Apocalypse Ark Read online

  Leaving the airport, Bolan picked up Bole Drive and followed it northwestward, staying with the flow of traffic when it changed names to become Africa Avenue. Most of the major streets he crossed in transit to the downtown area were named for other nations on the continent, or for the men who’d left their mark on Africa: Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta; General Reginald Wingate, one-time British administrator of Egypt and the Sudan; and Ethiopia’s own General Ras Makonnen, father of Emperor Hailie Selassie I. It seemed peculiar at a glance, collecting names from so many disparate sources, but Bolan guessed that Ethiopia’s turbulent history explained the choices.

  His first destination in Addis Ababa was a secondhand shop on Senegal Street, three blocks west of the Jan Meda Race Ground. The shop was called Blomkamp’s, after owner Pieter Blomkamp, a South African of Boer descent who’d traveled twenty-five hundred miles from home to make a killing in used furniture, old books, estate items—and guns.

  The latter trade was dicey and illegal. Ethiopia, while not forbidding private ownership of fully automatic weapons, did require registration of all firearms sales and mandated licensing of handgun purchasers. The maximum penalty for possession of an unregistered gun was fifteen years in prison, yet Ethiopian law placed no specific regulations on arms dealers, and customs demanded no end-user certificates for imported weapons.

  Lately, the asking price for AK-47s on the street averaged 250 U.S. dollars.

  Not bad.

  Bolan had cash to spare, collected from a human-trafficker in Dallas some weeks back, then supplemented by a fat donation from a D.C. numbers banker on the night before he flew from Dulles International to London Heathrow. It was dirty, sure. Blood money. But cash didn’t know where it came from and didn’t care where it was going. Call it Bolan’s form of money laundering, spending ill-gotten gains to balance out the books.

  Free enterprise, and then some.

  Addis Ababa claimed some four million inhabitants, confined within an area of two hundred square miles. To Bolan, navigating downtown traffic, it appeared that most of them were out and on the streets that afternoon in cars and buses, perched on bicycles and scooters, many of them gambling their lives to duck and dodge through traffic on foot. Most of the signs were in Amharic, a Semitic language Bolan didn’t speak or read, but many had English subtitles. In fact, as the soldier’s guidebook had informed him, English was the most widely spoken foreign language in Ethiopia, used as the standard medium of teaching in the nation’s secondary schools.

  So he’d get by all right. And if words failed him, there were other ways to get his point across.

  Like pure brute force, the language understood by human predators regardless of their race or nationality.

  * * *

  BLOMKAMP’S WAS NOTHING much to look at from the street, probably just the way its owner planned. Bolan parked his car a half block south and fed the meter, walked back to the shop, and entered through a glass door with a decal listing business hours. Somewhere at the back, a buzzer signaled his arrival.

  Pieter Blomkamp came out of the back room, dressed as if for a safari in a khaki shirt and matching shorts with cargo pockets, ginger hair cut short above his fleshy, florid face. He approached Bolan smiling, extending a hand.

  “You’re a welcome surprise, I can tell you,” Blomkamp said. “Not many like you come my way.”

  “How’s that?” Bolan asked.

  “White men! There’s a shortage in the neighborhood, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Bolan let it pass. He’d come for weapons, not political debate. Reforming bigots lay beyond his field of expertise unless a bullet was the medium of change.

  “I got your name from Jack Armstrong, concerning special merchandise,” he said.

  “How is old Jack?” Blomkamp inquired.

  “Alive and kicking,” Bolan said.

  So far. Under another name, of course, as chief of station for the CIA running clandestine operations in the Horn of Africa.

  “Good, good. So, special merchandise it is.”

  Blomkamp took time to lock his shop’s front door, reversed the hanging sign to indicate the place was closed, then beckoned Bolan toward the back room he’d emerged from moments earlier. Once there, he moved a sliding bookcase to reveal a padlocked hidden door, unlocked and opened it, and led Bolan into his armory.

