They were running everywhere dead ahead, trying to flee certain death from above, haphazard human—or inhuman—traffic rearing up in his sights as he came out of the thickest patch of smoke. Closing on the hungry bonfires consuming diseased flesh, a few of the gunmen fired wild bursts at the warbirds, squawking in panic and confusion over this sudden final judgment of their deed. Three, then four hardmen wheeled around the corner of a firewall dancing up a hut that used to provide the most meager of shelter, he assumed, for the late occupants. They skidded to a halt, ten or so paces from Bolan, sandaled feet kicking up dust. Figure the horrific pounding of explosions and the sight of their own getting a heavy-metal dose of their own poison was too much for them to stomach, fleeing now to save themselves.
There was nowhere for them to run or hide.
Two of them stared at the sight of the tall white man who had marched out of nowhere, staring ahead as if he were some avenging angel of doom that had materialized out of the smoke. Their eyes wide, the soldier read the looks, then heard the muffled cries from behind bandannas. It sounded as if they wanted their lives spared, a show of mercy from the lone invader. It was all just some terrible mistake. Two of them were on the verge, it looked, of throwing down their arms.
How could they expect that which they had never shown? Bolan decided, and blew them off their feet, a raking blast of steel-jacketed projectiles down the line, flinging them back toward other running and doomed killing brethren being gored and gutted from the sky.
There was no point, Bolan knew, in engaging in a long and protracted sweep of the village and its perimeter. Fire was eating up anything left standing. The smoke was so thick, so putrid it left little doubt to Bolan the savages had completed their task.
What was left of the hardforce was pretty much chopped up or blown into the firewalls next as a Hellfire missile ripped through a motor pool, ten or more broken dark figurines taking to the air above the crunching blast. A half dozen far from the epicenter were sent staggering about from the shock wave, howling next, flinching, darting from renewed bursts of terror no doubt kicking them into high gear as wreckage hammered home.
Ducking under a winging slab of metal, Bolan hosed down a few more Somali killers, then changed clips on the advance, began searching the hellgrounds.
The evil fumes pouring into his senses was enough to nearly knock even the most battle-hardened soldier off his feet, and Bolan knew he wasn’t above any queasy roil in his gut. He swiveled, searching, attempting to control any deep intakes of the foul air. He spotted an armed runner to his nine, hit the trigger on his M-16. The Executioner drove the gunner into his comrade, who was minus an arm just above the elbow from the Hellfire amputation. A mercy burst, and the amputee dropped in his tracks in an ungainly flop, face plastered to earth.
All done?
Bolan listened to raging flames, scoured the dead for wounded or live ones, bodies strewed and stacked in what was a fairly tight but wide circle where the warbirds had unleashed their final ring of doom, two or three flaming technical carcasses seeming to float back to Earth like some ghastly magic act.
Keying his com link, scanning the carnage, peering into the smoke and fires for any signs of armed resistance, the Executioner raised the Black Hawk’s pilot. Sitrep. He barely heard Black Hawk One inform him it looked clear of hostiles from where he sat, sickened as he was by what he saw here. Perhaps it was because he’d been here before—other places, other times—but the end result was all the same.
Death. All gone on, both the innocent and the guilty.
Again, Bolan felt a part of his soul, his humanity collapsing on itself, a sorrow welling up from deep inside, wanting to take him down into a void of hot rage. He would suck it up, of course, aware this was only the beginning, that more monsters were beyond Somalia, their own rampage only just out of the gate to lay waste to whatever evil they didn’t bag for some future trial. Perhaps, he thought, this evil he found here was simply a microcosm of the end. He was no doomsayer, no Nostradamus and certainly no John the Divine, but he had to wonder. Was this just part and parcel of the evolution of man speeding to his ultimate destiny? Would, could, such evil in a part of the world where life meant less than zero, spread like a cancer, spill from one border to the next, contaminate one country after the other? No matter what he did, no matter how much evil he destroyed, he knew the Four Horsemen would live on in Somalia—perhaps continue to thrive throughout the entire region known as the Horn of Africa—but at least a fat batch of homicidal maniacs could no longer scourge their own countryside.
