Deadly Plunder

A red flag goes up in Washington after pirates murder the innocent crew of a U.S. merchant vessel off the coast of Namibia. Backed by certain authorities and protected from the law, the African rebel group behind the attack believes they are untouchable...but Mack Bolan is about to change that.

Sent in to restore balance, Bolan is on a seek-and-destroy mission—eliminate the key players one at a time and burn the organization to the ground. But victory will be no easy feat, as the rebel leader, with no intention of surrendering, quickly calls in reinforcements. Yet the group makes one fatal error—not seeing the Executioner coming.

It was a gamble, but Bolan made his decision

He moved out, scuttling through the darkness where he knew a deadly snake or scorpion might strike at any second. But venom was way down the list of Bolan’s concerns at the moment.

He crawled until he reached the riverbank, then slithered down its muddy slope into the water…and the crocodiles. But if they were there, none found him as he struck off toward the line of tethered speedboats, focused on the machine gunner in the second craft.

The man behind the weapon wouldn’t hear anyone coming, but he’d likely feel the speedboat dip as Bolan hauled himself aboard. That would be the crucial moment. Do or die.

No time to waste—the warrior clutched the speedboat’s rail and lunged out of the murky river, dark water streaming off him. Boarding took both hands, leaving Bolan effectively unarmed as he set foot on the deck—but he was never truly defenseless.

As the pirate turned to face him, gaping, Bolan lashed out with the long edge of his flattened hand. He caught the shooter by the throat, cracked something vital and swept him overboard.

Crouching behind the NSV, the Executioner grabbed his pistol grip and swung the weapon’s smoking muzzle toward his enemies. Every last one was going down.

Rebel Trade

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

—African proverb

I plan to hit the ground running in Africa. I will move faster, strike harder and react smarter than my enemies. And when the sun goes down, we will see who is still standing.

—Mack Bolan

The Mack Bolan Legend

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

For Corporal Loren M. Buffalo

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

Prologue

Skeleton Coast, Namibia

Bushmen once called Namibia’s coastline The Land God Made in Anger. Later, Portuguese seafarers dubbed those barren shores The Gates of Hell.

It was a natural mistake.

Namibia’s winds blow from landward, sweeping most of the country’s rain out to sea. The pitiful one-third of an inch that reaches soil in any given year cannot relieve the stark aridity of the Namib Desert, sprawling over 31,200 square miles of sunbaked desolation. And if that were not enough to give the coast an evil reputation, there remains the cold Benguela Current, rising as it moves along the shoreline to produce dense ocean fogs the natives call cassimbo. While that haze obscures the coast, a constant heavy surf draws boats toward land—and to their doom, if they cannot escape it.

Hundreds of ships have left their shattered, rusting bones on the Skeleton Coast—among them the cargo ship Eduard Bohlen in 1909, the Blue Star Line’s MV Dunedin Star in 1942, the Otavi in 1945 and South Africa’s Winston in 1970. Some of those hulks were still on shore, grim warnings to the skippers of another generation, but the Skeleton Coast had earned its nickname from the sunbleached bones of whales and seals slaughtered for profit by human predators.

So much death.

This morning, with the first gray tentacles of mist already visible to starboard, Captain Jake Mulrooney was determined that he would not add his crewmen or the MV Cassowary to the local tally of disasters. Fog and the Benguela Current were enough to deal with, but Mulrooney also had to think about the danger posed by pirates now, while navigating African waters.

The MV Cassowary’s cargo wasn’t anything exotic. It included lumber, mining gear and pharmaceutical supplies—any of which might draw the interest of a pirate crew while they were churning north from Cape Town toward another pickup at Port Harcourt before they started the long westward haul toward the States. Reported incidents of piracy were escalating everywhere along the coast of Africa, and while Namibia still couldn’t hold a candle to the mayhem of anarchic Somalia, it was catching up.

More fog ahead, driven by winds from shore. Captain Mulrooney was about to issue orders for a change of course, putting more space between the MV Cassowary and the coastline, when his first mate, Don Kincaid, spoke softly, urgently.

“We have a bogey on the radar, sir,” he said. “Approaching from the northwest at a speed of thirty-five knots. Collision course, unless they spot us and veer off.”

Thirty-five knots was translated to forty miles per hour in landlubber’s terms, a respectable pace when compared to the MV Cassowary’s top speed of twenty knots. The unknown craft could overtake them from behind with no great effort, and approaching from the bow, to cut across their path, the intercept was guaranteed.

Coincidence? A boater out for sportfishing or laughs, who hadn’t seen the MV Cassowary yet? Maybe. But Mulrooney couldn’t stake his life and cargo on a theory of coincidence.

“How long to contact at our present speed?” the captain asked.

“I make it thirteen minutes, sir,” the mate replied.

“Hail them and ask for an ID,” Mulrooney ordered.

“Aye, sir.”

Staring into mist and spitting rain with Zeiss binoculars, Mulrooney listened while Kincaid broadcast the call. He was disturbed, but not surprised, when no reply came through the speakers mounted on the MV Cassowary’s bridge. Another try; the same result.

Kincaid stated the obvious. “They’re running silent, sir.”

“Okay,” Mulrooney said. “Identify us one more time, alert them that they’re traveling on a collision course…and warn them that we’re armed.”

