Rebel Trade. Don Pendleton

for targets to reveal themselves.

       Andjaba nearly called a halt then, but his fear of telling headquarters that he had let the raider slip away was greater than his dread of being sunk or blasted from the water, shredded into food for sharks and bottom-feeding crabs. Whatever lay in store for him beyond the breakers, he could not be proved a coward in the eyes of soldiers who relied on him for leadership—or in the view of his entirely merciless superiors.

       Two hundred yards would tell the story either way. So little distance left before they reached the breakers and were suddenly at sea. Andjaba’s former haven lay behind him, shattered, turned into an open grave for slaughtered comrades. All that presently remained to him was vengeance and a chance to save his damaged reputation as a leader.

       What else mattered, in the world he’d chosen to inhabit?

       Almost there, and up ahead, already clear, he saw the stolen speedboat turning, spewing up a foaming wake before them, as it circled back to face the onrushing pursuers. What possessed the stranger to turn back, once he had reached the open ocean, with a chance to flee?

       Unless—

       Andjaba tried to see the trap before it closed on him, but he was already too late. Off to his left, the river’s southern bank erupted into a preview of hell on earth. Airborne, he could only hope the dark water rushing up to meet him might preserve him from the hungry flames.

      * * *

      MINI MS-803 MINES ARE five inches long, three inches tall, and one and a half inches thick. Their convex polystyrene case is brown. Each mine’s total weight—one kilogram, 2.2 pounds—includes one pound of PE9 plastic explosive with a PETN booster charge. Most of the remaining weight belongs to three hundred cylindrical steel fragments, each measuring one-quarter of an inch by one-third of an inch.

       When the Mini MS-803 explodes, using any one of several detonating triggers, its shrapnel flies in a sixty-degree arc, with an estimated killing range of fifty to one hundred feet. At fifty, the manufacturer claims a fragment density of two per square yard. At one hundred, the spray of shrapnel sweeps a zone six feet six inches tall. Each shrapnel fragment has sufficient energy at eighty feet to penetrate a half-inch-thick pine board.

       In short, an efficient mass-murder machine.

       Bolan had placed his mines at ten-foot intervals, their skinny wire legs planted in the river’s muddy bank. Their detonation, all at once, produced a sound that made him think of giants slamming doors in unison. Within a fraction of a second, eighteen hundred steel projectiles swept across the water, ripping into twin boats and the men on deck, filling the air with crimson spray. Perhaps the shrapnel couldn’t penetrate an engine block, but with the pilots dead or wounded, one of the pursuit crafts stalled out in the middle of the river, while its partner veered off toward the northern river bank and ran aground.

       The screaming started then, from those who still had vocal cords and strength enough to use them. Bolan tracked the sound, locating targets, while his speedboat idled and he found another box of belted ammunition for the NVS machine gun. Loading it, he felt no vestige of remorse. Each man aboard the two pursuit boats, like the others back in camp, had been a murderer and pirate. Somehow, the police and military forces of Namibia had managed not to notice them while they were raiding, robbing, raping, killing.

       All of that was finished—at least, for these few predators.

       Others were waiting for him, and the Executioner had not forgotten them.

       But first things first.

       When the NVS was loaded, Bolan steered his boat directly toward its stalled-out twin, adrift in midstream. One man was trying to negotiate the blood-slick forward deck, slopping along on knees and elbows, while a mournful groaning issued from the cockpit. Bolan stopped when he was twenty feet away and got behind the heavy gun, raking the crippled boat from bow to stern and back again with 12.7x108 mm slugs. It took all of a second-and-a-half to still all sound and movement on the pirate craft.

       Move and repeat.

       The second boat had nosed into the bank, locked tight, but still its engine had not died. The prop was churning muddy water into moonlit foam, a pirate in the cockpit fairly sobbing as he tried to back it out, to no effect. Bolan considered calling out to him, telling the wounded man he should forget about it, but he finally let the machine gun do his talking for him, ripping up the beached craft from its engine forward.

       One of Bolan’s tracers found the fuel tank, detonated it, and lit the river’s surface with a spreading slick of gasoline. The tide of fire swept out to sea, followed the river’s current to extinction, while its stationary source burned to the waterline with all aboard.

       Bolan was on the move again by that time, angling the last boat toward the river’s mouth and on beyond it, toward the beach where he’d concealed his Zodiac. From there, five miles due south along the coast, he’d find the inlet where his car was waiting, at the dead end of a narrow highway leading inland.

       Back to Windhoek and the targets waiting for him there.

      Chapter 4

      Windhoek

      “Slow down,” Oscar Boavida said. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

       His caller, still excited to the point of hyperventilation, paused to bring his voice under control, and started again from the beginning. It was even worse the second time.

       “The river camp has been attacked, sir,” he explained. “Unless someone escaped in the confusion and has run away, I am the only one alive.”

       The cell phone may as well have been a scorpion in Boavida’s hand. He fought an urge to fling it, terminate the call before some eavesdropper could hear the rest and use it as a basis for indictment. Did his men still fail to grasp that when you used a cell phone, you were basically broadcasting every word you spoke over a kind of radio? Those words, free-floating in the atmosphere, could be plucked from the air at any point between transmission and delivery, recorded, used in evidence.

       But this was news, goddamn it, that he had to hear. If he had lost two dozen men, the odds were good that law enforcement or the military knew about the raid already. It stung to think that Boavida was the last to know.

       “We need to speak about this privately,” he told the shaken caller. “Say no more now. Come to meet me at the place. You know the one I mean?”

       “I think so,” his soldier said. “On the—”

       “Say no more!” Boavida snapped. “We don’t know who may be listening!”

       That was incriminating in itself, but if compelled to answer for it later, he could always claim that he was worried about airing party business on an open line. In fact, that much was true. He simply would not say which business was involved. There was no need to mention piracy, for instance, much less homicide.

       “I understand, sir. I will—”

       Boavida cut the link before his caller could spill any more sensitive details. Seething at the soldier’s indiscretion and the grievous loss he had reported, Boavida placed the cell phone on his desk top, slumping back into his padded swivel chair. He closed his eyes and tried to organize his furious, chaotic thoughts.

       The raid his man described could not have been official, that much Boavida knew without enquiring any further. He had friends in the Namibian regime, and while they might not always have the power to prevent a raid on this or that facility, they always gave him warning in advance. Likewise, the army or police would not send one man by himself—if that, in fact, turned out to be the case. Both outfits loved a show with vehicles and flashing lights, aircraft if they could spare it, and men in body armor shouting till their throats ached while the television cameras rolled.

       Whatever had befallen Boavida’s river camp, it clearly had not been a normal operation by Namibia’s Defense Force or the smaller, less well-organized Namibian Police. Even that body’s Special Field Force, formed in 1995 for paramilitary