Predator Paradise

“I…I feel sick, my cousin.”

“Get over it! We have work to do!”

Omari wound the bandanna around his face, knotting it tight against the back of his skull with an angry twist. He had another disturbing thought right then, as the veil seemed to do little to stem the tide of miasma assaulting him, mind, senses and soul. What if he fainted, flat on his back, the vomit trapped by the bandanna, strangling him?

The screaming, shooting and the awareness Omari was watching him closely, perhaps questioning his resolve, put some iron in his legs. He was turning toward the Russian transport truck, where they were hauling out more ten-gallon cans of gasoline, when Nahbat spotted their great leader.

Resentment flared through him, another dagger of pain and confusion to the heart. Dugula was standing in the distance on a rise. Surrounded by twenty or more of his men, he watched through field glasses, making certain they did as they were ordered. When he appeared satisfied the job would get done, he hopped into his jeep, the others falling into an assortment of technicals, Hummers. That the great man wouldn’t dirty his hands with this hideous chore inflamed him with great anger, leaving him to wonder if Somalia would ever know justice, much less peace.

He lingered by the technical, watching as the convoy kicked up clouds of dust, all of them gone to greet the UN plane flying in from Kenya.

Another wall of grief dropped over Nahbat. He knew what they would do when that plane landed. It sickened him. There was an answer, he believed—no, there was an answer he knew and felt in his heart—a way around this insanity, one far greater, a solution most certainly noble and humane and merciful, but the afflicted, the doomed he heard wailing around him would never see it.

All that medicine and food, he thought, on board the UN plane. Doctors, with skill and knowledge, who could, if not save the afflicted, perhaps ease their pain and suffering until a cure was delivered.

It would never happen.

He had seen it before, too many times.

“May God have mercy.”

“What was that?”

Wheeling, startled, he found Omari glaring at him. He watched, holding back the tears, fighting down the bile, his cousin marching toward him, holding out a can.

Nahbat shook his head, muttered, “Nothing.”

And took the can.

CHAPTER ONE

If it was true a man learned more from failure than success, Ben Collins knew he was in no position to test that theory. In his line of work, there were no second chances. Failure wasn’t an option; failure spelled death. In black ops, he made it a point to see losing was for the other guy.

The stack of boxes stamped CARE, deep in the aft of the C-130, would be the last thing the warlord’s frontline marauders saw when they hit the ramp. The ruse didn’t stop with this first strike, but what others didn’t know, he thought, wouldn’t kill them. At least not yet.

It was just about time to get down to dirty business, murky waters, he knew, that had been chummed since the first bunch of al-Qaeda and Taliban criminals had been dumped off at Gitmo. There was blood in that water again, he thought, flesh to consume, but it all went way beyond waxing a bunch of thugs and terrorists in some of the most dangerous, godforsaken real estate this side of Hell. Sure, there were bad guys to bag, chain, thrust under military gavel. There was a trial to consider, arranged to go down in secrecy….

Whoa, he told himself. This was only the first giant leap; the goal line was way off on the distant horizon. No point in getting ahead. There were still details to nail down and he could be sure, given the nature of black ops, not to mention the usual chaos and confusion of battle, more than a few problems would crop up along the way.

The ex–Delta Force major raked a stare over the six black ops under his command of Cobra Force Twelve. Seven more commandos on the ground were moving in right then, on schedule to help light the fuse. According to radar monitoring the two Hummers’ transponders, the sat imagery, piped into his consoles amidships from an NRO bird parked over and watching the area in question—AIQ—they were three miles out, closing hard, with Dugula and twenty-one henchmen rolling across the plain, the latest round of the Exterminator’s methods of population control framed, live and in color, on another monitor. Behind his ground force, two Black Hawks and one Apache were picking up the rear, covering all bases.

All set.

No blue UN helmets, doctors, or relief workers were on board. This was no mission of mercy, or another group of unarmed do-gooders from Red Cross or UNICEF, he thought, getting ripped off by Dugula.

He studied their faces, but there was no need to sound off with last-minute Patton speeches to shore up resolve. They knew the drill, briefed thoroughly for days, the details gone over one last time on the Company airbase just inside the Kenyan border, before he put the radio call on the special UN frequency to Dugula that they were moving, coordinate the drop-off. All of them were battle-hardened CIA men—specifically Special Operations Division—or ex-military, he knew, with more than a few Afghanistan forays notched on some of their belts.

