Desert Fallout

“How long has he been here?” Masozi asked. He pulled his French MAB-15, flicking off its safety.

“We had a group encounter with a white man out on the docks. Two had gunshot wounds, and the other four were scared witless,” Kamau said. The muscles on the big African’s forearms swelled as he clenched his huge fists. “They arrived about fifteen minutes ago, and we’ve been securing the compound.”

“A white man,” Masozi said with a grunt. His brow furrowed at the thought of the stranger who had hit the mining camp in Liberia. “How did they describe him?”

“They said he was big, almost tall as me. Black hair, blue eyes.”

“It can’t be a coincidence,” Masozi replied. “That’s the one I told you about.”

Kamau nodded.

“What one?” Mubarak asked.

“An American agent was harassing the diamond mine we have in Liberia,” Masozi explained. “More than six feet tall, approximately two hundred pounds, all lean muscle. Fights like twenty men.”

Mubarak’s caramel-colored features paled. “Oh, hell.”

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Masozi said.

“It’s the man they call the soldier,” Mubarak whispered breathlessly.

“That’s a myth. A story spread to make us afraid of Americans now that they’re too lazy to send their Marines and Army,” Kamau replied.

“He’s real,” Mubarak said. “He’s been active in Egypt.”

“And there were rumors that this bogeyman took out another faction of pirates a little farther up the coast a while back,” Masozi said. “So what?”

Mubarak looked at the crate and its two jars of seed. His hands trembled. “You said your soldiers returned fifteen minutes ago?”

“I’ve heard the stories,” Kamau said. “The man is a ghost, and he could hide, even among black men, as one of their own.”

“Why did you come to me just now?” Masozi asked.

“We found one man, his neck broken, but positioned as if he were still on guard duty,” Kamau explained. “This was about two minutes ago, and he hasn’t been dead longer than ten minutes.”

Mubarak licked his lips and fumbled a pistol out of his belt. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

Masozi turned to see what had panicked the Egyptian so badly, when something metallic clattered onto the floor under a side window of the storehouse. He couldn’t get a clear look at what was on the ground as Kamau picked him up as if he were a rag doll. The Somali giant carried him several feet, behind the cover of a stack of crates, instants before a fragmentation grenade detonated with a roar of doom. The Shabaab leader’s ears rang in the aftermath of the detonation. Kamau shook his shoulder, mouthing words that didn’t penetrate the sonic haze of aching eardrums.

Mubarak, or more precisely what was left of him, was a ragged floor mat of bloody, crushed flesh.

“We’ve got to move!” Masozi bellowed.

Kamau rolled his eyes at the Shabaab commander’s statement, and Masozi realized that was probably what the security chief was saying. The Uzi submachine gun in the big man’s fist looked as if it were a mere toy as he poked it over the top of the crates and raked the area around the window.

Masozi didn’t need to hear to know that Kamau was going to cover his exit from the storehouse. Fortunately, the hand grenade hadn’t damaged or detonated the crated rocket launchers, otherwise the explosion would have caused far more than temporary deafness.

Everything was going to hell.

MACK BOLAN WAS disappointed when he saw that his grenade had blown the panicky Egyptian into chopped meat. It wasn’t a total disappointment, since Mubarak’s face was intact and he could get the answers he needed from other sources, but it would have been easier to interrogate the Egyptian to get the lowdown on exactly how the man had gotten his hands on jars full of seed that could be turned into a powerful toxin. Now, he would just have to rely on established intelligence databases to identify Mubarak and the faction of terrorists he worked for.

Masozi would likely provide those answers, if Bolan weren’t forced to kill him. Either way, he had recorded the men’s conversation on an MP3 file thanks to the compact PDA, and a wire-thin high-audio-definition microphone built by Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz of Stony Man Farm’s domestic antiterrorism squad called Able Team. Bolan would be able to transmit the conversation back to the Farm, and the computer staff would run through analysis on what was being said.

