Rogue Assault

by Don Pendleton

  Round three scorched through the flimsy chain-link fence to strike the communications hut—again, already damaged—and complete the devastation started by his mortar rounds. This time, he didn’t risk a second shot before he rose and ran, backtracking toward the compound’s gate. The longer he could keep his adversaries guessing about when and where he’d strike from next, the better chance he had of winnowing the odds and coming out the other side of it alive.

  He had the launcher on his shoulder, round four heavy in the tube, when Bolan heard a voice raised from the camp. This one was calling out to him, without a name.

  “American!” it shouted. “Do you want your friend?”

  It took five seconds to locate the voice’s source, a plainclothes gunman moving toward the gate in lockstep with a slouched and limping human shield. Most of the shooter’s face was hidden by the man in front of him, whom Bolan recognized at once, despite his injuries.

  Nilson Medina. Badly hurt, yet still alive.

  But for how long?

  “American!” the gunman called again. “I know you hear me! Do you want your friend to live? You made a bargain with the general, and now you’ve broken it!”

  Street clothes told him the hostage-taker was a member of the Special Intervention Force. A cop, at least by virtue of his creds. As such, he was immune to deadly force at Bolan’s hands.

  But not untouchable.

  In fact, the way he acted, Bolan thought he’d already been touched by one or more of Bolan’s “special” mortar rounds. How high he was remained impossible to quantify at this range, and it only mattered insofar as it affected his reaction time and volatility. Would the cocaine he’d snorted without knowing it make him more or less likely to blow out Medina’s brains?

  Trading his launcher for the FAL, Bolan decided there was only one way to find out.

  16

  General Diallo saw Abdoul Loua crossing the compound with Nilson Medina, marching the prisoner toward the compound’s gate. Loua’s movements seemed jerky, but Diallo couldn’t tell if the captain was walking with a peculiar gait, or if Diallo’s own eyes were playing tricks on him. He still felt dizzy, and there was a buzzing in his ears that didn’t sound or feel like a reaction to explosive charges detonating.

  The explosions! Suddenly it struck Diallo that they’d stopped. The mortar rounds, then hurtling rockets, were followed by a deathly stillness. The general should have felt relieved, but didn’t trust the silence after so much thunder hurled his way. If the American had ceased firing, there had to be a reason for it, and Diallo knew his men hadn’t eliminated their opponent. He was out there, somewhere, and no doubt preparing for another strike.

  “Captain!” Diallo called to Loua in the relative quiet, nothing but the moans and curses of his wounded to compete with his shout for attention. “Where are you taking that man?”

  Loua ignored him—or, to be fair, may have been deafened by close-range explosions. Instantly angry, but willing to grant the benefit of a doubt, Diallo started after Loua, trailed by half a dozen soldiers he had rallied while the mortar blasts were marching back and forth across his compound. If the captain thought that he was leaving with Diallo’s prisoner, he had to have lost his mind.

  Shell-shocked, perhaps.

  Diallo was barely ten paces behind the two men when Loua’s right knee buckled, spraying crimson mist. As he was crumpling to the ground, Diallo’s buzzing ears picked out a rifle shot, fired somewhere in the dark woods out beyond the chain-link fence and razor wire.

  The captain howled in pain, spraying the trees with automatic fire, one-handed, doing no more good than any of Diallo’s other soldiers had so far. While he was thus engaged, the general ran forward, scuttling in a crouch, and caught the prisoner. Whipping a meaty arm around Medina’s neck, keeping his own head down, Diallo gripped the hostage as a human shield and cried out to the forest, “You have cheated me! We had a bargain!”

  In his grip, the bloodied officer surprised Diallo with a cackling laugh. “A bargain!” he crowed. “You try to make a deal with death?”

  “Shut up, idiot!” snapped the army’s chief of staff.

  Then, to the night he called, “You want your friend alive? Why should I give him to you now?”

  Another rifle shot rang out. Diallo flinched, but he wasn’t the target. To his left, one of his soldiers grunted and collapsed, half of his face a mutilated ruin. Instantly, another shot, this one drilling a trooper on Diallo’s right, as he was turning, poised to run.

