camellia in his buttonhole. The only thing missing was his head.
A great fountain of blood had jetted from the redly gaping horror of his neck to flood the papers on the desk and cascade to the white tiles on the far side. The crimson pool was still wet and sticky, and a cigarette with a two-inch trail of white ash was still smoldering in the ash tray. Whoever it was that had decapitated the policeman with a single murderous sweep of savage force must have left only minutes before Randall arrived. He had probably passed them on the road.
Tearing his eyes away from the severed head, which was lying against a chair with the mild eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, Randall ran wildly from the room. "Hannah?" he shouted desperately. "Hannah . . . ? "
There was no sign of the voluptuous redhead in the deserted house. In the bedroom. Randall's valises had been opened again and the crimson silk bathrobe had gone.
* * *
Randall screeched Nessim's Fiat to a halt a block away from Smollett's office and ran down the dark street towards the warehouse over which the ex-CIA man had his headquarters.
His mind was a chaos of shuddering fury not only because they had taken Hannah again but because he had been fond of the quiet-voiced, helpful policeman who had risked so much to assist them. Well, his murder was going to be avenged! If Randall's hunch was right and Smollett, for it had to be Smollett, was going to bring Hannah here before shipping her back to the desert chieftain who had paid money for her, then there was a chance that he might not be too late. The men who had killed Nessim and taken the girl could only have been a few minutes ahead of him, he reflected grimly. And before he settled with Smollett he was going to beat the truth about that goddamned bathrobe out of him! It would be a pleasure!
To his surprise, the pass door in the high wooden gates of the cotton warehouse was not locked. They must be very sure of themselves. Probably they had tipped off the police, hoping Randall would be pulled in for Nessim's murder as soon as he arrived back at the house. Too bad for them he had gotten back early . . .
Easing open the door, he slipped through and stole soft-footed across the yard towards the warehouse. A dim light showed through a frosted glass window at the far end of the huge building, whose double doors were standing open. Above them, light streamed through the windows of Smollett's office. There was a Mercedes sedan parked in front of the doors, its hood still warm.
Randall crept down a dark aisle between ranked bales of cotton stacked high up into the shadows overhead. The warm dusty air was pungent with the breath-catching stink of bleach.
The downstairs light came from a partitioned off section at the far end where some of the products of the warehouse were treated before being shipped off to purchasers. Randall drew Nessim's revolver from his pocket and softly tried the brass handle. From overhead, he could hear Smollett's heavy footsteps pacing his office in the gallery of the building. His pulses began to race with anger again, but his head remained cool.
The handle turned easily. He thrust open the door and stepped into the room with the gun held ready to fire at two surprised Arabs. "All right," he grated. "Put up your hands and don't make a sound!"
Ahmed and Hassan were lowering Hannah's naked, drugged body into a large wicker hamper standing by a row of shallow troughs half filled with bleach at the far end of the workshop. An empty hypodermic lay on a table nearby. They straightened up with their dark faces a study in consternation.
The knife that Hassan plucked from the sleeve of his djellabah and threw as he raised his hands sped so fast and with such deadly accuracy that Randall didn't even see it until it pierced the soft flesh of his upper arm. He gave a cry of pain and clapped his other hand to his bicep to pluck out the deadly blade. Then gun fell from his nerveless fingers and spun away under a bench laden with glass retorts and dyes in bottles.
Hassan was holding another knife menacingly. "All right, my friend: You put up your hands while I see if you have any further weapons!" he snarled, handing the knife to Ahmed and advancing warily to one side of the discomfited movie man.
Randall slowly raised his hand. He could feel blood from the wound trickling warmly down his arm. It was only a flesh cut but it hurt like hell. He was furious with himself for being so easily worsted. But he dare not make a move under the menace of that other knife . . . not yet.
He looked wildly around him. He was backed against the wall. Above his head, a row of glass carboys containing acids used in the bleaching process stood on a shelf with their wicker-covered bellies projecting slightly. He drew a deep breath and then fear, rage, and desperation lent him strength and determination.
As Hassan stooped to recover the bloodstained knife from where he must have dropped it when he plucked it from his arm, Randall closed his fingers around the base of one of the heavy carboys and with a superhuman effort hurled it against a concrete beam supporting the ceiling above the kneeling man's head.
