Rogue Assault

by Don Pendleton

  “Let’s have a look,” Bolan suggested, then descended via metal stairs that occupied one corner of the pit. A pry bar lay atop one of the larger crates, and Bolan quickly had its lid off, baring half a dozen AK-47s to the light, well oiled and packed in straw.

  “Bingo,” he said, and moved on to a smaller crate. Grenades in that one, Semtex in the top crate of the stack beside it.

  “What we need,” he told Medina, “are the detonators.”

  Storing detonators with explosives is the biggest no-no in the arms trade, nearly any novice being smart enough to figure out that placing them in close proximity to each other was an invitation to disaster—and to sudden death. Bolan still checked the pit, but came up empty. While Medina went to check the nearby cabinets, before heading to the other rooms, Bolan proceeded to collect supplies he thought might prove useful in their campaign.

  Some of the Semtex, for a start, would be a bonus, then two cases of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition and one of 7.62 mm NATO rounds. He had them stacked up on the floor above the service pit when Medina called out, “Here they are!”

  He brought a box of blasting caps back from a cabinet on the west wall of the garage. “The box says fuses,” he explained. “If no one looked inside, they would suppose fuses for trucks.”

  “Not even close,” Bolan replied, viewing the detonators wrapped in layers of cotton. “Now we need some kind of timer.”

  “I’ll go look,” Medina said, and went to search the building’s other rooms. Bolan descended to the pit once more, removed the yellow blocks of Semtex from their crate and started planting them among the stacks of wooden boxes holding guns and ammunition. By the time he’d placed a detonator in each charge, Medina had returned, lugging a microwave oven.

  “This has a timer,” he said. “It is all I could find. But as to the wiring...” He shrugged.

  “We can manage,” Bolan told him. “Plug it in as close as possible, then help me find some wire for the connections.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they had rigged an octopus of slender wires attached to half a dozen detonators and were ready to depart. One trip removed the cases they were keeping to the back steps, after which Bolan knelt to set the microwave’s timer for twenty minutes. More than time enough for them to clear the lot, the fence, the neighborhood.

  They had dropped Furtado in a safe place, pressed combat dressings to his wounds and were a quarter-mile away when Storm Transport ceased to exist, consumed by flame and thunder, sending out a shock wave that cracked windows in a four-block radius. Bolan imagined ammunition cooking off in the inferno, sounding like a war zone.

  Which, in fact, it was.

  The Executioner had brought his war to Guinea-Bissau with a vengeance, no holds barred.

  And he was blitzing on.

  6

  Hal Brognola was relaxing at home with a glass of whiskey when the phone rang on his desk. He recognized the muted grumble of his private line at once and frowned. It rarely brought good news, and even then it nearly always meant that someone had been killed.

  He set down his glass and reached for the phone, hoping the right people would be dead.

  “Hello,” he said. The scrambler kicked in automatically, defeating any eavesdroppers.

  “I’m just updating,” Bolan said without preamble or a salutation, speaking to him from tomorrow and forty-two hundred miles eastward. “We’re up two to nothing and counting.”

  “Did I hear you say we?” Brognola inquired, with a frown. “Does that mean us?”

  “Funny thing,” Bolan said. “At the first stop, a cop under cover came out of the closet to help.”

  “That’s a fluke,” Brognola replied. “He’s legit? Is it he?”

  “Yes and yes,” Bolan answered. “I saw his ID. Seems he’s burned out on swimming upstream, getting nowhere.”

  “Your call,” the big Fed allowed, “but it sounds like a bad career move.”

  “I suggested a contact. He’s thinking it over. I’ll leave it with him.”

  “Which department?” Brognola asked.

  “The Judicial Police.”

  “And you figure he’s clean?”

  “If he’s not,” Bolan answered, “the people who bought him are going to be disappointed.”

  “As long as he doesn’t sell you down the river.”