It was reassuring to know he was wading into the fire with pros. To an operative they had on their war faces, togged in brown camos, M-16/M-203 combos the lead weapon. Webbing, combat vests, all of it stuffed and hung with spare grenades and clips, then on down to Beretta 92-F side arms on the hip, commando daggers sheathed on the lower leg. The blades were last resort, Collins stating earlier this was blast and burn, the faces of Dugula and a few of his top lieutenants committed to memory.

Once they blasted off the ramp it was going to be a turkey shoot for the most part, Somali thugs hemmed in, turning tail, unless he missed his guess, when the flying hammer dropped on them from above. He glanced at their own two armored Hummers, one mounted M-60 machine gun, belted and ready to rip. The other vehicle, showing off its TOW antitank launch pad, would be out of the gate first. Altogether, plenty of firepower, muscle, experience and determination to win the day against a bunch of one-time camel herders who now had control of Mogadishu, and into the deep south of the country, because none of the other competing clans had the guns or the guts to stand up to them.

He took a moment next to ponder the sudden curve-ball thrown him by superiors. Cobra Force Twelve was his diamond, once in the rough, but with three successful missions under the belt, with his track record in Delta and later on working with the Company, he had made friends in high and powerful places. Hell, he was a damn hero, in fact, enough medals and ribbons to fill a steamer trunk, but this one wasn’t for God and country. What was now in motion—at least the campaign given the thumbs-up by the White House—was pretty much his show.

But there was a wild card—the man’s handle—out there with the ground team.

It wasn’t entirely true he was solely in charge, Collins knew. There was this odd man out preying on his thoughts, some hotshot hardballer, according to his dossier, dropped in his lap at the eleventh hour. The order to put the thirteenth man on the team had come straight from the President, Wild Card inserted as coleader of Cobra Force. Beyond some irritation and anxiety, a dig to professional pride he was forced to share all tactical and command decisions, the tall dark man tagged Wild Card made him a little nervous, what with the question as to exactly why the White House shoved him onto the mission in the first place.

He wanted to believe the colonel—with a record full of deletions that left little doubt he was likewise black ops—was simply there as an extra gun, with supposedly all the combat experience in the world to aid, assist and kick much additional ass. Or was it something else? Was Wild Card a watchdog? Had the rumor mill churned at the Pentagon, spilling some seeds of doubt into the Oval Office? Had someone in the loop gotten cold feet, gone running to the higher-ups if just to save his own skin? Were his own people sharpening blades right then, poised to spring a trap?

No matter. If Wild Card had some personal agenda, if he proved a threat to the bigger picture, well, Collins knew there was an answer for that problem.

“Dragon One to Cobra Leader.”

Collins strode to the intercom on the bulkhead. “Cobra Leader. Go.”

“You boys strap in—we’re going down. Show time.”

“Roger. Stick to the plan, Dragon One, no matter how hot it gets out there.”

“Aye-aye. Catch you on the flip side. Good luck. Dragon One, over and out.”

Collins grabbed a seat, fastened on the webbing as the bird began to descend. Round one, he thought, coming up, but it was only the beginning. Shortly, if nothing else, one question about Wild Card would be answered. And if the odd man out couldn’t pull his weight, wasn’t as good as advertised, he would just be one less hassle to eliminate with a bullet in the near future.

The picture, small or large, both fuzzy at the moment, would clear up soon enough.

Spilled blood, he concluded, always had a way of separating the lions from the jackals.

IN A PERFECT WORLD all men and women, especially the poor and needy, would be fed, housed, educated. Beyond the basics even, the sick, the dying, the maimed, all manner of physical affliction would be cured, and they would rise to live, full, healthy, happy lives. In this world there would be opportunity for all, he thought, an even playing field where man could use whatever natural abilities and intelligence, not to attain wealth, privilege, stature or dominion over others, but to help his fellow man make the earth a bright, kind, gentle place. There would be mercy, compassion, tolerance. There would be peace, harmony, trust and understanding. There would be no crime, no killing, no greed, no lust for a bigger slice of everything at the expense of his fellows, no life wasted in self-destruction. There would be no famine, disease or war.

There would be no Habir Dugula.

