Threat Factor Read online

  Or even now, when he was poised at full alert.

  Waabberi wished that he knew more about the stranger he’d been asked to serve as translator and guide. The man was white and used the name Matthew Cooper, although Waabberi would have bet a year’s income that he’d been christened something else.

  This Cooper was supposed to be “a specialist,” which could mean anything in cloak-and-dagger terms. Given the time and place, the opposition he’d be facing, it was safe to guess that mayhem was among his specialties.

  How else could the American expect to tackle Mogadishu’s warlords and survive?

  As far as the specifics of his mission, no details had been forthcoming. It was strictly “need-to-know,” a bit of hedging by Waabberi’s CIA control against the possibility that he would be abducted and interrogated by some unnamed enemy.

  And so, Waabberi came to the Bakaara Market with a pistol tucked under his belt. It was a big Beretta Model 92, dragging his pants down on the left and covered by the loose tail of his baggy shirt, positioned for a cross-hand draw.

  Waabberi guessed that most of those around him in the market crowd were similarly armed. Reliance on a gun or knife for personal defense was something every Mogadishan child learned at an early age from parents, older siblings, or the acts of violence they witnessed for themselves. Survival of the fittest—or the fastest—had replaced the rule of law so long ago that only those of middle age or older could recall a better time.

  But if Waabberi’s life was dangerous before, he knew that the real peril would begin this day, within the next few minutes. When he met the stranger from America—assuming that the man actually showed up—Waabberi’s danger level would increase dramatically.

  He would no longer be just an observer of the violence around him, someone who reported back in secret and was paid in U.S. dollars for his trouble. From the moment he laid eyes on Cooper’s face and shook his hand, Waabberi knew he would become a target.

  Any second now.

  SIMEON BOORAMA WAS TIRED of waiting. He had spent the best part of a week trailing his target, wishing he could simply kill the man and be done with it, reining in his agitation with great effort.

  Now, the job was nearly done. This day Boorama was expected to eliminate his mark—but still, he had to stand and wait, until some other man arrived. It was a two-for-one, and his instructions were exremely clear: Miss either one, and it would be his own head on the chopping block.

  Preferring overkill to failure every time, Boorama had collected five more soldiers for the final act. They melded perfectly into the mob of shoppers thronging the Bakaara Market on this absolutely normal evening. Their weapons were half-heartedly concealed, and in the absence of police patrols they passed unnoticed among others who were similarly armed.

  Boorama watched his target, drifting among the produce stalls that offered maize, beans, sorghum, peanuts, wheat and sesame. A few aisles over, someone was cooking sambuusa spiced with green peppers that made his mouth water. Boorama contented himself with a cup of sweet lassi—yogurt and water, flavored with mango and sugar—while stalking his man.

  A time or two during the long week of surveillance, he’d been almost certain that he had been spotted. Once, Dirie Waabberi had turned in the aisle of a grocery store and stared at Boorama directly, but Boorama had brushed on past him, nearly touching shoulders with a muttered “Scusi,” and moved on.

  Apparently no harm had been done, since the target had not varied his routine over the next few days. Granted, Waabberi had made some basic efforts to evade surveillance, but Boorama had assistants on the case by then, and the man could not shake them off, no matter what he tried.

  And finally, the end was near.

  Boorama hoped his next assignment would be simpler. In and out, an easy execution without all the spying nonsense complicating every move he made. Of course, he offered no complaints to his superiors—that would have been the next best thing to suicide.

  Boorama understood he was just a cog in the machine, expendable and easily replaced. With nearly half of all adult Somalis unemployed, and those with jobs averaging less than one thousand U.S. dollars per year in income, thousands of young men literally would have killed to claim Boorama’s job.

  Somali lives came cheap, Boorama’s own no less than those he had extinguished on behalf of his employers. He’d lost count along the way, but knew his willingness to kill upon command was the only thing that kept him earning money—kept him breathing.

  Boorama thought he might even have killed his own kin in order to survive. Waabberi’s life meant less than nothing to him, in the larger scheme of things.

