“What, the shootings yesterday?”
Awrala nodded. “In old town,” he said, “and at the social club called The Jackal.”
“I’m aware of it,” Kenyangi said. “And what about the other killings, at this warehouse that was burned last night?”
Awrala had to shrug at that. “Perhaps,” he said. “I cannot say. But, sir—”
“Musse Guleed owns The Jackal, does he not?” the colonel asked.
“Sir, all I know is that these foreigners have slaughtered citizens in Mogadishu, and they may have plans to cast a wider net of violence.”
“Explain.”
“According to the information I’ve received, it’s likely that these terrorists are on their way to Merca, where they plan further destruction.”
“Merca,” Kenyangi said.
“Yes, sir. As I understand it.”
“And you can’t be any more specific, I suppose?”
“Sir, I believe you should have little difficulty finding a white man and woman in the neighborhood.”
“Provided I turn over every rock along the way,” Kenyangi said.
“They have an arsenal of weapons, sir, and they are murderers. Mass murderers, in fact. Invaders of my country. Their continued presence threatens any effort toward a lasting peace.”
Kenyangi made a sound that might have been a cough, or pure derisive laughter.
“Peace, you say. Is there a word for that in Somali?”
“Three, in fact,” Awrala said. “It depends on how the words are used.”
“Three words for peace, but none in Mogadishu,” Kenyangi said. “I’m afraid that without further details, I cannot begin to help you.”
“I can offer you descriptions of the man and woman, sir.”
“Woman? A white woman?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And is the man a Russian, too?”
Awrala shrugged again. “Who knows?”
Kenyangi planted meaty forearms on his desk. “I have a unit close to Merca,” he declared. “Describe these strangers for me, and I’ll see what I can do.”
BOLAN CROUCHED BESIDE the car in waist-high leaves and hoped that no one riding in the passing convoy would glance over, to catch a glint of sunlight on chrome. He held his Steyr ready, just in case.
There were three vehicles in the procession. The leading jeep carried three men besides its driver, while two open trucks behind it bore a dozen riflemen apiece. Judging from their attire, they weren’t from AMISOM—they wore no helmets, and their mismatched battle dress would hardly qualify as uniforms.
Bandits? Tribal militia?
Either way, Bolan wanted no part of them. At worst, they were extremely dangerous. At best, disposing of them would mean wasting precious ammunition.
Luckily, no one in the convoy glanced over toward Mironov’s vehicle. Or, if they did, perhaps the lookout’s khat-dulled mind could not interpret what the bleary eyes had seen.
In any case, they got a pass.
This time.
“Halfway along with no traffic, and then we meet that lot,” Mironov said, as she rose from the weeds along the driver’s side of the sedan. “Too close for comfort, eh?”
“We’re getting into clan country,” Waabberi said. “In broad terms, there are Bantus and Somalis, but it breaks down further. From the Bantus, there are Reer Gosha and Reer Shabelle. For the Somalis, there are Dir, Digil and Hawiye, each with several smaller clans dividing them. On top of that, we have the true minorities—Reer AwSalaat, Reer Marka, Reer Baraawe and Yahar Saalax.”
“How do you keep it straight?” Mironov asked.
Waabberi smiled and said, “The same way you distinguish true Russians from Tatars, Ukrainians, Bashkirs, Chuvash and all the rest. We have fewer to concern us.”
“Have I offended you?” Mironov asked.
“By no means,” Waabberi said. “Most of us are blind to other nations, other cultures, unless television shows us something that amuses or repulses us. Who truly knows the world, these days?”
Bolan cut in on the philosophy. “The part we need to think about,” he said, “lies thirty-odd miles down this road. With any luck, we won’t be playing hide-and-seek the whole way there.”
“And we must still find Guleed’s camp,” Mironov said. “How do you say it in America? His home away from home?”
“That’s how we say it,” Bolan granted. “But normally a person doesn’t keep a fleet of tanks at his vacation hideaway.”
