Predator Paradise

Keying his com link, scanning the carnage, peering into the smoke and fires for any signs of armed resistance, the Executioner raised the Black Hawk’s pilot. Sitrep. He barely heard Black Hawk One inform him it looked clear of hostiles from where he sat, sickened as he was by what he saw here. Perhaps it was because he’d been here before—other places, other times—but the end result was all the same.

Death. All gone on, both the innocent and the guilty.

Again, Bolan felt a part of his soul, his humanity collapsing on itself, a sorrow welling up from deep inside, wanting to take him down into a void of hot rage. He would suck it up, of course, aware this was only the beginning, that more monsters were beyond Somalia, their own rampage only just out of the gate to lay waste to whatever evil they didn’t bag for some future trial. Perhaps, he thought, this evil he found here was simply a microcosm of the end. He was no doomsayer, no Nostradamus and certainly no John the Divine, but he had to wonder. Was this just part and parcel of the evolution of man speeding to his ultimate destiny? Would, could, such evil in a part of the world where life meant less than zero, spread like a cancer, spill from one border to the next, contaminate one country after the other? No matter what he did, no matter how much evil he destroyed, he knew the Four Horsemen would live on in Somalia—perhaps continue to thrive throughout the entire region known as the Horn of Africa—but at least a fat batch of homicidal maniacs could no longer scourge their own countryside.

Was it enough? Was it ever?

The Black Hawk was down, time to go, and the Executioner hopped up through the hatch. He wished he could have done far more here, spare at the very least a few innocent lives, but he would be glad to put this evil place behind.

Damn glad, but the nagging question lingered in his mind: what next?

“YOU’RE LATE. Sixty-five minutes isn’t an hour, Stone. We’re rolling, we’re on a tight schedule here. I’m talking deadlines that are shaved down to seconds, or have you forgotten mission priority?”

“We can meet you back at Shark Base if your panties are that twisted up.”

“Don’t get fucking smart, Stone, and we’re not going back to Kenya.”

“News to me.”

“I can believe that. By the way, quite the floor show I hear you put on. Too bad it didn’t make a damn bit of difference, since I understand from my flying aces on your Black Hawk loaner Dugula’s qat-chewing shitbags had already wiped out that village. What was that all about anyway, you going in alone?”

Bolan had turned off his hand radio, shed his com link when boarding the Black Hawk, wanting only a few brief moments with his own thoughts to bury the weight of where he’d just been, what he’d seen. He had begun to shed the ghosts of the hell he was putting behind, in the air, when Tsunami had pointed at his own, then the soldier’s handheld radio, Collins squawking for him to shag his ass and pick up.

Now, if he didn’t know better, it sounded to Bolan as if Collins was disappointed he was still on the team, alive and kicking. Collins pointed out their former ranks in the military didn’t mean squat in the here and now, it was his show, the gist Bolan caught being he was on board as a courtesy, that he had to have humongous muscular clout somewhere that the Cobra leader would sure as hell like to have a face-to-face with, since Colonel Stone didn’t strike him as a team player. Collins repeated his question.

“Concern.”

“What?” Collins snapped.

“For your troops, since you were all worked up about anybody coming down with some plague.”

“Took the gamble yourself, I see. Appreciate all that big concern for the men, but I tell you what, the first sign you’re sick from something you picked up back there, I don’t give a damn if you cough too hard or break out in a sudden sweat, you’re off the team. And if I have to, I’ll strap a parachute on you myself and drop you in the middle of nowhere.”

Bolan ignored the threat. “We’re two minutes, maybe less away from—”

“I’ve got you marked on my screens. Just hustle the fuck up when you guys get dropped off—belay that, I want to see you sprint up the ramp.”

Bolan grunted. Somehow he didn’t picture himself sprinting on the good major’s command.

“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before the next round, and it’s going down in a few hours. I’m assuming you’ve got a few jumps behind you?”

“One or two.”

“You’re shitting me, I hope.”

“If you’re worried about me breaking a leg or my neck, don’t. But if you don’t mind, I’ll rig my own chute, okay?”

“I wouldn’t see it any other way. Oh, and Stone? No more cowboy or crusader shit. We clear?”

Bolan hesitated, then said, “Yeah.”

“You want to bleed for all the little people not even their own give a camel’s steaming pile about, do it on your own dime or go find a church, light a candle and finger the Rosary. From here on, you better get acquainted with the concepts of team integrity and tactical cohesion.”

Collins was off the air as at least three different remarks—two of which were smart-ass—leaped to Bolan’s mind about those particular concepts. What the hell was really going on here? he wondered. With each passing minute and every exchange turning more brittle and heading toward volatile with Collins, the more the soldier was feeling the hairs wanting to stand up on the back his neck. Something about Cobra Force Twelve was out of tilt.

It wasn’t the blinding light of any divine truth being revealed, but it damn near felt like a bolt of lightning hitting him between the eyes, seeking to jolt him closer to a dark reality. He searched the faces of the commandos Collins had wanted joined to his hip, but didn’t allow the look to linger or penetrate. It was just a suspicion, nagging, growing, but one he decided to keep to himself until…

What?

That only four of the commandos carried serpent handles? That they were special to Collins, not essentially and integrally part of the team? But, if so, why? What demon lurked behind the masks of that tactical integrity, duty and honor they believed they showed him? His gut—rarely wrong—told him not only was there something shady, perhaps even sinister about his so-called teammates, but that this mission was set to come unraveled.

He’d play it out to the end of whatever the ride, the Executioner decided, aware now more than ever he was on his own, but one soldier up against who, how many and what?

HIS BLACK-OPS HANDLE for Operation Stranglehold—the mission so tagged by Cobra Central—was Gambler, but his real name was…

Who really knew? The name Harry Smith wanted to come to mind if he chose to replay a childhood that never existed. No one, not even himself, could remember his given name at birth. Even all the classified documents and disks at the NSA and the CIA were so full of deletions on his past operations and his slew of assumed names and handles not even the superspooks could accurately confirm his true identity, if put to task.

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