Rogue Assault

by Don Pendleton

  “A white man. Beyond that, not much. They were frightened, and after he blew up the merchandise, well...”

  Camara had another thought. “This missing man. Do you suppose that he was taken hostage?”

  “It’s unclear. As to the killings, there are some...discrepancies.”

  “Explain.”

  “The shift on duty when the fighting started—Bruno and his men—were mostly shot with an assault rifle, two of them killed by a grenade. But the relief crew, with Fidelis...”

  “What?” Camara demanded.

  “It appears they were shot in the back, with a different weapon,” Ialá explained.

  “And you know this because?”

  “I’m informed by the Special Intervention Police”

  Camara sometimes thought of the SIP as his police force, though it answered to General Diallo.

  “Two weapons means two shooters, eh?” he said. “The cutters must have been mistaken.”

  “Or the missing man could be a traitor,” Ialá said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Nilson Medina. He came highly recommended. Blooded prior to his recruitment, with a record.”

  “Which was verified?”

  “As usual, sir. Through channels with the Judicial Police,” Ialá said.

  “If we can trust them,” Camara replied.

  “You believe they’d risk an agent undercover, with so few on staff?”

  “We won’t know till we find and question this Medina, will we, Aristide?”

  “If he is still alive.”

  “And if he’s not, it solves our problem,” Camara said. “On the other hand, if he is breathing, then he has become a liability. Either a traitor or a hostage who can tell his captors everything he knows about our Family. In either case—”

  “We’ll find him,” Ialá stated. “I already have men searching for him.”

  “Excellent,” Camara said. “As for the white man, how hard can it be to find him in Bissau? Whether he’s British, French or Portuguese, he’ll have been seen.”

  “And if he is American?” Ialá asked.

  “No difference. Find him. Bring him to me alive, if possible. Wherever he is from, we need to know if he was sent on some official project, or if he’s a mercenary. And if so, who paid him to attack us.”

  “It must be Admiral Pires or General Sanhá,” Ialá said. “Who else would dare to challenge General Diallo?”

  “That’s the question we must answer, Aristide. And soon.”

  Camara had already thought of other possibilities. An outside syndicate—perhaps Italian, Corsican or even Russian—might feel threatened by the flow of drugs from Guinea-Bissau into Europe. All were ruthless, capable of reaching out to strike their adversaries from a distance. And if war was brewing on an intercontinental scale, Camara had to know before his patron learned of it at army headquarters.

  Before it came around to bite him on the ass when he least expected it.

  Calequir, Bissau

  THE SAFE HOUSE was a small two-bedroom dwelling in a neighborhood of winding narrow streets between Estrada da Granja do Pessube and Estrada de Santa Luzia, north of downtown Bissau. It was dark when Bolan reached it, his passenger navigating from the shotgun seat. At Medina’s direction, he followed an unpaved driveway to a mangy yard of sorts behind the house, then turned the Peugeot 308 around so that it stood facing the street for a speedy departure at need.

  The house was dark, as was the neighborhood surrounding it. Bolan decided he would take his rifle with him, leaving his RPG-7 and rockets locked up in the trunk. If something happened and he needed high explosives to escape the house, he would rely on the grenades clipped to his belt beneath his windbreaker.

  Nilson Medina had explained himself after a fashion, while directing Bolan to his hideaway. At thirty-three, he was a ten-year veteran of the Judicial Police, assigned to infiltrate Edouard Camara’s drug syndicate in the guise of a felon with nothing to lose, seeking profit wherever a dishonest CFA franc could be made. He’d been accepted to the Family, kept filing his reports with headquarters, but nothing ever seemed to happen. Recently, one of his fellow officers had been assassinated, almost certainly by other cops—the Special Intervention Force—and he was getting fed up with his job.

  “Still,” Bolan had observed, “you took a chance tonight. You’re on the hook for murder now.”

  Medina shrugged at that and said, “What difference does it make? I stopped a crime in progress. If I’m prosecuted and convicted, they will send me to First Squadron and I’ll walk away. It’s all a joke, you see.”

