Rogue Assault

by Don Pendleton

  The dealer’s combination home, garage and office was a mobile home flanked by a line of prefab huts. He led Bolan around the west end of the dwelling, to the first hut on that side, and used two different keys on heavy padlocks that secured its door. A switch turned on fluorescent fixtures bolted to the ceiling, and a noise inside the hut resolved itself into the humming of two dehumidifiers, one planted at each end of the hut’s interior.

  Between them, racks and tables gleamed with oily gunmetal, while crates of ammunition and accessories were stacked along both of the hut’s longer walls. The dealer shut them in once Bolan was across the threshold. He made a vague pass over his assembled merchandise with one dark hand and said, “If you find something suitable, we will discuss the price.”

  Bolan went shopping.

  The dealer’s merchandise was heavy on hardware used by his homeland’s armed forces, salted with exotic foreign items here and there. Whenever feasible on foreign soil, Bolan preferred to use the local army’s weapons, on the theory that their ammo was more readily available, and ditching them wouldn’t point to a foreign shooter.

  Bearing that in mind, his first pick was a Belgian FAL 50.63 assault rifle manufactured by Fabrique Nationale d’Herstal. It was the paratrooper’s model, with a folding stock and charging handle, plus a 406 mm barrel compared to the parent rifle’s 533 mm. Chambered for 7.62 mm NATO rounds, it was still a killer at 330 yards, with a full-auto cyclic fire rate of 650 rounds per minute.

  For his sidearm, Bolan chose another Fabrique Nationale product, the FNP-9, chambered for 9 mm Parabellum ammunition. Its magazine held sixteen rounds, while its double/single-action mechanism let him fire a seventeenth from the chamber without cocking the external hammer. A polymer frame reduced the pistol’s unloaded weight to 24.7 ounces. Tritium-illuminated sights aided with shooting in the dark, and the gun’s muzzle was threaded to accommodate a suppressor, which Bolan added to his shopping list.

  His third acquisition was an RPG-7, the Guinea-Bissau army’s standard issue antitank weapon, with a mixed bag of high explosive, fragmentation and thermobaric rockets. The latter was commonly known as a “fuel-air bomb,” because it fed on oxygen from its surroundings to produce a fiery blast wave of longer duration than any produced by condensed explosives. With an effective range of 220 yards and a theoretical striking range five times that, the RPG would open any doors that slammed in Bolan’s face.

  For closer work, Bolan chose a dozen M-312 hand grenades, fragmentation models copied outright from the American M-26 with its four-to-five-second fuse, plus a half dozen M-84 stun grenades. And for the closest work imaginable, he picked out a German-made KM2000 fighting knife, its 6.8-inch westernized tanto blade jet black, fitted with an ergonomic ambidextrous polyamide handle.

  He paid for the lot with cash from one of his usual sources—a lowlife back home who had no further need for money—and packed his new arsenal in two sturdy duffel bags. Rolling out of the junkyard, he felt fully dressed for the first time since boarding his outward-bound flight in the States.

  Zona Industrial, Bissau

  BOLAN’S FIRST TARGET was a former factory located in Bissau’s industrial zone, a half mile northwest of the former U.S. embassy, which had suspended operations back in 1998 and moved its people to Dakar. Officially, that meant Americans unwise enough to take their holidays in Guinea-Bissau were, at a bare minimum, 230 miles from any kind of help.

  No problem. Bolan wasn’t on vacation, and he had a knack for solving problems on his own.

  In fact, for human predators, he was the problem. And a fatal one, at that.

  Bolan had no idea what had been manufactured at the run-down plant standing in front of him, nor did he care. According to the information he’d received, it was a cocaine cutting plant today. The drugs came in by ship, unloaded at the waterfront and then were trucked a few blocks inland to be cut, repackaged and distributed for local street sales. It wasn’t the core of Guinea-Bissau’s drug network by any means, but Bolan had to start somewhere.

