Rebel Trade Read online

  “I understand, sir. I will—”

  Boavida cut the link before his caller could spill any more sensitive details. Seething at the soldier’s indiscretion and the grievous loss he had reported, Boavida placed the cell phone on his desk top, slumping back into his padded swivel chair. He closed his eyes and tried to organize his furious, chaotic thoughts.

  The raid his man described could not have been official, that much Boavida knew without enquiring any further. He had friends in the Namibian regime, and while they might not always have the power to prevent a raid on this or that facility, they always gave him warning in advance. Likewise, the army or police would not send one man by himself—if that, in fact, turned out to be the case. Both outfits loved a show with vehicles and flashing lights, aircraft if they could spare it, and men in body armor shouting till their throats ached while the television cameras rolled.

  Whatever had befallen Boavida’s river camp, it clearly had not been a normal operation by Namibia’s Defense Force or the smaller, less well-organized Namibian Police. Even that body’s Special Field Force, formed in 1995 for paramilitary missions, would not hit and run this way. They had a penchant for detaining and abusing prisoners, not simply shooting men at random and retreating into darkness.

  In which case…who?

  The MLF had many enemies, both in Angola and Namibia. This raid smacked of a grudge that might be personal, something outside the law, but Boavida couldn’t prove that, either, since it seemed the gunman had never spoken a word amidst his killing.

  What in hell was up with that?

  It worried him, and Oscar Boavida did not like to worry. He had plenty of important things to occupy his mind, without the vision of some rogue fanatic hiding in the shadows, waiting to attack his people when they least expected it.

  And if the man was not a rogue, was not alone, so much the worse for Boavida.

  In that case, he would be forced to go out hunting for another enemy.

  And crush him like a piece of garbage when he found the man.

  * * *

  HEADQUARTERS FOR THE Mayombe Liberation Front occupied a two-story cinder-block building on Bloekom Street, on the borderline between Windhoek’s Southern Industrial District and the neighboring Suiderhof suburb. The surrounding shops and housing blocks were lower-middle-class, at best, leaning toward poor, despite their close proximity to aptly named Luxury Hill.

  Bolan had swapped his digicam field uniform for urban casual, a navy T-shirt over jeans and running shoes with Velcro tabs in place of dangling laces that could trip him when being sure-footed was essential to survival. On the VW Jetta’s shotgun seat, a khaki windbreaker covered the duffel bag that held his AK-47 and grenades. The loose shirt worn outside his jeans hid the Beretta tucked inside his waistband.

  Watching. Waiting.

  Bolan made a point of never rushing into anything if there were time and opportunity to scope a target and evaluate the best approach. That didn’t always work, of course, but in the present case he had some time to spare.

  Not much, but some.

  The MLF made no attempt to hide in Windhoek, proud to sport a flag outside its rundown headquarters. From all appearances, the setup was on ordinary office not unlike those operated by the ruling SWAPO party—short for the South West Africa People’s Organization, which has carried each election since Namibia secured independence in 1990—or its smaller rivals: the Congress of Democrats, the All People’s Party, Democratic Turnhalle Alliance or the South West Africa National Union. MLF Central was smaller and shabbier, true, as befit an exiled band committed to opposing government activities in neighboring Angola, but a passerby would have no reason to suspect that anyone inside was a conspirator in murder, piracy or terrorism.

  Not unless they knew the MLF’s peculiar bloody history.

  Bolan had studied up on that, via the internet, while he was airborne over the Atlantic and while flying down from Lisbon to Windhoek. The short version was a familiar story. Rebels in Angola had joined forces to defeat and oust the Portuguese during a war for independence that had raged for fourteen years. Then, as so often happened in the grim affairs of humankind, the native victors had almost immediately set to fighting one another for supremacy, sparking a civil war that bled the new republic white across a quarter century. The main contestants, backed by smaller allied groups, had been UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola). During the worst of it, when one-third of Angola’s population was displaced, Russia and Cuba backed the MPLA’s cause, while the U.S. had joined Red China and South Africa to aid UNITA. Today, the MPLA was Angola’s dominant party, claiming eighty-odd percent of the popular vote, and the losers were predictably dissatisfied. Unused to anything but bloodshed, they fought on—some of them from Namibia.

  Which was where Bolan came in.

  In most cases, he would not be assigned to tip the scales of any civil war in one direction or the other. While the CIA still fought its share of proxy wars, with mixed results, The Executioner preferred to target individuals or groups that led an unapologetic life of crime, more often killing for their own amusement or for profit than for any cause. He’d started out with mobsters who had crushed his family, and Bolan’s war had grown from there, encompassing the terrorists, drug barons, human traffickers and other parasites who thrived on human misery.

  The MLF might have a solid reason for existing in Angola, where its leaders came from, but the outfit’s mission in Namibia was grabbing loot to fuel the war at home, a process that included both drug trafficking and acts of piracy against civilian targets. When they crossed the line to prey on U.S. merchant ships and pleasure craft, murdering innocents on board, the rebels had invited intervention by the Executioner.

  They simply didn’t know it yet.

  But that was due to change.