Kincaid frowned at the order but acknowledged it, and did as he was told.

The MV Cassowary was a merchant vessel, not a battle wagon, but that didn’t mean she was defenseless. Any captain sailing into so-called third-world waters without guns and ammunition stashed aboard these days would rate the designation of a world-class idiot.

When Kincaid’s warning brought no answer from the smaller, faster craft, Captain Mulrooney said, “Break out the hardware, Don. All hands to duty stations, just in case.”

“Aye, sir!”

The hardware came to half a dozen 12-gauge riot shotguns, one semiautomatic AR-15 rifle and Mulrooney’s .45-caliber Colt Combat Commander. None of the crew was trained in handling firearms, as far as Mulrooney knew, but how much skill did it take to point and fire a shotgun at close range?

There’d be no shooting, anyway, unless the MV Cassowary was attacked. In that case, he and Kincaid would try to block any attempted boarding. Failing that…well, they could turn the ship into a floating Alamo, if need be, but Mulrooney prayed it wouldn’t come to that.

The trouble these days was that you could never trust a pirate gang to loot a ship and leave, or even take the craft and put its crew ashore. At last count, according to the International Maritime Bureau, pirates in Somalia alone had been holding more than five hundred hostages, demanding ransom from the owners of their vessels under threat of death.

And Mulrooney wasn’t winding up that way.

Not while he had a trigger finger left.

“Visual contact, sir,” Kincaid said.

Mulrooney found the strange boat with his glasses, spotted the armed men along its rails. His stomach tightened, hit him with a sudden rush of unaccustomed nausea. Mulrooney fought it down and told his crewmen on the bridge, “We won’t be stopping. If they try to board, they’ll have to do it at top speed and under fire. Worse comes to worst, we ram them. Leave them sinking.”

“Aye, sir!” came the chorus from his men.

They seemed almost exuberant, as if it was some kind of game. Damned youngsters, raised in video arcades where players gunned down everything from gangbangers and cops to alien invaders with no consequence besides the loss of pocket change. It shouldn’t be that easy—and it wasn’t, in real life, as Jake Mulrooney had discovered during Operation Desert Storm. The trick to surviving a firefight was—

“Sir!” Kincaid’s tone quickly focused the captain’s attention. “They seem to have some kind of rocket launcher.”

“That’s an RPG,” Mulrooney said, as he observed the pirate at the speedboat’s prow. “Rocket-propelled grenade.”

Call it the modern version of your grandfather’s bazooka or the German Panzerfäust from the Second World War. He couldn’t judge the warhead’s size or nomenclature from the MV Cassowary’s bridge, but if they scored a hit… .

“Firing!” Kincaid announced, as if they needed any kind of play-by-play. There were no blind men on the bridge. All of them saw the RPG’s back blast, had time to note that it had scorched the small attack craft’s forward deck, and then it was a scramble for the nearest cover as the rocket hurtled toward them, riding on a tail of flame.

A damned good shot, Mulrooney thought, with grudging admiration, as the RPG came home, smashed through the window he’d been peering from a moment earlier, and detonated as it struck the bulkhead opposite. The blast ruptured his eardrums, deafened him forever, and he saw the fireball coming for him, even with his eyes pressed tightly shut.

Too late to fight.

So this is what it’s like, Mulrooney thought, to go down with the ship.

Chapter 1

Durissa Bay, Namibia

The soldier came ashore by moonlight, solo, powering a nine-foot Zodiac inflatable by the strength of arms and back alone, its outboard motor shipped and silent. He made no more sound emerging from the water than a fish might while leaping for an insect lit by starshine in the night. No one observed him. No one heard.

Mack Bolan dragged the Zodiac above the waterline and stashed it in a patch of six-foot-tall kunai grass where it would likely pass unnoticed, barring a determined search. He thought of wiping out the drag marks leading from the surf, but then decided it would be a waste of time.

The men he’d come for did not ordinarily patrol the beach. They might have lookouts closer to their camp—in fact, he would be counting on it—but the compound lay a mile or better from the spot where Bolan stood beside his Zodiac, breathing the scents of Africa.

Some scholars said it was the cradle of humanity. Bolan had not studied enough on that score to debate it, one way or another, but he knew that a lot of what he’d seen in Africa during his several tours of duty on the continent was inhumane. From slavery and genocide, to tribal warfare that persisted over centuries, cruel exploitation by imperial invaders, rape of the environment for profit, famine, epidemics, revolution, terrorism—Africa had seen it all.

And most of it was still continuing, to this day.

Bolan’s concern, this night, involved a band of pirates operating out of Durissa Bay. They were earmarked as his entry point for a campaign designed to reach beyond their local stronghold into quarters where a combination of corruption and extremist zeal made life more dangerous than it had any need to be.

Bolan was dressed in digicam—the digital camouflage pattern adopted for U.S. Army uniforms in 2004—with war paint to match on his face and his hands. Tan rough-out desert boots and moisture-wicking socks protected his feet. His web gear was the “Molly” setup—MOLLE, for MOdular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment—that had replaced Vietnam-era “Alice” rigging in recent years.

