Nightmare Army

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_9aa71ed7-db11-56db-a53d-19423b904798)

Labored breath loud in his ears, bare feet shuffling down the dark path, Motumbo staggered through the dark jungle. His side, red and sticky with blood, pulsed with pain at each step, but he didn’t stop. Instead he kept scanning around, nose flared to scent possible prey, red-rimmed, watery eyes staring wide into the darkness.

Time held no meaning for him anymore—he couldn’t say whether it had been twenty minutes or two hours since he had broken free of his captors. Now all that was left in his mind was the relentless desire to move, to hunt.

Normally the Congolese jungle held no fear for him, even at night. Although there were creatures in the dense forest that should be avoided, such as the stealthy leopards, the territorial gorillas and the wide variety of poisonous snakes, spiders and insects inhabiting the lush underbrush, Motumbo knew them all and how to avoid them. Growing up in the isolated northern region, the twenty-year-old had been fortunate to avoid the violence that had swept much of his country for the past decade. But he hadn’t been so lucky avoiding the silver ghosts haunting the deep tropical forest.

They had appeared about six months ago, mysterious, gleaming beings appearing seemingly out of nowhere to snatch whomever they could find: men, women and children. Appeals to local law enforcement had been ineffective; the men who had tried to find the elusive beings had either come back empty-handed—or disappeared, as well. The populations of the scattered villages in the area, still on edge from the violence of the simmering civil war that had been slowly cooling for the past few years, didn’t enter the jungle unless they absolutely had to. But they had to eat.

That was how Motumbo had been captured one day, hunting in the jungle against his father’s wishes. The ghosts had appeared like magic around him, one of them tossing a small canister at his feet that had spewed a noxious yellow gas. One whiff had made him pass out in seconds.

When he’d awakened, he had been in a place unlike anywhere he had ever seen before. Bare, bright rooms with hard, white walls. Strange currents of cool air came from square holes in the ceiling. And he’d been surrounded by quiet, pale men and women, all dressed in long, white coats with paper masks over their faces, their dark brown or bright blue eyes measuring and cold.

And the screaming. From the moment he woke to the night he was able to escape, Motumbo always heard someone screaming. Sometimes it was a man, the voice hoarse and low, sometimes a woman, the shrill shrieks lancing through his head. But it was constant, unrelenting, endless.

The men and women poked and prodded him, weighed him, made him do physical tests that he didn’t understand. Failure to comply was met with shocking force, administered by large men with devices that shot strange darts with wires attached to their handles that made Motumbo’s entire body feel as if it was on fire. He’d only needed to experience that once and afterward he had complied with their demands as quickly as possible.

In some respects, it wasn’t so bad. He was dressed and well-fed. He was even allowed to watch television for an hour each day, but sometimes the programs gave him headaches. The tests weren’t hard—at least, not in the beginning. Then one day he had been given an injection of a thick, black liquid and brought into a room with another person, a woman. Motumbo had just stared at her for a moment, as she had looked back at him. Then he had felt a strange sort of pressure in his head, as though his skull was about to split open if he didn’t do something right now, and a funny kind of warmness in his arms and legs, and the only thought in his mind was to—

No! He banished the rising memory before that terrible nightmare replayed behind his eyes again. Instead he concentrated on how he had escaped, catching a scientist by surprise when he had come in to check on the teen’s progress after the latest round of injections of the black stuff that made his limbs pulse with a warm, drowsy fire. The man hadn’t even had time to shout before Motumbo had leaped on him, bearing him to the ground and smashing his skull until it leaked blood. He had taken the man’s lab coat, identification and mask, and headed out a maintenance door he’d noticed was often left unguarded. Outside, he’d thought he was free, but had encountered another guard, who’d seen through his flimsy disguise. Motumbo hadn’t hesitated then, either. He had grabbed the man and battered his face until he had slumped to the ground. It was only afterward that he realized the guard had stabbed him in the side. He’d left the strange place, running at first, trying to put as much distance between himself and it.

The wound in his side throbbed now, but Motumbo’s pace never slowed. One hand pressed to his right side, the other held out to block low branches or to fend off a predator, he kept moving forward. Occasionally he glanced around the unfamiliar terrain, having no idea where he was or which direction his village might be. But always, always there was the insistence demand to hunt, to find...

A rustle in the trees to his right made the teenager freeze, cocking his head to pinpoint the source of the noise. He turned in time to see a blur of fur and fangs leap straight at his face The mouth of the leopard was opened wide to sink into his cheeks while the jungle cat’s front claws reached out to pierce his arms or shoulders and the rear claws raked across his abdomen to disembowel him. All of that would normally happen in the next half second as the jungle predator efficiently killed him.

But the moment Motumbo’s vision locked on to the leaping predator, time seemed to slow. The pupils of his eyes dilated even farther, taking in every detail of the large cat, from the snarl on its face to the scrap of rotting meat wedged near its upper left canine to its left paw extended a few inches ahead of the right one to hook into him first. The soaring cat turned sluggish, floating through the air instead of flying at him in the blink of an eye.