  “Not for the boys you put away tonight,” Bolan reminded him. “Camara will have people looking for you now.”

  Medina hadn’t answered that, but now, inside his safe house with doors locked against the hostile night and coffee on the kitchen table, he told Bolan, “I was getting nowhere with the system as it is. We can collect intelligence from now until the end of time, but to what end? No one dares move against the men behind the trafficking in drugs—or children, for that matter. Did you know that girls as young as eight and nine years old are sold in Senegal? For service as domestics, we are told, but who can say?”

  “I didn’t know it, but I’m not surprised,” Bolan replied. Trafficking in children was a global scandal, whether they wound up with pedophiles or slaving in some filthy sweatshop for pennies a day. Bolan had dealt with human traffickers before, but it was like declaring war on cockroaches. No matter how many went down, more always stood in line to take their place.

  “It’s foolish, I suppose,” Medina said, “but when I heard your voice tonight I had to do something. Fidelis and the others would have killed you, held a celebration, and the world would just have gone on as before.”

  In fact, Bolan was more concerned about the prospect that he might have killed an undercover cop and never known it, but he didn’t contradict Medina. Why puncture his illusion, when the guy had risked his life for Bolan, possibly destroying his career?

  Instead, he told his host, “Well, I appreciate your help. What now?”

  “I think we have an opportunity,” Medina said, “to break the Family. Perhaps we cannot touch General Diallo, but Camara may be vulnerable.”

  “You and me,” Bolan said.

  “Yes.” Medina nodded earnestly.

  “You understand I’m not a cop. I don’t have a book of rules. We wouldn’t be collecting evidence or bringing anyone to trial.”

  “That’s all a waste of time, in any case,” Medina said. “Our president dismisses judges on a whim, replacing them with cronies who support him, then ignores complaints from the United Nations. Even if the courts were independent and relieved of all corruption, who would try the men behind Camara and his kind? Oppose the generals, and you invite another coup.”

  “Just so you’re ready for whatever happens next,” warned Bolan.

  “I am ready,” Medina said with a smile. “When do we start?”

  Headquarters of the Forces Armées de Guinée-Bissau,

  Bairro Militar, Bissau

  “AND WHY IS THIS MY PROBLEM?” General Ismael Diallo asked his unexpected visitor.

  Edouard Camara frowned, as if he didn’t fully understand the question, then replied, “Because, General, the plant was your facility as well as mine.”

  “Was it?” Diallo asked, frowning. “If that is true, I should be angry that you failed to keep it safe. Do you present yourself for punishment?”

  Camara shifted in his chair, doubly uneasy now. “I meant to say—”

  “By all means, tell me what you meant to say,” Diallo interrupted him. “It’s late, and I’m expected elsewhere.”

  “There is a possibility—no, say a probability—that the attack was planned, commissioned if you like, by forces
from outside the country. Clearly, that is your field of authority and expertise.”

  “What would you have me do?” Diallo asked. “Should I ask the foreign consulates in Bissau if they are responsible? Perhaps you’d have me call Dakar and question the Americans? They would be pleased to answer truthfully, I’m sure.”

  “General, I simply mean that when the culprit is identified—”

  “Aha!” Diallo wore a predatory smile. “And that’s the problem, is it not, Edouard? The culprit, as you call him, has not been identified. You say he was a white man. So, what of it? That narrows the field to Europe, North America, Australia—am I overlooking any possibilities?”

  “I doubt that the Australians—”

  “Russians, then? The vor v zakone? Perhaps it was the Mafia or Unione Corse? Is there a possibility your addled witnesses mistook a Mexican or a Colombian for white?”

  “General, the man spoke English.”

  “Yes, according to your soldier who lay dying.”

  “I would trust him all the more for that,” Camara said.

  “Then follow up on that,” Diallo said. “You know what steps to take. Contact the airport for recent arrivals. Check the hotels. Use your eyes and ears inside the Judicial Police.”