  His choice of weapons for the job was a Benelli CB-M2 submachine gun, an Italian 9 mm weapon that measured less than eighteen inches long with its butt folded. He had loaded the piece with a 30-round box magazine and stuffed his pockets with spares, just in case.

  Not that he planned to miss.

  Up close, the way Boorama liked to work, he would cut Dirie Waabberi and his nameless friend in two before they even recognized the danger to themselves.

  His other soldiers were for backup, to support him if the set went wrong somehow—if, for example, Boorama killed or wounded others in the crowd, and the injured or their friends and relatives returned fire. He would have to fight his way out of the market, reach one of the cars that he had standing by and make good his escape.

  What was it they always said in the United States?

  No sweat.

  If only that were true in the Bakaara Market, where the floodlights seemed to amplify the fading heat of yet another muggy afternoon, forcing Boorama to mop his forehead with a shirtsleeve. He looked forward to the getaway, riding at high speed in a stolen car with all the windows open, chilling him with the evaporation of his sweat off his skin.

  But first, the kill.

  Tired as he was of waiting, Simeon Boorama felt it coming to an end. His man was moving now, with more assurance than he’d shown since entering the market. Not just drifting, killing time, but walking with a purpose, eyes straight forward, locked on someone he’d been waiting for.

  Boorama saw the white man half a second later, knew that he had to be the contact Waabberi had been expecting. Who he was or where he’d come from mattered no more to Boorama than the stranger’s choice of underwear or aftershave.

  It was Boorama’s job to kill him, nothing more.

  “I see him,” he informed the others, speaking into the tiny microphone attached to his lapel. “It’s time. Move in, but remember, they belong to me.”

  BOLAN IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZED Dirie Waabberi from his photograph and moved to intercept him near a market stall piled high with what appeared to be secondhand clothing. He kept it casual, no rushing, making himself as inconspicuous as a tall white man could be.

  Waabberi drifted toward the clothing stall, not making any signal of acknowledgment as yet. Bolan took time to scan the crowd behind his contact, and to either side, looking for any evidence of urgent, hostile movement. But the shoppers surged in all directions, jostling one another, making it a tough call.

  Moments later, Bolan stood beside Waabberi, studying a rack of mismatched scarves as he began the ritual.

  “I always fancy red or white,” he said.

  “I like the blue, myself,” Waabberi answered automatically. “Welcome to Mogadishu, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Thanks. I need to get some things before we start. Hardware. But it’s too public here.”

  “No problem,” Waabberi said. “I know a dealer who provides good quality.”

  “Are you on foot?”

  Waabberi nodded and replied, “I understood that you would have a car.”

  “I do.” Bolan had paid to park it in a fenced lot, guarded by a one-eyed man who wore a rusty-bladed panga on his belt. “We may as well get started.”

  They were turning when he saw the gunman coming at them, smiling in anticipation of an easy kill. The shooter wore a loose jacket, drawn back
to bare a stubby submachine gun slung over his right shoulder, its muzzle rising as he closed the gap to fire at point-blank range.

  Bolan reacted in a heartbeat, instinct stepping up to take the place of conscious thought. Instead of bolting from the shooter, he lunged forward, struck the weapon’s muzzle downward with his left hand, while the right snapped forward from the shoulder, slamming the heel of his palm into the gunman’s nose.

  It might have been a fatal blow. He didn’t pull it, but the impact varied from one subject to another. Bolan didn’t know if he had driven shards of bone into the shooter’s brain or blinded him with splintered cartilage. The hit was hard enough to put the man down without a fight, and that was all that mattered at the moment, giving Bolan time to whip the right sleeve of the gunner’s jacket free and release the submachine gun from its shoulder sling.

  “Let’s go!” he snapped, and steered Waabberi back along the path Bolan had followed as he entered the Bakaara Market, hoping that the shooter was alone. He wasn’t.

  Bolan guessed it when he saw three others closing in, instead of shying from the crazy white man with a gun. He knew it when another fired a pistol shot from somewhere on his left flank, missed and struck an old man in the face.