  “I’m on top of it,” Bolan assured him. “No contact with regulars yet, but Camara’s guys know someone’s working their turf.”

  “About those regulars,” Brognola said, “you need to keep an eye out for the Special Intervention Force. They’re cops, at least on paper, but—”

  “I know. And I’m playing by the rules.”

  “Your rules,” the big Fed answered back.

  “That’s right.”

  Brognola recognized Bolan’s commitment to abstain from cop-killing, regardless of the circumstances, and while he appreciated that stand as a former G-man, he could also say that there were so-called lawmen he’d have dropped the hammer on in nothing flat, if it came down to life-or-death time. Take those two in New York City, for example, who had served as hit men for the Mafia. Or the six who’d been arrested back in 2010, for taking out the mayor of Santiago, Mexico. Hell, Mexico’s entire Federal Judicial Police force had been disbanded in 2002, for corruption, replaced by a new Federal Investigations Agency—and that outfit had only lasted seven years before it had to be dismantled.

  Bottom line: Brognola had been a cop of one kind or another most of his adult life, and he knew damn well from personal experience that some of his brothers behind the badge—“soldiers of the same side” in Bolan’s parlance—deserved no more than a solitary cell or a swift lethal injection. Still, if the Executioner exempted cops en masse from his attentions, there was nothing the big Fed could do to change his mind.

  “You’ll watch it, though?” he asked, hoping it didn’t sound like nagging to his oldest living friend.

  “You know I will,” Bolan replied.

  “Okay, then. If there’s anything you need...”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Right. Stay frosty, guy.”

  “West Africa,” Bolan said. “Frost is hard to come by. Later.”

  And the line went dead. No lingering over goodbyes, and what would be the point, when any might be the last?

  Brognola didn’t see himself as fatalistic, though he tended to be cynical. What lawman wasn’t, if he’d spent more than a weekend on the job? You went in hoping to be good, to make a difference, and wound up satisfied if you went home alive, in one piece, when your shift was over. As for “saving” anyone, what did that even mean today?

  Helping the relatively innocent to stay alive, perhaps, if only for another day or two.

  Before the next damned predator showed up.

  “God keep,” he told the silent room, and reached for his whiskey.

  Cupelon de Cima, Bissau

  “YES, I UNDERSTAND,” Edouard Camara said. “There were no witnesses? Yes, thank you, you’ll receive the normal bonus.”

  After he cut the link, Camara wondered why in hell he was thanking the policeman who had called. For bringing more bad news? He’d lost more valuable property, and this attack would do more damage to his reputation than the first, if left unpunished. But who could he punish to set an example, with no ID for the person or persons behind the assaults?

  Camara understood the motive—first to weaken, then destroy him—but that didn’t help identify his enemy. There were too many of them for a random guess to do much good. He thought at once of Amilcar Mané and Danilson Pinhel, his main competitors, but would the navy or the air force back their leading traffickers in what amounted to a war against the army under General Diallo?

  Doubtful.

  Then, he had the vague descripti
on of a white man from the first attack, whatever that might mean. Since Guinea-Bissau had become the leading hub for cocaine shipments from West Africa to Europe, more white “tourists” had been visiting the capital. Nearly all of them were male, well dressed, with faces that betrayed hard lives. Camara had been visited by Brits and Irishmen, by French and Dutch importers, by crude Russians and one elderly Sicilian who complained about the weather and the food while bargaining for drugs.

  Any or all of them might move against Camara if they thought removing him would grant them some advantage. Each had doubtless ordered death for dozens, maybe hundreds, in their respective homelands, but Camara thought they were probably wise enough to avoid direct confrontation with General Diallo in a nation as unstable as Guinea-Bissau. To remove Camara personally, hoping his successor might negotiate a lower price per kilo, would be one thing. But an all-out war against his Family was something else. Why not simply go shopping from the other military services instead?

