Rebel Trade

A grave mistake.

They hadn’t reckoned on the Executioner—an oversight that could turn out to be their last.

A room was waiting for him at the Hilton Windhoek, near the city’s zoo. Matt Cooper’s platinum AmEx would cover it, and if he fell asleep with lions roaring in the neighborhood, so be it. It would prove he was in Africa.

In Bolan’s war, the names and faces changed, along with the landscapes, but the Evil never varied. Everywhere he went, some individual or group was hell-bent on destroying others or coercing them into some action that repulsed them, something that would push their so-called civilized society a little closer to the brink of bloody anarchy. Sometimes he felt as if he were the only plumber in a vast metropolis where every pipe not only leaked, but threatened to explode and flood the place at any moment. Rushing here and there with meager tools, he fought to stem the tide, his work unrecognized by those he saved.

And sometimes Bolan failed.

He couldn’t rescue every sheep from the innumerable wolves stalking the flock on seven continents. Or scratch Antarctica and make it six; the basic problem still remained. Unless he could be everywhere at once, shadowing every man, woman and child on Earth, he couldn’t do it all.

And Evil never died.

No matter how many of its foot soldiers Bolan liquidated, Evil always reared its head again, invulnerable to his bullets, his grenades, his blade.

So, what?

Spotty religious training from his childhood told Bolan that even God could not destroy Evil—or that he chose to let it run amok for reasons left mysterious. In fact, if you believed the words of “holy writ,” He had created Evil in the first place as some kind of crazy test for humankind that never seemed to end.

Bolan didn’t know if that was true. More to the point, he didn’t care.

His job as a committed warrior was to face Evil where it appeared and beat it down, or die in the attempt. Another round would start tomorrow, and it could go either way.

At the moment he needed sleep.

And time to plan his moves.

Chapter 3

Erongo Region, Namibia, Present

The NSV machine gun’s sound was thunderous, eclipsing the rattle of Kalashnikovs and the pop-pop of handguns. Bolan swept the pirate camp from west to east and back again, night-vision goggles pushed up on his forehead to prevent him being blinded by the weapon’s awesome muzzle-flashes. Slugs the size of fat cigar stubs, each weighing one-ninth of a pound, ripped through men, tents and anything else before them, traveling at half a mile per second.

It was devastating—but it couldn’t last.

The NSV devours ammunition at a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute, and the standard belt holds only fifty rounds. Gone in four seconds, give or take. A way around that problem is the use of non-disintegrating steel belts with open links, assembled in ten-round segments using a cartridge as an interlink. While ammo belts could stretch for miles, in theory, MG barrels warp under prolonged full-auto fire, and standard ammo boxes only hold 250 belted rounds.

Which should be running out for Bolan’s weapon any second.

The sudden ringing silence was a shocker. Bolan had an instant choice to make: start searching for another box of ammo without knowing where it was, or run like hell. One choice meant almost certain death; the other was a gamble with no guarantees at all.

The Executioner had always been a gambler.

While a reload for the NSV might prove elusive, Bolan knew exactly where to find the starter button for the pirate speedboat he presently occupied alone. Grabbing his AK-47 on the run, he fired a short burst at the vessel’s mooring line, then dropped into the pilot’s chair and gunned the engine into roaring life. He ignored the fuel gauge, since he didn’t have the time nor the means to fill the gas tank, even if the needle fell on empty. Bolan had a need for speed, as some old movie put it, and it was time to split.

One second, he was sitting still; the next, his boat was lunging forward in a westerly direction. Bolan cranked the wheel to clear the craft in front of him, but still managed to graze its stern with jolting force. There was a switch to run the bilge pump somewhere on the dash in front of him, but why waste time searching for it, when he didn’t plan to be afloat that long? The open sea lay approximately a mile in front of him, maybe two minutes if he kept the speedboat’s throttle open all the way.

He gave a passing thought to obstacles that might undo him, but the river wasn’t deep enough for sunken wrecks, and stark desert meant no fallen trees. The only hippos still surviving in Namibia were found on game reserves, well inland, and there’d been no sign of crocodiles as Bolan had hiked in from the river’s mouth.

