Rebel Trade. Don Pendleton

MOdular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment—that had replaced Vietnam-era “Alice” rigging in recent years.

       His weapons were the basics for a job on foreign soil. To accommodate the local trend in ammunition for assault rifles, he’d picked an AK-47 rifle that was standard-issue for the Namibia Defense Force, chambered in 7.62x39 mm. The GP-30 grenade launcher attached beneath its barrel added three pounds to the weapon and fired 40 mm caseless rounds. Native soldiers and police used a variety of semiauto sidearms chambered for 9x19 mm Parabellum bullets, so Bolan had chosen a Beretta 92-FS to fill his holster, its muzzle threaded to accept a sound-suppressor. When it came to cutting, he had gone old-school, selecting a classic Mark I trench knife with a blackened double-edged blade and spiked brass knuckles on the grip. Aside from the GP-30’s caseless HE rounds, he also carried Russian RGN fragmentation grenades—short for Ruchnaya Granata Nastupatel’naya—with a kill radius of between twenty and sixty-six feet and dual fuses for detonation on impact or after elapse of four seconds, whichever came first.

       Because he couldn’t trust the moonlight on a night with scudding clouds, Bolan also wore a pair of lightweight LUCIE night-vision goggles that turned the landscape in front of him an eerie green. Manufactured in Germany, where night-vision devices had been pioneered during the Second World War, the fourth-generation headgear offered a crystal-clear view of the beach and the river that Bolan would be following on foot to reach his target.

       After a quick stop to make last-minute preparations on the river’s southern bank.

       Wildlife did not concern Bolan as he moved inland. The largest four-legged predators in residence were brown hyenas, shy of men unless they caught them sleeping in the open and could bite a face off in a rush. He did keep an eye on the ground for puff adders and cobras, but met no reptiles on his way to the river. Once there, he gave a thought to crocodiles, but, with his LUCIE goggles, saw none lurking on the bank or in the water.

       He was good to go.

       A mile or less in front of him, the district’s most ferocious predators had no idea they were about to host a visit from The Executioner.

      * * *

      JACKSON ANDJABA HAD not planned to be a criminal when he was growing up. A member of the Himba tribe, born in the Kunene Region of northwestern Namibia, he had quickly tired of tending goats and cattle in a hamlet consisting of round thatched huts. At fifteen, he had fled the village for a town of some twelve thousand souls, Opuwo, but it had still seemed too small for him. Another year had found him in the capital, Windhoek, with twenty times Opuwo’s population and no end of opportunities for a young man.

       Or so it seemed, at first.

       Andjaba had discovered that his rural background and his relative naïvete made him unsuited for survival in the city. He had learned that friends were vital, and had found them where he could, among the young and tough slumdwellers scrabbling to exist from day to day. In their society, no stigma was attached to theft or acts of violence broadly defined as self-defense. The missionaries who had visited his childhood village in Kunene had it wrong. The Golden Rule should read: do unto others first, and do it right the first time.

       His first killing had been accidental, grappling for a knife an enemy had planned to gut him with, but it secured Andjaba’s reputation as a fighter who would go the limit, no holds barred. He graduated after that to more elaborate and dangerous conspiracies—hijackings, home invasions, theft of arms from military transports. Soon, he was recruited by a mixed troop of Angolan exiles and Namibians who liked a little revolutionary politics mixed with their looting.

       Perfect.

       It pleased him to go sailing on the ocean he had never seen until his twenty-second birthday, and while doing so, to terrorize the high and mighty captains with their cargos bound for places he would never visit, meant for selling on behalf of masters who already had more money than their great-grandchildren’s grandchildren could ever spend. It made him feel…significant.

       Andjaba still preferred the city life, but he endured the camp behind Durissa Bay because it was his first full-fledged command, located midway between Ugabmond and Bandombaai, two coastal fishing villages where the young women were impressed by men with guns and money, while their elders understood the risks involved in any protest. No one dared speak to the authorities, since Andjaba had removed the nosy mayor of Ugabmond and dropped him down a dry well in the desert, where his bones would lie until the end of days.

       In theory, Andjaba and his men were hunted by the army and Namibia Police Service, but neither seemed to have much luck locating them. In part, he knew that was because of bribes paid to authorities in Windhoek. On the other hand, he knew that some of those in power also sympathized with the Angolan refugees who led the movement that Andjaba served. Drawn by the lures of politics and profit, men often behaved in unexpected ways.

       They would go raiding once again tomorrow, when a British oil tanker was scheduled to be passing by. Its course was set from Lagos, for the pickup, to delivery at the SAPREF refinery, ten miles below Durban, South Africa. The ship was a VLCC—Very Large Crude Carrier—still smaller than the ultra-large ULCCs, but capable of loading 320,000 deadweight tonnage. New, the tanker cost around $120 million, while its cargo—or the threat of spilling it at sea—was vastly greater.

       In the morning, early, they would—

       The explosion shocked Andjaba so much that he dropped his bottle of Tafel lager, half-full, and nearly fell off his camp chair. Someone screamed, a drawn-out cry of agony, that sent Andjaba scrambling for his rifle, feeling panic clamp its grip around his heart.

      * * *

      BOLAN HAD FOUND ONE sentry lounging on an overlook, along the river’s southern bank, apparently convinced the compound he’d been set to guard was out of bounds for any adversary. By the time he recognized that critical mistake, he had forgotten how to breathe, the process interrupted by the blade of Bolan’s Mark I severing his larynx and carotid arteries. The young man couldn’t whimper, but he spluttered for a bit before he died.

       In passing, Bolan claimed the 40-round detachable box magazine from his first kill’s Kalashnikov, and two more thirties from his saggy pockets. Done with that, he pitched the empty AK down the river’s bank and watched it vanish with a muffled splash. There was no point in leaving guns behind that might be used by enemies to kill him, and the extra ammo might be useful, too.

       If he’d had all the bullets in the world, it might have been a safer place.

       Closing on the pirate camp, Bolan could hear the normal sounds of men conversing, doing chores, bitching about the work. Something was cooking, but he couldn’t place the smell. Some kind of bushmeat he supposed, and put it out of mind. Whatever they had in the pot, these murderers and poachers were about to miss their final meal on Earth.

       Bolan had primed his GP-30 launcher with a high-explosive caseless round before he left the Zodiac inflatable. He’d heard that Russian soldiers called the weapon Obuvka (shoe), while dubbing its predecessor models Kostyor (bonfire) and Mukha (fly). All three were single-shot muzzle-loaders, chambered for the 40x46 mm low-velocity grenades designed for handheld launchers, rather than the 40x53 mm rounds fired from mounted or crew-served weapons. You could mistake them at a glance, but that mistake would cost a careless warrior dearly—as in hands, eyes or his life.

       Today, Bolan’s “shoe” was loaded with a VOG-25P fragmentation grenade, average kill radius twenty feet. The projectile’s warhead contained thirty-seven grams of TNT, plus a primary charge that bounced it anywhere from three to six feet off the ground before the main charge blew. It was a “Bouncing Betty” for the new millennium, designed to make the art of killing more efficient.

       Just what Bolan needed here—at this time.

       The pirates—some of them Namibian, the rest Angolan refugees—had four boats moored along the river, with their tents set back some distance from the water’s edge. It could have passed for a large safari’s camp, until you saw the automatic weapons everywhere and noticed that the men in camp all wore tricolor armbands: red, black and yellow, with a red star on the center stripe.