His weapons were the basics for a job on foreign soil. To accommodate the local trend in ammunition for assault rifles, he’d picked an AK-47 rifle that was standard-issue for the Namibia Defense Force, chambered in 7.62x39 mm. The GP-30 grenade launcher attached beneath its barrel added three pounds to the weapon and fired 40 mm caseless rounds. Native soldiers and police used a variety of semiauto sidearms chambered for 9x19 mm Parabellum bullets, so Bolan had chosen a Beretta 92-FS to fill his holster, its muzzle threaded to accept a sound-suppressor. When it came to cutting, he had gone old-school, selecting a classic Mark I trench knife with a blackened double-edged blade and spiked brass knuckles on the grip. Aside from the GP-30’s caseless HE rounds, he also carried Russian RGN fragmentation grenades—short for Ruchnaya Granata Nastupatel’naya—with a kill radius of between twenty and sixty-six feet and dual fuses for detonation on impact or after elapse of four seconds, whichever came first.

Because he couldn’t trust the moonlight on a night with scudding clouds, Bolan also wore a pair of lightweight LUCIE night-vision goggles that turned the landscape in front of him an eerie green. Manufactured in Germany, where night-vision devices had been pioneered during the Second World War, the fourth-generation headgear offered a crystal-clear view of the beach and the river that Bolan would be following on foot to reach his target.

After a quick stop to make last-minute preparations on the river’s southern bank.

Wildlife did not concern Bolan as he moved inland. The largest four-legged predators in residence were brown hyenas, shy of men unless they caught them sleeping in the open and could bite a face off in a rush. He did keep an eye on the ground for puff adders and cobras, but met no reptiles on his way to the river. Once there, he gave a thought to crocodiles, but, with his LUCIE goggles, saw none lurking on the bank or in the water.

He was good to go.

A mile or less in front of him, the district’s most ferocious predators had no idea they were about to host a visit from The Executioner.

* * *

JACKSON ANDJABA HAD not planned to be a criminal when he was growing up. A member of the Himba tribe, born in the Kunene Region of northwestern Namibia, he had quickly tired of tending goats and cattle in a hamlet consisting of round thatched huts. At fifteen, he had fled the village for a town of some twelve thousand souls, Opuwo, but it had still seemed too small for him. Another year had found him in the capital, Windhoek, with twenty times Opuwo’s population and no end of opportunities for a young man.

Or so it seemed, at first.

Andjaba had discovered that his rural background and his relative naïvete made him unsuited for survival in the city. He had learned that friends were vital, and had found them where he could, among the young and tough slumdwellers scrabbling to exist from day to day. In their society, no stigma was attached to theft or acts of violence broadly defined as self-defense. The missionaries who had visited his childhood village in Kunene had it wrong. The Golden Rule should read: do unto others first, and do it right the first time.

His first killing had been accidental, grappling for a knife an enemy had planned to gut him with, but it secured Andjaba’s reputation as a fighter who would go the limit, no holds barred. He graduated after that to more elaborate and dangerous conspiracies—hijackings, home invasions, theft of arms from military transports. Soon, he was recruited by a mixed troop of Angolan exiles and Namibians who liked a little revolutionary politics mixed with their looting.

Perfect.

It pleased him to go sailing on the ocean he had never seen until his twenty-second birthday, and while doing so, to terrorize the high and mighty captains with their cargos bound for places he would never visit, meant for selling on behalf of masters who already had more money than their great-grandchildren’s grandchildren could ever spend. It made him feel…significant.

Andjaba still preferred the city life, but he endured the camp behind Durissa Bay because it was his first full-fledged command, located midway between Ugabmond and Bandombaai, two coastal fishing villages where the young women were impressed by men with guns and money, while their elders understood the risks involved in any protest. No one dared speak to the authorities, since Andjaba had removed the nosy mayor of Ugabmond and dropped him down a dry well in the desert, where his bones would lie until the end of days.

In theory, Andjaba and his men were hunted by the army and Namibia Police Service, but neither seemed to have much luck locating them. In part, he knew that was because of bribes paid to authorities in Windhoek. On the other hand, he knew that some of those in power also sympathized with the Angolan refugees who led the movement that Andjaba served. Drawn by the lures of politics and profit, men often behaved in unexpected ways.

They would go raiding once again tomorrow, when a British oil tanker was scheduled to be passing by. Its course was set from Lagos, for the pickup, to delivery at the SAPREF refinery, ten miles below Durban, South Africa. The ship was a VLCC—Very Large Crude Carrier—still smaller than the ultra-large ULCCs, but capable of loading 320,000 deadweight tonnage. New, the tanker cost around $120 million, while its cargo—or the threat of spilling it at sea—was vastly greater.

In the morning, early, they would—

The explosion shocked Andjaba so much that he dropped his bottle of Tafel lager, half-full, and nearly fell off his camp chair. Someone screamed, a drawn-out cry of agony, that sent Andjaba scrambling for his rifle, feeling panic clamp its grip around his heart.

* * *

BOLAN HAD FOUND ONE sentry lounging on an overlook, along the river’s southern bank, apparently convinced the compound he’d been set to guard was out of bounds for any adversary. By the time he recognized that critical mistake, he had forgotten how to breathe, the process interrupted by the blade of Bolan’s Mark I severing his larynx and carotid arteries. The young man couldn’t whimper, but he spluttered for a bit before he died.