“Nor will Guleed keep them for long, I think,” she said. “He may have buyers coming, as we speak.”
“You think he may?” Bolan asked. “Or you know he does?”
“I know no more than you,” she answered. “But each moment wasted is a moment lost forever.”
“Let’s stop wasting time, then,” Bolan said, “and get back on the road.”
10
As he apoproached Merca, Bolan had no intention of touring the former beach resort, which had been ravaged during the Somali civil war. It was presently held by members of Al-Shabaab—The Youth, in Arabic—an insurgent group also known as the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations. Al-Shabaab supported the Islamic Courts Union, primary rival of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, while its three thousand-odd members got most of their weapons and money from leaders of the Ethiopian National Defense Force.
That mix represented quintessential Somali politics, a volatile cocktail of cultures and religions, exacerbated by meddling neighbors pursuing their own agendas. And Bolan wanted no part of it.
He had more than enough on his plate as it was, with rival warlords, Russians and enough lethal hardware to set the Horn of Africa ablaze. The very last thing that Somalia or any of the other countries in the region needed at this moment was a new war or an escalation of some ongoing conflict.
But, ironically, the only way to head off future bloodshed was to spill more first.
They had Jama Hassan’s directions to the arms depot, assuming that he hadn’t found a way to lie while suffering his final agony. If he’d deceived them, Bolan thought, Hassan deserved all the acting awards rolled up in one.
And they were screwed.
They’d have to start from scratch, locate a new informant and determine first if Guleed even had the stolen hardware—then, if so, where he had stashed it. That could cost a day or more, and still might lead them nowhere.
Bolan saw the turn-off for the road Hassan had claimed would lead them to their target. It was numbered, thankfully, so that he didn’t have to understand the writing on the sign, although Waabberi translated.
“It’s Revolution Avenue,” he said.
A purist would have quibbled, noting that an avenue should technically be lined with trees or shrubbery, instead of running flat-out through more sunbaked grassland, but there was a hint of trees, off in the distance, where a smudge on the horizon broke up the monotony of open space.
They would be sitting ducks out there, if any hostiles came along. It wouldn’t matter if they were Guleed’s men, Basra’s, some half-baked militia or a gang of local killers setting up in business for themselves. Bolan and company would have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Mironov felt it, too, saying, “I don’t like this. We’re too exposed.”
“We have to take our chances,” Bolan said. “We’ll play it cagey, closer to the compound.”
If there was a compound. If Hassan’s last words had not been simply misdirection, one last Screw you! to his killers.
“Do you think he lied?” Mironov asked, as if reading his mind.
Bolan could only shrug. “Another ten miles, give or take, to prove it one way of the other. There’s no doubt that he was hurting when he spilled it.”
“You believe I was too harsh?” Natalia asked.
Bolan focused on the road ahead, as he replied, “You got results.”
“You wish that I had let him live?”
“Impractical,” Bolan said
, and he let it go at that.
Hauling a warlord’s wounded second in command across Somalia wouldn’t be a smart move at the best of times, although he would have liked a second session with Hassan if it turned out the man had lied. Too late.
Whatever lay in store for them outside of Merca, they had only two options: retreat, or see it through.
And turning tail before the battle even started wasn’t Bolan’s style.
CAPTAIN ABASI BOIPELO did not fully understand his latest orders, but he had become accustomed to confusion since he was conscripted from his native Kenya to participate in AMISOM’s futile attempt at keeping peace within Somalia.
The mission was absurd. No one could “keep” a peace that had disintegrated into bloody chaos decades earlier. And AMISOM could not restore peace in Somalia by emulating the United Nations policy of doing next to nothing while atrocities were committed on a daily basis. In his own country, political violence had claimed a thousand lives and displaced a quarter of a million people in 2007, but a combination of armed force and shrewd negotiation had restored effective government by the new year.
Whereas Somalia kept on getting worse.