The heavy glass vessel smashed against the edge of the beam and exploded with a noise like a grenade, to shower the room with fragments of glass and send five gallons of concentrated hydrochloric acid cascading over the upturned face and shoulders of the Arab below.
Hassan screamed a dreadful sobbing cry that soared agonizingly up the scale as he collapsed in a jerking, writhing heap on the floor, clawing frantically at the acid that was eating away his eyes and searing into the flesh of his skull.
Randall was already throwing himself across the room at the petrified Ahmed. He cannoned into the wiry Arab, knocking him back against the troughs and twisting him violently around as the knife flew from his hand. Then, concentrating all of his 180 lbs. weight on his arms, the enraged American seized the unfortunate Sudanese by the neck and thrust his head and shoulders brutally down into the bleach filling the trough.
Ahmed struggled wildly against his deadly hold. Horrible choking noises bubbled from the seething surface of the bleach. His shoulders bucked frantically against Randall's remorseless iron grip as his air-starved lungs involuntarily sucked in floods of the chlorine caustic through his mouth and nose. His dying fingers beat frenziedly at the air.
Randall waited until the struggles ceased. Then, panting hoarsely, he allowed the body to flop wetly from the trough to the ground, recovered his gun from under the bench, and raced for the rickety stairway leading from the warehouse to Smollett's office.
Smollett dropped on him from the platform at the top of the ladder. He landed on Randall's back, smashing him to the ground with all the breath knocked from his body as the revolver flew from his hand again.
Gasping for air, Randall strove desperately to twist onto his back. Smollett had seized his injured arm and screwed it cruelly up between his shoulders, clawing with his other hand for Randall's eyes.
The winded movie man beat ineffectually at the floor with his free hand. Smollett's weight was crushing him, and although the ex-CIA crook was flabby, he was immensely strong. If Randall couldn't break his grip in a few seconds, his arm would be dislocated. His mind reeling with pain, his head forced back agonizingly as Smollett's thumb lodged in his eye socket, he forced his jaw fractionally forward until he could bite savagely into the fleshy part of his antagonist's hand.
Smollett shouted with rage, releasing his grip on Randall's arm to seize his hair and drag the punishing teeth away from his hand.
As soon as his arm was free, Randall drew his knees up under him with a supreme effort, threw Smollett's heavy body to one side, and scrambled to his feet to kick ferociously at the big man's jaw as he rose menacingly to his knees. Smollett went down as the heel of Randall's shoe caught him on the side of the chin. But he was up again in a flash, his hands held away from his sides, an evil glint in his small eyes.
"All right, fatso," Randall snarled, "this is where you get what's coming to you. I'm going to break your fat carcass into pieces!"
"You and who else, punk?" Smollett sneered. "I just about had enough of your fuckin' interferin'. It's time you were put out of the way once and for all, and I'm the guy whose gonna do it!"
Randall rushed forward before he had finished speaking, feinted with his left, and swung a powerful right to Smollett's jaw. The big man blocked the blow expertly with his palm and smashed a murderous hook to the side of the movie man's head. Randall staggered back with his ears ringing: It felt as though he had been hit with a battering ram. His cheek was split and blood trickled warmly down to his chin.
Before he had time to recover, Smollett pressed home his advantage and unleashed two vicious body punches that rocked the movie man on his heels. Stumbling back out of reach, Randall fetched up against a wall of cotton bales and panted for breath. Smollett was immensely heavy and immensely strong; Randall's only chance was to keep the fight at long range. Once they got to close quarters the crooked ex-CIA man's additional weight would turn the scales in his favor. Yet even at a distance, Randall was at a disadvantage with a shorter reach.
Smollett was coming at him again now, panting hoarsely as he hammered home a flurry of savage blows to Randall's face and body. But the younger man was tough too. Wincing and gasping as his adversary's meaty fists raked across his chin, pounded the flesh over his ribs and sank agonizingly into his abdomen, he stood up and traded punch for punch. If he could stay on his feet and prolong the combat, maybe the older man, who should be out of condition from his own excesses, would tire first.
He landed several glancing blows on Smollett's chin, thudded in a couple of lefts to the heart, and then scored with a brutal right carrying all his weight to the solar plexus. The older man momentarily dropped his guard as his lungs screamed for air . . . and Randall, ducking under his pawing fists, brought up his head to pound his fist ferociously into the other man's face.
