The Executioner took stock of the situation

He was under no grand illusions about their effort to strike back at terrorism, in this or any other mission. The new war had shifted tactics, going preemptive in world headlines, but it was still the same never-ending battle for the Executioner.

No matter how many they took out, it was a monumental task to expect even the most skilled and determined force to rid the planet of what the Administration tagged as evildoers. There would always be more terrorists when the sun rose the following day.

It never stopped for Bolan.

Other titles available in this series:

Storm Burst

Intercept

Lethal Impact

Deadfall

Onslaught

Battle Force

Rampage

Takedown

Death’s Head

Hellground

Inferno

Ambush

Blood Strike

Killpoint

Vendetta

Stalk Line

Omega Game

Shock Tactic

Showdown

Precision Kill

Jungle Law

Dead Center

Tooth and Claw

Thermal Strike

Day of the Vulture

Flames of Wrath

High Aggression

Code of Bushido

Terror Spin

Judgment in Stone

Rage for Justice

Rebels and Hostiles

Ultimate Game

Blood Feud

Renegade Force

Retribution

Initiation

Cloud of Death

Termination Point

Hellfire Strike

Code of Conflict

Vengeance

Executive Action

Killsport

Conflagration

Storm Front

War Season

Evil Alliance

Scorched Earth

Deception

Destiny’s Hour

Power of the Lance

A Dying Evil

Deep Treachery

War Load

Sworn Enemies

Dark Truth

Breakaway

Blood and Sand

Caged

Sleepers

Strike and Retrieve

Age of War

Line of Control

Breached

Retaliation

Pressure Point

Silent Running

Stolen Arrows

Zero Option

Predator Paradise

Mack Bolan®

Don Pendleton

In the United States, we go to considerable trouble to keep soldiers out of politics, and even more to keep politics out of soldiers.

—Brigadier General S. B. Griffith II, USMC

Introduction to On Guerrilla Warfare

Mao Tse-tung, 1961

Powerful people in league with certain aspects of the military have the ability to move mountains—or to unleash untold misery on humankind. Left unchecked, the butcher’s bill could be exorbitant. Can we afford the tab?

—Mack Bolan

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Habir Dugula was no stranger to death. He knew there were many ways to die in his country, most of them brutal. Old age rarely claimed life in Somalia. The land itself could kill a man without water in a matter of hours.

The parched and unforgiving earth produced next to nothing to feed ten million hungry mouths. The country’s famine, though, was no secret to Western relief workers, he knew, nor to the world at large for that matter, thanks to naive intrusion by CARE, UNICEF, the Red Cross and the United Nations, which seemed to take a morbid pride in denouncing his nation as a seething hotbed of outlaws, thieves and genocidal maniacs.

Starvation, so it was said, had laid waste to nearly a half-million Somalis in the past five years, another two million on the brink, if he was inclined to believe UN or Red Cross statistics. Those numbers, in his mind, were greatly exaggerated—propaganda—if only to give the West excuses to make incursions into his nation, strip him of power and return Somalia to the control of white colonial imperialists. It was true, however, that he was branded the Exterminator by the United Nations, the devils of the American media. To some extent he was responsible for the plight of the starving, at least in the area he controlled south of the city. He had his reasons, plus the blessing of God, to maintain a certain population control, and that was enough. First, they would want food, then, bellies full, education would be the next demand, minds alive and seething soon enough with what they perceived a monstrous injustice perpetrated on them by him. With the power of knowledge there was little doubt an uprising was sure to find its way to his front door.

Not if he could help it.

There would always be too many hungry mouths to feed, he knew, always the poor and the needy who would fall by the wayside, and he didn’t intend to let the great unwashed, the weak and the vanquished weigh him down, hold him back from climbing the next rung up the ladder of power and glory. As long as he didn’t have to look at the dying masses on his doorstep, there was no point burdening himself with guilt. Sentiment was weakness.

Then there was civil war, consuming another half-million or so lives in the past decade, what with roughly five hundred clans divided into twenty-six main factions, all of them heavily armed, shooting up one another in a running bloodbath that saw no end in sight. There was widespread disease, savaging mostly the children, but again, if he didn’t have to see it…

Why bother, he decided, to attempt to search for reason when madness and the law of the gun ruled his country? How could a man show mercy to even the poor and the needy when his own survival was always in question? As leader of his clan, there was a bottom line, deemed by him every bit as important as seeing the next sunrise. If death, war, famine and pestilence appeared destined to push millions of Somalis to the edge of the abyss, the least he could do for himself—and the continued survival of his clan—was to profit from the madness somehow. Even in the hell that was his country, cash was still king.

So was the power of the gun.

Dugula had a busy day ahead. He rose from behind his desk, checking the wall map and factoring in the grueling stretch of miles needed to take him to the afflicted village and its refugee camp, due southwest of Mogadishu. Three events on the day’s agenda, a long, hot twelve hours or more before him, and it was time to embrace death once again. The grim problem could prove the first order of the day’s business, but, then again, he concluded, it was best to deal with the most troubling and by far the most hazardous of his three chores.

Listening to the soft hum of the air conditioner, pumping out icy waves through the office of his command-and-control center, he knew that once he stepped outside, the sweat would start to flow free and unchecked. Discomfort he could live with, but uncertainty he wouldn’t entertain, since not having answers to certain questions, not knowing who or where his enemies were, could kill. Indeed, the first outbreak of sweat, he thought, would be brought on by more than just the brutal hammering of sunlight.

He watched as Nahbat, his AK-47 leading the way, swept through the door.

“They are on Aboyge Street. Perhaps three minutes remain before they arrive.”

Dugula grunted, a slew of questions about the visitors tumbling through his mind. He picked up his AK-47, chambered a round, aware of the numbers coming their way. “Assemble everyone in the courtyard. Same drill as before. Do it quickly, and may God pity the first man who is not ready to fight to the death, if necessary, because I will not show mercy to cowards.”

“Understood.”

White men in Somalia, Dugula thought. They were a rare sight. It was beyond strange—malevolent perhaps—how these whites had ingratiated themselves to a rival clan, even if they had thrown around large sums of both shillings and U.S. dollars to buy protection, gather information, carve inroads into their clans. But for what purpose? Who were they? CIA? Mercenaries? The first time he had met them they had dropped off an envelope bulging with U.S. dollars, saying little, only that they would require his help, that he would be well compensated for, again, some unspecified act. Dugula had some idea what they wanted, catching the whispers from his various informants around the city, but he needed to hear them state it out loud.

Slipping on his dark sunglasses, he marched outside, grimacing at the first blast of heat. He was halfway across the courtyard, counting his own men, spread along both walls, a gauntlet of assault rifles and RPGs, poised to catch the visitors in a crossfire, when the first wave of the technicals rolled through the gate. The technicals were a common sight all over Mogadishu, he knew, the Toyota pickups or anything else on wheels, with roofs cleaved off to allow free and easy fields of fire for the .50-caliber machine guns or the smattering of TOW rockets. Truck beds, he noted, were crammed with gunmen, most of the them mooryan, teenage thugs. The glaze in their eyes from the amphetamine-like high of qat warned him they were edged out. Not good, no telling what they would do as he saw their fingers tight around the triggers of assault rifles, ready to shoot, he had to assume, for little or no reason.

He stood his ground, dust spooling in his face, the technicals fanning out. Twelve, no, thirteen technicals lurching to a halt then, nervous-sounding laughter, chatter among the mooryan, a few mouths still grinding away at qat. As before, the black minivan was last, carrying its mystery whites, two motorbikes with gunmen flanking the vehicle. Dugula waited, pulse drumming in his skull. The minivan stopped in the dust cloud, door sliding open.

Three men in brown fatigues stepped out, slow, sure of themselves. AKs were draped across their shoulders, spare banana clips wedged in their waistbands. Commando daggers were sheathed at their hips. As they cut the gap, Dugula found the black hoods concealing their identities unsettling for a moment. He wasn’t sure what to make of this display, wondering if they were issuing some silent statement meant to unnerve him, or if their desire to keep their faces hidden was genuine, bore some special significance. If he chose, he could have them followed again, but the word from his trackers was that these men were bounced all over Mogadishu in the black van, changing vehicles, in and out of safehouses, able, or so he was told, to vanish into the air. It made him wonder how accurate—or deceitful—their report, whom he could trust, where did the truth lie. Money always had a way of shifting allegiance.

Blue Eyes, as he thought of the hood in the middle, held his stare. Dugula was certain he was grinning to himself. Arrogant bastard, he thought, stifling the urge to whip the assault rifle off his shoulder and blaze away. Dugula felt himself being measured, Blue Eyes laughing back at him, a private joke.

“We have to stop meeting like this, Habbie. Your little slice of hell on Earth, not high up on my list of hot spots to start with, is starting to make even me a little jumpy, and I’ve been down some dark alleys in my day.”

“Perhaps you would prefer we do this on some sandy beach, sipping iced tea?”

“Right. After a nice dip in the Indian Ocean. No, thanks, but I’d rather swim with sharks of the human variety than what’s out in those waters. And do me and yourself a favor when we leave here. Leave your own mooryan at home. If I start seeing a bunch of your shooters on my bumper, I’m going to begin thinking ours can never be a working and profitable match made in Hell.”

“Perhaps if I knew exactly what you wanted? If I were to understand what is this working relationship to which you refer?”

“It’s this.”

The white with the scar on his hand spoke up, producing a thick envelope from behind his back, tucking it in his waistband. “Fifty thousand dollars, American. An advance, if you agree.”

“But you need to understand the rules first, Habbie,” Blue Eyes said before Dugula could ask the obvious. “Then we can play ball. You love money, you want power, you want to be top dog on the block. You’re on every shit list from UNICEF to the White House. Thing is, what we are, we’re your three wise men, come here bearing gifts.”

“How magnanimous. To what do I owe this great honor?”

The third black hood got into the act next. Like the first time they met, the three whites ricocheted the verbal shooting match between them, leaving Dugula wondering if this act was scripted, and who, exactly, was in charge between them. Number three had blackness behind the slit where his left eye was, Dugula fairly assuming there was a patch covering some war memento.

