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  After a quick stop to make last-minute preparations on the river’s southern bank.

  Wildlife did not concern Bolan as he moved inland. The largest four-legged predators in residence were brown hyenas, shy of men unless they caught them sleeping in the open and could bite a face off in a rush. He did keep an eye on the ground for puff adders and cobras, but met no reptiles on his way to the river. Once there, he gave a thought to crocodiles, but, with his LUCIE goggles, saw none lurking on the bank or in the water.

  He was good to go.

  A mile or less in front of him, the district’s most ferocious predators had no idea they were about to host a visit from The Executioner.

  * * *

  JACKSON ANDJABA HAD not planned to be a criminal when he was growing up. A member of the Himba tribe, born in the Kunene Region of northwestern Namibia, he had quickly tired of tending goats and cattle in a hamlet consisting of round thatched huts. At fifteen, he had fled the village for a town of some twelve thousand souls, Opuwo, but it had still seemed too small for him. Another year had found him in the capital, Windhoek, with twenty times Opuwo’s population and no end of opportunities for a young man.

  Or so it seemed, at first.

  Andjaba had discovered that his rural background and his relative naïvete made him unsuited for survival in the city. He had learned that friends were vital, and had found them where he could, among the young and tough slumdwellers scrabbling to exist from day to day. In their society, no stigma was attached to theft or acts of violence broadly defined as self-defense. The missionaries who had visited his childhood village in Kunene had it wrong. The Golden Rule should read: do unto others first, and do it right the first time.

  His first killing had been accidental, grappling for a knife an enemy had planned to gut him with, but it secured Andjaba’s reputation as a fighter who would go the limit, no holds barred. He graduated after that to more elaborate and dangerous conspiracies—hijackings, home invasions, theft of arms from military transports. Soon, he was recruited by a mixed troop of Angolan exiles and Namibians who liked a little revolutionary politics mixed with their looting.

  Perfect.

  It pleased him to go sailing on the ocean he had never seen until his twenty-second birthday, and while doing so, to terrorize the high and mighty captains with their cargos bound for places he would never visit, meant for selling on behalf of masters who already had more money than their great-grandchildren’s grandchildren could ever spend. It made him feel…significant.

  Andjaba still preferred the city life, but he endured the camp behind Durissa Bay because it was his first full-fledged command, located midway between Ugabmond and Bandombaai, two coastal fishing villages where the young women were impressed by men with guns and money, while their elders understood the risks involved in any protest. No one dared speak to the authorities, since Andjaba had removed the nosy mayor of Ugabmond and dropped him down a dry well in the desert, where his bones would lie until the end of days.

  In theory, Andjaba and his men were hunted by the army and Namibia Police Service, but neither seemed to have much luck locating them. In part, he knew that was because of bribes paid to authorities in Windhoek. On the other hand, he knew that some of those in power also sympathized with the Angolan refugees who led the movement that Andjaba served. Drawn by the lures of politics and profit, men often behaved in unexpected ways.

  They would go raiding once again tomorrow, when a British oil tanker was scheduled to be passing by. Its course was set from Lagos, for the pickup, to delivery at the SAPREF refinery, ten miles below Durban, South Africa. The ship was a VLCC—Very Large Crude Carrier—still smaller than the ultra-large ULCCs, but capable of loading 320,000 deadweight tonnage. New, the tanker cost around $120 million, while its cargo—or the threat of spilling it at sea—was vastly greater.

  In the morning, early, they would—

  The explosion shocked Andjaba so much that he dropped his bottle of Tafel lager, half-full, and nearly fell off his camp chair. Someone screamed, a drawn-out cry of agony, that sent Andjaba scrambling for his rifle, feeling panic clamp its grip around his heart.

