“I would think,” One Eye said, “your ambitions would be a little bit larger than ‘exterminating’ all those hungry mouths you and the twenty-something other clans won’t feed.”
“While you rip off planeloads of UN aid and resell it across the borders,” Scar Hand said. “Chump change, compared to what we’re offering you.”
“Now you insult me in front of my men.”
“No offense intended. Just the hard facts,” Blue Eyes shot back.
“We won’t waste your time—don’t waste ours. We’re thinking you’ve got a big day ahead of you,” One Eye said. “Probably heading out to exterminate some camp infested with disease.”
“Or take down another UN plane,” Scar Hand said.
How did they know so much? Dugula wondered. Or were they guessing? Perhaps his secured phones and fax weren’t so secure. Or had Hahgan infiltrated his clan with spies?
“In or out?” Blue Eyes asked. “No is no, and we’re fine with that.”
“You can go back to business as usual,” Scar Hand said. “Stay small.”
“Decision time,” One Eye added. “Dump or jump off the crapper.”
Dugula took a few moments, peering into those slitted gazes, eyes, he decided, without emotion, no soul. It was true that he wanted far more for himself than remaining where he was, doing what he’d done. The suggestion on their part was that certain freedom-fighting organizations—of which at least forty members were under his protective umbrella—had already agreed to some undefined role for some allegedly grand but mysterious big events. If he declined? Then what? Risk some long, protracted war with rivals who supposedly were ready to leap on board for this so-called big event? Let rivals grab the glory these whites were offering? What glory? Or was this some elaborate ruse, a trap being laid by rivals? He didn’t think so; none of the competition was that clever or devious. His rivals were, for the most part, thugs with hair-trigger tempers, rarely, if ever, thinking through the consequences to their impulsive violence. If he was right, then being presented with some bigger picture…
Dugula felt curiosity and greed wrestle him to the brink of acceptance. “How much money?”
“Is that a yes?” Blue Eyes wanted to know.
“The money?”
“Two million, deposited into a numbered account in one of several European banks of your choosing,” One Eye answered.
“Half on acceptance,” Scar Hand said, “the other half when the curtain drops on the last act.”
“I have a large clan,” Dugula said. “Many men to feed, house, equip, arm. They say there are over two million assault rifles in Mogadishu, but, as you said, my ambitions are bigger than just having my men ride around in technicals with outdated Russian machine guns. You demand much, tell me next to nothing. I hear promises, words, big plans. I would like to hear how badly you are willing to enlist my services. Two million,” he told them, shaking his head softly, lips pursed.
He watched them, no change of expression, their eyes cold, then Blue Eyes said, “Four. That’s as high as we can go.”
Dugula already had an answer to give them, but the fact that they had upped the ante with little hesitation told him they had come to the bargaining table prepared to lowball his services. So be it, he decided. Depending on what the future held, how great the risk, whatever his undeclared role in this big event, he could always ask for—no, demand—more money. If he was going to be allied with other Muslims for some glorious battle against the infidels, how could a mere three Westerners possibly dare to think they could deceive him into a course of action that would destroy him and the clan?
“When will you need these services of myself and my men?”
“Soon,” Blue Eyes said. “Carry on with your day. You’ll know when it’s begun.”
Dugula smiled back at the laughing eyes, unwilling to show fear or hesitation now that his decision was final. “Then…the envelope, please.”
HUSSEIN NAHBAT was pained and baffled. Beyond that there was a fair amount of anxiety about the future, namely his own.
From the shotgun seat of his technical, he saw the village and surrounding camp of nomads rise up in the distance on the barren plain. The panorama of squalid dwellings, meandering camels, goats and black stick figures in rags struck him as little more than some hellish mirage, floating up on the slick heat shimmer. Judging the numbers of shabby stone hovels, the huts erected by sticks wrapped in plastic sheeting, he guessed four to five hundred Somalis. Whatever Ethiopian refugees had crossed the border, survived this far, he figured perhaps another hundred or so bodies would be tossed to the fires. If what he’d heard about their trek and their affliction was true, they were walking contagions, cursing the Somalis here with the same inevitable fate. Drought, famine, another round of civil war between rebel forces and the outbreak of some hemorrhagic fever had been driving Ethiopians across the borders into Sudan, Kenya, Eritrea.
