Kitabı oku: «Conflict Zone»

“Change of plans,” Bolan snapped. “Follow me.”

The Executioner turned and raced with the hostage toward a line of vehicles. A shot rang out behind them, followed instantly by a dozen volleys.

Turning, Bolan raked the compound with a long burst from his Steyr AUG. Mandy fumbled with her pistol, getting off several shots, yelping as a round stung her palm.

Reaching the motor pool, Bolan chose a jeep at random, slid behind the wheel and gunned its engine into snarling life as Mandy scrambled into the shotgun seat.

“Hang on!” he said, flooring the gas pedal, barreling through the middle of the camp to reach the access road—and freedom.

Conflict Zone

Mack Bolan_®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

—William Hazlitt

“On the Pleasure of Hating” in

The Plain Speaker (1826)

I can’t stop hate. No one in history has come close, so far. But I can interrupt atrocities, beginning now.

—Mack Bolan

“The Executioner”

For Corporal Jason Dunham, USMC

April 14, 2004

God Keep

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

PROLOGUE

Esosa Village, Delta State, Nigeria

David Uzochi had been fortunate. He’d left home an hour before dawn to hunt, and he had been rewarded with a herd of topi when his ancient Timex wristwatch told him it was 8:13 a.m.

With game in sight, it came down to his skill with the equally ancient .303-caliber Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle he carried, its nine-pound weight as familiar to Uzochi as the curve of his wife’s hip or breast.

He’d nearly smiled, thinking how pleased Enyinnaya would be when he brought home the meat, but he had caught himself in time, before the twitch of his lip or glint of sunlight on his white teeth could betray him to the grazing topi.

His first shot had been the only one he needed. As the other topi dashed away frantically to save themselves, Uzochi had been swift to clean his kill. There was no time to waste, when flies appeared to find a wound almost before the skin was broken, and the brutal sun began corrupting flesh before the last heartbeat had time to fade away.

The four-mile walk back to Esosa was a good deal shorter than his outward journey, since he was no longer seeking game, and he wouldn’t rest once along the way, despite the forty-something kilograms of flesh and bone draping his left shoulder. Uzochi drew a kind of buoyancy from his success, doubly thankful that he had meat enough to share with some of his neighbors.

The sound of the explosion made him break stride, pausing long enough to lock on its apparent point of origin.

The pipeline. What else could it be?

He cursed the Itsekiri bastards who were almost certainly responsible. Their war against pipelines and the pumping fields meant less than nothing to Uzochi, but he understood the Itsekiris’ hatred for his people, the Ijaw. And if this raid had brought them near Esosa…

Any doubt was banished from Uzochi’s mind when he saw the first black plume of smoke against the clear sky. The pipeline passed within a thousand yards of his village, and how could any Itsekiri cutthroat neglect such a target when it was presented?

Uzochi began to run, jogging at first, until he stabilized the topi’s deadweight to his new pace, then accelerating. He couldn’t sprint with the topi across his shoulders, and he never once considered dropping it.

Whoever managed to survive the raid would still need food.

Tears blurred his vision as he ran, thinking of Enyinnaya in the Itsekiris’ hands. Perhaps she’d seen or heard them coming and had fled in time.

A distant crackling sound of gunfire, now.

The sudden pain he felt was like a knife blade being plunged into his heart. It didn’t slow him, rather the reverse, but in his wounded heart David Uzochi knew he was too late.

Too late to save the only woman he had ever loved.

Too late to save the child growing inside her.

But, perhaps, not too late for revenge.

If he’d forgotten where the village lay, Uzochi could have found it by the smoke. When he was still a half mile distant, he could smell the smoke and something else. A stench of burning flesh that killed his appetite and made his stomach twist inside him.

It was over by the time he reached Esosa. Twenty minutes since he’d heard the last gunshots, and by the time he stood in front of the smoking ruins of his home, even the dust raised by retreating murderers had settled back to earth.

Uzochi didn’t need the dust, though. He could track his enemies as he tracked game, with patience that assured him of a kill.

He would begin as soon as he had dug a grave for Enyinnaya and their unborn child. As soon as he had cooked a flank steak from the topi over glowing coals that once had been his home.

He needed strength for the pursuit.

Strength, and the ancient Lee-Enfield.

It meant his death to track the Itsekiri butchers, but he wouldn’t die alone.

CHAPTER ONE

Bight of Benin, Gulf of Guinea

They had flown out of Benin, from one of those airstrips where money talked and no one looked closely at the customers or cargo. In such places, it was better to forget the face and name of anyone you met—assuming any names were given—and rehearse the standard lines in case police came later, asking questions.

Which plane? What men? Why would white men come to me?

“One minute to the beach,” the pilot said. His voice was tinny through the earphones Mack Bolan wore.

The comment called for no response, and Bolan offered none. He focused on the blue-green water far below him and the coastline of Nigeria approaching rapidly. He saw the sprawling delta of the Niger River, which had lent its name both to the country and to Delta State.

His destination, more or less.

“Still time to cancel this,” Jack Grimaldi said from the pilot’s seat. He spoke with no conviction, knowing from experience that Bolan wouldn’t cancel anything, but giving him the option anyway.

“We’re good,” Bolan replied, still focused on the world beyond and several thousand feet below his windowpane.

From takeoff, at the airstrip west of Cotonou, they’d flown directly out to sea. The Bight—or Bay—of Benin was part of the larger Gulf of Guinea, itself a part of the Atlantic Ocean that created the “bulge” of northwestern Africa. Without surveyor’s tools, no one could say exactly where the Bight became the Gulf, and Bolan didn’t count himself among the very few who cared.

His focus lay inland, within Nigeria, the eastern next-door neighbor of Benin. His mission called for blood and thunder, striking fast and hard. There’d been no question of his flying into Lagos like an ordinary tourist, catching a puddle-jumper into Warri and securing a guide who’d lead him to the doorstep of an armed guerrilla camp, located forty miles or so northwest of the bustling oil city.

