Final Coup

Lareby followed the soldier into their separate suite next to that of the Secret Service and said, “Which bedroom do you want?”

Bolan scanned the area, then said, “I’ll probably end up sleeping out here on the couch. If I get a chance to sleep at all. I want to keep one ear open for anything going on to our sides or in the hall.”

Lareby nodded. “We’ll probably hear Essam’s lackeys pounding up and down the halls most of the time,” he said. “But you think I should do the same? I could pull that other couch up near the door and—” he pointed across the room at a slightly shorter version of the sofa Bolan had indicated “—and I could rack out next to—”

The big American shook his head. “There’s no need for both of us to do that,” he said. “Besides, we’re going to spend a lot more time away from this room than in it.”

“Okay,” the CIA man said and headed for the nearest bedroom.

Bolan walked to the phone on a nightstand next to the couch and lifted the receiver to his ear, at the same time pulling a business card out of his jacket pocket. A moment later he had punched in the number printed on the card, and a moment after that the hospital answered.

“Jack Grimaldi’s room, please,” Bolan said.

As he waited, he caught himself grinning. Grimaldi had awakened before the ambulance could arrive and, still under the influence of the morphine Lareby had administered, tried to get out of the jeep just as the meeting had broken up. He was raring to go after the men who had shot him, and it had been difficult to get him to go to the hospital. Just as the ambulance had arrived, Bolan had finally convinced him by saying, “Look, Jack. It doesn’t hurt to be careful. Besides, you’ll just be hanging around, waiting for our folks to send one of the other jets. Just do it for me, okay? I can’t afford to use a pilot who isn’t running at one hundred percent.”

Even under the drug’s influence, Grimaldi had seen through the ruse. But he had finally nodded in agreement.

The phone buzzed in Bolan’s ear, and a second later he heard Grimaldi pick up the receiver next to his hospital bed. “It must be you, Sarge,” the pilot growled. “Nobody else knows I’m here.”

“Ease up, old buddy,” he said. “Actually, everybody back home at the Farm knows where you are. I told them when I called for another plane to be sent over. How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” Grimaldi said. “Got a few stitches is all. But they want to keep me overnight for observation. Frankly, it all makes me feel like something growing in a test tube. There’s only one reason I haven’t already walked out of here.”

“And I’ll just bet she has a name,” the Executioner said with a chuckle.

“As a matter of fact, she does.” Grimaldi laughed back. “Although I can’t pronounce it. In any case, she’s promised me a sponge bath as soon as her shift is over.”

“You get well,” Bolan came back. “There’s no telling when we might need you.”

“Affirmative, big guy,” the pilot said.

In the background, Bolan heard what sounded like a hospital privacy curtain closing.

“Gotta go,” Grimaldi said. “Got a visitor. And she’s armed with a sponge.”

The Executioner was still smirking as he hung up. But his momentary light spirit disappeared when he heard the sudden knock on the door to the hall. It came in the form of five strikes with little-to-no pauses in between.

It was not the two knocks, pause, and then two more raps that he and the Secret Service men had agreed upon as their “code knock” when visiting one anothers rooms.

From beneath his torn and battle-rumpled sports coat, the Executioner drew the sound-suppressed 9 mm Beretta 93-R.

Then he walked toward the peephole.

Bolan held the 93-R in front of the peephole for a good three seconds before dropping the Beretta to his side. More than one man had been shot through a peephole when the gunman on the other side saw it darken, and the Executioner had no intention of joining that club. Finally satisfied that it wasn’t a ruse, he stuck an eye in front of the hole.

A moment later, he opened the door. “What are you doing here?” the soldier asked bluntly. “You should be in bed. Or getting your chemotherapy.”

A brief expression of sadness covered Antangana’s face. Then it switched almost magically into a knowing grin. “I do not restart my treatments for another couple of days,” he said. “So I thought I would come to assist you.”

Bolan opened the door wider and let the man into the room.

The soldier had barely recognized Antangana. The man had changed out of his suit into a pair of worn brown slacks, sandals and a brightly colored dashiki. The loose garment—like the suit coat before it—seemed to emphasize his emaciation.

“I was President Menye’s prime minister,” the man said as soon as Bolan had swung the door closed and replaced the Beretta in his shoulder rig. “And no one knows that evil man better than I do. I will help you find him, and I will help you kill him.” His grin seemed to take up all of his face, and Bolan saw a perfect row of gleaming white teeth behind his upper lip.

Bolan looked the man up and down. He was still getting into this mission, and the one thing he’d learned so far was that he couldn’t be certain who could be trusted and who could not. Antangana’s multicolored African-patterned dashiki was so large on him it could have hidden any number of weapons.