Was it enough? Was it ever?
The Black Hawk was down, time to go, and the Executioner hopped up through the hatch. He wished he could have done far more here, spare at the very least a few innocent lives, but he would be glad to put this evil place behind.
Damn glad, but the nagging question lingered in his mind: what next?
“YOU’RE LATE. Sixty-five minutes isn’t an hour, Stone. We’re rolling, we’re on a tight schedule here. I’m talking deadlines that are shaved down to seconds, or have you forgotten mission priority?”
“We can meet you back at Shark Base if your panties are that twisted up.”
“Don’t get fucking smart, Stone, and we’re not going back to Kenya.”
“News to me.”
“I can believe that. By the way, quite the floor show I hear you put on. Too bad it didn’t make a damn bit of difference, since I understand from my flying aces on your Black Hawk loaner Dugula’s qat-chewing shitbags had already wiped out that village. What was that all about anyway, you going in alone?”
Bolan had turned off his hand radio, shed his com link when boarding the Black Hawk, wanting only a few brief moments with his own thoughts to bury the weight of where he’d just been, what he’d seen. He had begun to shed the ghosts of the hell he was putting behind, in the air, when Tsunami had pointed at his own, then the soldier’s handheld radio, Collins squawking for him to shag his ass and pick up.
Now, if he didn’t know better, it sounded to Bolan as if Collins was disappointed he was still on the team, alive and kicking. Collins pointed out their former ranks in the military didn’t mean squat in the here and now, it was his show, the gist Bolan caught being he was on board as a courtesy, that he had to have humongous muscular clout somewhere that the Cobra leader would sure as hell like to have a face-to-face with, since Colonel Stone didn’t strike him as a team player. Collins repeated his question.
“Concern.”
“What?” Collins snapped.
“For your troops, since you were all worked up about anybody coming down with some plague.”
“Took the gamble yourself, I see. Appreciate all that big concern for the men, but I tell you what, the first sign you’re sick from something you picked up back there, I don’t give a damn if you cough too hard or break out in a sudden sweat, you’re off the team. And if I have to, I’ll strap a parachute on you myself and drop you in the middle of nowhere.”
Bolan ignored the threat. “We’re two minutes, maybe less away from—”
“I’ve got you marked on my screens. Just hustle the fuck up when you guys get dropped off—belay that, I want to see you sprint up the ramp.”
Bolan grunted. Somehow he didn’t picture himself sprinting on the good major’s command.
“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before the next round, and it’s going down in a few hours. I’m assuming you’ve got a few jumps behind you?”
“One or two.”
“You’re shitting me, I hope.”
“If you’re worried about me breaking a leg or my neck, don’t. But if you don’t mind, I’ll rig my own chute, okay?”
“I wouldn’t see it any other way. Oh, and Stone? No more cowboy or crusader shit. We clear?”
Bolan hesitated, then said, “Yeah.”
“You want to bleed for all the little people not even their own give a camel’s steaming pile about, do it on your own dime or go find a church, lig
ht a candle and finger the Rosary. From here on, you better get acquainted with the concepts of team integrity and tactical cohesion.”
Collins was off the air as at least three different remarks—two of which were smart-ass—leaped to Bolan’s mind about those particular concepts. What the hell was really going on here? he wondered. With each passing minute and every exchange turning more brittle and heading toward volatile with Collins, the more the soldier was feeling the hairs wanting to stand up on the back his neck. Something about Cobra Force Twelve was out of tilt.
It wasn’t the blinding light of any divine truth being revealed, but it damn near felt like a bolt of lightning hitting him between the eyes, seeking to jolt him closer to a dark reality. He searched the faces of the commandos Collins had wanted joined to his hip, but didn’t allow the look to linger or penetrate. It was just a suspicion, nagging, growing, but one he decided to keep to himself until…
What?
