Rebel Trade

And Evil never died.

No matter how many of its foot soldiers Bolan liquidated, Evil always reared its head again, invulnerable to his bullets, his grenades, his blade.

So, what?

Spotty religious training from his childhood told Bolan that even God could not destroy Evil—or that he chose to let it run amok for reasons left mysterious. In fact, if you believed the words of “holy writ,” He had created Evil in the first place as some kind of crazy test for humankind that never seemed to end.

Bolan didn’t know if that was true. More to the point, he didn’t care.

His job as a committed warrior was to face Evil where it appeared and beat it down, or die in the attempt. Another round would start tomorrow, and it could go either way.

At the moment he needed sleep.

And time to plan his moves.

Chapter 3

Erongo Region, Namibia, Present

The NSV machine gun’s sound was thunderous, eclipsing the rattle of Kalashnikovs and the pop-pop of handguns. Bolan swept the pirate camp from west to east and back again, night-vision goggles pushed up on his forehead to prevent him being blinded by the weapon’s awesome muzzle-flashes. Slugs the size of fat cigar stubs, each weighing one-ninth of a pound, ripped through men, tents and anything else before them, traveling at half a mile per second.

It was devastating—but it couldn’t last.

The NSV devours ammunition at a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute, and the standard belt holds only fifty rounds. Gone in four seconds, give or take. A way around that problem is the use of non-disintegrating steel belts with open links, assembled in ten-round segments using a cartridge as an interlink. While ammo belts could stretch for miles, in theory, MG barrels warp under prolonged full-auto fire, and standard ammo boxes only hold 250 belted rounds.

Which should be running out for Bolan’s weapon any second.

The sudden ringing silence was a shocker. Bolan had an instant choice to make: start searching for another box of ammo without knowing where it was, or run like hell. One choice meant almost certain death; the other was a gamble with no guarantees at all.

The Executioner had always been a gambler.

While a reload for the NSV might prove elusive, Bolan knew exactly where to find the starter button for the pirate speedboat he presently occupied alone. Grabbing his AK-47 on the run, he fired a short burst at the vessel’s mooring line, then dropped into the pilot’s chair and gunned the engine into roaring life. He ignored the fuel gauge, since he didn’t have the time nor the means to fill the gas tank, even if the needle fell on empty. Bolan had a need for speed, as some old movie put it, and it was time to split.

One second, he was sitting still; the next, his boat was lunging forward in a westerly direction. Bolan cranked the wheel to clear the craft in front of him, but still managed to graze its stern with jolting force. There was a switch to run the bilge pump somewhere on the dash in front of him, but why waste time searching for it, when he didn’t plan to be afloat that long? The open sea lay approximately a mile in front of him, maybe two minutes if he kept the speedboat’s throttle open all the way.

He gave a passing thought to obstacles that might undo him, but the river wasn’t deep enough for sunken wrecks, and stark desert meant no fallen trees. The only hippos still surviving in Namibia were found on game reserves, well inland, and there’d been no sign of crocodiles as Bolan had hiked in from the river’s mouth.

Clear sailing then, but there was more on Bolan’s mind than making a clean getaway.

He wanted the remainder of the pirates on his tail.

To that end, he eased off the speedboat’s throttle, waited with the engine idling, staring back toward the MLF camp. It took his shaken enemies some time to get their wits about them, check out who was still alive and fit for battle. Bolan could have reached the coast, reclaimed his Zodiac and been well under way before he heard another speedboat’s engine growling on the river, but it would have meant that he had failed.

A clean sweep was the plan, and that required a chase.

The second boat was finally coming. Bolan waited for a visual through his night-vision goggles, but it wouldn’t do to let them close to killing range. Not if he wanted to get through the night alive.

And that was definitely part of The Executioner’s plan.

* * *

JACKSON ANDJABA SURVEYED the ruins of his camp, mouthing a string of bitter curses. All around him there was devastation, dead and dying soldiers scattered everywhere, the dazed survivors struggling to their feet since the threat had passed, checking themselves for wounds.

But he could not allow them any time for rest. The enemy who had destroyed their haven—one man—was rapidly escaping while they blundered through the compound’s smoking wreckage.

Furious, Andjaba started shouting orders at the men whose bodies seemed to be intact. At least, he saw that they could stand upright and hold their weapons. What else did a fighting man require?