“Here it is,” One Eye began. “In the coming days there are going to be several very significant big events, within and beyond your borders. We prefer to not stand here in this heat and dust and with sky spies framing our every move, answering a bunch of questions that only time and decisive action will answer in the first place. First, we’re taking the human cargo you have smuggled in-country. They’re part of the plan. They go with us.”

There it was, he thought, gut clenching, spine tightening. Before the thought they were some sort of international bounty hunters or CIA black ops, come to either kill or capture the holy freedom fighters he had been paid to grant safe haven to, Blue Eyes, as if he could read minds, cooled some of his fears.

“Relax. We’re not here to kill or arrest those who are under the care of your golden umbrella.”

“Truth be known,” Scar Hand said, “their leaders are aware of our presence here. Call it a blessing from Allah, a strange union between infidels and Islam, but it’s arranged. And your guests have already agreed to go the distance.”

Dugula bared his teeth, a half smile, half grimace, and waved a hand. “This is all very mysterious, and suspicious. You talk, ten ways out of your mouths, but you say little.”

“No time to stand around and gnaw on nerves or question what’s damn near an act of God being dumped in your lap. You accept—on faith—and you’ll be well rewarded,” One Eye said.

“There is a number inside the envelope,” Blue Eyes said. “Call it. A cutout to a very important individual in a country better left unnamed at this time, but an individual you know well through your own Web site. He’ll back our story, and he’s backing us.”

“You are telling me, what, exactly?”

“Rule number one,” Blue Eyes said. “You’re on a need-to-know basis, that is, until the time comes when your role will become larger than the scourge of Muhammad’s head-lopping converters. Then it will be defined, a blinding light that will grant you, shall we say, instant transformation. Super warlord. That could be you.”

They paused, Dugula sensing he was supposed to be impressed or implore them to continue. “I’m listening.”

“You recruit some of these fighters for your clan,” One Eye said, “from other countries, some of them used by you to wipe out rivals, help keep the iron grip on your turf. They train here, they plan their operations when they’re not beefing up your troops. Surprised? Habbie, we know everything that goes on in this neck of the woods. Hey, as far as some folks you know are concerned, we’re the next-greatest thing to Allah. Think of us as damn near supernatural.”

“The Alpha and the Omega,” Scar Hand declared. “That’s us.”

“And we’re here to tell you what is in motion cannot be aborted,” Blue Eyes said.

“We don’t need to spell out the organizations of the fighters you have in-country,” Scar Hand said. “All you really need to know is they’re with us. More truth—these fighters have already been contacted by their leaders, weeks back, and they’ve been ordered to accept our terms without conditions.”

“They know some of the score,” One Eye said. “Not much, but the truth will be revealed in due course. But their leaders know something of the endgame. All parties—down to you—have agreed.”

“You want endgame speculation? What will go down could prove one of the biggest coups,” Scar Hand said. “One of the most fearsome blows Islam has ever struck against the infidels.”

“With or without you,” Blue Eyes said, tone hardening, “it’s a done deal.”

“And Umir Hahgan? You come to Somalia, three wise white men,” Dugula said, putting an edge to his voice, “and you go straight to my main rival. How much did you pay him? And if I say no to this strange offer, ask no questions, go along, a blind man in the dark among the wolves and hyenas, what then? Do you set Hahgan’s men against me?”

“It’s like this,” Blue Eyes said. “We hedged our bets, granted. Hahgan’s giving up some fighters, and yeah, he’s been paid, enough to keep the troops in qat and whores for a while. Time to put aside all this petty squabbling over some real estate. Fact is, you’re stronger than Umir, more men, more guns, more contacts from Cairo to Karachi, but we’ll pencil in the number-two man on the roster if we have to. Hey, you need to start thinking more about your future, leave the hand-wringing to the losing side. Now’s the time.”

“Think big, as in immortality big,” Scar Hand added. “Your name could end up being glorified by the entire Muslim world, feared by your enemies, for decades to come. You’re a rising star, could be bigger than Osama, if you want. Let me ask you, you don’t want to just be a second-string warlord, creaking around this shithole in your golden years, or do you?”

“I would think,” One Eye said, “your ambitions would be a little bit larger than ‘exterminating’ all those hungry mouths you and the twenty-something other clans won’t feed.”

“While you rip off planeloads of UN aid and resell it across the borders,” Scar Hand said. “Chump change, compared to what we’re offering you.”

“Now you insult me in front of my men.”

“No offense intended. Just the hard facts,” Blue Eyes shot back.

“We won’t waste your time—don’t waste ours. We’re thinking you’ve got a big day ahead of you,” One Eye said. “Probably heading out to exterminate some camp infested with disease.”

“Or take down another UN plane,” Scar Hand said.

How did they know so much? Dugula wondered. Or were they guessing? Perhaps his secured phones and fax weren’t so secure. Or had Hahgan infiltrated his clan with spies?

“In or out?” Blue Eyes asked. “No is no, and we’re fine with that.”

“You can go back to business as usual,” Scar Hand said. “Stay small.”

“Decision time,” One Eye added. “Dump or jump off the crapper.”

Dugula took a few moments, peering into those slitted gazes, eyes, he decided, without emotion, no soul. It was true that he wanted far more for himself than remaining where he was, doing what he’d done. The suggestion on their part was that certain freedom-fighting organizations—of which at least forty members were under his protective umbrella—had already agreed to some undefined role for some allegedly grand but mysterious big events. If he declined? Then what? Risk some long, protracted war with rivals who supposedly were ready to leap on board for this so-called big event? Let rivals grab the glory these whites were offering? What glory? Or was this some elaborate ruse, a trap being laid by rivals? He didn’t think so; none of the competition was that clever or devious. His rivals were, for the most part, thugs with hair-trigger tempers, rarely, if ever, thinking through the consequences to their impulsive violence. If he was right, then being presented with some bigger picture…

Dugula felt curiosity and greed wrestle him to the brink of acceptance. “How much money?”

“Is that a yes?” Blue Eyes wanted to know.

“The money?”

“Two million, deposited into a numbered account in one of several European banks of your choosing,” One Eye answered.

“Half on acceptance,” Scar Hand said, “the other half when the curtain drops on the last act.”

“I have a large clan,” Dugula said. “Many men to feed, house, equip, arm. They say there are over two million assault rifles in Mogadishu, but, as you said, my ambitions are bigger than just having my men ride around in technicals with outdated Russian machine guns. You demand much, tell me next to nothing. I hear promises, words, big plans. I would like to hear how badly you are willing to enlist my services. Two million,” he told them, shaking his head softly, lips pursed.

He watched them, no change of expression, their eyes cold, then Blue Eyes said, “Four. That’s as high as we can go.”

Dugula already had an answer to give them, but the fact that they had upped the ante with little hesitation told him they had come to the bargaining table prepared to lowball his services. So be it, he decided. Depending on what the future held, how great the risk, whatever his undeclared role in this big event, he could always ask for—no, demand—more money. If he was going to be allied with other Muslims for some glorious battle against the infidels, how could a mere three Westerners possibly dare to think they could deceive him into a course of action that would destroy him and the clan?

“When will you need these services of myself and my men?”

“Soon,” Blue Eyes said. “Carry on with your day. You’ll know when it’s begun.”

Dugula smiled back at the laughing eyes, unwilling to show fear or hesitation now that his decision was final. “Then…the envelope, please.”

HUSSEIN NAHBAT was pained and baffled. Beyond that there was a fair amount of anxiety about the future, namely his own.

From the shotgun seat of his technical, he saw the village and surrounding camp of nomads rise up in the distance on the barren plain. The panorama of squalid dwellings, meandering camels, goats and black stick figures in rags struck him as little more than some hellish mirage, floating up on the slick heat shimmer. Judging the numbers of shabby stone hovels, the huts erected by sticks wrapped in plastic sheeting, he guessed four to five hundred Somalis. Whatever Ethiopian refugees had crossed the border, survived this far, he figured perhaps another hundred or so bodies would be tossed to the fires. If what he’d heard about their trek and their affliction was true, they were walking contagions, cursing the Somalis here with the same inevitable fate. Drought, famine, another round of civil war between rebel forces and the outbreak of some hemorrhagic fever had been driving Ethiopians across the borders into Sudan, Kenya, Eritrea.

It was their task, Nahbat knew, to cleanse the area, contain the plague these people had brought to Somalia. This land was not their home, and their leader, calling them leprous invaders, had issued the decree they were to put the torch to all homes and flesh, diseased or otherwise, Ethiopian or Somali.

As Omari, his cousin, bore their technical down on the northern outskirts of the first line of beehive-shaped hovels, he found the others were already hard at it, rounding up men, women, children. The shooting had started, rattling bursts of autofire coming from all points around the village, limp bodies already being dragged from the tents of various sizes on the western perimeter. Dugula’s men, he noted, didn’t handle the bodies. Instead, they forced Ethiopians at gunpoint to drag their own dead—or dying—to the pit. He saw other Ethiopians, weakened by disease and malnutrition, standing utterly still outside their tents, some of the women hitting their knees, pleading for mercy.

There was none.

And the pain bit deeper into his belly. This was madness, this was…what, he wondered—wrong? Evil?

Nahbat was unaware Omari had ground them to a halt, as he witnessed a small baby ripped from the arms of its wailing mother, a pistol leaping in the hands of her executioner, a bullet through the brain abruptly silencing her pleas. Though he had to follow orders under threat of execution, and related as he was to Habir Dugula—a distant cousin of one of the leader’s countless sons and daughters by various wives and mistresses—what he felt whenever they cleansed a village went beyond horror and pain.

He felt his heart ache, a swollen lump in his throat threatening to shut off air the more he watched. He wanted to weep.

Nahbat fought back the tears. He suddenly longed to be a twelve-year-old boy again, a simple goatherd, ignorant to the horrors of his country. That seemed like only yesterday, when, in fact, it was just a little over a year ago his cousin had shoved an assault rifle in his hands, and life had changed forever. Strange, he thought, in this one year of being an armed combatant in the war for Mogadishu and the campaign of genocide against those deemed unfit to live, he felt like a tired, sick old man. He was too young, he thought, to feel such pain. Worse, he was helpless to do anything but carry out his part in the atrocity, thinking himself a coward for being unable to stand up and shout how wrong this was.