No question at all.

Aside from the inherent risk of getting burned or blown before he’d cleared Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Bolan would have been traveling naked, without so much as a penknife at hand. Add weapons-shopping to his list of chores, and he’d likely find himself in a room without windows or exits, chatting with agents of Nigeria’s State Security Service.

No, thank you, very much.

Which brought him to the HALO drop.

It stood for High Altitude, Low Opening, the latter part a reference to Bolan’s parachute. HALO jumps, coupled with HAHO—high-opening—drops, were known in the trade as military free falls, each designed in its way to deliver paratroopers on target with minimal notice to enemies waiting below.

In HALO drops, the jumper normally bailed out above twenty thousand feet, beyond the range of surface-to-air missiles, and plummeted at terminal velocity—the speed where gravity’s pull canceled out drag’s resistance—then popped the chute somewhere below radar range. For purposes of stealth, metal gear was minimized, or masked with cloth in the case of weapons. Survival meant the jumper would breathe bottled oxygen until touchdown. In HAHO jumps, a GPS tracker would guide the jumper toward his target while he was airborne.

“Four minutes to step-off,” Grimaldi informed him.

With a quick “Roger that” through his stalk microphone, Bolan rose and moved toward the side door of the Beechcraft KingAir 350.

It was closed. Bolan donned his oxygen mask, then waited for Grimaldi to do likewise before he opened the door. They were cruising some eight thousand feet below the plane’s service ceiling of 35,000, posing a threat of hypoxia that reduced a human being’s span of useful consciousness to an average range of five to twelve minutes. Beyond that deadline lay dizziness, blurred vision and euphoria that wouldn’t fade until the body—or the aircraft—slammed headlong into Mother Earth.

When Grimaldi was masked and breathing easily, Bolan unlatched the aircraft’s door and slid it to his left, until it locked open. A sudden rush of wind threatened to suck him from the plane, but he hung on, biding his time.

He was dressed for the drop in an insulated polypropylene knit jumpsuit, which he’d shed and bury at the LZ. Beneath it, he wore jungle camouflage. Over the suit, competing with his parachute harness, Bolan wore combat suspenders and webbing laden with ammo pouches, canteens, cutting tools and a folding shovel. His primary weapon, a Steyr AUG assault rifle, was strapped muzzle-down to his left side, thereby avoiding the Beretta 93-R selective-fire pistol holstered on his right hip. To accommodate two parachutes—the main and reserve chutes, hedging his bets—Bolan’s light pack hung low, spanking him with every step.

“Two minutes,” Grimaldi said.

Bolan checked his wrist-mounted GPS unit, which resembled an oversize watch. It would direct him to his target, one way or another, but he had to do his part. That meant making the most of his free fall, steering his chute after he opened it, and finally avoiding any trouble on the ground until he’d found his mark.

Easy to say. Not always easy to accomplish.

At the thirty-second mark, Bolan removed his commo headpiece, leaving it to dangle by its curly cord somewhere behind him. He was ready in the open doorway, leaning forward for the push-off, when the clock ran down. He counted off the numbers in his head, hit zero in a rush and stepped into space.

Where he was literally blown away.

EIGHT SECONDS FELT like forever while tumbling head over heels in free fall. It took that long for Bolan to regain his bearings and stabilize his body—by which time he had plummeted 250 feet toward impact with the ground.

He checked his GPS unit again, peering through goggles worn to shield his eyes from being wind-blasted and withered in their sockets. Noting that he’d drifted something like a mile off target since he’d left the Beechcraft, he corrected, dipped his left shoulder and fought the wind that nearly slapped him through another barrel roll.

Lateral slippage brought him back on target, hurtling diagonally through space on a northwesterly course. Bolan couldn’t turn to check the Beechcraft’s progress, but he knew Grimaldi would be heading back to sea, reversing his direction in a wide loop over the Gulf of Guinea before returning to the airstrip in Benin, minus one passenger.

The airfield’s solitary watchman wouldn’t notice—or at least, he wouldn’t care. He had been paid half his fee up front, and would receive the rest when the Stony Man pilot was safely on the deck, with no police to hector him with questions. Whether he had dumped Bolan at sea or flown him to the Kasbah, it meant less than nothing to the Beninese.

Twenty seconds in and he had dropped another 384 feet, while covering perhaps four hundred yards in linear distance. His target lay five miles and change in front of him, concealed by treetops, but he didn’t plan to cover all that distance in the air.

What goes up had to go down.

Bolan couldn’t have said exactly when he reached terminal velocity, but the altimeter clipped to his parachute harness kept him apprised of his distance from impact with terra firma.

Eleven minutes after leaping from the Beechcraft, Bolan yanked the rip cord to deploy his parachute. He’d packed the latest ATPS canopy—Advanced Tactical Parachute System, in Army lingo—a cruciform chute designed to cut his rate of descent by some thirty percent. Which meant, in concrete terms, he’d only be dropping at twenty feet per second, with a twenty-five-percent reduction in potential injury.

Assuming that it worked.

The first snap nearly caught him by surprise, as always, with the harness biting at his crotch and armpits. At a thousand feet and dropping, he was well below the radar that would track Grimaldi’s plane through its peculiar U-turn, first inland, then back to sea again.

And what would any watchers make of that, even without a Bolan sighting on their monitors? Knowing the aircraft hadn’t landed, would they then assume that it had dropped cargo or personnel, and send a squad of soldiers to investigate?

Perhaps.

But if they went to search the point where the Stony Man pilot had turned, they would be missing Bolan by some ten or fifteen miles.

With any luck, it just might be enough.