Smollett cried out with pain as his smashed nose sprayed crimson over the lower half of his face, swaying dazedly away from Randall's attack. Randall leaped tigerishly forward to jolt a searing left followed by a pile-driving right across to the big man's diaphragm. As Smollett fell back under the hail of blows, the movie man advanced relentlessly, his fists pistoning, forcing the battered ex-CIA crook towards the lighted door of the process room.
But Smollett wasn't finished yet. He came back with a stinging roundhouse left that caught Randall on the side of the head and knocked him off balance with stars shooting in front of his eyes. Then, seizing a high stool used by tellers checking the incoming bales, he swung it by the legs and aimed a murderous blow at the younger man's unprotected head.
Desperately. Randall twisted aside as the stool smashed to splinters against a concrete pillar behind him . . . but the effort destroyed his balance completely and sent him sprawling on his back on the floor. Brandishing one leg of the shattered stool, Smollett took a flying leap at the fallen man.
Randall jerked his knees back into his stomach, planted his heels in Smollett's groin as the big man dropped towards him, and then straightened his legs with all his force. Smollett hurtled through the open doorway and landed on his back on the work-bench in an explosion of breaking glass.
The movie man was after him in a flash. As Smollett floundered upright, blinded by blood streaming from a cut above his eyes caused by a fragment of one of the smashed retorts. Randall kicked him savagely in the belly. Smollett reeled away howling with pain and tripped over the acid-scarred body of Hassan. But. before he had hit the ground, Randall's steely fingers were twisted in his lapels, hauling him to his feet and battering at his bloodied face with his free hand.
Smollett went down again . . . and once more Randall dragged him up to pound pitilessly at the gory ruin of his face with his punishing right.
This time Smollett went down for good. As he lay moaning through cut and bloody lips, Randall jumped astride his fallen body, jammed one foot into his armpit, seized his right wrist in both hands, and hauled upward on the arm with all his strength. "All right, fatso," he panted. "Let's have it. I want the whole story, right from the start."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Smollett groaned.
"You heard me. About the bathrobe. The attacks on me. Your own dirty part in it. The lot."
"I'll see you in hell first," Smollett snarled. "You're breaking my fuckin' arm."
"I will if you don't talk," Randall said grimly. "Give!"
"Fuck off!"
Breathing heavily, Randall shifted his other leg so that the knee was jammed against the back of Smollett's elbow. Then, still hauling the arm up against the pressure of his foot, he began bending it back over his knee. "Talk!" he repeated.
Smollett squealed with agony and writhed on the floor, but his bruised lips remained obstinately closed.
Sweat stood out on Randall's forehead as he mercilessly increased the pressure. Suddenly there was a sharp sound like a tree branch snapping in a wind.
"Aaaaaaaaaggggghhhh!" Smollett gave a high scream of animal pain as Randall let the arm flop uselessly to the ground. "You bastard!" the ex-CIA man gasped. "You fuckin' bastard you broke my arm!"
Randall kicked the squirming man over onto his other side, pulled up his good left arm, and jammed a foot once more into his armpit. "You got ten seconds to talk before I break the other one!" he shouted, starting to exert pressure against his knee. "One, two, three, four "
"Aaaaaaah! No, no, no . . . don't! . . . Okay, I'll talk, I'll talk!" Smollett squealed. Beneath the curtain of blood, his face had paled to a livid green and the rash of sweat on his brow gleamed oilily in the harsh light.
"Give!" Randall spat.
"It was . . . those black bastards . . . in the south," Smollett groaned through set teeth. "There's a whole . . . gang of 'em in exile in Senegal. They're planning a coup. They got agents in Paris who stole the plans from the Embassy . . . Let go of my arm: You're killing me!"
"Then they worked the plans into a fake robe which they planted on me, thinking I'd innocently take it to Senegal and then they could steal it back?" Randall pursued.
"Yeah, yeah. But they was keepin' a close watch in case you screwed up. And when they discovered your plans was changed they tried to get it back and send it some other way. In the meantime the Arab intelligence guys had traced the map to you, so they blew up the plane they thought you was on . . . My fuckin' arm!"
