Rogue Assault

by Don Pendleton

  “Still listening,” the caller said.

  “I take for granted that you would not wish to meet at army headquarters?”

  “You take it right.”

  “In which case, I propose a meeting at what you Americans might call my home away from home. There is a camp of sorts outside Ponta Gardete, eight miles southwest of Bissau. I can provide the GPS coordinates if you—”

  “I’ll find it,” said the caller, interrupting him.

  Diallo checked his watch and calculated travel time, with necessary preparations at the site, before he said, “Shall we say midnight?”

  “Suits me,” the American replied. “I’ll see you there.”

  Diallo was about to answer when the dial tone’s humming cut him off. A surge of anger welled inside him, but he swallowed it with difficulty, told himself that he would be avenged for every insult soon enough. His first priority was setting up the trap to snare his enemy.

  “Put this creature in the car, Captain,” he told Loua, with a parting sneer at Nilson Medina. “Then make sure the other troops are ready to depart. We leave in fifteen minutes. Any man not present and accounted for shall spend the next month at hard labor, clearing swampland.”

  “Yes, sir!” Without waiting for acknowledgment of his salute, Captain Loua snatched Medina from his chair and marched him toward the door. Another moment and it closed behind them, leaving Diallo alone with his thoughts.

  He was excited by the prospect of bloodletting, minor as it might turn out to be, but a sensation of anxiety still nagged at Diallo. The man he planned to kill, after thorough interrogation, had already proved himself a ruthless and resourceful bastard. He would kill without remorse to reach his goal, whatever that turned out to be.

  Diallo had the same approach to life, which helped explain his worry.

  The opponent he would face tonight, he thought, was very like himself.

  14

  Diallo had given Bolan nearly three hours to travel eight miles, but that didn’t prompt Bolan to dawdle. Quite the reverse, in fact, as he considered why the general himself required that time to reach the camp he had described.

  To bait a trap, perhaps.

  Already halfway there, Bolan maintained a steady sixty miles per hour with the Peugeot 308, clearing a mile a minute with no sign of any traffic cops or other obstacles to slow him. With preparations of his own to make before the showdown, arms and ammunition to be set in place after a recon of the general’s facility, he had no time to waste.

  A home away from home, my ass, he thought. Unless his educated guess was miles off target, General Diallo would have soldiers waiting at the meeting site and would be bringing reinforcements with him. After the losses he had suffered recently, the army’s chief of staff would tolerate no risk of finding himself and his people outgunned.

  How many soldiers would he wind up facing? Bolan didn’t know and didn’t care. He owed Medina this attempt to free him, even if the gutsy little cop was killed as soon as Bolan hung up on Diallo. One way or another, payment would be made.

  That left Bolan with a dilemma. If Diallo fielded members of the Special Intervention Force, he would be faced with members of a law enforcement agency who were exempt, as such, from death at Bolan’s hands. How would he draw the line when it came down to pulling triggers in the chaos that was combat? Bolan calculated that his only proper course of action was to mark his targets by their uniforms. Soldiers would turn up in fatigues or something similar, while any plainclothes adversaries would be cops.

  How would he deal with them? His private rule on use of deadly force was absolute, but wounding was another proposition altogether. In the past, he’d rendered crooked cops unconscious, leaving them to be arrested by their honest brethren, and he’d left a few with flesh wounds. If a killer cop or two got kneecapped in the heat of battle, as he fought to free Nilson Medina, Bolan thought he just might give himself a pass on that.

  And if it didn’t do the trick, if things came down to do or die, then he would check out with his principles intact.

  But he wouldn’t be checking out alone.

  Unknown to General Diallo, Bolan had the rural compound marked already on his list of targets slated for obliteration if the Guinea-Bissau blitz required it, and he recognized the northbound access road as he approached it, slowing for the turnoff. Rolling on three-quarters of a mile with trees arched overhead, he watched for landmarks he had seen on Google Earth and found the spot he’d chosen in advance, an unpaved track that veered off into trees and undergrowth with room enough to hide his car from passersby.