He worked the steering lines, enjoying the sensation as he swooped across the sky, with Africa’s landscape scrolling beneath his feet. Each second brought it closer, but he wasn’t simply falling down. Each heartbeat also carried Bolan northward, closer to his target and the goal of his assignment, swiftly gaining ground.

Four hundred feet above the ground, the treetops didn’t look like velvet anymore. Their limbs and trunks were clearly solid objects that could flay the skin from Bolan’s body, crush his bones, drive shattered ribs into his heart and lungs. Or, he might escape injury while fouling his chute on the upper branches of a looming giant, dangling a hundred feet or more above the jungle floor.

Best to avoid the trees entirely, if he could, and drop into a clearing when he found one. If he found one.

While Bolan looked for an LZ, he also watched for people on the ground below him. Beating radar scanners with his HALO drop didn’t mean he was free and clear, if someone saw him falling from the sky and passed word on to the army or MOPOL, the mobile police branch of Nigeria’s national police force.

Bolan wouldn’t fire on police—a self-imposed restriction he’d adopted at the onset of his one-man war against the Mafia a lifetime earlier—and he hadn’t dropped in from the blue to play tag in the jungle with a troop of soldiers who’d be pleased to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.

Better by far if he was left alone to go about his business unobstructed.

Bolan saw a clearing up ahead, two hundred yards and closing. He adjusted his direction and descent accordingly, hung on and watched the mossy earth come up to meet him in a rush.

GRIMALDI DIDN’T like the plan, but, hey, what else was new? Each time he ferried Bolan to another drop zone, he experienced the fear that this might be their last time out together, that he’d never see the warrior’s solemn face again.

And that he’d be to blame.

Not in the sense of taking out his oldest living friend, but rather serving Bolan up to those who would annihilate him without thinking twice. A kind of Meals on Wings for cannibals.

That was ridiculous, of course. Grimaldi knew it with the portion of his mind that processed rational, sequential thoughts. But knowing and believing were sometimes very different things.

Granted, he could have begged off, passed the job to someone else, but what would that accomplish? Nothing beyond handing Bolan to a stranger who would get him to the slaughterhouse on time, without a fare-thee-well. At least Grimaldi understood what had been asked of Bolan, every time his friend took on another mission that could be his last.

The morbid turn of thought left the ace pilot disgusted with himself. He tried to shake it off, whistled a snatch of something tuneless for a moment, then gave up on that and watched the Gulf of Guinea passing underneath him. Were the people in the boats craning their necks, tracking his engine sounds and following his progress overhead? Was one of them, perhaps, a watcher who had seen the Beechcraft earlier, reported it to other watchers on dry land, and now logged his return?

It was a possibility, of course, but there was nothing he could do about it. Radar would have marked his plane’s arrival in Nigerian airspace and tracked him to the inland point where he had turned. The natural assumption would be that he’d dropped something or someone; the mystery only began there.

Or, at least, so he was hoping.

Nigeria imported and exported drugs. According to reports Grimaldi had seen from the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Colombian cocaine and heroin from Afghanistan came in via South Africa, while home-grown marijuana was exported by the ton. Police, as usual, bagged ten percent or more of the illicit cargoes flowing back and forth across their borders, when they weren’t hired to protect the shipments.

So, they might think he had dropped a load of drugs.

And then what?

It was sixty-forty that they’d order someone to investigate the theoretical drop zone, which meant relaying orders from headquarters to some outpost in the field. Maybe the brass in Lagos would reach out to their subordinates in Warri, who in turn would form a squad to roll out, have a look around, then report on what they found.

Which should be nothing.

If they went looking for drugs, they’d check the area where Grimaldi had turned his plane, then backtrack for a while along his flight path, coming or going, to see if they’d missed anything. There were no drugs to find, so they’d go home empty-handed and pissed off at wasting their time.

But if they weren’t looking for drugs…

He knew the search might be conducted differently if the Nigerians went looking for intruders. Whether they were educated on HALO techniques or not, they had to know that men manipulating parachutes could travel farther than a bale of cargo dropping from the sky, and that the men, once having landed, wouldn’t wait around for searchers to locate them.

It would be a different game, then, with a different cast of players. MOPOL still might be involved, but it was also possible that Bolan could be up against the State Security Service, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the competing National Intelligence Agency. The SSS was Nigeria’s FBI, in effect, widely accused of domestic political repression, while the NIA was equivalent to America’s CIA, and the DIA handled military intelligence.

In the worst-case scenario, Grimaldi supposed that all three agencies might decide to investigate his drop-in, with MOPOL agents thrown in for variety. And how many hunters could Bolan evade before his luck ran out?

Grimaldi’s long experience with Bolan, starting as a kidnap “victim” and continuing thereafter as a friend and willing ally, had taught him not to underestimate the Executioner’s abilities. No matter what the odds arrayed against him, the Sarge had always managed to emerge victorious.

So far.

But he was only human, after all.

One hell of a human, for sure, but still human.

Grimaldi trusted Bolan to succeed, no matter the task he was assigned. But if he fell along the way, revenge was guaranteed.

The pilot swore it on his soul, whatever that was worth.

He didn’t know jackshit about Nigeria, beyond the obvious. It was a state in Africa, beset by poverty—yet oil rich—disease and chaos verging on the point of civil war, where he would stand out like a sore white thumb. But the official language was English, because of former colonial rule, so he wouldn’t be stranded completely.

And if Bolan didn’t make it out, Grimaldi would be going on a little hunting trip.

An African safari, right.

He owed the big guy that, at least.

And Jack Grimaldi always paid his debts.

TOUCHDOWN WAS better than Bolan had any right to expect after stepping out of an airplane and plummeting more than 24,000 feet to Earth. He bent his knees, tucked and rolled as they’d taught him at Green Beret jump school back in the old days, and came up with only a few minor bruises to show for the leap.

Only bruises so far.

Step two was covering his tracks and getting out of there before some hypothetical pursuer caught his scent and turned his drop into a suicide mission.