  “Retreat!” Diallo snapped at his surviving troopers, lurching backward from the gate.

  And in his dizzy mind, a question formed. Retreat to where?

  * * *

  BOLAN TRACKED THE retreating party, catching glimpses of Diallo’s head behind Nilson Medina’s bloody and disfigured face, but couldn’t hold the vision long enough to risk a shot. Instead, he swung off to the left once more and dropped a third of the original half dozen men Diallo had brought with him to the gate. A puff of scarlet from the soldier’s tunic, seen by firelight, and he dropped.

  Swing right again, to number four. The trooper fired a long burst from his AK-47, well within killing range if he had fixed on a target, but wasting his rounds as it was. Bolan stroked the FAL’s trigger again, punched a hole through the scared soldier’s forehead, and watched him go down.

  “Não atirem! Eu vou matá-lo!” Diallo shouted, sounding frantic, then apparently recalled who he was talking to, repeating it in English. “Hold your fire! I’ll kill him!”

  Bolan saw the pistol wedged into Medina’s ear, no clear view of Diallo as he weighed the odds. Medina seemed to find him in the darkness with his one good eye, lips twisting in a kind of smile as he called out, “Forget about me! Kill him!”

  Diallo struck his captive with the pistol, ducking at the same instant to keep himself hidden, crab-walking Medina to his right rear, farther back into the camp’s smoky ruin. As he went, Diallo shouted to his men in Portuguese, bringing the stragglers out to join him, closing ranks around their leader to obscure him.

  Bolan set down his rifle, retrieved the RPG and shouldered it. He didn’t want to harm Medina, but he had to spook Diallo’s men in order to secure a clean shot at the general. If nothing else, he hoped a near miss from a rocket might be adequate to scatter them and buy him time to make that shot. It was a gamble, but it seemed to be his only chance.

  He aimed directly at the shuffling clutch of soldiers, then lifted his sights to send the rocket hurtling over their collective heads, just high enough to scorch their hair in passing. Bolan squeezed the launcher’s trigger, felt it shudder and saw the fiery tail streak off down range. Diallo’s frightened men ducked, breaking off to either side before it reached them and kept going, roaring off into the fiery wreckage of the compound’s motor pool.

  Bolan exchanged the launcher for his rifle, scanned the battlefield to find Diallo crouching with Medina clutched in front of him. There was a shoulder he could zero in on, with a little luck, if he was quick enough and—

  Headlights flared behind him, lighting up the battleground as three black SUVs arrived to join the party. Bolan hesitated for a heartbeat, glancing back to see who was arriving, hoping it would be Joseph Mansaré’s men, and when he turned back toward Diallo he had lost his shot.

  The general was gone, Medina with him, lost in swirling smoke.

  * * *

  MEDINA FELT AS IF the arm around his neck was strangling him. He gagged, fighting for breath, but his bound hands prevented any effective struggle. He had hoped for sweet oblivion when the rocket sped toward them, but it was a miss. Now, with headlights nearly blinding him, Medina guessed the general had summoned reinforcements to the compound somehow, fielding them against Matt Cooper.

  All lost. Their effort wasted.

  Furious, he cursed and kicked and
squirmed, and was rewarded with a stunning crack across the skull. Diallo kept backpedaling, half dragging and half carrying Medina, clearly still afraid of being shot as he retreated. Wishing Cooper had fired through him to kill the general, Medina felt the burn of futile tears beneath his swollen eyelids, sobbing in frustration as he lurched and scuffed along.

  Across the camp, Medina saw the lead car of the new arrivals race forward and smash into the gate. The chain-link bowed, stretching on impact, then the gate’s frame tore free of its runners with a harsh metallic squeal and buckled inward, dragging claws along the full length of the steadily encroaching vehicle. Paint scarred from grille to tailgate, the Land Rover bulled its way inside and left the gate a flaccid dangling thing, no obstacle for two more SUVs that rattled over it.

