“And they’ll be covering the new arrivals, too, to some extent.”
They had not breached the fence so far, but they were closer. They’d crept nearer to it, gaining ten yards while the last car was distracting Guleed’s sentries. Bolan had chosen two prospective entry points: the northeast corner that was closest to them now, or midway down the compound’s northern side.
At either spot, they would be shielded for the most part by the bulk of huge T-90s squatting near the fence. They had observed the sentries long enough to know that none consistently surveyed the chain-link barrier behind the tanks. It might be all that separated them from outer darkness, but the guards appeared to trust that it could not be breached.
Which proved that they were fools.
That made them no less dangerous, of course. Fools armed with automatic weapons could be deadly—even worse than levelheaded riflemen, in fact. A dunce might open fire where wiser men would hesitate, seek confirmation of their targets and provide their enemies with a split-second advantage. Idiots might simply blast away, and even if they missed, the camp would be alerted to intruders.
So, the sentries closest to them had to die by stealth.
But first, Bolan, Mironov and Waabberi had to breach the fence.
And the Executioner wasn’t yet ready to move.
He lay and watched the second vehicle enter the compound, flanked by guards on foot who shut and latched the gate behind it. Two of them accompanied the car, maintaining flank positions while the unseen driver held his pace to walking speed. Only when they had reached the camp’s command post were the headlights killed, the engine silenced.
Mironov saw the new arrivals pile out of their car. Two of them carried weapons openly, though slung over their shoulders, muzzles pointing toward the ground. Guleed’s men made no effort to disarm them, but maintained a wary watch beyond arm’s reach, their own guns angled somewhere between waist and ankle height. If any of the visitors should try a hostile move, they would be cut down in a heartbeat, and they obviously knew it.
She was watching when Guleed emerged, smiling, to greet his guests. He shook hands with two of the four, and ignored the flankers with their shoulder-slung weapons, as if the pair did not exist. Mironov couldn’t hear what passed between them, but the two Guleed had favored with his personal attention followed him inside the camp’s CP, where she had seen two of the earlier arrivals disappear.
She nearly asked Bolan how many more he thought might come to bid on the Vasylna’s cargo, but Mironov caught herself. It was a silly question, since he couldn’t see the future.
Still, it would have been a handy talent.
If he was a psychic, the big American could have told her whether she’d survive the night.
Or maybe, she decided, it was better not to know.
AMARE TENAGNE SHOOK HANDS with Dahnay Zenawi, resisting the urge to wipe his palm on the leg of his pants afterward. Beside him, Berhanu Kelile managed to complete the simple greeting ritual with Zenawi’s second in command, though both wore expressions of distaste.
Tenagne, as a spokesman for the Eritrean Islamic Jihad—also called the Eritrean Islamic Salvation Movement—had little in common with the ONLF beyond adherence to Islam. While the ONLF fought for independence from Ethiopia, Tenagne’s group worked day and night to overthrow the Eritrean government, presently dominated by People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. With heavy tanks and other modern arms at his disposal, Tenagne knew he could challenge the Eritrean Defense Forces and possibly, with help from Allah, overcome them.
But before that dream was realized, he had to meet a bandit’s price.
Like all rebel groups, the Eritrean Islamic Jihad had various sources of income, few of them legitimate. The khat trade helped, and while Eritrea harbored fewer pirates than Somalia, they still made a fair living from raids against Red Sea shipping. Contract bombings and assassinations brought more cash into the coffers. If there were only two bidders, perhaps…
Tenagne voiced the question aloud to Guleed.
“Who else is coming to the auction?” he inquired.
Guleed’s smile had an artificial look about it. “For the moment,” he replied, “only those present.”
“For the moment? Does that mean there may be other bidders after us?” Zenawi asked.
“I am a businessman,” Guleed reminded them. “While you two are the first deserving candidates I thought of, I must still obtain a certain profit for my labors.”
“You have a price in mind, then,” Tenagne said.
