Volatile Agent

Bolan forced himself to look away.

The sergeant on Le Crème’s right shut the briefcase and placed it on the floor at his colonel’s feet. Bolan looked around the room. An expensive-looking portable stereo played hip-hop music featuring a French rapper. A bar stood against one wall and a motley collection of bottles sat on it, devoid of import tax stamps. Cigar smoke was thick in the room.

Bolan placed his hands palm down on the table and pushed himself up. He rose slowly and nodded to the colonel, who didn’t bother to return the favor. Bolan looked over at the gendarme who had opened the door. The man’s eyes were slits of hate.

The big American crossed the room, keenly aware of how many guns were at his back. He placed his hand on the door and slowly turned the knob. Coolly he swung it open and stepped out into the falling rain.

As he pulled the door closed behind him, Bolan saw headlights coming down the road. He stepped into the shadows beside the door and let his hand rest on the butt of the Desert Eagle. He didn’t want to offer too great a silhouette in case this was some kind of hit squad, nor was he eager to be splashed by any of the offal in the ditches lining the road.

The headlights slowed and finally the car stopped directly in front of Bolan. He saw it was a taxi, not unlike the one he had waiting for him around the corner. The back door opened and a big man climbed out. He was Caucasian, and as he climbed out his windbreaker swung open. Bolan saw two pistols tucked into twin shoulder holsters.

Bolan let his hand fall away from the butt of his pistol and assumed a neutral stance. The man rose to his full height and turned toward Bolan. He was square jawed and wide shouldered, his hair and beard both full and reddish tinged. When he faced the Executioner they stood eye to eye.

A scar turned the corner of the man’s mouth up in a perpetual sneer, and his skin was ruddy and heavily pockmarked over strong, almost bluntly Germanic features. He was holding a battered leather briefcase in one big hand. A gold signet ring sat on one thick pinkie.

Bolan nodded. The man sized him up like a professional boxer and then, almost grudgingly, nodded back. The man obviously knew why Bolan, a Westerner, was there. It was the same reason the man himself had come to this place.

Bolan turned and began walking down the street toward where he had instructed his own taxi to wait for him. Behind him Bolan heard the man knock on the same door he himself had, just minutes before. A voice answered from inside, and the man said something in a crude French patois. His accent was unmistakably Afrikaans.

As soon as he heard the voice any doubt Bolan might have held was gone. That was the man he had been sent to stop.

6

After the initial burst of automatic weapons fire riddled the wall outside the window to her room, the firing simply stopped. Remaining in a low profile, Saragossa waited out a tense fifteen minutes.

She heard movement in the street and she went carefully over to the shot out window. In the street below she saw armed men running through the square. The motley crew of brigands ran in and out of the UNICEF offices and the front gate of the mudbrick wall surrounding the main Yendere mosque. Islam was by no means the dominant religion in Burkina Faso, but the mosques were almost always the most dominant buildings in any given town in the country.

Weak, Saragossa leaned back against the wall of her room. She thought about making for the roof and decided against it. From the lobby below her she could hear men calling back and forth to each other in rough voices.

She felt flushed with fever, and perspiration dripped off her in sheets. She hurt all over, and she knew she had been irrevocably slowed down. She was no longer confident in her ability to hold out if she had to fend off another attack. She hadn’t packed enough ammunition to recreate the Bay of Pigs. The entire Burkina operation had been planned for one hell of a lot lower profile than it had turned out to be.

Saragossa went over to the bed and searched among her gear until she found her cell phone. She knew better than to think she’d get a signal, but the battery was fresh and other usage options on the device worked.

She crossed to the dresser and pulled out of the top drawer the legal tablet she used for her notes. On the first page, written in her tight, neat hand, was a summary of the information she had gathered about the Iraqi laboratory. This included a brief physical description of the building, its architecture and structural capabilities, a ten-digit grid coordinate and a precise GPS listing, as well as concise notes on the surrounding topography. It was everything she had been paid to deliver stripped down to the bare bone essentials. Using those notes, her intention had been to type up a full report for delivery to the principal in Caracas.