Bolan’s efforts at delaying the compound’s hard force from finding him, leaving a trail on the far side of the complex, had given him the opportunity to spy on the two men and their meeting. Normally the Executioner would have immediately begun dismantling the terrorist headquarters, but the sight of the vehicles parked inside the compound had tipped him off to the possibility of a larger conspiracy. This was confirmed when he identified a trio of Arab men armed with compact machine pistols, obviously bodyguards for a visitor from far to the north.

The big American dropped to the floor and moved to the ragged corpse. A few quick snapshots with his digital camera recorded Mubarak’s features for future identification. Another moment was spared to get the man’s fingerprints on a strip of plastic-topped adhesive that the warrior had kept in his war gear for such identification processes.

It wouldn’t take long for Kamau to arrange a counterattack, sending sentries into the storehouse to clear it out. Bolan scooped up the dead Egyptian’s pistol and spare magazines, adding them to his web belt. The soldier hadn’t been able to bring his customary Desert Eagle with him across various borders. Its ammunition had been depleted and he couldn’t get more .44 Magnum rounds to feed it here on the Horn of Africa. Mubarak had been armed with an Egyptian army–issue Beretta 92-F. The spare magazines would feed Bolan’s own machine pistol easily.

He also had the FAL rifle slung across his shoulders, but after listening to Masozi and Mubarak’s brief argument, he knew that he’d need something to give him equal footing with dozens of heavily armed pirates.

A solid kick snapped open the container for the stolen Carl Gustav rocket launcher. The meter-long weapon was heavy, but still remarkably handy. He took the time to stuff a variety of 84 mm shells into a bandolier provided for them, and went back to the window he’d entered through. The front of the storehouse suddenly erupted as AK-47 rounds tore through the front door and wall.

Bolan didn’t bother to slither through the window. He leaped, the butt of the rocket launcher leading the way, crashing through the glass. The chatter of a dozen rifles covered the noise, and his sudden appearance stunned the two guards sent around the back. The Executioner had seen them through the window, and laden with nearly seventy pounds of extra weaponry, his weight was enough to plow through the two Somali pirates, shoving them to the ground hard enough to stun them.

Bolan jammed his elbow into the throat of one of the gunmen, collapsing his windpipe. He reached out with his other hand to sink his fingers into the nostrils and eye sockets of the other guard. With the clenching of his fist, he blinded the Somali thug as fingernails popped eyeballs and tore bloody rifts through flesh. With a powerful wrench of his arm, Bolan snapped the stunned pirate’s neck using the holes in the man’s face as leverage. The death shriek that issued forth was drowned out by the thumps of two grenades thrown through the doors of the storehouse.

The pirates were so frightened of the intrusion by the Executioner that they were willing to risk their delivery of antiarmor rockets by using the minibombs on the storehouse. Bolan fished out another of his hand grenades and aimed the bomb at the crate of illicit firepower. Dropping the fragger in the midst of the 84 mm ammunition, Bolan whirled and ran from the building. The hand grenade would set off the armor-smashing shells, and the explosion could bring the building crashing down atop him if he didn’t gain some distance from the structure.

Thunder split the night, and the storehouse seemed to swell, heaving with a gigantic sigh. Chunks of masonry and other shrapnel flew from the front of the building, the roof collapsing under its own weight. The two bodies that Bolan had left behind the storehouse were crushed as the wall collapsed on them. The guards were already dead, but Bolan’s suspicion that he would have been pulverized was proved correct. He set down the Carl Gustav and its bandolier. It was too heavy, too much to move quickly with, but he still tucked it beside a vehicle for future usage.

Bringing the FAL to bear, he spotted Kamau and Masozi barking out orders, directing traffic as Shabaab pirates and militiamen scrambled, dealing with their wounded and searching for signs of their escaped opponent. Bolan announced his presence with a rapid-fire string of single shots into the crowd, the 7.62 mm NATO rounds piercing bodies, popping internal organs like balloons and sending gunmen on the fast track to oblivion. The 20-round string collapsed thirteen of the Somali compound guards, but Bolan left the men actually tending to the wounded alone.