  The place was wall-to-wall in guns, with crates of ammunition, magazines and other items stacked up in the middle of the room to form a kind of island. Bolan started browsing, picking weapons that would suit his purpose without leaving any trail back to the States. His prime considerations were reliability, convenience and availability of ammo on the streets, if he ran low. With that in mind, he leaned toward weapons issued to Ethiopian soldiers as standard equipment.

  His first choice was an AKMS variation of the AKM assault rifle, distinguished by its under-folding metal shoulder stock. That change aside, it was identical to its parent weapon, chambered in 7.62 mm, with an effective range of four hundred meters and a cyclic rate of six hundred rounds per minute.

  Bolan’s chosen backup weapon was an Uzi submachine gun, purchased by Ethiopia from Israel. His model was the standard version with a metal folding stock, chambered in 9 mm Parabellum, with its muzzle threaded to accommodate a suppressor. Bolan added that accessory as well, together with a stack of 40-round magazines.

  For his sidearm, Bolan deviated from the standard-issue Makarov and Czech-made Vz-52 PSL pistols carried by Ethiopian officers and noncoms. He opted instead for a Beretta 92, renowned for its reliability, and chambered for the same 9 mm Parabellum rounds as his Uzi to avoid carting around an extra caliber. As with the Uzi, he picked a Beretta and added its sound suppressor to his shopping list.

  Finally, grenades. Blomkamp had several crates of Russian RGD-5s, weighing eleven ounces each. Inside each lethal egg, 110 grams of TNT lay ready to detonate on command, expelling 350 precut metal fragments with a killing range of twenty meters. Each grenade’s UZRGM fuse gave Bolan four seconds to place it on target, once he’d pulled the pin and released the safety spoon.

  Blomkamp approved his choices with a smile, quoted a price, and pocketed the cash while Bolan packed his merchandise into a pair of nondescript gym bags, wearing the pistol underneath his jacket in a fast-draw shoulder rig. As they were walking toward the exit, Blomkamp said, “You’re going on safari, I suppose?”

  “Something like that,” Bolan replied.

  “Well, bag a few for me, while you’re about it, eh?”

  “A few what?”

  “Kaffirs, man! What else? They make the best sport, eh?”

  Bolan considered decking him, decided that it wouldn’t be the smartest move he’d ever made, and left the jowly racist peering after him. He made sure that Blomkamp couldn’t see his car or make the license as he drove away, feeling a sudden urge to shower, or at least to wash his hands.

  No time for that. They would be bloody soon enough.

  * * *

  BOLAN’S TARGET WAS a church of sorts on Congo Street, two blocks southeast of Addis Ababa’s Amanuel Mental Hospital, near Dilachim Secondary School. The proximity of lunatics to schoolchildren bemused him, but he trusted both facilities to be secure, and neither figured in his mission of the moment. Rather, he was looking for a way inside the job at hand, and that required that Bolan go to church.

  Specifically, the Temple of the Holy Covenant, presided over by one Bishop Berhanu Astatke, who’d been born in Adigrat, in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region, and adopted by Swiss parents when his widowed mother died in a tuberculosis epidemic. Educated in Zurich and Rome, he’d found religion as a graduate student and returned to his native soil as an evangelist for the sect he now served as its highest-ranking officer in Ethiopia.

  All perfectly legitimate on paper, and according to Astatke’s flock of two hundred parishioners.
Defectors told another story, and their tales had reached the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa, where one Paul Ray—alias “Jack Armstrong”—had passed the word along to headquarters at Langley. His report was filed there, more or less forgotten, until very recently, when circumstances had raised it from the status of a curiosity to urgent business.

  As it happened, urgent business for the Executioner.

  Bolan drove past the Temple of the Holy Covenant, a less-than-stately building made from cinder blocks and painted apricot, now faded by the sun to something more like antique-white. An overhead marquee identified the church and listed hours for its services throughout the week. Around the block, an alley lined with battered garbage cans permitted access to a back door fitted with a dead bolt lock, and windows of dirty frosted glass behind cages of rusty bars.