Guleed appeared to reflect, then said, “Each T-90 tank costs one-point-four million U.S. dollars to build. I have thirty-three tanks, plus twenty-four Strela-2 missiles valued at twenty thousand dollars each, and various small arms. A fair starting bid, I believe, would be four hundred thousand per tank, and five thousand per missile. Call it one-point-four million to start, for the lot.”
“One-point-five,” Tenagne said without a second’s hesitation.
“One-point-six,” Zenawi fired back.
Guleed’s smile turned authentic, as he raised open hands, patting the air between them.
“Gentlemen, while I appreciate your obvious enthusiasm, please allow me to be courteous before we settle down to business, yes? If you would all have seats, enjoy some coffee, or perhaps a little something stronger? Yes?”
Tenagne found a chair and sat, with Kelile close beside him. He accepted coffee but declined the wine, and resisted the tempation to ask if it had been a calculated insult. He had two more men outside, both armed, and he had not been searched for weapons on arrival, but it would be suicide to start a fight with odds so heavily inclined against him.
“There, now. That’s better, yes?” Guleed inquired, while nodding in agreement with himself. “Of course, it is. The bidding stands one-point-six million, if I recall.”
It was Tenagne’s turn. He sipped his coffee, thought about it for a moment, and decided there was no need to persistently increase his bid in hundred-thousand-dollar increments.
“One-point-six-one,” he said, raising Zenawi’s last bid by ten thousand dollars.
“One-point-seven,” Zenawi said, with a smile that stopped just short of mockery.
Tenagne had been cleared by his superiors to spend a certain amount of money, but they would not thank him if he bid the whole amount up front, to close the deal. Even in war, frugality was still a virtue.
“One-point-seven-one,” he said, and matched his adversary’s smile.
JIDDU BASRA WATCHED AS HIS men piled into three open trucks, filling bench seats at first, then hunkering down in the aisles between them. With the drivers and their passengers up front, plus the soldiers he would carry with him in his Humvee, he would field an even sixty troops against Guleed’s compound outside Merca.
But would it be enough?
Basra knew where the camp was located, as he knew where most of Guleed’s other properties were, but it had come as an embarrassing surprise to learn about the stash of military hardware sheltered there. It stood to reason that the tanks and other gear would be well guarded, but Guleed had suffered recent losses in the heart of Mogadishu proper, which might lead him to divert some of his men and guns to hometown duty.
Then again…
Basra was not relying solely on his three trucks filled with riflemen. He also had a tenuous alliance with the Abgaal clan in Shabelle Hoose and was expecting some of them to join his strike force, in return for Basra’s promise of a share in any vehicles or weapons they recovered from the compound. That should add another twenty-five or thirty fighters to his side, and might just be enough to grant him victory.
Of course, there was a chance Guleed would use some of the weapons he had stockpiled pending sell-offs to the highest bidders. If his men had learned to operate the stolen tanks, with their cannons and machine guns, this could easily be Basra’s final night on Earth.
So be it.
He had never planned to reach a ripe old age. Indee
d, when he was still a wild youth in his teens, Basra had not believed that he would live to see his twenty-first birthday. The rest was borrowed time, and if he died this night, Basra would not regret it.
Unless he failed to take Guleed down with him.
When the last soldiers were settled in their vehicles, Basra took his seat in the Humvee and ordered his driver to start the engine. They had an hour’s drive in front of them, if they met no obstructions on the way, and then there was the task of marching overland toward Guleed’s compound, from a point Basra had preselected on a topographic map of Shabelle Hoose.
By not approaching as a convoy, headlights blazing, Basra hoped that the surprise would be complete. His snipers could eliminate Guleed’s lookouts before a massed charge at the compound’s gates. Grenades would then breach the fence and grant his soldiers entry to the camp.
From there, it would be each man for himself.
If Basra should succeed, and he assumed control of Guleed’s operations in Mogadishu, it would not be long before he found new rivals anxious to depose him. He expected nothing less, fully aware that warlords ruled as long as they were able, and once their strength failed their termination was inevitable.