He tried to focus his distress on another baffling matter, failing to will away the nausea as the first wave of the stench of diseased flesh, the sickly sweet taint of bodies being doused by gasoline and torched, ballooned his senses. What was this business with the white men and the rival clan? Why were they involving themselves in some mysterious affair with foreigners that not even their great leader had the first clue was all about? They had lingered at the compound after the departure of the black hoods and Hahgan’s mooryan, while he assumed Habir Dugula made some attempt to verify the existence of the cutout, their supposed marching orders. Then there was a briefing by their great leader, all orders, no questions allowed. Simply put, he recalled, Dugula told them they would do whatever the white men’s bidding, that they would be paid in time, far more, or so promised, than their weekly handful of shillings. The future was more than just in doubt, he feared; the time ahead was in peril. He wondered if he would live to see his fourteenth birthday.

He was out the door somehow, Omari barking in his ear to get moving. The AK-47 began to slip from his fingers, bile shooting up into his throat. He heard the wailing, pleas for mercy, the braying of animals in terror. The din alone might have been enough to bring him to his knees, retch and cry, but the stink was overpowering by itself, threatening to knock him off his feet. The world began to spin, legs turning to rubber when a rough hand clawed into his shoulder, spun him.

“Take this!”

It was Omari, eyes boring into him over the bandanna wrapped around his nose and mouth.

The slap to his face rang in his ears like a pistol shot.

“What is wrong with you!”

“I…I feel sick, my cousin.”

“Get over it! We have work to do!”

Omari wound the bandanna around his face, knotting it tight against the back of his skull with an angry twist. He had another disturbing thought right then, as the veil seemed to do little to stem the tide of miasma assaulting him, mind, senses and soul. What if he fainted, flat on his back, the vomit trapped by the bandanna, strangling him?

The screaming, shooting and the awareness Omari was watching him closely, perhaps questioning his resolve, put some iron in his legs. He was turning toward the Russian transport truck, where they were hauling out more ten-gallon cans of gasoline, when Nahbat spotted their great leader.

Resentment flared through him, another dagger of pain and confusion to the heart. Dugula was standing in the distance on a rise. Surrounded by twenty or more of his men, he watched through field glasses, making certain they did as they were ordered. When he appeared satisfied the job would get done, he hopped into his jeep, the others falling into an assortment of technicals, Hummers. That the great man wouldn’t dirty his hands with this hideous chore inflamed him with great anger, leaving him to wonder if Somalia would ever know justice, much less peace.

He lingered by the technical, watching as the convoy kicked up clouds of dust, all of them gone to greet the UN plane flying in from Kenya.

Another wall of grief dropped over Nahbat. He knew what they would do when that plane landed. It sickened him. There was an answer, he believed—no, there was an answer he knew and felt in his heart—a way around this insanity, one far greater, a solution most certainly noble and humane and merciful, but the afflicted, the doomed he heard wailing around him would never see it.

All that medicine and food, he thought, on board the UN plane. Doctors, with skill and knowledge, who could, if not save the afflicted, perhaps ease their pain and suffering until a cure was delivered.

It would never happen.

He had seen it before, too many times.

“May God have mercy.”

“What was that?”

Wheeling, startled, he found Omari glaring at him. He watched, holding back the tears, fighting down the bile, his cousin marching toward him, holding out a can.

Nahbat shook his head, muttered, “Nothing.”

And took the can.

CHAPTER ONE

If it was true a man learned more from failure than success, Ben Collins knew he was in no position to test that theory. In his line of work, there were no second chances. Failure wasn’t an option; failure spelled death. In black ops, he made it a point to see losing was for the other guy.

The stack of boxes stamped CARE, deep in the aft of the C-130, would be the last thing the warlord’s frontline marauders saw when they hit the ramp. The ruse didn’t stop with this first strike, but what others didn’t know, he thought, wouldn’t kill them. At least not yet.

It was just about time to get down to dirty business, murky waters, he knew, that had been chummed since the first bunch of al-Qaeda and Taliban criminals had been dumped off at Gitmo. There was blood in that water again, he thought, flesh to consume, but it all went way beyond waxing a bunch of thugs and terrorists in some of the most dangerous, godforsaken real estate this side of Hell. Sure, there were bad guys to bag, chain, thrust under military gavel. There was a trial to consider, arranged to go down in secrecy….

Whoa, he told himself. This was only the first giant leap; the goal line was way off on the distant horizon. No point in getting ahead. There were still details to nail down and he could be sure, given the nature of black ops, not to mention the usual chaos and confusion of battle, more than a few problems would crop up along the way.

The ex–Delta Force major raked a stare over the six black ops under his command of Cobra Force Twelve. Seven more commandos on the ground were moving in right then, on schedule to help light the fuse. According to radar monitoring the two Hummers’ transponders, the sat imagery, piped into his consoles amidships from an NRO bird parked over and watching the area in question—AIQ—they were three miles out, closing hard, with Dugula and twenty-one henchmen rolling across the plain, the latest round of the Exterminator’s methods of population control framed, live and in color, on another monitor. Behind his ground force, two Black Hawks and one Apache were picking up the rear, covering all bases.

All set.

No blue UN helmets, doctors, or relief workers were on board. This was no mission of mercy, or another group of unarmed do-gooders from Red Cross or UNICEF, he thought, getting ripped off by Dugula.

He studied their faces, but there was no need to sound off with last-minute Patton speeches to shore up resolve. They knew the drill, briefed thoroughly for days, the details gone over one last time on the Company airbase just inside the Kenyan border, before he put the radio call on the special UN frequency to Dugula that they were moving, coordinate the drop-off. All of them were battle-hardened CIA men—specifically Special Operations Division—or ex-military, he knew, with more than a few Afghanistan forays notched on some of their belts.

It was reassuring to know he was wading into the fire with pros. To an operative they had on their war faces, togged in brown camos, M-16/M-203 combos the lead weapon. Webbing, combat vests, all of it stuffed and hung with spare grenades and clips, then on down to Beretta 92-F side arms on the hip, commando daggers sheathed on the lower leg. The blades were last resort, Collins stating earlier this was blast and burn, the faces of Dugula and a few of his top lieutenants committed to memory.

Once they blasted off the ramp it was going to be a turkey shoot for the most part, Somali thugs hemmed in, turning tail, unless he missed his guess, when the flying hammer dropped on them from above. He glanced at their own two armored Hummers, one mounted M-60 machine gun, belted and ready to rip. The other vehicle, showing off its TOW antitank launch pad, would be out of the gate first. Altogether, plenty of firepower, muscle, experience and determination to win the day against a bunch of one-time camel herders who now had control of Mogadishu, and into the deep south of the country, because none of the other competing clans had the guns or the guts to stand up to them.

He took a moment next to ponder the sudden curve-ball thrown him by superiors. Cobra Force Twelve was his diamond, once in the rough, but with three successful missions under the belt, with his track record in Delta and later on working with the Company, he had made friends in high and powerful places. Hell, he was a damn hero, in fact, enough medals and ribbons to fill a steamer trunk, but this one wasn’t for God and country. What was now in motion—at least the campaign given the thumbs-up by the White House—was pretty much his show.

But there was a wild card—the man’s handle—out there with the ground team.

It wasn’t entirely true he was solely in charge, Collins knew. There was this odd man out preying on his thoughts, some hotshot hardballer, according to his dossier, dropped in his lap at the eleventh hour. The order to put the thirteenth man on the team had come straight from the President, Wild Card inserted as coleader of Cobra Force. Beyond some irritation and anxiety, a dig to professional pride he was forced to share all tactical and command decisions, the tall dark man tagged Wild Card made him a little nervous, what with the question as to exactly why the White House shoved him onto the mission in the first place.

He wanted to believe the colonel—with a record full of deletions that left little doubt he was likewise black ops—was simply there as an extra gun, with supposedly all the combat experience in the world to aid, assist and kick much additional ass. Or was it something else? Was Wild Card a watchdog? Had the rumor mill churned at the Pentagon, spilling some seeds of doubt into the Oval Office? Had someone in the loop gotten cold feet, gone running to the higher-ups if just to save his own skin? Were his own people sharpening blades right then, poised to spring a trap?

No matter. If Wild Card had some personal agenda, if he proved a threat to the bigger picture, well, Collins knew there was an answer for that problem.

“Dragon One to Cobra Leader.”

Collins strode to the intercom on the bulkhead. “Cobra Leader. Go.”

“You boys strap in—we’re going down. Show time.”

“Roger. Stick to the plan, Dragon One, no matter how hot it gets out there.”

“Aye-aye. Catch you on the flip side. Good luck. Dragon One, over and out.”

Collins grabbed a seat, fastened on the webbing as the bird began to descend. Round one, he thought, coming up, but it was only the beginning. Shortly, if nothing else, one question about Wild Card would be answered. And if the odd man out couldn’t pull his weight, wasn’t as good as advertised, he would just be one less hassle to eliminate with a bullet in the near future.

The picture, small or large, both fuzzy at the moment, would clear up soon enough.

Spilled blood, he concluded, always had a way of separating the lions from the jackals.

IN A PERFECT WORLD all men and women, especially the poor and needy, would be fed, housed, educated. Beyond the basics even, the sick, the dying, the maimed, all manner of physical affliction would be cured, and they would rise to live, full, healthy, happy lives. In this world there would be opportunity for all, he thought, an even playing field where man could use whatever natural abilities and intelligence, not to attain wealth, privilege, stature or dominion over others, but to help his fellow man make the earth a bright, kind, gentle place. There would be mercy, compassion, tolerance. There would be peace, harmony, trust and understanding. There would be no crime, no killing, no greed, no lust for a bigger slice of everything at the expense of his fellows, no life wasted in self-destruction. There would be no famine, disease or war.

There would be no Habir Dugula.