Of course, wherever this place existed, it was only just a dream, Mack Bolan knew, and all too painfully well. For the man also known as the Executioner this Nirvana or Heaven, this imagined place on Earth, where all men were free, created equal to follow the tenets of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was the stuff of fantasy and angst, best left to the poets and the songwriters.

He was a soldier, first and last, brutally aware after walking countless miles in the arena of the savage, that as long as animal man existed, preying on the weak and the innocent, going for number one, peace was just a word.

The latest in a long line of vicious warlords in Somalia was all the proof he needed that evil was alive and well on Earth. But Habir Dugula was only one reason Bolan had undertaken this mission.

They were almost there, in place to give Dugula’s mass murderers and armed profiteers a dose of their own poison. Hearing the familiar thunder, Bolan spotted the C-130, coming in for a landing on the plain, due south, the giant bird vanishing from sight a moment later above the lip of the wadi. Fisting his M-16/M-203 combo, adrenaline burning, Bolan shot a look at his driver, a twist to Cobra Leader’s original attack plan flaring to mind. On the surface, the strike could in all probability work, he reasoned. For openers, they were all seasoned pros, whereas Dugula and goons were accustomed, for the most part, to slaughtering their unarmed countrymen. Sure, there was the usual street fighting in Mogadishu with rival clans, but as a rule of thumb, Dugula’s thugs outnumbered the competition, and any sustained shooting match was spurred more by hair-trigger impulse than skill and cold tactics on an even battlefield. Just the same, he knew a wild bullet, even one fired in haste or panic, could score flesh.

Timing was the key ingredient to get it started, the soldier knew, ground forces unleashing the lightning and thunder in sync. It was a brazen play, no two ways about it, Collins and company shooting their way off the ramp, Hummers rampaging into the stunned forces of Dugula, mowing them down off the starting line. The Black Hawks and the Apache, a mile or more to their rear, flying nap of the earth and jamming any atypical Somali substandard radar in the area, were a definite added bonus. If Dugula stuck to form, according to UN and CIA reports, he would hang back while his thugs boarded the C-130, then loaded up the APCs and transports parked at the command post of the warlord’s airfield. They would stock their warehouses with food and medicine slated for the sick and starving, sell it to other lesser-ranking warlords or whoever else could pay the going rate. Bolan expected once Dugula found they weren’t faced with well-intentioned UN or Red Cross workers, the warlord would bolt.

The soldier gave a moment’s thought to the mission, the parameters, endgame, reasons why he had accepted. For starters, it angered Bolan deeply that in this part of the world, where those who needed food and medicine the most, cried out for a helping hand just to get through the day, were not only denied the basics, but viewed as a blight to be removed from the body whole. In other words, those unfortunate enough not to be able to defend or fend for themselves, whatever the circumstance, weren’t worth protecting or sustaining, seen as deadweight, a possible contagion to the power structure, worthy of only subjugation or death.

Dugula had been on the soldier’s removal list for some time, the warlord living up to his ghoul’s handle given him by the UN for too long now. In a land where lawlessness ruled, where there wasn’t even the first fundamental institution, bureaucracy, no media or government whatsoever, it was impossible for even the World Health Organization to state the number of Dugula’s victims. Western intelligence could emphatically claim that entire villages had been wiped off the plains in a genocide campaign where Bolan assumed the warlord meant to do nothing but spread fear and terror.

The soldier had been around long enough to know that whatever they did here would make little difference in the long run. One less Dugula, one less army of murderers, though, terrorizing the countryside might tip the scales an inch or so in favor of the oppressed. What was true, in his mind at least, that all it took for evil to triumph was for good men to turn a blind eye, wash their hands of atrocity and man’s inhumanity to man as long as it didn’t encroach on their own world. If all of it boiled down to the power of the gun winning over evil, the Executioner was a proved old hand at the game.

A little over three days ago, Bolan recalled, he had been standing down at Stony Man Farm, the ultracovert intelligence agency in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and overseen by his longtime friend, Hal Brognola. Brognola, a high-ranking official of the Justice Department who was—in addition to routine Justice duties—a cutout between the President of the United States and the Farm, had presented the soldier with quite the unusual mission. How the channels ran through the various intelligence agencies to launch this mission and who, exactly, had brainstormed this campaign, not even Bolan or Brognola was sure. Assume Pentagon brass, CIA, NSA, but the Man—who green-lighted all Stony Man operations—wanted what he called the best of the best on board a black ops team called Cobra Force Twelve.