Target Response:. William W. Johnstone

      

TARGET RESPONSE

      TARGET RESPONSE

      WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

      with J. A. Johnstone

      PINNACLE BOOKS

      Kensington Publishing Corp.

       www.kensingtonbooks.com

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      ONE

      Jungle hell.

      Kilroy had survived and thrived in some of the world’s worst:

      The upper reaches of the Amazon where the borders of Brazil and Venezuela blur into each other in a steaming green inferno whose denizens had long ago traded curare-tipped poison darts for shotguns and machetes.

      The Suud, that near-impassable morass of hundreds of square miles of reeds and marshland where the White Nile flows south toward the desert flats below Khartoum.

      The emerald forests deep in the interior of New Guinea where tribal folk still follow the practices of cannibalism and head-hunting.

      The bamboo thickets and teak forests of Myanmar’s Shan State where Burmese warlords and their private armies war incessantly for control of the lucrative opium and heroin trade.

      From the Congo to the Philippines, from the Solomon Islands to the Florida Everglades, in some of the planet’s wildest places, Major Joseph Kilroy, U.S. Army, had plied his peculiar trade and come out not only alive but victorious.

      Kilroy—the killer.

      Now a strange destiny whose source lay in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. and the corporate boardrooms of Manhattan had led him here to a deadly showdown in the swamplands of the West African coast.

      It was in the fan-shaped Niger River delta where that great watercourse flows into the sea by a hundred nameless tributaries. Here, well east of the port city of Lagos, in one of the innumerable mangrove swamps dotting the coastline, Kilroy prepared to make his breakout.

      He’d been penned in the swamp for three days and three nights, hunted and harried by his foes. He’d have made his break long ago if he’d been alone. But he had a partner.

      When the enemy first struck their treacherous blow, Kilroy had fled into the swamp with Captain Bill Raynor. He and Raynor were the sole survivors of a ten-person Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) team on a covert investigative mission to Nigeria. The clandestine operation required them to pose as civilians.

      The other eight members of the team had perished when an explosion destroyed their plane in midair shortly after taking off from a Lagos airfield. They were homeward bound to deliver the results of the fact-finding mission to their handlers in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

      The hidden bomb that blew them and their aircraft to bits had also destroyed the evidence they’d amassed during their probe. Damning evidence that incontrovertibly proved that a leading global corporation had conspired against vital national security interests of the United States.

      Sheer chance had prevented Kilroy and Raynor from being on board the doomed flight. They’d been scheduled to depart with the others but a last-minute change in plans had resulted in their separating themselves from the team to follow up a hot investigative lead that took them to the Vurukoo oil fields.

      Raynor was an investigator, a veteran sleuth from the U.S. Army Military Police’s Criminal Investigation Division, on loan to the DIA for the Nigerian probe.

      Kilroy was no detective. He was a specialist, a trigger-puller supreme. A troubleshooter. His motto: “When I find trouble, I shoot it.”

      He was a member of the Army’s ultrasecret assassination arm, the Dog Team.

      In the secret vaults where the Army’s black ops files were kept, Kilroy held the rank of major. He outranked Captain Raynor, but was content to outwardly play an unassuming subordinate role as part of his cover. His assignment was to keep Raynor alive.

      The two of them had been in their tent in the Vurukoo oil patch when they had learned by radio that their DIA teammates had been blown out of the sky.

      Moments later, the enemy had struck.

      They had come in the form of a company of well-armed Nigerian troops, an elite unit of hand-picked soldiers from the capital who’d each sworn a loyalty oath to Minister of Defense Derek Tayambo. One of the most powerful and dangerous figures in the government’s ruling cabinet in Lagos, Tayambo was a key player in a continent-spanning terrorist conspiracy.

      There’d barely been been time for the two Americans to grab some arms and provisions and flee the oil fields before the attackers swooped down on them in force. Blocked from the land route, the duo fled into the swamp.

      Now Kilroy and Raynor had two deadly threats to contend with: their pursuers and the swamp itself.

      The swamp was rank marshland half flooded by overspill from the Rada and Kondo branches of the Niger River in oil-rich Vurukoo province. It knew two states of being: gloomy daylight and darkness.

      The scene could have been from earth’s primeval dawn hundreds of millions of years ago:

      Twisted mangrove trees writhed in eerie shapes, their snaky boughs intertwining to form a canopy of foliage that kept the swamp below locked in a perpetual daytime dusk. Contorted roots formed a gnarly woodwork web that floored land and water. Patches of solid ground were few and far between. Black stinking mud was everywhere.

      Weed-tufted islets were honeycombed by slow-flowing channels that frequently pooled into ponds and lagoons. A layer of jade green scum topped dark stagnant water. Here was the haunt of crocodiles, snakes, and insects.

      The heat was seething; the humidity, stifling. A murky haze overhung the steaming water. The air was thick with swarming clouds of flying insect pests. Stinging mosquitoes, biting flies, and noxious gnats that flew into eyes, mouths, and nostrils.

      At the height of the pursuit, there must have been 150 troops fanning out into the swamp and environs in search of Kilroy and Raynor.

      The swamp at least was impartial. It was hostile to all human trespassers in its domain, be they transplanted Yankees or homegrown Nigerians.

      Nigeria’s population is 55 percent Muslim and 45 percent Christian. The traditionalist Muslims of the dry northern uplands and the dynamic, business-oriented Christians of the south have a long history of bitter rivalry.

      Most of Minister Tayambo’s company of loyalist troops were Muslims from the arid north. The others were mostly city and town dwellers from the coast. The swamp fought and hindered them as it did the Americans they hunted.

      No human antagonist but rather a lethal swamp dweller was to spell doom for Bill Raynor. It got him at midday of the second day that he and Kilroy were in the marsh.

      The previous thirty-six hours had been a nightmare ordeal of hunger, thirst, fatigue, privation, and harrowing danger for the two men.

      They’d managed to scrounge up a single canteen of fresh water and a couple of handfuls of foil-wrapped