Threat Factor Read online

  He almost told her that it was her funeral, but swallowed back the words, afraid that they might be prophetic.

  Instead of wasting any more time protesting, Bolan told Waabberi, “All right, then. You’ve got two minutes. Find your spot.”

  AWALE ABDI SAMATAR WAS very nearly drunk. He thought another glass of wine might do the trick…or maybe three. What difference did it make? He had all night.

  Earlier in the evening his luck had soured at the card table, as usual, but Samatar was wise enough to quit while he still had some shillings left. He’d gone upstairs with one of Guleed’s girls, an Ethiopian who called herself Yenee, and had ended up spending more money there, without achieving what he’d hoped for. Yenee, for her part, knew better than to laugh.

  After having violated every other Muslim code that he could think of, Samatar was drinking, hoping that he’d pass out soon.

  Each time he visited The Jackal, Samatar was conscious of the fact that his money went back to Guleed’s pocket. Still, he came, three nights a week on average, sometimes more. He wondered what else was there to do in Mogadishu, if he wasn’t killing someone on specific orders or relieving them of property that Guleed wanted for himself.

  It was a soldier’s lot in life to serve, and things could have been worse. He might still be a pickpocket, living from hand to mouth and sleeping on the street. Or he might have been in prison.

  Or he might be dead.

  And would be dead, most certainly, if he decided to amuse himself at one of Mogadishu’s other sporting clubs, where Jiddu Basra’s men or members of some smaller rival gang made up the clientele. Guleed would probably avenge him, but that would have been small consolation to Samatar, as he lay rotting in his grave.

  At least at The Jackal, Samatar could debauch himself in peace and lose his money to a man he admired.

  And speaking of debauchery, if he could only get another glass of wine…

  He was about to hail the server, when a sudden racket from the entryway distracted him. A crashing sound came first, as of the front door was hammered open, slamming back against the nearest wall—and then, all hell broke loose.

  The stutter of an automatic rifle sent Samatar diving for his own weapon, standing against the wall behind his chair. He hoped that he was not too late to save himself.

  Samatar reached the AK-47, wobbled through an awkward shoulder roll, and wound up on his knees, facing the club’s front door and the dark street beyond it. Muzzle-flashes lit the smallish lobby, visible behind a drape that screened the gambling room from prying eyes outside. He saw and heard a body hit the floor, then raised his weapon as a tall man threw the drape aside. A tall white man, by Allah’s beard.

  Samatar wished he was sober, as he squeezed off a burst but missed his enemy, noting divots from the impact of his bullets march across the wall a foot or more above the white man’s head.

  Where had he gone?

  Another muzzle-flash answered the question, and a white-hot lance of pain pierced Samatar’s chest, its impact punching him away and backward, falling even as his index finger clenched around the AK-47’s trigger.

  As he fired through the ceiling, Samatar thought briefly of the girls and sweaty customers upstairs, and then forgot them all as his skull hit the floor with stunning force. He lost the rifle, his nerveless fingers fumbling after it and missing.

  In his last moment of consciousness, Awale Abdi Samatar finally knew how it felt to die.

  BOLAN HAD HALF EXPECTED the front door of The Jackal to be locked. It wasn’t, but he’d hesitated when he felt the knob turn in his hand, deciding in a heartbeat that a casual approach wasn’t the way to go.

  So he stepped back, kicked it open, and charged through as the door slammed against a wall. He saw a sentry bolt upright from a metal folding chair, fumbling an Uzi submachine gun off the floor beside him.

  Bolan’s Steyr spit a 3-round burst into the gunman’s chest, stitching a pattern that a silver dollar could’ve covered. Driven backward by the 5.56 mm tumblers punching through his sternum, dead before he fell, the shooter left a smear of crimson on the wall.

  And the gates of hell seemed to open up.

  Before Bolan could get a head count on the players in the gaming room that lay beyond a curtained doorway, they were all scrambling for weapons and cover, the familiar sound of gunfire cutting through whatever haze of alcohol, hashish or sex might have distracted them a moment earlier.