  He counted half a dozen cars outside the factory, sedans and SUVs. If they’d been loaded on arrival there could be upward of twenty people in the old three-story building. The cars would all belong to management or soldiers, since the mean income of citizens of Guinea-Bissau topped out around five hundred U.S. dollars per year. Add worker bees, and Bolan could be facing fifty, maybe sixty people in the factory, but most of them would be unarmed and disinclined to die protecting someone else’s drugs.

  He hoped so, anyway.

  The easy path would be to stand well back and hit the plant with RPGs, one high-explosive round to open up the brick wall facing him, then follow with a thermobaric warhead that would gut the place from top to bottom, sending all its product up in smoke. Simple. He’d take the overlords and soldiers anytime, but Bolan had no taste for slaughtering civilians who were driven by poverty into lives of relatively petty crime. He hoped they would be wise enough to flee, survive and carry word of what they’d seen back to their neighborhoods, let fear create a labor shortage for the men in charge.

  While Bolan tracked them down.

  Before he left the Peugeot, Bolan checked his weapons. Made a small adjustment to the shoulder rig he’d purchased with the FNP, for comfort, and made sure the thumb-break strap retaining it in place would open at his touch. He didn’t need the sound suppressor this time around, knowing that once he made his move inside the plant, all hell was going to break loose.

  His rifle wasn’t quite so easy to conceal, but Bolan did his best. With folded stock, it measured twenty-nine inches from muzzle to pistol grip, reaching midthigh when slung by its sling. The lightweight jacket Bolan wore to hide his shoulder holster covered most of it, his hand helping to mask the barrel when he stood upright. Pedestrians were sparse on this gray stretch of road, and the soldier figured any that he met would likely focus on his white face, rather than the gun barrel protruding from beneath his jacket’s hem.

  Ready, he left the car, locked it and moved out toward the brooding factory.

  * * *

  BRUNO CABRAL WAS BORED. Guarding the plant was tiresome duty, not because of any physical exertion, but the very opposite. His shift consisted of observing peasants as they mixed cocaine with baking soda, cutting purity from 99 percent to half of that or less, and packaged the new mixture for sale to users, all without allowing them to sample any of the product or remove it from the premises. His staff of guards, nine men in all, helped Cabral watch the cortadores—cutters—while they worked, but also served as a deterrent against rivals who might seek to raid the factory and make off with its powdered gold.

  Given a choice, which he wasn’t, Cabral would happily have played the other role. There was a rush beyond the reach of any drug in stalking enemies, raiding their strongholds, robbing them, relieving them of life’s sweet burden in a blaze of gunfire. Every minute that he spent eyeballing drones was precious time forever lost, nor did it help that most of them were women, stripped to skimpy underwear as one more hedge against employee pilferage. The skin show had enticed him, once upon a time, but it was dreary now.

  Not that Cabral had any choice. Orders were given; he obeyed. The men behind his syndicate merely had to wish him dead, and he would be a fading memory. There was no profit in rebellion, only death and hundreds—thousands—waiting for a chance to take his place.

  So he would suffer through the boredom, make the best of it and pray to all the gods of mayhem that his next assignment proved more interesting. Meanwhile...

  “Inacio!” he called out, to his second in command on watchdog duty.

  “I’m coming,” came the answer, footsteps drawing closer, clacking on the concrete floor.

  Inacio Viegas was a stout man, muscle under fat, with a thick mustache and hair that brushed his shoulders. He wore a stubby Steyr TMP machine pistol around his neck as if it were a pendant,
the eleven-inch weapon resting lightly on his belly. The arrangement left his hands free if he chose to draw the Walther PPS pistol that rode his right hip, or the long knife that he carried to the left.

  “Time to have a look around outside,” Cabral instructed.

  “I’m on my way,” Viegas said, and left the tiny office where Cabral retreated when the tedium became too much for him. He had a little television there, tuned at the moment to RTP África, airing a football game between the Guinea-Bissau national team and the Lions of Teranga, out of Senegal. Cabral wasn’t an avid sports enthusiast per se, but he had bet ten thousand West African CFA francs on the match and wanted to see it play out.

