Threat Factor

by Don Pendleton

  If it was what the gunners had in mind, it didn’t work as planned. They drove him under cover, right enough, but Bolan kept on moving, scrabbling over smooth concrete, around the far side of the barricade he’d chosen as a makeshift fortress. His assailants obviously hadn’t thought there’d be a backup strategy, expecting Bolan to stay huddled where he was until they overran his nest and killed him.

  He was pleased to disappoint them, rising on their left as they were focused dead ahead. He put the emphasis on dead, nailing the closer of the charging gunmen with a 5.56 mm tumbling projectile through the left side of his chest, ripping through lung, heart and aorta for a nearly instant kill. The guy kept going, nonetheless, momentum shoving him through two more shambling steps before his knees buckled and dropped him to the floor.

  The other one was quick, turning without a break in stride to fire at Bolan, but he never had a chance. The next rounds out of Bolan’s AUG spun him like a demented ballroom dancer, arms outflung, his weapon spinning through the air to land in shadow, somewhere hopelessly beyond his reach.

  Mironov nailed her opposition with a pair of 3-round bursts, rolling them up as if she did it every day. Bolan was up and moving by the time their bodies came to rest, firing toward the remaining opposition, carrying the battle back in their direction while Waabberi’s booming shotgun cut off any hope of safe retreat.

  And it was over in another moment, no one left among the khat plant’s labor force to raise a hand against the three intruders. Bolan took a minute and searched for chemicals he knew were found in any drug-processing operation and selected those most flammable. The quantities weren’t huge, but it would do.

  “No reason to leave them anything,” he said, as he uncapped a gallon jug of something strong enough to make his eyes water. “Let’s light it up.”

  8

  Jiddu Basra scratched idly at the scar that ran beneath the patch masking his left eye socket, an unconscious gesture that he often made in times of stress. The scar tissue was numb, it neither itched nor pained him any longer, but his fingers still came back to it habitually, as if reminding his subconscious mind that he was only mortal, after all.

  Just like the men who served him.

  Seventeen of them had proved it, sometime in the past half hour, when they were gunned down at his khat refinery. The plant itself was still in flames, since Mogadishu had no fire-fighters, but some of Basra’s men had dragged the bodies out and counted them. If any more were missing in the blaze, he’d hear about it later.

  At the moment, he was looking for someone to blame.

  Basra inhabited a world of enemies. Whoever was not with him was against him, and he couldn’t always trust the ones who smiled and promised loyalty. In fact, based on his personal experience, Basra trusted the smilers least of all.

  A man in his position, with his power and proclivities, was always feared and hated by the lesser folk around him, those he victimized or simply brushed aside in passing, as a lion swatted a bush squirrel or jerboa. It was nothing personal.

  But someone had selected him specifically, decided that the best way to hurt Basra was by striking at a pillar of his livelihood. And for that insolence, someone would die.

  The jangling telephone distracted him. His one good eye snapped open, focused on the instrument of torment, as a scowl formed on his lean, scarred face. The man who normally answered his phone was at the warehouse, playing fireman, likely getting in the way.

  Basra grabbed the receiver, snarled a curt greeting.

  “What!”

  “I need a word with Jiddu Basra,” a strange voice said.

  “Who’s calling,” Basra asked, switching to English automatically.

  “This message is for Basra only,” the caller said.

  Half inclined to slam down the phone, Basra nonetheless responded, “So, deliver it.”

  “I see you had a fire.”

  A sudden tingle, like a low-level electric shock, rippled along his spine. Basra leaned forward, elbows on his desktop.

  “You know something about that?” he asked.

  “I struck the match,” his caller told him, “but I didn’t give the order.”

  “No? Who did, then?”

  “Think about it. Who’s in line to gain the most, if you go down?”

  “You tell me, man,” Basra replied. “As far as I know, everybody loves me.”

  “Right. Would that include Musse Guleed?”

