Path To War

“Yes. So consider yourselves owed at least one more device. What concerns me is why I have not heard from my operators in the city.”

“Meaning what?” Baraka said, tensing at what he believed was a sudden tone of accusation.

“Meaning, you brought in a third party, these Arab fanatics.”

“That was explained already,” Baraka said. “Their country. Their contacts. Their safe ouses for your men and for safe transport of the device.”

Kimsung bobbed his head. “You see my dilemma.”

Baraka felt his anger rising. “Not quite.”

“These extremists will want just such a suitcase. Have you looked outside at the army of fanatics you are surrounded by?”

“Their turf, their rules. And they’ve been paid for their cooperation.”

“What’s to keep them from killing us and taking the device for themselves?” Kimsung posed.

“How about twenty of the most ferocious, kick-ass and take-no-prisoners warriors since Ghengis Khan?”

“I am pleased you have such great confidence in your men. Just the same, I would feel much better if we were on our—”

Kimsung froze in midsentence, the sudden commotion outside alerting Baraka something was terribly wrong. Baraka was pivoting when two of his men rushed inside, voices beyond the armed shadows of his soldiers shouting in panic hurtled at his ears—along with the distant crunch of explosions.

“We’re being hit!”

Baraka cursed, wheeled on Durban and said, “Grab the suitcase!”

THE EXECUTIONER WASN’T all that wild about Tachjine’s battle plan. Since they were on the enemy’s clock, and with the suitcase nuke believed to be somewhere in the sprawling terrorist camp, Bolan figured any last-second tinkering of the strategy would only delay launch time.

It was going to be a straightforward blitz, three Hueys and a matching number of Cobra gunships laying down an aerial bombardment of machine, Gatling and minigun fire, peppering the enemy with a 70 mm rocket barrage while the Moroccan Special Counterterrorism Force jumped off into hot landing zones for hand-to-hand encounters. That left too much to chance, as far as the soldier was concerned, an errant missile perhaps finding the suitcase nuke, the potential of a nuclear firecloud being touched off never far from his thoughts if this Baraka or his North Korean cronies were spooked into some grandstand suicide play. Factor in all these extremists, many of whom he was sure wanted nothing more than to get their mass murdering hands on the suitcase nuke for themselves, and with Tachjine refusing to encircle the camp on all points with his flying armada, sealing off any escape hatch…

The Executioner would have preferred the gunships blow the motor pool to smithereens right off the bat, but Tachjine seemed more interested in full-scale slaughter of the extremists, bent on rolling them up, north to south, drive them into his guns. Whatever commandos on the ground, it was their grim duty to dig out information from prisoners—wounded or not—and steer them toward this Baraka and his brigands. Assuming he walked out the other side of this mess, Bolan knew he’d have to contact Brognola for a sitrep and background check on Baraka. Smart money told Bolan this Baraka was the spearhead, a grunt on the firing line for some shadow conspiracy. What he wanted with the suitcase nuke, his agenda or the endgame for whoever he answered to…

There was only one way to get to the truth, he knew.

Bolan supposed the only good news was that he was going in, solo, prepared to wax and roll from his east by southeast vector. It was his task to take out as much of the motor pool as he could. No small feat, he knew, considering the number of vehicles, but he’d brought plenty of 40 mm high explosive rounds for the M-203 launcher fixed to his M-16. Togged in blacksuit, face, hands and neck smeared with warpaint, he was as close to invisible at the midnight hour as he could hope for.

That was until the shooting started and he announced his lethal intent.

He had come in through the wadi, dropped off two klicks from the camp by chopper. A check of his watch and he knew the doomsday numbers were rolling off in a hurry, Tachjine in a grim knot of adrenaline and urgency, anxious to get the fireworks started. His own team of agents was reluctant to remain behind in a Huey, but Bolan didn’t want to get bogged down shouting orders under fire. Besides, he was unsure how they would fare in all-out combat, certain, too, a few of them were family men. If he could help it he never wanted the blood of either the innocent or those fighting on the side of good on his hands. Dawkins, however, was manning an M-60 in the Huey, and with the other agents able to shoot from above, they weren’t exactly left sitting on the bench.