That only four of the commandos carried serpent handles? That they were special to Collins, not essentially and integrally part of the team? But, if so, why? What demon lurked behind the masks of that tactical integrity, duty and honor they believed they showed him? His gut—rarely wrong—told him not only was there something shady, perhaps even sinister about his so-called teammates, but that this mission was set to come unraveled.
He’d play it out to the end of whatever the ride, the Executioner decided, aware now more than ever he was on his own, but one soldier up against who, how many and what?
HIS BLACK-OPS HANDLE for Operation Stranglehold—the mission so tagged by Cobra Central—was Gambler, but his real name was…
Who really knew? The name Harry Smith wanted to come to mind if he chose to replay a childhood that never existed. No one, not even himself, could remember his given name at birth. Even all the classified documents and disks at the NSA and the CIA were so full of deletions on his past operations and his slew of assumed names and handles not even the superspooks could accurately confirm his true identity, if put to task.
And who cared? Beyond whoever he really was in name only, his legion, to be exact, very much gave a damn, and they would follow his orders, or else.
No, he figured he couldn’t state precisely who he was, but he knew where he’d been in the world, what he’d done. Most important, he had a full measure of who the man inside was, and just what that warrior was prepared to do. Oh, bliss to be, how sweet the light on the horizon of tomorrow, he thought, oh, the riches to be earned and enjoyed. Cobra Command, Pentagon, White House, the members of the entire intel-military infrastructure of the U.S. of A., would soon weep and gnash their teeth in impotent rage when they were gone with the wind.
Maybe, just for added chuckles, he’d leave behind a photo or two on a body, a big dung-eating grin, a middle-finger salute leaping out of the pics, “See ya, don’t wanna be ya.” Sure enough, the day was soon in coming when it would pay off beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings, and ranting and raving that he was, essentially, nonexistent, so far off the official radar screen, so distantly removed from legitimate channels he didn’t even have a Social Security Number. No sense in being a deniable expendable, taking all the risks all these years, if there was no reward, if he couldn’t make the power players and pencil pushers and CNN camera hogs—who thought they jerked his strings, safe behind the lines, thumbs planted square up their rectums, denying they had killers out there in the world doing nasty things—swallow a fat load for all his blood and sweat. Deny this, he thought.
He had to chuckle to himself over what he viewed as a role that landed him as the next-best thing to being supernatural, up there with the greatest of saints or the most horrific of demons in human skin who had gone before him. After all, they, he thought—whoever the hell they were—claimed the greatest deceit ever played on the world by the Devil was making man believe the Devil didn’t exist. And that, likewise, evil didn’t exist, that it was only each and every individual human’s perception of reality as it related only to his or her own world and all the wants and wishes that pertained exclusively to it.
He could live with that. He had to.
He was on the eve of pulling off some of the greatest treachery and rebellion, he knew, since Satan and his legion were cast out of Heaven.
Mogadishu was just an appetizer. Sudan, on the other hand, was a hunter’s paradise, nothing but choice specials on the menu for their operation. It was a smorgasbord, in fact, of terrorists, suicide bombers, weapons dealers, assassins and so on. Hell, there were so many training camps spread all over the largest country in Africa, he figured nothing short of a few tactical nukes could wipe out the legions of international thugs and murderers that came here from as far away as the Philippines for R and R, sharpening skills, planning operations before they were shipped out for jihad.
It certainly bolstered his confidence, not to mention swelled the old pride a little more, that the moment and the trying times ahead would get handled together with the two other like-minded and nameless, faceless almighty black ops marching beside him.
He advanced down the narrow concrete corridor, gloomy light thrown about from naked bulbs powered by a generator. And there he was, the man of the hour, Gambler saw. The door to Colonel Ayeed Bashir’s office was open, the lean hawk face in mustache and neatly trimmed beard glancing up from behind his desk. Gambler felt the grin loosening up now, decided to hold the expression, aware he—the three of them—held all the cards. Who was good or bold enough to call their bluff?