Of course, wherever this place existed, it was only just a dream, Mack Bolan knew, and all too painfully well. For the man also known as the Executioner this Nirvana or Heaven, this imagined place on Earth, where all men were free, created equal to follow the tenets of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was the stuff of fantasy and angst, best left to the poets and the songwriters.

He was a soldier, first and last, brutally aware after walking countless miles in the arena of the savage, that as long as animal man existed, preying on the weak and the innocent, going for number one, peace was just a word.

The latest in a long line of vicious warlords in Somalia was all the proof he needed that evil was alive and well on Earth. But Habir Dugula was only one reason Bolan had undertaken this mission.

They were almost there, in place to give Dugula’s mass murderers and armed profiteers a dose of their own poison. Hearing the familiar thunder, Bolan spotted the C-130, coming in for a landing on the plain, due south, the giant bird vanishing from sight a moment later above the lip of the wadi. Fisting his M-16/M-203 combo, adrenaline burning, Bolan shot a look at his driver, a twist to Cobra Leader’s original attack plan flaring to mind. On the surface, the strike could in all probability work, he reasoned. For openers, they were all seasoned pros, whereas Dugula and goons were accustomed, for the most part, to slaughtering their unarmed countrymen. Sure, there was the usual street fighting in Mogadishu with rival clans, but as a rule of thumb, Dugula’s thugs outnumbered the competition, and any sustained shooting match was spurred more by hair-trigger impulse than skill and cold tactics on an even battlefield. Just the same, he knew a wild bullet, even one fired in haste or panic, could score flesh.

Timing was the key ingredient to get it started, the soldier knew, ground forces unleashing the lightning and thunder in sync. It was a brazen play, no two ways about it, Collins and company shooting their way off the ramp, Hummers rampaging into the stunned forces of Dugula, mowing them down off the starting line. The Black Hawks and the Apache, a mile or more to their rear, flying nap of the earth and jamming any atypical Somali substandard radar in the area, were a definite added bonus. If Dugula stuck to form, according to UN and CIA reports, he would hang back while his thugs boarded the C-130, then loaded up the APCs and transports parked at the command post of the warlord’s airfield. They would stock their warehouses with food and medicine slated for the sick and starving, sell it to other lesser-ranking warlords or whoever else could pay the going rate. Bolan expected once Dugula found they weren’t faced with well-intentioned UN or Red Cross workers, the warlord would bolt.

The soldier gave a moment’s thought to the mission, the parameters, endgame, reasons why he had accepted. For starters, it angered Bolan deeply that in this part of the world, where those who needed food and medicine the most, cried out for a helping hand just to get through the day, were not only denied the basics, but viewed as a blight to be removed from the body whole. In other words, those unfortunate enough not to be able to defend or fend for themselves, whatever the circumstance, weren’t worth protecting or sustaining, seen as deadweight, a possible contagion to the power structure, worthy of only subjugation or death.

Dugula had been on the soldier’s removal list for some time, the warlord living up to his ghoul’s handle given him by the UN for too long now. In a land where lawlessness ruled, where there wasn’t even the first fundamental institution, bureaucracy, no media or government whatsoever, it was impossible for even the World Health Organization to state the number of Dugula’s victims. Western intelligence could emphatically claim that entire villages had been wiped off the plains in a genocide campaign where Bolan assumed the warlord meant to do nothing but spread fear and terror.

The soldier had been around long enough to know that whatever they did here would make little difference in the long run. One less Dugula, one less army of murderers, though, terrorizing the countryside might tip the scales an inch or so in favor of the oppressed. What was true, in his mind at least, that all it took for evil to triumph was for good men to turn a blind eye, wash their hands of atrocity and man’s inhumanity to man as long as it didn’t encroach on their own world. If all of it boiled down to the power of the gun winning over evil, the Executioner was a proved old hand at the game.

A little over three days ago, Bolan recalled, he had been standing down at Stony Man Farm, the ultracovert intelligence agency in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and overseen by his longtime friend, Hal Brognola. Brognola, a high-ranking official of the Justice Department who was—in addition to routine Justice duties—a cutout between the President of the United States and the Farm, had presented the soldier with quite the unusual mission. How the channels ran through the various intelligence agencies to launch this mission and who, exactly, had brainstormed this campaign, not even Bolan or Brognola was sure. Assume Pentagon brass, CIA, NSA, but the Man—who green-lighted all Stony Man operations—wanted what he called the best of the best on board a black ops team called Cobra Force Twelve.

It seemed the President—or whoever had put the idea in his head—felt the need for a second holding pen outside Guantanamo Bay. Gitmo, or so Brognola had been told by the Man, Bolan recalled, had gotten a bit overcrowded with bad guys. And secondly, or so the line of reasoning went, there was too much spotlight glaring on Gitmo, thanks to the media, which, in the usual convoluted political thinking, could end up smacking Washington with a black eye. Prisoner mistreatment, abyssmal living conditions, individual rights of terrorists denied, and so on. It hadn’t been spelled out one hundred percent, but Bolan’s gut told him the next prison camp for international criminals wouldn’t pop up on CNN.

Usually the soldier operated alone, or as part of the two Stony Man commando teams. Working with unknown factors, CIA or bona fide military men with combat experience, had proved perilous to his health in the past. Brognola, however, had laid it out, convinced him to colead Cobra Force Twelve. Never one to unduly swaddle himself in the Stars and Stripes, the big Fed had told him twenty to thirty of some of the most wanted terrorists, depending on how many could be taken alive, could prove intelligence mother lodes in the war on terror. Somalia was first on the roundup list.

Not even Brognola had been told where this military tribunal would be held, and Bolan wasn’t quite sure what to make on the lack of concrete details. It smacked of dark secrecy to the soldier, all around, and Brognola had as much as said if it blew up in the faces of those in the field doing all the hunting and capturing then America would take a verbal shellacking by the UN, her supposed allies, not to mention the Muslim world cranking up the heat for jihad.

And even with intelligence operatives all over the map, guiding them from hit to hit, they were on their own. The Executioner understood and accepted his usual role as a deniable expendable if he was caught or killed by the enemy. That was acceptable. What wasn’t were a few nagging speculations tossed his way by Brognola before he headed out to Fort Bragg to introduce himself—Colonel Brandon Stone—to the Cobra troops. The file on Collins and Cobra was classified, but the cyber sleuths at the Farm had unearthed a few questions, framed as suspicion, about the man and his team. They were terrorist headhunters, with a trio of successful outings to their credit, only a “but” in caps hung over their heads. The thing was, they had been in the general vicinity when a spate of kidnappings and murders of American citizens in Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia sullied their record. Coincidence?

Another reason to hop on board.

The soldier was there now, willing to let battle and time tell the truth.

He turned to the driver—Asp—the op’s mane of black hair and facial scruff framing the portrait of a mercenary. The pager on Bolan’s hip vibrated, the same signal transmitted, he knew, to the other ground troops. The bird had landed.

“Listen up,” Bolan told Asp, turning to make sure the lone black commando on the team—Python—heard him loud and clear. “There’s been a little change in plans.”

DUGULA WAS beyond troubled, and he couldn’t simply will away the gnawing in his belly. Something was shooting him to new heights of fear, a feeling so alive it had become a living monster in his face.

As the day ground on, everything appearing to go as planned, the worm in his belly squirmed harder, terror not far behind the unease, threatening, he imagined, to uncoil an adder in his guts, devour him from the inside out.

He had placed the call to the man in Saudi Arabia, more out of nagging paranoia than curiosity. Sure enough, the cutout who had arranged safe transport for freedom fighters he was harboring, so high up the chain of command in the Islamic jihad that disobedience was a death sentence, had confirmed what the whites had told him.

There was, so the middleman said, a series of big events about to unfold, fear not, perform the holy duty, whatever it was. The Saudi had instructed him to comply with whatever the foreigners wanted him to do, no matter how bizarre their requests seemed. Again he was told he would know when it started, but not knowing when or what disturbed him the most, visions of the noose once more tightening around his neck flaming to mind. He was to have faith as strong as steel, ask no questions. He would be an important, even a glorious instrument exercising the will of God in the coming days. He was being called, perhaps by the Prophet himself, a holy decree he was to carry out, once again, on faith. And he would be paid—the bottom line in his ultimate decision—more than he could ever spend in two lifetimes. Woe be to anyone who attempted to betray any of them, chisel out of the bargain, or so the Saudi told him.

Still, he had many questions, all of them bringing on doubt and worry that would see him thrash through one or many sleepless nights before this big event. Beyond that, he was angered that forces beyond his control had assumed he would obey their mysterious dictates, even order him to relegate his power to the enemy. Being on an overseas line, though, the conversation was brief, code words and phrases that should leave any enemy eavesdroppers guessing.

Dugula watched as the giant UN cargo plane descended from the direction of Kenya, touched down, hurled up spools of dust, began to taxi. For a moment, attempting to calm himself, he marveled at the naiveté of these relief workers. Surely by now they knew what became of their cargo. Were they stupid? Or did they actually believe one more attempt to funnel food and medicine into this region would buy the masses a few more days, even weeks before they succumbed to the inevitable fate of the weak? That he would actually distribute the relief to the surrounding villages?

Fools.

They had long since given up attempting airdrops, or trekking to the villages themselves, on foot or by truck, since a few relief workers had mysteriously vanished.

It occurred to him, the thought dredging up more paranoia, that perhaps this time they had brought along a few guns to test his will. If that happened, it would prove no contest at all. If they made demands at gunpoint, they were all dead, shot on sight, and he would simply load the trucks with the cargo, burn the bodies, destroy the plane, take his chances. This was Somalia, after all, and only a massive invading army would dare attempt to…

He was out of his jeep, standing his ground, ordering his clansmen to move up on the plane when the C-130 swung around, ramp lowering, the bay out of view. Strange, he thought, since the previous attempts were done in full view of the ramp coming down. It could have been paranoia, anxiety getting the better of him, but something felt terribly wrong all of a sudden. Dust in his face, he found himself easing back toward his jeep. It was a faint and distant rattle, buzzing in his head, but a chatter that blew the lid on his fear.

Dugula knew the sound of autofire when he heard it.

