Bolan was lethal and had earned his label as the Executioner the plain old-fashioned way, but he was not a hit man for the filthy rich.
Brognola generally screened out dirty jobs without referring them to Bolan, but he served the government, relied on it for covert funding and was forced to deal with parasites from time to time. That was a fact of life in politics, and the primary reason Bolan shunned political involvements like the plague. He had been lucky so far, but he didn’t want to think about what might become of the Stony Man Farm organization when Hal Brognola eventually retired.
A horn beeped twice behind him, not the kind of blaring he’d expect to signal road rage. Bolan stopped and faced northward, just as Brognola pulled up beside him in a pearl-gray Lincoln Town Car. Bolan went to meet him, slid into the shotgun seat and settled back as the big Fed merged his vehicle with the flow of midday traffic. He turned onto North Glebe Road, taking them past colleges on either side and into the residential suburbs.
“Nice ride,” Bolan said.
“Thank Javier Christos de Luna,” Brognola replied.
“I would,” Bolan said, “but I never heard of him.”
“He used to be a big cheese with the Gulf Cartel,” Brognola said. “Poor baby’s doing forty-five to life, with forfeiture of assets. I called dibs on this, over a yacht.”
“Good choice,” Bolan allowed. “You know a boat’s nothing but a hole in the water—”
“—that you throw money into,” Brognola finished. “I hear you. Besides, where in hell would I park it?”
Bolan let that go, waiting for his old friend to settle in and get around to business. They were coming up on Woodlawn Park and Highway 66, the interchange, when the big Fed said, “What it is, okay, we’ve got a problem in West Africa.”
Brognola ran it down, trusting Bolan to hear and absorb on the first pass, picking out the crucial details. Later, for the background, he could watch the DVD the big Fed had secured in the vehicle’s glove compartment. And the rest of it, what followed after...well, Bolan would work that out once he was on the scene.
“It’s Guinea-Bissau,” Brognola said. “Not a name you hear in conversation every day.”
“Or every year,” Bolan replied.
“Used to be Portuguese Guinea,” Brognola pressed on, “aka the Slave Coast, so no doubts about the state of race relations there. Fast-forward some four hundred years, and France grabs part of the package for French West Africa, but our President Grant weighs in to help Lisbon hang on to the rest, including a passel of islands. Natives start fighting for independence in the 1950s, but it takes them twenty years to pull it off. Since then, they mostly fight each other to decide whether they’ll have a president, a military junta or some mixed-up combination of the two.”
“Sounds like a mess,” Bolan observed.
“It’s Africa,” Brognola said. “We can go back and blame the European empires, slavers, missionaries—take your pick. Or maybe it’s the same damn mess we have worldwide, where races and religions clash.”
“Is it a tribal thing?” Bolan inquired.
“I won’t pretend to understand it all,” Brognola said. “From what I understand, there are at least six mainland ethnic groups, divided by their languages and traditions, plus mestizos with some Portuguese ancestry. In terms of religion, about half the people are Muslim, forty percent or so are traditional animists and the remainder are Christians. Muslims pitched in with the Portuguese to bury an animist uprising back in the old days, around World War I, but some people are still pissed about it.”
“Economics?” Bolan asked him.
“Mostly agricultural, exporting fish and nuts, which barely keeps the country going. Every year Guinea-Bissau comes in near the bottom for gross domestic product, same thing on the Human Development Index. Average household income hangs around five hundred dollars a year, and whatever the state makes from exports isn’t trickling down.”
“It never does,” Bolan observed.
“The trouble that concerns us,” Brognola went on, “began back in 2005.”
“What happened then?”
“Colombian and Mexican cartels decided that West Africa would make a great transshipment point for cocaine on its way to Europe. Three years later, the chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime called Guinea-Bissau Africa’s first narco-state.”
“It’s that bad?” Bolan asked.
“Picture this,” the big Fed replied. “They have sixty-three federal officers in the whole country, to police fourteen thousand square miles on the mainland and hundreds of islands offshore. Sixty-three agents watching 1.7 million people. And get this—no prison.”