  And there was still the problem of his missing soldier from the first attack. The name Nilsen Medina meant no more to him than that of any other peasant on the street, but he had passed inspection for recruitment by the Family, a proven killer with a record of arrests, albeit futile ones. For him to vanish, leaving six dead members of his nightwatch team behind, could only mean one of two things: Medina had been kidnapped by the killers, for some reason still unknown, or else he was one of the killers.

  That would mean he’d been a traitor all along. What in the West was called uma tupeira—a mole. If that turned out to be the case...

  Camara’s men were searching for Medina, scouring the city for a trace of him. So far they had found nothing, but such things took time.

  Edouard Camara hoped he had the time to spare.

  Quelêle, Bissau

  THE LAST PATRONS WERE straggling out of Flor de Paixão, which Medina translated for Bolan as the Passion Flower. The club was closing for the night, its diehard drinkers stagger-stepping as they left, supporting one another, talking in the too-loud voices frequently invoked by alcohol as if intoxication threatened deafness. Bolan watched the stragglers lurch off into darkness, while a stocky doorman locked them out and killed the nightclub’s neon.

  “Passion Flower, eh?”

  Medina shrugged. “They come to drink and maybe find a partner for the night. There would have been objections if Camara’s men called it the Brothel.”

  Bolan scanned the street, confirming that the other shops and bars along the block were also closed, no customers or nightly cleaning crews in evidence. He hated collateral damage and took every possible step to avoid it when circumstances permitted.

  “Okay, then,” he said, and prepared the Semtex. First, Bolan inserted the detonator, one of a half dozen still remaining from the stash they’d found at Storm Transport. One of its wires led to a battery they had acquired in transit from an all-night market that also sold cheap kitchen timers. Bolan completed the circuit, packed his IED into a shopping bag and stepped out of the car.

  Medina followed him across the street toward Flor de Paixão, covering their advance with his Spectre M4. On arrival at the club’s recessed front door, Bolan knelt and set the kitchen timer for two minutes, then retreated to the Peugeot with Medina on his heels. Bolan could hear the numbers running in his head before the plastic charge exploded, taking out the nightclub’s door and a substantial portion of the surrounding brickwork.

  Bolan took his rifle from the Peugeot’s driver’s seat and started back across the street, Medina keeping pace with him. A satchel with more Semtex, batteries and timers hung from Bolan’s left shoulder, nudging his hip with every stride. He had the detonators in a shirt pocket, well separated from the blasting compound that was otherwise inert.

  They reached the sidewalk as the nightclub’s doorman came back into view, gape-mouthed and staring at the rubble of the entryway. This time he had a pistol in his hand, and Bolan didn’t wait for him to raise it. One shot from the FAL 50.63 knocked his target back and out of frame, into the smoky darkness of the bar.

  Bolan cleared the threshold seconds later, with Medina covering his back. They passed the doorman’s nearly faceless corpse and moved into the nightclub proper, where the members of a cleaning crew stood cringing over brooms and vacuum sweepers. Farther back, another gunman roared out of a back room, pumping the slide on a short-barrel shotgun. Bolan and Medina fired together, dropping him before he had a chance to aim and fire.

  “Let’s get the others out of here,” Bolan said.

  Turning to the task, Medina shouted at the janitors, “Saia enquanto você ainda pode!”

  They were quick to take the hint, taking their gear along as they departed from the nightclub in a rush. While they were clearing out, Bolan surveyed the place, deciding where to place his charges for maximum effect. Behind the bar, for one, where alcohol would fuel the hungry flames, and against two pillars that upheld the ceiling’s weight.

  Already moving as the last of the custodians escaped, he went to work.

  * * *

  GENERAL DIALLO TOOK the call reluctantly, listened, then grunted at the caller and hung up. There was no option but to listen when a colonel of the Special Intervention Force called to report another raid against Diallo’s interests in Bissau. Edouard Camara would be calling shortly, he supposed, with a redundant message, and Diallo meant to find out why the gangster hadn’t solved their problem yet.

