“Neither of us have what we want,” Bolan said

Masozi tilted his head. “What do you mean?”

“Mubarak had a weapons stash that he was parceling out to us,” Bolan stated. “We want our gear.”

The Shabaab leader turned to Kamau. “Does this sound like a good idea?”

“I’m just in this to get some payback. Those were my men murdered by the sneaky bastard.”

Bolan realized that something bigger had just replaced his mission to destroy the Shabaab militia under Masozi. Something dark and ominous threatened more than just the shipping lanes around the Horn of Africa.

The incinerated remains of jars full of ricin seed, buried in the collapsed storeroom, were the portent of an apocalyptic threat….

Desert Fallout

Mack Bolan®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Asclepius, why do you weep? Egypt herself will be persuaded to deeds much wickeder than these, and she will be steeped in evils far worse. A land once holy, most loving of divinity, by reason of her reverence the only land on earth where the neteru (gods) settled, she who taught holiness and fidelity will be an example of utter [un]belief.

—Hermetica,

Asclepius III: 25

No nation is immune to the tragedy of being fooled into wicked deeds. But it is for the sake of those who still believe in justice that I never rest. My fidelity to them will never waver, and I shall defend their faith.

—Mack Bolan

To Fe. Patience, compassion and wisdom are gifts that grow the more you give them away.

Thank you, sir.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER ONE

The southern coast of Somalia

This was Africa.

That phrase popped into Mack Bolan’s mind as his lean, powerful frame sliced through the air over the hood of a rusty automobile, only moments ahead of the rattle of an AK-47 firing on full automatic. The fender and engine block stopped the swarm of rifle rounds looking to rend the Executioner’s flesh. He wouldn’t have more than a moment’s respite, but he made the most of it, reloading his Beretta 93-R and closing the slide on a fresh round.

The phrase was a cynical response to the violence that stalked through the continent, a place where life was cheap, and the forces of Animal Man reigned supremely. A child, starving despite tons of food in a nearby port? This was Africa. A family chopped to pieces by machete-wielding sociopaths? This was Africa. One violent government replaced by scum just as murderous? It often happened.

Bolan didn’t believe that any place in the world was more doomed than any other, that innocent people couldn’t be saved from the forces of greed and misery.

The Somali gunmen who had targeted him were fast and ferocious, already flanking the automobile to get a line of fire on the big American who had infiltrated their stronghold. One of the gunmen pivoted his AK to take out Bolan, but the Beretta machine pistol snarled, ripping a line of 9 mm bullets into the man from sternum to throat. The pirate stopped as if he hit an invisible wall, and the rifleman behind him staggered wildly, tumbling as he collided with the still-standing corpse. Bolan whirled and with one smooth movement pulled a knife from its sheath on his battle harness. The wicked, double-bladed, spear-point weapon gleamed in the sunlight, the only warning that another of the Somali killers had before the six inches of merciless steel plunged through the fragile bone triangle between the eyes.

Lobotomized by the razor-sharp blade, the pirate lost his grip on the FN FAL battle rifle he carried. Bolan released the handle on his knife and caught the big gun before it could clatter on the ground.

The Somali pirates skidded to a halt, gawking now that their opponent was suddenly in possession of a full-powered automatic weapon. Bolan let the partially spent Beretta fall to the ground, his trigger finger caressing the assault rifle to life. A volley of 7.62 mm NATO thunderbolts tore into the distracted rifleman who had been stopped by a collision with his dead partner. At over 2500 feet per second, the 165-grain rounds plowed aside bone and flesh like bulldozers.

“Get back! Get back!” another rifleman shouted in warning. Bolan swung the assault rifle around and took off the gunner’s head with a single bullet through the chin.

Retreating gunmen poured fire from their AKs into the car, but the fender and engine block proved sufficient to stop the much lighter 7.62 mm COMBLOC rounds that they fired. Knowing that their enemy was implacable and now much more heavily armed than he was when he’d whittled down their numbers with only a pistol, the Somali raiders retreated toward their compound.

