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They were roughly 150 yards from the aircraft when it finally exploded.
Bolan set Grimaldi on the tarmac and turned back toward the plane. Flames and smoke rose high enough to hide them no matter how skilled, how well-armed the snipers were—or how many of them were out there.
“So much for our low-profile entry into the country,” Lareby said. Bolan watched him as he stared back at the flames jumping from what was quickly beginning to look like a fiery dinosaur skeleton in a museum. The fire had spread to all parts of the plane.
Lareby knelt next to where Grimaldi sat. “Better check you out, sport,” he said. “Hold still. I’m a physician, after all.”
“Then get to work and prove it,” Grimaldi came back. “But I’m okay, seriously.”
“You’re okay for the moment,” Lareby said. “But in about ten minutes the adrenaline is going to wear off, and you’ll feel like someone jammed a hot branding iron through you.”
“I’ve lived through worse than this before,” the pilot said.
Bolan had been too busy to notice Lareby’s black leather bag. But he watched as the man pulled out a stethoscope, a hypodermic needle and a small vial. “What are you giving him?” he asked in a stern voice.
“Morphine,” Lareby said. “He’s right—his wounds aren’t life-threatening. The material in the ballistic siding slowed the bullets, and you couldn’t have asked for cleaner shots. Upper chest, then on out the back. Missed the lung. Worse-case scenario, it may have chipped a shoulder blade.”
“How about the leg wound?” Bolan pressed.
“He won’t be running any marathons for a while,” the CIA man said. “But it’s nothing. The blood’s already starting to coagulate.”
“I said I was all right,” Grimaldi said as the tried to get up off the ground. This time Bolan helped Lareby hold him back down, twisting him onto his back.
Only then did Bolan see how much pain there actually was in his old friend’s eyes. But the eyes were the only place it showed. His face looked more angry than hurt.
“They had to be loaded up with armor-piercing rounds,” Lareby said as he probed further at the pilot below him. “The wound channel is so straight you could stick a pencil through it. Hardly any tissue damage to the sides of the bullet’s path.” The CIA doctor pulled off the cap on the hypodermic needle with his teeth, spit it to the side, then punctured the top of the tiny vial with the needle. Holding it upward, he injected Grimaldi’s arm with the morphine and, one by one, Bolan watched the wrinkles in the Stony Man pilot’s face smooth out as the drug hit his system.
Grimaldi finally grinned. “You know,” he said. “On second thought, I think the adrenaline is wearing off. You wouldn’t by any chance have a six-pack of that stuff you can leave with me?” His tongue suddenly loosened, Grimaldi continued with, “They got any flowers around here?” he asked jokingly. “I’m getting this uncontrollable urge to wear flowers in my hair and go to San Francisco.”
Bolan and Lareby hauled Grimaldi to his feet. “Sorry, Flower Child,” Bolan said. “But Timothy Leary’s dead and the Age of Aquarius is long gone.”
“Maybe for you, Sarge.” Grimaldi laughed. He was standing on his own now, but his feet were still wobbly. “But I’ve got all of Janice Joplin, Blind Faith and Cream on CDs back in my car. It’s to drown out the ‘rap’ I have to endure at stop-lights.” He frowned for a moment, scratching his chin. “Or they might be in my room back at the main house. But I’m gonna look until I find them and—”
Bolan cleared his throat. “Jack?” he said.
“Yeah?” the pilot said.
“No more morphine-speak, okay? Just shut up.”
Grimaldi lost his grin. “Gotcha,” he said.
A moment later, Bolan had taken him by the arm and was moving him backward, farther away from the fiery plane. When he had gotten the pilot out of earshot of the other men, Bolan turned to look at them.
They all stared back. And unless he missed his guess, they were all wondering just what the “main house” was.
Jack Grimaldi had realized his mistake even before Bolan spoke, and he said, “Sorry, Sarge. I guess I could blame it on the morphine, but that’s no excuse.”
Bolan turned his back to the rest of the men in case any of them read lips. “It’s no big deal, Jack,” he said. “But these guys are paid to be suspicious of anybody and everybody. Look at it from their point of view for a moment. We suddenly appear, seemingly out of nowhere, and they get orders directly from the White House that we’re in charge. And while we know all about them, they know nothing about us. We’ve got to be cautious.”
Grimaldi nodded. “Rest assured it won’t happen again, big guy,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to get checked out by some hospital here. But from now on my only topic of conversation around strangers will be my health.”
The Executioner smiled. “One slipup in…how many years have we been working together?”