  Odd that Diallo’s men wouldn’t open the gate for their potential rescuers, Medina thought, but they were likely so unnerved by Cooper’s relentless shelling that they didn’t even realize salvation was at hand. Three vehicles, say fifteen men at least inside them, and the odds were getting worse with every breath Medina took.

  He wished that Cooper would cut and run, abandon him and flee while there was time. Live on to fight another day and learn from this experience for future confrontations with a world of enemies. He couldn’t save Medina. Guinea-Bissau was a hopeless case.

  But something told him the American wouldn’t desert him. Not yet, even though it was the wisest thing to do. Cooper had a sense of honor that would get him killed this night, unless Medina helped to change his mind.

  Roaring, Medina twisted in his captor’s grasp, ignoring blows across his scalp, struggling until he faced the general, then lunged at him, teeth snapping at Diallo’s face. They were the only weapon he had left, reverting to primeval savagery. Diallo yelped, recoiling, shoved Medina back with one hand while his other raised the pistol.

  Snarling like a rabid thing, Medina saw the muzzle flash, before his world went black.

  * * *

  CAPTAIN MANSARÉ LEAPED from his Land Rover and hit the ground running, conscious of officers following closely. He was on uneasy ground here, physically confronting soldiers with drawn weapons, but the explosions and gunfire he’d witnessed clearly granted any law enforcement officer leave to intervene. Pair that with his suspicion that one of his people was caged in the camp, and Mansaré was prepared to defend his approach before any tribunal.

  Whatever happened next would be up to Diallo’s men, if any were prepared to challenge him. So far, he’d seen a number of them clearly dead and wounded, scattered here and there around the compound. Others scuttled to and fro, alone or in small groups, firing their weapons toward the forest that surrounded them. So far, few of them seemed to take much notice of the new arrivals on the scene.

  Mansaré stopped one running trooper, clutching his arm, and demanded, “What’s happening here?”

  The young man blinked at him, wild-eyed but rational enough to note the captain’s stars on Mansaré’s collar. “Shelling, sir,” he answered, in a shaky voice. “Rockets. I don’t—”

  More gunfire crackled from the far side of the camp, and the private twisted loose from Mansaré’s grasp, sprinting for the exit created when their Land Rovers had flattened the gate. Mansaré felt his people watching him, swallowed his trepidation as he ordered, “Come with me. We need to find Diallo.”

  He didn’t use the general’s rank when he spoke, since Mansaré was prepared to treat Diallo as a criminal, make an arrest on his own authority and face the consequences if his superiors balked. And if the army’s chief of staff resisted...?

  It was why they’d brought so many weapons, after all.

  Mansaré hardly recognized Diallo’s compound from the aerial photos on file at his office. Every major building had been damaged or demolished by explosions, and many of the tents were torn by shrapnel. Smoke and haze hung over everything, a smell of burning flesh and gasoline with—what else was it? Not a smell, so much as a sensation, tingling in his nostrils.

  As if on cue, one of his men sneezed loudly, making several of the others jump. Nobody laughed, under the circumstances, cutting angry glances toward the one who’d made the noise. Mansaré let it go, pressed on across the killing ground, alert for any sign of Diallo or Nilson Medina. The first man that he recognized was hobbling toward them, dragging one bloody leg, face contorted in pain.

  Abdoul Loua, captain of the Special Intervention Force.

  Before Mansaré had a chance to speak, Loua began to shout at him. “Your little bastard caused all this! Where is he? Give him to me, damn you!”

  Mansaré saw the automatic rifle dangling from Loua’s right hand and leveled his own weapon, calling out, “Stop where you are! Drop the weapon!”

  “All your fault!” Loua said. “We should have wiped you out to start with!”

  Loua began to raise his rifle, but Mansaré didn’t give him time to fire. A short burst from his AK-47 ripped across the rogue cop’s chest, then several of his men were firing, too, their bullets making Loua dance and spin before he dropped, twitched once and then lay still.

  Shaking, Mansaré told his people, “Hurry! Find Diallo and Medina. No one stops us now.”