Bolan took it step by step, with all due haste. He shed the parachute harness first thing, along with his combat webbing and weapons. Next, he stripped off the jumpsuit that had saved him from frostbite while soaring, but which now felt like a baked potato’s foil wrapper underneath the Nigerian sun. That done, he donned the combat rigging once again and went to work.

Fourth step, reel in the parachute and all its lines, compacting same into the smallest bundle he could reasonably manage. That done, he unsheathed his folding shovel and began to dig.

It didn’t have to be a deep grave, necessarily. Just deep enough to hide his jumpsuit, helmet, bottled oxygen and mask, the chute and rigging. If some kind of nylon-eating scavenger he’d never heard of came along and dug it up that night, so be it. Bolan would be long gone by that time, his mission either a success or a resounding, fatal failure.

More than depth, he would require concealment for the burial, in case someone came sniffing after him within the next few hours. To that end, he dug his dump pit in the shadow of a looming mahogany some thirty paces from the clearing where he’d landed, and spent precious time re-planting ferns he had disturbed during the excavation when he’d finished.

It wasn’t perfect—nothing man-made ever was—but it would do.

He had a four-mile hike ahead of him, through forest that had so far managed to escape the logger’s ax and chainsaw. As he understood it from background research, Nigeria, once in the heart of West Africa’s rain forest belt, had lost ninety-five percent of its native tree cover and now imported seventy-five percent of the lumber used in domestic construction. Some conservationists believed that there would be no forests left in the country by 2020, a decade and change down the road toward Doomsday.

That kind of slash-and-burn planning was seen throughout Africa, in agriculture, mineral prospecting, environmental protection, disease control—you name it. The native peoples once ruled and exploited by cruel foreign masters now seemed hell-bent on turning their ancestral homeland into a vision of post-apocalyptic hell, sacrificing Mother Nature on the twin altars of profit and national pride.

Of course, the foreigners were still involved, and if they didn’t always have traditional white faces, they were every bit as rapacious as Belgium’s old King Leopold or Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm. Africa still had treasures to steal or buy cheaply, and Nigeria’s main claim to fame was petroleum.

Which brought Bolan’s mind back front and center to his mission as he slogged through a forest whose upper canopy steamed, while its floor lay in warm, muggy shade.

The oil rush was on in Nigeria, had been for years now, and like any mineral boom, it spawned winners and losers. The haves and have-nots. In Nigeria’s case, the have-nots—or rather, some of them—had taken up arms to demand a piece of the action. Barring concessions that pleased them, they aimed to make life untenable for the haves.

Which led to Bolan traveling halfway around the world, sleeping on planes and later jumping out of one to drop from more than four miles high and land on hostile ground where he’d be hunted by both sides, if either one detected him.

All for a young woman he’d never met or heard of previously, whom he’d never really get to know, and whom he’d never see again if he pulled off the job at hand and saved her life.

The really weird part, from a “normal” individual’s perspective, was that none of it seemed strange to Bolan. Hell, it wasn’t even new. The maps and faces changed, of course, but it was what Mack Bolan did.

Well, some of what he did.

The rest of it was killing, plain but often far from simple. He’d received the Executioner nickname the hard way, earning it. A few had nearly rivaled Bolan’s record as a sniper when he wore his country’s uniform.

As for the rest, forget it.

If there was another fighting man or woman who could match his body count since Bolan had retired from military service to pursue a one-man war, it ranked among the best-kept secrets of all time.

He had a job to do, now, in Nigeria. Helping a total stranger out of trouble.

And there would be blood.

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Thirty-three hours prior to touchdown in Nigeria, Bolan had cruised along Skyline Drive in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, watching the marvels of nature scroll past his windows. As always, he knew that the drive was only the start of another long journey.

His destination that morning wasn’t the end.

It was a launching pad.

He blanked that out and took the Blue Ridge drive for what it was: a small slice of serenity within a life comprising primarily tension, violent action and occasional side trips into Bizarro Land.

Bolan enjoyed the drive, the trees and ferns flanking the two-lane blacktop, and the chance of seeing deer or other wildlife while en route. He’d never been a hunter in the “sporting” sense, and while he’d never thought of carrying a placard for the other side, it pleased him to see animals alive and well, wearing the skins or feathers they were born with.

When you’d dropped the hammer on enough men, he supposed, the “game” of killing lost its dubious appeal.

But stalking human predators, well, that was Bolan’s job. And it would never end, as long as he survived.

So be it. He had made a choice, in full knowledge that there could be no turning back, no change of mind or heart once the decision was translated into action. Bolan was the Executioner, and always would be.

War without end. Amen.

Which didn’t mean he couldn’t stop and smell the roses when he had the opportunity. What was he fighting for, if not the chance to lead a better and more peaceful life?

Of course, he fought for others. Sacrificed his future, in effect. There’d be no wife and kiddies, no white picket fence, no PTA meetings or Christmas parties at the nine-to-five office. No pension or gold watch when he’d put in his time.

Just death.

And he’d already had a preview of his own, stage-managed in Manhattan by the same folks who had built the installation that lay five or six miles down the scenic route.

Mack Bolan was no more.

Long live the Executioner.

BOLAN CLEARED security without a hitch. He passed a tractor harrowing one of the fields on his left as he drove toward the main house. Stony Man was a working farm, which paid some of the bills and supported its cover, since aerial photos would show cultivated fields and farmhands pursuing their normal duties.

Those photos wouldn’t reveal that the workers were extremely motivated cops and members of America’s elite military teams—Navy SEALs, Special Forces, Army Rangers, Marine Corps Force Recon—who spent duty rotations at Stony Man under a lifetime oath of secrecy. All armed. All dangerous.

There were risks involved in spying on Stony Man Farm. Each aircraft passing overhead was monitored on radar and by other means. If one appeared too nosy, there were means for dealing with the problem.