Clear sailing then, but there was more on Bolan’s mind than making a clean getaway.

He wanted the remainder of the pirates on his tail.

To that end, he eased off the speedboat’s throttle, waited with the engine idling, staring back toward the MLF camp. It took his shaken enemies some time to get their wits about them, check out who was still alive and fit for battle. Bolan could have reached the coast, reclaimed his Zodiac and been well under way before he heard another speedboat’s engine growling on the river, but it would have meant that he had failed.

A clean sweep was the plan, and that required a chase.

The second boat was finally coming. Bolan waited for a visual through his night-vision goggles, but it wouldn’t do to let them close to killing range. Not if he wanted to get through the night alive.

And that was definitely part of The Executioner’s plan.

* * *

JACKSON ANDJABA SURVEYED the ruins of his camp, mouthing a string of bitter curses. All around him there was devastation, dead and dying soldiers scattered everywhere, the dazed survivors struggling to their feet since the threat had passed, checking themselves for wounds.

But he could not allow them any time for rest. The enemy who had destroyed their haven—one man—was rapidly escaping while they blundered through the compound’s smoking wreckage.

Furious, Andjaba started shouting orders at the men whose bodies seemed to be intact. At least, he saw that they could stand upright and hold their weapons. What else did a fighting man require?

It was a struggle, with the sound of the escaping speedboat dwindling in his ears, but finally Andjaba got a dozen men together and divided them between the two remaining boats. He climbed into the first, positioned in the bow behind a PKP Pecheneg light machine gun, belt-fed with 7.62x54 mmR rounds. Another shouted order, and the boat nosed into open water with the second vessel growling close behind it.

The chase would come down to speed and timing. Andjaba could not say where his quarry hoped to go in the stolen speedboat, how far he meant to travel once he’d cleared the river’s mouth, or even how much gasoline was in the fleeing craft’s fuel tank. He checked on fuel before a raid, and would have done so in the morning, but the midnight strike had caught him unprepared.

An error that he would have to correct before the night’s disaster was reported back to MLF headquarters in Windhoek. If he survived to file that grim report himself, he’d include a conclusion that would mollify his masters—the destruction of the enemy who’d ravaged them, preferably after he was grilled for information on his motives or the sponsors of his raid.

If, on the other hand, Andjaba did not live to speak with headquarters…well, then, his troubles would be over.

But he did not plan to die this night. He’d lost enough men as it was, without taking a fling at martyrdom.

The boat they sought was running without lights, of course, but Andjaba could hear its motor snarling, sending echoes back to him across the dark water. He was tempted to unleash the Pecheneg, but wasting ammunition in a fit of rage solved nothing. Worse, it might defeat his purpose when he found a target and the gun refused to fire, adding insult to injury.

A sudden difference in the sound confused Andjaba for a moment, then he realized the stolen boat had slowed—or had it stopped? Why would the damned fool cut the throttle, he wondered, when he knew they must be coming after him?

Perhaps the boat had stalled from careless handling, or maybe it was running out of fuel. But no, when they were almost within sight of it, Andjaba heard the motor roar again and speed away, almost as if their enemy was playing cat-and-mouse.

Madness. But it would cost him, having let them close the gap. The first glimpse of his target would be ample for the PKP to do its work, hosing the stolen boat with fourteen rounds per second. He would try to hit the engine, stop the boat and leave their adversary to be captured, but Andjaba thought the night-prowler would choose to fight it out.

Too bad.

A shot-up boat could be repaired. A corpse could be examined for whatever tell-tale clues remained to its identity. Jackson Andjaba, on the other hand, could not be resurrected if his MLF superiors ordered him shot for dereliction of his duty—as they well might, if he let the enemy escape.

A bit of caution, then, but if the bastard saw no wisdom in surrender, death would be his choice. And Andjaba would be happy to oblige.

“Just let me see your face,” he muttered to the night. “It’s all I ask.”

