Threat Factor Read online

  Suppose that it was not imagination. If Guleed’s men swarmed the tank, what damage could they do? Set it on fire? Find a way to disable the engine? Blow the treads to prevent its escape? Blind the crew by obstructing the view ports and periscopes?

  Waabberi suddenly recalled the programs he had seen on television, showing footage from bygone wars. He’d seen tanks set ablaze with Molotov cocktails, crewmen scrambling out with their clothing on fire, to be shot on the run. If there was a worse way to die, it escaped him.

  He considered warning Cooper, then decided it would just distract him, when his focus on the task at hand was critical. If he was quick enough, Waabberi thought he could defend the tank himself, discourage those who’d found sufficient courage to attack it from the rear.

  It seemed the very least that he could do.

  Leaving his earphones on, but disconnecting them from the T-90’s intercom, he scrambled up the short ladder to reach the turret’s hatch. He supposed that would be the point of greatest risk, emerging from his shelter to confront an enemy who might be waiting on the other side with weapons poised to fire.

  But what choice did he have?

  Waabberi slung the Benelli shotgun over his shoulder and drew his Beretta, balancing on the ladder while his free hand found the latch and released it, freeing the hatch. His next move had to be a fluid rush. Throw back the hatch, emerging simultaneously, ready to absorb the shock of bullets and die fighting, if it came to that.

  The rush was relatively easy, and he left the turret hatch upright to partly shield his back as he emerged, thrusting the pistol out in front of him. Three riflemen stood gaping up at him from the T-90’s deck, one in the act of climbing up to ride the turret.

  He shot that one first, a bullet through the cheek at point-blank range, then caught the others just recovering from their surprise. Two rounds apiece, and they were tumbling backward, out of sight, before a ricochet glanced off the turret, shattered, and a fragment of it sliced across Waabberi’s forehead.

  Blinking through a warm cascade of blood, he spun to find the shooter, saw his would-be killer lining up another shot and squeezed off half-a-dozen rounds to put him down.

  Wiping his eyes, Waabberi saw that men were creeping all around the tank, surrounding it, while it kept on firing. A sudden forward lurch surprised Waabberi—and a couple of the shooters who had gone to ground in front of the T-90, only to be crushed beneath its treads.

  He realized his American ally was gunning for the closer line of tanks, seeking a better angle on his targets now. If he was stopped, it would mean half the armored vehicles surviving, sold for use somewhere in Africa, to multiply the continent’s eternal suffering.

  Cursing, Waabberi scrambled for the 12.5 mm machine gun, wishing he knew more about it, relieved when he spotted the simple spade grips and butterfly trigger. The weapon was already primed for remote-control fire, but his hands on the grips overrode that system.

  GULEED STILL COULDN’T QUITE believe the Ethiopians had tried to kill him—but, why not? He’d been a moving target all his life, first dodging predators in childhood, later growing strong and fast enough to prey on them in turn.

  This night, as he beheld the ruin of his grandest profit-making scheme in progress, it seemed only right that every hand should turn against him.

  And, in truth, Tenagne’s double cross had halved Guleed’s work load, relieving him of killing both the Ethiopians and the Eritreans.

  As if he could have let them walk away.

  Now, he had to try to salvage something from the chaos and destruction that surrounded him, if that was even possible. At least half of the Russian tanks were blasted into twisted, flaming wreckage, but he spared a thought for salvaging the rest. He had dispatched a hastily collected strike team to disable the T-90 hijacked by his unknown enemies, kill those inside and thereby save the tanks that still remained undamaged.

  But it seemed that plan, in turn, had gone awry.

  The damned tank had begun to move, advancing far enough to swing its cannon toward the others parked along the camp’s eastern perimeter and bring them under fire. Not only that, but one of the intruders manned the turret’s antiaircraft gun, seemingly impervious to bullets from below as he rained death upon Guleed’s soldiers.

  And what was this? A howling from the gates behind Guleed, where several dozen men were bursting through, all firing as they came. Was that Jiddu Basra leading the charge? Guleed could not be certain, glimpsing the distorted face by firelight, and despite a sudden urge to face the traitor who had dared desert him, he decided that self-preservation trumped revenge.