They included Stinger ground-to-air missiles and a dowdy-looking single-wide mobile home planted in the middle of the Farm’s airstrip. If friendly aircraft were expected, a tractor pulled the mobile home aside to permit landing. If intruders tried to land uninvited, the trailer not only blocked the runway, but could drop its walls on hinges to reveal quad-mounted TM-134 miniguns, each six-barreled weapon capable of firing four thousand 7.62 mm rounds per second.

Fifty yards out from the farmhouse, Bolan recognized Hal Brognola and Barbara Price waiting for him on the wide front porch. A couple of young shirtless warriors in blue jeans and work boots were painting the upper story of the house, a procedure that Bolan had never observed before. He caught Price glancing his way and couldn’t help smiling.

The home team waited for him where they stood. Bolan climbed the three porch steps and shook their hands in turn. Price’s greeting was professional, giving no hint of all the times they’d shared a bed in his upstairs quarters at the Farm, when he was passing through.

“Good trip?” Brognola asked, as always.

“Uneventful,” Bolan answered.

“That’s the best kind. Join us in the War Room?”

Bolan nodded, then followed Brognola and Price inside.

The War Room occupied roughly one-quarter of the farmhouse’s basement level. It was basically a high-tech conference room, with all the audiovisual bells and whistles, but Brognola had always called it the War Room, since discussions held around its meeting table always ended with an order to destroy some target that duly constituted authorities found themselves unable to touch by legitimate means.

Sooner or later, it came down to war.

Bolan supposed that somewhere in the Farm’s computer database there was a tally of the lives that had been terminated based on orders issued in that room. Bolan had never made a point of keeping score, and didn’t plan on starting now, but sometimes he got curious.

The Farm wasn’t his sole preserve. It issued orders to the fighting men of Able Team and Phoenix Force, as well, while dabbling here and there in God knew what covert attempts by other agencies to hold the savages at bay. Sometimes—most times—it worked, but only in the short-term. In the long war of Good versus Evil, whoever laid down the ground rules, there was no final victory, no irredeemable defeat.

There was only the struggle.

And it was about to resume.

Aaron Kurtzman—“the Bear” to his friends—was waiting when they reached the War Room, seated in the motorized wheelchair that was his chief mode of conveyance since a bullet in the back had left him paralyzed from the waist down. That had occurred during a raid on Stony Man, initiated by a traitor in the upper levels of the CIA, and it accounted for the ultrastrict security that cloaked the Farm today.

“I won’t ask you about your trip,” Kurtzman said, smiling as he put the crunch on Bolan’s hand.

Brognola humphed at that, making the others smile, then said, “Consistency’s a virtue.”

“Absolutely,” Price told him as she took her usual seat. “No one would ever doubt your virtue, Hal.”

“In my day, civilized discourse required amenities,” Brognola said. “But hey, screw it. Let’s get to work, shall we?”

“Sounds good,” Bolan replied, smiling.

“What do you know about Nigeria?” Brognola asked.

“It’s in West Africa,” Bolan said. “Ruled by France, then Britain, until independence in the early sixties. Trouble with Biafra in the same decade. There’s oil, and everybody wants it. Drugs, coming and going. Tribal conflict verging on a civil war at times, and throw in some religious upheaval. Advance-fee frauds that go around the world through e-mail. Bribes are the order of the day, never mind corruption. That’s it, in a nutshell.”

“You’ve hit all the basics,” the big Fed acknowledged. “Are you up to speed on MEND?”

“Guerrillas. Terrorists. The acronym escapes me at the moment,” Bolan said.

“You’re still well ahead of the norm,” Brognola said. “It’s the Movement for Emancipation of the Niger Delta, waging armed resistance against the federal government and foreign oil companies. You’ve heard of Marion King Hubbert?”

“No,” Bolan replied. “Can’t say I have.”

“No sweat. He died in 1989,” the big Fed stated. “A geo-physicist with Shell Oil, out of Houston, best known for his theories on capacity of oil and natural gas reserves. It boils down to what they call Hubbert Peak Theory.”

“Which is?” Bolan coaxed.

“Bare bones, the idea that Earth and every part of it have finite petro-gas reserves. Extraction supposedly follows a bell curve, increasing until pumping hits the ‘Hubbert peak,’ and then declining after that.”

“Sounds right,” Bolan replied. “They aren’t making any more dinosaurs.”

“So true,” Brognola said. “Anyway, the word from so-called experts at State is that MEND wants to create an ‘artificial Hubbert peak,’ whatever the hell that means. I don’t claim to understand it, but one of MEND’s spokesmen—a character calling himself Major-General Godswill Tammo—says the group plans to seize total control of the oil reserves in Delta State.”

“How are they doing so far?” Bolan asked.

“They haven’t captured any fields or pumping stations, but it’s not for lack of trying,” Brognola replied. “Their main deal, at the moment, is attacking pipelines, storage tanks, whatever they can reach. Also, they’re big on snatching CEOs and members of their families, whenever they can find an opening. Which brings us to the job at hand.”

Bolan sat quietly, waiting.

“Bear, if you please,” the big Fed prompted.

A screen behind Brognola came to life, displaying a candid photo of a ruddy-faced, balding corporate type wearing a tailored suit that Bolan knew was expensive.

“Jared Ross,” Brognola said by way of introduction. “He’s an executive V.P. in charge of production for K-Tech Petroleum, based in Warri. That’s a Delta State oil town, with roughly one-fifth of the state’s four-point-seven million people. Most of the foreign oil companies working in Nigeria have their headquarters in Warri, operating refineries at Ekpan, more or less next door.”

Bolan made the connection, saying, “He’s been kidnapped?”