"Knocking off 118 innocent people, by the way!" Randall grated, giving the arm an extra jerk. "Nice guys!"
"Aiiiiiiie! Stop! It ain't no fault of mine, goddamn you!"
"No? And it's no fault of yours that you didn't just tell me all of this when I came to see you? You couldn't just have told the truth, you fat slob? I wasn't even involved, for Christ's sake!"
"I didn't know then!" Smollett shrieked as the pressure on his left arm increased again. "I didn't know, I tell you! I was only interested in the broad, I swear it! . . . I only found out when I delivered her to Kerim. That meeting you busted in on was called to discuss the threat of a rebel uprising down there! Kerim hired me then to get your goddamn baggage!"
"Okay," Randall breathed, relaxing his grip a little. "Just one more question: Where's the robe now?"
"How the fuck should I know?" Smollett said sullenly.
"How should you know? I'll tell you how you should know!" Randall shouted in a storm of rage. "You killed Nessim and kidnapped Hannah again so you could return Kerim the goods he'd paid for and get the robe for him at the same time, you lousy bastard! Now where . . . is. . . that. . . robe?"
"Aaaaaagh!. . . Ohhhhhhh . . . Euuuuuuugh! . . . Upstairs! Upstairs in my office! In the drawer of the desk!" Smollett screamed wildly as Randall increased the pressure on his arm intolerably with each word.
Randall expelled his breath in a long sigh. That was it, then! The last piece of the puzzle had fallen into place! Relinquishing his grasp on the big man's tortured arm, he left him blubbering abjectly on the floor and strode out towards the staircase.
As he returned with the garment that had caused so much death and destruction and pain, he stooped to recover Nessim's revolver from under the cotton bales. He had just thrust it into his pocket when, incredibly, Hannah's voice, still blurred with drugs but wild with alarm, screamed from the process room:
Randall whirled towards the open door. For ever afterwards the macabre scene beyond it was frozen into his mind as graphically as a vivid movie still the two dead Arabs in front of the troughs, Hannah's petrified head and naked shoulders emerging from the wicker hamper, and on the bloodstained, glass-littered floor the prone form of Smollett, eyes squinting evilly from his pain-contorted face, sighting along the barrel of the wicked automatic in his good hand.
Knowing that he would never be nearer death, Randall fired through his pocket. The twin reports sounded as one. cracking through the dusty air of the warehouse and ringing in the ear.
Randall felt the wind of Smollett's bullet stir the hairs on his scalp as a third red eye suddenly stared horribly from the center of the big man's forehead and he subsided lifeless to the floor.
The exhausted movie man gradually relaxed. He was shuddering all over, his battered face ached intolerably: his body felt as though it had been run over by a steam-roller and every muscle shrieked with strain; the knife wound in his arm was sending waves of agony through his shoulder but he was still alive! The mystery solved, he had got Hannah back, and he had won!
Breathing deeply, he walked shakily through the shambles on the floor and tenderly helped the shivering, half-hysterical redhead out of the hamper which had so nearly sent her for the second time to a living death in the desert. "Honey," he said, "I don't want to seem brutal at a time like this, but we got to get out of here, out of this country but fast! There's two Arabs, a police Colonel and an American dead . . . and no one to pin it on but us! Since Smollett was in the pocket of some mighty important guys here and in the south. I wouldn't rate our chances very high once the law laid a finger on us!"
"Oh, Mark!" was all the voluptuous young girl could sob. "Oh, Mark, my darling, my darling! . . . "
He was about to wrap the robe in his hands around her naked shoulders when he hesitated. And then, seeing a striped Arab shift hanging behind the door, he strode across and tossed the garment to her. "Put this on," he ordered brusquely. "That goddamn bathrobe's caused enough trouble already!"
He lowered one of the carboys of acid from the shelf, carried it across to an empty trough, and allowed the corrosive to gurgle out until the trough was half full. Then, shaking his head, he muttered: "It's no concern of ours. Let them fight it out among themselves. I don't know enough about it to take sides anyway! Let's just get rid of the lousy thing!"
Dropping the gaudy crimson and gold robe into the acid bath, he watched the dragons and temples, the arabic characters and the hidden lines and squares and circles of the map dissolve slowly in the fuming liquid.
Then, supporting the now weeping Hannah around the waist with his good arm, he led the way to Smollett's Mercedes and drove furiously towards the airport.