  When he had killed the Peugeot’s lights and engine, Bolan exited the car and stripped down, donning his blacksuit and the combat webbing hung with pouches for spare magazines and frag grenades. It would require three trips on foot to fetch the mortar and its special rounds, but Bolan took the RPG and its reloaded rockets with him on his first approach to General Diallo’s camp.

  He still had ample time to bait a death trap of his own and watch the rats arrive.

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST TIME since his kidnapping, Nilson Medina knew where he was going—and, perhaps, where he was meant to die. He drew no personal encouragement from his being still alive. He was a pawn of his abductors’, marched out to the vehicle that carried him to meet his fate, alive simply to lure Matt Cooper into position for his own annihilation. In his heart, Medina knew that General Diallo had no plans for either man to see another sunrise. It would be a foolish lapse in judgment.

  And whatever else he might be, General Diallo was no fool.

  They kept Medina’s hands bound, so he had no opportunity to grab a weapon from the gunmen who escorted him. If he was desperate enough, Medina knew that he could kick or head butt them, but to what end? Armed and positioned as they were, they’d simply beat him down—or execute him, if the general allowed it.

  Better, he decided, to conserve what strength he still possessed for a more crucial moment, when it might do Cooper some good. If nothing else, Medina thought, there was a chance that he could throw himself in front of guns trained on the man he’d come to think of as an unexpected friend.

  And if that failed, perhaps he could get close enough to bite one of his captors on the face—or better yet, his throat—and leave the bastard scarred as a remembrance of this night. A futile gesture, surely, but still better than nothing in the end.

  The convoy slowed as they approached Ponta Gardete, and he saw the lead car turn onto the road that would deliver them to General Diallo’s compound. Though he’d never visited the site before, Medina knew its layout from aerial photos on file at the Ministry of Justice, now retrievable as if by magic on the internet. Presumably, the web shots had been taken from a satellite in space. Medina didn’t understand the new technology, but hoped his knowledge of the camp might help him—or help Cooper—when the inevitable killing started.

  If he had been religious, Medina thought, this would be the time for him to pray. But as it was, he only had his bruised self-confidence and Cooper’s ability to overcome imposing odds. Neither, he feared, would be enough to see them through the next few hours alive, but at the very least their enemies would suffer in the act of killing them, and know they had been in a bitter fight.

  Sometimes that was the best a man could do.

  After a mile of following the access road, shocks jolting over potholes all the way, the convoy slowed for its approach to the guarded gates. Medina, wedged between his keepers, saw one of the sentries peer into Diallo’s car, then snap off a salute before he barked an order at his two companions. Moments later, with the gate now rolled aside, the caravan rolled through and circled toward that portion of the camp where vehicles were lined up side by side. A motor pool of sorts, with more soldiers on guard.

  “Get out,” Captain Torturer told him, when their car was pa
rked, its engine silent. “Stretch your legs while you still can.”

  * * *

  CAPTAIN ABDOUL LOUA shoved his prisoner into the shed they’d set aside for his confinement, its lone piece of furniture a plastic bucket for collecting waste material, superfluous unless his hands were freed. Nilson Medina stumbled, almost falling, then turned back to face the doorway after he regained his balance.

  “Not first-class accommodation, I’m afraid,” Loua said. “But it should be good enough for your remaining time.”

  “How long is that?” Medina asked him, lisping slightly with his swollen lips and bitten tongue.

  “Your friend has an appointment with the general at midnight,” Loua answered, glancing at his watch. “If he’s on time, you have about two hours and twenty minutes left.”

  “Why don’t we spend it in a friendly competition?” Medina asked. “Free my hands and leave your guns outside.”

  “It’s tempting,” Loua granted, “but I doubt that it would be much of a contest in your present state.”

  “I see. You only face opponents when they’re duct-taped to a chair,” Medina said.