“Not exactly. First, some background on the local tribes. They’re mainly Itsekiri and Ijaw, with Ijaw outnumbering the Itsekiri something like nine million to four hundred and fifty thousand. Anyway, for centuries they seemed to get along okay, but back in 1997 some genius in Lagos created an Ijaw government council, then put its headquarters in the heart of Itsekiri turf, in Warri. Maybe the result was intentional. Who knows? Long story short, when the smoke cleared, hundreds were dead and half a dozen petro installations had been occupied by rebels, cutting back production until soldiers took them out. MEND got its start from there, and in addition to the oil issue, you now have tribal warfare going full-blast in a region where they once had peace.”

Kurtzman spoke up, saying, “Beware the Feds who say, ‘We’re here to help.’”

“Which would be us, in this case,” Brognola replied. “Except the government in Lagos doesn’t know it, and we weren’t invited.”

“What’s the angle?” Bolan asked.

“You nearly had it when you asked if Jared Ross was kidnapped. It’s his daughter,” Brognola elaborated as another photo filled the screen.

Bolan saw a young woman in her late teens, maybe early twenties, smiling for the camera. She was blond and blue-eyed, fresh-faced, living the American dream. Bolan hoped it hadn’t turned into a dead-end nightmare.

“How long ago?” he asked.

“Last week,” Brognola said. “Six days and counting, now.”

“Do they have proof of life?”

“Seems so. The ransom note was flexible. MEND will accept a hundred million dollars for her safe return, or K-Tech’s pull-out from Nigeria.”

“That’s optimistic,” Bolan said.

“It’s fantasy. And Daddy doesn’t trust the local law to get her back. At least, not in one piece and breathing.”

So that’s where I come in, Bolan thought.

“I’ve got a CD file with all the players covered,” Brognola informed him, “if you want to look it over on your own.”

“Sounds good,” Bolan replied. “When would I have to leave?”

He already knew the answer, nodding as Brognola frowned and said, “They should’ve had us on it from day one. Let’s say ASAP.”

ALONE IN THE second-floor bedroom he used when at the Farm, Bolan read through Brognola’s files on his laptop. He started with background on Jared and Mandy Ross, found nothing unique or remarkable on either, and moved on to meet his opposition.

MEND, as Brognola had noted, was the source of most guerrilla violence in Delta State, but pinning down its leadership was problematic. An anonymous online article from The Economist, published in September 2008, described MEND as a group that “portrays itself as political organisation that wants a greater share of Nigeria’s oil revenues to go to the impoverished region that sits atop the oil. In fact, it is more of an umbrella organisation for several armed groups, which it sometimes pays in cash or guns to launch attacks.” It’s so-called war against pollution, Bolan saw, consisted in large part of dynamiting pipelines, each of which then fouled the area with another flood of oil. And more often than not hundreds of villagers perished while collecting the free oil, engulfed in flames from inevitable explosions.

According to the files Brognola had provided, two men seemed to dominate the hostile tribal factions that were presently at war in Delta State. Ekon Afolabi led the Itsekiri militants, a thirty-six-year-old man who’d been in trouble with the law since he was old enough to steal. Somewhere along the way, he had discovered ethnic pride and politics. Depending on the point of view, he’d either learned to fake the former, or was using it to make himself the Next Big Thing within his sphere of influence.

The candid shots of Afolabi showed a wiry man of average height, with close-cropped hair, a wild goatee and dark skin. In addition to tribal markings, his scrabble to the top, or thereabouts, had left him scarred in ways that would be useful for identifying his cadaver, but which didn’t seem to slow him in any kind of violent confrontation.

Afolabi’s second in command was Taiwo Babatunde, a hulk who nearly dwarfed his boss at six foot three and some three hundred pounds, but from his photos and the file Bolan surmised that Babatunde lacked the wits required to plot a palace coup, much less to pull it off and run the tribal army on his own. Call him the boss man’s strong right arm, a blunt tool that would flatten Afolabi’s opposition on demand.

And likely have a great time doing it.

The file named Afolabi’s soldiers as prime suspects in a dozen oil field raids, at least that many pipeline bombings and the murder of a newscaster from Delta Rainbow Television Warri who had criticized MEND for its violence. Communiqués demanding ransom for the safe return of Mandy Ross, while carefully anonymous, had been dissected by the FBI’s profiling team at Quantico, who claimed that certain trademark phrases ID’d Afolabi as their author.

Bolan hoped the Feds were right.

The Ijaw tribal opposition’s leader was Agu Ajani, turning twenty-nine next week, if he survived that long. He was another bad guy from the get-go, and while anyone could blame it on his childhood—orphaned at age four, warehoused by the state, then written off the first time he went AWOL, living hand-to-mouth among eight million strangers on the streets of Lagos—Bolan only cared about Ajani’s actions in the here and now.

By all accounts, he was a ruthless killer with a clear sadistic streak, one of the sort who’d rather leave his enemies shorthanded, courtesy of a machete or meat cleaver, than to kill them outright. Which was not to say he hadn’t put his share of bodies in the ground. Official sources credited his Ijaw faction with a thousand kills and counting in the ethnic war that ravaged Delta State.

In photos, Ajani didn’t look the part. He favored floral-patterned shirts, the tourist kind, with short sleeves showing off his slender arms. A missing pinky finger on his left hand told the story of a near-miss in a knife fight, but he’d won that scrap and every one thereafter.

Up to now.

If Ekon Afolabi’s number two was a behemoth, Ajani’s was a smaller version of himself, some thirty pounds lighter and three or four inches shorter, with a bland face that belied his rap sheet. Daren Jumoke was a suspect in half a dozen murders before he turned political and started killing in the name of his people. Jumoke’s “civilian” victims had been women, who were also raped. Bolan guessed that his juvenile record, if such things existed where he was going, would reveal a violent bully with a hyperactive sex drive and a deaf ear when it came to females saying no.

