He heard something crash behind him. The sudden noise caused him to wheel around, his big hand wrapping around the Type 79’s pistol grip. Though the vehicles obscured his vision, he heard one of his men shouting and cursing. A woman sobbed and apologized rapidly and repeatedly.
The corner of Mulumba’s mouth curled up in a snarl. He slammed the SUV’s door and wound his way between a couple of the vehicles, searching for the sources of the noise.
He saw one his fighters, a youth who just was barely eighteen, standing over the woman. He was holding his AK-74 up by his left ear, the rifle butt pointed at her. She was holding one hand up defensively, begging for him to stop. Tears trailed down her cheeks and glistened even in the fading sunlight.
A cardboard box lay on its side on the ground. Its contents, a few cans of food, were spread over the rocky ground. Glass jars of cherry jelly had shattered, spreading the glass and the contents everywhere.
“Hey!” Mulumba shouted.
The guard, who’d been ready to strike, hesitated and turned toward Mulumba. The woman also whipped her gaze in the big African’s direction and, seeing him, began to sob even harder.
Bridging the distance in long strides, Mulumba closed in on the other two. He looked at the guard.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.
The guard gestured at the cowering woman with the barrel of his AK-74.
“She dropped this box of food,” the man said.
“And you would beat her for this? For dropping my things?”
The man opened his mouth to reply.
Mulumba gestured for silence and the guard shut up.
Mulumba looked down at the woman, who was shaking and pressing her body against the ground as though she wanted to melt into the earth for protection.
“You dropped my food, yes?”
The woman nodded vigorously. “I didn’t...”
Again he waved a hand for silence.
“You shouldn’t be beat for this,” Mulumba said. He watched as her face morphed from terror to confusion to relief. She began to sob again, this time from relief.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
Mulumba smiled coldly and nodded once.
He then turned the Type 79’s muzzle in her direction. Terror immediately overtook her again and she threw up a hand to protect herself.
The Chinese gun ground out a half dozen rounds. The bullets pierced her chest and flayed the flesh of her shoulders, splattering the ground and the cardboard box.
Turning his gaze on the guard, he watched the young soldier fidget and cast his eyes at the ground.
“I’m sorry about the food,” the guard said.
Mulumba shrugged and his expression suddenly turned bored. “Don’t worry. We have plenty of food.”
He turned and walked away. For a moment, at least, he felt a little more in control, a little less vulnerable to surprises. Perhaps he’d been overreacting. The other two men had been simple-minded fools. Only by the most generous definition were they warriors. Of course, they both were dead, their corpses rotting in a hole somewhere. They weren’t real soldiers, real masters of the destinies, not like him.
He reached his tent. He had a flask of whiskey stashed inside. A drink sounded good. Besides, he needed to go online to check with the bank in Zurich. As best he could tell, the Iranians hadn’t come through with the money they’d promised. So they’d brought all this trouble on themselves for nothing.
He grabbed the entrance flap, peeled it aside and ducked his head to enter the tent.
The sound of automatic weapons fire at his six caught his attention.
He turned.
* * *
HAWKINS KNELT NEXT to one of the dozen or so tents arrayed throughout Mulumba’s camp. The smell of marijuana smoke and body odor registered with him, causing him to wrinkle his nose involuntarily. He peered around the edge of the tent and saw a guard standing there, taking a hit from a marijuana cigarette. Holding in a lungful of smoke, the guard stared at the sky for several seconds before he exhaled.
Several minutes ago Hawkins had crept out from a line of trees to the west of the camp and crawled over fifty yards of hard-packed earth until he’d reached the tents. McCarter had sent him and Encizo in to terminate the outer ring of guards with knives and sound-suppressed weapons. The idea was for the two American members of Phoenix Force to lead as many of Mulumba’s prisoners to safety before they launched any major gun battles. Once they’d moved them off the line of fire, it would be open season on the rest of Mulumba’s people.
The only thing saving the main man at the moment was that the Stony Man fighters needed any information Mulumba could provide. Once they’d milked him of anything useful, his chances of growing to a ripe old age dropped to almost nil.
Assuming, that is, Phoenix Force actually could take down the guy’s small army of rebels and snag him before he tried to escape. Assuming that one or more members of Phoenix Force didn’t end up dying out here. Like the other members of the group, Hawkins knew every time he walked into battle could be his last. If his number came up, he hoped he didn’t let down his teammates in the process.
Hawkins straightened just a little before he stepped from cover. He crossed the space between himself and the pot-smoking hardman. Just as he got within a few feet of his target, some stones crunched under Hawkins’s boot. Even high, the other guy heard the noise and began to turn in Hawkins’s direction. The soldier surged forward and was on the hardman in an instant. He clamped a hand over the guard’s mouth, could feel the scratch of his whiskers against his palm, and jerked his head to the left.
With his right hand, Hawkins dragged the blade across the other guard’s throat and held on to him until his struggling body went still. The Stony Man fighter dragged the corpse to a nearby tent and thrust the body inside.
