Predator Paradise

by Don Pendleton

  Beyond the rage, he felt a moment’s pang of sorrow, aware he had forsaken much, and so far achieved very little. He had a wife and six children in Pakistan, after all, wondered if they were even still alive, aware he would never see his family again unless he wished to risk venturing into Karachi, arrested by Pakistani authorities who had proved themselves traitors as they had thrown themselves in league with the Americans. Loss, he thought, seemed to be the way of his life, but he was tired of losing.

  It was time to strike back.

  It seemed like only yesterday, that harrowing trek northwest through Afghanistan, Iranian sympathizers whisking him and a band of fighters safely into their country. From the beginning they had been informed they would be shipped to Sudan, under the protective umbrella of Colonel Bashir, whose own loyalties to Islamic jihad were suspect. Nayid was certain he was motivated to grant them all safe haven as long as the cash kept coming. They had been told they were to train harder, pray more and with feverish passion to implore God to keep them strong and faithful.

  That a big event was in store for all of them.

  Their Iranian benefactor had said a lot, but told them little.

  He moved through the night, away from his camonetted tent, watching the deep shadows around the perimeter where light glowing from the few strung bulbs powered by the generator was swallowed by the nooks and crannies of the surrounding hills. Lugging his AK-74, he looked up the hill, peering into the dark. Softly he cursed the sentry he was going to relieve, spotted the winking eye of a cigarette, a veritable beacon to any threat in the scrubland beyond their camp.

  There would be no point in chastising the man, he knew, rethinking his stance on the smoker, sure there was no danger in this part of Sudan where they were protected by Bashir and his soldiers. Sentry duty was long, hard, boring. As long as none of them were caught napping, a cigarette couldn’t possibly hurt. They were sixty-three strong, heavily armed, all of them brothers in jihad, even though they came from various countries.

  Their goal was the same.

  Complete and utter destruction of America and Israel.

  He decided he was brooding, wasting energy on things he couldn’t change. He skirted past the target range, felt the grin cut his lips at the sight of the current and former three American Presidents, paper targets riddled with bullet holes. Someday, God willing…

  Quick but hardly quiet, flinching as stones rattled under his boots, he saw the sentry pitch away the smoke, ash and flame arcing away, the man there, then gone, melting back into some cubbyhole. Something felt wrong.

  “In here.”

  The voice hissed out of the black hole. Closing, he strained to bring the face into view. There was just enough moon and starlight for him to make out the bearded visage of Musif the Yemeni.

  “What is it?”

  “Shh. Keep your voice down.”

  He followed Musif’s stare to the south, looked back, found the Yemeni searching the black sky. “I thought I heard something. I thought I saw something move out there.”

  Nayid kept scouring the plain, the sky, the hill’s ridgeline. He didn’t see or hear anything.

  “You’ve been up here too long. Go get some sleep.”

  Musif seemed to ignore his relief. Finally he grunted, “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Go, then.”

  Musif was climbing out of the hole, Nayid feeling the hackles rising on the back of his neck as he sensed some presence in the night, began scouring the ridgeline. For a second he believed he was simply infected by Musif’s paranoia, then he heard the soft chug. It was quiet enough, but it sounded like a cannon shot in Nayid’s ears.

  Especially when he felt the hot gore splatter his face and glimpsed Musif toppling back into his hole.

  Nayid realized what was happening, but he knew it was too late to stop it. It didn’t seem right, and there was an instant where he wanted to curse this abominable injustice, aware he would never taste the glory of revenge against the infidels.

  The tall black figure appeared to materialize out of the very earth when Nayid framed him through his haze of terror and outrage. He was taking up slack on the AK’s trigger when he heard that dreaded coughing noise again, felt the hammer blow between his eyes that turned the night into impenetrable blackness.

  THE EXECUTIONER used the smoker’s cherry eye as his homing beacon. Two double taps from his sound-suppressed Beretta and they were down, crunching into the hole from where they had risen, lights doused instantly from one 9 mm subsonic round each to the head. If Collins’s intel was on the money, Bolan was alone on the ridge, but he searched his surroundings just the same, senses tuned to any sound or movement all around. No point in getting carried away with any newfound trust in Collins, since he was the one hung out there to dry if it went to hell before the show started.