Bolan gave them a few seconds’ lead, retrieving his Beretta, his knife and a bandolier of ammunition for the FN rifle he’d acquired.

Bolan checked his Beretta for any damage from its sudden meeting with the dirt. It was in perfect working order, so he slipped it back into its shoulder holster, keeping in mind that it had a few rounds missing from its magazine. The FAL was given a reload, simply because he had the luxury of seven full boxes for the rifle. The partially spent magazine went into the empty pouch on the bandolier. Fully armed, the big American scanned for signs that one of the Somali gunmen had hung back, ready to take a shot at him.

No snipers were in evidence, and Bolan took off on the trail that the remaining compound guards had left behind them. As the only white man in the streets, Bolan knew he’d draw a lot of attention. He’d lost track of a shipment of diamonds illegally mined across the continent in Liberia. Actually, it wasn’t a matter of losing the shipment. He had determined where the bloodstones were going—the port city of Kismayo to be exact. However, Bolan fell behind in pursuit of the diamonds in order to free the slaves who had been sent to hard labor by Liberian militiamen who were still sympathetic to al Qaeda, the Hizbul Shabaab. The precious gems were going to Kismayo as part of a plan to reinforce the finances for their pirates operating out of the hard-line Islamist-controlled southwestern coast of Somalia. Both the Ethiopian army and the Islamic Courts Union had tried to tame the port city, but there was still violent lawlessness.

Unfortunately, the ICU was standing by its claim of Kismayo, even after being pushed into retreat by the Ethiopians and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, and were reluctant to act against the renegade Shabaab militia, which had worked so diligently as an impromptu special forces assisting the Islamic Courts’ military units against the Ethiopians.

It didn’t bode well for the country that the authorities turned a blind eye to Shabaabist activities that included kidnapping Western journalists and murdering unarmed and wounded enemy soldiers in their hospital beds.

Bolan wasn’t in Kismayo to determine the legitimacy of the ICU and the Taliban-like enforcement methods of their youth wing. He was here to make sure the murderous thugs who collaborated with slavers wouldn’t profit from the blood and sweat of Liberians kidnapped and abused on the other side of the continent.

So, walking in public, his general description known by the smugglers, was simply the best way to home in on the profiteers. The trail of wounded or frightened Shabaab militiamen was clear as they rushed back to their home base.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Bolan whispered softly.

He continued his pursuit, knowing that every moment he delayed, the longer the Shabaab gunmen would have to prepare against his assault.

ORIF MASOZI FROWNED as Ibrahim Mubarak patted the crate. Masozi’s briefcase full of diamonds was supposed to go toward buying rocket launchers for his fellow pirates. The crate, however, didn’t look as if it contained top-of-the-line Egyptian-issue 84 mm Carl Gustav recoilless rifles and the big, powerful rounds of ammunition they fired.

“What the hell is this?” Masozi asked. They shared the Arabic language, but the dialects were far enough removed from each other, and Masozi’s native Arabic was flavored with Somali phrases and dialects. They were forced to converse in English.

The Egyptian smiled to his Somali trading partner. “A little something extra for the Shabaab.”

Masozi’s frown deepened, and he was tempted to brush his fingertips over the 9 mm MAB pistol under his untucked white shirt. “The dimensions on that crate are all wrong for military armor-piercing shells and their launchers.”

“You’ve got your recoilless rifles,” Mubarak returned. He pointed at a pair of containers.

Masozi did some quick mental math, and realized that there was only room in the two standard crates for three-quarters of the shipment he’d needed. “Son of a bitch! You shorted me on the firepower, and now you’re making up for it with what?”

Mubarak pried open the crate with a crowbar. “Good stuff.”

Masozi looked and saw there were two Egyptian jars. “Artifacts? Who are we going to sell secondhand Egyptian treasure to?”

“You could throw the jars away for all I care,” Mubarak said. “They’re only replicas.”