  * * *

  SERGEANT JAKOVA ULENGA scanned the length of Bloekom Street through Opticron Aspheric LE 8x25 pocket binoculars, nudging the focus knob to keep the field in sharp relief. From the concealment of his beat-up Opel Corsa, parked outside a coffee shop, he had a clear view of the avenue and its MLF gathering point, two blocks down.

  His vigil had been boring, nearly putting him to sleep, until the past half hour, when anxious-looking men began arriving at the party’s office, glancing nervously along the street before they entered and were lost to sight. Sergeant Ulenga wished he had a listening device inside, to find out what was happening, but he had been unable to secure permission for a bug or wiretap on the office telephones.

  Too risky, his lieutenant had said.

  No cause for eavesdropping, his captain had decreed—as if that legal nicety had ever stopped them in the past.

  The fix was in, somewhere upstairs, Ulenga had no doubt of it. There was a chance that he’d be reassigned from his surveillance of the MLF at any moment, but until he was, Ulenga meant to gather every bit of useful field intelligence that he could manage.

  And do what with it?

  That was the greater problem. If he witnessed MLF members in the commission of a crime, he could arrest them on the spot—or try to—but would they be prosecuted? Cases had a way of being sidetracked and forgotten in Namibia, if those accused had friends well-placed within the ruling SWAPO party. Law-enforcement officers who swam against that tide were sometimes swept away, or at the very least condemned themselves to drab careers without advancement in the ranks.

  Something to think about, particularly when demotion meant a cut in the already-meager income paid to officers of the Namibian Police. Sergeant Ulenga had declined repeated opportunities to supplement his pay with graft, a choice that caused some of his fellow officers to view him with suspicion or outright contempt. It also meant that he was kept away from certain tasks—narcotics raiding,
for example, where the payoffs could be lucrative indeed. But he made do with chasing rapists, murderers and clumsy thieves who operated without the protection of a syndicate.

  At least, he had, until he’d set his sights on the Mayombe Liberation Front.

  Ulenga was aware of MLF activities outside the law, and knew that some of them were tacitly encouraged by SWAPO. He hoped that piracy and other crimes that soiled Namibia’s world standing might allow him to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators, but he had not reached that point in his one-man investigation.

  And perhaps he never would.

  But he figured he would damn well try, and…what was this? Ulenga’s attention quickly shifted to a white man standing on the street across from the MLF office, studying the building and its neighbors. He wondered if the man’s appearance had anything to do with the procession of unhappy-looking members who had been arriving for the past half hour.

  Something else he should investigate.

  Ulenga watched the white man stroll along the street, so casual, as if he might be window-shopping, obviously studying the MLF building’s facade in the reflection of store windows. When he turned back to his car, a Volkswagen, the stranger held a rather bulky cell phone with a stout six-inch antenna rising from one end of it.

  The sergeant recognized a sat phone, even though he’d never used one personally. Who, he wondered, could this unknown man be calling that required an uplink to the far side of the world from Bloekom Street?

  A puzzle. And Ulenga hated those.

  The best that he could do, for the time being, was watch and wait to see what happened next. Perhaps, if members of the MLF noticed the white man virtually on their doorstep, they would come out to interrogate, assault or murder him. In which case, Sergeant Ulenga would have ample cause for an arrest.

  Almost unconsciously, Ulenga let a hand dip to the Vektor SP1 pistol he wore beneath the loose tail of his shirt, confirming that it would be ready if and when he needed it.

  That done, he settled back to watch. And wait.

  U.S. Department of Justice: Washington, D.C.

  THE SAT PHONE BUZZED at Hal Brognola from its cradle on the near-left corner of his desk. He closed his laptop, putting it in sleep mode while he took the call, and reached out for the handset that resembled a cell phone on steroids.

  “Brognola,” he said to an ear in the sky, secure in his knowledge that the sat phone was scrambled 24/7. In the unlikely event that a stranger’s phone reached him by accident, any receiver not tuned in to his would relay only static and gibberish.

  “Striker,” the deep voice replied, from half a world away.

  “How’s it going?” Brognola asked.

  “Going,” Bolan said. “I did the river dance. Phase one complete. I’m back in town now, for phase two.”

  He didn’t have to say which town. Windhoek harbored the MLF’s headquarters and would also be the center of its various supporting rackets in Namibia. Three hundred thousand people, give or take, and none of them was expecting Bolan. How could they, when the man was officially dead and buried?

  Few Namibians would even recognize the name, Brognola thought. Bolan had never stopped in Africa when he was taking on the Mafia, in what became a very public one-man war against the odds. He wasn’t on the radar in those days, before apartheid crumbled and the great colonial powers were stripped of their African holdings.

  But Windhoek was about to feel the full effect of Bolan’s presence, even if its people had never learned his name or any of the pseudonyms he used to navigate his second life. There could be no escaping that reality.

  “You’ve got it covered, I suppose,” Brognola said. “But if there’s anything that we can do from this end… .”

  “Understood,” Bolan replied. “I’ve got a couple of angles working now. We’ll see how they turn out.”

  “Okay,” Brognola said. He had to trust the man on-site or everything went up in smoke.

  Sometimes, it all went up in smoke, regardless.