  Another way to kill some time.

  Cabral supposed Viegas would find nothing out of place while touring the factory’s perimeter. Although the threat of hijacking was ever present, business had been relatively calm in Bissau for the past six months; another truce was in place between the rival warlords. Until next time, anyway, when some insult or trespass set the blood flowing again.

  Cabral supposed it was a mark of sickness that he wished something would happen, anything, to give his daily life some added spice. Money was fine, of course, but if the truth be told, he had cast his lot for the organization in hope of finding some adventure. War was bad for business, he realized, but it was also where the action was.

  Without it, he was simply killing time. And time was slowly killing him.

  The Lions scored another goal, their fans went wild and Cabral cursed his home team’s goalie.

  “You useless son of a bitch! Your mother—”

  He might have added more but never got the chance, as gunfire rattled through the factory and brought him lurching upright from his chair. He snatched the AK-47 from its place beside the TV set.

  * * *

  THE BACK DOOR to the factory was locked, but Bolan got it open in a little under thirty seconds, thankful that the plant’s chief of security was lax on hardware. Likewise, there was no alarm tape on the door or any of the windows that he could see, suggesting that the operators of the plant put all their faith in men and guns.

  Why wouldn’t they?

  Their country had been fighting one domestic battle or another for the past half century, decades before most of them were alive. The gun, grenade, vendetta—it was all they knew.

  It made them dangerous.

  Once inside the factory, he shut the door behind him, softly, moving along corridors where paint flaked off the walls like scales of eczema and littered the linoleum beneath his feet. No one had given any thought to sweeping up in recent memory, letting the place slowly disintegrate as long as roof and walls remained intact. If they were breached, presumably the syndicate could find another abandoned old place to serve its needs, with no great inconvenience to the men in charge.

  The soldier hadn’t traveled far into the plant when his ears picked up a distant sound of music, something with a Latin tone, but something tribal going on behind the melody. He recognized that there were lyrics, but he couldn’t translate them.

  No matter. Tunes meant people. When he found the music’s source, he would have targets.

  But it didn’t quite work out that way.

  Bolan was getting closer to his destination, still another turn or two through mildew-smelling hallways left to go, when he picked out a closer sound. Footsteps were approaching, and a male voice was trying to sing along with the recording in the background. If the guy had asked Bolan’s opinion, the soldier would have told him not to quit his day job.

  Which, he saw a moment later, had to be plant security.

  Bolan was looking for a place to hide—a recessed doorway, anything—but hadn’t found one when the singing man came into view. He had long hair, a mustache and some kind of little SMG hanging around his neck, backing a pistol and a knife belted around his waist. At sight of the intruder, rifle raised and sighted on his chest, the guy quit singing, blinked and made his move.

  He tried for the submachine gun, and reached it just as Bolan fired, drilling his sternum with a 7.62 mm NATO round from twenty feet. Even dying as he fell, the guard emptied his magazine, filling the corridor with ricochets and concrete shards while the Executioner hit the floor and stayed there, waiting out the storm.

  Too close. Too loud. No more advantage of surprise.

  Bolan was up and running while the echoes from that fusillade of auto-fire still rattled through the factory. However many guards remained inside the plant, they’d all be on alert now. And the hired help? Would they flee or freeze in place? Maybe retreat to something like a panic room?

  Another corner, and he ran head-on into a pack of women wearing scanty underclothes and nothing else. No time to count, but Bolan guessed there had to be twenty-five or thirty, anyway. One of them squealed, and then the whole group started yelping. Bolan stepped off to one side, tried to wave them past him toward the exit, but a few in front turned back to run away from him and it became a cellulite stampede.

  Damn it!

  He followed, hanging back a little so that any guards the women met in flight wouldn’t see Bolan bringing up the rear and fire into their ranks. It was the best that he could do right now, in terms of granting mercy to the worker bees—and as he soon found out, it didn’t help at all.