If push came to shove, however, everything they needed, all the information they had paid for, was on that sheet of paper. Saragossa settled herself back down below the window. The rain coming in through the shattered pane felt good against her feverish skin. With her back to the wall she could cover the door, and she kept her mini-Uzi close.

She placed the legal pad between her legs and opened her cell phone. She quickly tapped through her menu and selected the camera option. Carefully she centered the lens on the page. She drew the camera back, bringing the words on the paper into sharp focus. She held her hand steady and clicked the picture.

When that was done, she shut the phone and tore off the sheet with her notes on it, separating it from the legal pad. She folded the paper into quarters, then began ripping them into tiny pieces. When she was done she made a pile on the floor between her legs and used a match from her medic kit to light them.

The paper was consumed in seconds.

Still nauseous Saragossa leaned her head back against the wall. She cradled the mini-Uzi and prayed for her rescue to arrive.

7

Bolan walked into the airport terminal out of the rain. He wore a dark, hooded poncho, and water ran off him in erratic rivers. He scanned the waiting area of the open room and saw the gendarme from the previous night lounging against the wall by a folding table set in front of the small side room that was the customs station. Three other gendarmes and two men in army uniforms were scattered around the nearly deserted room.

The Banfora airport was an international operation. Burkina Faso was so small that it was possible to reach a host of other countries from any of the country’s thirty-three airports, only two of which boasted paved runways. Because of this even the smallest of air terminals held a gendarme contingent for customs administration and at least a small force for security against insurrection. From the looks of the nearly empty terminal, it appeared that almost the entirety of the army had been moved toward the border with Ivory Coast to meet the incursion there.

The gendarme turned toward Bolan as soon as he saw him. Bolan pulled a manila envelope out from under his poncho as the man began walking toward him. The big American tossed the thick envelope onto one of the seats in a row of hard plastic chairs. He saw the man’s eyes follow the envelope. When he looked up at Bolan again, the Executioner tapped the face of his watch meaningfully, then turned and walked back out into the rain.

Bolan walked around the edge of the terminal and crossed a muddy stretch of grass before walking into the tall grass bordering the airport. The land was mostly undulating plains filled with tall grass and short, brushlike trees. Bolan knew as he moved closer to the border the terrain would become increasingly hilly.

Setting up behind a stand of short acacia trees, Bolan watched the area through a pair of binoculars. After several minutes he saw a soldier leave the terminal and run over to a vehicle parked beside a rusting hangar. The soldier started up an old truck with a canvas-covered bed and drove to the front of the airport terminal. As soon as the truck pulled to a stop, Le Crème’s gendarme strolled out of the building and climbed up into the cab beside the driver.

Behind him the rest of the security unit followed, clambering over the tailgate and into the back of the truck. As soon as the last man was in, those in the back shouted something and the truck pulled away from the terminal and drove down the access road toward the highway leading into the township.

Bolan watched them go, satisfied for the moment. The operation had been so rushed there had been no time to implement a more comprehensive strategy than the one just executed. When Bolan was finished, it would take even more cash at even higher levels of government to smooth the incident over. What Le Crème thought was a smuggling operation was something very different.

Briefly, Bolan considered moving his operations into one of the hangars or even inside the terminal itself. It mattered little if the few remaining civilian officials saw his face. But he dismissed the idea. If everything didn’t unfold precisely, he wanted as little potential for collateral damage as possible. In a country where the life expectancy was barely fifty years of age, the people didn’t need to be shot for political machinations for which they weren’t responsible.

Bolan looked at his watch. Communication with Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi was based on an arranged timetable. Grimaldi would begin his approach in the Cessna Conquest I in ten minutes. Once he landed the pilot would turn the airplane and point the nose straight back up one leg of the twin strips with engines idling, prepared for an immediate takeoff.

Bolan caught a flash of movement and turned. A Land Rover pulled off the highway and began to speed down the terminal access road. Bolan zeroed in the binoculars on the vehicle windshield. James du Toit’s square head came into focus behind the wheel. Bolan felt a grim satisfaction. Du Toit appeared to be grinning madly at some private joke. His lips moved as he said something to someone else in the vehicle.