Boipelo’s latest orders were no stranger than some others he’d received since taking on the AMISOM assignment. Headquarters had ordered him to locate a camp or compound somewhere north of Merca and prevent a band of insurgents from raiding it, perhaps annihilating those inside. Whoever they were.
The order was vague to a fault, and the part that included details was fantastic. Boipelo was supposed to watch out for a white man and woman, traveling with one or more native Somalis, who supposedly had killed three dozen men in Mogadishu while inflicting significant property damage.
The important questions, in Boipelo’s opinion, remained unanswered. Precisely who was killed in Mogadishu, and for what? Was this another feud between the dominant warlords? And if so—rather, in any case—how were two white people involved? What sort of camp was Boipelo assigned to protect? Who were its occupants? Were they of any value to Somalia, or simply more troublemakers whom the strife-torn country would be better off without?
Captain Boipelo did not expect answers to such questions. He had long since given up on understanding anything beyond the broad strokes of ideas conceived by his superiors—and even that was asking too much in some cases. It was bad enough that AMISOM made him take orders from Ugandans. Second-guessing them and trying to decipher what was going on inside their heads was an impossibility.
But he would do as he was told. With thirty men and two armored personnel carriers at his disposal, Captain Abasi Boipelo would carry out his orders to the best of his ability. It was a soldier’s lot to risk his life for others, often in a cause that did not meet with his approval.
But if he was killed here, fighting for a nation in name only, he intended to return and haunt the bastards who had sent him to his death.
And then, there would be hell to pay.
DIRIE WAABBERI WAS RELIEVED when the big American had said they were bypassing Merca proper. He had not set foot inside the city for at least five years, and had no plans to visit it again while al-Shabaab and the Islamic Courts Union retained control. Life in Somalia was harsh and violent enough without the added burden of religious zealots who told others how to live—and killed them if they disobeyed.
The good part about being a fanatic, Waabberi supposed, was the sheer certainty that your actions could never be wrong, your judgment never mistaken. With Allah, Jehovah or Jesus guiding your hand, everything you did was justified in advance.
Unlike Waabberi’s present job with this man who called himself Matt Cooper and Russian agent Natalia Mironov.
He wasn’t having second thoughts—far from it, which was frightening enough, all by itself—but he’d begun to wonder what would happen after they finished their mission, if they managed to survive the next few hours or days.
Suppose they found the Russian weapons and destroyed them. Then, what? Crawling farther out along that shaky limb of fantasy, suppose they then crushed Musse Guleed? So, what?
The situation in Waabberi’s homeland had degenerated to the point that he no longer thought eliminating a specific person, gang, or party would suffice to end the bloodshed and privation that had plagued Somalia for over one-third of a century. Riding in the backseat of Mironov’s car, toward what might be his death, Waabberi worried that his sacrifice would be in vain. A waste of time and energy.
A waste of ammunition?
No.
Whatever happened next, Waabberi still believed that he had made a difference. Each bandit they had killed was one less predator on Mogadishu’s streets, committing one less murder, rape or robbery. In some cases, he guessed, eliminating one outlaw might keep a hundred or a thousand crimes from happening.
There would be other criminals, of course—already were, no doubt, vying for the positions vacated by those he’d personally killed—but that was life. He realized no stuggle against evil could be won conclusively and for all time. Evil—like Good—refused to simply die and disappear. It surfaced time and time again, in every place where human beings gathered and pretended they were something more than animals with appetites, he supposed.
“See that?”
Mironov’s voice cut through Waabberi’s reverie. He leanded forward, peering between her head and Bolan’s, looking off toward the horizon where her index finger pointed.
What? he was about to ask, but then a puff of smoke appeared beside the highway. Half a second later, the concussion of the blast tapped lightly at Waabberi’s ears.
“Grenades,” Bolan said. “Better stop and wait it out.”
Mironov was already breaking, pulling over on the highway’s dusty shoulder. “Who do you suppose is fighting?” she inquired.