Bolan smiled at that and shook his head, apparently left speechless.
“It gets worse,” Brognola told him. “Since their last half-assed coup, back in 2010, the heads of their army, navy and air force have been designated as prime targets under the U.S. Drug Kingpin Act. Of course, we can’t touch them legally, and their own government couldn’t clean house if it wanted to. In September 2011 the prime minister went begging in New York, asking the UN and the European Union to patrol his country’s borders. The guy can’t do it himself, for fear of touching off another coup.”
“I’m guessing we wouldn’t be talking if that had worked out,” Bolan said.
“You’re guessing correctly. Twelve years and counting in Afghanistan, eight-plus in Iraq and Libya still cooking with the NATO intervention, no one in Wonderland’s up for policing West Africa. As for the EU, it’s too busy keeping Greece afloat. The governors see what’s been happening on our side of the pond, from Bogotá to Mexico, and who in hell would want that kind of mayhem on the Continent?”
“Which leaves us...where?” Bolan asked.
“In hot water,” Hal replied. “Last week, the DEA went after some Guinea-Bissauan traffickers in the South Bronx. It turned into a bloodbath. Now the White House has widows and senators howling for retribution, with no legal way to deliver.”
“I get it.”
“You’ve got it,” Brognola said, “if you think you can handle it.”
“Tackle the army, navy and the air force?” Bolan smiled again. “Why not?”
“Only the army, this time,” the big Fed replied. “One general and his assorted scumbag cronies.”
“Hey, sounds like a piece of cake.”
“There’s a DVD in the glove compartment. Should have all the details that you need,” Brognola said.
“When do I leave?”
“The day after tomorrow,” Brognola replied “Did I mention that the only flights to Guinea-Bissau leave from Lisbon twice a week?”
Washington Dulles International Airport
BOLAN DROPPED HIS RENTED CAR and checked into the Marriott Hotel for an easy walk to the terminal. He booked his flight to Madrid on Aer Lingus, seven hours and forty minutes nonstop, with a two-hour layover at Madrid-Barajas Airport. From there, Iberia would carry him to Lisbon on a forty-minute commuter hop, leaving Bolan with a day and night to kill before a four-hour flight to Bissau with TAP Portugal.
The Marriott was perfect for his overnight, before he flew halfway around the world to tackle the Guinea-Bissauan army and its narco cohorts single-handed. Bolan didn’t feel intimidated by the odds against him, but he knew that preparation was a soldier’s best life insurance. Dining on room service steak and potatoes, he fired up the DVD Brognola had provided and got his first look at the enemy.
General Ismael Diallo stood five foot nine and weighed two hundred pounds, straining the seams of his tailored uniform. As bald as a billiard ball, he almost seemed to glisten in the photos the big Fed provided, as if freshly oiled or prone to epic perspiration. He loved decorations, from the dozen medals on his chest to the Parmigiani Bugatti Type 370 watch on his wrist that retailed for a cool two hundred grand. Th
at clearly didn’t fit a soldier’s salary, particularly in a country that spent less than ten million per year on all its armed forces combined. In most of the photos Diallo was smiling, smug and self-satisfied, but one caught him scowling at the camera, his face like a grouper homing on prey.
According to Diallo’s file from Stony Man, he had joined the army at sixteen with his parents’ permission, and had risen through the ranks with an uncanny flair for picking winners in his homeland’s various coups, mutinies and upheavals. Already a general when the army moved against the prime minister in 2010, Diallo had emerged from that crisis and the European Union’s halfhearted effort to reform Guinea-Bissauan security forces as de facto commander in chief of the nation’s army. Despite his nominal subordination to civilian leaders in Bissau, Diallo ruled his roost, as did commanders of the navy and air force, cooperating when they felt like it, all looking out primarily for Number One.
