"The shoes fit well." It was the tall one.
The other one was not enjoying the situation. "How is it that you assume the shoes are yours? Did we not come on him together?"
"It was I who saw him first," the tall one said. "You may have his trousers. If he has a pouch we will share its contents."
"It is not right that you take the shoes for yourself," the mirror-decorated one muttered.
The tall man turned to me. "Remove your pants," he commanded, still in Swahili. His eyes were yellow with red streaks shot through them and there were delicately etched scars on each cheek that were not noticeable at first because of the large scar.
My hand rested on the handle of my makeshift knife, hiding it from their view. It seemed that I would have to use it. The one with the stretched earlobe was taking the panga from his belt. There was little doubt of their intentions. They could not rob a white man of everything he had and then let him live.
"All right, I'll take my pants off," I said. I had regained some strength, but I did not want to show it. "But I must get to my feet." I extended my left hand to the tall one.
He looked contemptuously at it for a moment and then grabbed at my forearm roughly and jerked me to my feet. At the instant I came off the ground, I pulled my metal-shard knife from my waist and shoved it hard into the African's mid-section.
His eyes saucered in surprise as the razor-sharp metal slid through flesh and muscle. His right hand went automatically to the handle of his panga, but that was his last voluntary act. He grunted out an ugly noise and slid to the dust at my feet.
Mirror-ear stared wide-eyed at his fallen companion for a brief moment. Then he made a wild sound in his throat and swung the panga that he had just drawn.
I ducked backwards. The big blade sizzled past my face cutting the air audibly and just missing my head and shoulder. If I hadn't moved, it would have decapitated me. When I had avoided the panga, however, I had fatten to the ground. The African now moved over me and swung the knife again, and the glistening, curved blade whistled through the air toward my neck. I rolled quickly to my right, and the blade thudded the hard clay. While my attacker recovered his balance, I turned and kicked out savagely at his leg. I heard bone snap somewhere. He fell to the ground near me with a loud cry.
If I had been my usual self, that would have been the end of him. But I was slow to follow up the advantages that I had created. As I got to my knees, the African was already standing and a look of desperation came over his face. He swung at me again, and this time the arc was wide. The blade slit the sleeve of my shirt as it sliced downward. I jabbed out toward him with my shard and made a shallow laceration on his chest. He gave another grunt and swung the panga at my head as I fell back against the stump. The force of the swing caused Mirror-ear to lose his balance and fall across my right arm. I grabbed the back of his ragged collar with my left hand, pulled his head back, and drew the metal shard across his throat.
Blood spattered onto my face and chest as the African gasped loudly and reached convulsively for his severed throat. He fell face down onto the stump, still clutching at his throat, and then he rolled off onto the hard ground, motionless.
Breathing hard, I slumped back on one elbow. I was angry to have wasted important energy needed for survival on this fight, but I was grateful that I was still alive. When I had made a mental note of the dangers of the bush back at the wreck, I had forgotten one: man. Man, it seemed, was always at the top of the list. If you ignored that one factor, you might be dead before the bush could kill you.
At least I had one fact to go on in this situation. These men had come from a westerly direction, rather than the southwesterly one which I had taken. It just might be that they had come through a village or had left a road back there somewhere. The same could be said of the direction in which they were headed. I rose weakly and chose the westerly direction.
The hot African sun was slanting down in the sky when I gave out again. I collapsed in the tall grass, wondering whether there was still any real chance of making it. I needed water badly. There was no longer any feeling in my tongue and mouth. I lay there and watched a scorpion crawl slowly past me in the grass. I didn't know whether I could move if it attacked, but it did not seem to take notice of me. In a moment it was moving away. I grimaced and envied it, for it had no problem of survival, at least not at the moment. It seemed a bit ironic that its species had been crawling around on the planet's surface for over four hundred million years, long predating the dinosaurs, and that it would probably be on earth well after man was gone. It didn't seem fair somehow, but then I was prejudiced.
As I lay there, another sound assailed my ears. It was a distant humming, not unlike that of the flies earlier. But this sound quickly grew in volume and became recognizable as that of a car engine.
I propped myself up and cocked my head to hear. Yes, it was a vehicle of some kind. I rose unsteadily and headed toward the sound. I could see nothing but the grass and occasional trees. But the noise was getting closer with every second.
"Hey!" I yelled out over the grass. "Hey, over here!"
I stumbled and fell. Getting groggily to my feet once more, I staggered forward again. In a moment, I saw it — a Land Rover, dusty and scratched up, bumping along a secondary road that was nothing more than a track through the grass. The Rover, an open vehicle, was occupied by two men who had not seen me, for it approached the nearest point to me on the road and continued on.
"Hey!" I yelled.
I stumbled awkwardly through the grass and finally made it to the road. I yelled again when I got there. I started drunkenly after the vehicle, but fell on my face.
I lay there swearing aloud and feeling desperation rise in my chest. That car might be my last chance for survival.
Then I heard the Rover slow and brake to a stop. I tried to get up to see what had happened, but my strength was gone. I heard the engine idling a moment, then the Rover was in first gear again, swinging back around on the road and heading toward me. They had either heard me or seen me after all.
In just seconds the car stopped near me, the engine was cut, and I heard two men speaking in British accents.
"Good Lord, it's a European."
"What's he doing out here in the bush on foot?"
"Maybe we ought to ask him."
Soon there was cool water running into my mouth, spilling onto my dirty shirt front, and I could feel my tongue again.
"Good God, man, what happened?"
I focused on the two beefy faces leaning over me. They were middle-aged, white Rhodesians, probably gentlemen farmers out for a day in the bush.
"A plane crash," I answered. "I walked away from it."
As they hoisted me into the Rover, I knew I had made it. But I could not forget the body of Alexis Salomos being devoured by hyenas out there because of somebody in Athens. I hoped that David Hawk would let me dig into what was happening in the Apollo Building to find out whether Adrian Stavros was really in Brazil as everybody thought Because if any of Alexis Salomos' theory were true, there was trouble ahead of a kind that AXE had not seen in a good, long time.
Three
"You don't look too good, Nick."
David Hawk, director of America's super-secret AXE agency, was holding a stubby cigar between the fingers of his right hand and leaning forward on his wide mahogany desk. We were sitting in his office at AXE headquarters which was cleverly hidden in the rented space of the Amalgamated Press & Wire Services on DuPont Circle in Washington.