Long odds, however it was sliced, but with this many enemy guns, the soldier knew he would need all the help he could get. As for Tachjine, well, if it turned out the Moroccan wasn’t playing it straight, the desert would simply get littered with another corpse.

Shedding his night-vision goggles, Bolan adjusted his eyes to the sheen of firelight glowing just over the edge of the southeast rise. M-16 leading the way, scanning the ridgeline, he climbed the slope, then dropped into a prone position when he topped out.

And found his first three marks.

They were grouped around a fire barrel, AK-47s slung around their shoulders as they rubbed their hands near the flames, smoking and conversing quietly among themselves in Arabic. Between tents, stone ruins from some ancient village long since dead and gone and the motor pool, the soldier figured he was looking at a compound that covered at least three city blocks. An extremist training and operations camp this large had to be backed, he knew, by power-players, either high up in the Moroccan military, government or both. It always left a bad taste in his mouth, but he was realist enough to know that bribery was alive and well in this part of the world.

A hundred shooters, he considered.

He had three in his sights, so why not get started?

Drawing the sound-suppressed Beretta, shouldering his M-16, he spied a narrow gully, and dropped into the crevice. Hunched and homing in on their voices, he advanced down the gully, intent on cutting the range to kissing close. At what he figured was twenty yards or so, he crawled up an incline, took a knee and aimed the Beretta over the lip. There were other armed shadows in the vicinity, but they were moving away, vanishing in the gaps of the second line of tents. He steadied the weapon in a two-handed grip, drew a bead on a kaffiyeh, gently caressed the trigger. Number One extremist was toppling, the headcloth sheared off his shattered skull, when Fanatics Two and Three came alive. Swinging his aim, the Executioner cored a 9 mm Parabellum shocker through a vented mouth, shoving whatever the fanatic was going to shout back down his throat, as a crimson finger jetted out the back of his skull. Fanatic Three froze for a mircosecond, lurching back at the sight of still another of his brothers in terror sprawled at his feet, and the Executioner punched his ticket, painting a third eye on his forehead.

And then it went to hell.

According to Tachjine’s time frame, the soldier still had two more minutes to get into position, but he saw the Cobras bearing down on the camp, as they unloaded their opening salvo. Cursing Tachjine’s impatience—or was it something else altogether?—Bolan stowed the Beretta, filling his hands with the M-16/M-203 squad blaster. A brief sideline stand, and Bolan watched as Gatlings, miniguns, 20 mm automatic cannons and 70 mm missiles began churning up the north end rows of tents. Armed figures, maybe twelve in all, were spiraling to earth with death and fury from above.

And the Executioner got busy doing his part.

A short march down the incline and five hardmen, armed with a hodgepodge of assault rifles, machine guns and RPGs, burst through the flaps of their tent, the air rife with angry shouts in Arabic.

The Executioner hit them with a long burst, sweeping the M-16 autofire, left to right, knocking them down, human bowling pins, but sliced to red ruins.

A clean strike, but the soldier knew the worst was yet to come.

CHAPTER FOUR

Colonel Yoon Kimsung was livid. Before embarking on Pyongyang’s African venture, he had considered everything that could go wrong. The list was short, but it was so rife with potential grave danger the operation could spiral down into a disastrous misadventure before the first shot was fired in anger.

First, there was the scheme—approved in person by Kim Jong-Il—to ingratiate themselves to Arab fanatics, thus allowing them to land their private jet, complete with suitcase nuke on board, at a remote desert airstrip run by lunatics he would have never sought out on his own. By and large, the Muslim fundamentalists—mindless brutes who blew themselves up on a regular basis and claimed it was for the glory of their religion and God—weren’t to be trusted. Who could, in all rationale and reason, ally themselves with savages who didn’t even place the first scintilla of value on their own lives, believed their own rubbish about some afterlife where they would float away to this Paradise and their god, swarmed by seventy virgin beauties if they murdered scads of innocent people? Oh, but the horror, the stupidity of such creatures, he thought. Killing, though, had never been a problem where he was concerned. Since he was Special Forces, he was often placed in charge of hunting down and eradicating rebels in the North Korean countryside who sought to oust Kim Jong-Il, or outspoken rabble who needed their thinking re-shaped by swift and merciless beatings.