“Don’t take this personally,” the soldier said as he reached out, twisted the man to face away from him and patted him down. The closest thing to a weapon he found was an Okapi folding knife in the man’s right front pocket. Opening the folding blade, he looked down at the inexpensive steel. Patterned loosely after the centuries-renowned Spanish navajas, the Okapis were manufactured in South Africa and although nonlocking and difficult to sharpen, they could be deadly in the hand of a man who knew how to use them.

Antangana’s knife didn’t look as if it had been used for much more than peeling apples or cutting vegetables. Bolan folded the knife closed again and dropped it in his pocket for the time being.

“With all due respect, Mr. Prime Minister,” the soldier asked, “exactly what is it you think you can do to help, considering your health?”

“I know this country,” Antangana stated. “I know it as well as I know myself. And I know the people and our customs. I can help you deal with them without accidentally offending them and turning them to stone.” He paused to catch his breath. “I believe you Americans say something like I can ‘cut through the bullshit.’”

Bolan had to fight to keep a smile from forming on his own face. “Well,” he said, “have a seat.” Unleathering the Beretta again and gesturing with it at the couch.

Antangana dropped down on the couch as Bolan took a padded armchair. A second later, Lareby came out of the bedroom. The CIA man had taken off his vest and rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. He was drying his hands with a white towel as he crossed the threshold. “I see we have company,” he said.

Bolan kept his eyes on the man in the dashiki. “Yes, we do,” he said. “You remember him, I’m sure. Antangana— Jean—Antangana. Unfortunately at this point, he belongs to the group of men I trust the least in the world.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lareby said as he finished drying his hands and arms. “And what group might that be?”

“Volunteer informants,” the Executioner replied. “They’re almost always playing both ends against the middle.”

By this point, Antangana had bent one knee beneath him and was sitting on his own foot while his other leg extended to the floor. In spite of Bolan’s words, the smile he had entered the room wearing never left his face. “I understand your logic,” he said. “And I must admit I would probably distrust you if our roles were reversed. But I promise you I am an exception. So. What can I do to gain your confidence?”

“You can start by telling us why you didn’t volunteer your help earlier at the meeting.”

“Because there were men present who I do not trust,” Antangana said simply. “And I did not want them to know any more about your plans than necessary.”

The man’s sickly appearance seemed to loom even larger as he tried to take a deep breath. There was something about him—something Bolan couldn’t put his finger on—that made the Executioner believe he was sincere in his desire to assist them. “Who don’t you trust?” he asked.

“There are several I suspect of sympathizing with the KDNP. Others with the CPU. And one or two, I am relatively certain, are still loyal to President Menye.”

Bolan thought about the man’s words for a moment. His gut still told him that this man was telling the truth. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to grow up in a country such as Cameroon without taking on prejudices of one sort or another. While the remaining leaders of the nation might not be actual members of the KDNP or CPU, they would likely lean one way or the other.

“Assuming I believe you,” Bolan finally said. “What would make you want to help us at this time? Particularly since you were one of Menye’s top men before he vacated his little throne.” The Executioner rarely used sarcasm, but when he did, it cut all the way to the bone.

Antangana shrugged. “The answer to your question is really not very complicated,” he said. “When he first took office, Menye was not the self-inflated potentate that he gradually became. I was proud to work for him then. But, little by little, he began to change. A small lie here. An execution carried out for personal reasons there. Before long, he had created a regime far more remorselessly cruel than Cameroon had ever known in the past.” Antangana paused and drew in another deep breath. “And so I was stuck.”

“You tried to resign?” Bolan asked.

“I did,” Antangana said. “I do not remember Menye’s exact words, but they included that my head might look attractive on top of a spear stuck into the ground.” He paused and traded legs beneath him. “That dampened my enthusiasm for resigning rather quickly.”

Lareby had pulled one of the chairs away from the dining-room table, flipped it backward, then sat with his arms crossed over the back, his chin resting on them. “I can see how it might,” the CIA man said. “But why didn’t you just leave the country and seek asylum in America or somewhere else?”

“Because by the time I realized how power-crazed he had become,” Antangana said, staring hard at the man, “too much had already occurred. I was afraid any country in which I sought refuge would consider me as guilty as Menye himself. Besides, the man had already murdered two of his staff who he only suspected of plotting against him. I had no desire to be the third.”

Lareby and Bolan exchanged glances and nods. The story sounded believable. The soldier turned back to Antangana. “All right,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to give you a shot. And you can take that statement both literally and figuratively. If you’re on the level and really want to help us, great. But if it turns out that you have your own personal agenda that conflicts with ours, all I can promise you is a faster and more humane death than your old boss would have given you.” He reholstered the Beretta and pulled the Okapi out of his pocket, flipping it across the room to Antangana. “Try to use that piece of steel on me or anyone else, and I’ll kill you with it,” he said. “Understood?”