  The decision for the soldier to go it alone and take down the sentries came straight from Collins on the ride in. Again the Executioner didn’t trust the battle scheme, full of holes and any number of dire possibilities, but he was grateful to some extent to be the odd man out, trusting his own skills, breathing clean air away from the others. Which left him wondering if Collins was thinking in the heat of battle maybe he’d catch some errant friendly fire.

  He had accepted his role, neither too eager nor showing any surprise, though he hid his suspicion that Collins was suddenly going against the grain, using Wild Card as a solo act when the man had been espousing the virtues of teamwork up to then. If there was something devious behind this sudden shift in strategy, then Bolan would treat his Cobra so-called teammates the same as any terrorist here. He might be getting paranoid, viewed as a lone wolf, not one of the guys, a loose cannon, but Bolan didn’t think so. He couldn’t remember the last time his gut instinct had been wrong.

  They had ridden across the plain, two Hummers and one APC strong, coming up on the enemy’s south end, the commandeered vehicles now parked in a wadi, all of them waiting on the C-130 to drop its package. All the maps, sat imagery and high-tech apparatus at the Cobra leader’s disposal were paving the way, so far, so good, but this outing was meant to reel in the biggest number of human sharks yet. Aside from his weapons, handheld, spare clips and grenades, Bolan was also weighted down with a nylon satchel choked with plastic cuffs.

  Sixty-plus terrorists were supposed to go down under a cloud of sleeping gas. NARCON-D would be released, a small fuel-air explosive that would disperse the potent tranquilizer over the entire camp. Or so the plan went. If it was up to Bolan, he’d just as soon bomb the place off the planet with a dose of thermite. Only he did understand Collins’s explanation there might be a mother lode of valuable intelligence stored at the camp. The major talked about training videos, storehouses of explosives and other agents that might be used to build bombs. He went on about training manuals, the need to get inside their heads, “tune up the enemy” with Q and A, learn about any operations on the table.

  He wanted facts and figures and every shred of intel on hand. He wanted a lot, as far as Bolan was concerned. Sudan, he knew, was littered with dozens of camps just like this one. What was to say there was anything even here remotely smacking of valuable intelligence? If there was—and Collins seemed certain the gold mine was in the camp—how did the major know? It was something of a monstrous bad joke, he thought, that terrorists could train, arm themselves and operate right under full view of Western eyes in the sky. They came here from as far away as Indonesia, the worst of the worst, and Bolan had to wonder why this particular camp was chosen. No mistake, Sudan was an outlaw nation, and the explanation from Collins for targeting this bunch was they were paying tribute to Bashir to claim real estate here. Bottom line, Collins stated he was looking to connect all the intelligence dots.

  Well, he had been given his thirty minutes and no more to leg it in on the sentries, framed, according to Collins, by heat sensors in the hands of the latest addition of black ops. Aware the smallest beam of light could still reflect off his skin, B
olan had smeared his face, neck and hands with black warpaint. He had done his part, beating the clock by six minutes according to his chronometer. Two cashiered out, and it looked to Bolan as if he was all alone up there. Again Collins’s intel was proving so good it struck Bolan as damn near divine. It seemed every step of the mission was orchestrated, contrived, or was the major really that good?

  Bolan scanned the camp, his surroundings, waiting for the C-130 to release the bomb, which would be rolled right off the cargo ramp, floating to Earth by parachute. Wind, altitude, weight of package, rate of descent were apparently all factored in by Collins’s supercomputers, the blast preset to go off a hundred feet above the camp. If the package sailed past the camp and detonated beyond the perimeter, if a roving terrorist spotted it coming down and they ran like hell, if they themselves had protective masks on hand…

  Stowing the Beretta, Bolan snugged on his gas mask, then unslung his assault rifle. It was a sprawling camp, situated in a valley, ringed by low black hills. Tents, large and small, were all camo-draped, the terrorist training grounds complete with stone mock-ups, target ranges, a PT course, Toyota Land Cruisers and motorbikes spread around the perimeter. Not much light, but Collins said his guys would arc a few flares over the camp.

