Threat Factor

Her cargo was supposed to be a deep, dark secret, but Andreychuk knew that every ship afloat sprang leaks from time to time. Some leaks let water infiltrate the cargo holds, while others provided information to the sea wolves who paid well for tips involving profitable merchandise.

With the exception of his first mate, Mykola Shymko, the captain didn’t trust the other members of his crew as far as he could throw them—preferably overboard. They were a mixed lot, competent enough as long as he was watching them perform their duties, but he assumed that most of them were ex-convicts. Their crude tattoos spoke volumes with respect to lives pursued outside the law.

Andreychuk noted that the trawler had drawn closer while he was distracted by his private thoughts. He had been debating whether he should hail the other ship, when a gruff voice behind him asked, “Is something wrong?”

The captain turned to face his latest client, known to him as Grigory Glazkov. The man was Russian, with a military look about him—flinty eyes and roughly chiseled features set beneath a graying crew cut that was thinning at the crown.

“I hope not,” Andreychuk replied. “But maybe so.”

Glazkov had seen the trawler now and recognized its flag. “Liberian,” he noted.

“Maybe,” Andreychuk said. “Maybe not.”

Glazkov had to have known that many vessels listed in the Liberian International Ship & Corporate Registry were Liberian in name only, logged as a matter of convenience that frequently included tax evasion and concealment of the true owner’s identity. The trawler’s flag—resembling that of the United States, but with only one star in its blue canton, and eleven red-and-white stripes in its field instead of thirteen—told Andreychuk nothing.

“Can we outrun them, if need be?” Glazkov inquired.

Andreychuk shrugged and said the obvious. “She’s keeping up so far.”

They were two miles offshore from Bargaal, still some thirteen hundred miles from their intended destination of Mombassa, Kenya. Andreychuk had no idea how fast the nameless trawler could travel—and now he saw that it didn’t matter. “Speedboats!”

From Glazkov’s lips, it sounded like a curse.

And so it was.

Three sleek powerboats—one red, two white—had suddenly appeared from the trawler’s starboard shadow and were racing toward the Vasylna at full speed, fairly skimming across the ocean’s surface. Each carried five or six men, and Andreychuk didn’t need his binoculars to know they were armed.

“You can repel them, yes?” Glazkov demanded.

“Perhaps.” Andreychuk’s tone left no doubt of his skepticism.

Even as he spoke, the first speedboat reached the Vasylna, one of its passengers raising a stubby weapon to his shoulder and squeezing its trigger. With a muffled popping sound, a grappling hook hurtled over the Vasylna’s port-side railing and caught hold, trailing a crude rope ladder behind it.

“We must fight back!” Glazkov barked at him, reaching underneath his jacket to produce an automatic pistol.

“Not so fast, Comrade,” another voice said from behind the Russian.

Glazkov and Andreychuk turned as one, to find a stocky figure standing in the wheelhouse doorway. Mykola Shymko held a pistol of his own, aimed at the Russian’s head.

“Full stop, Captain, I think,” the first mate said.

So much for trust.

1

Mogadishu, Somalia

Mogadishu—or Muqdisho, in Arabic—was the crossroads of East Africa. Local natives opened seafaring trade with India in the first century, and later welcomed Portuguese merchants and seamen. Ali bin Said al-Busaid, the fourth sultan of Zanzibar, leased Mogadishu to Italy in 1892, while his successors sold it outright to Rome in 1905. Kenya captured the city in 1941, then yielded control to Great Britain from 1950 to 1960, with the advent of chaotic independence. But Somalia’s capital retained its Italian flavor, at least in the names of its streets. Italian coexisted with English, Arabic and Somali as one of Somalia’s four official languages.

Which explained why Mack Bolan, driving west from Aden Adde International Airport in a rented car, made his first turn on Via Medina, proceeding southwestard from there onto Via Londra and Via Roma.

He was headed downtown, toward the teeming heart of a city whose population exceeded two million. A recent sitrep out of Langley estimated that Mogadishans owned at least one million assault rifles, making their city the most heavily armed on Earth.

And they weren’t afraid to use those weapons, either. Street battles between rival warlords and criminal gangs were routine—so common, in fact, that the Western media rarely bothered to report a skirmish or bombing with less than a dozen slain victims.

In short, Bolan was headed into an active war zone—unarmed.