It was their task, Nahbat knew, to cleanse the area, contain the plague these people had brought to Somalia. This land was not their home, and their leader, calling them leprous invaders, had issued the decree they were to put the torch to all homes and flesh, diseased or otherwise, Ethiopian or Somali.
As Omari, his cousin, bore their technical down on the northern outskirts of the first line of beehive-shaped hovels, he found the others were already hard at it, rounding up men, women, children. The shooting had started, rattling bursts of autofire coming from all points around the village, limp bodies already being dragged from the tents of various sizes on the western perimeter. Dugula’s men, he noted, didn’t handle the bodies. Instead, they forced Ethiopians at gunpoint to drag their own dead—or dying—to the pit. He saw other Ethiopians, weakened by disease and malnutrition, standing utterly still outside their tents, some of the women hitting their knees, pleading for mercy.
There was none.
And the pain bit deeper into his belly. This was madness, this was…what, he wondered—wrong? Evil?
Nahbat was unaware Omari had ground them to a halt, as he witnessed a small baby ripped from the arms of its wailing mother, a pistol leaping in the hands of her executioner, a bullet through the brain abruptly silencing her pleas. Though he had to follow orders under threat of execution, and related as he was to Habir Dugula—a distant cousin of one of the leader’s countless sons and daughters by various wives and mistresses—what he felt whenever they cleansed a village went beyond horror and pain.
He felt his heart ache, a swollen lump in his throat threatening to shut off air the more he watched. He wanted to weep.
Nahbat fought back the tears. He suddenly longed to be a twelve-year-old boy again, a simple goatherd, ignorant to the horrors of his country. That seemed like only yesterday, when, in fact, it was just a little over a year ago his cousin had shoved an assault rifle in his hands, and life had changed forever. Strange, he thought, in this one year of being an armed combatant in the war for Mogadishu and the campaign of genocide against those deemed unfit to live, he felt like a tired, sick old man. He was too young, he thought, to feel such pain. Worse, he was helpless to do anything but carry out his part in the atrocity, thinking himself a coward for being unable to stand up and shout how wrong this was.
He tried to focus his distress on another baffling matter, failing to will away the nausea as the first wave of the stench of diseased flesh, the sickly sweet taint of bodies being doused by gasoline and torched, ballooned his senses. What was this business with the white men and the rival clan? Why were they involving themselves in some mysterious affair with foreigners that not even their great leader had the first clue was all about? They had lingered at the compound after the departure of the black hoods and Hahgan’s mooryan, while he assumed Habir Dugula made some attempt to verify the existence of the cutout, their supposed marching orders. Then there was a briefing by their great leader, all orders, no questions allowed. Simply put, he recalled, Dugula told them they would do whatever the white men’s bidding, that they would be
paid in time, far more, or so promised, than their weekly handful of shillings. The future was more than just in doubt, he feared; the time ahead was in peril. He wondered if he would live to see his fourteenth birthday.
He was out the door somehow, Omari barking in his ear to get moving. The AK-47 began to slip from his fingers, bile shooting up into his throat. He heard the wailing, pleas for mercy, the braying of animals in terror. The din alone might have been enough to bring him to his knees, retch and cry, but the stink was overpowering by itself, threatening to knock him off his feet. The world began to spin, legs turning to rubber when a rough hand clawed into his shoulder, spun him.
“Take this!”
It was Omari, eyes boring into him over the bandanna wrapped around his nose and mouth.
The slap to his face rang in his ears like a pistol shot.
“What is wrong with you!”
“I…I feel sick, my cousin.”
“Get over it! We have work to do!”
Omari wound the bandanna around his face, knotting it tight against the back of his skull with an angry twist. He had another disturbing thought right then, as the veil seemed to do little to stem the tide of miasma assaulting him, mind, senses and soul. What if he fainted, flat on his back, the vomit trapped by the bandanna, strangling him?