  Loua suppressed the flash of anger, forced a smile and said, “We’ll see when I bring you the white man’s head. Five minutes after midnight, shall we say?”

  Medina laughed, then spit onto the dirt floor of his cell. “Goodbye, Captain,” he said.

  Loua backed out, padlocked the door and moved off to inspect the camp’s perimeter. There was chain-link fencing topped with coils of razor wire on every side, but it wasn’t electrified, and in the absence of alarms he knew the wire could easily be cut. Not trusting General Diallo’s regulars to check it properly, he set off on his own to walk the fence and verify that it was still intact.

  The hike would also give him time to think.

  Loua was angry at himself for being goaded by Medina. The pathetic prisoner was nearly dead, yet he had gotten under Loua’s skin and come close to provoking an assault that might have finished him. Was that his game, in fact? Knowing that he was doomed, had he set out to sabotage the fraudulent exchange to liberate the general’s cocaine? After the ordeal he had suffered, could Medina even think that clearly?

  And he seemed to have such confidence in the American he’d only known for...what? Less than two days. As if the white man was some kind of superhero who could swoop down from the sky and save Medina from the fate that had been planned for him. Ridiculous! One man against an army was no contest, even if Diallo’s regulars were lazy, poorly trained and sometimes insubordinate.

  The odds were all against the American. There was no hope that he could survive.

  Especially if Loua found him first.

  “I welcome it,” he muttered to himself, passing a sentry on the fence line.

  When the private turned to blink at him, Loua snapped, “Watch the forest, idiot!” and left a newly minted enemy scowling behind him.

  Damn Medina for suggesting that he feared the white man! Nothing could be further from the truth. Loua had never run from any fight, and while he’d lost a few in childhood, that was long ago.

  “I welcome it!” he said again. And dared the night to prove him wrong.

  * * *

  BOLAN SURVEYED THE COMPOUND, picking out its obvious command post and communications shack, two Quonset huts, the motor pool, mess hall, latrine, three rows of two-man tents, the metal shed that held Nilson Medina under lock and key.

  He’d watched Diallo move about the camp, directing junior officers while Bolan counted heads and took stock of the enemy. Three dozen tents for privates gave him thirty-six, while officers and noncoms occupied the prefab huts. Diallo would have bedded down in the CP if there’d been time to spare, but this would be a busy night and Bolan didn’t see him getting any sleep.

  Until the big one.

  Bolan’s vantage point was a ridge overlooking the camp two hundred yards out, screened by forest from direct line of sight. He’d worked out the distance while waiting for Diallo’s men to settle in, then backed off to the high ground where the E1 mortar stood with shells laid out around it, ready to fly. The RPG and its rockets were stashed in the woods, closer in, where Bolan could retrieve them on his way to penetrate the compound.

  First things first, and that meant waiting.

  Not that Bolan planned to keep his midnight date with General Diallo. Not exactly. Strolling to the gate for any kind of face-to-face was tantamount to suicide. Diallo wanted to retrieve his stolen cargo, sure, but he’d also take for granted that Medina’s ally was a solo act, with no risk in grabbing him besides a loss of soldiers when they swarmed him. Later, as the general would reason, there’d be time enough to learn where the cocaine was stashed, while they were grilling him to death.

  No, thanks.

  Bolan had a very different scenario in mind. He wasn’t sure that he could extricate Medina from the camp alive, but there was absolutely no hope if he blundered down to meet the enemy and wound up in a cage himself. His plan was rash, audacious, but at least it offered some hope for Medina.

  Call it one in twenty, maybe twenty-five.

  Better than nothing, anyway.

  He’d registered the small shed where Medina was confined, well separated from the CP, motor pool and other targets plotted on the map in Bolan’s head. Controlling shrapnel was impossible, but he could definitely shell the compound without scoring a direct hit on the prison hut. If their positions were reversed, Bolan knew he would give the go-ahead. He hoped Medina would have felt the same, considering the grim alternative, but had to play his hand without approval from his incapacitated partner.