Along with the time slowdown, Motumbo was immediately filled with an insensate, killing, red rage.

Reaching out with his right hand, he gripped the left paw, heedless of the extended claws, and grabbed the right paw with his left hand. As soon as his fingers closed on both limbs, he wrenched them sideways, as far apart as he could with all of his strength, which now seemed limitless.

The crack and tear of snapping bones and ripping flesh sounded in the night. The leopard’s ferocious expression turned to agony as its forelegs were almost ripped off its body. Using the momentum of the cat’s leap, Motumbo whirled and threw the sixty-kilogram animal ten meters away. The crippled animal landed against a moss-covered tree with a sickening thud. Unable to rise, it let out a shocked yowl, as if unable to comprehend how it had gone from supreme hunter to mortally wounded in two heartbeats.

As soon as the overwhelming urge to kill had come over him, it abated, and Motumbo regained control of himself as though coming out of a daydream. He hadn’t suffered a scratch from the beast’s attempted attack, but his head felt thick and sluggish, and his muscles burned from the effort to protect himself.

A low mewling came from the base of the tree where the leopard had landed, and Motumbo walked over to it, seeing the animal writhing in pain, its front legs twisted and useless, its back legs limp and unmoving. Broke its back when it hit the tree, he thought. Careful to avoid the sharp teeth, he grabbed it behind the scruff and, with an amazing burst of strength, snapped its neck.

As he did so, bright lights popped on all around the small clearing. Motumbo looked up to see the three of the silver ghosts appear at the far end. The red rage fell over his vision again and he sprang at them, fingers outstretched to tear them apart, if he could only get his hands on one...

A loud hiss of compressed air sounded from his left and Motumbo felt the bite of the darts again, followed by searing agony that locked his limbs and sent him crashing to the ground, his face twisted in pain, a choked cry forcing its way from between his gritted teeth.

The silver ghosts looked at him from behind the strange masks they wore, and one of them held a small vial of something under his nose that made him dizzy and sleepy.

His last conscious thought before the blackness took him was what one of the ghosts said to the others. “Killed a full-grown, healthy leopard while unarmed. The company will be very pleased with our results so far, don’t you think?”

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_d4bc2f29-c992-5621-b090-e9a4dcdfcdb4)

Fingers clenching the grip of his silenced SIG-Sauer P-229 pistol, Mack Bolan listened to the two men as they walked closer to his hiding spot. Talking in rapid-fire Armenian, they were close enough now that he could smell the harsh smoke from their Turkish cigarettes as it mixed with the tang of the gun oil on the hunting rifles slung over their shoulders.

Normally he wouldn’t hesitate to take them out if they got too close. The two men weren’t taking any security precautions. He could easily hear them, even over the constant wind at this altitude. Their steps were slow on the goat trail, their conversation casual, unhurried. At the moment they had no idea where he was.

When they reached the ideal position, he would stand from cover and put both men down with double taps to the chest in under two seconds. The .40-caliber bullets would smash through their woolen sweaters, crack their sternums and plow into their hearts, mangling them before exiting their backs in a spray of blood. Two quick steps forward, along with a third shot into each man’s forehead, and all he would be left with would be to make sure these men were never found.

But this situation was anything but ordinary.

Bolan had spent the past four days surveilling the mountaintop headquarters of Aleksandr Sevan, the leader of the Jadur clan, currently at the top of the Armenian mafia hierarchy. Tightly knit and bound by a strict code of honor and ethics, as well as family ties, the Armenians had resisted all attempts at agents infiltrating their ranks, with even local agents with impeccable jackets either found dead or simply vanishing, never to be seen again.

Meanwhile, over the past few decades, the Armenians had extended their tentacles from their small landlocked country to encircle both Europe and America in a stranglehold of crime and fear. With a well-deserved reputation for savage brutality and the use of violence in response to even minor threats against them, they had made inroads into every type of crime on both continents, from street crimes such as kidnapping, bank robbery, drug smuggling and sex slavery to white collar offenses such as wire fraud, bank fraud, racketeering and embezzlement. Along the way, the Armenians were willing to work with local, established mafias, such as the Russians or Mexicans, to get what they wanted, but also had no qualms about going toe-to-toe with larger mobs to get in on the action, wherever it might happen.

All that was why Bolan was here. When INTERPOL intelligence had managed to get a line on Sevan’s movements, they’d expected him to end up back at the walled town of Artakar, twenty miles east of Tumyanan, where the Jadur clan ruled it and the surrounding mountainous countryside with a heavy hand. Every village and farm in ten kilometers had been co-opted by the syndicate, with large rewards for reporting any suspicious behavior, and illegal shipments of contraband ranging from heroin to guns to women often stored in farms before being moved on to their final destination.