In passing, Bolan claimed the 40-round detachable box magazine from his first kill’s Kalashnikov, and two more thirties from his saggy pockets. Done with that, he pitched the empty AK down the river’s bank and watched it vanish with a muffled splash. There was no point in leaving guns behind that might be used by enemies to kill him, and the extra ammo might be useful, too.

If he’d had all the bullets in the world, it might have been a safer place.

Closing on the pirate camp, Bolan could hear the normal sounds of men conversing, doing chores, bitching about the work. Something was cooking, but he couldn’t place the smell. Some kind of bushmeat he supposed, and put it out of mind. Whatever they had in the pot, these murderers and poachers were about to miss their final meal on Earth.

Bolan had primed his GP-30 launcher with a high-explosive caseless round before he left the Zodiac inflatable. He’d heard that Russian soldiers called the weapon Obuvka (shoe), while dubbing its predecessor models Kostyor (bonfire) and Mukha (fly). All three were single-shot muzzle-loaders, chambered for the 40x46 mm low-velocity grenades designed for handheld launchers, rather than the 40x53 mm rounds fired from mounted or crew-served weapons. You could mistake them at a glance, but that mistake would cost a careless warrior dearly—as in hands, eyes or his life.

Today, Bolan’s “shoe” was loaded with a VOG-25P fragmentation grenade, average kill radius twenty feet. The projectile’s warhead contained thirty-seven grams of TNT, plus a primary charge that bounced it anywhere from three to six feet off the ground before the main charge blew. It was a “Bouncing Betty” for the new millennium, designed to make the art of killing more efficient.

Just what Bolan needed here—at this time.

The pirates—some of them Namibian, the rest Angolan refugees—had four boats moored along the river, with their tents set back some distance from the water’s edge. It could have passed for a large safari’s camp, until you saw the automatic weapons everywhere and noticed that the men in camp all wore tricolor armbands: red, black and yellow, with a red star on the center stripe.

Small versions of a banner flown by the Mayombe Liberation Front.

The GP-30 had sights adjustable to thirteen hundred feet—call it four football fields and change—but Bolan was within one-quarter of that distance when he chose his target, picking out the farthest boat from where he stood in shadow, half a dozen men engaged in working on its motor. When he fired, the AK-47 barely kicked against his shoulder, and the launcher made a muffled pop that could have been mistaken for a normal sound around the camp.

Until his fragmentation round went off.

Four men went down in the initial blast, shot through with shrapnel, dead or gravely wounded as they fell. Two others suffered deep flesh wounds but managed to escape under their own power, diving for weapons they had laid aside when they took up their wrenches, screwdrivers and other tools.

The screaming started then, Bolan deliberately deaf to it as he advanced, using the forest near the river to conceal himself. A mile or so to the north or south, and he’d have been exposed to view as he crossed desert sand, but there was shade and shelter at the riverside for pirates and the man who hunted them.

The hunt was on, and it would not end until all of them were dead.

* * *

JACKSON ANDJABA SCANNED the treeline, searching for the enemy who had discharged the blast among his men. He’d recognized the sound of the grenade launcher—most of the weapons issued to Namibia’s armed forces had been made in Russia, after all—but one pop did not help him place the shooter, and the detonation told him only that the camp was under fire.

Not from the army, though. Andjaba knew that if a team of soldiers had been sent against them, they’d be charging from the forest already, spraying the camp with automatic weapons, shouting for surrender even as they shot his scrambling men without remorse. War in Namibia had never been an exercise in surgical precision. Winners claimed their victory by standing on a heap of corpses, satisfied that no one had survived to challenge them.

Andjaba shouted orders at his men: the obvious, commanding that they look for cover, watch the trees, control their fire until they had a target. They were well supplied with ammunition, but could not afford to waste it blasting trees and shadows while their adversaries used the night against them as a weapon.

“Douse that fire!” Andjaba bellowed. “And those torches! Keep your damned heads down!”

He heard another pop, and braced himself for the explosion that he knew was coming, no way to prepare for it or save himself except by dropping prone with arms over his head. More screams followed the detonation, and his men were firing now without a trace of discipline, spraying the night with their Kalashnikovs, one blasting with the NSV heavy machine gun mounted on the second boat in line, shredding the darkness with its muzzle-flashes and its 12.7x108 mm rounds. One in every seven bullets was a tracer, drawing ruby arcs across the weapon’s field of fire.

Seen from a distant bird’s-eye view, the camp might have appeared to be engaged in a frenetic celebration, but it was hell at ground level and getting worse by the second. Andjaba’s soldiers couldn’t hope to hear him now over the racket of their guns. And what would he have told them anyway? Keep firing? Cut and run? Offer a prayer to gods they’d long forgotten and ignored?

Crawling on his belly like a lizard, any trace of pride abandoned in that moment on the killing ground, Andjaba searched the treeline for a muzzle-flash that would betray one of their enemies. He could not separate incoming fire from that which his men were laying down, but after seeing first one pirate drop, and then another, he knew that the enemy was using something besides just grenades.

Where were they? How had they approached to killing range without a warning from the guard he’d posted on the river?

That was easy. They had killed the lookout, young Paolo Alves, without making any fuss about it. Andjaba would find his body later, if he managed to survive the trap that had been sprung against him. In the meantime, though, survival was his top priority.