  Escape, and fight another day. There would be time to settle up with Basra—if it was Basra—after Guleed regrouped and found a way to stack the odds in his favor.

  Escape meant taking to the air, without delay.

  Clutching his pilot by one arm, and shouting orders to the men who still remained with him, Guleed began a wild sprint toward the helicopter that had brought him to this bit of hell on Earth.

  DESPITE HIS EARPHONES AND the echo of the tank’s 125 mm cannon, Bolan had noted Waabberi’s departure from the turret. He’d paused and listened long enough to hear the rapid-firing of Waabberi’s pistol, followed seconds later by the hammering of the T-90’s heavy machine gun.

  Waabberi was keeping the ants away from their picnic, but he couldn’t hold the line for long, with only three hundred rounds for a weapon that fired eleven rounds per second. Even milking it for short burst, he’d be lucky to last a full minute topside.

  It was another reason for Bolan’s order to Mironov, putting the tank in motion, though his primary objective was destruction of the fifteen T-90s that still stood unscathed against the compound’s western fence. If he survived and managed to escape without disabling them, Bolan would have to count his mission as a failure.

  And he wasn’t going down that road, with or without a tank.

  Mironov seemed quite capable at the controls. Her takeoff was a little jerky, but within a few seconds the armored beast was rolling forward, toward the camp’s command post, then turning left to give Bolan a clear view down the line of carbon-copy targets.

  It was close enough to perfect that he told her, “This is fine,” and settled down to work once more.

  After he’d blasted seventeen of the Vasylna’s stolen tanks and turned them into flaming heaps of scrap iron, Bolan’s work became almost monotonous. Granted, he was destroying military hardware valued in the millions, intermittently annihilating infantry with his coaxial machine gun, but the tank provided him with a security he’d never felt while fighting on his own two feet.

  He guessed it had to be like one of the violent computer games he’d heard about, but never played. The only difference being that if one of Bolan’s adversaries scored a lucky hit on the T-90 with an armor-piercing round, it wouldn’t be game over.

  It would be life over, in a searing flash of heat and agony.

  He dismissed the thought as soon as it took shape, loaded another Refleks missile for variety and sent it screaming toward his eighteenth target, following the laser beam he’d painted on the sitting duck’s turret.

  At least the fireworks varied, each blast perfectly unique, like giant fiery snowflakes from the depths of hell. The end result, although predictable, was still one of the greatest shows on Earth.

  Nineteen, he counted to himself. And fired again.

  BASRA WAS CERTAIN THAT he’d seen Guleed, if only for a second in the firelight, gaping at him from a corpse-littered patch of ground near the compound’s command post. Guleed was gone—off and running when a high-explosive blast made Basra flinch and blink—but Basra knew his enemy could not have traveled far.

  Most of his soldiers followed Basra, as he ran in the direction he supposed Guleed had gone. Some faltered, since the path would lead them past a tank whose crewmen seemed intent on blowing up the others ranged before it, while a man atop the moving turret sprayed machine-gun fire around the camp. Bas
ra himself was not immune to fear—much less to death or injury—but something close to madness drove him onward, barking orders at the men who chose to follow him, commanding them to keep duty in mind and serve him well.

  He glimpsed Guleed again, when he had halved his distance from the tank whose cannon still belched fire and thunder. There he was, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of Basra, running with a group of soldiers toward…toward what?

  The gate was far behind Guleed, and Basra knew from his own visits to the camp, in the old days, that there was only one exit.

  He saw the helicopters then, obscured by drifting smoke and dust, half-hidden by the CP even as he passed it. Guleed had to have flown in, and he planned to leave the same way, unless Basra stopped him.

  Could they overtake Guleed in time?

  Bullets were faster than a sprinting man. With that in mind, Basra stopped short and snapped his rifle to his shoulder, barely aiming at the men downrange before he fired a burst in their direction, hoping for the best. Around him, others in his party skidded to a halt and opened fire, as well.