Masozi took a deep breath, his patience starting to fade. “Give me a good reason not to open up your idiot skull, Mubarak.”

“Seeds of the castor oil plant, Orif,” Mubarak explained. “Ricinus communis, in Latin.”

Masozi’s eyes widened as he looked in the open-topped jar. “Ricin.”

Mubarak smiled. “The plants originated on this continent, my friend. And I’m a little off in the actual botanical title of this particular strain.”

Masozi raised an eyebrow. “But you can process this stuff into ricin.”

Mubarak nodded. “A particularly powerful strain. Just the thing your people would need to push back against the Ethiopians and the TFG.”

Masozi looked at the seeds, temptation tugging at him for a brief moment, then his frown returned.

“Weapons of mass destruction bring down some serious heat,” Masozi said.

“This is Somalia. The Americans went after North Korea, and lost. North Korea developed nuclear weapons, and all those cowards could do is negotiate. They were murdered up the coast in Mogadishu, and they will never come back. The sentiment among those who would have the courage to go against the Islamic revolution here is that Africa isn’t worth the effort. You don’t see them landing in the Sudan, or invading Libya. They’ll turn a blind eye, and you can poison all the Christians and Ethiopians you want,” Mubarak said.

Masozi ran his fingers over the case full of diamonds. “Why not sell this to someone with some real backing?”

“Because Syria already has those markets filled,” Mubarak replied.

“Don’t try to screw with me, Ibrahim,” Masozi snarled. “If your group had real, viable weapons of mass destruction, you wouldn’t be fucking around with a bunch of people who can barely afford rubber rafts and recoilless rifles and ammunition.”

Mubarak squeezed the skin between his eyebrows, his eyes clenched shut as he fought off a wave of frustration. “Fine, you don’t want it, keep the third of the diamonds that would have gone to the missiles I didn’t bring.”

“Don’t get testy with me. I wanted that firepower so that we could make damn sure that we could deal with the gunboats sent to escort freighters rolling past the Horn,” Masozi said. “Even if we have ricin on our side, how is that going to help against a twenty- or thirty-foot craft bristling with cannon?”

“It’s for whatever ground forces the TFG and Ethiopian government send after you,” Mubarak replied.

Masozi looked at the seeds in the jar. “Are they safe to touch?”

Mubarak nodded. “They haven’t been processed.”

“And if we do process them?” Masozi asked.

“Twice the yield of standard ricin,” Mubarak told him.

Masozi let the seeds sift through his fingers. “Twice the yield? Where did you get this shit? Syria?”

“Egypt,” Mubarak said.

Masozi frowned. “Not a lot of arable land to plant this stuff. Whatever there is, it’s all dedicated and you can’t mix it with other crops.”

“They were grown in a hydroponics laboratory,” Mubarak said.

“How’d you develop that?” Masozi asked.

“Are you buying it, or what?” Mubarak countered.

Masozi’s frown turned into a grimace. “I—”

There was commotion at the storehouse door. Masozi sighed and went to it.

“Sir, there’s an intruder in the compound,” his security chief, Kamau, announced. The Somali guard was well over six feet tall, and Masozi often imagined that there had to have been the blood of giants in his background.

“How long has he been here?” Masozi asked. He pulled his French MAB-15, flicking off its safety.

“We had a group encounter with a white man out on the docks. Two had gunshot wounds, and the other four were scared witless,” Kamau said. The muscles on the big African’s forearms swelled as he clenched his huge fists. “They arrived about fifteen minutes ago, and we’ve been securing the compound.”

“A white man,” Masozi said with a grunt. His brow furrowed at the thought of the stranger who had hit the mining camp in Liberia. “How did they describe him?”

“They said he was big, almost tall as me. Black hair, blue eyes.”

“It can’t be a coincidence,” Masozi replied. “That’s the one I told you about.”

Kamau nodded.

“What one?” Mubarak asked.