  The game was on now, and the only way to win it was to charge on, straight ahead.

  Bolan went through the curtain in a fighting crouch and dropped another adversary as his target tried to cock an AK-47. Shock was written on the gunman’s face as he went down.

  The others started firing then, mostly without direction, making lethal noise as hardmen often did, to keep the enemy at bay until they worked out what in hell was happening. The walls were cinder block, painted a terra-cotta hue that had been stained by years of smoke and sweat in close quarters. Now they were being chipped and scarred by bullets, drilled through completely in places by the larger calibers.

  Bolan had claimed the table of the second man he’d shot, flipped it to make a shield of sorts but knew it wouldn’t serve him long or well. The first hits showered him with splintered wood and told him that a couple of his enemies, at least, had seen him go to ground.

  Which meant that it was time to move.

  But first, a little shock and awe.

  He palmed one of the RGN grenades, removed its pin and dropped the spoon. Four seconds on the doomsday clock, when Bolan lobbed it overhand toward the far end of the casino. No one seemed to notice the threat amid the general confusion, but they sure heard and felt the blast when Bolan’s frag grenade exploded, shattering cheap furniture and bodies in a heavy-metal thunderclap.

  He gave the flying shrapnel one more second, then rose to his feet and swept the smoky killing ground for targets. There were plenty, mostly stunned and choking on the cloud of smoke and dust produced by the explosion, but he turned first toward the door where he had entered, eyes drawn by a flutter of the curtain there.

  Mironov flashed Bolan one of her ironic smiles and moved off toward a staircase that gave access to the second floor.

  One of Guleed’s dazed gunmen rose as she swept past him, leveling a pistol at her back. A single round from Bolan’s Steyr drilled the would-be killer’s skull above one eye, and dropped him to the dusty concrete floor.

  Mironov raised a hand in parting and began to mount the stairs.

  DIRIE WAABBERI HAD HEARD the muffled gunfire echoing from The Jackal, then the boom of what he guessed had to have been a hand grenade. Cooper, he surmised, convinced that none of Guleed’s men would lob explosive charges at intruders in the club.

  Although, from what he heard—the escalating volume of erratic fire—it might not make much difference.

  Waabberi didn’t mind watching the back door, if it kept him out of that. He’d had one firefight as it was that day and wasn’t sure his luck would see him through another.

  Now, if only Cooper and Mironov could contain Guleed’s gunmen inside the club…

  Waabberi cursed as the back door flew open, spilling agitated men into the night. They huddled for a moment underneath a small light—mounted on the wall above the door to ward off burglars, he supposed—but they would scatter in another second and be gone, unless Waabberi acted swiftly.

  Cursing once again, he shouldered the Benelli shotgun, sighted on a central figure in the huddled group and fired a blast into their midst.

  Each of his buckshot pellets was a .30-caliber projectile, twenty hurtling downrange with one shot, spreading an inch for every yard they traveled. From thirty feet, his first round nearly tore off one shooter’s arm, while a second man fell, clutching his wounded face.

  Before the other men could bolt, Waabberi swung his shotgun’s muzzle right and left, firing twice more. All five of them were down, wounded, but he saw a couple moving slightly, obviously still a
live.

  And if they lived, they were a threat.

  To Cooper. To Mironov. To himself.

  Waabberi turned and panned his gaze along the waterfront as far as he could see. The dark facades of buildings showed no sign of life, but it was always possible that someone could be watching him. Still, if a watcher planned to join the fight, Waabberi guessed he would have made a move by now.

  Get on with it, he thought. But how?

  He could stand back and use the shotgun, or approach the wounded men with his Beretta for the coup de grâce. The shotgun’s relatively louder noise made up his mind.

  Waabberi held the warm Benelli in the crook of his left arm and drew the pistol from his belt with his right hand. Eight paces brought him nearly to the club’s back door, standing above the men he’d shot. They were sprawled in a heap with tangled arms and legs.

