Rebel Trade

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But just to keep it interesting…

Bolan kept his left hand on the speedboat’s steering wheel, picked up the AK-47 with his right, and half turned in the pilot’s chair to fire a burst one-handed in the general direction of the boats pursuing him. He kept it high on purpose, wasting rounds to spoil his adversary’s aim without inflicting any damage on the leading shooter or his crew.

Not yet.

Their moment was approaching.

Another aimless burst from his Kalashnikov, and Bolan set the rifle down beside him once again. The LMG fire from the lead pursuit craft faltered, and he pictured crewmen ducking as the bullets rattled overhead. It was a different game entirely when the rabbit shot back at the hunters, changing up the rules. Raiders accustomed to attacking merchant ships and terrorizing unarmed crews acquired a new perspective when the bullets came their way.

Call it a learning curve, while it lasted.

With any luck at all, about another minute, maybe less.

Ahead, Bolan could see a glint of moonlight on the South Atlantic, stretching in his mind’s eye all the way to Rio de Janeiro. Wishing for a brief second that he was there, relaxing on a beach at sunset with a cold drink in his hand and someone warm beside him, Bolan freed the detonator from his web belt, switched it on and started counting down the doomsday numbers in his head.

* * *

ANDJABA DUCKED, CURSING, as bullets swarmed over his head and off into the night. But for its strap around his neck, he might have lost the PKP machine gun overboard, and that only increased his rage at being forced to cringe and crawl before his men.

Not that they noticed him, as they drove for the nearest cover themselves. The pilot of Andjaba’s speedboat nearly toppled from his seat, grabbing at the steering wheel to save himself, and in the process sent the boat roaring off toward a collision with the river’s northern bank before he managed to correct the looping move and bring them back on course.

Seizing any chance to salvage wounded dignity, Andjaba rounded on the pilot, bellowing, “Will you hold it steady for Christ’s sake! How am I supposed to stop him if you can’t drive straight?”

The pilot mouthed an answer, but his words were whipped away and lost as the boat accelerated, engine revving upward from a rumble toward a howl. Andjaba was relieved, knowing the last thing that he needed at the moment was a confrontation with an overwrought subordinate.

One adversary at a time, and top priority belonged to the intruder who had left so many of his soldiers dead or dying in the river camp.

Andjaba bent back to the Pecheneg and checked its belt by touch, discovering that he had only twenty-five or thirty rounds remaining in the ammo box. Was there another on the boat? If so, could he find and retrieve it, then reload, before his target reached the open sea, less than a quarter mile away? And if the faceless raider did reach the Atlantic, which way would he turn?

Northward, 250 miles along the coastline, lay Angolan waters, possibly patrolled by gunboats of the Marinha de Guerra. Southward, he would have to travel twice as far before he could seek sanctuary in South Africa. No contest, either way, with two boats against one.

But what if he proceeded out to sea?

It struck Andjaba that his ignorance of their opponent might prove fatal. How had this man arrived to strike the MLF encampment? Clearly he had not walked from Angola or South Africa, nor even from Windhoek. And an air drop would have left him no means of evacuation from the battle zone. But if he’d landed from the sea, there might be reinforcements waiting for him on a larger vessel, running dark, somewhere beyond Andjaba’s line of sight.

Perhaps with guns trained on the river’s mouth, waiting for targets to reveal themselves.

Andjaba nearly called a halt then, but his fear of telling headquarters that he had let the raider slip away was greater than his dread of being sunk or blasted from the water, shredded into food for sharks and bottom-feeding crabs. Whatever lay in store for him beyond the breakers, he could not be proved a coward in the eyes of soldiers who relied on him for leadership—or in the view of his entirely merciless superiors.

Two hundred yards would tell the story either way. So little distance left before they reached the breakers and were suddenly at sea. Andjaba’s former haven lay behind him, shattered, turned into an open grave for slaughtered comrades. All that presently remained to him was vengeance and a chance to save his damaged reputation as a leader.

What else mattered, in the world he’d chosen to inhabit?

Almost there, and up ahead, already clear, he saw the stolen speedboat turning, spewing up a foaming wake before them, as it circled back to face the onrushing pursuers. What possessed the stranger to turn back, once he had reached the open ocean, with a chance to flee?

Unless—

Andjaba tried to see the trap before it closed on him, but he was already too late. Off to his left, the river’s southern bank erupted into a preview of hell on earth. Airborne, he could only hope the dark water rushing up to meet him might preserve him from the hungry flames.