Killing Jumoke, Bolan thought, would be a public service. As it was, his gang apparently had no connection to the Ross kidnapping—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t find a way to use them in a pinch, maybe as cannon fodder to distract his Itsekiri opposition.

Bolan was starting to read about his native contact in Warri, one Obinna Umaru, when a muffled rapping on his door distracted him. He answered it and smiled at finding Barbara Price on his threshold.

“Finished your homework yet?” she asked.

“Almost.”

“I don’t want to distract you.”

“I could use a break,” he said, and stood aside.

She brushed against him, passing, and it sent a tingle racing through his body, as if he had touched a bare low-voltage wire.

“So, Africa again,” she said. “Your shots all up-to-date? Dengue fever? Yellow fever? Typhoid?”

“My rabies shot is out of date,” he told her.

“Don’t let anybody bite you, then.”

“I’ll make a note. Coffee?”

“It keeps me up all night,” she said, and smiled. “You have a few cups, though.”

“Will I be needing it?” he asked.

“Homework. You said it wasn’t finished.”

It was Bolan’s turn to smile. “Now that I think of it, I’ve barely started.”

“It’s best to be thorough.”

“I hear you.” Still smiling, he said, “Maybe I ought to take a shower first. To freshen up and clear my head.”

“Sounds good,” she said, hands rising to the buttons of her blouse. “I have to tell you, I’ve been feeling dirty all day long.”

CHAPTER THREE

Delta State, Nigeria

Bolan smelled the Itsekiri camp before he saw it. Supper cooking and open latrines, gasoline and diesel fuel, gun oil and unwashed bodies.

The unmistakable odors of men at war.

He had to watch for lookouts, as well as snares and booby traps. MEND’s rebels knew that they were hunted by the state, and by their tribal adversaries. They’d be foolish not to post guards on the camp’s perimeter, but Bolan wouldn’t know how thorough they had been until he tested the defenses for himself.

Beginning now.

There’d be no cameras or other electronic gear, of course. He would’ve heard a generator running by the time he closed the gap to half a mile, and there was nothing on the wind but human voices and the clanking, clattering that no large group of humans in the wild seemed able to avoid. So much the better for his own quiet approach, if he could spot the posted guards and take them down without a fuss.

He found the first one watering the ferns, his rifle propped against a nearby tree, well out of splatter range. The guy was actually humming to himself, eyes closed and head thrown back, enjoying one of nature’s little pleasures.

It was easy, then, when Bolan stepped up close behind him, clapped a hand over his mouth and gave his head a twist, driving the black blade of his Ka-Bar fighting knife into the lookout’s throat. One thrust dealt with the vocal cords, the right carotid artery and jugular, ensuring silence even as it robbed the brain of vital oxygen and sent the guard’s lifeblood spouting in a geyser that would only stop when there was no more left for atricles and ventricles to pump.

Which took about two minutes.

Bolan didn’t wait around to watch. He left the dead-man-gasping where he lay, scooped up his battle-worn Kalashnikov, and moved on through the forest shadows, looking for his next target.

Not victim, since—in Bolan’s mind at least—human predators invited mayhem with their daily actions, through their very lifestyle. He had no time for philosophical discussions with the folks who claimed that “every life has value” or that “everyone deserves a second chance.”

Some lives, based on objective evidence, were worse than useless. They spread pain and misery every day that they continued. Most had scorned a thousand chances to reform and find a place within the millieu known as civilized society. They had not merely failed, but rather had defiantly refused to play the game by any rules except their own.

And when they couldn’t be controlled, when the prisons couldn’t hold them, when they set themselves above humanity and any common decency, they earned a visit from the Executioner.

He couldn’t reach them all, of course—only the worst of those who came to his attention, who were physically accessible and whose predation took priority over the other millions of corrupt, sadistic scum who flourished all around the globe.

Right here, right now, he had a job to do.

The second guard wasn’t exactly napping, but he had allowed his mind to wander, maybe thinking of his next trip into Warri, all the sex and liquor he’d enjoy when his commanders let him off his leash. A party to remember when they shipped him off to raid another oilfield, blow another pipeline, blitz another Ijaw village to the ground.

The pipe dream ended with a subtle sound behind him, not alarming, but enough to make the young man turn, one eyebrow raised, to check it out. Both eyebrows vaulted toward his hairline as a strong hand clutched his throat and slammed him back against the nearest tree before the Ka-Bar’s blade ripped through his diaphragm to find his heart.

Two down. How many left?

Bolan moved on, seeking more targets—and the one life he had come to save.

THERE WAS A POINT where even fear became mundane, when human flesh and senses had to let go of panic or collapse. No conscious choice determined when the mind and soul had had enough. No individual could say with any certainty what his or her limit was, and resolve to fear no more.

But on her seventh morning of captivity, when Mandy Ross awoke from fitful sleep, she realized that somehow she was less afraid than she had been on waking yesterday. She had survived another night intact, and misty daylight lancing through the forest shadows didn’t bring the sense of waking terror that had been her only real emotion for the past six days.

Of course, she was afraid, convinced the worst still lay ahead of her, but there was nothing she could do about it. It was all out of her hands.

For instance, Mandy’s captors hadn’t raped her yet, although she recognized the looks they gave her, and she didn’t need a crash course in whatever dialect they spoke to understand what some of them were saying when they flashed grins in her direction.

It was coming, she supposed. And so was death.

The leader of her kidnappers had made that crystal-clear. If K-Tech Petroleum didn’t meet their demands, she would be killed. Not merely shot or stabbed, mind you, but hacked up into pieces while alive, the odd bits mailed off to her father and to K-Tech’s various directors as an object lesson in obedience.