“Out here,” the Executioner replied, “it could be anyone. The bad part is, they’re sitting on our only route to Guleed’s compound, unless we go a hundred miles out of our way.”
“And get lost in the bargain,” Mironov said sourly.
“What now?” Waabberi asked, surprised to find that he was worried they would have to turn around and leave their mission incomplete.
“We wait,” Bolan explained. “A little while, at least.”
HOOROONE WALAAL ABDALLE ducked below the spray of shrapnel from another hand grenade, biting his tongue to keep from cursing and inviting Allah’s wrath. He clutched an AK-47 to his chest and offered up a silent prayer for guidance in extremity.
The ambush was not going as he’d planned. Indeed, the target that Abdalle had been waiting for, with twenty of his men, had not arrived. He and his men had spent most of the day waiting and watching for a convoy of relief trucks manned by members of the enemy Bagadi clan, but now they were engaged in battling soldiers.
It shamed Abdalle, as a regional chief of the Biyomaal clan, that his plans had gone so badly—even disastrously—awry. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had seen AMISOM peacekeepers firing their weapons, but here they were, blasting away with machine guns and rifles, even lobbing antipersonnel grenades at his militiamen.
And all because Abdalle lacked control over his troops. They were supposed to let the military convoy pass, headed for who-knew-where, but one of Abdalle’s men had raised his head from concealment to peer at the armored personnel carriers, then fired his rifle when one of the soldiers on board spotted him.
Abdalle would have liked to execute that man for disobeying orders, but the idiot had died in the first volley of return fire from the AMISOM vehicles. After that it was a case of fight or risk a bullet in the back while fleeing, and Abdalle did not wish to die a coward.
If he had to suffer for the actions of a fool, at least he could accept that fate in manly fashion and go down fighting.
Which, in the present circumstances, might occur at any moment.
Abdalle cringed in the roadside ditch, while .30-caliber machine-gun bullets raked the sand and gravel above him, raising clouds of
dust that settled over him, clotting his nostrils, sticking in his throat. He could not even rise and fire without getting his head shot off by one of the APC gunners.
A third grenade—or could it be the fourth?—exploded twenty feet from where Abdalle huddled in his ditch. The shock wave made him fear that he might be entombed alive, but more dust simply showered down to make him beige from head to foot.
Abdalle knew what had to come next if he and his men could not defeat their enemies or manage to escape. Pinned down and outnumbered, with the losses they’d sustained, they would be routed from the ditch and killed where they lay by their adversaries controlling the high ground.
Sudden urgency gripped Hooroone Abdalle. Spitting dust, he raised his voice to make it heard above the roar of gunfire, shouting for his men to rally and confront their enemies. The faces he could see regarded him with something close to shock, but they were taking in his exhortation, gathering their courage. He could see it in their eyes.
Abdalle led his soldiers by example. Vaulting to his feet, he swung his AK-47 toward the nearest armored vehicle and squeezed its trigger, spraying bullets that rattled off the monster’s olive-drab hide.
He saw the pindle-mounted machine gun tracking toward him, dirty-yellow flame already leaping from its muzzle, as he tried to raise his own Kalashnikov and bring the gunner under fire. One chance, and then—
FIVE MINUTES AFTER IT had begun, the shooting stopped. It was an average firefight, as such things went, in Bolan’s personal experience. The close-range killing never lasted long, unless it was a case of armies fighting hand-to-hand with clubbed rifles and bayonets.
“What now?” Waabberi asked from the backseat.
“We wait and see which way the winners go,” Bolan replied.
Mironov had produced a compact pair of field glasses, closer to opera size than standard, passing them around while they sat and watched the fight proceed a mile in front of them. His vision thus assisted, Bolan could tell by their uniforms the victors in the skirmish were a group of AMISOM troops, and that their vehicles had been headed in the same direction as Bolan and his group were traveling before the shooting started.
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