  However Bolan tried to breach the place, he’d have to wait for nightfall. Daylight penetration meant witnesses on hand and probable involvement of police. Once law enforcement got involved, his options would be reduced to two: escape somehow without employing lethal force, or go to jail with no hope of assistance from the embassy or any other outside source.

  Deniability was key to every mission Bolan undertook. He had accepted that from day one of his service to the government that had once pursued him as the world’s most wanted fugitive. Exemption of police from deadly force was Bolan’s private rule, a self-imposed restriction recognizing law-enforcement officers as “soldiers of the same side,” even when they sold their badges to the highest bidder and were criminals themselves. He’d long since given up on arguing the point with any of his few surviving friends. It was a rule—a solemn vow—Bolan would live or die by, if it came to that.

  The dashboard clock in his Tekeze told him it was nearly five o’clock, which left him two hours to kill before nightfall. He drove around downtown until he spied the golden arches of McDonald’s, where he bought a sack of burgers at the drive-through window and consumed them as he reconnoitered neighborhoods adjacent to the Temple of the Holy Covenant, marking approaches and escape routes that could serve him after dark.

  He had the layout now, but there was still much that he wouldn’t know until he breached the temple. He expected guards but couldn’t guess their number or surmise how they would be equipped. Smart money said they would be true believers, primed to kill or be killed for the cause, but he could test their mettle only when the action started. Until then, guesswork was worse than useless and could lead him into fatal error.

  When he had finished his burgers, Bolan found a shopping mall, pulled in at the outer edge of its parking lot, with ready access to the street, and passed his time reviewing maps of the capital. He’d roughly memorized them on his long flight from the States, but there was no such thing as being too prepared. A wrong turn on a one-way street could trap him if he wasn’t ready for it, and he hadn’t stayed alive this long, against all odds, by skimming over small details.

  By sundown he would know the battlefield as if it were his own hometown.

  Whatever happened after that was up to Fate.

  * * *

  BISHOP BERHANU ASTATKE checked the large clock on his office wall again and saw that he still had ten minutes left before his special members gathered for the evening service. Glancing toward the closed door to his left, he opened the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk and removed the bottle of Baro Dry Gin that he kept hidden there. Whether the bottle was in fact a secret from his flock didn’t concern Astatke at the moment.

  Nothing in his chosen creed forbade the use of alcohol, though several passages from holy writ condemned excess in any phase of life. Bishop Astatke smiled at that, considering the course of action his superiors had chosen, nearly chuckling to himself as he unscrewed the lid and drank two swallows directly from the bottle.

  The gin drowned nervous twitching in his gut, leaving the bishop more relaxed than he had been a moment earlier. With some reluctance, he recapped the bottle, tucked it out of sight and closed its drawer on the temptation to keep guzzling fire until his mind went blank.

  His message for this night, delivered to an all-male audience, would call for fortitude and courage in the troubled days ahead. A prophecy of conflict that should come as no surprise to any member of the church’s inner circle by this time. It might come down to all-out war, in fact, and he assumed that most of the parishioners expected at the gathering would turn up fully armed.

  Soldiers of God, bless them.

  Bishop Astatke only hoped that they—and he—hadn’t been led astray.

  The bottle whispered to him from its hiding place, but the bishop had a response on the tip of his tongue. “Get thee behind me, devils. At least for the next few hours.”

  In the spirit of the evening, he opened the drawer above his liquor stash and a clip-on holster for his belt. Nestled inside it was a Makarov pistol, no longer issued to Russian troops as standard equipment, but still manufactured for sale at home and abroad. The pistol’s magazine was fully loaded with eight 9 mm Makarov rounds, but Astatke didn’t keep a round in the chamber. Why take chances, when he’d never been proficient with guns in the first place?

  Still, it was a symbol and would send the proper message to his loyal parishioners. Preparedness, a will to fight and die for their beliefs if need be. Death to infidels who stood between God’s chosen people and their goal of ultimate redemption.

  Bishop Astatke rose, finding it easier to clip the holster on his belt when he was standing, and had nearly managed it when angry voices focused his attention on the nearby chapel. He was halfway to the office door, phrasing an admonition in his mind, when someone yelped as if in pain, then gunshots echoed from the church’s breeze block walls.