The problem, simply stated, was that while her father was a wealthy man, he didn’t have a hundred million dollars or the prospects for obtaining it by any means before the deadline imposed by her captors ran out. And even though he was in charge of K-Tech’s operations in Nigeria, he obviously couldn’t grant the kidnappers’ alter-native demand, for a company pull-out. Even if he lost his mind and tried to order an evacuation of all K-Tech workers from the country, he’d be countermanded by his bosses in a heartbeat, either fired or placed on leave until he had regained his senses.

Nope.

The way it looked to Mandy Ross, she was as good as dead.

The thing, now, was to face her death as bravely as she could—or maybe hasten it along herself, before the goons who’d snatched her took it in their pointy little heads to stage an orgy with her as the guest of dishonor.

They hadn’t left her much in terms of weapons, but she’d thought about the problem long and hard over the past few days, as it became more and more obvious that she would never leave the rebel camp alive.

She had no blades or cutting tools of any kind, no rope or any other kind of ligature with which to hang herself, no toxic substances that she could swallow in a pinch. Childhood experience had taught her that you couldn’t suffocate yourself by force of will alone, holding your breath. At some point, you passed out and started breathing automatically, as nature reasserted its control.

But she had teeth, and with some effort she supposed that she could reach the same veins in her wrists that other suicides accessed with knives and razors. It would hurt like hell, but only for a little while. When her only other option was to wait around until she was gang-raped, then fileted alive, well, anyone who thought that was a choice needed to have his or her head examined.

The only question, now, was how long she should wait.

How much time did she have?

To hell with it, she thought. There’s no time like the present. Get it done.

NIGHT FELL HARD in a tropical country. There was no dusk to speak of, no romantic twilight. Having screened most of the sun from ground level, casting massive shadows all day long, the great trees played their final trick at sundown, producing the illusion of a switch thrown by a giant to put out the lights.

Bolan had witnessed the effect on four continents and knew what to expect. He’d almost reached the campground clearing when he lost daylight, and only needed moments for his night eyes to adjust.

Three guards lay dead behind him, in the forest, which cleared roughly one-quarter of the camp’s perimeter. He hoped it would be all he needed, but he didn’t have an exit strategy so far, and wouldn’t until he had found out where the MEND terrorists were confining Mandy Ross. From there, once she was extricated from whichever hut or tent they kept her in, he could decide on how to flee.

A narrow unpaved road allowed the rebels access to the world beyond their forest hideout, passable for Jeeps, dirt bikes and—if it didn’t rain too hard—the ancient army cargo truck that stood out in the compound’s motor pool. Bolan had no idea where following that track might lead him, and he filed it as a last resort, without trying to guess.

He had considered that he might find Mandy Ross already dead or hurt so badly that she couldn’t travel. Even with real soldiers, passions sometimes flared out of control, resulting in atrocities. If that turned out to be the case, Bolan could switch from rescue to revenge mode in a heartbeat. And whatever he might see inside the camp, he’d keep to himself, most definitely never sharing with the victim’s family.

How much could one endure and still go on?

It all depended on the person, both their outward strength and inner fortitude. Some persevered while others crumbled and surrendered, let themselves be swept away. He had no take on Mandy Ross, as yet—except that nothing in her affluent and privileged life would have prepared her for her present circumstance.

Scanning the camp with practiced eyes, he noted points of interest: the command post, the motor pool, a commo tent with a pole-mounted satellite dish for some kind of battery-powered commo setup. The men slept in puptents or out in the open, but one other hut caught his eye.

The only one with a sentry outside it.

If that wasn’t the camp’s one-room jail, then what was it?

Bolan was determined to find out.

He had begun to move in that direction, following the tree line still, using the shadows, when he saw one of the MEND gunners heading for the guarded hut. He was five-nine or -ten, wiry and muscular, bearing a metal plate of food, wearing a pistol on his right hip and a sheathed machete on the left. Bolan watched him dismiss the guard after some muffled talk that almost sounded like an argument.

The guard left, and the plate-bearer entered the hut. Before he closed the door, Bolan had time to glimpse the startled face of Mandy Ross.

“WHAT DO YOU want?” Mandy Ross asked.

“I’ve brought your supper,” the grinning gunman said.

“I’m not hungry,” she replied, and almost giggled, thinking, I’ll just nibble on my wrists tonight, if you don’t mind.

“You must keep up your strength,” the intruder said, still smiling.

She recognized him as an officer, second or third in charge of things around the camp. His name was James Something-or-other, which would have surprised her if she hadn’t spent the two weeks prior to her abduction meeting Africans with Anglo given names who were her father’s business colleagues. As it was, she focused on her captor’s face and words without distractions.

“Strength for what?” she asked him. “Are we marching somewhere?”

“Marching? No.” He laughed at that. “But after being kept so long in this place, you must need some exercise.”

She saw where he was headed, his dark eyes sliding up and down her body like a physical caress, and tried to head him off.

“I’m fine.”

“Indeed, you are,” James Something instantly agreed.

“Thanks for the food,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll eat my monkey meat alone.”

“Tonight is lizard, I believe,” he said. “Perhaps you need something to stimulate your appetite.”

“No, thanks, all the same.”

“But I insist.”

Still keeping up the smile, James looked around her tiny cell, as if expecting that it would have sprouted decorations other than the folding cot that was its only furniture. She guessed that he was looking for someplace to set the plate. At last, he turned back toward the door and placed it on the hut’s dirt floor.

“Perhaps you’ll want it afterward,” he said.

“You’re making a mistake,” Mandy reminded him. “Your boss laid down the hands-off rule.”

James shrugged. “What he does not know, will not hurt him. It will be our little secret.”

“Oh, you think so?”

“I can guarantee it,” James replied, resting his left hand on the hilt of his machete. “Even if I must remove your tongue.”

“He’d never notice that, I guess.” She fairly sneered at him.

“Accidents happen. Possibly, you tried to run away and I was forced to shoot you.”

“So, you like them dead? Sounds just about your speed.”

James shrugged. “I strive for flexibility.”