  Waabberi ducked and drew a pistol of his own, but held his fire as Bolan said, “Not here!”

  The last thing Bolan wanted was a bloodbath to begin his mission in Somalia. He would not initiate a cross fire that endangered innocent civilians, even if the bulk of them were packing heat and long accustomed to surviving in an urban war zone.

  “This way!” Bolan urged his contact, weaving through the crowd with shoulders hunched, as more shots sounded from behind them. Someone screamed—a child or woman, from the pitch of it—and then the panic started, as shoppers bolted every which way as they sought to clear the lines of fire.

  The first few shots from handguns echoed flatly through the marketplace, but then an automatic rifle joined the chorus. Bolan recognized the stutter of an AK-47 and heard more screams as military rounds struck flesh and bone.

  The shooters obviously didn’t care who else went down, as long as they dropped Bolan and/or Waabberi. The Executioner couldn’t pause to verify that he was on some hit list after only two short hours in Somalia, but it strained the notion of coincidence to think the ambush had been sprung by chance, just when Waabberi met him in the market.

  He could sort through the details if and when they made it to the car alive and put some space between themselves and the remaining members of the hunting party.

  Bolan knew that he could drop at least a couple of them with his liberated SMG, but he resisted the temptation. There was nothing he could do to help the panicked shoppers who were falling all around him, but he would not boost the ever-rising body count.

  They’d reached the outskirts of the Bakaara Market, facing onto a street. There would be fewer bystanders out here. His enemies would have a relatively clear shot when they overtook him, and he’d have a chance to deal with them, in turn.

  “Across the street,” he urged Waabberi, but they never made it.

  As the Executioner stepped off the curb, a car screeched to a stop in front of him, its female driver craning toward the open window on his side.

  “Get in,” she snapped, “unless you want to die right here!”

  2

  Baltimore, Maryland, Three Days Earlier

  Meeting in public was a switch. When Hal Brognola met with Bolan to discuss a new assignment, the usual sites were at Stony Man Farm or the resting place of heroes at Arlington National Cemetery. This day, of all places, the meet had been scheduled at Baltimore’s Harborplace and The Gallery Mall.

  Brognola had joked about it in their brief telephone conversation, explaining that he had to do some shopping for “the little woman.” Swarovski Crystal, no less, for an upcoming anniversary. Bolan was in the neighborhood, more or less, mopping up the stateside end of a Nigerian heroin pipeline in Newark, and he drove down for the day.

  The mall was located on East Pratt Street, in the heart of Baltimore’s posh Inner Bay shopping district. Bolan checked out the sailboats in passing, then focused on the signs that told him where to park his rented car.

  Swarovski’s was predictably located in The Gallery, but Bolan was an early bird, by habit and as a condition of survival. He had time to browse through the Pratt Street and Light Street pavilions, admiring the World Trade Center, strolling past the windows of a self-styled psychic’s reading room. Finally, when it was time, he made his way on foot across Pratt Street, into The Gallery.

  He trusted that it wouldn’t be a trap—Brognola was too slick for that—but Bolan still remained alert for enemies and noted exits as he passed them, without thinking twice about it. He was ever-conscious of the big Beretta 93-R’s weight beneath his right armpit.

  The Gallery’s shops were a mixed bag, though mostly upscale. En route to Swarovski, he passed by Sbarro, Ann Taylor, Trade Secret, Talbot’s, a bank and an entrance to the four-diamond Renaissance Harborplace Hotel, with 620 rooms.

  On a professional level, he noted fire alarms and security cameras, checked out the roving security guards whose visible hardware consisted of steel telescoping batons, and wondered if a holdup gang had ever tried the bank. The setup wasn’t perfect—far too many witnesses for comfort—but a team of pros would have the option of escaping over water, through Baltimore Harbor and out into Chesapeake Bay, if they timed it just right.

  Most of the shoppers passing by him in the mall were casually dressed, but they still looked like money. There were no homeless souls in evidence, no street urchins except the kind who carefully cut holes in their designer jeans in affectation of a postgrunge style.