  “Sure, man. We’re old, old friends.”

  “I guess that slipped his mind,” the caller said.

  “Who are you, anyway?” Basra inquired.

  “Nobody special. Just a soldier.”

  “Soldier of fortune, would that be?”

  “I do all right,” the caller said.

  “Well, man, if what you’re saying’s true, you picked the wrong side this time.”

  “I go with the money,” the caller said. “And the less I have to do for it, the better I like it.”

  “You telling me all this for some good reason?” Basra asked.

  “Best reason in the world, for both of us,” the stranger said. “My contract specifies that I get rid of you. It doesn’t say you have to die. If you pull out of Mogadishu, it comes down to the same thing.”

  Basra could only laugh at that.

  “Me, leave? Why doesn’t that footo weine that you’re working for get out, instead?”

  It was the caller’s turn to laugh. “I get the feeling he’s not going anywhere.”

  “Maybe we’ll see about that, eh?”

  “Your call,” the caller said. “I’m not a bodyguard.”

  The line went dead.

  “YOU’RE SURE HE’LL COME today?” Mironov asked, as she drove slowly along Corsi Primo Luglio past drab apartment houses.

  “If it’s Thursday, he should be here,” Waabberi replied from the four-door’s backseat.

  It was Thursday morning, true enough, but Bolan had to wonder if the night’s events might cramp their target’s style, change his routine.

  “Why Thursdays?” he inquired.

  Waabberi shrugged. “I don’t know what he’s thinking,” he replied. “Someone tipped me about his visits, and I started watching, taking care he didn’t see me. Every Thursday, right around this time, he comes.”

  “To see the woman and her boy,” Mironov said, still sounding skeptical.

  “His boy,” Waabberi answered. “Even if he won’t get married, it still means something, having a son.”

  “Some father figure,” she said.

  “He brings money, little presents. Makes the other bad men stay away.”

  “Okay, then,” Bolan interrupted. “When he shows up, if he shows, I’ll grab him, put him in the back.”

  “I’ll cover him,” Waabberi said.

  “He won’t be in a fighting mood, but caution’s always good,” Bolan replied. “You have the ties?”

  “Right here.” Waabberi brandished half a dozen narrow strips of plastic made for binding packages, which doubled nicely as handcuffs in an emergency.

  “We’ll give him ten more minutes,” Bolan said.

  “I need someplace to park,” Mironov told him. “Cruising back and forth draws too much notice, even here.”

  She found a place on the next pass and nosed in, half a block west of the target. Bolan noted with approval that she kept the engine running while they waited.

  “What if he has company?” Mironov asked Waabberi.

  “Every time I followed him, he was alone. I think he keeps this secret to himself.”

  “That may not be an option, now,” Bolan suggested. “After last night, there’s a decent chance he may have guards.”

  “What, then?” the Russian agent queried.

  “If I see a chance,” Bolan replied, “I take them out and haul him in, the same as if he’d come alone.”

  “And if he doesn’t have the information that we need?” she pressed him.

  “Then that tells us somethi
ng in itself. He’ll know if Guleed has the merchandise. If it’s a negative, that tells us where we need to look next time, and we still hurt Guleed.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Mironov said.

  “Asking’s the easy part,” Bolan said.

  He saw their target coming toward them, even as Waabberi warned them, “There he is!”

  “He must have parked on the cross street,” Mironov said. “We can’t tell if he’s covered now.”

  “If he brought anyone along, they must be waiting in the car,” Bolan replied. “Let’s go.”

  Mironov put the car in motion, smooth acceleration carrying them toward their meeting with the man who topped Bolan’s most-wanted list. Before they drew abreast of him, Mironov braked, and Bolan vaulted from the car, holding the big Beretta 93-R where his subject couldn’t fail to see it.

  “You’re the white man!” Jama Hassan said.

  “Looks like it,” Bolan granted. “I’ll take that pistol, since you won’t be needing it while we go for a little ride.”