“Quite well,” the prime minister said. “And please believe me when I tell you I have no hidden agenda of any sort. My only goals are to save my country and pray that my chemotherapy is successful. If I cannot be successful with the second goal, I hope to see my country become a peaceful democracy before I die. And, oh, yes…I want to see Menye caught or killed, of course.”

Bolan and Lareby remained silent.

“May I assume, then,” Antangana said after another breath, “that we are all in agreement?” He rocked forward and came back to his feet, pulling the leg on which he sat out from the couch and returning it to the floor.

Bolan nodded. “We’ll try to take Menye alive so his war crimes can be exposed to the rest of the world. But I can’t promise you that’ll be possible,” he said.

“It is possible that if he is tried in the International Criminal Court that he might go free,” Antangana said, and for the first time since he’d entered the room his smile became a frown. “One never knows what can happen during a trial. Evidence can become tainted and thrown out. The truth can be twisted.” A few beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. “Menye is the most guilty man I have ever known,” he said as he wiped his face with the sleeve of the dashiki. “He has sacked this nation worse than Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun ever dreamed about, using embezzlement, nationalization of the oil, timber and coffee industries, and outright murder to funnel millions of dollars into his bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.” He fell silent for a moment and closed his eyes. “But still, it is quite possible that he could walk free.”

“Maybe,” Bolan said. “But it didn’t work that way for Saddam Hussein.” He turned and jerked his bullet-ridden sports coat from the back of the chair. One shoulder was still ripped out but until more equipment, clothing and supplies arrived from America, it would have to do as a cover for his Beretta and Desert Eagle.

“But if the worst should happen and he is found not guilty…” Antangana stared at the big man across the room, letting the sentence trail off unfinished. But the quiver in his voice betrayed his terror at the possibility that Menye might once again take the reins of power in Cameroon.

“Then I’ll personally carry out the execution,” Bolan said, as he stuck his arms into his jacket.

Since he was going by the name Matt Cooper, neither of the other two men in the room caught the double meaning in the Executioner’s last statement. “Is there anything else you’ve got to tell us?” Bolan asked.

“I know where Menye is hiding,” he said simply.

Bolan stopped with one arm in the jacket, the other still out. He had begun to expect some good intel from this new informant, but not a bombshell like this. The soldier had to remind himself that Antangana’s story still needed to be confirmed. If the man was playing double agent, it could all be a trap.

Lareby was less diplomatic about his suspicions. “How do you know where he is if you’re not still in league with him?” the CIA man asked gruffly.

“In Cameroon there are very few secrets,” Antangana said. “Although Menye’s location is one of them.”

“Get to the point,” Bolan said as he finished shrugging into his jacket and sat back against the chair.

“I have an informant of my own who saw suspicious men entering through the alley door of an old abandoned warehouse,” the prime minister said. “He recognized one of Menye’s personal bodyguards who had disappeared when Menye took off.” He frowned a moment. “I believe you Americans call it ‘going away with sheep?’”

Lareby suppressed a laugh. “Close. It’s called ‘going on the lamb.’”

Bolan looked across the room, through the window, and saw that dusk was falling over Yaounde. “Yeah,” he said. “It means he’s running.”

“Where does it come from?” Antangana asked, frowning. “I know of no lambs that—”

The Executioner was growing impatient with this man who was obviously easily sidetracked. “I don’t know where it comes from and it doesn’t matter. You have an address for this warehouse location?”

“I do,” Antangana said. “But it is in the most dangerous slum in Yaounde. Murders occur every night.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Bolan rose from his chair. He had relied on his Desert Eagle during the gun battle back at the airport, and was down to one full magazine and one partially loaded with five shots. Until his supplies arrived, he would have to make do with what he had. He patted the Beretta beneath his jacket. It was still filled with 9 mm fragmentation rounds, and he had two extra magazines under his right arm opposite the pistol in his shoulder holster.

It might be enough. Or it might not. In any case, he would be sure to pick up the weapons of his enemies as he went.

Looking quickly across the room, he saw Lareby checking his own weapon. “How are you fixed?” Bolan asked.

“Full gun, one extra mag,” the CIA man said.

Bolan knew the small double action .380 held eight rounds, with one in the chamber. The other magazine would give Lareby an additional seven. “Better make them count then,” he said.

The CIA counterterrorist expert nodded.

The soldier took another glance outside and saw that darkness was replacing the twilight he had seen a few moments earlier. Antangana had held the closed Okapi folding knife in his fist ever since Bolan tossed it back to him, but now he watched the man drop it back into the same pocket where it had been found during the search.