Bolan frowned and refocused the binoculars. He zoomed in on the South African mercenary again.

Suddenly a pile of black hair rose from du Toit’s lap, standing between him and the steering wheel. Bolan cursed in frustration. The girl from Le Crème’s shack snuggled into the comfortable passenger seat of the vehicle. The Land Rover pulled up to the airport terminal. Bolan ground his teeth together in frustration.

He didn’t know why the girl was there. Maybe du Toit had given Le Crème such a generous payoff the corrupt gendarme colonel had simply thrown the girl in as a bonus. Maybe du Toit had just bought her. Hell, Bolan thought, maybe she was the guy’s wife, the why didn’t really matter at the moment.

The steady drizzle of rain began to increase. The stiff breeze shifted slightly, and the orange wind sock on top of the terminal spun in a different direction. Bolan watched as the pair got out of the Land Rover and entered the terminal. He had just minutes to figure out how to change his plans.

She’s not important, Bolan tried to tell himself. He didn’t like how it sounded, even in his head. She had chosen her company, and he couldn’t be held responsible for that. His life and the life of Marie Saragossa were on the line. Bolan frowned. He knew what he was getting into, had always known, and it had been his choice. Saragossa was a mercenary at heart. She’d turned down a hundred opportunities to get out of the game since Noriega had fallen. She was in Burkina Faso by choice.

Bolan knew it would be easy for him to extrapolate how many lives could depend on the information that Marie Saragossa held, but it didn’t feel right in the face of a girl cursed by poverty to a short, brutal life. He couldn’t kill her. She was, when all was said and done, an innocent.

Bolan looked at his watch, then back up to the sky. Right on time Bolan’s sensitive ears picked up the sounds of the Cessna Conquest’s big, prop-driven engine. Grimaldi was approaching for his landing. Bolan reached for his sat phone, prepared to scrub the mission. His eyes fell across his little cache. He saw the clackers for the Claymore mines he had set out along the runway where the helipad was located. It was more than enough to take out a Super Puma as it landed, destroying du Toit’s transportation and putting down his eighteen-man strike force.

Claymores were indiscriminate killers, and the back blast area was significant. If du Toit pulled the Land Rover up next to the helipad to rendezvous with his team, the girl would be gravely injured. At best.

Grimaldi landed the plane smoothly despite the heavy rain and crosswind. He began to brake the aircraft as he guided it toward the terminal. Its rear end skidded out to the side slightly as the rear landing gear slid in the mud on the runway. On board the plane the rest of Bolan’s equipment for the mission was secured. Bolan knew he needed his long weapons. While he had wreaked considerable havoc before through the use of his Beretta and the Desert Eagle, he was going into a war zone when he left Banfora. It would be suicide to consider completing the operation armed as he was.

Bolan, his mind racing, debated with himself as Grimaldi taxied the plane into position. At that moment, from over Bolan’s shoulder, came the rhythmic thumping of a powerful helicopter engine. Du Toit had managed to place his troops and equipment in the area of operations in just hours despite the heavy rains.

Bolan watched the terminal, hoping du Toit would leave the girl in the building when he came out to meet his men.

Grimaldi reached the end of the runway and turned the plane smoothly, his tires leaving deep ruts in the muddy strip as he did so. From above Bolan’s head the racket of the helicopter coming in obscured all other sounds. A doorway set next to the observation window opened and du Toit walked out, heading toward the helicopter pad.

Bolan gripped the binoculars. Stay inside, he silently willed the girl. But she emerged from the terminal right behind du Toit.

The pair approached the landing pad as the helicopter hovered into position and the pilot began to lower the powerful aircraft. Bolan had placed his mines on either side of the pad, away from the raised dirt mound, camouflaging them and the detonation cord carefully so they were positioned in a V-pattern facing out from the rear of the helipad.

Bolan watched du Toit and the girl standing on the edge of the landing pad. The South African gave the pilot a thumbs-up as the skids touched down on the muddy soil. Bolan made up his mind. He was willing to risk detonating the Claymore on the far side.