CHAPTER TWO

Collins wished he could see Dugula’s face, the horrifying reality that this wasn’t the usual candy raid doing far more than just ruining the warlord’s day. He could well imagine Dugula right then, nuts going numb, knifing chest pains, pasta legs, a scream of outrage no one but himself could hear, much less cared to, the whole shrieking nine yards of terror and confusion over why and who had come to yank his ticket. It was a fleeting impulse, wanting to be there, grinning in the guy’s face of fear, but any gloating, Collins knew, was on hold.

Collins had a full shooting gallery before him to contend with. Getting hands on the Kewpie doll was the ultimate prize, but since the moment at hand was no guaranteed straight flush, Dugula had to keep.

The Cobra leader flamed away with his M-16, Mamba on the starboard side, likewise clamping down with autofire on the stunned opposition. So far they were on the money, Collins thought, shock appearing on the verge of winning the opening round, but the going would get a lot tougher once they were off the ramp. Figure ten had ventured up the ramp, AKs not even up and out, their faces laughing, maybe a private joke bandied about between them in their native tongue, but the Somali thugs lost all arrogant composure when the first few rounds began chopping into their ranks. White caftans were shredded to red ruins before they were even aware they were chewed and screwed, Collins and Mamba sweeping long bursts, port to starboard and back. Somalis tumbled, screamed, sailed down the ramp, a whirling dervish or two losing a sandal in midflight.

“Go!” Collins roared, but he heard engines revving already, pedal to the metal, the Hummers streaking away from their starting line, amidships.

The Hummer known as Thunder Three was a blur in Collins’s eye. Holding back on the trigger of his assault rifle, he gutted another Somali with a short burst. Diamondback, he saw, manning the M-60, cut loose with the heavy-metal thunder. Two heartbeats’ worth of pounding of 7.62 mm lead erased the terror on the face of a goon peeking over ramp, head erupting, the shattered crimson eggshell gone with the vanishing corpse. Thunder Four was right on their bumper, the point Hummer, Collins saw, about to bulldoze through a bloody scarecrow rising on the lip of the ramp, his arms shooting up as if they were supposed to slam on the brakes or veer around him. There was a thud on impact, Collins catching the sound of bones cracking like matchsticks, the scream flying away with the ramp kill.

One, two, and both Hummers were airborne, tires slamming to earth a moment later at the end of the ramp, his drivers straightening next, cutting the wheels hard, whipping around and gone to charge into what Collins figured was fifty percent of what was left of Dugula’s shooters. According to intel, there were twenty-plus more Somali gunmen, either moving from the command hut or sitting tight, depending on Dugula’s mood, but those numbers would be handled, he hoped, by his Apache and the colonel.

Collins was picking up the pace, Mamba on the march, both of them feeding fresh clips to their M-16s when the Cobra leader sighted on a downed Somali. He was dragging himself through the pooling blood on his elbows, toward the edge of the ramp, head cocked. The spurting hole in the middle of his back, the way he slithered ahead, legs limp weight, told Collins he’d taken one through the spine. Paralysis below the waist would prove the least of his woes; Collins unable to understand Somali but believed he caught the gist of it. Sounded like the guy wanted mercy, he thought, or was trying to tell him this was all some hideous mistake. Whoever he was, Collins knew he wasn’t one of the catches of the day.

“Welcome to the big leagues, son,” Collins told him, then drilled a 3-round burst into his face.

Halfway down the ramp, Collins leaped, landing on hard-packed earth, M-16 searching out fresh blood off to the port side of the Hercules. The trick now, he knew, would be taking Dugula and a few top lieutenants alive. He already had that figured out beforehand, though, his hand ready to unleather the tranquilizer gun on his right hip just as soon as he made eyeball confirmation. The dicey part would be getting close enough to drop Dugula and trophies in the sleeping bag. As for his other commandos, the running scheme was to encircle them before they could bolt. Thunders One and Two would race in from the north, a sweeping left hook to their flank. It was a tactical page, he thought with a moment’s pride, ripped straight out of Genghis Khan’s war book. If one of his troops got close enough to Dugula first, they were ordered to lob a canister his way, where a cloud of barbituate-laced gas would disperse.

Collins saw three, then four technicals already in flight, dust billowing around the vehicles as they reversed away from the C-130, Thunders Three and Four charging to outflank them. Collins took a moment to watch the action.

Autofire chattered around the technicals, two vehicles sitting, shooters steeled to go to the mat, two more murderous goon squads on wheels rolling to break out, but the noose was tightening, he saw. Screams of pain lanced out of all that swirling dust, but Collins felt grim satisfaction it was nearly a lock. Still, he saw two technicals break out of the ring, racing across the plain. His commandos were alternating bursts between shooting gunmen out of their technicals and blasting out tires.

He was grinning to himself, his Black Hawks soaring overhead to run down the rabbits, the Apache strafing the troops and transports at the command post to the northeast when he found only one of his ground Hummers barreling in from the wadi.

“What the—?”

The M-60 gunner on that rig—Lionteeth—told him the colonel was engaged somewhere with Somali gunmen. Or had he broken off, purposely changed their role on his own command? If so, why?

Scouting the plain, Collins spotted the other Hummer. Thunder One was rolling slow, nearly creeping toward the fleeing Somalis. The Cobra team leader figured out the strategy. A lone figure peeled off from the Hummer, M-16 blazing at the profiteers who were squirming from an overturned transport rig, an APC near them demolished, swathed in leaping flames, treated, he reckoned, to a direct hit from the Apache’s Hellfire missile.

Wild Card was doing his thing, Collins thought, and cursed. So he had a prima donna on the team, the guy might as well have told him to kiss his ass, he’d do it his way.

A few choice words, assuming the colonel survived, had to wait as Collins drew a bead on a Somali gunman still standing in the dust, and drilled a burst into his chest.

THE EXECUTIONER sensed Asp and Python weren’t happy about being ordered to change the game plan right before the shooting started, but they did as ordered. The shift in strategy, at least on his part, had one goal in mind. Cutting off any retreat on foot, he knew, was a dicier proposition than simply allowing the Black Hawks and Apache to blow the enemy off the plain. Say the warbirds ground up the Somalis with lead and Hellfires from above, and any capture of Dugula was all but lost. If their job was to cuff and stuff the world’s most wanted international terror mongers, then anything short of bringing Dugula and top henchmen to justice spelled mission failure.

Bolan left the Apache to its Hellfire-and-chain-gun demolition. The command post, with any radar and tracking goodies, was blown away by the warbird, six or so Somalis scythed by 30 mm doom as they were bolting from the flying rubble. Before that round of destruction, the warbird had plowed a missile into one of the transport trucks, dead ahead to Bolan’s twelve, wreckage spewing out of the fireball bowling another canvas-covered transport onto its side.

The soldier cut a wide berth around the hungry flames and oily smoke, his M-16 leading the way, the stink of burning diesel fuel and toasted flesh swelling the air, grinding into his senses as he closed on the cries of panic. His vector, if he nailed the enemy before him in seconds flat, would land him directly in the path of two technicals charging away from the ring of Cobra lead. It was a dust bowl near the C-130’s nose, armed combatants blazing away, he saw, commandos then chasing down Somalis who had decided it was better to flee than stand and fight. It was hard for the soldier to tell which was which and who was who, but a split-second assessment of the numbers of bodies flying from technicals signaled to him the Somalis were clutching the short end of the stick.

Maybe ten Somalis, he viewed, came crawling or staggering out of the bed of their dumped transport. They were lurching to their feet, punch-drunk from the hard topple, AKs jerking in different directions, uncertain where the next immediate threat would rear up.

Bolan took care of their confusion, finger caressing the M-203’s trigger. He dumped the 40 mm fragmentation bomb into their ranks—no point in wasting precious seconds when the prize was maybe on the fly. The blast ripped out the heart of the pack, torn figures kicked in separate directions. Three hardmen with the quickest feet and the most luck, knocked down by the concussive force but clearing the fireball and shock waves, scurried to get back in action. The Executioner tagged the trio with a raking burst of autofire, left to right and back, bodies flung into tight corkscrews, dropping. Two of the warlord’s goons then popped into the soldier’s gun sights on the other side of the downed transport, running for the oncoming technicals, arms flapping as if they were hailing a cab.

Bolan shot them both up the back, flinging them ahead, their arms windmilling, faces hammering down with such force their legs flew up. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Asp charging the Hummer at a group of Somalis pouring AK-47 autofire from the bed of a technical, Python opting to help hose down those survivors still in the fight with his M-16.

Bolan cut his path hard and fast toward the racing technical, drawing target acquisition on three gunmen in the jeep’s bed. Rotor wash from the Black Hawks, hovering thirty yards behind, kicked up a cyclone of grit and dust, obscuring confirmation until the technical was nearly on top of the warrior.

But Bolan pinned down their man, Dugula’s face of terror and outrage framed from the shotgun seat of the technical, the soldier’s attention shifting back to the M-60 gunner who swiveled the machine gun in his direction. There was a moment’s hesitation from the hardman on the M-60, a spray of bullets flying wild past the soldier, before he hit him with a burst of 5.56 mm tumblers and sent him flying. Two Cobra Hummers then burst out of the dust storm, an M-60 roaring, other Cobra commandos racing on foot ahead to help lay waste to the pack of Somalis in the trailing rig.

The Executioner focused on the big catch charging his way.

Dugula, Bolan glimpsed, was flailing his arms, raging at his driver, when he hit the M-16’s trigger. The windshield imploded, a crimson halo where the wheelman had sat bearing grim testament that Dugula was the last passenger. The Executioner sidled away from the unmanned jeep, one last Somali launched from the bed of Dugula’s getaway, then he blew out the port tires with a long burst of autofire. He let it surge past, saw Dugula’s eyes bugging out, mouth vented, a silent scream lost to the din of autofire from some point downrange. Deflated tread slammed down into a rut, and the jeep shot up and over a jagged rip in the land, sailing a few yards, before it flipped onto its side.