  The leaders of the pack had reached another turn in the corridor and screamed their way around it, all their sisters following, when automatic fire was suddenly unleashed somewhere in front of them. Two guns, at least, and in the narrow hallway it would be impossible to miss a charging crowd. The cries of panic mingled now with wails of pain and sounds of bullets ripping into flesh.

  And now, like something from a British bedroom farce gone wrong—Scarface meets Benny Hill—the women came stampeding back toward Bolan, some spattered with blood from others, two or three clutching at wounds and sobbing as they ran. He flattened against one wall to let them pass, his rifle aimed downrange in case the shooters followed.

  But the sound of screams and bare feet slapping concrete faded, and the gunmen didn’t appear. Some kind of argument was going on around the corner, possibly involving the slaughter of the innocents, while Bolan edged his way along the corridor. He heard two voices, which confirmed his guess about the guns.

  He pulled a fragmentation grenade out of a jacket pocket, yanked the pin and pitched the lethal egg. It made a perfect bank shot off the facing wall and was gone.

  2

  Arlington, Virginia

  Four days earlier

  Mack Bolan strolled along North Randolph Street, outside the Ballston Common Mall, past trees that sprouted from their sidewalk gaps to shade the avenue. He’d been around the block already, killing time, since he had left his rented Chevy in the mall’s vast parking lot, and could have rattled off the local landmarks if there’d been a quiz.

  Inside the mall, if Bolan had been interested, he would have found no end of stores, banks, theaters and restaurants, all air-conditioned for his pleasure and collaborating to relieve him of his cash. He would have fit in all right, well groomed and stylishly attired, though desperately short of “bling.” In fact, however, this wasn’t a shopping trip, and Bolan hadn’t come to see a movie. He was waiting for a ride, hoping that Hal Brognola would arrive on time.

  Four minutes left.

  In Arlington, they normally connected at the cemetery, strolling past the graves of heroes while Brognola sketched the outlines of the latest mission, aiming Bolan like a missile toward another pack of human predators. The dead were cool about it, never interrupting, maybe eavesdropping—who really knew?—but making no suggestions, pro or con. The choice was always Bolan’s, and he rarely took a pass.

  This day, for reasons that might later be explained, the big Fed had suggested that he pick up Bolan on the street, discuss their business on the move. It made no differe
nce to the soldier, and he trusted his old friend implicitly. Whatever his old friend might have in mind, it wouldn’t be a one-way ride.

  Traffic on Randolph ran both ways, the southbound lanes on Bolan’s side. Brognola had to come from one direction or the other, and if Bolan had to cross the street to meet him, that was fine. He’d let the man be his tour guide, listen to whatever was on his mind and then decide where they should go from there.

  Brognola had been FBI when Bolan met him, in another life and war, when the Executioner was a one-man army taking on the Mafia. It had begun as payback for his slaughtered family, then turned into an international crusade when Bolan realized that taking out one nest of vipers barely scratched the surface of an ancient evil feeding off of civilized society. His struggle paralleled Brognola’s efforts to defeat the Mob by legal means, and they’d collaborated for a time, until it suited Bolan’s purposes to die in public and be resurrected as a brand-new soldier with a wider war in front of him. These days, Brognola rode a desk at the Justice Department down on Pennsylvania Avenue, and answered to the Oval Office rather than the Hoover Building down the block.

  And Bolan’s enemies? Well, faces changed and motives varied—politics, religion, race or plain old greed—but on the inside, they were all the same: ruthless and cruel, contemptuous of human life and suffering. The only language that they understood was violence—and Bolan spoke it fluently.

  In theory, his arrangement with Brognola granted Bolan freedom to reject missions that he felt to be misguided, ill-conceived or striving toward some goal that he objected to. In practice, Bolan had declined no more than two or three jobs since the program was inaugurated, one of those because he needed private time to help his sole surviving relative, the others targeting selected foreign heads of state who had displeased one or another multinational money machine.