“More than I’d like to count,” Grimaldi said.
Bolan chuckled under his breath. “It’s time to regroup and replan.” He took Grimaldi by the arm and guided him back toward the rest of the Americans.
By now, the flames and smoke from the jet were dying down, and they’d soon be visible targets again. With absolutely no cover or concealment on the vast, wide-open runway. The sounds of gunfire from the terminal had all but vanished, but Bolan didn’t kid himself.
The snipers had not fled the area. They, like Bolan himself, were waiting for the smoke to clear before they resumed fire. And as he half-carried Grimaldi farther from the inferno, the fog began to disperse.
And the soldier saw a half-dozen Cameroonian army jeeps racing toward them.
That was the greeting he’d been briefed to expect, but he’d had no advance intel that it would be during a pitched gun battle.
For a brief moment, the Executioner glanced back at the skeletal aircraft. The fire and smoke was close to burning itself out, which meant that he had to get all his men away from what was about to become a disaster zone.
The smoke continued to float apart in the air as they advanced, allowing Bolan a better view of where they were headed. But it was a mixed blessing. The clearing air also allowed the snipers to pick out their targets again, and the blasts from the rifles in the windows of the terminal building came back with a vengeance.
The fog had all but been left behind them when Bolan spotted the corrugated steel shack between the runways. It stood at an angle that would be difficult to shoot at from the terminal and, with the wounded men, it appeared to be their best objective. It would not stop high-powered rifle rounds but if they could get behind its walls, it would at least keep the enemy from locking in on specific targets.
Specific targets meaning human beings.
Them.
Bolan began to run toward the small building as the bullets from the snipers’ scoped rifles spit past him. With Grimaldi still in tow, he utilized a “serpentine” tactic, running an S pattern that changed in speed, shape and size so that it became no true pattern at all. Behind him, he could hear the other men following.
The soldier dropped Grimaldi to the grass as soon as he was behind the shack. And then, just as suddenly as it had started, the rifle-fire ceased. Bolan glanced around the corner of the building and saw why.
On both sides, as well as behind the terminal, stood a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. Topped with coil after coil of rolled razor-wire, it was meant to stop or slow anyone trying to transverse it. It would be easy to scale the fence. But passing through the razor-wire without getting shredded to pieces—or at least tangled and providing an easy, stationary target for the sharpshooters in the terminal—would be all but impossible.
But the fence and wire didn’t do a very good job of retarding the tank that was pushing slowly through it to the left of the runway where the jet’s remains still stood. The armored vehicle began snapping the fence and the steel poles between, which it stretched as if they were dry wooden matchsticks.
Bolan stared at the tank for a moment. An older-model Chieftain, it was of British design and had obviously been left behind when Great Britain moved out of Cameroon. Originally meant for use by a legitimate new government, it had, not surprisingly, fallen into the hands of terrorists instead. Bolan knew that the Chieftain had been created as a result of Britain’s World War II warfare experience. It was built to give priority to both firepower and armored protection.
The soldier felt the muscles in his face tighten. Earlier, he had had a brief moment of regret that his team’s rifles, grenades, extra ammo, clothes and other gear had been left on the jet and were now either in ashes or otherwise useless. But watching the tank roll forward undeterred, he realized they had carried nothing that would stop the British Chieftain.
No, Bolan thought, as the jeeps arrived and their occupants began scooting closer to make room for the Americans. Until more firepower could arrive via diplomatic pouches, he and the other men would have only the weapons they had carried on them and anything they could beg, borrow, or steal from the Cameroonians.
Taking a seat next to the dark-skinned sergeant in one of the jeeps, Bolan held on to the top of his door as the man cut a sharp U-turn and picked up speed again. A 60 mm machine gun was mounted in each jeep, but they would be of little more use against the Chieftain than his .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. They led the convoy of jeeps to escape the inevitable aim of the tank’s antitank rounds or machine gun— either of which could turn the jeeps into fiery infernos like the jet.
Bolan had learned many truths during his career as a warrior. And one of them was that when you were outgunned and unable to go toe-to-toe with a superior weapon itself, the only plan of action that had any chance of succeeding was to take out the man whose finger was on the trigger.
The soldier’s eyebrows furrowed in concentration as a head suddenly rose through the hatch on top of the tank. All Bolan could see was the man’s hair and eyes.
The men inside would not be expecting any significant return fire from the Americans’ pistols or the AK-47s carried by the Cameroonian regulars in the jeeps. So as soon as their speed had leveled off, Bolan twisted and rested the Desert Eagle on the side of the jeep. Aiming high, he lined up the front and rear sights of the big .44 Magnum pistol just above the head sticking out of the tank’s hatch.