It was the life that he had chosen, win or lose, and he was not intimidated by the risks involved.
On this night, revenge and greed were running neck and neck as motivators for his final push against Guleed. The warlord owed him an eye, as Basra saw it, but he meant to claim the bastard’s life instead.
When the smoke cleared, the best man would have won.
And if that man was not Basra, then he did not deserve to live.
“THEY MAY BE CARVING UP the pie right now,” Mironov whispered.
Bolan nodded and replied, “Let’s hope so. It will keep the boss man occupied while we go in.”
“And when is that?” she asked.
“Right now.”
“I’ll cover you,” Mironov said, and he could feel her smile as he crept closer to the chain-link fence, wire cutters in hand.
No guards were visible as Bolan went to work, snipping through links to make a flap approximately two feet high and three feet wide. He only cut two sides, since there was no attachment at ground level and the right-hand side would be their small gate’s hinge.
When he was done, he pulled the flap out toward himself, wincing involuntarily at the expected creaky twanging sound it made, and held it open while Mironov, then Waabberi, wriggled through. Waabberi held the flap when it was Bolan’s turn, and then they eased it shut, securing its corners with a pair of paper clips that would easily pop free if anybody hit the makeshift gate with any kind of velocity or force.
Like scrambling for their lives.
But Bolan doubted they would return that way when they were done, assuming they lived to retreat. The plan he had in mind would cause such panic and destruction in the compound that the fence itself might no longer exist.
And if he failed, they wouldn’t need an exit.
Bolan rose to a crouch, concealed by the bulk of a T-90 tank, and edged left to get a look around the dusty vehicle. A slouching young sentry armed with a Kalashnikov crossed his narrow field of vision and was gone again.
How best to put his plan in operation?
He had discussed the broad strokes with his two companions, but the fine points had to wait until they passed the wire and dealt with any guards in the immediate vicinity. Then, Bolan had to pick a tank with loaded weapons—or hope that all of them were battle-ready where they sat.
It made a certain kind of sense, in fact. Guleed could sell the tanks as is, ammo and all, to any would-be General Patton, or he’d have them standing ready to defend his compound if it was attacked. As far as fuel went, Bolan knew the tanks were functional. If Guleed’s people hadn’t driven them, they’d still be sitting on the beach at Merca.
So, with any luck at all, he simply had to get inside a tank, pick one of the thirty-three and go for it. A three-man crew was standard, so he had that covered.
He planned to enter through the turret hatch, but that meant taking out whatever guards were close enough to glimpse Bolan and his two allies in the short time they would be exposed. He’d seen one guard on the beat, but there were likely more.
“Wait here,” he told Mironov and Waabberi, then moved silently along the narrow path Guleed’s soldiers had left between the nearest tanks, to keep from scraping paint off either one. There was enough room that he didn’t have to turn sideways, but it still had a claustrophobic feel about it.
When he stood between the tanks’ front fenders, with their cannons protruding far out before him, Bolan risked a glance in each direction. To his left, the guard he had already seen was moving away. On his right, another was nearing, still eighty or ninety feet short of the spot where he stood.
Close enough.
The Executioner drew his knife and settled in to wait.
13
“The bid stands at two million dollars,” Guleed said, as if either of his visitors might have forgotten it within the past five seconds.
It was Tenagne’s bid, if he chose to proceed. The Eritrean sat deep in his armchair, enveloped by the incongruous floral-print upholstery, staring at Dahnay Zenawi over tented fingers. Tenagne’s face was impassive, but Guleed imagined that he could hear cogwheels spinning inside the rebel leader’s skull.
He wanted to nudge the smaller man, remind him that time was money, but Guleed knew that pressure from him would derail the proceedings. He had to let the rivalry between the bidders spur them on. Any intrusion might rebound against his own interests.
“Another twenty thousand,” Tenagne said finally.
“And ten more,” Zenawi replied, not quite smirking.
