Desert Fallout. Don Pendleton

his fingers through her hair, and Metit could tell that he was examining her scalp. When he reached the bruise that her rapist had inflicted on her to knock her out, she winced, shoulders trembling at the touch.

      “The skin’s not broken, your eyes dilate and there’s no sign of blood from your ears or nose,” Bolan said.

      “Does that mean no concussion?” Metit asked weakly.

      Bolan nodded. He gave a low whistle and called, “Kamau!”

      Metit noticed Bolan’s companion for the first time. He was a black African, well over six and a half feet tall, with powerful arms jutting from the sleeves of a khaki shirt that stretched tautly across a barrel of a chest. Kamau’s head was shaved bald, but he wore a bushy mustache and a scruff of chin growth. The African was laden with weaponry, much as her savior was, but she still hadn’t gotten a feeling of menace off either of the men.

      “Not another living soul in sight,” Kamau reported as he reached into his pack for a medical kit. “How’s she doing?”

      “She’s beat to hell and back,” Bolan replied, “but she doesn’t have a concussion or any other signs of a skull fracture.”

      “Small mercies,” Kamau said grimly, looking around.

      “Who are you?” Metit asked as Bolan put a wet compress to her forehead. He also slipped some painkillers between her dry lips and gave her a sip from the straw attached to the hydration bladder on his backpack. The straw kept her from gulping the water, but she suckled for a minute before her thirst was sated. Her stomach was no longer empty, but water and pain pills wouldn’t make her heave more. Metit’s nausea had dissipated.

      “Matt Cooper,” Bolan answered.

      “Kamau,” the big African added.

      “Names don’t explain why you’re here,” Metit said.

      “No, they don’t,” Bolan told her. “This looked like an archaeological dig. Who were the goons with the rifles?”

      “Terrorists who hit us a few days ago,” Metit answered. “We were looking for the hidden tomb of a fabled Egyptian sorcerer.”

      Kamau looked at her, then to Bolan. “That explains where Mubarak got the seeds.”

      Metit blinked, her brain starting to clear. “They were waiting for Mubarak to come back.”

      Bolan’s lips drew into a tight line. “He’s the reason we came here. Someone followed Mubarak to Somalia and tried to kill us.”

      Metit wrinkled her brow. “Are you…”

      She looked at some of the murdered riflemen.

      “No,” Kamau said. “I’m an undercover agent. Cooper, he hasn’t said. But we are here with the support of people Mubarak wanted to sell the sorcerer’s seeds to.”

      “Undercover agent?” Metit asked.

      “I’m Ethiopian,” Kamau confessed. “Our country is not thrilled to have a bunch of radical fundamentalists controlling a large part of a neighboring nation.”

      “And I’m not thrilled to see any terrorists trading diamonds for military weapons,” Bolan told her.

      Metit shook her head numbly. The clarity she’d felt when she’d recognized Mubarak’s name was fading. “Is it all right for me to lie down? My name, by the way, is Rashida Metit.”

      Bolan nodded in acknowledgment of her introduction.

      “Kamau?” he said.

      “I’ll check the perimeter again,” Kamau replied. “Whoever did this left to get into the catacombs your people were exploring. They could be on their way back any moment and they have guards at the cave entrance who could have heard you.”

      Metit shuddered. “I’ll stay awake. And quiet.”

      Kamau gave her a warm, reassuring smile, then stalked toward the entrance to the catacombs that had been built into the side of a mountain.

      Bolan rested a calming hand on Metit’s shoulder. “I’ll see what medical attention I can provide, and you fill me in on this sorcerer.”

      “Set Akhon,” Metit explained. “He was a master of death according to the few hieroglyphic references to him in the prepyramidal tombs.”

      “Prepyramidal era?” Bolan asked. “It makes sense. More than a couple of ancient peoples had developed poison sprayers and chemical flame projectors around that time.”

      “You know your ancient history,” Metit answered.

      Bolan looked toward the catacombs, then to the bodies strewed around the camp and sighed. “Only because some people don’t see humankind’s greatest mistakes as anything other than inspiration for more madness and carnage.”

      The Executioner tended to the young woman’s injuries. The psychotics who had wrought this destruction in the name of an ancient weapon were bound to return to camp sooner or later. Bolan needed Metit in peak health and able to fend for herself.

      Then, Bolan would be free to deliver justice to a ruthless squad of murderers.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Isoba Kamau thought about the twisting journey that had brought him from his youth as the child of ethnic Somali parents in Addis Ababa to the Sinai Peninsula, specifically the most recent stretch. The Ethiopian army Intelligence Division had sent Kamau undercover into Somalia, since his physical features and the Somali and Arabic taught to him by his parents enabled him to blend in, despite his great size and strength. Working his way through the ranks of infighting among the radical Islamists who had dissolved into competing factions with the defeat of the Islamic Courts Union in 2006, Kamau had risen to a position of trust under one small unit leader of the Shabaab. With his strength and fighting ability, he had proved himself to Masozi, and managed to limit his violence to rivals of the Shabaab splinter. Uncovering the pipeline of illegal Liberian diamonds that helped the young militia commander had been Kamau’s goal.

      That was when the American, Matt Cooper, arrived and the Shabaab splinter was hammered mercilessly. Cooper admitted that he had been behind some of the damage wrought among the renegade Islamists, but the major issue had been where the Egyptian Mubarak had gotten his hands on potential weapons of mass destruction like ricinus seeds. Whoever the American really was, he had seen through Kamau’s position as Shabaab security chief.

      It was probably Kamau’s polylinguistic ability, as well as the reaction to the deaths of his supposed comrades. Cooper had a sharp eye, and had betrayed that he was on his own mission of justice in the war-torn Somalia. Kamau was glad to finally drop the act of fanatic. Though he was familiar with Islam as practiced by his mother, the zero-tolerance xenophobic variety practiced by the hordes swarming southern Somalia was a heavy weight on Kamau’s broad, powerful shoulders.

      He whispered the Lord’s Prayer, the Somali-Orthodox version of it in Amharic, thanking God for the relief of breaking away from the Shabaab on a scouting mission to seek Mubarak’s stash of deadly arms and poisons.

      Masozi had whispered, before he and Cooper left for Egypt, to keep a close eye on the American. Masozi was paranoid and utterly bigoted. A white man was a devil in disguise, and Cooper’s guise as a mercenary only reinforced the Shabaab leader’s anxiety that he would betray them. Kamau, being a fellow African who knelt to Mecca five times a day, was utterly trustworthy.

      Kamau smiled at the irony as he knelt behind a rock, observing the guards at the entrance to the catacombs of Set Akhon. The AK-47 gripped in his massive hands felt like a toy, but anything larger would be impractical. He noticed movement at the entrance, and in the late-afternoon sun, he was able to finally see what the enemy looked like.

      Each was dressed in a black Nomex flight suit, the de rigueur uniform of special operations teams in the field. The suits had multiple pockets and were made of environmentally resistant materials that protected