  * * *

  BOLAN HAD FOUND ONE sentry lounging on an overlook, along the river’s southern bank, apparently convinced the compound he’d been set to guard was out of bounds for any adversary. By the time he recognized that critical mistake, he had forgotten how to breathe, the process interrupted by the blade of Bolan’s Mark I severing his larynx and carotid arteries. The young man couldn’t whimper, but he spluttered for a bit before he died.

  In passing, Bolan claimed the 40-round detachable box magazine from his first kill’s Kalashnikov, and two more thirties from his saggy pockets. Done with that, he pitched the empty AK down the river’s bank and watched it vanish with a muffled splash. There was no point in leaving guns behind that might be used by enemies to kill him, and the extra ammo might be useful, too.

  If he’d had all the bullets in the world, it might have been a safer place.

  Closing on the pirate camp, Bolan could hear the normal sounds of men conversing, doing chores, bitching about the work. Something was cooking, but he couldn’t place the smell. Some kind of bushmeat he supposed, and put it out of mind. Whatever they had in the pot, these murderers and poachers were about to miss their final meal on Earth.

  Bolan had primed his GP-30 launcher with a high-explosive caseless round before he left the Zodiac inflatable. He’d heard that Russian soldiers called the weapon Obuvka (shoe), while dubbing its predecessor models Kostyor (bonfire) and Mukha (fly). All three were single-shot muzzle-loaders, chambered for the 40x46 mm low-velocity grenades designed for handheld launchers, rather than the 40x53 mm rounds fired from mounted or crew-served weapons. You could mistake them at a glance, but that mistake would cost a careless warrior dearly—as in hands, eyes or his life.

  Today, Bolan’s “shoe” was loaded with a VOG-25P fragmentation grenade, average kill radius twenty feet. The projectile’s warhead contained thirty-seven grams of TNT, plus a primary charge that bounced it anywhere from three to six feet off the ground before the main charge blew. It was a “Bouncing Betty” for the new millennium, designed to make the art of killing more efficient.

  Just what Bolan needed here—at this time.

  The pirates—some of them Namibian, the rest Angolan refugees—had four boats moored along the river, with their tents set back some distance from the water’s edge. It could have passed for a large safari’s camp, until you saw the automatic weapons everywhere and noticed that the men in camp all wore tricolor armbands: red, black and yellow, with a red star on the center stripe.

  Small versions of a banner flown by the Mayombe Liberation Front.

  The GP-30 had sights adjustable to thirteen hundred feet—call it four football fields and change—but Bolan was within one-quarter of that distance when he chose his target, picking out the farthest boat from where he stood in shadow, half a dozen men engaged in working on its motor. When he fired, the AK-47 barely kicked against his shoulder, and the launcher made a muffled pop that could have been mistaken for a normal sound around the camp.

  Until his fragmentation round went off.

  Four men went down in the initial blast, shot through with shrapnel, dead or gravely wounded as they fell. Two others suffered deep flesh wounds but managed to escape under their own power, diving for weapons they had laid aside when they took up their wrenches, screwdrivers and other tools.

  The screaming started then, Bolan deliberately deaf to it as he advanced, using the forest near the river to conceal himself. A mile or so to the north or south, and he’d have been exposed to view as he crossed desert sand, but there was shade and shelter at the riverside for pirates and the man who hunted them.

  The hunt was on, and it would not end until all of them were dead.

 
* * *

  JACKSON ANDJABA SCANNED the treeline, searching for the enemy who had discharged the blast among his men. He’d recognized the sound of the grenade launcher—most of the weapons issued to Namibia’s armed forces had been made in Russia, after all—but one pop did not help him place the shooter, and the detonation told him only that the camp was under fire.

  Not from the army, though. Andjaba knew that if a team of soldiers had been sent against them, they’d be charging from the forest already, spraying the camp with automatic weapons, shouting for surrender even as they shot his scrambling men without remorse. War in Namibia had never been an exercise in surgical precision. Winners claimed their victory by standing on a heap of corpses, satisfied that no one had survived to challenge them.

