Trial By Fire. Don Pendleton

liked. He swiftly divvied up the piles into working loads and packed them into the luggage that had shoulder straps.

      He nodded at the tallest and largest cadet as the youth laced up his commandeered boots. “You.”

      The young man leaped to his feet. “Sir?”

      Bolan checked the load in the RPD. “You’re my pig man.”

      “Sir?”

      Bolan shoved the RPD into the young man’s hands. “You’re my pig man. You are humping this pig.” Bolan draped two canvas sacks containing spare 100-round drums across the oxlike shoulders before him. “You copy?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Who can shoot a pistol?”

      A diminutive cadet and the flight attendant raised their hands. Bolan handed out South African steel to the woman and gave the cadet a rifle and spare magazines. “Who knows how to make a litter?”

      A black cadet raised his hand.

      “Good, grab a buddy and get the copilot loaded up.”

      Bolan looked at the dead enemies. Their tracks said they had come from the west. The creek was flowing south. “Put the bodies in the creek.”

      The cadets stared. They were close to losing it. “Move!” One advantage Bolan had on this mission was that his charges were U.S. Military preparatory school cadets. Unlike a lot of American teenagers, they knew how to take orders. “I have to make a call.”

      The cadets and crew all gave Bolan very hopeful looks

      He walked a bit away and pressed a preset button on the CIA satellite phone he’d picked up in Pretoria. He waited while his signal moved through significant filters. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman answered. “Striker, this is Bear. Sitrep.”

      “Objectives were taken. I took them back. Pilot is dead. Copilot is badly injured and going septic.”

      “Describe ‘taken,’ Striker.”

      “Nine hostiles down. Believe hostiles happened upon crash site by chance. They’re not our shooters, but they’re not alone. They were a patrol for a larger force.”

      “Any identifiers?”

      “Leaders possibly named Caesar and Mama. Check the scuttlebutt for the area.”

      “Copy that, Striker.”

      “Pilot died in crash. His body was exhumed. Things were done. I interrupted an atrocity in the making. I have a worst-case scenario. Requesting immediate extraction.”

      “Negative, Striker. No extraction assets within range.”

      “Requesting immediate backup. SEALs, Rangers, anyone within airborne range.”

      “Negative on U.S. Military personnel, Striker.”

      “Request Farm personnel, Able, Phoenix, any and all available.”

      “Negative on Farm personnel.” Bolan could hear the regret in Kurtzman’s voice. “Exposure is already too high.”

      The vault of the African heavens broke open. Rain sheeted down as if liquid curtains falling out of the sky. The silver lining was that maybe it would cover their tracks and help obscure the crime scene.

      “Striker…”

      Bolan knew by Kurtzman’s voice it was bad. “Copy, Bear.”

      “I have been instructed to tell you that if you can extract the primary objective, secondary objectives can be considered…expendable.”

      Bolan’s blood went cold. “I understand. Farm Protocol 4. Mission understood.”

      “Copy that, Striker. Will advise.”

      There was no Farm Protocol 4. It was a code word arranged by Bolan and Kurtzman. It could have been Corn Flakes or Looks Like Rain. What Bolan had just told Kurtzman was that he had gone rogue. It was Bolan’s mission, and he was operating outside government jurisdiction. No one was expendable save himself, and the Stony Man Farm computer expert should establish a private link between Bolan and the Farm.

      “Any chance on a supply drop?”

      “Working on it. Must advise not to plan on it.”

      “Copy that. Striker out.”

      Bolan strode back into the center of camp. “Everyone, take a gun. Take a pack. Take a machete.” Bolan glanced up as the African sky continued to unload. “We’re out of here.”

      2

      “Dead!” Julius Caesar Segawa was incensed. As far as he was concerned, this section of the rain forest was his private reservation. Anything that entered was either prey or asked and paid for permission to enter. He stared down at the naked, bloated, bullet-perforated, logjam of his men clogging a bend in the creek. “Dead! I want them dead! Whoever has committed this atrocity! They burn in my fire! Their livers sizzle upon my plate with onions!”

      Segawa’s men shook their rifles as they became willingly infected with their savior’s rage.

      Solomon Obua knelt his mighty frame by the creek bed and stared at the bodies. Obua had been a Ugandan superheavyweight Olympic boxing contender. His dreams of Olympic and professional boxing glory had ended after he had killed his second opponent in the ring in his second Pan-African game. Obua had joined the army, and in the forest he had heard the call of Julius Caesar Segawa—his true calling. Years of jungle fighting had stripped Obua’s six-foot-six, 250 pound physique down to 210 pounds, which left him looking like a bodybuilder who had spent the last six months in a death camp. His body consisted of little else but muscle and sinew that crawled across his bones. Segawa’s men grew their hair and beards out to be more like Jesus, and Segawa, but Obua still shaved his head as he had when he was a boxer. Segawa ruled through religious intimidation and willpower. Obua enforced Segawa’s will through sheer physical intimidation.

      Obua’s father had been a game guide for safari hunters before Ugandan independence from the United Kingdom. There was nothing Obua didn’t know about tracking in Equatorial Africa. It was Obua’s belief that over the past ten years God had told him directly that his best quarry, and his best food, was man.

      They had found the crash site, and what Obua had discovered there intrigued him. There had clearly been a mighty battle but no trace of any of the brethren. The rain had washed away much of the evidence, but throwing the bodies in the creek was simple deduction. Obua slid into the water and pulled a corpse to him. He stuck an inhumanly long and bony finger into a bullet hole and probed. A bullet came up beneath his ministrations. “A 9 mm round, Caesar. Subsonic hollowpoint.” He turned to the next closest body and dug another mushroom-shaped bullet out his best scout’s spleen. “Another 9 mm, subsonic hollowpoint.”

      Segawa’s men had committed the worst atrocities that Africa had seen in the new century, yet several soldiers turned from the sight of Obua’s hands-on crime-scene investigation and threw up. Obua probed every last injury of every corpse. William Wagaluka had been the squad leader. The burned and bone-crushed wound in the side of his head confounded even Obua. He pulled the bullets out of the last two bodies and peered at them. “More 9 mms…solids.”

      “Brother William said he had Uncle Sam’s children in his grasp.” Segawa mentally reviewed the pictures of the cowering cadets Wagaluka had texted him. The flight attendant would be given to the men. The female cadet had intrigued Segawa particularly. The single cell-phone picture he had seen of her had painted an entirely new ritual in his mind. “You say the Americans have reached out for their children so fast?”

      Obua looked long and hard at a bloody bullet and then flicked it into the water. The more he examined the situation the more it intrigued him. “The Americans, they no use 9 mms except in their pistols. They all carbined up.”

      “English?” Segawa scowled. “French?”

      “Same-same.”