Predator Paradise

But who was to blame in the final analysis? Bolan had to wonder. The one who handed them the weapon, or the one who freely accepted it? Both?

No matter really, he knew, since a bullet would kill him no matter who fired it, whether a raving sociopath, a frightened kid threatened by elders to do murderous deeds, or a warrior fully seasoned with the blood of other warriors on his hands.

One of the boys was dead before he hit the ground, cradling something, the other standing, capping off another and unnecessary burst into unfeeling flesh, then taking in what he had done, head cocked halfway toward the Executioner, oblivious to all else, eyes twinkling mirrors of the firestorms. Was that pride in the eyes? The boy satisfied? Whatever sick drama had played out here, Bolan would never know but he could venture a guess. The soldier glimpsed the shredded ruins of the small child, butchered alongside with what he assumed was his potential rescuer, then he pounded a burst of autofire up the back of their killer. The boy never knew what hit him, and it was just as well, Bolan thought. Mercy, if any was due, was reserved for the afterlife.

There would be time enough, assuming he walked out of here in one piece, to feel hot anger later. Even still, he knew there could never be any reasoning—or mercy shown for the guilty—for the madness he found here. The Executioner briefly felt a curious, distant, otherworldly sense, as light as the wind, slightly disembodied even as he waded deeper into this horror. It was as if he’d been here before, and he had, too many times, in fact, to tally. It struck him—as he heard the Apache unload Hellfire missiles, the stutter of weapons fire from the Black Hawk mowing down illegal combatants—all of this murder of innocents strewed before him, a zenith of man’s inhumanity to man, had always been here, somewhere in time and place, one way one or another, throughout the ages. Human nature was the only one constant, and sad but true, that went double for animal man.

The guilty had to be punished, no exceptions, no mercy. High time, he decided, for a little Old Testament vengeance.

Bolan melted into, then swept out of the drifting smoke, his gut knotted with a grapefruit-size chunk of raw anger, despite the intention to roll into this a stone-cold professional. Unless he was a psychopath or simply evil, Bolan knew no man could fully digest without the first flicker of wrenching emotion the atrocity that had happened here. With the full slamming force of death in his face, the bile squirmed in his gut for a moment, urging him on to wax as many armed killers as quickly and mercilessly as possible. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed the dead; vultures, brazen and impatient to gorge, descending now on bodies. He could ill afford to concern himself with unfeeling flesh, dwell on the full, hideous impact of all these lives snuffed out so callously. And if there was contagion here, he was willing to risk infection, if only to avenge this monstrosity, Collins be damned.

They were running everywhere dead ahead, trying to flee certain death from above, haphazard human—or inhuman—traffic rearing up in his sights as he came out of the thickest patch of smoke. Closing on the hungry bonfires consuming diseased flesh, a few of the gunmen fired wild bursts at the warbirds, squawking in panic and confusion over this sudden final judgment of their deed. Three, then four hardmen wheeled around the corner of a firewall dancing up a hut that used to provide the most meager of shelter, he assumed, for the late occupants. They skidded to a halt, ten or so paces from Bolan, sandaled feet kicking up dust. Figure the horrific pounding of explosions and the sight of their own getting a heavy-metal dose of their own poison was too much for them to stomach, fleeing now to save themselves.

There was nowhere for them to run or hide.

Two of them stared at the sight of the tall white man who had marched out of nowhere, staring ahead as if he were some avenging angel of doom that had materialized out of the smoke. Their eyes wide, the soldier read the looks, then heard the muffled cries from behind bandannas. It sounded as if they wanted their lives spared, a show of mercy from the lone invader. It was all just some terrible mistake. Two of them were on the verge, it looked, of throwing down their arms.

How could they expect that which they had never shown? Bolan decided, and blew them off their feet, a raking blast of steel-jacketed projectiles down the line, flinging them back toward other running and doomed killing brethren being gored and gutted from the sky.

There was no point, Bolan knew, in engaging in a long and protracted sweep of the village and its perimeter. Fire was eating up anything left standing. The smoke was so thick, so putrid it left little doubt to Bolan the savages had completed their task.

What was left of the hardforce was pretty much chopped up or blown into the firewalls next as a Hellfire missile ripped through a motor pool, ten or more broken dark figurines taking to the air above the crunching blast. A half dozen far from the epicenter were sent staggering about from the shock wave, howling next, flinching, darting from renewed bursts of terror no doubt kicking them into high gear as wreckage hammered home.

Ducking under a winging slab of metal, Bolan hosed down a few more Somali killers, then changed clips on the advance, began searching the hellgrounds.

The evil fumes pouring into his senses was enough to nearly knock even the most battle-hardened soldier off his feet, and Bolan knew he wasn’t above any queasy roil in his gut. He swiveled, searching, attempting to control any deep intakes of the foul air. He spotted an armed runner to his nine, hit the trigger on his M-16. The Executioner drove the gunner into his comrade, who was minus an arm just above the elbow from the Hellfire amputation. A mercy burst, and the amputee dropped in his tracks in an ungainly flop, face plastered to earth.

All done?

Bolan listened to raging flames, scoured the dead for wounded or live ones, bodies strewed and stacked in what was a fairly tight but wide circle where the warbirds had unleashed their final ring of doom, two or three flaming technical carcasses seeming to float back to Earth like some ghastly magic act.

Keying his com link, scanning the carnage, peering into the smoke and fires for any signs of armed resistance, the Executioner raised the Black Hawk’s pilot. Sitrep. He barely heard Black Hawk One inform him it looked clear of hostiles from where he sat, sickened as he was by what he saw here. Perhaps it was because he’d been here before—other places, other times—but the end result was all the same.