Survival, and elimination of his foes.

Or was it wiser to attempt escape?

Three of their boats were still unharmed. If he could rally his surviving men in time to board and flee, their enemies—who clearly had approached on foot somehow—could only stand and watch them disappear into the night. The river flowed another fifty, maybe sixty miles inland, to Lake Mbuende. He could ditch the boats there and lead his people overland, a forced march to the nearest town, where they could pick up any vehicles available and make good their escape.

But first, he needed some way to communicate amidst the hellish racket in the compound. Some way to reassert command and turn his panicked men into a fighting force once more.

Which meant that he would have to take a risk.

Andjaba bolted upright, daring any sniper in the woods to cut him down. He stalked among his men, cursing and shouting at them, striking those who still ignored him in their urgency to waste more bullets on the hostile night. A third grenade exploded in the camp, sent shrapnel whispering around him, but Andjaba braved it, rallying his men.

They won’t believe this later, he decided, but it made no difference. They had to get away. Nothing else mattered at the moment.

If they did not move, and soon, they wouldn’t have another chance.

* * *

BOLAN WATCHED THE LEADER of the pirates rallying his men, lined up a shot to drop him, but the NSV machine gunner unleashed another roaring burst just then, his heavy slugs hacking across the trees and undergrowth where Bolan was concealed. The Executioner fell prone, as leaves and bark rained down around him, knowing that he’d missed his opportunity.

The gunner with the big gun had to go.

Bolan rolled to his left, stayed low as the machine gun tried to find him. There was no good reason to believe the shooter had him spotted, but so powerful a weapon, firing thirteen rounds per second, didn’t need precision aiming. It could shatter trees and chop down shrubbery in search of targets, tearing up a field of fire where nothing larger than a mouse or creeping reptile might survive.

There were two ways to take the gunner: from a distance, with the AK-47, or by getting closer, circling around his blind side somehow, while he concentrated on the havoc he was wreaking with his NSV. Both methods had their drawbacks, with the worst scenario involving sudden death.

What else was new?

Bolan made his decision, saw potential in it if he reached the boat and boarded it without having his head blown off. The pirate craft was larger than his Zodiac, and faster, vastly better armed. If he could capture it, empty the NSV into the camp, then take the boat and flee, he thought there was a good chance that his targets would pursue him in the other two.

Or, they might take off in the opposite direction, sure.

It was a gamble, just like every other move he’d made in combat since the first time he’d seen action as a Green Beret. Audacity was half the battle, and the rest, sometimes, came down to luck.

Bolan moved out, scuttling crablike through darkness where he knew a deadly snake or scorpion might strike at any second, hoping the hellacious racket and vibrations from the battle would have sent them fleeing toward a safer hunting ground. Venom was way down on the list of Bolan’s worries at the moment, while lead poisoning was at the top.

A fleeing pirate stumbled over one of Bolan’s legs, then rose and ran on without looking back, perhaps thinking a tree root had upended him. The bruising impact hurt, but Bolan had no time or opportunity to walk it off. He kept on crawling, reached the river’s bank, and slithered down its muddy slope into the water.

Thinking, crocodiles.

If they were there, none found him as he struck off toward the line of tethered speedboats, three presumably in shape to travel, while the fourth one might be out of whack from his grenade blast. He passed the first boat, clinging to its gunwale with his free hand, still unnoticed, focused on the second craft in line and its machine gunner.

A few more yards… .

Up close, his ears rang with the NSV’s staccatto hammering, an almost deafening cacophony. The man behind the weapon obviously wouldn’t hear him coming, but he ought to feel the speedboat tip as Bolan hauled himself aboard. That was the crucial moment, when it all came down to do or die.

No time to waste, as Bolan clutched the speedboat’s rail and lunged out of the murky river, water streaming from him in a dark cascade. Boarding took both hands, leaving him effectively unarmed as he set foot on the deck—but The Executioner was never quite defenseless.

As the pirate turned to face him, gaping, Bolan rushed his startled enemy and lashed out with the long edge of one flattened hand. It caught the shooter’s throat, cracked something vital inside there and swept him overboard.

Crouching behind the NSV, Bolan grabbed its pistol grip and swung the weapon’s smoking muzzle toward his enemies.

Chapter 2

Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport:

One day earlier

Bolan had entered Namibia without fanfare, traveling as Matthew Cooper. His passport was legitimate, within its limits: printed on one of the blanks Stony Man Farm secured from the State Department, correct in every way except for the false name and address listed for its holder. It would pass inspection anywhere on earth, taking the worry factor out of border crossings. After that, however, he was on his own.

Customs was easy, sliding through without inspection of his bag. The uniformed attendant didn’t really seem to notice Bolan, looking past him toward the couple that was next in line. Young, Arabic and nervous-looking, they were virtually begging for a shakedown. Bolan wished them well—or not, if they were smugglers, terrorists, whatever—and moved on to claim his rental car.

The clerk was middle-age, ebony-skinned and spoke excellent English—Namibia’s official language in a nation that also recognized German from colonial times, plus a half dozen regional dialects. Bolan’s rental car was a Volkswagen Jetta NCS—a compact sedan, four-door, with a 170-horsepower 2.5-liter engine. The white paint job, with any luck, would pass unnoticed in the city and hold dust on rural roads to cut the polished shine. The credit card that Bolan used also identified him as Matt Cooper. It was an AmEx Platinum, no limit, billed to a Virginia mail drop where the tab was always paid on time, in full. It cleared without a hitch, and he was on his way.