THE WORLD WAS a shattered hell of noise, foul smells and choking dust from where he lay, slumped against the door, spitting flecks of blood and glass chips from his lips. Dugula heard the bitter chuckle next, but the sound was chased away by the Black Hawks, the bleat of massive blades a pounding racket that washed fire through his brain. They were nightmare specters suspended in the sky, two giant prehistoric birds of doom.

American commandos! He hadn’t clearly seen the faces of their attackers, but he had been there in Mogadishu when the infidel forces had come to supposedly restore order to a lawless country, when he had been on the shortlist of kill or capture. The infidels had returned.

Black Hawks. It was happening again, only this time it appeared the invaders would create a different outcome. The three white devils had maneuvered him into this trap; he was sure of it. But if they were working with his own Muslim handlers, why? It made no sense, a preposterous riddle without the first clue. He had made every accommodation possible to the freedom fighters, arming them, refuge inside his borders, food, women and qat. Or had they, too, been deceived? Beyond his sense of outrage over the betrayal, pure fear began writhing in his belly.

“You’ll know when it’s begun.”

He ran those words through his mind again, hatred burning. Now what?

His clansmen, he was sure, were all dead. If there were any survivors, could they stand and fight while…?

What? Should he attempt to flee again, but this time on foot? That he was still alive was no guarantee he wouldn’t be shot down in the next few moments. Where was his AK-47? And what would he do if he found the weapon? He was outnumbered, outgunned, alone most likely, autofire withering, no more screams, the lopsided battle winding down. There was a silence beyond the whapping rotors that sparked new fear. There really was no choice, he decided. Escape clearly wasn’t going to happen. Best to die on his feet. If this was the end, it was God’s will. So be it. The least he could do would be to kill as many of the enemy as he could before he was sent to Paradise.

Pinned by Muhmar’s deadweight, he shoved him away, grunting with the effort before he had him wedged between the seats. He scrabbled his hands through the bed of glass on the floorboard, crying out as a sliver jabbed his finger. There. He plucked up the assault rifle, aware at least that one of his enemies was close by. He hadn’t had a good look at the commando who had blasted out the window, sent the jeep careening out of control, trapping him now on his side, but he glimpsed enough of the eyes of the tall dark man to know his own doom was certain, the infidel probably circling the wreck even then.

How could this have happened? he wondered, rage clearing the sludge in his limbs. The attack had been unleashed, all thunder and lightning, instant death and destruction, so fierce it left little doubt they were there to kill him. It had been so easy before, intimidating the UN and Red Cross relief workers, seizing shipments…

It was over.

With the stock of the assault rifle, he punched out a jagged shard, groaning as pain knifed down his neck, reaching a point of fire between his shoulder blades. Nothing felt broken, but he assumed any pain was moments away from ending altogether.

Dugula squeezed through the opening, AK in shaky hands, the warlord unmindful of sharp glass tearing at his clothes. He sensed a presence behind him as he rose, the AK-47 swinging around, ready to kill whoever it was, however many were at his rear. He heard himself snarl, cursing all of this hideous misfortune, finger taking up slack on the trigger, pure murder pumping in his heart. It was the tall dark commando, rolling through the dust, coming out of nowhere, a floating wraith, right on top of him before he could act. The AK-47 nearly drew a bead, but Dugula knew it was already too late. There was a glimpse of the M-16, a question wanting to form in his mind as to why he wasn’t already dead on his feet, when the fist plowed into his jaw and the lights winked out.

“YOU WANT TO MIRANDIZE that asshole, too, Colonel? Maybe find him a lawyer?”

The plastic cuffs were fastened to Dugula, Bolan wrenching the warlord’s arms behind his back when it looked and sounded to the soldier as if this were where Collins wanted to assert his command in front of the troops. It was sheer luck on his part but earned, just the same, by audacity and determination that he’d gotten to Dugula first. Judging the tone he caught, Bolan could tell Collins didn’t like getting upstaged, and on the first leg of the mission.

“I wasn’t looking to steal anybody’s thunder,” Bolan said.

“Is that why you took it upon yourself to seal off their rear when you knew my gunships were supposed to do that?”

“It seemed the thing to do at the time.”

“Is that a fact?”

Bolan watched Collins, holding his ground beside Dugula, the warlord groaning, coming around, legs twitching in the dust. The short right cross had branded a purple welt on his jaw, hardly the kind of punishment, Bolan knew Dugula deserved. There was a village of innocents being butchered right then weighing on Bolan’s thoughts. The sky over the hills east had darkened, several more plumes of black smoke rising now since the battle here had erupted, bringing on a wide patch of unnatural dusk against the horizon. Time was wasting, lives being snuffed, Bolan sure they were being executed in droves by now. Up to then he hadn’t heard Collins mention any secondary objective beyond rounding up Dugula. This, Bolan knew, would prove a defining moment, grant him some insight into Collins’s true nature.

The salt-and-pepper flattop seemed to appear first in the boiling dust before six feet of muscled frame brought Collins swaggering out of the cloud, M-16 canted across his chest. Bolan read the former Delta major’s anger beyond the tight smile. The other commandos were toeing the dead or dying, pleas for help or mercy bleating out from several wounded Somalis. Collins slowed his pace, head swiveling, the soldier following the Cobra leader’s stare toward a commando—Tsunami—who was bent over a bloodied form convulsing near a technical riddled with bullet holes. Bolan panned on, found two more Cobra ops flanking a Somali who was on his knees, hands clasped, praying, it sounded, while in the same breath asking for mercy.

Collins shook his head. “He’s nobody.”

Bolan kept the anger to himself over the coldblooded killing that followed, as the commandos drilled autofire into the Somali’s chest. A kill in the heat of battle was one thing to Bolan, but when the enemy surrendered, execution on the spot was unacceptable. One act of outright savagery, Bolan knew, always led to another and even more brutal act. If a soldier couldn’t separate the difference, he was lost, no exceptions.

“Major. Over here.”

Again Collins peered at another Somali. His face was forced up and aimed at Collins, the commando named Roadrunner wadding up a handful of hair, a knee speared in his back. The Cobra leader gave a thumbs-down.

The face shoved away, the commando stood, drilled a 3-round burst into the Somali’s back, abruptly silencing his plea.

Collins held up and rotated a clenched fist, signaling the Black Hawks to move off, presumably to recon the area for any gunmen who had managed to slip away.

“So, is this where it starts, Colonel?”

“Does what start?”

Something flickered through Collins’s eyes, a darkness stirring behind the look, Bolan believing he sensed an angry animal presence of the savage he’d just seen carry out the executions.

Collins lowered his voice, edged with tight anger as he said, “I don’t have time to jack around with you, Colonel. From here on, we map out a strategy. I’d like you to stick with the program. I need to know we’re on the same page and not out here clashing cocks. We clear? Sudden interruptions in tactics, in my experience, have a way of proving hazardous to everybody’s health.”

“And improvising?”

Collins grunted. “Is that what you call it? Well, that depends on who’s doing the improvising and why. I’m getting a sense here, Stone, that maybe you’re not really a team player, or that you’re a lot more than I’ve been led to believe. That maybe you’re telling me I don’t know how to do my job?”

Bolan nodded at Dugula. “He’s in the net, but there’s a few loose ends still running around over those hills, Major. This isn’t over.”

Collins glanced past Bolan. “What’s happening over there isn’t my concern, Colonel. They’re not part of the mission parameters. And we’re not some flying hospital or a bunch of Red Cross workers on a mission from God. Say we do what you’re implying, say we’re successful driving out the rest of Dugula’s bad boys. Then what? We’re looking at slews of wounded, dying, diseased, mouths to feed. We’re not equipped for that scenario to start with.”

“They’re being slaughtered, Collins. Women, children. If they don’t fit into your plans, chances are you could still put a few of Dugula’s top lieutenants on your mantel.”

“Hey, this isn’t some game show to me, Stone. I’m not in this to land a seat as some military expert on FOX & Friends when I hang it up.”

“Then let it be about something right.”

Collins paused, considering something. “A part of me can almost respect you for wanting to be a decent guy and all that, Colonel. In other circumstances I might feel the same way. But do you know why whatever’s left of Dugula’s brigands are over that hump torching those people? They’re carrying a plague, Stone, that’s straight from up top. It’s all been caught on sat imagery, and I’ve got the details in triplicate if you care to read the reports. The UN, WHO all know about it, and not even they will send in some relief help at this time. And we’ve been ordered to leave it alone. What’s over those hills is a bunch of Ethiopian nomads who brought some sort of hemorrhagic contagion, some real wicked stuff that infected hundreds. We don’t know what it is. It could even be Ebola. You think I want to risk the lives of my men just to play some kind of Mother Teresa to a bunch of people who are going to die anyway? Whose own countrymen will march in right behind us and kill and burn them even if we do take out the rest of Dugula’s rabble? You want to be running around, shooting up bad guys with open sores and black shit flying out of their mouths and maybe getting doused in their infected blood? For all we know, this plague could be an airborne contagion.”

“You don’t want to do it, then let me handle it.”

“I’ve got a lot to do, Colonel, before we move on to our next objective. I’ll have to beg off.”

“Then I’ll go it alone. I won’t just walk away.”

Collins measured Bolan, bobbing his head. “Okay, tell you what. Just to show I’ve got some heart, take one of the Black Hawks, I’ll even throw in the Apache, since my numbers show about thirty or more of Dugula’s punks running around over there. I can spare four of my men, but that’s it. You’ve got one hour, Stone, then I’m in the air. I’ll take back my men and leave you behind if you’re not ready to fly. Will that accommodate your sense of mercy and compassion for the oppressed?”

It suddenly sounded too easy, Collins relenting, handing over his own men even, despite his argument about the risks of infection. Bolan sensed something else had prompted the Cobra leader to cave, but Collins was already keying his com link, relaying the order, the Black Hawk coming back to pick up the soldier.

The Executioner watched as Collins snatched Dugula off the ground by the shoulder, then barked the handles of the four commandos who would ride with the colonel.

“One hour, Colonel. Clock’s ticking.”

No good luck, no kiss off, nothing. On his own, but he had been, pretty much, since accepting the mission.