  MUSSE GULEED DID NOT take bad news well. Sometimes he wondered why that was, since there’d been so much of it in his life. Shouldn’t he have been used to it, by now?

  And yet, he felt the same familiar rage building inside him, beginning with an acid spill into his stomach, followed by a throbbing pain behind his eyes. Blood pressure rising, he supposed, but what was he supposed to do about it?

  When a man was angry, action was required.

  “What do you mean, you lost him?” he demanded of the two young sentries who stood quivering before him.

  “Sir,” one of them said, “he ordered us to park the car and wait inside it, while he went to see his…his….”

  “I know all about his whore and brat,” Guleed stormed at them. “It was foolish to keep up the same routine today, of all days.”

  “Sir,” the other chirped, “he ordered us to—”

  “Damn it, I know that! Stop whining like a child and tell me what happened!”

  The men glanced at each other, dry mouths making little smacking sounds, as if their tongues were shriveling. Perhaps, he thought, they were.

  “Sir,” said the first one who had spoken, “we could not see anything after he turned the corner onto Corsi Primo Luglio.”

  Of course, they couldn’t. Guleed clenched his teeth and asked, “So, how long did you wait?”

  “He told us fifteen minutes, sir. We waited twenty, to be safe.”

  Guleed’s jaw ached from where he’d clenched his teeth, a counterpoint to the insistent, mounting pain inside his head.

  “And then?”

  “We went to check, sir,” said the young man on his right. “We saw the building as we passed.”

  “He gave you the apartment number?”

  “No, sir,” the other said. “We began knocking on doors. It was the ninth apartment that we tried.”

  “And you learned what, exactly?”

  “That Mr. Hassan had not arrived, sir.”

  “Then, sir,” his comrade said, “we went back and searched the street again, an alleyway behind the houses. We found nothing.”

  “So, you wasted what? An hour at the scene, and then the drive back here?”

  No answer came, from either one.

  “I see.” Guleed made no attempt to mask his anger and disgust. “You understand the gravity of this?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “Ordinarily, I’d kill you now,” Guleed informed them. “As it is, however, we’ve already lost so many men that I cannot afford to execute you…yet.”

  “Please, sir. We will do anything,” the man on his left said.

  “Yes, sir. Anything” came from Guleed’s right.

  “The first thing you shall do, in order to redeem yourselves, is go back to the place where Hassan disappeared. You will ask everyone who lives there, everyone you see along the street, if they saw anything at all. Hassan or anybody else. A face, a vehicle, a sign from God. I don’t expect you to return alive, if you are empty-handed. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir!” Two voices chimed as one.

  “And if, by some chance, it should cross your mind to run away, remember that I know your families. Betray me, and I will devour them while they are still alive. Now go, before I change my mind.”

  THEY DROVE HASSAN A few miles east of Mogadishu, passing the abandoned U.S. Embassy again, to reach a safehouse that Mironov had suggested. Bolan was beyond surprise at that point, but it struck him that the Russians were prepared for trouble in Somalia, despite the closure of their embassy around the same time that America’s diplomats fled.

  From media reports, he knew that Moscow had been aching to tackle Somalia’s pirates since 2007, if not earlier. Russian destroyers, spoiling for a fight, were commonly seen offshore, daring the modernday buccaneers to try their luck. It was a wonder that there’d been no incidents already—but perhaps the navy had been reined in while the SVR played its hand first, ashore.

  In any case, he and Mironov had been thrown together on the same team, and she’d proved her worth repeatedly. Bolan only hoped that her safehouse would have stout walls and be free of inquisitive neighbors.

  In fact, it turned out not to be a house at all, but an abandoned radio station. The broadcast tower had been hauled away for scrap, but its great rusting feet remained, bolted into concrete and severed at the ankles by cutting torches. The station itself was a squarish blockhouse with no windows, surrounded by a weedy wasteland.