The mission had been straightforward: Bolan would go in, alone, infiltrate the headquarters, kidnap Sevan and extract him to an airfield near Tumyanan, where Jack Grimaldi waited to fly them both to Washington, D.C. No one in European law enforcement would know he was in-country—the Armenians were as free with their bribes with law enforcement as with anyone else, and rumors ran rampant of corrupted police officers and administrators in a half-dozen countries. In and out, no muss, no fuss, the whole operation had been scheduled to take no more than thirty-six hours.

That deadline had passed two days ago. When Sevan hadn’t showed up, Stony Man Farm had put out cautious feelers about what was behind the deviation. A change in plans, or was the entire mission some kind of smokescreen or diversion? Careful intel-gathering and analysis by Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman and Akira Tokaido, members of Stony Man’s cyber team, revealed that the criminal ringleader had been held up by a supposedly minor matter involving a meeting with Salvatore Gambini, one of the heads of the Italian Mafia with whom the Armenians were very close. The meeting had run long, with the two crime family heads celebrating their partnership. When he’d heard about the change in plans, Bolan had cursed not being able to try to get to that one. There were few things he liked better than capturing two scumbag mobsters for the price of one. Gambini would simply have to wait until another day.

Instead he had sat and watched and waited, preferring to take the chance of staying to capture the mob leader rather than leaving and attempting to pick up his trail another day. The longer he stayed in place, however—even with moving his base camp once already to obscure traces of his being here—the odds were greater that he would be detected sooner or later.

Although the Jadur patrols didn’t come out this far, Bolan couldn’t take a chance on a shepherd or farmer stumbling across his base of operations. His low-slung, camouflaged tent was covered by the native grasses so artfully so that an intruder would have had to step on it to discover it. When the flap was closed, it was just another grass-covered hillock among a cluster of them scattered on the mountainside. Bolan had been living on cold MREs—meals ready to eat—and doing anything outside the tent under the cover of darkness, using night-vision goggles to see if the moon was obscured. He hadn’t lit a fire, awakening on the brisk autumn morning to heavy frost and a chilly tent, nor showered in the past two days, as well.

Despite the uncertainly and rough conditions, Bolan lived for situations like this, pitting himself against both the elements and his enemy. Unlike just about anyone else who found themselves in this situation, he thrived on the challenges of remaining undetected while completing his mission, no matter what obstacles might be thrown in his path.

All of which brought him back to the moment at hand, and the two men walking just a few paces away from his hidden lair. The odds were good that they might be part of Aleksandr Sevan’s mob. On the other hand, they might be two farmers, perhaps a father and his eldest son from a nearby farm, out hunting game birds. Either way, if they found Bolan, the odds were very good that they were both going to die. While he tried to avoid civilian casualties—that was the kindest term he could use to refer to any of the population of the area—these tough, hardy mountain people had compromised themselves by accepting deals with the devil that lived in the walled city.

Sevan’s control of the region was ironclad, and Bolan couldn’t take the chance of anyone seeing him and telling the mobsters. His mission was too important to risk because of a chance encounter. Therefore, he waited; every sense locked on what he could hear and smell of the two men, and stood ready to execute both of them, even while hoping they would simply keep walking.

“Doesn’t look like they’ve spotted you, Striker,” a voice said in his ear. Bolan didn’t reply. The voice came from Akira Tokaido, about six thousand miles away in the Stony Man Farm Computer Room, watching the two men through the 1.8 gigapixel eye of an ARGUS camera mounted on the underbelly of a Predator Hawk drone flying overhead at 15,000 feet. “Hunting rifles are confirmed. I think they’re old Mosin-Nagants. Anyway, they’ve passed your site, and are moving south-southeast, still walking and talking. Looks like they’re headed down the mountain. We’ll keep tabs on them in case they come back your way.”

Even with the all-clear sounded, Bolan waited until the men’s conversation faded from hearing before he uncurled his fingers from his pistol and replied. “Copy that.”

“That was way too close for my comfort,” Kurtzman grumbled. Bolan imagined him watching several monitors at once from his wheelchair while drinking from a cup of his abominable coffee that was always brewed 24/7 at the Farm. “Far be it from me to second-guess you, Striker. We’ve backed you on a lot of high-risk missions before, but even before the delay, this one seems a bit, well—”

“Suicidal?” Akira offered.

“I was going to say high-risk, but if the combat boot fits...” Kurtzman’s voice trailed off

Slowly, cautiously, Bolan unzipped his observation port and stuck out his camouflaged high-powered binoculars. First he spotted the two hunters, watching them for a few seconds as they trudged away from him. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Tokaido or the incredible technology watching over him; it was just that, when out in the field, Bolan preferred to always verify what information came his way with his own eyes whenever possible.

“Duly noted, Bear.” After the hunters had disappeared from view, Bolan turned his attention to the walled city below him.