They were down to bidding pennies now, but Guleed made sure to keep the same smile plastered on his face. Both bidders knew that he was only in it for the money, but he didn’t need to rub their noses in his greed.
Tenagne stalled again, causing Guleed to grind his teeth behind the smile. The Russian hardware might be all Tenagne’s Muslim comrades needed for their final push against the Eritrean government, but Tenagne also needed cash on hand to fuel the tanks and feed the soldiers who would follow them to victory if he was lucky.
Armies might fight on their stomachs, as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, but it took money to keep those stomachs filled and fit for combat. Tenagne’s jihadists might draw support from peasants in the countryside, but how many of them had fuel depots within their filthy villages? How many could support a modern blitzkrieg on religious zeal alone?
“Make it two million and fifty thousand,” Tenagne said at last.
Dahnay Zenawi did not wince, exactly, but behind his stoic expression there lay…what, exactly? Disappointment? Anger? Resignation? Guleed guessed that the ONLF’s man was reaching his limit. The well was about to run dry.
Guleed was all the more surprised, then, when Zenawi said, “Two-point-one million dollars.”
Tenagne involuntarily winced. Recovering swiftly, he picked up his coffee mug, took another sip and swished the liquid noisily around inside his mouth, as if he were a wine taster. Guleed suppressed an urge to giggle at the strange performance.
Tenagne glanced at his companion, whose name Guleed had managed to forget within a minute after they were introduced. The younger man remained impassive, though one of his shoulders moved a bit, perhaps the bare suggestion of a shrug. Tenagne sighed, a weary sound, and faced his rival once again.
“I make it two-point-two,” he said.
“Two-point-three,” Zenawi said quickly, arrogantly.
Guleed no longer had to fake his smile. He would be satisfied with the result, whether Tenagne followed suit and raised the bid or not. He didn’t care which side procured the weapons, or what bloody use they made of them at home, as long as he was paid well for the trouble of providing them.
“More coffee, anyone?” he asked, beaming.
BOLAN WAS WAITING WHEN the sen
try passed before him, never even glancing to his left, where mortal danger lay. With lightning speed, Bolan reached out and clamped a hand over the stranger’s mouth, dragging him bodily into the shadowed space between the two massive battle tanks, ramming his chest against one of the armored hulls to drive the breath out of his lungs.
The startled guard reacted on pure instinct, dropping his Kalashnikov to claw at Bolan’s hand. Before he reached it, Bolan drove his twelve-inch blade between the young man’s ribs, ramming through muscle and a lung before it found his pulsing heart.
The sentry stiffened, then began to thrash without conscious volition, as the vital pump inside his chest faltered and stalled. Instead of surging into the aorta and the pulmonary arteries, blood spilled into the dying youth’s thoracic cavity. For all intents and purposes, he was dead before his knees buckled and left him slumped in Bolan’s arms. One down.
He dragged the warm corpse back to where Mironov and Waabberi waited for him, left the knife in place until he’d laid the body on the ground, then drew it clear and wiped it on the dead man’s baggy trousers.
“There’s another one,” he said, and registered Mironov’s nod.
They had already tracked the sentries from a distance, noting that a pair of riflemen had been deployed to man each side of the rectangular compound. The lookouts roamed at will, with no set pattern, sometimes trailing one behind the other, then reversing to cross paths and move in opposite directions.
What would happen when the second watchman on the camp’s east side found his companion missing? Would he raise a general alarm, or mount a quick search of his own? Would he assume the missing soldier had responded to a call of nature, or might any deviation from routine provoke panic?
Bolan knew he would simply have to wait and see.
But he would wait where he could see other sentry coming, intervene before the man had a chance to shout and bring the others running.
The eastern fence was close to one hundred yards long, lined with sixteen T-90s facing inward, cannons leveled toward the CP at the center of the camp. Each tank was ten feet wide, with four to five feet left between them, and more space at each end of the lineup. Peering to the west, Bolan saw the first sentry who’d passed him at the far end of his beat, just turning back to head the other way.
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