  Overhead, a half moon lit the forest treetops, beaming down on Bolan’s firebase. It reminded him of other jungle nights, when he had waited for the action to begin, his fate to be decided in a contest of his own ability against the enemy’s. So far, the Executioner had always walked away and left his adversaries on the battlefield.

  His luck had held.

  And this time? There was no way to predict the outcome, but he came to every fight with reasoned confidence in his ability and preparation. Beyond that, it all came down to guts and luck.

  Another soldier might have prayed for help, an unseen hand to guide his own and tweak his aim, but Bolan was averse to off-loading responsibility. Whatever happened in the next half hour or so, he would be shouldering the credit—or the blame—himself. No crying afterward that unseen deities had failed him by ignoring his entreaties.

  This part, every soldier had to do alone.

  And live or die with how the hand played out.

  * * *

  ONE HOUR, GENERAL DIALLO THOUGHT, checking his watch by moonlight. There were spotlights stationed here and there around the camp, facing the forest, but he’d ordered them switched off. Inside the compound, likewise, he had doused most of the lights, aside from one in his command post, one inside the mess hall and a third by the latrine. The last thing that he needed, at the moment, was some clumsy private falling in a slit trench, floundering in muck.

  One hour, and Diallo knew his adversary had to be close by now, if he was coming. There had always been a chance that the American would try to dupe him, set the time for an exchange of drugs for his associate, then strike somewhere in Bissau while Diallo and his soldiers were away. A possibility, but he believed the white man would appear on schedule, compelled by some archaic sense of honor, duty, call it what you like.

  The cocaine worried him, of course. It would require a dozen of his strongest men to shift that load by hand, and driving it up to the gates of his camp would be madness. No, he thought his enemy would likely bring a sample with him, probably one kilo, seeking to exchange directions to the rest for what was left of his accomplice. It was logical—and it would also be his last mistake.

  Diallo had a squad of soldiers hidden i
n the woods, outside the wire, prepared to move in on his signal, cutting off the fool American’s retreat when he arrived, most probably on foot. That team was scattered, since Diallo realized his adversary might not come directly to the camp’s gate, but their focus was the access road that linked his compound to the outside world. Between them and rest of his defenders, led by Captain Loua’s small detachment from the Special Intervention Force, Diallo had no fear that he would let the white man slip away.

  Not this time.

  His mistake during the previous attacks had been trusting Edouard Camara to resolve the problem. Certainly Camara—may he rot in peace—had copious experience in dealing with and killing off assorted felons like himself, but when he’d faced a soldier in the field, he’d proved completely useless. Under other circumstances, General Diallo might have thanked the white man for exposing Camara’s ineptitude, but thanks would play no part in their dialogue later this night.

  There would be questions, screaming—and, perhaps, some valuable answers.

  And if, at last, his enemy refused to speak in spite of all Diallo’s efforts, killing him by inches, slowly, would be its own reward. Let his fate serve as an example to all future challengers, a lesson etched in blood.

  The crisis that had challenged General Diallo would become a triumph when his enemies were crushed, the news of their demise broadcast through sources he could trust. He would emerge a stronger man, whose future enemies would think more carefully before attacking him.

  And those who dared, in spite of everything, would surely die.

  * * *

  NILSON MEDINA STRAINED against the plastic ties that bound his wrists behind his back, but only felt them biting deeper into his bruised and bloodied flesh. Police loved them for binding suspects, since the ties couldn’t be loosened, only cut, and there was no lock to be picked as in the case of handcuffs. Finally, disgusted, he admitted to himself that he couldn’t fight with his hands.

  That left his feet, his knees, his teeth, whatever else Medina could employ against his captors when they came for him next time. Escape remained a fantasy, but one good kick to the captain’s balls would improve Medina’s mood immensely. Nothing that might happen after that held any interest for him, since he knew he was as good as dead.