The Executioner turned, forging into the dust as the Black Hawk landed. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was a familiar churning in his gut, warning him that everything wasn’t as it appeared with Collins and Cobra Force Twelve.

Bolan hopped into the warbird’s belly. Time, he knew, would separate truth from lies, the righteous from the unclean of spirit. Right then there was another battle to fight, and hopefully a village, or part of it, at least to save.

One hour, he thought.

It could prove an eternity.

CHAPTER THREE

As anxious as Collins was to put Somalia behind him and set the stage for round two, it wouldn’t hurt, he figured, to stay grounded for another hour or so. By then a few questions might get put to rest, or, perhaps better still, he could spare himself some grief in the future. No, it wouldn’t cause him the first twinge of pain or regret if Stone—or the other four without the snake handles—didn’t come back from the crusade. Stone the Merciful, he thought. What the hell kind of warrior went out of his way to play savior to people who were doomed to die anyway? The diseased of that village had never been on the itinerary of things to do, but it might just help his own scheme of things if Wild Card was aced in the next sixty minutes trying to play savior. Something about the big colonel was nagging him the more he pondered any number of possible scenarios. The SOB could be anything—a spy, a plant, a shooter with orders given behind his back to terminate all of them if…

There were calls over the satcom to make right then, last-minute details to be ironed out before the next incursion, a date with another homicidal megalomaniac that would go down inside Sudan’s border. Hot spots to ignite, more bad guys to stuff or cuff, dreams to hold on to, he thought. Stone was on his own. He’d forget about him for the time being and let fate run its course.

Collins was up the ramp, kicking through a few boxes strewed before him when he heard Dugula squawking for answers as Asp and Python snapped on the leg irons, removed the plastic cuffs at gunpoint, then clamped the warlord to the cuffs on the bench.

He marched up to Dugula, slashed a backhand across his mouth.

“I’ll say this one time only, Habir. Any more whining, any crap out of you at all, even give me that evil eye once more, I’ll put one through your eye and dump you off with the rest of your garbage outside,” Collins rasped. “You’ll know what this is all about when I’m damn good and ready to clue you in. Not another goddamn word! So sit back and enjoy the flight.” He stood, boring Dugula with his no-shit stare, found the warlord cowed into silence.

Where there was life, the guy figured there was hope, Collins thought, and left him to stew and taste the blood on his lip. He then passed out the orders, dividing up the duties between monitoring their consoles for any traffic in the area and securing the perimeter outside the Hercules. An all-clear from his commandos at the consoles, and he felt that insidious weight settle back on his shoulders.

Striding aft, he stared at the distant horizon. The warbirds were gone, Wild Card six minutes on the clock already. What the hell was that big bastard all about anyway? he wondered. Angered still the colonel had bucked the game plan, he recalled giving the tactical shift by Wild Card a long few moments’ worth of spectating. Sure, the big guy could move, a pro, no doubt in his mind, but that transport truck had been indirectly dumped on its side by his Apache. It didn’t take much martial skill or effort to plow a 40 mm knockout punch into badly mauled Somalis crawling out of that rig, but Stone had bored in, just the same, going for broke. The back-shooting of two on the fly he didn’t have a problem with—hell, he would have done the same, all that honor and facing down the other guy, armed and on equal footing, just a bunch of Hollywood nonsense. It irked him, finally, that Stone had beaten him to Dugula, the new guy first to haul in a door prize, but he wasn’t about to tip his hand that the old warrior pride had been stung. He knew a whole lot more than some glory on the battlefield was at stake.

BOLAN WAS UNDER no illusions he could save the village. Given the length of time Dugula’s genocide campaign had been underway, the thickness and numbers of black clouds rising to blot out the landscape, and swarms of vultures that seemed to multiply out of nowhere the closer the Black Hawk bore down on the massacre, the Executioner had to assume saving any innocents would simply prove an exercise in futility.

If that was the case, Bolan had an alternative going in.

Whatever Collins’s reasoning for not participating in what the soldier saw as the final solution to the Dugula atrocity, the least he could do for the dead was exact more than a few pounds of flesh from the savages.

His com link tied into the flight crews of the Black Hawk and Apache, he handed out the orders as soon as they soared over the hills. Bolan found utter chaos down there, black smoke cloaking entire areas of what he could only view as a vision of Hell. He made out brief bursts of autofire rattling throughout the village, screams whipped away by rotor wash, spotted men and women still being run down, shot. If this wasn’t worth fighting against, risking his life for…

Whether Collins had shown his true colors as a savage remained to be seen.

Bolan put together his attack strategy based on enemy numbers, village layout, civilian body count. The majority of Somali thugs appeared to be wrapping up their grisly cleansing chore, a series of pyres confined to the far eastern edge of the campsite. He figured fifteen to twenty still torching the dead, that hardforce fit best for some Apache chain-gun pronouncement of their fate. There were still pockets of gunmen on the move as he sighted them lurching about between rows of beehive huts, combing for any survivors, skirting along a straight north-to-south sweep. With all the smoke taking to the sky, shielding the birds, and coupled with what he believed was their single-minded obsession to murder and burn, Bolan figured they had a few moments to spare before the enemy noticed they were about to be hit.

Bolan gave it to the pilots, ordered his Black Hawk crew to drop him off at the southeastern edge of the village. There was no time to lay it out, diagram tactics and such. The Apache was to strafe the pyre grounds and churn up anything that cropped up with a gun, take out everything on wheels. To his mild surprise they copied, but why wouldn’t they? He shared leadership with Collins, but that alone was starting to make him wonder. There was no time to question motives or ponder all that Collins had done and failed to do as far as this leg of the mission fell. Bolan was on his own, and he told the four commandos Collins had handed over as much. They were to sit tight, help the M-60 door gunner with firepower from the air.

“So, tell me, why bring us along in the first place?” Roadrunner asked.

“We’re supposed to just sit up here and scratch ourselves, Colonel?” Tsunami added.

“Contagion,” Bolan told them, as the Black Hawk veered in the direction where it would drop him off. “The good major seemed real concerned about his guys coming into contact with some unspecified disease down there. Consider this a favor. You want to cover me from up here or play with yourselves, that’s up to you.”

A shrug, a grunt, a soft shake of the head but Bolan could almost read the thoughts behind the body language. He wasn’t looking to play hero, aware he could use all the help on the ground he could get. The problem was he wasn’t sure he could trust them. And if he pulled it off by himself, say cuffed and brought back a few top henchmen to Collins? Perhaps, he decided, it was time to take a deeper measure of the Cobra leader. His suspicion was that Collins had hung him out here to burn. If so, then why?

“Have it your way, Colonel,” Tsunami said as the Black Hawk lowered, the LZ clear of any hardforce as far as Bolan could tell. “Good luck.”

The Executioner jumped off, M-16 out and ready to announce his presence. Bolan didn’t have long to wait as two goons in skullcaps appeared from between a row of huts already ablaze. They swung his way, eyes wide, confused and shocked, but just in time for Bolan to wax them off their feet.

OMARI NAHBAT BELIEVED that not only were they doing a service for their country, but they also were performing God’s work. Surely, he thought, God wouldn’t want his children to suffer a slow, agonizing death from plagues that had no cure. Even if there was medicine to relieve their misery, it would only prolong a life that would end soon enough, flesh succumbing eventually to the ravaging dictates of plague. It was God’s will, since any antibiotics or painkillers that found their way into the country always ran out—or were pilfered by the strong who were meant to rule. Why fight the course of nature? That was hardly murder in his eyes, as he watched the corpses dragged by Ethiopians or the more brave of heart of his clansmen, the dead flung or rolled into the leaping flames. This was containment, pure and simple, a way to save the healthy populace from plague, spare the strong and healthy. Who or what could fight invisible killers, anyway? Fire was the only cure, cremation on the spot of the afflicted the only answer, the way he and the others saw it. There were no regulated state-run hospitals in his country, and doctors usually came in from beyond the borders, provided, of course, they had the nerve, the cash or the medicine to sell just to stay long enough to waste their time on the walking dead. Disease was as monstrous and unforgiving a killer as famine in Somalia, and it was everywhere.

The shriek jarred him. Nahbat slipped the AK-47 off his shoulder. Two of his clansmen, he found, wrestled with what he assumed had been a corpse. Arms thrashed, a cry rang out, then they tossed the boy’s body into the fire. One of them stepped back, chuckling, slapping his palms as if that might wash away any disease he might have come into contact with. The awful scream chilled Nahbat for a moment, shivering him to the bone, but he was grateful when it ended moments later.

He turned away, suddenly wondering, as he searched the line of clansmen, where Hussein had gone. There had been something in the boy’s eyes he had found unsettling. What was it? Horror? Contempt for the rest of them? Judgment? He was young, unaccustomed to the harsh realities of life, but that was no excuse for Hussein to neglect his duties, to not pull his weight. The boy needed to learn respect, he thought, show gratitude to a cousin who had given him life beyond being a simple goatherd and who might have perhaps been destined to suffer the same fate as the afflicted in the remote regions of the country.

The shooting was subsiding now to the south, the stink of plastic on fire from that direction flung up his nose, compounding the queasy churn in his gut as he found still more huts being torched. He strode from the pyres, both to clear his senses of burning flesh and to find Hussein. He had been standing at the edge of the pit moments ago, but the boy’s familiar short, spindly frame was nowhere to be found.

He needed to have a talk with Hussein anyway, find the truth of whatever was in the boy’s heart. There was no room in the clan for weaklings. If he discovered Hussein couldn’t cut it, he would have to kill his cousin, if only to save face.

He was forging into a wall of drifting smoke, searching the village, the fires spreading now, warping the plastic-covered tents, when he thought he spotted a large black object in the sky. It appeared to fly south, there then gone, but it was nearly impossible to make out what it was, the towering barricades of smoke all but obscuring his view.

He decided it was nothing more than his senses bombarded by the task at hand, eyes playing tricks, and went in search of Hussein.

“COME WITH ME, little one. Do not be afraid. I will take you from this place.”