The airport, named for a Herero tribal chief and early nationalist leader, was located twenty-eight miles east of Windhoek. Modernized in 2009, it had one terminal plus an arrivals and departures hall. Bolan had no problem finding his way out of the parking lot and onto Highway B6 westbound toward the capital. He kept pace with the traffic flow around him, watching out for speed signs on the way and spotting none. The good news: he saw no police, either.

Windhoek was established as an Afrikaner settlement in 1840, likely chosen for the local hot springs that led aboriginal inhabitants to call it Otjomuise, “place of steam.” Today, those springs lie near the city’s center and remain a draw for locals and tourists alike. Three hundred thousand people occupy the capital and its thirty-odd suburbs, seven percent of Namibia’s overall population. Highways linking Windhoek to the cities of Gobabis, Okahandja and Rehoboth were built with desert flash-flooding in mind, but the capital’s main drag—Independence Avenue, formerly Kaiserstraße—did not get its first coat of asphalt until 1928.

Germany had claimed Namibia—then German South-West Africa—in 1884, to forestall British incursions. When Herero and Namaqua tribesmen took up arms against the occupying army in 1904, General Lothar von Trotha had launched a three-year genocidal campaign that claimed 110,000 native lives within three years, many killed by systematic poisoning of desert wells. South Africa occupied the territory in 1915 and maintained its notorious racist standards until 1988, when independence climaxed two decades of armed rebellion by the South West Africa Peoples’ Organization. Today, SWAPO is Namibia’s dominant political party and a full member of the Socialist International, prone to denial of alleged human rights violations. While nominally allied with neighboring Angola, SWAPO has also granted sanctuary of a sort to Angolan rebels battling for radical change in their homeland, including independence for the small north-Angolan province of Cabinda.

And some of them were pirates, too, supporting their movement by ransoming ships and their cargoes collected at sea. Hal Brognola had briefed Bolan on the problem, stateside, before Bolan had caught a transatlantic flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to Portugal’s Lisbon Portela Airport, and on from there to Windhoek. Attacks at sea included raids on U.S. merchant vessels, most recently the MV Cassowary with her captain and five crewmen murdered.

Piracy aside, the rebel movement also filled its coffers by importing illegal drugs from South Africa. Dagga—marijuana—was the drug of choice for most Namibian users, though cocaine, heroin and LSD were also making inroads, and legislative efforts to hike prison terms for drug addicts had failed in the face of widespread public opposition. That was good for the smugglers, since prohibition kept street prices inflated, and the insurrectionists who peddled drugs for profit evidently saw no conflict with their high-minded ideals.

Bolan himself had never been a blue-nosed moralist where drugs or any other substance was concerned. By most standards he was a libertarian, but he had also learned firsthand that vicious predators infested every form of traffic in forbidden goods and services. The profits gleaned from dagga sales loaded the weapons pirates used to hijack ships at sea, primed the explosives left by terrorists to murder innocent civilians and equipped assassins for attacks on democratically elected leaders.

He would stop that, if he could.

But first, he needed hardware.

* * *

ASSER TJIRIANGE RAN an import business in the Katutura suburb of Windhoek. According to the guidebook Bolan carried, Katutura translated from the Herero language as “the place where we do not want to live.” Created in 1961 for resettlement of blacks uprooted from the present-day Hochland Park sector, Katutura had overcome its stigma as a ghetto during recent years, boasting small but decent homes and the ten-thousand-seat Sam Nujoma Stadium.

Tjiriange’s shop was located in Katutura Central, on a short street featuring a jeweler, two automotive garages, a fast-food restaurant and a cut-rate furniture store. Ostensibly, Tjiriange imported native art and handicrafts from Angola, Botswana and South Africa, selling them at marked-up prices to collectors in Windhoek and overseas. And while, in fact, he earned a living from that trade, it was his other line of work that let him buy a mini mansion in the formerly all-white enclave of Pioneer Park.

Tjiriange’s other trade involved illicit arms.

* * *

NAMIBIA IS A WELL-ARMED country. Police estimate that some 260,000 firearms reside in civilian hands, though less than 98,000 are legally registered under the nation’s Arms and Ammunition Act. Authorities receive an average five hundred applications for gun licenses each week, many of which are denied. The street price for an AK-47 rifle averages $250, although military-style weapons and imitations of the same cannot be purchased legally without a special license. On the other hand, no permits are required to carry pistols in public places, concealed or otherwise. But the impact of those weapons on society is difficult to judge, since Namibian authorities stopped reporting homicide statistics in 2004.

None of which meant anything to Bolan as he went shopping for hardware in Katutura. Tjiriange greeted him like a long-lost friend, alerted by a phone call to expect a special customer with ample cash in hand. He locked the shop’s front door and hung a closed sign on it before leading Bolan through the aisles of wicker furniture, carved figurines and other items offered to the general public, to an office at the rear. From there, a door opened behind a rack of jackets hanging in a narrow closet, granting them admission to a second showroom, hidden from the public eye.