  I do this in cold blood, he thought. A lesson learned about himself, on what might yet turn out to be the last night of his life.

  One of the wounded gunmen gasped at him, perhaps a choked-off plea for help. Waabberi fired into the upturned face, then swung his pistol toward a second target. This one cursed him, spewing filth until a bullet drove his left eye back into his skull.

  More gunfire from the club, and some of it was coming from the second floor, accompanied by women’s screams. Frowning, Dirie Waabberi moved around the bodies lying in his path and stepped across the threshold into hell.

  MIRONOV HAD BEEN HALFWAY up the stairs before one of Guleed’s men challenged her. He was a strange sight, naked from the waist down, with a holster dangling backward from one shoulder and an automatic pistol in his hand.

  She shot him, two rounds from her AKS carbine, muttering, “Don’t flaunt your shortcomings” as she climbed past his crumpled body to the second floor.

  Mironov heard a couple of the women babbling, one of them abruptly silenced by a loud slap, jumbled words trailing away to sobs. And she was ready, waiting, when the man who’d struck his hired companion lurched into the corridor.

  He had a chance to blink once and produce a wordless raspy sound before she shot him in the face. At point-blank range, the 5.45 mm bullet drilled a tidy hole through one cheek, then exited spectacularly from the left-rear quadrant of his skull, misting the air and wall.

  Two down—how many remained?

  She counted seven doors still closed, with sounds emerging from behind most of them, blurring with the echoes of her gunshots and the racket from downstairs. She still had twenty-eight rounds in her rifle’s magazine, and nineteen in the GSh-18, before she would be troubled to reload.

  With any luck, it ought to be enough.

  As if in answer to her thought, someone inside the next room on Mironov’s right fired wildly through the cheap door with a pistol. Three, four, five shots rang out in rapid-fire and striking only cinder blocks across the hall. Mironov let the shooter waste his ammo, offered nothing in return, for fear of giving away her position.

  If she waited long enough…

  Another moment, and the door swung open, framing her adversary with a naked woman clutched before him as a human shield. He aimed across the woman’s shoulder, triggering another shot, as Mironov dropped to one knee and aimed between the captive’s thrashing legs.

  She squeezed the carbine’s trigger twice, one of her bullets shattering the gunman’s right kneecap, the other slamming through his left shin, bisecting the tibia. Screaming, without a leg to stand on, he collapsed, still firing as he fell.

  The wailing hooker fell across her captor’s body, ruining Mironov’s chances for a heart shot, so she pumped another round into the shooter’s skull, instead. His death throes cast the woman from him, and she bolted toward the staircase, trailing breathless screams behind her.

  The Russian agent was rising from her crouch when doors began to open simultaneously all along the corridor. The rest of Guleed’s randy troops came out to join the party, two of them stark naked, with the rest in different stages of undress. They all brought weapons, though, all angling toward Mironov in the narrow confines of the hallway.

  Later, she supposed it was the combination of her sex and her pale skin that saved her. None of the Somali gunmen could believe that they were being threatened, slaughtered, by a white woman. The shock and its resultant hesitation gave Mironov time to switch her carbine’s fire-selector switch from semiauto to full-auto fire, before she squeezed the trigger and held it down.

  Twenty-five rounds swept the hallway in two seconds flat, shredding flesh, smashing bone, gouging streaks in the cinder-block walls. Mironov’s targets lurched, screamed, staggered, fell in awkward attitudes of death or flailing agony.

  But it was not enough.

  One of the men was still upright, another on his knees and using his last ounce of strength to raise a pistol with his left hand, while the right clutched at a gaping stomach wound. Mironov dropped and rolled, drawing her pistol, aiming as she’d been instructed in her combat training courses, trusting practice and instinct.

  The GSh-18 spit once and loosed a crimson geyser from the kneeling gunman’s neck. Twice more, shots ripping through the groin and left chest of the man still on his feet. As he fell, she swung back to face the kneeling target, but he’d toppled over backward, shivering and gargling his life away.

