Free Whipsaw by Don Pendleton Page B

tight ball, trying to lend in with the floor of the forest or sink to the other side of the shadows.
    Bolan moved back toward the hunters a few feet to interpose himself between Marisa and the searchers. Concealng himself among the fronds of a patch of tall ferns, he roached down and waited.
    He could see one of them moving straight toward him. The others had spread out to the left. Bolan steeled himself as the searcher drew closer. The fronds waved as the man rushed into them from the other side. Bolan waited until he took one more step. As he brushed by him, Bolan snaked an arm around his neck, crushing the windpipe and preventing him from shouting.
    The man tried to breathe, and the gurgle in his throat dribbled away as Bolan exerted still more pressure, bracing his other forearm against the back of his captive's skull. With a sudden jerk, he snapped the neck. Easing up slightly, he felt the head loll to one side, then lowered the lifeless body gently to the ground.
    It had been too damn near a miss. And Marisa was a liability, especially in the jungle. At all costs, they had to get closer to the road.

9
    Bolan hauled Marisa up the slippery incline, his feet sliding on the damp, rotten leaves. The firing continued behind them, and stray slugs whined through the branches overhead, showering them both with tattered leaves. Just ahead the lip of the incline curved up nearly vertically. From fifty feet, it looked to be about five or six feet high, but it could be more. It was going to be close.
    The nearest of their pursuers was no more than fifty yards behind them. Bolan kept tugging at Marisa's arm, until he thought it would pull out of its socket.
    The dense jungle behind them swallowed nearly every sound except the gunfire. Bolan crossed mental fingers, hoping that Marisa's faith in her compatriots was not misplaced. If it were, it would be too late for her to regret it. Bolan tripped over a log, nearly buried in dark brown leaves.
    As he struggled to his feet, he lost his grip on the woman for a moment, and she cried out, afraid he had left her behind.
    He clapped a hand, slippery with decayed vegetation, over her mouth and held it there until she stopped struggling. He leaned forward to whisper in her ear. "Come on, Marisa, hold it together. We're almost to the road. Okay?" At first she didn't respond, but when he asked a second time, she nodded as best she could.
    As he let go, he heard a rustle of leaves and dropped to the round, pulling her down with him. Straining his eyes to see in the dark, he saw nothing that looked out of place. The rustling noise had stopped, but he was certain one of the search party was just behind a curtain of thick, umbrellalike leaves. A shot would alert the others, but he couldn't afford to turn his back on a threat that close.
    "Wait here," he whispered.
    Bolan started to crawl toward the fan of broad leaves, spread open like the fingers of a huge hand. Keeping his eye fixed on the center of the fan, he moved one hand, then a leg, another hand, a second leg. He controlled his breath, taking deep gulps as seldom as he could and taking care to make no noise.
    Since he had begun his approach, not a single leaf had fluttered. He was starting to think he had imagined the noise when he spotted something jutting out just past the face of a leaf. It could have been a twig or some sort of weird bug. Or the muzzle of an automatic rifle. Bolan squinted to sharpen the focus, but the effort was futile.
    There just wasn't enough light. Lying flat out, Bolan rolled onto his back, waited a few seconds, then rolled again to lie on his stomach about four feet to the left.
    As he lay there, he listened for a long moment. The gunfire had tapered off a little, as if the men were trying to conserve ammunition. Or, Bolan though, maybe they had blown off their fear, and fired now only with some reasonable cause.
    From his new vantage point, he could still see the projection. And now it looked just a little too