Before Phoenix Force had hit this location, the U.S. military had scrambled a Predator drone over the camp to shoot new video. As best as they’d been able to tell, Mulumba had maybe twenty armed men in the camp, probably a few of them barely eighteen, if that. Hawkins had spent enough time on Africa’s killing fields to know that rebel movements in these countries often recruited cannon fodder by force, snatching underage boys and coercing them into becoming soldiers or turning them into murderous automatons with the help of drugs. Experience told Hawkins that at any time he might end up blowing the head off of an aggressor who turned out to be a thirteen-year-old kid. He’d accepted that fact, though by no means had he made peace with it.
Moving through the tents, he caught up with two more guards, taking down each with his blade. He was beginning to feel edgy. It had been about two minutes since he’d made his first kill. With each passing second, the chances of something going wrong increased. Someone might miss one of the dead guards or discover their bodies. Mulumba might climb into one of the vehicles and leave, forcing Phoenix Force into a vehicle pursuit.
Hawkins had no intention of letting a thug like Mulumba walk away. He knew Encizo felt the same.
The soldier continued to wind his way through the tents, occasionally halting at one long enough to check it for occupants. He came across a pair of women; one was kneeling next to a fire, the second stood over her, pointing and speaking rapidly in a language Hawkins didn’t understand. A grilling rack was positioned over the fire, its metal blackened by flames. A similarly scarred pot stood on the rack, its contents bubbling audibly. Hawkins caught a whiff of some kind of meat cooking in the pot, though he couldn’t recognize it.
He made a mental note of their location before he started moving again. Once they started evacuating the camp, he’d try to make sure the two women were moved, too.
Slipping out into the open just for a second, he was able to get past the women, who seemed engrossed in their work, and continue moving. U
p ahead, he could see a couple of the Toyota SUVs that Mulumba seemed to prefer. He also saw several women, all dressed in worn clothing, their feet bare or shod in cheap flip-flops, milling around the vehicles and carrying armloads of canned goods, sacks of nuts and coffees, as well as portable stoves and other items.
Mulumba had obviously decided to pick up stakes and leave the area. Considering that two of his compatriots had been killed in the span of a couple of days, Hawkins had no trouble believing the African strongman wanted a change of scenery.
Hawkins knelt in the shadow cast by one of the tents and activated his throat mike.
“Rafe?”
“Go,” Encizo replied.
“You have a visual on Mulumba yet?”
“Negative.”
“You made any friends?
“Four. You?”
“Three down.”
“Only three? I didn’t come all this way to carry you.”
Hawkins grinned. “I’ll try to do better.”
An automatic weapon chattered from some distance away and Hawkins flinched. The sound of several terrified women screaming cut through the air.
“Damn,” he said.
“So much,” Encizo said, “for evacuating people before it gets too heavy.”
“Yeah.”
McCarter’s voice broke in. “You lads okay?”
“Vertical,” Hawkins replied.
“What happened?”
“Somebody fired a gun,” Hawkins said.
“I figured that much, you bloody ignoramus.”
“You know as much as I do then.”
“Impressive bit of intel,” McCarter said. “I guess it’s time for me to come in and fix everything.”
“Please do,” Encizo said. “We’re confused and scared.”
“Smartass,” McCarter replied. “Hawk, you see if you can isolate Mulumba. Encizo, you do what you can to get the civilians out of here.”
“Not sure I can get them all.”
“Understood. Just get as many of them away from Mulumba as you can. If they aren’t on the firing line, we can operate more efficiently.”
“Meaning kill more bad guys more quickly,” Hawkins said.
“Exactly,” McCarter said.
* * *
HAWKINS RAN TOWARD the sound of the autofire.
He emerged from the tents and spotted three females clustered together. The two women who looked the youngest stood next to one another. One, her hand covering her mouth, was staring wide-eyed at something while the second woman had her hand flat on her chest as though she was trying to keep her heart from bursting out. A third woman stood in front of the other two, her slender arms extended, her legs spread in a wide stance, offering up her frail form as a shield for the others.
Hawkins admired the lady’s guts.
He sheathed his knife, drew the Beretta 92-F from his thigh holster and threaded in the sound suppressor with quick, practiced movements. He crept up to the line of SUVs, then passed between a couple of them. One of Mulumba’s men was walking up to the women, motioning with the barrel of his rifle for them to move away.
His face was a mask of anger and he was shouting something at the women that Hawkins couldn’t understand. The shielding woman didn’t budge. The guard halted a couple of feet from her and raised his rifle, preparing to strike her with it. Hawkins raised the Beretta in a two-handed grip, lined up a shot and tapped the trigger. A single 9 mm round punched into the bridge of the guard’s nose. The bullet’s impact smacked the back of the hardman’s skull and he spun a quarter of a turn before his legs went rubbery and his body crashed to the ground.
The gunshot had splattered the woman with flecks of blood, brain matter and bone fragments. While she didn’t scream, she did back away from the fallen man and, with her fingertips, began to frantically brush away the bits of human matter from her clothes and skin. Her young friends screamed again.
Hawkins disappeared between the vehicles again, not wanting to attract attention. Part of him worried the sight of a heavily armed commando in their midst would only stoke panic among Mulumba’s prisoners. But he also worried they would, in their search for protection, crowd around him and render him unable to fight without putting them in jeopardy.