  It was perfect.

  They marched Hassan inside, after Mironov used a small key on the front door’s shiny padlock. It was dark inside the building as they entered, and they used flashlights to navigate until Mironov started a backroom generator and the dusty ceiling fixtures came to life.

  The looters had been thorough. Everything resembling communications gear had been been stripped from the building, nothing left of furnishings except a few chairs and an old desk with its empty drawers pulled out and scattered. Someone had carved a skull and crossbones on the desktop.

  Bolan detested torture, but years of warfare had endowed him with a certain ruthlessness that wouldn’t let him balk at dirty jobs, when he had work to do and lives were riding on the line. In this case, if he let the stolen tanks and other military hardware slip away, thousands of innocents might die.

  What was the comfort of a proved killer next to that?

  He steered Hassan across the main room of the station to a sturdy wooden chair, and pushed him into it. Hassan regarded him with sullen eyes and spoke for the first time since his abduction.

  “So, you have me. What next?”

  “You can live or die,” Bolan replied. “It’s up to you.”

  “What is the price for life?” Hassan inquired.

  “A little information.”

  “Ah. You’d have me be a traitor, then.”

  “Or a survivor,” Bolan said. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”

  “And if I refuse, you kill me.”

  “Not so fast,” Mironov interjected. “We will have the information first.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Mironov drew and fired her pistol in a single fluid motion. Its muffled cough was lost inside Hassan’s scream as the bullet shattered his left kneecap, spraying blood and shards of cartillage.

  Hassan’s first impulse was to clutch his knee, but with his hands still bound behind his back the effort only pitched him from the chair. He landed on the mangled leg and shrieked again, thrashing in agony.

  Surprise did not crack Bolan’s poker face. He listened as Hassan wound down from screaming, into gasping sobs, waiting until he thought the wounded man could understand a question.

  But Mironov beat him to it. Crouching on the bloodstained concrete floor, she clutched Hassan’s hair in her left hand, drawing back his head until his eyes met hers.

  “Thank your mouth for that,” she said. “Now you’re a cripple, bu
t you still have one good leg. Be smart, and you can hobble with a cane until somebody does the world a favor and gets rid of you. Be stupid, and the other knee goes next. From there, who knows?”

  “What do you want?” Not quite a sob, this time.

  “The tanks and guns from the Vasylna,” she replied. “Who stole them?”

  “I don’t go out on the boats. I—”

  “Don’t make me repeat the question.”

  “Guleed!” he blurted out. “He took them!”

  “Hmm. And has he sold them yet?”

  “Sold, yes,” Hassan whimpered. “But not delivered.”

  “I believe he speaks the truth,” Mironov told Bolan.

  “That still leaves the location,” he replied.

  “Indeed.” The Russian agent drew the muzzle of her sound suppressor across Hassan’s forehead and asked, “Where will we find them, then?”

  “There is a camp. Outside Merca.”

  “Specifics, if you please.”

  Hassan stammered directions. Bolan memorized them on the spot.

  “Do you believe him?” Mironov asked.

  Bolan nodded.

  “So do I,” she said. And rising, stepping back a yard, leveled her pistol at his face.

  Hassan cried out, “You promised!” Then a second muffled gunshot silenced him for good.

  “I promised nothing,” Mironov said. Turning back toward Bolan with a somber smile, she added, “So, your conscience is intact, Matt.”

  JIDDU BASRA FELT CALM as he prepared for war. The first hot rush of fury had subsided in the hours since his men were killed, his khat refinery destroyed. Someone had much to answer for, but he could wait.

  At least, a little while.

  It would take time for all his soldiers to reach Mogadishu, driving in from outposts in the provinces of Shabelle Hoose and Shabelle Dhexe, to the south and north. When all who still remained to him were present and accounted for, all armed and ready, then he could begin the final push against his mortal enemies.

  And in the meantime, he would benefit from planning.