  “I shall,” Camara said. “As to the airport, General, your own men might have more success with Customs than my own.”

  Diallo considered that for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll send someone from Special Intervention,” he agreed. “Now, if that’s all...”

  Camara clearly wasn’t satisfied, but he knew when to quit. “Yes, General,” he said. “Your help is much appreciated.”

  “You’d be wise to clean this up, Edouard,” Diallo warned the gangster as he rose to leave. “It would be most unfortunate if you appeared to be incapable of dealing with a crisis. I would have to wonder if you were...expendable.”

  “I’ll see to it, General,” Camara said, and scuttled out before Diallo had a chance to change his mind.

  Calequir, Bissau

  NILSON MEDINA STIRRED the pot of stew that bubbled on his stove and wondered whether he had lost his mind. The tall American he knew as Matthew Cooper—an alias perhaps, but it didn’t matter—sat nearby, checking a list of targets that Medina had compiled against a city map of Bissau. Charting their approach, presumably, and paths for their escape.

  Madness.

  And yet, he didn’t feel as if he’d gone insane. Quite the reverse, in fact. Medina felt as if his long months working undercover in Edouard Camara’s crime family had been a waste of time and energy that verged on masochistic self-abuse. Each day he’d witnessed crimes that would have sent his targets off to prison in a normal country, with police and courts working together for the public good. Sometimes he’d been forced to swallow hysterical laughter, realizing that nothing he saw or reported would take even one monster off the streets.

  Ironically, the muffled laughter at odd times had helped his cover, made the psychopaths he worked with daily think Medina had to be one of them—or maybe even worse. He’d kept up the charade, knowing that it was useless, until he’d been forced to make a choice that night.

  Now, in the law’s eyes, he would be a murderer. As if that mattered in Bissau. Police might shoot a killer if they caught him in the act, but otherwise, what punishment was there? Not execution, which had been abolished by the parliament. Perhaps consignment to First Squadron, where he’d wait a night or two before he wriggled out a window, crawled out through an open sewer line or simply strolled past sleeping guards to freedom in the moonlight.

  So, he’d made a snap decision in the heat of battle, which had paired him with a foreigner embarking on what sounded like a suicidal quest. To what end?

  Would the stew he’d offered to prepare before they set out into darkness be his final meal?

  And did it even matter?

  Medina had no family to speak of—none he kept in touch with, anyway. No lover, wife or children. Not even a cat to mourn him if he never made it back to his small flat in Santa Luzia, northeast of the city center. His landlord would wonder where he’d gone—or where his monthly check had gone, at least—and would throw out Medina’s things after a week or so, perhaps after inquiring at the Ministry of Justice headquarters.

  So be it.

  Medina wasn’t suicidal, wasn’t even tired of living, but he felt his life so far had largely been a waste. He had joined the Judicial Police with a hope of improving his country, or at least life in its capital. Perhaps he’d been naive, or even foolish. He’d accomplished nothing so far, aside from consoling occasional victims of crime. To what end, when he couldn’t protect them or promise them justice?

  The American, Medina thought, might be his last hope for...for what? A gesture or statement of some kind, before he was swept from the world and forgotten?

  Perhaps.

  Or they might accomplish something greater, root out certain characters who helped make life in Guinea-Bissau a depressing daily hell on earth. Something to shoot for, at the very least. And shooting there would be. He had no doubt of that.

  “The stew is ready,” he announced, tipping it from the pot into a pair of mismatched bowls. “Bom apetite!”

  Bairro Militar, Bissau

  PASCAL KINTE HAD BALKED at meeting General Diallo inside army headquarters. Some people who had stepped inside that edifice were never seen again, and while the nation’s Minister of the Interior felt reasonably safe, he also bore in mind that soldiers had deposed three presidents of Guinea-Bissau, killing one of them, within as many decades.