  The delicate delinquents almost made him smile.

  Brognola wasn’t quite as stylish, though he’d spent some decent money on his suit, keeping up with the fast-track bureaucrats in Washington. Still, the fedora planted squarely on the big Fed’s head looked like the same one he’d been wearing when he first met Bolan in Miami, several lifetimes ago.

  Brognola’s handshake was the same as always, strong and dry. J. Edgar Hoover had discouraged clammy palms when Brognola was starting as a rookie agent with the FBI, and the big Fed maintained the standard ever since.

  “Glad you were in the neighborhood,” he said, as they began to drift along the promenade. “You want some coffee?”

  “Might as well,” Bolan replied.

  They stopped at Starbucks, ordered coffee black and claimed a table for two in a corner away from the counter, where Bolan sat down with his back to the wall. When they were settled in their chairs, Brognola said, “You’ve been to Somalia. I need you to go back.”

  “Okay. What’s going down?”

  “Long story short, as you know, Somalia started falling apart back in 1977, when it went to war with Ethiopia. Some kind of border dispute. It seems to happen every day in East Africa. Anyway, the Somali army was decimated and the government’s authority went up in smoke, which sparked a military coup in 1978. A guy named Mohamed Siad Barre held the reins until December 1991, when half a dozen groups of rival insurgents collaborated long enough to kick him out. They replaced him with President Ali Muhammad, but as you might guess, it didn’t work out.”

  “The tribal thing,” Bolan stated.

  “In spades. Three other would-be leaders pulled out on Muhammad, and the coalition fell apart. Meanwhile, Siad Barre was hanging on with his own army in the south. The chaos and resultant famine prompted UN intervention in December 1992, lasting until the spring of 1995. A lot more people died, including some Americans, with no apparent progress toward resolving any of the country’s problems.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Bolan said.

  “Depressingly familiar,” Brognola replied. “By 1998 the original country was splintered. You had the self-proclaimed Republic of Somaliland in the northwest, Puntland to the northeast, and Jubaland in the south. None were recognized by us or the UN, an
d there was still an outfit called the Rahanweyn Resistance Army running wild, shooting at everybody else.”

  “There is some kind of government today, though, isn’t there?” Bolan asked.

  “You could call it that,” Brognola said. “In 2004 a group of relative moderates founded the Transitional Federal Government, based in Baidoa. Before the ink was dry on their charter, Somalia got spanked with a huge tidal wave from the Indian Ocean, followed by floods that killed 350,000 people in 2006.”

  “They can’t catch a break,” Bolan said. “Couldn’t last time I was in Mexico.”

  “And Mother Nature’s only part of it,” Brognola told him. “Through it all, a bloody rivalry goes on between the tribes in Jubaland and Puntland, all of them ignoring the transitional government. Come 2006, Islamic fundamentalists declare a new state of their own, called Galmudug, imposing strict Sharia law from the Koran. That basically ignites another civil war between the TFG in Baidoa and something called the Islamic Courts Union. The Muslim militia captured Mogadishu in June 2006, then Ethiopia jumped in six months later, supporting the TGF. Fighting’s in progress as we speak.”

  “It’s grim, all right,” Bolan agreed, “but we can’t straighten out a whole country.”

  “You’re right,” he replied. “Unfortunately, civil war and scrambled politics are not the only problems in Somalia, right now.”

  “Back to the warlords,” Bolan said.

  “Exactly right,” Brognola agreed. “We’ve seen it all before, a hundred times. When government breaks down, there’s no Utopia. The savages take over. As it stands right now, the rival gangs in Mogadishu and surrounding areas have staked their claims to three main rackets, when they aren’t killing one another for sport.”

  “Those rackets being…?”

  “First,” Brognola said, “they went with kidnapping for ransom. It was logical enough, I guess. A spin-off from the civil, where snatching enemy officers may give your side an advantage. Now, though, it’s strictly commercial. The first major target was an economist from Mogadishu University, involved with some kind of UN development program. His kidnappers asked for ten grand, but the UN wouldn’t pay.”