Line Of Honor. Don Pendleton

was simple enough.

      It wasn’t long before Bolan saw dust in the distance. Tshabalala spoke across the com link. “Contact, Striker!”

      “I see it.” Bolan spun his bike to a halt. If he could see the contact’s dust, the contact could see the rooster tails Bolan and the Zulu’s bikes were hurling up. “Let’s set up shop.”

      Tshabalala brought his bike in front of Bolan’s broadside-on, and the big American laid his bike down behind it. He unlimbered his rifle and his optics and laid himself out across the warm metal of his bike. Tshabalala hid his rifle behind his bike, pushed up his goggles and stood in plain sight as if he hadn’t a care in the world; except that he might possibly be having motorcycle trouble. Bolan scanned the approaching dust cloud from behind his companion’s front forks.

      The only thing the horsemen were missing was a banner that read The Janjaweed Are Coming!

      The word Janjaweed was an Arabic colloquialism. Taken in context it literally meant a man, with a gun, on a horse. Mnan’s men qualified. The Janjaweed had gone from scrappy militias of Arabic nomadic herders who quarreled locally with the settled farmers over water and land resources since time out of mind, to well-equipped and organized cavalry cohorts that operated with overt support from the government in Khartoum, and often coincided their raids on farming villages and towns with Sudanese military air strikes.

      Fortune had turned once more.

      South Sudan was working toward full independence and Darfur was heading in the same direction. Much of the Janjaweed’s open support had dried up. Times were hard, but young men who had spent the past five to ten years raping and pillaging to their hearts’ content weren’t easily returned to the hardscrabble existence of herding goats and camels on the Sudanese plains. The Sudan was full of refugee camps and villages struggling to rebuild. The civil wars were nearly over, but there remained plenty of plunder for the hard-hearted.