  Even after granting Kinte’s request for a meeting on neutral ground, Diallo had refused to leave the Military District, west of downtown Bissau. As a compromise, they were meeting at one of a half dozen officers’ clubs in the neighborhood, this one catering to members of the army. The management wouldn’t expel a ranking officer from the air force or navy, but either one would find the atmosphere inside the club unwelcoming, to say the least. Such rivalries were common, Kinte understood—and all the more so in a nation where the several branches of its military service were, in effect, competing criminal syndicates.

  As a civilian, albeit among the highest office holders in the land, Kinte felt like the odd man out as he entered the club—called Diamonds—shortly after nine o’clock. The club was fairly crowded, and approximately half of the male patrons wore some variation of their daily uniforms. Many wore sidearms, Kinte saw, and he wondered if he should have brought along the bodyguard who normally escorted him to meetings in the daytime.

  Too late now. It would be cowardly of him to turn around and leave. Aside from angering the general, it would reveal a weakness that inevitably would destabilize their partnership.

  A hostess was approaching Kinte when he saw Diallo seated in a booth, off to his left. He waved the young woman away and went to join the general, sliding into the booth without first asking for permission to sit down. It was a petty thing, perhaps, but still asserted independence of a sort.

  Diallo skipped the normal salutation, saying, “I suppose you’ve heard by now.”

  “About the shooting? Yes.” Kinte avoided any mention of the factory per se, or of its function for the syndicate.

  “It cost us something like 230 million francs,” Diallo said.

  Kinte performed the calculation in his head. Say half a million U.S. dollars, or 437,000 Swiss francs on exchange at his bank in Zurich. As an afterthought, he added, “And the men who died.”

  Diallo waved that thought away. “They were Camara’s,” he replied. “Street thugs. There is no shortage of them in Bissau.”

  “What has been done to punish those responsible?” Kinte inquired.

  “Edouard has orders to locate them,” Diallo said, without stating that the orders came from him. That much was understood between them. “And
the Special Intervention Force will help, as necessary.”

  “So, it’s handled, then,” Kinte stated.

  “I believe so,” the general replied. “But there is one discrepancy.”

  “Namely?”

  “A missing man. One of Camara’s pawns, supposedly.”

  “You doubt it?” Kinte asked.

  “I don’t like leaving anything to chance,” Diallo said.

  Kinte nodded and asked the question he’d been dreading. “How may I assist you, General?”

  “Use your resources to discover whether he, this missing one, is what he claimed to be or...something else.”

  “The name?” Kinte inquired.

  “Nilson Medina. Or, at least, that’s what he called himself.”

  A relatively simple task, Kinte thought. It shouldn’t be dangerous.

  “I’ll see what I can find,” he said, “and let you know.”

  “Sooner rather than later,” the general told him. “We have no time to waste.”

  Ministry of Justice, Estrada da Granja do Passube, Bissau

  JOSEPH MANSARÉ WAS WORRIED. Hours had passed since the shootings at Edouard Camara’s drug-cutting plant, and now one of Mansaré’s men was missing in the aftermath of mayhem. As a captain of the Judicial Police, with fewer than seventy officers still on the job nationwide, he couldn’t afford to lose another.

  Particularly not Nilson Medina.

  Months ago, Medina had gone undercover with Camara’s syndicate, filing reports religiously on each new violation of the law that he observed firsthand. Captain Mansaré had been filing those reports, collecting them, in hopes that someday soon reform would overtake the capital, perhaps encouraged by persistent pressure from United Nations headquarters, permitting prosecution of the drug lords who had turned Guinea-Bissau into a global laughingstock.

  Of course, Mansaré knew what that could mean for Bissau and the country as a whole. His memories of military uprisings were fresh and vivid. There was every chance, he thought, that three or four top-ranking officers would balk at being taken into custody and tried for crimes that might mean life in prison. If the country had a prison worthy of the name. Only the threat of intervention from outside could possibly restrain them from unleashing hell upon the feeble justice system—and, perhaps, upon each other—in defense of what was truly, now, a narco state.