THE END
EPILOGUE
Randall sent Hannah to make enquiries at the airport reservation desk. Fortunately his money and both their passports were in the inside pocket of his jacket, but by now Nessim's body might have been discovered and with it their baggage. There could be an alert out for him . . . but hardly anyone in Khartoum had seen the girl since their arrival.
His eyes shielded by dark glasses, a wide-brim straw hat he had found in the Mercedes pulled low down over his bruised and battered face, the movie man slid into the airport post office and wrote out a cable to Mervyn Solomons in Paris:
REGRET SUDAN UNSUITABLE FOR MOVIE STOP TOO MUCH TROUBLE STOP RETURNING PARIS-RANDALL.
Buying a newspaper at a kiosk, he spread the sheets in front of his face and sat down in an unobtrusive corner to wait for Hannah.
It was fifteen minutes before the curvaceous young redhead returned and when she did, he didn't recognize her at first! She was wearing a trim blue airline uniform and carrying a small valise. He stared at her.
"There's a plane leaving in a half hour," Hannah explained. "But it's all booked up . . . and there's not another until tomorrow at noon." Her face was creased into a curious secretive smile and she seemed to have recovered astonishingly from her dreadful ordeal.
Randall was still gaping at her. "Why the imagine dress?" he asked.
"I guessed we don't dare wait that long," Hannah went on, "so I fixed something else instead."
"But.. . ? "
"There's a purser's uniform in this valise," Hannah said. "Go on in the men's room and put it on. When you come out, go to the door marked 'Aircrews Only' and wait for me there. After that, just tag along and leave it to me."
"B-b-b-but what . . . ? How did you . . . ? " Randall was almost speechless with incomprehension.
"I found a friend," Hannah said vaguely. "A friend who can smuggle us on that plane-provided we don't mind traveling in the baggage compartment. And of course there's a price to pay."
"Why . . .why sure I'll pay." Randall stammered. "And, of course, I don't mind how the hell we travel just so long as we get out of here! How much do you . . . ? "
Again that strange inward smile flitted across the voluptuous redhead's beautiful face. "I'll tell you when we're aboard," she said.
An hour later, Randall, resplendent in blue and gold braid, lay sprawled comfortably on a pile of mail sacks staring out the tiny porthole of the baggage compartment in the jetliner's tail. Thirty thousand feet below, the wrinkled blue sheet of the Mediterranean slid into view under the plane's swept back wing. He yawned. The roar of the motors was lulling him to sleep.
Hannah appeared around the partition shielding the compartment from the other stewards' quarters. Bright light streaming in through the porthole burnished her hair and threw dark shadows across the blue jacket beneath the tightly out-thrust bulge of her breasts. "Mark honey," she said, "it's time to take off that uniform."
Still half asleep, Randall resignedly stripped off the gold-trimmed jacket and pants.
"And the shirt and tie and shorts," Hannah ordered.
Staring bemusedly at the smiling girl, he muttered a bewildered protest and complied. When he was completely naked, she reached out a hand and grasped the long, limp shaft of his penis.
Randall gasped in surprise. At the first touch of her cool fingers his cock jerked and stiffened, lenglithening into rigidity as she lightly clenched and unclenched her small hand around the hotly throbbing shaft. She milked the long thick pole of flesh sensuously, skimming the loose foreskin up and down its entire length until the bloated puce head burst into view with a pearl of seminal fluid glistening at its tip. When the wetly pulsing rod was iron-hard, she turned her head and called over her shoulder: "Elizabeth? It's okay he's ready!"
Stuttering with amazement, Randall's jaw dropped open as a girl in a stewardess's uniform undulated into view around the partition a tall girl with a wide-lipped, sensual mouth and a crop of short golden hair that tolled around her head like a soundless bell . . .
"This is Elizabeth," Hannah explained with a lustful twinkle in her eye. "It was she who smuggled us aboard but I told you there would be a price to pay." As her hand tightened around the throbbing staff spearing out from the speechless Randall's naked loins, she added:
"We're going to start paying right now . . . and we're going to go on paying a long time. All three of us! . . . "
Exchanging a smile of delighted complicity, the two girls stripped off their uniform jackets and began hastily to unbutton their blouses.