Diallo’s closest civilian ally was Edouard Camara, a veteran narcotics trafficker at age thirty-two, well connected to Colombia’s Norte del Valle Cartel, based in Valle del Cauca, and Mexico’s La Familia Michoacána. Both were capable of shipping cocaine by the ton, and the Mexican outfit also had a profitable sideline in heroin. He had been convicted twice in Senegal for smuggling drugs, but managed to escape both times, killing a policeman in his second jailbreak. Senegal’s parliament had abolished capital punishment in 2004, but DEA reports indicated that Camara still took care when crossing the border.
In Guinea-Bissau, of course, he had nothing to fear. Brognola had exaggerated slightly about the country having no prisons. In fact, its first—an aged colonial mansion oddly dubbed “First Squadron”—had begun receiving prisoners in 1999. It hardly mattered, though, since the facility lacked beds, electric power, running water, bars or locks. With only a commander and two unarmed guards on duty, inmates routinely walked away from the so-called lockup, returning if and when they felt like it. The United Nations was collaborating with Guinea-Bissau’s ministry of justice to “rehabilitate” a couple old Portuguese colonial prisons, but progress was sluggish at best.
One of the stumbling blocks, according to Brognola’s file, was Minister of the Interior Pascal Kinte, a cohort of Diallo’s and Camara’s who’d grown wealthy by turning a blind eye to Guinea-Bissau’s thriving drug trade. An equal-opportunity grafter, he also worked with leaders of the navy and air force to keep the coke flowing, but Kinte seemed to have a special soft spot for Diallo. As his dossier explained it, Diallo had protected Kinte and his family during the upheavals of 2008 through 2010, accepting Kinte’s aid with smuggling as a form of payback. Not that Kinte was complaining, judging from the huge smile that he wore in every photograph available. His bank accounts in Austria and Switzerland, while maybe not as fat as General Diallo’s, guaranteed that Kinte and his heirs would never want for anything.
Except, perhaps, for sanctuary from the Executioner.
None of the players knew a storm was coming, and if warned, they likely would have scoffed at any threat from one lone man. Others before them had adopted that same attitude, and all of them were dead.
Still, it would be a challenge, taking on a whole army in a nation so far gone that there were no controls over the military. And police would be a problem, too. Pascal Kinte controlled one unit, called the Special Intervention Force, whose members were suspected of assassinating officers from the rival Judicial Police, Guinea-Bissau’s equivalent of the FBI, with sixty-three surviving agents nationwide. Bolan had long ago sworn that he’d never kill a cop, no matter how corrupt, brutal or murderous that officer might be. It was the only limitation that he’d set on the conduct of his private wars, but it wasn’t sacrosanct. There had been an exception....
So he’d avoid police if possible. And if it wasn’t possible...well, he would have to wait and see what happened next. But soldiers were fair game, and Bolan reckoned he would likely bag his limit soon.
Unless they got him first.
Aboard Aer Lingus Flight 6963
BOLAN FLEW BUSINESS CLASS, courtesy of Tyrone Reeves, a Baltimore banker who had recently quit the business and dropped out of sight. He’d be a long time coming back, and Bolan doubted whether anyone would miss him much. It was a cutthroat business, after all, and swimming with the sharks in Tyrone’s case had been a literal experience, involving a one-way cruise into Chesapeake Bay.
Bolan liked business class for its leg room, ignoring the bit about free checked baggage and “restaurant class” dining service. On a long trip like the flight from Dulles to Madrid, it was worth twelve hundred dollars of a dead man’s money to relax and sleep in relative comfort, preparing himself for the action ahead. He couldn’t fault the food, had definitely eaten worse on planes and on the ground, but it was only fuel for the machine. By this time on Friday, he’d be on the ground in Guinea-Bissau, fighting for his life.
ON RARE OCCASIONS, Bolan thought back to a time when his entire life hadn’t been consumed by war or preparation for war. Those early days weren’t forgotten, but they blurred sometimes, losing their color like a faded set of Polaroid pictures. He picked out images of family, all gone except for his brother, Johnny, who no longer resembled the boy he had been before tragedy struck. Friends from high school were faces with names that got lost in the shuffle, mere whispers faint to his ears.