* * *

THE FIRST RATTLE OF automatic fire made Bolan duck and twist the speedboat’s steering wheel, swooping from left to right and back again, in an attempt to spoil the shooter’s aim. It was a risky move, since he had no clue as to the river’s depth at any given point, and stranding on a sandbar or some other unseen obstacle could finish him for good.

Evasion was the key, but that meant constant forward motion, leading his pursuers toward the killing ground he had prepared for them. It all hinged on his drawing them along behind him—and not getting killed in the process.

The shooter in the lead pursuit craft was about four hundred yards behind him, well within effective range for what sounded like a 7.62 mm weapon. Then again, there was a world of difference between the range at which a given slug could wound or kill, and any shooter’s realistic hope of zeroing in on a target.

The down side: with a Russian light machine gun’s rate of fire, the man behind the weapon didn’t have to be a legendary marksman. All he had to be was lucky. Just one round had to find its mark by accident, hurtling along at something like 860 yards per second, and the man on the receiving end was down. Forget about the Hollywood “flesh wounds” that left an action hero fit to run ten miles and take out half a dozen burly adversaries with his bare hands on arrival at his destination. That was movie magic, light years out of touch with flesh-and-blood reality.

The truth: a hit by any military bullet hurts like hell, unless it slams the target into instant shock on impact. Any torso wound can kill, unless there is an expert MASH team standing by to pull a miracle out of the hat. And any talk about a “clean” wound through a human abdomen is fantasy. Get “lucky” with a stray shot through an arm or leg, and anything beyond a graze will shatter bone, turn muscle into hamburger, and leave you bleeding out from severed arteries.

Long story short—in any shooting situation, it is best to give, and not receive.

Or, in the present case, to duck and weave like crazy, until it was payback time.

But just to keep it interesting…

Bolan kept his left hand on the speedboat’s steering wheel, picked up the AK-47 with his right, and half turned in the pilot’s chair to fire a burst one-handed in the general direction of the boats pursuing him. He kept it high on purpose, wasting rounds to spoil his adversary’s aim without inflicting any damage on the leading shooter or his crew.

Not yet.

Their moment was approaching.

Another aimless burst from his Kalashnikov, and Bolan set the rifle down beside him once again. The LMG fire from the lead pursuit craft faltered, and he pictured crewmen ducking as the bullets rattled overhead. It was a different game entirely when the rabbit shot back at the hunters, changing up the rules. Raiders accustomed to attacking merchant ships and terrorizing unarmed crews acquired a new perspective when the bullets came their way.

Call it a learning curve, while it lasted.

With any luck at all, about another minute, maybe less.

Ahead, Bolan could see a glint of moonlight on the South Atlantic, stretching in his mind’s eye all the way to Rio de Janeiro. Wishing for a brief second that he was there, relaxing on a beach at sunset with a cold drink in his hand and someone warm beside him, Bolan freed the detonator from his web belt, switched it on and started counting down the doomsday numbers in his head.

* * *

ANDJABA DUCKED, CURSING, as bullets swarmed over his head and off into the night. But for its strap around his neck, he might have lost the PKP machine gun overboard, and that only increased his rage at being forced to cringe and crawl before his men.

Not that they noticed him, as they drove for the nearest cover themselves. The pilot of Andjaba’s speedboat nearly toppled from his seat, grabbing at the steering wheel to save himself, and in the process sent the boat roaring off toward a collision with the river’s northern bank before he managed to correct the looping move and bring them back on course.

Seizing any chance to salvage wounded dignity, Andjaba rounded on the pilot, bellowing, “Will you hold it steady for Christ’s sake! How am I supposed to stop him if you can’t drive straight?”

The pilot mouthed an answer, but his words were whipped away and lost as the boat accelerated, engine revving upward from a rumble toward a howl. Andjaba was relieved, knowing the last thing that he needed at the moment was a confrontation with an overwrought subordinate.

One adversary at a time, and top priority belonged to the intruder who had left so many of his soldiers dead or dying in the river camp.

Andjaba bent back to the Pecheneg and checked its belt by touch, discovering that he had only twenty-five or thirty rounds remaining in the ammo box. Was there another on the boat? If so, could he find and retrieve it, then reload, before his target reached the open sea, less than a quarter mile away? And if the faceless raider did reach the Atlantic, which way would he turn?