Bolan knew what he wanted, more or less, but looked at everything Tjiriange had for sale. In addition to the AK-47 with its GP-30 launcher and the sleek Beretta 92, he also took a Dragunov sniper rifle chambered in 7.62x54 mmR, fitted with a PSO-1 telescopic sight. Although uncertain whether he’d be making any long shots, Bolan still preferred to have an extra weapon and not need it, than to miss it in a crunch and find himself outgunned.

And, as an afterthought, he picked up half a dozen Mini MS-803 mines with radio-remote ignition switches, the South African equivalent of Claymores manufactured in the States.

He paid the tab with cash acquired before he’d left the States.

Once he left the shop, the next matter on Bolan’s mind was a meeting with a target who had no idea The Executioner existed, much less that he’d flown to Namibia specifically for their impending tête-à-tête. Forewarned, the man might have tried to leave the city—or the country—and that didn’t fit with Bolan’s plans.

One unexpected meeting coming up.

Whether the stranger Bolan sought survived the meet or not would be entirely up to him, depending on his level of cooperation and the prospect that he’d keep his mouth shut afterward.

On second thought, his chances didn’t look that good at all.

* * *

NITO CHIVUKUVUKU MISSED the nightlife in Luanda, where five million people thronged the streets, not counting foreign visitors, and anything you might imagine or desire was readily available for sale. Windhoek, one-fifth the size of the Angolan capital, had opportunities for sin, of course, but they were limited, mundane. It was like hoping for a giant, super-modern shopping mall and being stuck inside a rural village’s pathetic general store.

The bottom line: Chivukuvuku wished he could go home.

The other bottom line: if he went home, he likely would be dead within a month.

He had worn out his welcome in Luanda and—to be honest—throughout his homeland generally. The Angolan National Police would love to lay their hands on Chivukuvuku, and he did not relish the idea of screaming out his final breaths inside some filthy dungeon. When he went home, if he ever went home, it would be as a heroic liberator of his people, honored for his sacrifice on their behalf.

And yes, beloved by all the ladies, too.

But in the meantime, there was work to do in Windhoek and along the cruel coast of Namibia. So close to home, and yet so far away. Until the final day of victory, there would be guns and drugs to smuggle, ships to loot or hold for ransom, building up the MLF’s war chest. And if he skimmed some off the top, who in his right mind would suggest that any soldier in the field should be denied a taste of pleasure, every now and then?

On this night, for instance.

He had started off at the Ten Bells, a pub on Werner List Street that displayed no bells, much less the ten it advertised. From there, glowing from the Starr African rum inside him, he was headed for the brothel run by Madame Charmelle Jorse on Sam Nujoma Street. The night was warm, as always, and the four-block walk would sober him enough to make sure that he chose a pretty girl and not a discount special.

Buzzed as he was, and looking forward to the climax of his evening. Chivukuvuku paid no real attention to the traffic flowing past him. He kept his distance from the curb, where a less steady man might lurch into the street and spoil his happy ending. If questioned afterward, Chivukuvuku could not honestly have said he saw the white Volkswagen pass him by and turn into a cross street one block farther south. In terms of model, year or who was at the wheel, he would have been a hopeless case.

If anyone had asked.

As it turned out, however, no one would.

When Chivukuvuku reached the corner where the Volkswagen had turned unnoticed, he was mildly startled by the vision of a white man dressed in casual attire. Mildly surprised, because he knew, on some level, that roughly one-sixth of the city’s populace was white. And he saw them every so often, particularly if his dealings took him to the central business district, but he rarely met a white man on his nightly prowls.

Not quite anticipating trouble, Chivukuvuku edged a little closer to the curb, putting some extra space between the white man and himself, still conscious of the traffic passing on his left. A tight spot, viewed from one perspective, but he had survived in tighter and emerged the winner.

Besides, Chivukuvuku had a gun.

So did the white man, as he soon found out. One moment, as they stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change, there was a safe six feet between them. The next, he saw the white man moving, felt the firm touch of a gun’s muzzle against his ribs.

“It’s silenced,” the stranger said, speaking perfect English. “You can come with me or have a fall in traffic. Time to choose.”

“Who are you? What do you—”

“I’ll ask the questions, somewhere else. Time’s up.”

“All right! I’ll come with you.”

A hand snaked underneath Chivukuvuku’s lightweight jacket, found his gun and made it vanish.

“This way,” the white man said, steering Chivukuvuku to their right, along a side street that seemed suddenly deserted. When they reached a white car and the right rear door was already opened for him, his abductor said, “Climb in and take a nap.”

“A nap?” Chivukuvuku was confused, as well as frightened.

“In,” the stranger said, his silenced pistol prodding.

Chivukuvuku stooped to do as he was told, felt something strike his skull behind one ear and tumbled into darkness streaked by shooting stars.

* * *

THE YOUNG ANGOLAN REBEL didn’t want to die. That much was clear when he awoke, bound to a tree with duct tape, on the outskirts of a Windhoek suburb curiously called Havana. There’d been no time for The Executioner to rent a private space, and he had not believed that there would be a need.

His business with the captive wouldn’t take that long.

“I only have three questions,” Bolan said. “The first—where can I find your boats?”

