Desert Fallout

Bolan popped up over the pickup’s hood and triggered his FAL at the rooftop, raking the night sky. Drawing on his limited, halting Arabic, he shouted, “Over there!”

The big American pointed at the rooftop. Four Somali gunmen turned and saw what the Executioner had indicated. The young radicals hoisted their Kalashnikov rifles and opened up on the rooftop, as well.

The soldier sidestepped and sought new cover, this time behind the bed of the Peugeot. He’d moved just in time as the front of the pickup truck was clawed by a storm of automatic fire punctuated by the muffled thunderbolt of the enemy heavy antiarmor rifle. Bolan grimaced and knew that the Shabaab pirates who were aware of the mysterious marauders wouldn’t last long, and any hopes of additional forces following their cue were slim because of the death toll and terror inflicted upon the Somali militiamen by both Bolan and the hidden squad of killers.

The 84 mm rocket launcher and its bandolier sat at the wheel well of a Mercedes four-wheel drive, just where he’d left them. A mad dash across open ground drew the snipers’ attention, but Bolan was too swift, his own dark form flowing through the shadows, keeping ahead of the lines of bullets chasing him. He skidded to a halt, snatched up the launcher and swung behind the bulk of the jeep. Bullets hammered into the Mercedes’s frame as Bolan swung open the launch tube and stuffed a black, serrated warhead into the breech. Closing the action, he now had a weapon capable of evening the odds against the hidden gunmen. Rather than aim across the hood of the Mercedes, Bolan swung around the front fender, locked onto a spot at the top of the wall and triggered the Carl Gustav. The range was a mere twenty meters, but it was enough for the warhead to arm itself, and when it struck just below the roof, the explosive impact split the building, carving out a terrible furrow. Screams resounded from the marauders’ vantage point, at least two of the enemy shrieking as shrapnel reduced their limbs to bloody stumps.

The sniper fire had died out immediately, but Bolan swung back behind cover anyway. He took the lull to feed the FAL rifle another magazine, and just for good measure, he popped a fresh 84 mm warhead into the Carl Gustav. He’d come to stop the flow of illicit diamonds into Somalia, and he had been determined to give another crew of pirates a crippling blow.

The discovery of a batch of raw materials for processing a particularly toxic strain of ricin and the intrusion of a mysterious party of well-equipped and stealthy commandos had altered the mission. It didn’t take much imagination for Bolan to realize that Mubarak had gone rogue, taking a secret supply of deadly biological poisons to the black market in exchange for a suitcase full of illicit diamonds. The dark-clad assassins had all the earmarks of a retrieval team.

At least, that was the hope Bolan harbored. The gunmen had opened fire so quickly on the Shabaab militiamen and Bolan, that it had to be a shock-and-awe strike.

The suppressed antiarmor rifle was the thing that gave Bolan the most consternation.

“White man!” someone called.

Bolan turned at the sound of the voice. He spotted Masozi and Kamau, crouched behind the corner of a building. They were armed, but they hadn’t leveled their weapons at him.

Yet.

“What?” Bolan asked.

“Who was that shooting at us?” Masozi asked.

Bolan settled quickly into the role of lone mercenary. “Not a damn clue. I was just here to get the Egyptian back for shorting me.”

Masozi’s eyes narrowed.

Bolan patted the Carl Gustav launcher. “I was supposed to get six of these.”

“He promised me four,” Masozi answered. “You made a mess of my people.”

“I just came for the cheater,” Bolan said. “I may have fired on a couple of your boys in self-defense, but I nearly got flattened when they blew up half your storehouse.”

Kamau glared. “That so?”

“You might have bought his story about magic beans,” Bolan began.

“What’s your name?” Kamau cut him off.

“Matt Cooper,” Bolan replied. “You?”

“Orif Masozi,” the Somali answered. “This is Kamau, my chief of security.”

Bolan stepped into the open, keeping the launcher at low ready. There was the chance that there was a second squad of sharpshooters among the rooftops, but there hadn’t been a shot fired in the minute that Bolan was conversing with the Shabaab. “I think it’s clear.”

“What the hell was that?” Kamau asked. “And never mind the name, who are you?”

Bolan didn’t lie with his answer. “I’m a free agent who needs a lot of firepower. What say we grab the diamonds and get the hell out of this place.”

Masozi pointed at the storehouse. “If you can sweep them up and sift them from the ashes, they’re all yours.”