  Andjaba shouted orders at his men: the obvious, commanding that they look for cover, watch the trees, control their fire until they had a target. They were well supplied with ammunition, but could not afford to waste it blasting trees and shadows while their adversaries used the night against them as a weapon.

  “Douse that fire!” Andjaba bellowed. “And those torches! Keep your damned heads down!”

  He heard another pop, and braced himself for the explosion that he knew was coming, no way to prepare for it or save himself except by dropping prone with arms over his head. More screams followed the detonation, and his men were firing now without a trace of discipline, spraying the night with their Kalashnikovs, one blasting with the NSV heavy machine gun mounted on the second boat in line, shredding the darkness with its muzzle-flashes and its 12.7x108 mm rounds. One in every seven bullets was a tracer, drawing ruby arcs across the weapon’s field of fire.

  Seen from a distant bird’s-eye view, the camp might have appeared to be engaged in a frenetic celebration, but it was hell at ground level and getting worse by the second. Andjaba’s soldiers couldn’t hope to hear him now over the racket of their guns. And what would he have told them anyway? Keep firing? Cut and run? Offer a prayer to gods they’d long forgotten and ignored?

  Crawling on his belly like a lizard, any trace of pride abandoned in that moment on the killing ground, Andjaba searched the treeline for a muzzle-flash that would betray one of their enemies. He could not separate incoming fire from that which his men were laying down, but after seeing first one pirate drop, and then another, he knew that the enemy was using something besides just grenades.

  Where were they? How had they approached to killing range without a warning from the guard he’d posted on the river?

  That was easy. They had killed the lookout, young Paolo Alves, without making any fuss about it. Andjaba would find his body later, if he managed to survive the trap that had been sprung against him. In the meantime, though, survival was his top priority.

  Survival, and elimination of his foes.

  Or was it wiser to attempt escape?

  Three of their boats were still unharmed. If he could rally his surviving men in time to board and flee, their enemies—who clearly had approached on foot somehow—could only stand and watch them disappear into the night. The river flowed another fifty, maybe sixty miles inland, to Lake Mbuende. He could ditch the boats there and lead his people overland, a forced march to the nearest town, where they could pick up any vehicles available and make good their escape.

  But first, he needed some way to communicate amidst the hellish racket in the compound. Some way to reassert command and turn his panicked men into a fighting force once more.

  Which meant that he would have to take a risk.

  Andjaba bolted upright, daring any sniper in the woods to cut him down. He stalked among his men, cursing and shouting at them, striking those who still ignored him in their urgency to waste more bullets on the hostile night. A third grenade exploded in the camp, sent shrapnel whispering around him, but Andjaba braved it, rallying his men.

  They won’t believe this later, he decided, but it made no difference. They had to get away. Nothing else mattered at the moment.

  If they did not move, and soon, they wouldn’t have another chance.

  * * *

  BOLAN WATCHED THE LEADER of the pirates rallying his men, lined up a shot to drop him, but the NSV machine gunner unleashed another roaring burst just then, his heavy slugs hacking across the trees and undergrowth where Bolan was concealed. The Executioner fell prone, as leaves and bark rained down around him, knowing that he’d missed his opportunity.

  The gunner with the big gun had to go.

  Bolan rolled to his left, stayed low as the machine gun tried to find him. There was no good reason to believe the shooter had him spotted, but so powerful a weapon, firing thirteen rounds per second, didn’t need precision aiming. It could shatter trees and chop down shrubbery in search of targets, tearing up a field of fire where nothing larger than a mouse or creeping reptile might survive.

  There were two ways to take the gunner: from a distance, with the AK-47, or by getting closer, circling around his blind side somehow, while he concentrated on the havoc he was wreaking with his NSV. Both methods had their drawbacks, with the worst scenario involving sudden death.

  What else was new?