It was a struggle, with the sound of the escaping speedboat dwindling in his ears, but finally Andjaba got a dozen men together and divided them between the two remaining boats. He climbed into the first, positioned in the bow behind a PKP Pecheneg light machine gun, belt-fed with 7.62x54 mmR rounds. Another shouted order, and the boat nosed into open water with the second vessel growling close behind it.

The chase would come down to speed and timing. Andjaba could not say where his quarry hoped to go in the stolen speedboat, how far he meant to travel once he’d cleared the river’s mouth, or even how much gasoline was in the fleeing craft’s fuel tank. He checked on fuel before a raid, and would have done so in the morning, but the midnight strike had caught him unprepared.

An error that he would have to correct before the night’s disaster was reported back to MLF headquarters in Windhoek. If he survived to file that grim report himself, he’d include a conclusion that would mollify his masters—the destruction of the enemy who’d ravaged them, preferably after he was grilled for information on his motives or the sponsors of his raid.

If, on the other hand, Andjaba did not live to speak with headquarters…well, then, his troubles would be over.

But he did not plan to die this night. He’d lost enough men as it was, without taking a fling at martyrdom.

The boat they sought was running without lights, of course, but Andjaba could hear its motor snarling, sending echoes back to him across the dark water. He was tempted to unleash the Pecheneg, but wasting ammunition in a fit of rage solved nothing. Worse, it might defeat his purpose when he found a target and the gun refused to fire, adding insult to injury.

A sudden difference in the sound confused Andjaba for a moment, then he realized the stolen boat had slowed—or had it stopped? Why would the damned fool cut the throttle, he wondered, when he knew they must be coming after him?

Perhaps the boat had stalled from careless handling, or maybe it was running out of fuel. But no, when they were almost within sight of it, Andjaba heard the motor roar again and speed away, almost as if their enemy was playing cat-and-mouse.

Madness. But it would cost him, having let them close the gap. The first glimpse of his target would be ample for the PKP to do its work, hosing the stolen boat with fourteen rounds per second. He would try to hit the engine, stop the boat and leave their adversary to be captured, but Andjaba thought the night-prowler would choose to fight it out.

Too bad.

A shot-up boat could be repaired. A corpse could be examined for whatever tell-tale clues remained to its identity. Jackson Andjaba, on the other hand, could not be resurrected if his MLF superiors ordered him shot for dereliction of his duty—as they well might, if he let the enemy escape.

A bit of caution, then, but if the bastard saw no wisdom in surrender, death would be his choice. And Andjaba would be happy to oblige.

“Just let me see your face,” he muttered to the night. “It’s all I ask.”

* * *

THE FIRST RATTLE OF automatic fire made Bolan duck and twist the speedboat’s steering wheel, swooping from left to right and back again, in an attempt to spoil the shooter’s aim. It was a risky move, since he had no clue as to the river’s depth at any given point, and stranding on a sandbar or some other unseen obstacle could finish him for good.

Evasion was the key, but that meant constant forward motion, leading his pursuers toward the killing ground he had prepared for them. It all hinged on his drawing them along behind him—and not getting killed in the process.

The shooter in the lead pursuit craft was about four hundred yards behind him, well within effective range for what sounded like a 7.62 mm weapon. Then again, there was a world of difference between the range at which a given slug could wound or kill, and any shooter’s realistic hope of zeroing in on a target.

The down side: with a Russian light machine gun’s rate of fire, the man behind the weapon didn’t have to be a legendary marksman. All he had to be was lucky. Just one round had to find its mark by accident, hurtling along at something like 860 yards per second, and the man on the receiving end was down. Forget about the Hollywood “flesh wounds” that left an action hero fit to run ten miles and take out half a dozen burly adversaries with his bare hands on arrival at his destination. That was movie magic, light years out of touch with flesh-and-blood reality.

The truth: a hit by any military bullet hurts like hell, unless it slams the target into instant shock on impact. Any torso wound can kill, unless there is an expert MASH team standing by to pull a miracle out of the hat. And any talk about a “clean” wound through a human abdomen is fantasy. Get “lucky” with a stray shot through an arm or leg, and anything beyond a graze will shatter bone, turn muscle into hamburger, and leave you bleeding out from severed arteries.

Long story short—in any shooting situation, it is best to give, and not receive.

Or, in the present case, to duck and weave like crazy, until it was payback time.