  In combat, swift solutions were the answer to most difficulties. Find an enemy and annihilate him without mercy. General Diallo saw no reason why the present circumstances should be any different, simply because his adversaries didn’t wave a flag or dress in uniforms.

  Camara disappointed him. If that continued, he would have to think about installing a replacement after he had planted Edouard in a shallow grave.

  Three strikes within a period of hours meant that someone was determined to upset Diallo’s operation. As to why—a profit motive, politics, some personal vendetta—he was at a loss to say. When the attackers were identified, hopefully caught alive for questioning, Diallo would have answers and would seek out those responsible for his discomfiture. Meanwhile, he needed to increase security around his residence and headquarters, in case the enemy was crazed enough to strike at him directly.

  It wasn’t a likely prospect, but his predecessor was deceased because he failed to take account of desperation and the lengths to which madness may drive a person. Privately, Diallo blessed the bombers who had taken out the man and thereby cleared his own path to command, but he wouldn’t repeat the former army chief of staff’s mistake. Diallo was an expert at protecting Number One—the only one who truly mattered in his world.

  His phone rang right on schedule, Camara on the line, prepared to brief him on the nightclub raid and bombing. Coming hard behind the drug-plant raid and the destruction of Camara’s secret arsenal, it had the mobster shaken. Diallo heard it in Camara’s voice, a sign of weakness that his caller couldn’t manage to suppress entirely.

  Weakness that could jeopardize Diallo, in his turn, unless it could be overcome.

  “What steps are underway to find the men responsible?” Diallo asked.

  “Searches of hotels, General,” Camara said, “along with questioning of street informants.”

  “You believe this white man is a member of some local gang?” Diallo challenged.

  “No, sir, but if a European team is active in Bissau, they will have been observed.”

  “Certainly,” Diallo said. “My own inquiries at the airport are continuing. About two dozen whites were checked through customs in the past two days. They will be traced to their respective lodgings, placed under surveillance and collected if it seems appropriate.”

  “Between us,” Camara said, “I believe we can prevent further attacks.”

  “If we cannot,” the gene
ral replied, “changes will be required. Good hunting, Edouard.”

  Diallo broke the link before Camara could say more, leaving him with the not-so-subtle threat. Fear was a first-class motivator, and he wanted every man below him in the ranks intensely motivated now, until the challenge to his personal authority had been resolved.

  Until the challengers were dead and gone.

  * * *

  CAPTAIN JOSEPH MANSARÉ had given up on going home this night, deciding he would rather sleep on the old sofa in his office than to drive home for a few hours of restless tossing and turning in bed. Reports of violence were coming in more regularly now, but there was still no word about his missing agent. He was prepared to write Nilson Medina off as dead, but the disappearance nagged at him. Why was Medina not among the others who’d been found inside the cocaine cutting plant?

  Mansaré actually managed to doze off, and had embarked upon a nightmare that involved hyenas in the streets, when he was jarred awake by the insistent shrilling of his office telephone. He nearly tumbled off the sofa, then caught himself and scrambled on all fours to reach the desk, cursing along the way.

  He was panting by the time he lifted the receiver, on its fourth ring. “Sim? Olá?”

  “Captain Mansaré?” his caller asked.

  In a small department like the Judicial Police, ranking leaders typically knew all of their officers by name. Mansaré couldn’t claim to recognize their voices on the phone, but this time he was driven by a hunch—a hope—to say, “Medina?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “So, you’re alive,” Mansaré said, stating the obvious.

  “I am.”

  “We’ve tried to reach you on your cell phone, and at home.”

  “I’ve been out of touch,” Medina said, sounding evasive.

  “You’re aware of what’s been going on tonight, I take it?” Mansaré asked.

  “Yes, sir. I have been...involved,” Medina answered.

  “Oh? Will you explain that, please?”