Northward, 250 miles along the coastline, lay Angolan waters, possibly patrolled by gunboats of the Marinha de Guerra. Southward, he would have to travel twice as far before he could seek sanctuary in South Africa. No contest, either way, with two boats against one.

But what if he proceeded out to sea?

It struck Andjaba that his ignorance of their opponent might prove fatal. How had this man arrived to strike the MLF encampment? Clearly he had not walked from Angola or South Africa, nor even from Windhoek. And an air drop would have left him no means of evacuation from the battle zone. But if he’d landed from the sea, there might be reinforcements waiting for him on a larger vessel, running dark, somewhere beyond Andjaba’s line of sight.

Perhaps with guns trained on the river’s mouth, waiting for targets to reveal themselves.

Andjaba nearly called a halt then, but his fear of telling headquarters that he had let the raider slip away was greater than his dread of being sunk or blasted from the water, shredded into food for sharks and bottom-feeding crabs. Whatever lay in store for him beyond the breakers, he could not be proved a coward in the eyes of soldiers who relied on him for leadership—or in the view of his entirely merciless superiors.

Two hundred yards would tell the story either way. So little distance left before they reached the breakers and were suddenly at sea. Andjaba’s former haven lay behind him, shattered, turned into an open grave for slaughtered comrades. All that presently remained to him was vengeance and a chance to save his damaged reputation as a leader.

What else mattered, in the world he’d chosen to inhabit?

Almost there, and up ahead, already clear, he saw the stolen speedboat turning, spewing up a foaming wake before them, as it circled back to face the onrushing pursuers. What possessed the stranger to turn back, once he had reached the open ocean, with a chance to flee?

Unless—

Andjaba tried to see the trap before it closed on him, but he was already too late. Off to his left, the river’s southern bank erupted into a preview of hell on earth. Airborne, he could only hope the dark water rushing up to meet him might preserve him from the hungry flames.

* * *

MINI MS-803 MINES ARE five inches long, three inches tall, and one and a half inches thick. Their convex polystyrene case is brown. Each mine’s total weight—one kilogram, 2.2 pounds—includes one pound of PE9 plastic explosive with a PETN booster charge. Most of the remaining weight belongs to three hundred cylindrical steel fragments, each measuring one-quarter of an inch by one-third of an inch.

When the Mini MS-803 explodes, using any one of several detonating triggers, its shrapnel flies in a sixty-degree arc, with an estimated killing range of fifty to one hundred feet. At fifty, the manufacturer claims a fragment density of two per square yard. At one hundred, the spray of shrapnel sweeps a zone six feet six inches tall. Each shrapnel fragment has sufficient energy at eighty feet to penetrate a half-inch-thick pine board.

In short, an efficient mass-murder machine.

Bolan had placed his mines at ten-foot intervals, their skinny wire legs planted in the river’s muddy bank. Their detonation, all at once, produced a sound that made him think of giants slamming doors in unison. Within a fraction of a second, eighteen hundred steel projectiles swept across the water, ripping into twin boats and the men on deck, filling the air with crimson spray. Perhaps the shrapnel couldn’t penetrate an engine block, but with the pilots dead or wounded, one of the pursuit crafts stalled out in the middle of the river, while its partner veered off toward the northern river bank and ran aground.

The screaming started then, from those who still had vocal cords and strength enough to use them. Bolan tracked the sound, locating targets, while his speedboat idled and he found another box of belted ammunition for the NVS machine gun. Loading it, he felt no vestige of remorse. Each man aboard the two pursuit boats, like the others back in camp, had been a murderer and pirate. Somehow, the police and military forces of Namibia had managed not to notice them while they were raiding, robbing, raping, killing.

All of that was finished—at least, for these few predators.

Others were waiting for him, and the Executioner had not forgotten them.

But first things first.

