Predator Paradise. Don Pendleton

guys with open sores and black shit flying out of their mouths and maybe getting doused in their infected blood? For all we know, this plague could be an airborne contagion.”

      “You don’t want to do it, then let me handle it.”

      “I’ve got a lot to do, Colonel, before we move on to our next objective. I’ll have to beg off.”

      “Then I’ll go it alone. I won’t just walk away.”

      Collins measured Bolan, bobbing his head. “Okay, tell you what. Just to show I’ve got some heart, take one of the Black Hawks, I’ll even throw in the Apache, since my numbers show about thirty or more of Dugula’s punks running around over there. I can spare four of my men, but that’s it. You’ve got one hour, Stone, then I’m in the air. I’ll take back my men and leave you behind if you’re not ready to fly. Will that accommodate your sense of mercy and compassion for the oppressed?”

      It suddenly sounded too easy, Collins relenting, handing over his own men even, despite his argument about the risks of infection. Bolan sensed something else had prompted the Cobra leader to cave, but Collins was already keying his com link, relaying the order, the Black Hawk coming back to pick up the soldier.

      The Executioner watched as Collins snatched Dugula off the ground by the shoulder, then barked the handles of the four commandos who would ride with the colonel.

      “One hour, Colonel. Clock’s ticking.”

      No good luck, no kiss off, nothing. On his own, but he had been, pretty much, since accepting the mission.

      The Executioner turned, forging into the dust as the Black Hawk landed. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was a familiar churning in his gut, warning him that everything wasn’t as it appeared with Collins and Cobra Force Twelve.

      Bolan hopped into the warbird’s belly. Time, he knew, would separate truth from lies, the righteous from the unclean of spirit. Right then there was another battle to fight, and hopefully a village, or part of it, at least to save.

      One hour, he thought.

      It could prove an eternity.

      CHAPTER THREE

      As anxious as Collins was to put Somalia behind him and set the stage for round two, it wouldn’t hurt, he figured, to stay grounded for another hour or so. By then a few questions might get put to rest, or, perhaps better still, he could spare himself some grief in the future. No, it wouldn’t cause him the first twinge of pain or regret if Stone—or the other four without the snake handles—didn’t come back from the crusade. Stone the Merciful, he thought. What the hell kind of warrior went out of his way to play savior to people who were doomed to die anyway? The diseased of that village had never been on the itinerary of things to do, but it might just help his own scheme of things if Wild Card was aced in the next sixty minutes trying to play savior. Something about the big colonel was nagging him the more he pondered any number of possible scenarios. The SOB could be anything—a spy, a plant, a shooter with orders given behind his back to terminate all of them if…

      There were calls over the satcom to make right then, last-minute details to be ironed out before the next incursion, a date with another homicidal megalomaniac that would go down inside Sudan’s border. Hot spots to ignite, more bad guys to stuff or cuff, dreams to hold on to, he thought. Stone was on his own. He’d forget about him for the time being and let fate run its course.

      Collins was up the ramp, kicking through a few boxes strewed before him when he heard Dugula squawking for answers as Asp and Python snapped on the leg irons, removed the plastic cuffs at gunpoint, then clamped the warlord to the cuffs on the bench.

      He marched up to Dugula, slashed a backhand across his mouth.

      “I’ll say this one time only, Habir. Any more whining, any crap out of you at all, even give me that evil eye once more, I’ll put one through your eye and dump you off with the rest of your garbage outside,” Collins rasped. “You’ll know what this is all about when I’m damn good and ready to clue you in. Not another goddamn word! So sit back and enjoy the flight.” He stood, boring Dugula with his no-shit stare, found the warlord cowed into silence.

      Where there was life, the guy figured there was hope, Collins thought, and left him to stew and taste the blood on his lip. He then passed out the orders, dividing up the duties between monitoring their consoles for any traffic in the area and securing the perimeter outside the Hercules. An all-clear from his commandos at the consoles, and he felt that insidious weight settle back on his shoulders.

      Striding aft, he stared at the distant horizon. The warbirds were gone, Wild Card six minutes on the clock already. What the hell was that big bastard all about anyway? he wondered. Angered still the colonel had bucked the game plan, he recalled giving the tactical shift by Wild Card a long few moments’ worth of spectating. Sure, the big guy could move, a pro, no doubt in his mind, but that transport truck had been indirectly dumped on its side by his Apache. It didn’t take much martial skill or effort to plow a 40 mm knockout punch into badly mauled Somalis crawling out of that rig, but Stone had bored in, just the same, going for broke. The back-shooting of two on the fly he didn’t have a problem with—hell, he would have done the same, all that honor and facing down the other guy, armed and on equal footing, just a bunch of Hollywood nonsense. It irked him, finally, that Stone had beaten him to Dugula, the new guy first to haul in a door prize, but he wasn’t about to tip his hand that the old warrior pride had been stung. He knew a whole lot more than some glory on the battlefield was at stake.

      BOLAN WAS UNDER no illusions he could save the village. Given the length of time Dugula’s genocide campaign had been underway, the thickness and numbers of black clouds rising to blot out the landscape, and swarms of vultures that seemed to multiply out of nowhere the closer the Black Hawk bore down on the massacre, the Executioner had to assume saving any innocents would simply prove an exercise in futility.

      If that was the case, Bolan had an alternative going in.

      Whatever Collins’s reasoning for not participating in what the soldier saw as the final solution to the Dugula atrocity, the least he could do for the dead was exact more than a few pounds of flesh from the savages.

      His com link tied into the flight crews of the Black Hawk and Apache, he handed out the orders as soon as they soared over the hills. Bolan found utter chaos down there, black smoke cloaking entire areas of what he could only view as a vision of Hell. He made out brief bursts of autofire rattling throughout the village, screams whipped away by rotor wash, spotted men and women still being run down, shot. If this wasn’t worth fighting against, risking his life for…

      Whether Collins had shown his true colors as a savage remained to be seen.

      Bolan put together his attack strategy based on enemy numbers, village layout, civilian body count. The majority of Somali thugs appeared to be wrapping up their grisly cleansing chore, a series of pyres confined to the far eastern edge of the campsite. He figured fifteen to twenty still torching the dead, that hardforce fit best for some Apache chain-gun pronouncement of their fate. There were still pockets of gunmen on the move as he sighted them lurching about between rows of beehive huts, combing for any survivors, skirting along a straight north-to-south sweep. With all the smoke taking to the sky, shielding the birds, and coupled with what he believed was their single-minded obsession to murder and burn, Bolan figured they had a few moments to spare before the enemy noticed they were about to be hit.

      Bolan gave it to the pilots, ordered his Black Hawk crew to drop him off at the southeastern edge of the village. There was no time to lay it out, diagram tactics and such. The Apache was to strafe the pyre grounds and churn up anything that cropped up with a gun, take out everything on wheels. To his mild surprise they copied, but why wouldn’t they? He shared leadership with Collins, but that alone was starting to make him wonder. There was no time to question motives or ponder all that Collins had done and failed to do as far as this leg of the mission fell. Bolan was on his own, and he told the four commandos Collins had handed over as much. They were to sit tight, help the M-60 door gunner with firepower