The Executioner often struck ruthlessly, but he was no cold-blooded murderer. As long as the men acting as medics sought to save lives, and the wounded men appeared incapable of putting up a fight, he would allow them to live. Helpless and nonhostile people weren’t Bolan’s enemy. There were still plenty of riled Shabaab killers to keep the warrior busy, however.

After a quick magazine change for the FAL, Bolan scurried to another position as rifles snarled in the darkness, dumping bullets toward where the blaze of muzzle-flashes had issued. Though he was only moving from one end of a pickup truck to another, the change in location gave Bolan a new angle on the enemy forces.

The Shabaab militiamen took the lull in return fire as an invitation to break from cover and stalk toward the vehicle that they’d hosed with their automatic weapons. Bolan let them get to within two yards of the Peugeot’s rear bumper before he cut loose with the big Belgian rifle. The leader of the security detail stared down at the smashed crater in his chest where his heart had once been. Blood sneezed from his nostrils, soaking his shirt with even more crimson before his legs folded beneath him. The second and third gunmen didn’t have time to register the death of their partner, Bolan’s next rounds spearing through their skulls.

The remainder of the squad spun and retreated, so the Executioner turned his attention toward Somali riflemen who had stayed back to provide cover. He took down the two snipers after he flicked the selector switch to full-auto. Most people wouldn’t have been able to handle a 7.62 mm NATO rifle at 600 rpm, but Bolan’s 220 pounds of finely tuned muscle and sinew, as well as years of experience, allowed him to drill tri-bursts into the Shabaab gunners who had opened up on him.

Pivoting, Bolan turned his fire toward the enemy troopers who had halted their retreat and turned their AKs toward him. The soldier had good cover, and better aim than the Islamist fanatics, but there were enough of them, spread out, that he wouldn’t be able to take them all down in one burst before they threw a wave of deadly steel-cored torment at him.

Moments later the Somalis jerked violently under gunfire from some unknown source. Bolan almost took it as a sign that a new player had entered the fight on his side.

The pickup truck Bolan crouched behind suddenly heaved as the unmistakable bulk of a .50-caliber rifle round smashed into its fender, seeking the Executioner’s flesh.

The death raining down on the Shabaab pirates came for Mack Bolan, as well.

CHAPTER TWO

Bolan leaped from behind the Peugeot’s fender as a second .50-caliber antimatériel round sliced through the vehicle as if it were made of paper. Had he not moved, he would have been caught in the path of the metal-crushing round and churned into froth by the passage of the irresistible bullet. He swept up his FAL, looking for the shooter who was concentrating on him, but couldn’t see a thing in the darkness.

The Shabaab gunmen were in a panic as they swept their AKs in all directions, opening fire on every shadow and flicker that caught their eyes. They had gone from warring with a one-man army to being surrounded and gunned down mercilessly. Bolan could see Kamau tuck Masozi under one arm and take flight once more, just as he’d done when he threw the first grenade through the storehouse window. Bolan was tempted to cut the two men down, but he needed answers. Everything had gone wrong, and the only way to salvage the situation was to get some inside information. That meant that suddenly, Bolan was on Masozi’s side.

Without a target, the Executioner was going to have to apply his razor-sharp intellect to determining where the new enemy was firing from. He couldn’t use muzzle-flashes, since whoever was firing utilized suppressed weaponry. It was disconcerting that the .50-caliber antimatériel rifle was also wearing a can, dampening its dragon’s-breath belch of flame down to a dull red glow that wouldn’t carry far in the night. However, there was no way for the riflemen to hide the angle at which their bullets impacted the ground, or the dust kicked up when they hit. The rounds impacted the dirt at an acute angle, meaning that the elevation of the enemy gunners had been between eight and twenty feet off the ground. That ruled out warehouses neighboring the Shabaab compound, which were thirty to forty feet tall with no windows.

Bolan swung back to the Peugeot and ducked below the fender. He put his eye to the cavernous tunnel that the enemy Fifty had torn through the metal, and saw shadowy figures crouched atop one of the small barracks buildings inside the complex. The enemy was dressed in black, making them almost impossible to see if they remained still, but because the Shabaab scattered under the onslaught of stealth weaponry, they had to change positions.