The screaming, shooting and the awareness Omari was watching him closely, perhaps questioning his resolve, put some iron in his legs. He was turning toward the Russian transport truck, where they were hauling out more ten-gallon cans of gasoline, when Nahbat spotted their great leader.
Resentment flared through him, another dagger of pain and confusion to the heart. Dugula was standing in the distance on a rise. Surrounded by twenty or more of his men, he watched through field glasses, making certain they did as they were ordered. When he appeared satisfied the job would get done, he hopped into his jeep, the others falling into an assortment of technicals, Hummers. That the great man wouldn’t dirty his hands with this hideous chore inflamed him with great anger, leaving him to wonder if Somalia would ever know justice, much less peace.
He lingered by the technical, watching as the convoy kicked up clouds of dust, all of them gone to greet the UN plane flying in from Kenya.
Another wall of grief dropped over Nahbat. He knew what they would do when that plane landed. It sickened him. There was an answer, he believed—no, there was an answer he knew and felt in his heart—a way around this insanity, one far greater, a solution most certainly noble and humane and merciful, but the afflicted, the doomed he heard wailing around him would never see it.
All that medicine and food, he thought, on board the UN plane. Doctors, with skill and knowledge, who could, if not save the afflicted, perhaps ease their pain and suffering until a cure was delivered.
It would never happen.
He had seen it before, too many times.
“May God have mercy.”
“What was that?”
Wheeling, startled, he found Omari glaring at him. He watched, holding back the tears, fighting down the bile, his cousin marching toward him, holding out a can.
Nahbat shook his head, muttered, “Nothing.”
And took the can.
CHAPTER ONE
If it was true a man learned more from failure than success, Ben Collins knew he was in no position to test that theory. In his line of work, there were no second chances. Failure wasn’t an option; failure spelled death. In black ops, he made it a point to see losing was for the other guy.
The stack of boxes stamped CARE, deep in the aft of the C-130, would be the last thing the warlord’s frontline marauders saw when they hit the ramp. The ruse didn’t stop with this first strike, but what others didn’t know, he thought, wouldn’t kill them. At least not yet.
It was just about time to get down to dirty business, murky waters, he knew, that had been chummed since the first bunch of al-Qaeda and Taliban criminals had been dumped off at Gitmo. There was blood in that water again, he thought, flesh to consume, but it all went way beyond waxing a bunch of thugs and terrorists in some of the most dangerous, godforsaken real estate this side of Hell. Sure, there were bad guys to bag, chain, thrust under military gavel. There was a trial to consider, arranged to go down in secrecy….
Whoa, he told himself. This was only the first giant leap; the goal line was way off on the distant horizon. No point in getting ahead. There were still details to nail down and he could be sure, given the nature of black ops, not to mention the usual chaos and confusion of battle, more than a few problems would crop up along the way.
The ex–Delta Force major raked a stare over the six black ops under his command of Cobra Force Twelve. Seven more commandos on the ground were moving in right then, on schedule to help light the fuse. According to radar monitoring the two Hummers’ transponders, the sat imagery, piped into his consoles amidships from an NRO bird parked over and watching the area in question—AIQ—they were three miles out, closing hard, with Dugula and twenty-one henchmen rolling across the plain, the latest round of the Exterminator’s methods of population control framed, live and in color, on another monitor. Behind his ground force, two Black Hawks and one Apache were picking up the rear, covering all bases.
All set.
No blue UN helmets, doctors, or relief workers were on board. This was no mission of mercy, or another group of unarmed do-gooders from Red Cross or UNICEF, he thought, getting ripped off by Dugula.
He studied their faces, but there was no need to sound off with last-minute Patton speeches to shore up resolve. They knew the drill, briefed thoroughly for days, the details gone over one last time on the Company airbase just inside the Kenyan border, before he put the radio call on the special UN frequency to Dugula that they were moving, coordinate the drop-off. All of them were battle-hardened CIA men—specifically Special Operations Division—or ex-military, he knew, with more than a few Afghanistan forays notched on some of their belts.