  Astatke tried to draw his pistol, but brought the whole loose holster with it, cursing most unlike a clergyman as he unsnapped the leather thumb-break strap, pulled out the Makarov and let the holster fall. With trembling hands, he pumped the pistol’s slide, chambered a round and reached for the doorknob.

  I could hide here, he thought, but he had to find out what was happening outside his door. The church and its parishioners were his responsibility, a debt he owed to God and to his temporal superiors. Above all else, he had to stop the hellish racket coming from the chapel before someone passing on the street took notice and alerted the police.

  Clutching his pistol in a death grip, tight enough to make his knuckles ache, Astatke cracked his door and peered outside. He saw nothing in the empty hallway, but recoiled as more shots reached his ears, louder without the closed door as a baffle. Muttering a hasty prayer, he crept out of the office, edged along the corridor to reach a door that stood behind the chapel’s altar. Shaking like a man gripped by malaria, he hesitated there, then found his nerve and pushed on through.

  Into a scene straight out of hell.

  * * *

  BOLAN HAD COME in from the alleyway, knowing he couldn’t pick the back door’s dead bolt, so letting the Spectre M-4 handle it. One nearly silent round at point-blank range was all he needed, but he heard the shattered locking mechanism clatter on a concrete floor inside before he cleared the threshold. Braced to deal with sentries double-timing to investigate, he was relieved to find himself alone inside a short, deserted corridor.

  The church was occupied, however. On his last drive-by, he’d seen a guard on Congo Street, playing it casual, and now the sound of murmuring voices drew Bolan toward what he supposed had to be the meeting hall. He passed two doors along the way, paused long enough to listen briefly at each one, then moved on when he heard nothing on the other side. A risk, but so was dawdling in the hallway when someone might wander by at any second, going to or from the chapel.

  Bolan reached another door; no doubt about the voices emanating from behind this one. It sounded like a conversation under way, rather than any kind of mass or sermon, and he took his chances, barging through into a
room with seating for a hundred people, give or take. Most of the pews were empty, but he counted seven men down front before they registered a stranger’s presence in their midst.

  As luck would have it, Bolan’s entry placed him in the chapel’s apse, behind the altar, facing toward the nave. It felt like being pushed onstage before a surly audience, except that most theater patrons wouldn’t have been packing guns. This group was armed to the last man, all reaching for their weapons as they realized someone stood before them with a submachine gun in his hands.

  Bolan was quicker, since he didn’t have to draw. He caught one of the gunmen rising, pistol raised, but still off-target when a 3-round burst spit past the altar, stitched a bloody track across the would-be shooter’s chest and sat him down again. A second burst from Bolan’s SMG sheared through the next grim face in line, then the survivors started to return fire, peppering the back wall of the apse with hasty shots.

  Bolan fell prone behind the altar, hoping its mahogany facade would hold up long enough for him to prime one of his Russian frag grenades and let it fly. He’d hoped to find Bishop Astatke without battling through the bishop’s congregation, but the fat was in the fire now, and he had no other choice. Survival was his first priority, living to fight—or to collect intelligence—another day.

  The soldier had palmed one of the green RGD-5s and was about to pull its pin when someone burst in through the same door that had led him to the chapel. The belated entrant was a man older than any of the trigger-happy worshippers out front, dressed all in black except the snow-white backward collar marking him as clergy. In his hand, where casual observers might expect a crucifix or other scepter of his faith, he clutched a pistol angling Bolan’s way.

  This had to be Bishop Astatke, likely coming from one of the rooms that Bolan hadn’t cleared in passing, and his hope of questioning the clergyman was gone. Before the bishop had a chance to use his sidearm, Bolan fired a burst that cut his legs from under him and dropped him squealing to the carpet. With the pistol spinning from his grasp, Astatke’s threat was minimized, and Bolan focused on the members of his congregation, who were more enraged than ever, yelling for the interloper’s blood as they poured gunfire toward the altar.