Suicide, however, was for fools.

Then there was this business in Casablanca. He’d been forced to leave two of his commandos in the city at the request of the American, supposedly to pay the fanatics a cash tribute, and he hadn’t heard from his men. They were hours overdue, in fact, for a callback. His commandos never failed to obey orders, no matter what their situation. That alone should have signaled trouble had found them. If they were captured, he knew them well enough—what with their training and fear of retribution—to know they would never talk to the authorities. On the other hand, he couldn’t be sure about the Arab fanatics, say if a legal net had dropped over them, and Moroccan agents or law enforcement went to work in ways on their bodies that left little to the imagination.

In some perverse way he didn’t quite understand himself, he was proud that Kim Jong-Il had placed him solely in charge of carrying out the mission of the ages in Angola. His country, after all—cut off from the world, sanctioned and branded as part of this so-called Axis of Evil—was in desperate need of fuel, food, mineral resources. As far as that went, Angola, swimming in diamonds and oil, could beef up his nation’s military with all the uranium, plutonium, centrifuges, upgraded delivery systems and other component parts necessary to shoot them to the top of the nuclear superpower heap. The battle for Angola hadn’t yet dawned, but when it did, and he was standing, tall and proud on the winning side, there would be enough diamonds and oil for sale to other countries tagged as rogue states by America to buy what was needed to turn North Korea into a warring giant. That they were considered an outlaw nation by America and the West only strengthened Pyongyang’s resolve, he knew, to become the world’s premier military behemoth.

Pygonyang had its eye toward the future, and tomorrow, even years after, conquest of other nations fueled the hopes and dreams of a country feared and snubbed by the rest of the world.

Grim concern number two was the fact that the superiors of the American mercenaries had arranged the delivery and sale of the nuclear suitcase, had found operatives from his own country, stationed in Myanmar, Cambodia and other Southeast Asian nations, who could pull strings with Pyongyang. Yes, the United States was well aware of his country’s nuclear proliferation, but the risk that American operatives were luring them into a trap with, ostensibly, their desire to purchase a suitcase nuke, was always foremost in his thoughts. When too many individuals knew too much about any covert operation, there was always plenty of room for anxiety.

At the moment, as the sound and fury of battle raged around the camp, Kimsung was furious that the plan looked to be in danger of unraveling into the dreams of dead men.

He was on the heels of Baraka, one of his insolent soldiers lugging the eighty-pound suitcase. Their subguns were fanning the chaos as Kimsung spotted the gunships, perhaps five total, scissoring above the camp. For the moment they appeared content to unleash miniguns and rockets on the north edge, but the manner in which the fireballs rose into the black sky, with saffron flashes that hurtled torn stick figures into the air on bright mushroom clouds, warned him the assault would find its way to the motor pool.

“You and your men get to the motor pool, Colonel! We’re bailing!”

Kimsung, flanked by his two top lieutenants, Unsan and Horyin, bared his teeth at Baraka. Armed with nothing but a Browning Hi-Power pistol, delivered to him by the fanatics when he landed at their airstrip, Kimsung found the mercenaries breaking open crates, unzipping large duffel bags. “Give us something more than these pistols we carry!”

Baraka wheeled, his eyes bugged with anger. “The hell you say. I can’t risk you and your guys getting chopped down here!”

“We protect ourselves!” Kimsung shouted above the clamor of explosions, autofire and the general pandemonium of distant shouts and screams.

“This is business, Colonel. You leave the shooting to us!”

“Yes, this is business that you do not seem to be handling all that well at present! Give us weapons! I will not place my safety and the safety of my commandos squarely in your hands! I will stand here and be shot down before that happens, do you understand me?”