  Bolan was settling in beside the dead when he spotted several armed shadows streaming from tents. He sensed the agitation down there, silently urging the C-130 to show when the handheld radio on one of his victims crackled. They were calling for Musif, looking his way. What had set off their bells and whistles? Bolan wondered. Had they left behind a possum at the garrison who had radioed ahead?

  The soldier gripped his assault rifle, scoured the sky south when he made out the faint rumble, spotted the black bulk of the Hercules. It was sailing in, maybe five thousand feet overhead, when he saw the canopy open. The way the enemy was scurrying about, Bolan suspected Collins was about to find the mother of all monkey wrenches hurled into his plan.

  MUSTAFA ALZHARI found the order outrageous at first. That was two days ago, when their Iranian sponsor had called over the secured line, informing him they would be attacked, arrested, that they were to give up peacefully, the assault on the camp would be nonlethal. They were to comply, go along with whatever was demanded of them by whoever their captors were. The Iranian told him to fear not, keep the faith, that the most glorious victory of Islam to date was just ahead, and he and his comrades in Sudan were to accept what would appear to be an ominous fate.

  God would take care of them, lead them to a glory they could never imagine. Or so the Iranian cryptically stated.

  Two days to think about it, since the Iranian didn’t seem willing to answer his questions, and the more Alzhari mulled it over the more he found the strange request absurd. Or was it? Naturally he had gone to Bashir, their guardian in Sudan, but the colonel had laughed off his anxiety and concerns. They were in Sudan, the colonel stated, why worry? Not even the Western imperialist warmongers dared to even set one foot inside his country.

  He had wanted to push the matter, only quietly gathered his top lieutenants, put them on high alert. No point in shaking the nerves of the rest of the fighters under his command. He went about his business, training, teaching class, secure in the knowledge he was, indeed, in a country so isolated, so feared by even the most brazen of Western warmongers he decided to take Bashir at his worst. Even still, why would the Iranian—?

  He heard the commotion beyond the flap of his tent. He was marching outside, taking in the numbers of his men suddenly up and flailing about all over the camp. He heard how there was no response from Bashir when Habib had tried to call the garrison for their normal nightly check-in. He saw three of his men moving toward the hill, calling out to the sentry who was supposed to be up there. He felt the fear cutting through him, aware there was all of a sudden too much mystery swathing the night for all of this to be mere coincidence. He heard the rumbling overhead next, looking skyward with the others when he saw the object floating to Earth. The massive dark shape sailing overheard, even at the high altitude, was unmistakable.

  He had seen enough C-130s, Spectres and B-52s in Afghanistan to know they were being attacked. And as a searchlight was framed on the object falling to Earth, he knew that long slender object was a missile attached to the parachute.

  He shouted a warning to run, but if that was one of those fuel-air explosives coming down there wouldn’t be enough time to flee the terrible fires about to be unleashed.

  Still he had to try, bolting, sprinting for all he was worth, working on a feverish prayer to God to spare him the fires of the coming hell.

  BOLAN TAGGED the threesome with a raking burst, left to right, the eruption of autofire confirming the fear he sensed from the camp proper that they were being hit.

  The enemy was now on high alert, shadows racing out of the tents, weapons up and ready, RPGs wielded here and there. They were pointing at the sky, a few of them darting from the descending package, other terrorists holding their ground, firing their AKs skyward.

  The night lit up next as the flares sizzled in, igniting an umbrella of white-red light, then the big package blew.

  Bolan was selecting targets, out of the hole, sidling off toward the east. Return fire was wild at best, a swarm of lead locusts eating up the rock and the earth yards behind the soldier. The Executioner rattled off 3-round bursts, catching runners on the fly, then took in the cloud of NARCON-D. The way it blew, Bolan could be sure there would be more fighters than sleepers when the smoke settled.