It was reassuring to know he was wading into the fire with pros. To an operative they had on their war faces, togged in brown camos, M-16/M-203 combos the lead weapon. Webbing, combat vests, all of it stuffed and hung with spare grenades and clips, then on down to Beretta 92-F side arms on the hip, commando daggers sheathed on the lower leg. The blades were last resort, Collins stating earlier this was blast and burn, the faces of Dugula and a few of his top lieutenants committed to memory.
Once they blasted off the ramp it was going to be a turkey shoot for the most part, Somali thugs hemmed in, turning tail, unless he missed his guess, when the flying hammer dropped on them from above. He glanced at their own two armored Hummers, one mounted M-60 machine gun, belted and ready to rip. The other vehicle, showing off its TOW antitank launch pad, would be out of the gate first. Altogether, plenty of firepower, muscle, experience and determination to win the day against a bunch of one-time camel herders who now had control of Mogadishu, and into the deep south of the country, because none of the other competing clans had the guns or the guts to stand up to them.
He took a moment next to ponder the sudden curve-ball thrown him by superiors. Cobra Force Twelve was his diamond, once in the rough, but with three successful missions under the belt, with his track record in Delta and later on working with the Company, he had made friends in high and powerful places. Hell, he was a damn hero, in fact, enough medals and ribbons to fill a steamer trunk, but this one wasn’t for God and country. What was now in motion—at least the campaign given the thumbs-up by the White House—was pretty much his show.
But there was a wild card—the man’s handle—out there with the ground team.
It wasn’t entirely true he was solely in charge, Collins knew. There was this odd man out preying on his thoughts, some hotshot hardballer, according to his dossier, dropped in his lap at the eleventh hour. The order to put the thirteenth man on the team had come straight from the President, Wild Card inserted as coleader of Cobra Force. Beyond some irritation and anxiety, a dig to professional prid
e he was forced to share all tactical and command decisions, the tall dark man tagged Wild Card made him a little nervous, what with the question as to exactly why the White House shoved him onto the mission in the first place.
He wanted to believe the colonel—with a record full of deletions that left little doubt he was likewise black ops—was simply there as an extra gun, with supposedly all the combat experience in the world to aid, assist and kick much additional ass. Or was it something else? Was Wild Card a watchdog? Had the rumor mill churned at the Pentagon, spilling some seeds of doubt into the Oval Office? Had someone in the loop gotten cold feet, gone running to the higher-ups if just to save his own skin? Were his own people sharpening blades right then, poised to spring a trap?
No matter. If Wild Card had some personal agenda, if he proved a threat to the bigger picture, well, Collins knew there was an answer for that problem.
“Dragon One to Cobra Leader.”
Collins strode to the intercom on the bulkhead. “Cobra Leader. Go.”
“You boys strap in—we’re going down. Show time.”
“Roger. Stick to the plan, Dragon One, no matter how hot it gets out there.”
“Aye-aye. Catch you on the flip side. Good luck. Dragon One, over and out.”
Collins grabbed a seat, fastened on the webbing as the bird began to descend. Round one, he thought, coming up, but it was only the beginning. Shortly, if nothing else, one question about Wild Card would be answered. And if the odd man out couldn’t pull his weight, wasn’t as good as advertised, he would just be one less hassle to eliminate with a bullet in the near future.
The picture, small or large, both fuzzy at the moment, would clear up soon enough.
Spilled blood, he concluded, always had a way of separating the lions from the jackals.
IN A PERFECT WORLD all men and women, especially the poor and needy, would be fed, housed, educated. Beyond the basics even, the sick, the dying, the maimed, all manner of physical affliction would be cured, and they would rise to live, full, healthy, happy lives. In this world there would be opportunity for all, he thought, an even playing field where man could use whatever natural abilities and intelligence, not to attain wealth, privilege, stature or dominion over others, but to help his fellow man make the earth a bright, kind, gentle place. There would be mercy, compassion, tolerance. There would be peace, harmony, trust and understanding. There would be no crime, no killing, no greed, no lust for a bigger slice of everything at the expense of his fellows, no life wasted in self-destruction. There would be no famine, disease or war.
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