Trial By Fire. Don Pendleton

down against the fuselage with tent spikes and burned it.

      The flight attendant screamed as the man with the machete hacked off the pilot’s hand. The corpse sagged on the three points still holding it in place. Machete man picked up the charred, fallen extremity and breathed over it like a man smelling pork chop that had just come out of the oven. The flight attendant crushed herself against the curve of the fuselage. Machete man raised his blade and pushed it hard enough between the woman’s clavicles to draw blood. He shoved the severed hand beneath her nose and snarled. Bolan didn’t speak Swahili but he was pretty sure the man had said “Eat!”

      The man shoved the hand against the woman’s face and shouted in English, “Eat!”

      The other invaders laughed.

      Bolan raised his BXP and fired.

      The one-and-half-pound South African riot grenade hit the man in the side of the head at about eighty miles per hour. He dropped the machete and rubbernecked three steps sideways into the wing with the embedded grenade ejecting its multiple skip-chaser bomblets out of his skull like a slot machine paying off. Bolan wrenched the rifle-grenade rings off his weapon and spun the suppressor tube onto his smoking muzzle. Thick gray gas began to fill the camp like a fog.

      Two men turned towards the sound of the grenade’s launch-thump, but Bolan had already moved. The two men sprayed the underbrush on full-auto. Bolan put 3-round bursts through each man’s chest and kept circling. South Africans knew something about riots, and the bomblets were filling the area with gas with remarkable efficiency. The jungle fighters had clearly never been exposed to CS. They stumbled about waving their arms and firing their guns in all directions. Two of the smarter ones turned their weapons on the captives. Bolan burned down both men before they could get off a shot.

      A guerrilla caught sight of Bolan through his streaming eyes and charged, waving a panga and screaming hysterically. The Executioner’s first burst staggered him, and the second sent him sprawling into the mud by the creek. The soldier kept circling. His weapon made a suppressed snapping noise, but between the gas, the screaming and AK full-auto fire the enemy still hadn’t spotted him.

      Two of the cadets jumped up to make a run for it.

      “Cadets! Stay down!” Bolan roared.

      They were teenagers, but they were U.S. Military teenagers and they were used to being bellowed at. The two cadets dropped like rocks. Bolan’s yell had a wonderfully focusing effect on the remaining five guerrillas. They spun on their oppressor. The soldier knocked them down like bowling pins. The BXP racked open on a smoking empty chamber with two targets still standing. Bolan dropped the spent weapon and slapped leather for the South African police pistol on his belt. A rifle bullet cracked by his head far too close for comfort. Bolan double-tapped each assailant in the chest to cease hostilities and two more in the face to put them down.

      The pistol racked open on empty. The screaming and shooting had stopped. The camp was quiet except for sobbing and choking, and the hiss of the CS munitions.

      Bolan took a deep breath and strode into the gas.

      He drew his knife and slashed the bonds of each cadet “Get out of the gas! Stick your heads in the creek! Go! Go! Go!” Bolan hooked the copilot under the arms. He had two broken legs, was gut-shot and the gas wasn’t doing him any favors.

      “You!” Bolan shouted at the flight attendant. “Help me!” Bolan dragged the copilot to the creek. Cadets lay prone in a line with their heads in the water like horses that had galloped a hundred miles.

      Bolan lay the copilot down and grabbed a fallen canteen. He shoved it into the flight attendant’s hands. “Wash out your eyes, then his!” Bolan stuck his head beneath the water and blinked repeatedly. He rose and reloaded his submachine gun and pistol, then scooped up a blood-spattered knit cap and strode back into the gas. He gathered up the still hissing gas bomblets and hurled them downstream.

      The soldier went back to the crew and took a knee beside the blonde flight attendant. Her eyes were red, swollen and still streaming from the gas. The copilot’s inflamed eyes rolled with delirium. He moaned as the woman flushed them out. Her Boer accent was thick enough to cut with a knife. “His legs were broken in the crash.”

      “And after?”

      “Bastards came at dawn. Pieter took a shot at them, didn’t he, but he was hurt and missed. They shot him in the stomach, twice. Called him long pig. Said he was going to taste better if he died slow. Made us dig up the pilot.” The woman shuddered. “Did some kind of voodoo with him.”

      Bolan gave the flight attendant a frank look. “You all right?”

      “Yes, I mean, no, I mean, it was bad, but I’m not like you mean. I think they wanted to have more fun with us. But from the way they talked? They got a boss man, some fella called Caesar, and a boss woman, Mama-something. They’re shite-scared of them.” The woman nodded at the female cadet, and the rest as they worked. “Me, the girl? God help us, the boys? I think the boss man and his cronies get first crack.”

      “Stay with Pieter. We’ll make a litter.”

      The cadets began to rise up from the creek. They milled around looking between the battlefield and Bolan as the remaining gas dispersed. The soldier glanced upward as he heard thunder roll. This neck of the rain forest was known to average eighty inches of rain per year, and the daily deluge was about to unload. They had to get moving. Bolan grimaced as he took in what had once been the cadets’ mirror-bright, full dress uniform shoes. They would all be lame by nightfall.

      “Lose the shoes!” The cadets gazed at him numbly. Bolan pointed at the corpses. “If you didn’t pack boots or sneakers, you’ve got six pairs of boots and three pairs of sandals right there. Strip the bodies. Cut off the shirtsleeves and pant legs. If the boots are too big, wrap your feet until they fit.” The cadets just stared. Bolan bellowed at the shell-shocked military cadets. “Move!”

      A very large cadet wiped at his streaming eyes. He tottered over to the nearest corpse and began tugging off its pants. He threw up but moved on to the shirt. Another cadet moved to help him. “Once you got your feet taken care of, take anything of use and pile it here,” Bolan ordered. “Weapons, cell phones, matches, money, spare clothes, anything of value.”

      The soldier stuck his head in the cabin as two of the cadets went through it.

      The interior had been ransacked in an inefficient fashion. Clothes and personal effects were scattered from the cockpit to the lavatory. The plane hadn’t been stripped clean like the bones of a kill the way one might expect in Equatorial Africa. The looters had simply taken whatever they wanted rather than every last thing of value.

      That didn’t bode well.

      Bolan walked over to the growing piles of plunder.

      The weapons were nearly all Chinese Type 56 AK-47s with folding spike bayonets. The standouts were a Russian RPD machine gun and a Dragunov sniper rifle that was missing its telescopic sight. Bolan found two South African RAP-401 pistols like the one he carried, which likely belonged to the pilot and copilot, since machetes and pangas seemed to be the usual weapon of choice for the locals.

      The loot from the plane was nearly as welcome as the firearms. Bolan had brought a first-aid kit, but the plane’s kit was the kind of medical smorgasbord that only a private luxury craft that never expected to have a medical emergency insisted on including. This jet also had a survival kit.

      The random pile included books of matches, several lighters, watches, cell phones and the personal effects of tribal militias.

      Bolan frowned at the last and unfortunately smallest pile before him.

      There was very little in the way of rations, and what there was consisted of three small bags of rice. The universal mess of irregular forces in sub-Saharan Africa was boiled rice and bush meat of the day. It was going to be Bolan and his squad’s as well for the foreseeable future. What was missing told him a lot. There were no blankets. No sleeping bags or hammocks. All these men carried were their weapons and a light lunch. The fact