But before he could squeeze the trigger, he heard the boom of the Chieftain’s gun and saw the tank literally thrown backward with the recoil.
What was left of the airplane finally crumbled into an unrecognizable mass of broken steel. Bolan tried to line up the Desert Eagle’s sights again. But before he could shoot at the eyes and scalp he’d seen, the terrorist in the tank had disappeared into the vehicle.
Who were these assailants? Bolan couldn’t help but wonder again. Were they Cameroonian People’s Union or Kamerun Democratic National Party? He didn’t know, but their attack was just as deadly no matter which side of the genocide they were on.
As the jeeps raced on, the rushing wind made conversation difficult. “We still having the meeting with the prime minister here at the airport?” Bolan shouted.
“The meeting is still scheduled,” the sergeant behind the wheel yelled back to him. “But I doubt it will be here.” He pointed toward the terminal and Bolan could see that it was rivaling the jet in the burning category.
Whoever was behind this “Welcome to Cameroon” fiasco was taking out the airport building as well as his plane.
“Who were we fighting?” Bolan finally got a chance to ask.
The sergeant shrugged as he answered. “Either the CPU or the KDNP,” he said. “Take your pick. They wear the same old combination of battle-dress uniforms and civilian clothes, and it’s hard to tell who they are unless you can get them to talk. CPUs usually speak English with a heavy accent. KDNP-ers have the same accent but almost always speak French. Most, however, are bilingual.”
By then the jeeps had slowed as they neared another set of buildings far from the terminal. Bolan guessed this to be the cargo plane landing area, and probably the airstrips used by the Cameroonian military forces. The structure was not nearly as architecturally pleasing or as well kept as the passengers’ terminal had been, but it was in a lot better shape than that building was going to be for a long time after the flames died down.
The Executioner looked over his shoulder at the still-burning airplane, far in the distance now. The old adage “between the devil and the deep blue sea” crossed his mind. But, somehow, that old saying didn’t quite sum up his, or his team’s, current situation.
It seemed far more likely that they were between two different kinds of hell.
The Chieftain was even farther away now than it had been before it finished off the airplane. But it was still following the jeeps across the runways toward the rough commercial buildings. And the same hair and eyes had risen again through the hatch.
Finally on flatter land, the Executioner once again rested the Desert Eagle on the jeep’s rear ledge and lined up the sights, allowing for even more bullet drop this time. Slowly, without allowing the big .44’s barrel to waver in the slightest, he squeezed the trigger.
The “scream of the Eagle” was still in his ears as the head sticking out of the British tank literally exploded like a watermelon. The tank ground to a halt. Three more men inside the old and battered war vehicle panicked and, rather than remain within the relative safety of the tank, pushed the headless man out through the exit hole. Clad in a variety of different patterned camouflage, OD-green BDU pants and blouses, and T-shirts, jeans and khaki work pants, they followed the corpse and dropped to the ground.
Bolan picked off all three of them as their boots hit the tarmac. The advance of the tank had ended, and with that failure, the sporadic sniper shots, which had already begun to die down from the flaming terminal, ended too.
“Stop the jeep,” Bolan ordered.
The driver hit the brakes.
The big American leaped from the jeep. The Desert Eagle still in his hand, he whirled in a quick 360-degree scan of the area.
The snipers he hadn’t already killed had fled the fiery inferno that had once been the terminal building. And the four men who had managed the Chieftain were dead. But as the rest of his American team and the army troops hopped over the sides of their vehicles, Bolan knew one thing for certain.
The enemy might have drawn the short stick here, in this battle, but the war was far from over.
Bolan and his team jumped back into the jeep, and the driver led the convoy on.
2
The initial meeting with Prime Minister Jean Antangana, other chiefs of state, and Cameroonian cabinet members who had not fled with ex-President Robert Menye, had been transferred to the commercial area of the airport as soon as the gunfire had broken out. The jeeps stopped in front of a cruder, more industrial-looking Quonset hut.
Bolan had replenished the Desert Eagle with a full magazine and now held it in his right hand, resting across his lap. He took notice of the fact that John Lareby, who was seated in front of him in the jeep, still had his Walther unholstered, while he gripped Grimaldi’s shoulder with his other hand.
The ace pilot had fallen asleep.