When the NVS was loaded, Bolan steered his boat directly toward its stalled-out twin, adrift in midstream. One man was trying to negotiate the blood-slick forward deck, slopping along on knees and elbows, while a mournful groaning issued from the cockpit. Bolan stopped when he was twenty feet away and got behind the heavy gun, raking the crippled boat from bow to stern and back again with 12.7x108 mm slugs. It took all of a second-and-a-half to still all sound and movement on the pirate craft.

Move and repeat.

The second boat had nosed into the bank, locked tight, but still its engine had not died. The prop was churning muddy water into moonlit foam, a pirate in the cockpit fairly sobbing as he tried to back it out, to no effect. Bolan considered calling out to him, telling the wounded man he should forget about it, but he finally let the machine gun do his talking for him, ripping up the beached craft from its engine forward.

One of Bolan’s tracers found the fuel tank, detonated it, and lit the river’s surface with a spreading slick of gasoline. The tide of fire swept out to sea, followed the river’s current to extinction, while its stationary source burned to the waterline with all aboard.

Bolan was on the move again by that time, angling the last boat toward the river’s mouth and on beyond it, toward the beach where he’d concealed his Zodiac. From there, five miles due south along the coast, he’d find the inlet where his car was waiting, at the dead end of a narrow highway leading inland.

Back to Windhoek and the targets waiting for him there.

Chapter 4

Windhoek

“Slow down,” Oscar Boavida said. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

His caller, still excited to the point of hyperventilation, paused to bring his voice under control, and started again from the beginning. It was even worse the second time.

“The river camp has been attacked, sir,” he explained. “Unless someone escaped in the confusion and has run away, I am the only one alive.”

The cell phone may as well have been a scorpion in Boavida’s hand. He fought an urge to fling it, terminate the call before some eavesdropper could hear the rest and use it as a basis for indictment. Did his men still fail to grasp that when you used a cell phone, you were basically broadcasting every word you spoke over a kind of radio? Those words, free-floating in the atmosphere, could be plucked from the air at any point between transmission and delivery, recorded, used in evidence.

But this was news, goddamn it, that he had to hear. If he had lost two dozen men, the odds were good that law enforcement or the military knew about the raid already. It stung to think that Boavida was the last to know.

“We need to speak about this privately,” he told the shaken caller. “Say no more now. Come to meet me at the place. You know the one I mean?”

“I think so,” his soldier said. “On the—”

“Say no more!” Boavida snapped. “We don’t know who may be listening!”

That was incriminating in itself, but if compelled to answer for it later, he could always claim that he was worried about airing party business on an open line. In fact, that much was true. He simply would not say which business was involved. There was no need to mention piracy, for instance, much less homicide.

“I understand, sir. I will—”

Boavida cut the link before his caller could spill any more sensitive details. Seething at the soldier’s indiscretion and the grievous loss he had reported, Boavida placed the cell phone on his desk top, slumping back into his padded swivel chair. He closed his eyes and tried to organize his furious, chaotic thoughts.

The raid his man described could not have been official, that much Boavida knew without enquiring any further. He had friends in the Namibian regime, and while they might not always have the power to prevent a raid on this or that facility, they always gave him warning in advance. Likewise, the army or police would not send one man by himself—if that, in fact, turned out to be the case. Both outfits loved a show with vehicles and flashing lights, aircraft if they could spare it, and men in body armor shouting till their throats ached while the television cameras rolled.

Whatever had befallen Boavida’s river camp, it clearly had not been a normal operation by Namibia’s Defense Force or the smaller, less well-organized Namibian Police. Even that body’s Special Field Force, formed in 1995 for paramilitary missions, would not hit and run this way. They had a penchant for detaining and abusing prisoners, not simply shooting men at random and retreating into darkness.

In which case…who?

The MLF had many enemies, both in Angola and Namibia. This raid smacked of a grudge that might be personal, something outside the law, but Boavida couldn’t prove that, either, since it seemed the gunman had never spoken a word amidst his killing.

What in hell was up with that?

It worried him, and Oscar Boavida did not like to worry. He had plenty of important things to occupy his mind, without the vision of some rogue fanatic hiding in the shadows, waiting to attack his people when they least expected it.