Rebel Trade. Don Pendleton

“Nito—”

       The Beretta came down on the man’s temple and temporarily silenced him. Bolan didn’t want the rebel running back to his comrades, telling tales. This way, when he was found, likely in a few days at the earliest, it would confuse them, maybe even bring some heat down on his fellow rebels from police. What Bolan absolutely didn’t need was anyone alerting his intended targets as to where he might be going next.

       Not Hakahana. Later, certainly, but not this night, and not tomorrow.

       In the morning, he would have to find the smallest watercraft available. Something inflatable that could be packed into the backseat of the Volkswagen, or maybe strapped atop its roof. Failing that, he’d have to rent or buy a trailer, make himself just that much more conspicuous. His first concern was hanging on to the advantage of surprise.

       “They won’t expect you,” Brognola had told him, as they walked among the graves at Arlington, with slate-gray clouds hiding the sun. “All over Africa, the pirates are convinced that they’re untouchable.”

       A grave mistake.

       They hadn’t reckoned on the Executioner—an oversight that could turn out to be their last.

       A room was waiting for him at the Hilton Windhoek, near the city’s zoo. Matt Cooper’s platinum AmEx would cover it, and if he fell asleep with lions roaring in the neighborhood, so be it. It would prove he was in Africa.

       In Bolan’s war, the names and faces changed, along with the landscapes, but the Evil never varied. Everywhere he went, some individual or group was hell-bent on destroying others or coercing them into some action that repulsed them, something that would push their so-called civilized society a little closer to the brink of bloody anarchy. Sometimes he felt as if he were the only plumber in a vast metropolis where every pipe not only leaked, but threatened to explode and flood the place at any moment. Rushing here and there with meager tools, he fought to stem the tide, his work unrecognized by those he saved.

       And sometimes Bolan failed.

       He couldn’t rescue every sheep from the innumerable wolves stalking the flock on seven continents. Or scratch Antarctica and make it six; the basic problem still remained. Unless he could be everywhere at once, shadowing every man, woman and child on Earth, he couldn’t do it all.

       And Evil never died.

       No matter how many of its foot soldiers Bolan liquidated, Evil always reared its head again, invulnerable to his bullets, his grenades, his blade.

       So, what?

       Spotty religious training from his childhood told Bolan that even God could not destroy Evil—or that he chose to let it run amok for reasons left mysterious. In fact, if you believed the words of “holy writ,” He had created Evil in the first place as some kind of crazy test for humankind that never seemed to end.

       Bolan didn’t know if that was true. More to the point, he didn’t care.

       His job as a committed warrior was to face Evil where it appeared and beat it down, or die in the attempt. Another round would start tomorrow, and it could go either way.

       At the moment he needed sleep.

       And time to plan his moves.

      Chapter 3

      Erongo Region, Namibia, Present

      The NSV machine gun’s sound was thunderous, eclipsing the rattle of Kalashnikovs and the pop-pop of handguns. Bolan swept the pirate camp from west to east and back again, night-vision goggles pushed up on his forehead to prevent him being blinded by the weapon’s awesome muzzle-flashes. Slugs the size of fat cigar stubs, each weighing one-ninth of a pound, ripped through men, tents and anything else before them, traveling at half a mile per second.

       It was devastating—but it couldn’t last.

       The NSV devours ammunition at a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute, and the standard belt holds only fifty rounds. Gone in four seconds, give or take. A way around that problem is the use of non-disintegrating steel belts with open links, assembled in ten-round segments using a cartridge as an interlink. While ammo belts could stretch for miles, in theory, MG barrels warp under prolonged full-auto fire, and standard ammo boxes only hold 250 belted rounds.

       Which should be running out for Bolan’s weapon any second.

       The sudden ringing silence was a shocker. Bolan had an instant choice to make: start searching for another box of ammo without knowing where it was, or run like hell. One choice meant almost certain death; the other was a gamble with no guarantees at all.

       The Executioner had always been a gambler.

       While a reload for the NSV might prove elusive, Bolan knew exactly where to find the starter button for the pirate speedboat he presently occupied alone. Grabbing his AK-47 on the run, he fired a short burst at the vessel’s mooring line, then dropped into the pilot’s chair and gunned the engine into roaring life. He ignored the fuel gauge, since he didn’t have the time nor the means to fill the gas tank, even if the needle fell on empty. Bolan had a need for speed, as some old movie put it, and it was time to split.

       One second, he was sitting still; the next, his boat was lunging forward in a westerly direction. Bolan cranked the wheel to clear the craft in front of him, but still managed to graze its stern with jolting force. There was a switch to run the bilge pump somewhere on the dash in front of him, but why waste time searching for it, when he didn’t plan to be afloat that long? The open sea lay approximately a mile in front of him, maybe two minutes if he kept the speedboat’s throttle open all the way.

       He gave a passing thought to obstacles that might undo him, but the river wasn’t deep enough for sunken wrecks, and stark desert meant no fallen trees. The only hippos still surviving in Namibia were found on game reserves, well inland, and there’d been no sign of crocodiles as Bolan had hiked in from the river’s mouth.

       Clear sailing then, but there was more on Bolan’s mind than making a clean getaway.

       He wanted the remainder of the pirates on his tail.

       To that end, he eased off the speedboat’s throttle, waited with the engine idling, staring back toward the MLF camp. It took his shaken enemies some time to get their wits about them, check out who was still alive and fit for battle. Bolan could have reached the coast, reclaimed his Zodiac and been well under way before he heard another speedboat’s engine growling on the river, but it would have meant that he had failed.

       A clean sweep was the plan, and that required a chase.

       The second boat was finally coming. Bolan waited for a visual through his night-vision goggles, but it wouldn’t do to let them close to killing range. Not if he wanted to get through the night alive.

       And that was definitely part of The Executioner’s plan.

      * * *

      JACKSON ANDJABA SURVEYED the ruins of his camp, mouthing a string of bitter curses. All around him there was devastation, dead and dying soldiers scattered everywhere, the dazed survivors struggling to their feet since the threat had passed, checking themselves for wounds.

       But he could not allow them any time for rest. The enemy who had destroyed their haven—one man—was rapidly escaping while they blundered through the compound’s smoking wreckage.

       Furious, Andjaba started shouting orders at the men whose bodies seemed to be intact. At least, he saw that they could stand upright and hold their weapons. What else did a fighting man require?

       It was a struggle, with the sound of the escaping speedboat dwindling in his ears, but finally Andjaba got a dozen men together and divided them between the two remaining boats. He climbed into the first, positioned in the bow behind a PKP Pecheneg light machine gun, belt-fed with 7.62x54 mmR rounds. Another shouted order, and the boat nosed into open water with the second vessel growling close behind it.

       The chase would come down to speed and timing.