  Mironov rose, checked for survivors, then reloaded her Kalashnikov and set about the task of clearing the bedrooms.

  BOLAN WAS STANDING IN the middle of the gaming room-turned-abattoir when Waabberi came in through a doorway that led toward the rear of the club. The Somali blinked at the carnage before him, looking vaguely sad as he inquired, “Guleed?”

  “No sign of him,” Bolan replied.

  “Nor in the cribs,” Mironov told them, coming down the staircase from the floor above.

  The warlord’s absence was a plus. If he had been among the dead, Bolan’s divide-and-conquer strategy could have been compromised. Instead, he felt they might be one step closer to their goal.

  That was the optimistic view, of course, and he had learned to take a cautious stance where optimism was concerned. There were no guarantees in mortal combat, no way of ensuring that a plan could be pursued without diversions, much less that it would succeed.

  Still, there was cause for hope.

  So far, so good.

  It felt strange, exiting the battleground with no wail of approaching sirens, no real fear of being intercepted by authorities. There was an outside chance they would encounter AMISOM’s peacekeepers, but they were conditioned not to fire without repeated warnings, and unless their own lives were directly threatened.

  Fighting in Mogadishu was the closest thing to jungle warfare Bolan had experienced within an urban setting, and that fact disturbed him, even as the unaccustomed freedom sought to put his mind at ease.

  While chaos was the norm, in Somalia’s capital, Bolan could not forget that most of the inhabitants, though armed, were relatively innocent civilians caught up in an abhorrent situation. Any resident below the age of thirty-five had grown up in a cross fire, learning at an early age to duck and dodge government soldiers, rebels and the warlords’ private armies that were worse than both. What child of Mogadishu had not witnessed murder, time and time again?

  It was no decent way to live, but it still beat the grim alternative.

  And Bolan meant to spare the innocent of Mogadishu if he could. Assuming that his targets would cooperate, that was.

  Crossing The Jackal’s threshold, stepping into the dark street where a muggy breeze dispersed the smell of gunpowder, he paused to face his two companions.

  “It’s time for me to reach out,” Bolan said, “and touch someone.”

  “Like that telephone slogan,” Mironov said.

  “Right,” Bolan said. “But I have something a little different in mind.”

  6

  “How many dead?” Guleed demanded of the young man standing ramrod-stiff in front of him.

  “Nineteen, sir.”


  Guleed could not recall the man’s name just now and didn’t give a damn. The news he’d brought from The Jackal, dragging Guleed away from the two young women in his bed, had swept such petty details from the warlord’s mind.

  “How many wounded, then?” he asked, dreading the answer.

  “None, sir,” the young man replied.

  “None wounded?”

  “No, sir. They’re all dead.”

  He slammed his fisted hand against the wall and saw the messenger take a backward step, apparently mistaking Guleed’s curse for a command. To calm him, Guleed said, “Tell me again what happened.”

  “We went down to The Jackal, sir, and—”

  “We? Who’s we?”

  “Myself, sir, and two others. Abukar Gutaale and Mohammed Samakab.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “We found the door open, which seemed unusual, without the normal music. Going in, we smelled the gunpowder and found the doorman dead. And then…the rest.”

  “All shot, you say?”

  “There was some kind of an explosion, also, sir. I saw the scorch marks, and the furniture was damaged.”

  “An explosion?”

  “I thought perhaps, sir, a grenade.”

  Why not? Guleed asked himself silently. If the bastards dared to raid his club and shoot his soldiers down like dogs, why wouldn’t they use hand grenades, as well?

  “You saw no one alive, then?”

  “Just the prostitutes, sir.”

  The whores. Of course.

  “And did you think to question them?” Guleed inquired.

  “We did, sir. They were very frightened, crying. You know women, sir.”

  “Get on with it!”

  “We found three, sir. The rest had run away. Two claimed that they saw nothing, only heard the noise and hid under their beds.”

  “That still leaves one.”

  “Yes, sir. She saw the shooter on the second floor only.”

  “Get to the damned point!”