  And it was working. Basra saw one of Guleed’s companions fall, immediately followed by a second. Before Basra could gloat, however, Guleed and his surviving guards returned fire. Their first rounds came in high, rattling a clear yard over Basra’s head, but then he heard Nadif Ali cry out and saw him crumple to the ground, clutching his stomach.

  Basra dropped into a prone position, trying for a better shot, but in the moment that he’d been distracted, Guleed was off and running again, zigzagging as he neared the waiting helicopters.

  “Allah, guide my aim,” he muttered, only half-believing that a god existed, not at all convinced that he would care enough to speed a bullet on its way.

  But, then again, what could it hurt?

  Before Basra could squeeze the trigger, though, a storm broke over him. A gale of bullets, raising spurts of dust around him, ripped through the bodies of his men and dropped them in awkward, twisted postures.

  The bullets had come from his right.

  He spun in that direction and beheld the huge tank’s turret facing him, muzzle-flashes winking from the short machine-gun barrel mounted just beside the monster’s cannon.

  Basra had no time to ponder how or why he’d been selected as a target by the tank crew. Even as he vaulted to his feet, the bullets found him, spun him in a whirlwind of blood and pain, hurtling down into darkness eternal.

  MIRONOV HUNCHED FORWARD IN the driver’s seat of the T-90, fighting an urge to floor the tank’s accelerator and race around the camp, chasing gunmen on foot, flattening Guleed’s command post and the other flimsy buildings he’d erected in the compound. Granted, racing was a stretch of the imagination, since the tank’s top speed was only forty miles per hour, but she longed to feel the impact of collision between irresistible force and immovable objects.

  She resisted with an effort, knowing it was childish. She was there to help the American finish off the stolen tanks, since they could not be salvaged for their Kenyan buyers. It would be a disappointment to her government, of course, but better a financial loss than taking blame for the diversion of such lethal tools to terrorists.

  Mironov had lost count of the T-90s that had been destroyed, but from her seat she could see eight tanks still intact. Allowing for a few more parked beyond her line of sight, she surmised that he had finished more than half the job at hand.

  And then, she saw three scarecrow figures rushing toward the tank, rocket launchers braced across their shoulders, recognizable on sight as RPG-29 Vampirs. They did not have the muzzle-heavy look of the older RPG-7s, since their 65/105 mm rockets did not protrude from the launching tube as in older models.

  They were no less deadly, launching at 910 feet per second, delivering a lethal punch at ranges up to five hundred yards. The RPH-29’s HEAT rounds had gutted T-90 tanks in field testing at home, and Mironov had no cause to doubt their effectiveness here.

  She keyed the tank’s intercom, nearly shouting at Bolan through her stalk microphone.

  “Rockets at twelve o’clock! Three men at eighty yards and closing!”

  He did not answer verbally, but she could feel the turret spinning, heard the rattling voice of the coaxial machine gun as it brought the three men under fire. She watched as they were riddled, shredded, swept aside—and knew, despite that minor victory, that they were running out of time.

  “Hurry!” she urged the grim American. “It won’t be long before they try again.”

  GULEED WAS GASPING BY the time he reached the Black Hawk helicopter, dragged himself inside and saw his pilot settle in at the controls. It had been close, with Basra, and he knew some other threat might interrupt his flight at any moment, keeping him from escaping when he was so close that he could almost taste freedom.

  By the time his pilot had fired up the helicopter’s twin GE free-turbine engines, the rest of Guleed’s men had scrambled aboard and were strapping themselves into seats. He counted five, out of the crew he’d flown from Mogadishu hours earlier, and didn’t know or care whether the rest were dead or wandering around the camp, waiting to die.

  Soldiers could be replaced. Guleed was not prepared to sacrifice himself on their behalf.

  The Black Hawk’s rotor blades were turning slowly now, accelerating at a sluggish pace that made Guleed hiss curses through clenched teeth. He clutched his QBZ-97 assault rifle, its drum at least half-empty now, and watched for any enemies who might approach the chopper prior to take off.