They were in lockstep with their escort, two soldiers front, two lieutenants pulling up the rear, AK-74s all around. Flanked by his comrades, Gambler shot them each a grin. Tim and Jim Smith—Warlock and Cyclops respectively—were likewise ghosts in the black-ops machine. He didn’t have to question their guts when all backs were to the wall, their experience to deal with and blast or simply walk out the other side of crisis, nor their commitment to the endgame when the blanket was stripped away from over the pit and all good Cobras lunged out, biting. Too many past ops to count, much less recall all the history together, but both men bore the scars of war, badges of honor. For instance, the handle that Jimbo, he knew, gave himself had shot out of his mouth, no hesitation, as if he were proud of the land mine in Afghanistan that had cleaved off half his face, sheared off the left ear, with hot shrapnel tearing out the eye. Warlock had had a close combat encounter with a Yemeni terrorist who didn’t like getting a light load of Semtex and Stingers and who was fond of knives. The purple scar ran from the knuckle of the middle finger, all the way to his bicep. It had been a rare occasion, not being there beside one or both ops, but the story went that not only had Warlock deflected the initial sweep of the Yemeni’s blade, using his arm as a shield, but also he’d ripped the knife out of his hand before the guy had “Allah akhbar” out of his mouth. The follow-up counterattack left little to the imagination, but after, he heard, Warlock dropped the Yemeni with a right the pride of any heavyweight, and he’d gone to work, performing surgery on the poor bastard even as he nearly bled out himself. Warlock loathed and feared knives to this day, unless, of course, he did the cutting.
There would be no knife play tonight, Gambler knew, three Berettas to use between them when the vibrating signal came through on their pagers.
The three of them had been to the colonel’s command post in southern Sudan twice before, ironing out the details for this third visit, where they were supposed to land Bashir some missiles, warheads packed with VX, which could be fitted on the Russian gunships outside. Unfortunately for the colonel, who was known in the region as Bashir the Crucifier or the Crucifying Colonel, he would never get his hands on the kind of hardware that would most certainly wipe out all the black rage against their Muslim oppressors.
Gambler had laid out their individual moves, redefined their roles while they were choppered out of Somalia by company liaisons. So far the setup was sticking to form.
He wasn’t even through the door when the vibration trem
bled from the hip down. One minute and counting, and he knew their guy would be on the money.
Gambler watched Bashir glance up from whatever intel and maps he’d been perusing, no doubt planning tomorrow’s massacre of Nilotes. The colonel sniffed the air, Gambler glimpsing Warlock checking his watch, counting off the numbers.
“Well?” Bashir stood erect, folded his hands behind his back. “I trust this time you bring me good news?”
Gambler ticked off the seconds in his head, Bashir darting a thinly veiled look of contempt over their faces, before anger broke through the expression.
“What? Why are you standing there, grinning like an idiot?”
“I bring you the best of all possible news, Colonel. You are the man of the millennium. We salute you, but we always did.”
Bashir squeezed the bridge of his nose, sighed. “I do not have all night for these shallow attempts to curry favor. Spit it out.”
He barked at Warlock, “You! Why do you keep looking at your watch?”
Warlock tapped the watch, shaking his head, frowning, then the three of them were grinning at Bashir, Cyclops giving his package a squeeze, stating his balls seemed to be itching and did the good Colonel have some kind of powder or salve handy?
Bashir looked at his men, grunting, appeared uncertain whether to laugh or scream in rage, fighting to keep his composure. “Okay. I watch your American TV sometimes, but the old videos, collector’s items I believe you call them, before everything in your country became sex and violence. I get it, I can take some joking, strange as it is. I like comedy myself. Is this some sort of bad Three Stooges routine?”
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