He reached over and pulled the detonation clacker to him. He covered the edge and double-checked the electrical connection by looking for the blinking light in the small, recessed window of the detonator. The connection was good. Bolan looked up.

The pilot began to power down the rotors. Du Toit stepped away from the girl and approached the crew doors as they slid open on either side of the helicopter cargo bay. Beyond the helicopter landing pad Bolan saw the door set inside the frame of the Cessna open up and Grimaldi kick a short rope ladder out the side.

Bolan set his jaw hard and squeezed the detonation clacker.

The Claymores positioned on the far side of the helicopter erupted. Shrapnel slammed into the side of the Super Puma with ruthless efficiency. The frame of the aircraft shrieked in protest, and flight-tempered glass shattered. The explosion was murderously loud, but Bolan could hear the mercenaries’ screams immediately.

Metal struts positioned at the point where the main rotor shaft met the roof of the helicopter shredded under the impact of the steel ball bearings, and the still spinning blades drooped dangerously. Bolan realized that if he triggered the second Claymore the mortality rate would be final for the South African mercenaries. He looked at the girl, hating that she was there, but he couldn’t bring himself to do the smart thing.

Du Toit had been thrown to the ground and behind him the girl cowered at the explosion. Du Toit rose and pulled the pistols under his arms clear of their nylon holsters. Wounded mercenaries stumbled out of the helicopter, holding injuries, their clothes soaked in blood.

Bolan came up with the Beretta 93-R ready. He thumbed the selector switch to the triburst setting and hooked the thumb of his free hand through the oversized trigger guard. He swiveled, running for the terminal from his concealed position.

Du Toit saw the motion and spun, his pistols coming up. Even across the distance Bolan could see the other man’s eyes widen in the shock of recognition. The Afrikaner’s face hardened in determination, and he triggered the twin pistols.

Bolan fired the Beretta twice, aiming low and letting the recoil climb the muzzle up as six rounds spit out, speeding toward du Toit. Bolan’s rounds flew wide as du Toit’s own shots tore into the turf two steps behind the Executioner. With each stride Bolan’s feet jarred into the mud and falling rain slashed at his face, forcing him to squint against its force.

Behind du Toit, Bolan saw the scrambling mercenaries heading for cover, some helping their wounded comrades, others simply throwing themselves into mud puddles in an effort to escape the flying lead. Bolan triggered two more bursts, but du Toit was already scrambling and the falling rain obscured the Executioner’s aim.

Bolan reached the corner of the terminal and raced around it. Mud splashed up his pant legs as he ran along the front of the building. Through the windows he saw the few remaining civilians, clerks and customers, rushing toward the back observation window that opened out to the landing strips.

Out of sight of du Toit, Bolan continued sprinting down the length of the terminal. He came up to du Toit’s Land Rover and pumped two bursts into the vehicle, puncturing the radiator and front passenger-side tire. Bolan risked a glance behind him as he neared the rear of the vehicle.

Du Toit came around the corner low, his pistols leading the way. Bolan twisted into a side shuffling gait and lowered the Beretta to his waist before triggering a quick blast at the crouching mercenary. The shots scored the side of the building, knocking chips of masonry flying and forcing du Toit to duck back around the sharp corner.

Bolan scurried behind the back of the Land Rover and went to one knee. Filthy water soaked the material of his jeans, chilling him unexpectedly. He took the Beretta into two hands and drew a bead on the edge of the terminal.

Du Toit did a quick sneak and peek around the edge of the building after changing his elevation in an attempt to try to throw off Bolan’s aim. A gust of wind blew stinging drops of rain into the big American’s face. He triggered the Beretta, missing du Toit but forcing him to duck back around the building edge once again.

Bolan popped to his feet, weapon held in front of him, and shuffled toward the corner of the building opposite du Toit. He fired the Beretta tight against the line of the terminal front wall to keep du Toit’s head down, then turned and sprinted the last few yards for the edge of the building.