Regrets? He had a few, as Old Blue Eyes once sang, but Bolan kept them to himself. The life he led had been a conscious choice, and he had no regrets for that. His failures—being too late for a friend in need on more than one occasion—had been balanced out, at least to some extent, by vengeance wreaked upon their killers. If the final tally ran against him...well, what of it?
Bolan understood the arguments for pacifism, recognized the courage and sincerity of champions who faced the bayonets and guns with nothing but a song and faith that human goodness would prevail someday. He honored anyone who showed that kind of valor—but it wasn’t his way of confronting evil. He’d been trained by experts in the U.S. Army Special Forces, and had quit the service when it couldn’t help avenge his family. The rest was bloodstained history, and Bolan offered no apology to anyone alive or dead for what he’d done.
Or for what he would do, if granted time, in battles yet unfought, against new enemies as yet unknown.
He browsed Cara, the airline’s in-flight magazine, skimming an article on ancient Irish castles, one on hiking and a profile of a TV chef he’d never heard of. None of it meant much to Bolan, though he found the castle photos pleasing in a way he couldn’t quite explain. Their sense of permanence, perhaps, withstanding sieges spanning centuries, now welcoming the tourist trade with perfect stoicism.
During other flights to combat zones, he’d worried about being met by hostiles on arrival. There was precious little chance of that this time, but once he had boots on the ground in Africa, Bolan knew he’d be swimming hard against the tide. Tourism wasn’t big in Guinea-Bissau, as a hefty Euromonitor report would tell you for the modest price of $1,900. Bolan didn’t need to spend that much of Tyrone Reeve’s money to discover that the nation’s poverty, endemic violence and thriving narco trade discouraged idle visitors from Europe and the States.
Why fly halfway around the world to sleep in lousy digs and get your ass shot off?
Long story short, it meant that he’d be on his own, the odd man out. More so than usual, in fact, because he’d make an easy mark for racial profiling. But he had worked in Africa before and lived to tell the tale—or not, in fact, since nearly everything he did was highly classified.
The quicker he could wrap things up in Guinea-Bissau, Bolan understood, the better were his chances of survival. Moving on to yet another battle in his endless war. That prospect might discourage some, but Bolan found it hopeful. When so many occupants of Planet Earth were simply killing time, the Executioner made time to kill.
And would, as long as time remained.
/>
3
Zona Industrial, Bissau
Now
The frag grenade’s explosion had a stunning impact at close quarters. Bolan, crouching with his face averted, heard the shrapnel slapping into cinder blocks and flesh, men crying out in pain where they’d been muttering a moment earlier. He surged around the corner, following his rifle’s lead, and found two shooters writhing on the concrete floor, surrounding walls and ceiling decorated with their blood and flesh.
He kicked their guns away and left them dying at their own pace, stepping past them and the women they had gunned down, following the corridor they’d guarded with their lives to see what waited for him next. More voices drew him onward, women wailing, angry men trying to quiet them by shouting.
All too late.
More feet approached as he neared the next sharp turn, and Bolan slowed to let his adversaries close the gap. It sounded like another pair of shooters, smart enough to keep their mouths shut, but they couldn’t keep their shoes from scuffle-flapping on the concrete floor. Bolan imagined them approaching, heard them slowing as they neared the corner. He crouched and held his rifle ready, muzzle leveled some twelve inches from the point where any moving target should appear.
The scouts had stopped now. They were whispering, inaudible and untranslatable, but Bolan knew what they were saying. Someone had to peek around the corner first, and they were arguing, deciding who would literally stick his neck out to discover if the coast was clear. Another beat, and Bolan heard one of the bodies shifting forward, fabric sliding against cinder blocks, until a pie-slice of a face slid into view, one eye revealed.
Bolan fired into it, a blur of crimson marking impact as the partial face slammed backward, out of frame. A startled cry reached the Executioner’s ears from number two, followed immediately by a burst of auto-fire that didn’t come within ten feet of his position. Panicked footsteps fled along the hallway, and Bolan slid out to see the runner making tracks in search of cover.
Rogue Assault Page 3