  His relief, as they began to lift off from the helipad, was stronger than the rush he got from chewing khat. It made him almost giddy, as the ground began to fall away beneath them. From Guleed’s new vantage point, the smoky compound resembled a scene from one of the Hollywood action movies he loved.

  For a heartbeat, he felt like a star.

  And then forgot the feeling, as a shell exploded in the air, a few yards to the chopper’s left. His side, and Guleed could hear the shrapnel peppering the Black Hawk’s fuselage.

  He didn’t understand, at first, but then he saw the tank that had destroyed so many others. It was rolling toward him, with its cannon angled skyward, lazy curls of smoke escaping from the muzzle.

  Almost sobbing curses, Guleed leveled his rifle toward the creeping monster that pursued him, held the trigger down and sprayed its armored hide with automatic fire.

  BOLAN HAD READ UP ON the T-90 prior to leaving Stateside for Somalia. He understood the tank’s Ainet fuse-setting system, which allows the tank to detonate HE-FRAG rounds preselected ranges as determined by the gunner’s laser range finder. The system required him to lase a target prior to loading his next round, whereupon the tank’s automatic loader passed a 125 mm shell through an equally automatic fuse setter, timing detonation for the proper distance.

  As in tracking a low-flying aircraft.

  Ainet worked best on hovering choppers, but cooperation from the target wasn’t strictly necessary. High-explosive fragmentation rounds were fin-stabilized, two feet long and left the cannon’s muzzle at a speed of one thousand meters per second. The projectile contained seven pounds of TNT or its equivalent, and released an average one thousand pieces of shrapnel upon detonation, guaranteed to kill or damage anything within a radius of fifty feet.

  His first round shook the rising Black Hawk occupied by Guleed and a handful of his soldiers. The second riddled it from nose to tail with shrapnel, severing the fragile mechanism of its rotors and controls. Bolan couldn’t tell if the pilot was breathing, but if so, he wasn’t having any luck with his machine.

  The Black Hawk climbed steeply, then seemed to stall around two hundred feet, nosed over, and came rushing back to earth, its ten thousand-odd pounds of steel and flesh surrendering to the relentless draw of gravity. It shattered on impact, then belched a rising mushroom cloud of flame into the night.

  Bolan was swinging back toward the remaining tanks, prepared to pick up where he’d left off with the demolition work, when Miro
nov’s sharp voice filled his head.

  “We’ve got company, Matt,” she informed him. “It looks like AMISOM.”

  He had a choice to make.

  The AMISOM troops would be riding APCs, not battle tanks, which meant that he could take them out with no great difficulty. But suddenly, Bolan thought there might have been enough bloodshed for one night, in this landscape that had grown accustomed to disaster.

  With Guleed dead, and the peacekeepers arriving, did it matter if he left ten or eleven of the stolen tanks intact? In theory, they’d be seized, presumably sent on to their original consignee, after all the usual delays occasioned by bureaucracy at war.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re getting out of here. Head east, back toward the car. We’ll ditch our chariot when we’ve piled up a decent lead.”

  “Roger!” she told him through the earphones, almost laughing, as the tank began to turn once more, gathering speed.

  Bolan half turned, looking for Waabberi at the turret’s hatch, just as the lithe Somalian closed the lid behind himself. There was a gash across Waabberi’s left forehead, bleeding freely, but it didn’t seem to faze him.

  “Are we finished?” he inquired.

  “Except for that bit about getting out alive,” Bolan replied.

  “No problem, then,” Waabberi said. He smiled, followed by a grimace as the new expression lanced his face with pain.

  Bolan reversed the turret, tracking the AMISOM vehicles as Mironov plowed through the compound’s eastern fence. He saw Guleed’s survivors firing at the new arrivals, hoping that they had enough fight in them to detain the peacekeepers while he and his companions made their getaway.

  A mile or two should do it, then they’d ditch the tank, gut it with frag grenades and jog back to Mironov’s waiting car. With any luck at all, they’d be long gone before the cavalry could disengage and follow them.