He heard himself say it, only Hussein Nahbat didn’t believe his own words of assurance, much less feel any confidence he could pull off a disappearing act. If he did manage to escape into the surrounding wasteland, leading this boy to safety, then what? Where would he go? His parents were dead, and the village he had come from had perished recently from famine or disease, or so his cousin had said. Better to die, wandering in self-imposed exile, he decided, wasting away, step by step, hungry and thirsty, leaving his and the boy’s fate in the hands of God than play any part in the evil around him. Beyond his flesh, he had a soul still to think about, to attempt to save in the eyes of a merciful God. And surely God would judge this evil, he had to believe, in a world far better than the one he so desperately wished to escape.

He wanted to think himself a coward for running, not standing up to them, fighting back, but what could he do? He was only one against a small army of murderers. Not only that, he wasn’t sure he could even pull the trigger on his clansmen, despite the fact he knew they were evil men who deserved only death. And if he didn’t participate in throwing the dead—and, God have mercy, the dying—into the fires or shoot down unarmed women and children, they would deem him unworthy to live among their ranks, brand then execute him as traitor and coward. Flee, then, leave it all to fate. Perhaps, at the very least, he could find a way to spare one innocent from this madness, even if that meant risking his own life.

The sudden chatter of weapons fire from nearby jolted him. Nearly gagging behind his bandanna from any number of ghastly smells, he stared at the child, figured he was no more than five or six. It was hard to tell how old he actually was, the boy little more than a dark, emaciated scarecrow, flesh hanging loose on a body that hadn’t seen perhaps even a morsel of wheat, a crumb of bread, he believed, in days. The eyes were sunken, lifeless orbs, the face nearly a skull, that death’s-head expression he had seen on children who were too weak from hunger to even speak. Hussein felt the tears coming back, the burning mist equal parts grief and air singed by heat and the sting of death. How the boy had been missed by his clansmen, he couldn’t say.

Fate? Divine intervention?

Somehow he had gotten this far, managed to slip away, the others too consumed by their hideous undertaking, a few of them even laughing and joking about what they did, their callous displays somehow making the atrocity even more revolting. It had been an accident—or was it something else again?—when he had stumbled over what he had believed at first was a discarded bundle of rags.

He laid down his assault rifle. He had never fired the weapon, never would. He reached out a hand, swept away the debris the boy had hidden under.

“We must go.”

Did he see a flicker of hope in those eyes?

The boy took his hand, too weak to stand on his own, Nahbat knew, so he scooped the child up, clutching him to his chest.

He looked around at the firestorms consuming their homes, searching, fearing his armed brethren would discover him now, just as he was moving. He coughed, the sound alarming him, afraid he would be heard by roving killers, but he hoped the drifting banks of smoke would help conceal his escape. Beyond two fires, nearly converging, he saw open land. He was skirting around the dead who had been shot where they stood when he heard, “Hussein! Stop!”

He thought he would be sick, felt his legs nearly fold as despair froze him in his tracks. There would be no rational explanation in the eyes of his cousin, he knew, for this action, much less forgiveness.

So be it.

He turned slowly, a nauseous lurch in his heart. As he watched his cousin step through the drifting smoke, the AK-47 up and aimed his way, he experienced a moment of blinding clarity, a strange peace settling over him. It was over; both he and the boy were dead, but he wouldn’t beg for their lives.

“You disappoint me greatly, Hussein.”

“As do you and the others, cousin.”

He decided to try to reason with Omari, if only for the boy, even though he knew it was hopeless. “Do not do this, Omari.”

His cousin laughed. “You would die for him? For what? Why? You would risk catching plague and infect the rest of us?”

He smiled at his cousin. “You are already infected, I am afraid.”

“I have handled none of them, you fool, unlike you, who clutch that boy and are probably now infected yourself.”

“I was referring to your soul.”

The weapon was lowering, Omari considering something, baffled, it seemed, then Hussein saw the madness fly back into his eyes. Even before the weapon was up and blazing, Hussein Nahbat had a stark revelation, aware in his dying moment, as he felt the bullets tearing first into the boy, that he had only been dreaming a fool’s dream for thinking he and the boy could have survived this chaos.

CHAPTER FOUR

They were teenagers, fourteen, eighteen tops, but Bolan knew all too painfully well youth received no special consideration in a world where anarchy and savagery dictated who lived to steal a few more years on the planet. With the average life expectancy of a Somali male roughly two decades, if famine or drought or disease didn’t get them, they were snapped up by warlords to shoot it out with rival clansmen, profit somehow off the misery of their countrymen or marched out to commit genocide when there was no food or medicine to plunder from relief aid. An education on the hard facts, the dark side of life came by way of the sword. If they didn’t want to fight, they were killed on the spot.

Simple as that.

But who was to blame in the final analysis? Bolan had to wonder. The one who handed them the weapon, or the one who freely accepted it? Both?

No matter really, he knew, since a bullet would kill him no matter who fired it, whether a raving sociopath, a frightened kid threatened by elders to do murderous deeds, or a warrior fully seasoned with the blood of other warriors on his hands.

One of the boys was dead before he hit the ground, cradling something, the other standing, capping off another and unnecessary burst into unfeeling flesh, then taking in what he had done, head cocked halfway toward the Executioner, oblivious to all else, eyes twinkling mirrors of the firestorms. Was that pride in the eyes? The boy satisfied? Whatever sick drama had played out here, Bolan would never know but he could venture a guess. The soldier glimpsed the shredded ruins of the small child, butchered alongside with what he assumed was his potential rescuer, then he pounded a burst of autofire up the back of their killer. The boy never knew what hit him, and it was just as well, Bolan thought. Mercy, if any was due, was reserved for the afterlife.

There would be time enough, assuming he walked out of here in one piece, to feel hot anger later. Even still, he knew there could never be any reasoning—or mercy shown for the guilty—for the madness he found here. The Executioner briefly felt a curious, distant, otherworldly sense, as light as the wind, slightly disembodied even as he waded deeper into this horror. It was as if he’d been here before, and he had, too many times, in fact, to tally. It struck him—as he heard the Apache unload Hellfire missiles, the stutter of weapons fire from the Black Hawk mowing down illegal combatants—all of this murder of innocents strewed before him, a zenith of man’s inhumanity to man, had always been here, somewhere in time and place, one way one or another, throughout the ages. Human nature was the only one constant, and sad but true, that went double for animal man.

The guilty had to be punished, no exceptions, no mercy. High time, he decided, for a little Old Testament vengeance.

Bolan melted into, then swept out of the drifting smoke, his gut knotted with a grapefruit-size chunk of raw anger, despite the intention to roll into this a stone-cold professional. Unless he was a psychopath or simply evil, Bolan knew no man could fully digest without the first flicker of wrenching emotion the atrocity that had happened here. With the full slamming force of death in his face, the bile squirmed in his gut for a moment, urging him on to wax as many armed killers as quickly and mercilessly as possible. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed the dead; vultures, brazen and impatient to gorge, descending now on bodies. He could ill afford to concern himself with unfeeling flesh, dwell on the full, hideous impact of all these lives snuffed out so callously. And if there was contagion here, he was willing to risk infection, if only to avenge this monstrosity, Collins be damned.

They were running everywhere dead ahead, trying to flee certain death from above, haphazard human—or inhuman—traffic rearing up in his sights as he came out of the thickest patch of smoke. Closing on the hungry bonfires consuming diseased flesh, a few of the gunmen fired wild bursts at the warbirds, squawking in panic and confusion over this sudden final judgment of their deed. Three, then four hardmen wheeled around the corner of a firewall dancing up a hut that used to provide the most meager of shelter, he assumed, for the late occupants. They skidded to a halt, ten or so paces from Bolan, sandaled feet kicking up dust. Figure the horrific pounding of explosions and the sight of their own getting a heavy-metal dose of their own poison was too much for them to stomach, fleeing now to save themselves.

There was nowhere for them to run or hide.

Two of them stared at the sight of the tall white man who had marched out of nowhere, staring ahead as if he were some avenging angel of doom that had materialized out of the smoke. Their eyes wide, the soldier read the looks, then heard the muffled cries from behind bandannas. It sounded as if they wanted their lives spared, a show of mercy from the lone invader. It was all just some terrible mistake. Two of them were on the verge, it looked, of throwing down their arms.

How could they expect that which they had never shown? Bolan decided, and blew them off their feet, a raking blast of steel-jacketed projectiles down the line, flinging them back toward other running and doomed killing brethren being gored and gutted from the sky.

There was no point, Bolan knew, in engaging in a long and protracted sweep of the village and its perimeter. Fire was eating up anything left standing. The smoke was so thick, so putrid it left little doubt to Bolan the savages had completed their task.

What was left of the hardforce was pretty much chopped up or blown into the firewalls next as a Hellfire missile ripped through a motor pool, ten or more broken dark figurines taking to the air above the crunching blast. A half dozen far from the epicenter were sent staggering about from the shock wave, howling next, flinching, darting from renewed bursts of terror no doubt kicking them into high gear as wreckage hammered home.

Ducking under a winging slab of metal, Bolan hosed down a few more Somali killers, then changed clips on the advance, began searching the hellgrounds.

The evil fumes pouring into his senses was enough to nearly knock even the most battle-hardened soldier off his feet, and Bolan knew he wasn’t above any queasy roil in his gut. He swiveled, searching, attempting to control any deep intakes of the foul air. He spotted an armed runner to his nine, hit the trigger on his M-16. The Executioner drove the gunner into his comrade, who was minus an arm just above the elbow from the Hellfire amputation. A mercy burst, and the amputee dropped in his tracks in an ungainly flop, face plastered to earth.

All done?

Bolan listened to raging flames, scoured the dead for wounded or live ones, bodies strewed and stacked in what was a fairly tight but wide circle where the warbirds had unleashed their final ring of doom, two or three flaming technical carcasses seeming to float back to Earth like some ghastly magic act.

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

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

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

Was it enough? Was it ever?

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

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

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

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

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

“News to me.”

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

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

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

“Concern.”

“What?” Collins snapped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One or two.”

“You’re shitting me, I hope.”

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

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

Bolan hesitated, then said, “Yeah.”

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

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

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

What?

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

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

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

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

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