Twisting in midstride, Bolan muscled himself around the corner of the terminal. He put his head down and ran for the tail of the Cessna even as he heard Grimaldi revving the engines to a feverish pitch of mechanical intensity. Bolan hit the danger area between the cover of the building and the safety of the airplane at a dead sprint. He pumped his arms and raced flat out toward Grimaldi’s aircraft.

Bolan risked a look over his shoulder as he ran and saw confused mercenaries fanning out for cover on the edge of the airport landing strips. Stony Man intel had discovered du Toit was holding off armament until his crew was in-country in order to facilitate quick hop times between intervening nations as the Super Puma flew into Banfora. Bolan had still been fearful that the men might have chosen to arm themselves with at least pistols in spite of du Toit’s orders.

This appeared not to be the case. As Bolan raced toward Grimaldi and the waiting Cessna, he heard a burst of fire and knew du Toit had doubled back around the terminal’s far corner. He realized he was lucky to have gotten even as much of a lead as he’d pulled off so far. He felt like cursing the rain and wind that had hampered his aim but held back as he knew it had hampered du Toit’s aim, as well.

He caught a glimpse of a limp arm hanging out of the door of the helicopter. He saw two men covered with blood lying unmoving and facedown in the muck. Past them Bolan saw wounded men being helped by other mercenaries toward the edge of the airfield. He had hurt the South Africans. Not as bad as he’d hoped, but hurt them still.

There was a twin barking of pistols and, despite the wind, Bolan felt the shock wave as du Toit’s rounds tore past him.

Bolan spun as he ran, sliding in the mud and throwing himself flat into the wet earth. He stretched out his pistol and fired back toward the terminal where du Toit knelt by the corner, his back to Bolan’s original observation and ambush hide among the acacia trees. Du Toit fired again, and Bolan heard the rounds strike the fuselage of Grimaldi’s plane, dimpling the airframe.

Bolan returned fire, squeezing off a careful burst. The girl stood on the ground between Bolan and du Toit. She simply stood unmoving in the rain as both men tried to fire around her. Bolan forced himself to look away and to concentrate on du Toit, but the girl’s eyes tracked him like lasers.

On his feet again, Bolan pulled his shot to the left of the girl, still trying to throw off du Toit’s aim. He whirled and raced for the plane. Bolan heard du Toit’s guns go off again and ahead of him Grimaldi started the plane rolling.

Bolan shoved the Beretta into his shoulder sling and reached out for the rope ladder Grimaldi had kicked over the lip of the aircraft door. He grabbed hold with first one strong hand and then the other. He could no longer hear du Toit’s firing over the plane’s racing engines. Grimaldi saw that he was on the ladder, and Bolan felt the plane pick up speed as he clung to the dangling rope structure.

Bolan hauled himself up the ladder as the Cessna began to sprint down the muddy landing strip. He looked back and saw du Toit racing after him, both pistols blazing in the rain. The girl stood still, only her head moving as she tracked the fleeing plane’s progress.

The Executioner reached the top of the ladder as Grimaldi pulled the nose of the plane airborne. The Executioner tumbled inside and yanked the ladder in after himself. He stood in the doorway and looked down as the airfield disappeared beneath him. The rain was falling too hard for him to see clearly, and he was soaked to the bone with it. Angry at the missed opportunity, Bolan grabbed the door and slammed it shut.

“Saragossa had better damn well be worth this,” he muttered.

8

Du Toit lowered his pistols and watched the plane taking off into the storm.

Rain beat into his upturned face, and he fairly shook with the energy required to suppress his anger. He turned and looked at the girl before spitting on the ground, then he examined his helicopter, his beloved Super Puma.

The cargo bay was a slaughterhouse. Du Toit turned away, disgusted. His stomach was twisted in knots. Not again, he thought. He stalked away from the carnage of the ambush toward the terminal building. Bile was sour in his mouth.

A few years earlier du Toit had been part of a small mercenary force headed for Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, to initiate a coup. Instead, the mercenaries were taken at an airport in Zimbabwe while onboard their Boeing 727, awaiting the loading of weapons and equipment.

Du Toit had spent eighteen months incarcerated in Chikurubi Prison, where high tides frequently submerged the first floor with filthy water. He would die before he would go back to another African prison.