  Bolan made his decision, saw potential in it if he reached the boat and boarded it without having his head blown off. The pirate craft was larger than his Zodiac, and faster, vastly better armed. If he could capture it, empty the NSV into the camp, then take the boat and flee, he thought there was a good chance that his targets would pursue him in the other two.

  Or, they might take off in the opposite direction, sure.

  It was a gamble, just like every other move he’d made in combat since the first time he’d seen action as a Green Beret. Audacity was half the battle, and the rest, sometimes, came down to luck.

  Bolan moved out, scuttling crablike through darkness where he knew a deadly snake or scorpion might strike at any second, hoping the hellacious racket and vibrations from the battle would have sent them fleeing toward a safer hunting ground. Venom was way down on the list of Bolan’s worries at the moment, while lead poisoning was at the top.

  A fleeing pirate stumbled over one of Bolan’s legs, then rose and ran on without looking back, perhaps thinking a tree root had upended him. The bruising impact hurt, but Bolan had no time or opportunity to walk it off. He kept on crawling, reached the river’s bank, and slithered down its muddy slope into the water.

  Thinking, crocodiles.

  If they were there, none found him as he struck off toward the line of tethered speedboats, three presumably in shape to travel, while the fourth one might be out of whack from his grenade blast. He passed the first boat, clinging to its gunwale with his free hand, still unnoticed, focused on the second craft in line and its machine gunner.

  A few more yards… .

  Up close, his ears rang with the NSV’s staccatto hammering, an almost deafening cacophony. The man behind the weapon obviously wouldn’t hear him coming, but he ought to feel the speedboat tip as Bolan hauled himself aboard. That was the crucial moment, when it all came down to do or die.

  No time to waste, as Bolan clutched the speedboat’s rail and lunged out of the murky river, water streaming from him in a dark cascade. Boarding took both hands, leaving him effectively unarmed as he set foot on the deck—but The Executioner was never quite defenseless.

  As the pirate turned to face him, gaping, Bolan rushed his startled enemy and lashed out with the long edge of one flattened hand. It caught the shooter’s throat, cracked something vital inside there and swept him overboard.

  Crouching behind the NSV, Bolan grabbed its pistol grip and swung the weapon’s smoking muzzle toward his enemies.

  Chapter 2

  Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport:

  One day earlier

  Bolan had entered Namibia without fanfare, traveling as M
atthew Cooper. His passport was legitimate, within its limits: printed on one of the blanks Stony Man Farm secured from the State Department, correct in every way except for the false name and address listed for its holder. It would pass inspection anywhere on earth, taking the worry factor out of border crossings. After that, however, he was on his own.

  Customs was easy, sliding through without inspection of his bag. The uniformed attendant didn’t really seem to notice Bolan, looking past him toward the couple that was next in line. Young, Arabic and nervous-looking, they were virtually begging for a shakedown. Bolan wished them well—or not, if they were smugglers, terrorists, whatever—and moved on to claim his rental car.

  The clerk was middle-age, ebony-skinned and spoke excellent English—Namibia’s official language in a nation that also recognized German from colonial times, plus a half dozen regional dialects. Bolan’s rental car was a Volkswagen Jetta NCS—a compact sedan, four-door, with a 170-horsepower 2.5-liter engine. The white paint job, with any luck, would pass unnoticed in the city and hold dust on rural roads to cut the polished shine. The credit card that Bolan used also identified him as Matt Cooper. It was an AmEx Platinum, no limit, billed to a Virginia mail drop where the tab was always paid on time, in full. It cleared without a hitch, and he was on his way.

  The airport, named for a Herero tribal chief and early nationalist leader, was located twenty-eight miles east of Windhoek. Modernized in 2009, it had one terminal plus an arrivals and departures hall. Bolan had no problem finding his way out of the parking lot and onto Highway B6 westbound toward the capital. He kept pace with the traffic flow around him, watching out for speed signs on the way and spotting none. The good news: he saw no police, either.