Death. All gone on, both the innocent and the guilty.

Again, Bolan felt a part of his soul, his humanity collapsing on itself, a sorrow welling up from deep inside, wanting to take him down into a void of hot rage. He would suck it up, of course, aware this was only the beginning, that more monsters were beyond Somalia, their own rampage only just out of the gate to lay waste to whatever evil they didn’t bag for some future trial. Perhaps, he thought, this evil he found here was simply a microcosm of the end. He was no doomsayer, no Nostradamus and certainly no John the Divine, but he had to wonder. Was this just part and parcel of the evolution of man speeding to his ultimate destiny? Would, could, such evil in a part of the world where life meant less than zero, spread like a cancer, spill from one border to the next, contaminate one country after the other? No matter what he did, no matter how much evil he destroyed, he knew the Four Horsemen would live on in Somalia—perhaps continue to thrive throughout the entire region known as the Horn of Africa—but at least a fat batch of homicidal maniacs could no longer scourge their own countryside.

Was it enough? Was it ever?

The Black Hawk was down, time to go, and the Executioner hopped up through the hatch. He wished he could have done far more here, spare at the very least a few innocent lives, but he would be glad to put this evil place behind.

Damn glad, but the nagging question lingered in his mind: what next?

“YOU’RE LATE. Sixty-five minutes isn’t an hour, Stone. We’re rolling, we’re on a tight schedule here. I’m talking deadlines that are shaved down to seconds, or have you forgotten mission priority?”

“We can meet you back at Shark Base if your panties are that twisted up.”

“Don’t get fucking smart, Stone, and we’re not going back to Kenya.”

“News to me.”

“I can believe that. By the way, quite the floor show I hear you put on. Too bad it didn’t make a damn bit of difference, since I understand from my flying aces on your Black Hawk loaner Dugula’s qat-chewing shitbags had already wiped out that village. What was that all about anyway, you going in alone?”

Bolan had turned off his hand radio, shed his com link when boarding the Black Hawk, wanting only a few brief moments with his own thoughts to bury the weight of where he’d just been, what he’d seen. He had begun to shed the ghosts of the hell he was putting behind, in the air, when Tsunami had pointed at his own, then the soldier’s handheld radio, Collins squawking for him to shag his ass and pick up.

Now, if he didn’t know better, it sounded to Bolan as if Collins was disappointed he was still on the team, alive and kicking. Collins pointed out their former ranks in the military didn’t mean squat in the here and now, it was his show, the gist Bolan caught being he was on board as a courtesy, that he had to have humongous muscular clout somewhere that the Cobra leader would sure as hell like to have a face-to-face with, since Colonel Stone didn’t strike him as a team player. Collins repeated his question.

“Concern.”

“What?” Collins snapped.

“For your troops, since you were all worked up about anybody coming down with some plague.”

“Took the gamble yourself, I see. Appreciate all that big concern for the men, but I tell you what, the first sign you’re sick from something you picked up back there, I don’t give a damn if you cough too hard or break out in a sudden sweat, you’re off the team. And if I have to, I’ll strap a parachute on you myself and drop you in the middle of nowhere.”

Bolan ignored the threat. “We’re two minutes, maybe less away from—”

“I’ve got you marked on my screens. Just hustle the fuck up when you guys get dropped off—belay that, I want to see you sprint up the ramp.”

Bolan grunted. Somehow he didn’t picture himself sprinting on the good major’s command.

“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before the next round, and it’s going down in a few hours. I’m assuming you’ve got a few jumps behind you?”

“One or two.”

“You’re shitting me, I hope.”

“If you’re worried about me breaking a leg or my neck, don’t. But if you don’t mind, I’ll rig my own chute, okay?”

“I wouldn’t see it any other way. Oh, and Stone? No more cowboy or crusader shit. We clear?”

Bolan hesitated, then said, “Yeah.”

“You want to bleed for all the little people not even their own give a camel’s steaming pile about, do it on your own dime or go find a church, light a candle and finger the Rosary. From here on, you better get acquainted with the concepts of team integrity and tactical cohesion.”

Collins was off the air as at least three different remarks—two of which were smart-ass—leaped to Bolan’s mind about those particular concepts. What the hell was really going on here? he wondered. With each passing minute and every exchange turning more brittle and heading toward volatile with Collins, the more the soldier was feeling the hairs wanting to stand up on the back his neck. Something about Cobra Force Twelve was out of tilt.

It wasn’t the blinding light of any divine truth being revealed, but it damn near felt like a bolt of lightning hitting him between the eyes, seeking to jolt him closer to a dark reality. He searched the faces of the commandos Collins had wanted joined to his hip, but didn’t allow the look to linger or penetrate. It was just a suspicion, nagging, growing, but one he decided to keep to himself until…

What?

That only four of the commandos carried serpent handles? That they were special to Collins, not essentially and integrally part of the team? But, if so, why? What demon lurked behind the masks of that tactical integrity, duty and honor they believed they showed him? His gut—rarely wrong—told him not only was there something shady, perhaps even sinister about his so-called teammates, but that this mission was set to come unraveled.

He’d play it out to the end of whatever the ride, the Executioner decided, aware now more than ever he was on his own, but one soldier up against who, how many and what?

HIS BLACK-OPS HANDLE for Operation Stranglehold—the mission so tagged by Cobra Central—was Gambler, but his real name was…

Who really knew? The name Harry Smith wanted to come to mind if he chose to replay a childhood that never existed. No one, not even himself, could remember his given name at birth. Even all the classified documents and disks at the NSA and the CIA were so full of deletions on his past operations and his slew of assumed names and handles not even the superspooks could accurately confirm his true identity, if put to task.