  * * *

  BOLAN SAW MOST OF IT from his place outside the wire. Land Rovers rolling in, charging the gate and bashing through it, the policemen piling out. Across the compound, veiled in smoke but visible by firelight, General Diallo grappling with Medina, dragging him until the hostage turned on him and fought, despite bound hands. A close-range pistol shot, Medina falling lifeless. Bolan had Diallo in his sights until a burst of wild fire from the camp swept over him, scoring the trees that sheltered him and causing him to flinch.

  When he looked back again, the general was gone.

  He scanned the camp, seeking Diallo in the murk and battle smoke, not finding him. The officers who’d plowed in through the gate could be distinguished by their uniforms from General Diallo’s regulars, but Bolan had no reason to believe they would recognize him. Even if Captain Mansaré had informed them of their coversations, what would that mean if they met a stranger in the heat of battle?

  Maybe nothing. But it ran against the grain for him to stand by on the sidelines, maybe giving General Diallo time to slip away in the confusion.

  Bolan swapped his rifle for the RPG once more, sighted on a portion of the compound farthest from the open gate and fired. The rocket was still airborne as he snatched his FAL and broke from cover, sprinting toward the gate through darkness, like a shadow on the move. The warhead’s blast drew every eye in that direction as he reached the gate, passed through it and found cover near the three Land Rovers that had brought Mansaré’s men to join the fight.

  From there, he saw Mansaré’s party moving in the general direction that Diallo had to have run when Bolan lost him, soldiers here and there around the camp still firing toward the forest, others doubling back to intercept Mansaré and his men. The odds were still uneven, weighted on the army’s side, and Bolan didn’t want to see the new arrivals massacred after he’d called them to the party.

  He could circle wide around them, leave them to their fate and try to find the general, or lend a hand where he was needed at the moment. But maybe Mansaré’s people would turn on him with no idea that he was on their side.

  Damn it!

  The ring of troops was closing tight as Bolan raised his rifle, index finger taking up the trigger slack.

  * * *

  ISMAEL DIALLO RAN as if his life depended on it—which, in fact, it did. Fighting the dizziness that made his head swim, fearing any moment that a bullet would rip through his back and bring him down, he ran. Across the camp he fled, until he reached the fence, then turned right automatically, jogging along with chain-link on his left, knowing the fence would lead him without fail to find the gate, smashed open by whoever had arrived to join
the fight brief moments earlier.

  They had to be enemies, since he had called no reinforcements of his own to help. Official-looking vehicles and men in uniforms; it had to be the damned Judicial Police, perhaps alerted somehow to the fact that he had grabbed their undercover man. They were too late to save him, but the fools still might try to avenge him if they found Diallo.

  If they lived that long.

  He’d leave them to his soldiers, use the cover of their skirmish to escape while time remained. Once through the gate, Diallo knew that he could reach Ponta Gardete without difficulty, moving through the forest with the access road to guide him. In the town, he’d commandeer a vehicle and drive himself to Bissau, barricade himself inside headquarters. He would be safe there, with his troops and tanks around him, while he sorted out the damage from this night’s fiasco.

  Diallo saw the flattened gate ahead, heard firing on his right flank and glanced back to see the uniformed invaders dueling with his soldiers, muzzle flashes lighting up the night. Clutching the pistol he had used to kill Medina, ready at a second’s notice to defend himself, the general passed through and out into the night, merging with shadows as he fled.

  * * *

  BOLAN’S FIRST SHOT dropped a shirtless soldier armed with an RPK light machine gun, just as his mark fired a burst toward Mansaré’s small squad of police. The cops were all firing by then, taking down other regulars as Diallo’s men turned on the threat they could see. Whether they thought the rival officers had shelled their camp or not, Bolan couldn’t have said, nor did it matter now. In lieu of dueling with the forest, they would take what they could get.

  And there were still enough of them to do the job.

  Bolan shot two more gunners on the run, both falling in a mess of blood and tangled limbs. His gas mask didn’t interfere with aiming, but it made his face sweat more than normal in the muggy, humid night. He couldn’t wipe his forehead without breathing in the heady mix of coke and smoke he’d spread over the camp, and while a breeze was starting to disperse it now, he left the mask in place.