  The gray-white cloud ballooned, swelling out, but from the deep southern perimeter. Maybe ten to fifteen terrorists were falling, a few more reeling around as the wave rolled over them, but Collins’s guys up in the Herc had missed their mark.

  The Executioner knew all of them were in for a long and bloody night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Collins feared the moment had all the earmarks of a horrendous disaster. Somehow his two guys on board the Herc had either misread their screens, miscalculated math that was nearly done down to the inch for them or a sudden gust of wind had blown the chute off target. Where it was supposed to blow dead center in the camp, the NARCON-D had nearly gone off in his face.

  The truth was, it had. The shock wave of the detonation alone nearly dropped him in his tracks.

  Collins heard the vicious curse trapped in his mask, a muffled roar that swelled and echoed through his head. His M-16 was out and ready, but he was nearly blinded in the cloud so there was nothing to clearly shoot. There was, however, shooting all over the camp, something—one of his guys—bumping into him, Collins aware Wild Card was out there, taking care of business or being taken care of. The cloud’s dispersal would cover one square city block, which meant if the enemy spotted them when they finally burst out of the cloud, they had lost the edge. Communication, other than the handheld radios, was out the window since the com links couldn’t snug on, much less allow for fitting the mike under the masks. It would take ten minutes at the outside for the cloud’s tranquilizing potency to diminish to the point that they could shed the protective gear, communicate. By then, Collins knew they could all be dead.

  It was a goat screw beyond his own worst miscalculations. He had a brief moment where he saw the future, felt the coming stab of bitter anger, wiping egg off his face, Stone standing there, looking at him, as silent as a statue but itching to say, “I told you so.”

  Whoever he’d jolted into, Collins shoved him in the direction away from the wrath of the most blistering retorts of autofire. West then, and with any luck…

  He could see flare light now, armed shadows cropping up, his guys taking his cue on instinct and following his vector. Collins was drawing target acquisition, nearly out of the cloud when he heard the cry of pain beside him. Turning, he found one of his own, a spurt of blood shooting out his chest, spin then topple on his back.

  IF COBRA FORCE WAS smothered in the NARCON-D cloud, Bolan knew for the moment he was one hundred percent on his ow
n. But what was new? he figured. The longer the campaign ground on, the larger he felt that bull’s-eye growing on his back.

  No time now to concern himself with what Cobra did or didn’t do, the Executioner was advancing down the hill, drilling precision bursts into the closest hardmen, spinning them around, human compasses dead on their feet, spraying blood. Bolan chose the RPG threats next as they popped into his gun sights. He nailed one rocket man as the terrorist swung his way, the missile sailing overhead, slamming into the hillside. The explosion rocked the night, Bolan then adding his own fireball into a group of maybe eight as they raced for cover behind a Land Cruiser. The blast took out the vehicle, the warrior changing clips, searching out some temporary concealment as lead snapped past his scalp. Bolan eased into a narrow depression and began to arm frag and incendiary grenades, hurling the steel eggs at armed runners, alert for any new players who showed up in masks or toted M-16s. Whatever Collins’ s original scheme, it was all but shot to hell. Everyone was, essentially, on his own.

  A trio of detonations marched through clustered packs of terrorists, Bolan bringing up the M-16, hosing down anything he found in caftan, smock, skullcaps or headcloth. Forget any gold mine of intel, Bolan knew he and Cobra Force were in for the fight of their lives.

  He chased down a pair of runners beating flight westward, stitching them up the spine, the rising bursts finally blowing off skullcaps in dark eruptions of blood and brain matter.

  And Bolan sighted the first casualties for Cobra.

  They were bulling their way out of the cloud, far to the west, a line of autofire punching out through the smoke, connecting enemy flesh. He spotted one, then two bodies in masks being dragged and dumped behind a Land Cruiser.

  The Executioner decided to stick to the far eastern edge, aware that Collins would be in a state of perhaps mindless rage over the loss of two men. Couple that with bad gut feeling about the others, and Bolan figured it best to lone-wolf the action.