“What boats?” the prisoner replied. “I don’t know—”

The Beretta coughed. Its bullet clipped the target’s left earlobe. His mouth fell open and a cry of pain was building in his throat when Bolan plugged it with the pistol’s silence.

“I don’t like torture,” he informed the prisoner. “I’ve never trusted it, and, frankly, don’t have time to do it properly this evening. I’ll ask again and you can live or die, okay?”

The rebel tried to nod, then settled for a grunt that Bolan took for his agreement. With the silencer removed, the young man made a gagging sound, then spat, careful to turn his face away from Bolan as he did so.

“So? The boats,” Bolan said.

“They’re upriver from Durissa Bay,” his prisoner replied. “About a mile inland.”

“How many men will I find there?”

“It varies. Twenty-five or thirty usually. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

It sounded reasonable, but Bolan had no way to verify it short of visiting the site, which he planned to do tomorrow night. First, though, there was more shopping to be done in Windhoek. Final preparations to be made.

“Last question,” he informed the hostage. “Where’s the MLF headquarters in Windhoek?”

“What do you want with—”

“Simple question, simple answer,” Bolan warned him.

The taped-up man gave him an address in the Hakahana suburb, translated in Bolan’s travel guide as hurry up.

And that was sound advice.

“You said three questions, eh? So, can I go now?”

“What’s your name?” Bolan asked.

“Nito—”

The Beretta came down on the man’s temple and temporarily silenced him. Bolan didn’t want the rebel running back to his comrades, telling tales. This way, when he was found, likely in a few days at the earliest, it would confuse them, maybe even bring some heat down on his fellow rebels from police. What Bolan absolutely didn’t need was anyone alerting his intended targets as to where he might be going next.

Not Hakahana. Later, certainly, but not this night, and not tomorrow.

In the morning, he would have to find the smallest watercraft available. Something inflatable that could be packed into the backseat of the Volkswagen, or maybe strapped atop its roof. Failing that, he’d have to rent or buy a trailer, make himself just that much more conspicuous. His first concern was hanging on to the advantage of surprise.

“They won’t expect you,” Brognola had told him, as they walked among the graves at Arlington, with slate-gray clouds hiding the sun. “All over Africa, the pirates are convinced that they’re untouchable.”

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.

And if the man was not a rogue, was not alone, so much the worse for Boavida.

In that case, he would be forced to go out hunting for another enemy.

And crush him like a piece of garbage when he found the man.

* * *

HEADQUARTERS FOR THE Mayombe Liberation Front occupied a two-story cinder-block building on Bloekom Street, on the borderline between Windhoek’s Southern Industrial District and the neighboring Suiderhof suburb. The surrounding shops and housing blocks were lower-middle-class, at best, leaning toward poor, despite their close proximity to aptly named Luxury Hill.

Bolan had swapped his digicam field uniform for urban casual, a navy T-shirt over jeans and running shoes with Velcro tabs in place of dangling laces that could trip him when being sure-footed was essential to survival. On the VW Jetta’s shotgun seat, a khaki windbreaker covered the duffel bag that held his AK-47 and grenades. The loose shirt worn outside his jeans hid the Beretta tucked inside his waistband.

Watching. Waiting.

Bolan made a point of never rushing into anything if there were time and opportunity to scope a target and evaluate the best approach. That didn’t always work, of course, but in the present case he had some time to spare.

Not much, but some.

The MLF made no attempt to hide in Windhoek, proud to sport a flag outside its rundown headquarters. From all appearances, the setup was on ordinary office not unlike those operated by the ruling SWAPO party—short for the South West Africa People’s Organization, which has carried each election since Namibia secured independence in 1990—or its smaller rivals: the Congress of Democrats, the All People’s Party, Democratic Turnhalle Alliance or the South West Africa National Union. MLF Central was smaller and shabbier, true, as befit an exiled band committed to opposing government activities in neighboring Angola, but a passerby would have no reason to suspect that anyone inside was a conspirator in murder, piracy or terrorism.

Not unless they knew the MLF’s peculiar bloody history.

Bolan had studied up on that, via the internet, while he was airborne over the Atlantic and while flying down from Lisbon to Windhoek. The short version was a familiar story. Rebels in Angola had joined forces to defeat and oust the Portuguese during a war for independence that had raged for fourteen years. Then, as so often happened in the grim affairs of humankind, the native victors had almost immediately set to fighting one another for supremacy, sparking a civil war that bled the new republic white across a quarter century. The main contestants, backed by smaller allied groups, had been UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola). During the worst of it, when one-third of Angola’s population was displaced, Russia and Cuba backed the MPLA’s cause, while the U.S. had joined Red China and South Africa to aid UNITA. Today, the MPLA was Angola’s dominant party, claiming eighty-odd percent of the popular vote, and the losers were predictably dissatisfied. Unused to anything but bloodshed, they fought on—some of them from Namibia.

Which was where Bolan came in.

In most cases, he would not be assigned to tip the scales of any civil war in one direction or the other. While the CIA still fought its share of proxy wars, with mixed results, The Executioner preferred to target individuals or groups that led an unapologetic life of crime, more often killing for their own amusement or for profit than for any cause. He’d started out with mobsters who had crushed his family, and Bolan’s war had grown from there, encompassing the terrorists, drug barons, human traffickers and other parasites who thrived on human misery.

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