* * *

MINI MS-803 MINES ARE five inches long, three inches tall, and one and a half inches thick. Their convex polystyrene case is brown. Each mine’s total weight—one kilogram, 2.2 pounds—includes one pound of PE9 plastic explosive with a PETN booster charge. Most of the remaining weight belongs to three hundred cylindrical steel fragments, each measuring one-quarter of an inch by one-third of an inch.

When the Mini MS-803 explodes, using any one of several detonating triggers, its shrapnel flies in a sixty-degree arc, with an estimated killing range of fifty to one hundred feet. At fifty, the manufacturer claims a fragment density of two per square yard. At one hundred, the spray of shrapnel sweeps a zone six feet six inches tall. Each shrapnel fragment has sufficient energy at eighty feet to penetrate a half-inch-thick pine board.

In short, an efficient mass-murder machine.

Bolan had placed his mines at ten-foot intervals, their skinny wire legs planted in the river’s muddy bank. Their detonation, all at once, produced a sound that made him think of giants slamming doors in unison. Within a fraction of a second, eighteen hundred steel projectiles swept across the water, ripping into twin boats and the men on deck, filling the air with crimson spray. Perhaps the shrapnel couldn’t penetrate an engine block, but with the pilots dead or wounded, one of the pursuit crafts stalled out in the middle of the river, while its partner veered off toward the northern river bank and ran aground.

The screaming started then, from those who still had vocal cords and strength enough to use them. Bolan tracked the sound, locating targets, while his speedboat idled and he found another box of belted ammunition for the NVS machine gun. Loading it, he felt no vestige of remorse. Each man aboard the two pursuit boats, like the others back in camp, had been a murderer and pirate. Somehow, the police and military forces of Namibia had managed not to notice them while they were raiding, robbing, raping, killing.

All of that was finished—at least, for these few predators.

Others were waiting for him, and the Executioner had not forgotten them.

But first things first.

When the NVS was loaded, Bolan steered his boat directly toward its stalled-out twin, adrift in midstream. One man was trying to negotiate the blood-slick forward deck, slopping along on knees and elbows, while a mournful groaning issued from the cockpit. Bolan stopped when he was twenty feet away and got behind the heavy gun, raking the crippled boat from bow to stern and back again with 12.7x108 mm slugs. It took all of a second-and-a-half to still all sound and movement on the pirate craft.

Move and repeat.

The second boat had nosed into the bank, locked tight, but still its engine had not died. The prop was churning muddy water into moonlit foam, a pirate in the cockpit fairly sobbing as he tried to back it out, to no effect. Bolan considered calling out to him, telling the wounded man he should forget about it, but he finally let the machine gun do his talking for him, ripping up the beached craft from its engine forward.

One of Bolan’s tracers found the fuel tank, detonated it, and lit the river’s surface with a spreading slick of gasoline. The tide of fire swept out to sea, followed the river’s current to extinction, while its stationary source burned to the waterline with all aboard.

Bolan was on the move again by that time, angling the last boat toward the river’s mouth and on beyond it, toward the beach where he’d concealed his Zodiac. From there, five miles due south along the coast, he’d find the inlet where his car was waiting, at the dead end of a narrow highway leading inland.

Back to Windhoek and the targets waiting for him there.

Chapter 4

Windhoek

“Slow down,” Oscar Boavida said. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

His caller, still excited to the point of hyperventilation, paused to bring his voice under control, and started again from the beginning. It was even worse the second time.

“The river camp has been attacked, sir,” he explained. “Unless someone escaped in the confusion and has run away, I am the only one alive.”

The cell phone may as well have been a scorpion in Boavida’s hand. He fought an urge to fling it, terminate the call before some eavesdropper could hear the rest and use it as a basis for indictment. Did his men still fail to grasp that when you used a cell phone, you were basically broadcasting every word you spoke over a kind of radio? Those words, free-floating in the atmosphere, could be plucked from the air at any point between transmission and delivery, recorded, used in evidence.

But this was news, goddamn it, that he had to hear. If he had lost two dozen men, the odds were good that law enforcement or the military knew about the raid already. It stung to think that Boavida was the last to know.

“We need to speak about this privately,” he told the shaken caller. “Say no more now. Come to meet me at the place. You know the one I mean?”

“I think so,” his soldier said. “On the—”

“Say no more!” Boavida snapped. “We don’t know who may be listening!”

That was incriminating in itself, but if compelled to answer for it later, he could always claim that he was worried about airing party business on an open line. In fact, that much was true. He simply would not say which business was involved. There was no need to mention piracy, for instance, much less homicide.

“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.