Fortunately, he should have no trouble finding military hardware in the city.

His destination, as luck would have it, lay at the very heart of Mogadishu’s urban battleground. The Bakaara Market was Somalia’s largest open market, and while relatively new—created under the Mohamed Siad Barre regime, in 1972—it had compiled an impressive record of outlaw activities. Aside from the selling of daily essentials, such as dietary staples, medicine and gasoline, the market had become a virtual arms dump since the Somalian revolution of 1986-92 and the ensuing civil war that had continued to the present day. Aside from standard small arms and explosives, Bolan understood that antiaircraft guns, mortars and other heavy weapons were available upon demand, for those with ready cash.

No problem getting strapped, then, even with his relatively pale skin working to his disadvantage in a country where Caucasians were often regarded as the enemy, regardless of their nationality.

The Bakaara Market’s other offerings included forged passports and other vital documents, prepared within minutes for buyers in a hurry, and counterfeit currency produced in such abundance that it sparked the collapse of the Somali shilling and forced a brief closure of the market in 2001. For months after the market reopened, its vendors had demanded U.S. dollars in place of their own nation’s worthless money.

Small wonder, then, that the Bakaara Market had witnessed repeated, brutal acts of violence. Sporadic firefights and RPG attacks made the market hazardous for merchants and patrons alike, while a series of combat-related fires had swept the ramshackle stalls between 2001 and 2007, claiming dozens of lives.

It sounded like a little bit of hell on Earth.

Unfortunately, it was also Bolan’s point of contact with a native ally he had never met, but whose local knowledge might prove critical to Bolan’s latest mission.

Might being the operative word.

Experience had taught the Executioner to deal with strangers at arm’s length, regardless of their prior endorsements by those whom he had cause to trust. That was true in the States, true in Europe, and doubly true in a place like Somalia, where decades of savage internecine warfare had replaced civilization with something close to anarchy.

As he approached Mogadishu’s Hamarwein Old Town, rolling north on Via Morocco, Bolan considered stopping off before his meet to buy a pistol and some ammunition, maybe add an SMG to his preliminary shopping list, but he was running late already with a flight delay in Cairo, and he didn’t want to leave his contact hanging any longer than he absolutely had to.

He’d memorized a recent photo of the man he was supposed to meet, Dirie Awaale Waabberi, and hoped he would be able to quickly spot his face out of a mob at the Bakaara Market. But Bolan knew from personal experience that Third World slums and marketplaces could overwhelm strangers without even trying.

Bolan himself was no stranger to Africa, per se, but he couldn’t pretend to pass for a native or long-term resident. He had been in and out of the continent on varied missions through the years, but governments and causes changed like the seasons. Africa’s only constants were physical beauty and stone-cold indifference to human survival.

So Bolan passed on pistol-shopping for the moment, and instead took his chances with mobility and instinct as he drove to meet a stranger who would either help him or betray him to his enemies.

As for those enemies themselves, a cautious man would say that they had Bolan hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. But those who leaped to that conclusion didn’t know the Executioner.

DIRIE WAABBERI HAD a pistol of his own, but he wasn’t sure by any means that it would keep him breathing through the night. Dusk was approaching, and the floodlights mounted over the Bakaara Market were already lit, but he saw menace in the shadows between market stalls and in the eyes of strangers passing by on either side of him.

It was easy to die in Mogadishu. Anyone could sidle up to Waabberi in the crush of shoppers, slip a blade between his ribs or shoot him in the head, and who would care? Beyond a momentary ripple as he crumpled to the pavement, who would even notice?

On his way to the Bakaara Market, Waabberi had passed a small contingent of AMISOM—African Union Mission in Somalia—peacekeepers, instantly recognizable wearing their green berets and green armbands. They carried weapons but were virtually barred from using them except in the last straits of self-defense. Yet, even then, being outnumbered some 750 to one by Mogadishans who often possessed superior weapons, what chance did they have? If they kept any peace in the city, Waabberi had yet to observe it.

They would not save him, if he had been marked for death by enemies.

Waabberi had survived to celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday, just two weeks earlier, but he was ever conscious of the fact that it might be his last. The course of action he had chosen, working with a foreign stranger to defy powerful foes, could prove to be a fatal mistake.

But he was hopeful, all the same.

A man had to do something when confronted by such wickedness, or else humanity itself was lost.