  And with Bolan in the mix, some fire and smoke was guaranteed.

  “Later,” the soldier said, and cut the link as the big Fed cradled his receiver, wishing there was something he could actually do to help, but coming up empty on ideas.

  And realistically, there wasn’t much that Brognola could do from where he sat, despite the reach of Stony Man Farm in Virginia. Officially, the U.S. and Namibia were cordial. Windhoek welcomed America’s consular staff, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, Centers for Disease Control, and had even granted office space to the U.S. Department of Defense. On the flip side, though, the same regime was tight with a couple dictators who always made the U.S. State Department’s Ten Least Wanted list in any given year.

  In practical terms, it meant that if and when Brognola felt inclined to offer Bolan help during his current mission, he’d have no idea which government officials could be trusted, versus those who’d lay a snare for Bolan with the information Brognola provided. That was unacceptable, a risk that the big fed was not prepared to take.

  When Bolan said he had a situation covered, Brognola had learned to take him at his word. If any help was needed, something feasible, Bolan had his number memorized and programmed. Worrying about it wouldn’t make him place the call—and anyway, if Bolan had to request help from Washington, the odds dictated that it likely would arrive too late.

  Hands off, then. Brognola would track the action from afar, and maybe give some thought to praying that his oldest living friend came out of it alive.

  Maybe.

  But there was one thing Hal knew from experience. Since he’d been six years old, relying on a friend you couldn’t see, someone who occupied a cloud somewhere beyond the reach of telescopes, had never done a thing to put his mind at ease.

  * * *

  BOLAN HAD TOUCHED BASE with Brognola as a courtesy, to keep him in the loop, without expecting any concrete help from comrades in the States. They had his back, of course, but that was all abstract and far beyond arm’s length. Bolan had always been a go-to guy, and he had frequently gone to it on his own, without backup.

  No sweat.

  Well, he took that back. There was a world of sweat in Windhoek and Namibia at large, where only one percent of all the country’s land was arable and most of what remained was desert, baking underneath a tropic sun that scorched some of the world’s largest sand dunes.

  Plain fact: if you weren’t sweating in Namibia, most likely you were dead.

  So Bolan sweated, but not from worry over walking into an MLF den with his AK-47, kicking butt and taking names. Even though word had likely filtered back to Windhoek from Durissa Bay by this time, that still left him with a fair advantage of surprise. The outfit’s leader in Namibia, one Oscar Boavida, wouldn’t be expecting yet another raid so soon, and not here in the nation’s capital, where he had friends in power.

  Friends whose names would also grace The Executioner’s hit list before he shook the Namib Desert’s pale sand from his shoes.

  He couldn’t say how many friends, or name them individually yet, but he expected to wrap up the mission in another day or two. Three, tops. Bolan’s approach to war had never been reserved or easygoing. He preferred to shake things up, force his opponent’s hand, knowing that angry, frightened men were apt to make mistakes.

  And it was time to start phase two.

  He slipped behind the Jetta’s wheel and stashed his sat phone, moved his windbreaker aside and reached into the duffel bag that held a portion of his mobile armory. The AK-47 had a folding stock that compensated for the GP-30 caseless launcher’s added weight up front. He could conceal it well enough beneath the jacket, draped over his arm, and carry extra magazines in his pants pockets. While not much of a disguise, he reckoned it would get him safely
to the other side of Bloekton Street.

  And after that, all bets were off.

  Whatever happened once he crossed the MLF’s threshold, it would be sudden, bloody business with no possibility of compromise. No quarter asked or granted, either way. Bolan was not invincible, by any means, but he possessed experience and skills beyond the range of most trained warriors. There were ordinary soldiers, there were others deemed elite—and then, there was the Executioner.

  Emerging from the Volkswagen, he saw an older model compact car approaching from his left, almost on a collision course. Bolan stopped short, prepared to let it pass before he crossed. Another ten or fifteen seconds made no difference. In fact, if someone came out of the blockhouse while he crossed the street, so much the better. It would clear his path inside, instead of forcing him to knock or ring a bell for entry, like a salesman going door to door.

  In his case, peddling death.

  The compact didn’t pass him, though. Instead, he made a jerky stop in front of Bolan, blocking access to the street and the MLF rallying point on the other side. Bolan let the AK-47’s muzzle poke out from beneath his jacket, angling it toward the dark face that was leaning toward him, scowling through an open window as the compact’s driver spoke.

  “If I were you,” the stranger said, “I’d reconsider going over there. They may be waiting for you, and I’d hate to see you killed before we have a chance to talk.”

  Chapter 5

  It was a gamble, but he got into the car. An Opel, Bolan observed, clean inside despite its scarred and dented body. As he settled in the sagging shotgun seat, he kept his AK-47 pointed at the driver, index finger on the trigger.

  They were off and rolling when he said, “We ought to introduce ourselves.”

  The driver took his right hand off the Opel’s steering wheel and made a slow move toward the right hip pocket of his trousers, forced to lean left in the process. Bolan let his AK’s muzzle prod the stranger’s baggy shirt above one kidney, a reminder that he wouldn’t help himself by pulling out a weapon.