A swarthy man wearing the trappings of a colonel strutted out the front door and instinctively walked toward Bolan. “I am Colonel Luc Pierre Essam,” he said as he shrugged back his shoulders in pride and extended his hand to the Executioner. “I am in charge of the military protection squads, and it was my men who just saved you.”
Bolan just stared him in the eye as he transferred the Desert Eagle to his left hand and gripped Essam’s.
It was CIA field agent Lareby who spoke next. “Well, I guess we can’t thank you enough for clarifying that misconception, Colonel Essam,” he said. “Until this minute, I’d have sworn that we pretty much saved ourselves.”
The colonel’s smile faded. There was an awkward pause, and then he stepped back and said, “If you please, gentlemen. We are set up in a private room inside the hut.” He waved his hand toward the door.
Bolan hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward Grimaldi. “Our pilot needs medical attention,” he said.
Colonel Essam nodded. “I have already called for ambulances,” he said. “Your man will leave for the hospital in the first to arrive.”
Bolan nodded his understanding, and he and the other men stepped down from the jeeps before following Essam into the building. Once inside, the Executioner finally holstered his .44. There was a short row of bunk beds that had been slept in but not made, and he had to remind himself that while tidiness was insisted upon to instill discipline in the armed forces of the U.S., that was not the case in many Third World countries.
Essam opened the door to a large room. Bolan led the way inside and saw a variety of men already seated around a long conference table. Some wore suits and ties. Others were decked out in dress uniforms or battle gear. But no two sets of BDUs matched—in some cases, not even the blouse and pants on the same soldiers.
In short, they were barely better dressed than the terrorists who had attacked the aircraft.
With oil, timber and coffee exports, Cameroon’s economy was better than many other African nations. But “good” was a relative term. The mismatched uniforms meant the army was scrounging out its existence as best it could. And as mismatched as the uniforms were, Bolan knew from experience that with egomaniacs like Menye, the troops “ate first.” He had yet to meet any of Cameroon’s civilians, but he knew they would be in even worse shape than these military men.
The pompous Colonel Essam escorted Bolan to an empty chair just to the right of the head of the table. The other men found open seats among the Cameroonians still loyal to their prime minister.
“Gentlemen,” Essam said as he moved to the head of the table but remained standing. “We are in what English-speaking people call ‘dire straits.’ Does everyone know what I mean by that?”
The men around the table nodded.
“Then I will turn this meeting over to Prime Minister Jean Antangana,” Essam said. “But I would like to say one more thing first. To the men in this room who serve directly under me within the security force—the Americans who have just entered the room are in charge. And you will obey their orders. I do not like this any more than any other man would like having to call upon an outside nation for help, but that is, unfortunately, the case.” He stopped speaking for a moment and looked toward Bolan. “I am sure the Americans understand our hesitancy.”
Bolan, and the other newcomers to the room, nodded.
“Nevertheless,” Essam restated, “that is the reality of the situation. We need their expertise, and they have graciously agreed to provide it.” He stepped back from the seat and a coffee-colored man of mixed race, wearing a blue business suit, white shirt and paisley tie took his place.
Essam moved to the chair the man had just vacated, directly across from Bolan.
The soldier could see that the prime minister was sick before he even opened his mouth.
Jean Antangana cleared his throat and his chest sounded as if marbles were rattling around against one another. “For those of you who have graciously come to our aid, I thank you.” Now that the man was standing, Bolan could see that Antangana’s suit was at least two sizes too large. The bony features of his face, along with a slightly yellow tint to his tanned skin, furthered his observation that the man was seriously ill. And had been for a long time.
“We are facing hard times,” Antangana finally went on. “Our president has left office and is on the run. Which, considering some of the outrageous actions he has taken, is not such a bad thing.”
There were chuckles around the room, but they had a fearful ring to them.
“And we have two men running for office who may be even more evil than Menye was.” He cleared his throat once more with the same peculiar rattling sound. When the spasm had passed, he said, “We cannot have this. Neither candidate, or party, is acceptable.”
A man toward the end of the table wearing BDU pants and a soiled brown T-shirt butted in. “If I might be so bold,” he said. “I see no reason not to kill them both.”
Antangana shook his head. “That would do no good,” he said. “Both the Cameroon People’s Union and the Kamerun National Democratic Party would simply install other men in their place. Keep in mind that this is an emergency election, and candidates are allowed to file right up to the day before the election.”
“Sir,” a black man wearing a lightweight tropical suit said, “why don’t you file for the position?” He cleared his throat nervously. “I am sure all of the men in this room would support you.”
There was a murmur of assent around the room.