“Let’s go,” Antangana said simply, then led the men out the door, into the elevator and out of the hotel into the night.

4

The strong odor of trash and human waste nearly blocked out the smell of the other odors in Yaounde’s darkened business district. The area was half-deserted. Bolan watched through the back window of the taxicab and saw gangs of young men walking up and down the streets. The teenagers were doing their best to look and act like American gangbangers, and wore an almost laughable combination of Western attire— baseball caps turned backward, and sleeveless T-shirts that emphasized elaborate tattoos—mixed with dashikis and other African attire. He remembered the cabdriver asking if this was really the part of town they wanted to visit. Bolan had said simply, “Yes.”

He continued to use all of his senses as he took in the atmosphere of this neighborhood. Barely present above the nauseous odors was the scent of oil, freshly cut pine and other woods, and coffee beans. But he saw no one on the streets who looked like they worked in any of those enterprises.

The workmen, he suspected, scuttled out as soon as closing time came each day, giving way to the human “vampires” who ruled the night. He remembered what Jean Antangana had said earlier, back at the hotel, about this being the most dangerous area of the city. And although the Executioner had seen even more poverty and crime in places like Calcutta and the fish market area of Iquitos, Peru, he sensed that violence could break out at any time.

Like in most Third World countries, tourists were forbidden to bear weapons, and their clothing and the large sums of money they likely carried made them easy targets. Bolan knew that while he—with the ripped shoulder and torn lapel of his coat—didn’t look like the typical tourist, the semi-ruined jacket could be misinterpreted as the result of an earlier mugging.

Lareby’s multipocketed vest, faded blue jeans and Timber-land hiking boots shouted “Visitor,” and even Antangana, with his expensive dashiki and carefully pressed slacks, looked out of place.

The soldier glanced at the scrap of paper Antangana had given him. The address of the warehouse where Menye and the men still loyal to him were supposedly hiding was accompanied by a crude, hand-drawn map of the area.

Bolan looked up at a street sign as they passed. Unless he had misinterpreted the map, they were roughly three blocks away from the address he had given the cabbie. Not wanting the driver to know their exact location lest he alert one or more of the roving gangsters of the “easy pickings,” he had told the man to drop him off two blocks before they reached the warehouse in question.

This was Yaounde—the capital city of a nation in tremendous upheaval.

And Bolan didn’t trust anyone.

The cabdriver finally pulled to a halt and Bolan leaned forward, handing him several Communauté Financière Africaine franc bills. He added several more to what would have been a normal tip, and said, “You never saw us. Right?”

“Right,” the cabbie said, smiling. But then his smile turned quickly to a frown. “One last time, my friends. Are you sure this is where you desire to be let out?” He paused for a second, then started to speak again before Bolan could answer. “I could take you to a very fine brothel in a safer part of the city. The women are all beautiful, and—”

Bolan interrupted with, “No thanks,” as he shut the door behind him. He stood silently as the cab drove quickly away. It was obvious that the driver didn’t care to spend any more time in this neighborhood than he had to.

Antangana stepped up next to Bolan. “According to my informant, there is a rear exit that Menye’s men use. Menye, of course, does not leave at all. He is too easily recognized. I suggest we follow the alleys, then make our entrance into the building in the same way.”

Bolan nodded. “You were the prime minister, right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then why is it that the only thing even resembling a weapon you have is that cheap Okapi?” Bolan asked. “I remember seeing pictures of Menye and some of his other cabinet members. They were always in uniform and always armed.”

“I am not a fighter,” Antangana said. “I am a strategist.”

“Then strategize from a point about ten feet behind us,” Bolan said as he led the way down a darkened alley. “And don’t get in our way if trouble breaks out.”

Antangana nodded.

But trouble came even before the three men were expecting it.

The first thing Bolan saw as they entered the alley was the beam of a flashlight, aimed directly into his eyes. For a second, he was blinded. Then he closed his eyelids as quickly as he could. He knew the light had shifted when he felt the heat of the strong beam leave his face, and when he opened his eyes again he could see only blurry forms of Lareby and Antangana. Their eyes had been forced closed as well.

Bolan grimaced. He knew that they’d all lose their night vision for several minutes.

Turning back to the oncoming light, the Executioner saw the distinctive outline of a large halogen torchlight. It contained both a huge spotlight-style plastic beam, which was the one being used on them, and a softer, more regular flashlight mounted on the top. Holding the heated beam, Bolan could make out the dark and fuzzy form of a man wearing his baseball cap backward. A dashiki rivaling Antangana’s in flashy color fell halfway down his thighs.

To his sides and behind him, Bolan saw other barely visible forms in the darkness. He counted a total of six in addition to the torchbearer, and knew they were another of the roving night gangs he’d seen since entering the slum.

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