Bolan grimaced looking at the gouts of smoke pouring out of the shattered warehouse.

“So much for that plan,” Bolan grumbled. “Let’s get a closer look at the guys who shot at us then.”

Kamau frowned, but after a moment of consideration, he nodded in agreement. Leading he way, Uzi locked in his massive fist, he approached the half-wrecked barracks. Through the shattered wall, Bolan and his companions could see the bullet-riddled bodies of Shabaab militiamen, slumped on their cots or strewed across the floor. It was a complete slaughter, and Bolan felt better.

The kind of commandos that Bolan could consider soldiers of the same side wouldn’t engage in wholesale execution of unarmed opponents. The corpses were evidence of bottomless ruthlessness that trained U.S. special operations forces wouldn’t resort to. None of the Shabaab gunmen had even gotten close to a sidearm. It was one thing to end the life of an armed sentry on patrol, even after knocking him out, but shooting unarmed, half-naked, half-awake men as they lay in their berths was a sign of brutal, cold-blooded murder.

Kamau sneered as he looked at the carnage. “Bastards. What kind of coward shoots a sleeping man?”

Bolan looked at the tall Somali and held his tongue. He had to remember that the Shabaab had declared that they would execute any American sailors they encountered after the United States Navy executed several pirates who’d held a U.S. merchant captain hostage. Looking back at the littered corpses in the barracks, he remembered that these sleeping men could easily have taken another ship and gunned down unarmed crew members.

Their loss wasn’t one that the Executioner would mourn, even if he would have waited until they were awake, dressed and armed to put bullets into them.

“Give me a boost to the roof,” Bolan said. “I’ll help you up then.”

The Somali giant nodded and laced his fingers together, lifting Bolan to the top of the building. It was empty except for a couple of fallen weapons and a stripped-off load-bearing vest. Bolan reached down and gripped Kamau’s massive paw. Had not the Executioner’s muscles been honed by countless hours of exercise and almost daily combat, the three-hundred-pound bulk of the Somali giant would have proved a strain. Even so, Bolan was glad that Kamau dug the waffle tread of his boots into the wall to assist in getting to the roof.

“They grabbed their wounded and dead and ran,” Bolan noted. “They left behind a vest and a couple of weapons, though.”

Kamau pulled a flashlight from his belt, and Bolan did the same. It was to examine the evidence left behind by the mysterious marauders, but it was also to look for weakened sections of roof. Neither man relished the potential of crashing to the ground if he took a misstep.

Bolan crouched by the vest and saw that it had been sliced off. Blood soaked into the ballistic nylon of the shell showed that one of the commandos had shorn off the garment in order to reach a chest or neck injury. Kamau, on the other part of the roof, prodded an assault rifle with the tip of his machete, just in case the weapons left behind were rigged with booby traps.

“They were too busy trying to escape to leave us a surprise,” Bolan said.

“Not that you’re taking chances by pawing that assault vest,” Kamau noted.

Bolan nodded. “Whoever it was unsnapped the pouches of spare ammunition and took them with when they bugged out.”

“That’s very odd,” Kamau said. “No spent casings.”

Bolan frowned. “They probably had brass catchers hooked up to their guns.”

Kamau squinted at the circle of light as he ran it across the rifle. Bolan recognized the gun as a Steyr-AUG, an A-3 model, from the rails mounted on it. The compact bullpup allowed a full-length barrel on a short, handy rifle. The weapon was the size of a submachine gun yet had the punch of a rifle. Bolan had used the Steyr quite a few times in the past. Its plastic furniture was dull, dark slate gray, in variance with the usual olive-drab shell that the AUG was adorned with. Kamau flipped over the rifle, and in the glow of the flashlight beam, Bolan could see frayed fabric hooked to a collar around the ejection port.

“They took their brass with them,” Kamau noted. “Probably will ditch it off a pier.”

“Those are paranoid levels of operational security,” Bolan said. He picked up the Steyr and worked the spring-loaded bolt handle. The chamber was empty. Whoever had sanitized the weapon had thought to take the round in the breech, as well as the remainder of its magazine. “We won’t get fingerprints off this, nor do we have serial numbers on this thing.”

“Fingerprints,” Kamau noted. “You have your own crime lab or something, Cooper?”

“I’ve got a few friends who can look through Interpol databases for relevant information.”

“How do we know you’re not a policeman?” Kamau asked.