He moved to the other side of the SUV and glided along it, keeping his head down. He rounded the vehicle’s front end, ducked and hid between it another vehicle. Peering out from his cover, he saw two of Mulumba’s grim-faced guards running toward their dead comrade from a couple dozen yards away, their eyes sweeping for the shooter as they moved.
Hawkins waited a second for the footsteps to grow louder before he rose and, using the SUV for cover, put one of the approaching hardmen in the Beretta’s sights. He squeezed the trigger twice. The bullets cut across the distance. The first buried itself in the throat of the thug on the right, while the second drilled through his nose. Momentum carried the dead guard’s body another step before he pitched face forward onto the ground. The second guard had covered a couple of yards before it registered with him that his comrade had disappeared. Even as the man was casting a quick look over his shoulder, Hawkins was bracketing the guy’s torso in the Beretta’s sights, knocking out two more rounds of Parabellum, both of which lanced into the guard’s chest and cut his sprint short.
Hawkins moved out from between the parked vehicles. The women were staring at the fallen thugs. The two who were afraid a few seconds ago looked on the verge of panic. Their hands were clasped over open mouths, chests heaving, tears streaming down their cheeks. Even the third woman, who’d thrust herself between the guards and her companions, stood frozen, eyes fixed on the dead men.
Apparently sensing someone was standing behind her, she whirled in Hawkins’s direction. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened.
He jerked his head in the direction of the helicopter they’d used to get close to the camp. “I’m a friend,” he said, using what little French he knew. “Go. Get out of here while you can.”
She kept her gaze fixed on him for several seconds, likely trying to figure out whether she could believe him. The other women—who Hawkins could tell were little more than teenagers—were grabbing at her arms and shoulders, trying to pull her away. She shrugged them off.
Hawkins again gestured for them to leave. “Go.”
The woman licked her lips.
“You here for Mulumba?” she replied, also in French.
Hawkins nodded.
Her face became a mask of barely contained rage.
“Kill him.” She spit.
“Consider it done,” he said. “There’s a truck that way. Less than a kilometer from here. Gather up anyone you can find, take them there. Get these girls out of here.”
She eyed him, her wariness obvious. “Who are you?”
“Mulumba’s death sentence,” Hawkins said. He was starting to feel impatient, knowing that he was burning time. “You need to know more?”
She chewed on her lip a moment and considered the question. “No,” she said finally.
“Good,” Hawkins said before moving on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Crouched behind a boulder, Encizo stalked two of Mulumba’s men. One was speaking into a two-way radio. From the smattering of French the Cuban understood and the urgency in the man’s voice, he could tell the thug was trying unsuccessfully to reach one of his comrades. The guy had tried to contact others on his team and had failed each time. The second man, apparently alarmed, was pulling his rifle from his shoulder and looking around, as though the others would pop out from a bush and yell “Surprise!”
Encizo already had stowed his blade and exchanged it for a sound-suppressed Beretta. By his reckoning, he was one hundred yards or so from Mulumba’s tent. Though he couldn’t see it, a group of th
e warlord’s prisoners was visible, each of them carrying boxes and other items out of the various tents and storage sheds that dotted the property.
The SUVs, along with a couple of rusted pickups and sedans covered in faded paint, were parked along the dirt road that wound through the camp. The roads had been scarred with deep ruts, probably created during the country’s rainy season.
The Cuban had taken down six other hardmen at this point. He guessed Hawkins had terminated at least as many. He needed to take down these men and make his way to Mulumba.
He rose in a slight crouch from behind the boulder, sighted on the man with the radio and squeezed the trigger. The bullet slammed into the man’s chest and he wilted.
Seeing his comrade fold in front of him, the other guard brought up his weapon and wheeled toward Encizo. The Phoenix Force commando never let the man finish his assault. The Beretta chugged two more rounds. One slug whistled past the guard, while the second lanced into his temple and drilled through his head before bursting out the other side of his skull. The impact caused the man to stumble sideways even as his body went limp and he collapsed. The Kalashnikov in his grip suddenly erupted, letting loose a short burst. Jagged yellow flames flashed from the muzzle and the bullets chopped into the ground, kicking up a plume of rock fragments and dirt.
Encizo muttered an oath. Obviously he’d just tipped the opposition that he was there. The remaining guards would respond.
“Encizo,” McCarter said. “Sitrep!”
“I’m okay,” he said.
“I heard shots.”
“Affirmative. Just took down two of their men. One of them had to fire his gun one last time before he went to hell.”
“I think we lost the element of surprise,” McCarter said dryly.
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Glad to help. Now, keep going.”
“Roger.”
Encizo continued toward Mulumba’s position. He followed the line of vehicles as long as he could, depending on them for cover. By the time he’d gotten within twenty yards or so of Mulumba’s tent, Hawkins had fallen in with him. They put several yards between them but continued to move in the same direction. By now, both men realized trying to maintain stealth at the expense of power no longer served them well. Encizo had holstered his Beretta and instead was wielding his MP-5 with a 30-round magazine. Hawkins brandished a compact M-4 A-1 CQBR.
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