“An American agent was harassing the diamond mine we have in Liberia,” Masozi explained. “More than six feet tall, approximately two hundred pounds, all lean muscle. Fights like twenty men.”

Mubarak’s caramel-colored features paled. “Oh, hell.”

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Masozi said.

“It’s the man they call the soldier,” Mubarak whispered breathlessly.

“That’s a myth. A story spread to make us afraid of Americans now that they’re too lazy to send their Marines and Army,” Kamau replied.

“He’s real,” Mubarak said. “He’s been active in Egypt.”

“And there were rumors that this bogeyman took out another faction of pirates a little farther up the coast a while back,” Masozi said. “So what?”

Mubarak looked at the crate and its two jars of seed. His hands trembled. “You said your soldiers returned fifteen minutes ago?”

“I’ve heard the stories,” Kamau said. “The man is a ghost, and he could hide, even among black men, as one of their own.”

“Why did you come to me just now?” Masozi asked.

“We found one man, his neck broken, but positioned as if he were still on guard duty,” Kamau explained. “This was about two minutes ago, and he hasn’t been dead longer than ten minutes.”

Mubarak licked his lips and fumbled a pistol out of his belt. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

Masozi turned to see what had panicked the Egyptian so badly, when something metallic clattered onto the floor under a side window of the storehouse. He couldn’t get a clear look at what was on the ground as Kamau picked him up as if he were a rag doll. The Somali giant carried him several feet, behind the cover of a stack of crates, instants before a fragmentation grenade detonated with a roar of doom. The Shabaab leader’s ears rang in the aftermath of the detonation. Kamau shook his shoulder, mouthing words that didn’t penetrate the sonic haze of aching eardrums.

Mubarak, or more precisely what was left of him, was a ragged floor mat of bloody, crushed flesh.

“We’ve got to move!” Masozi bellowed.

Kamau rolled his eyes at the Shabaab commander’s statement, and Masozi realized that was probably what the security chief was saying. The Uzi submachine gun in the big man’s fist looked as if it were a mere toy as he poked it over the top of the crates and raked the area around the window.

Masozi didn’t need to hear to know that Kamau was going to cover his exit from the storehouse. Fortunately, the hand grenade hadn’t damaged or detonated the crated rocket launchers, otherwise the explosion would have caused far more than temporary deafness.

Everything was going to hell.

MACK BOLAN WAS disappointed when he saw that his grenade had blown the panicky Egyptian into chopped meat. It wasn’t a total disappointment, since Mubarak’s face was intact and he could get the answers he needed from other sources, but it would have been easier to interrogate the Egyptian to get the lowdown on exactly how the man had gotten his hands on jars full of seed that could be turned into a powerful toxin. Now, he would just have to rely on established intelligence databases to identify Mubarak and the faction of terrorists he worked for.

Masozi would likely provide those answers, if Bolan weren’t forced to kill him. Either way, he had recorded the men’s conversation on an MP3 file thanks to the compact PDA, and a wire-thin high-audio-definition microphone built by Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz of Stony Man Farm’s domestic antiterrorism squad called Able Team. Bolan would be able to transmit the conversation back to the Farm, and the computer staff would run through analysis on what was being said.

Bolan’s efforts at delaying the compound’s hard force from finding him, leaving a trail on the far side of the complex, had given him the opportunity to spy on the two men and their meeting. Normally the Executioner would have immediately begun dismantling the terrorist headquarters, but the sight of the vehicles parked inside the compound had tipped him off to the possibility of a larger conspiracy. This was confirmed when he identified a trio of Arab men armed with compact machine pistols, obviously bodyguards for a visitor from far to the north.

The big American dropped to the floor and moved to the ragged corpse. A few quick snapshots with his digital camera recorded Mubarak’s features for future identification. Another moment was spared to get the man’s fingerprints on a strip of plastic-topped adhesive that the warrior had kept in his war gear for such identification processes.

It wouldn’t take long for Kamau to arrange a counterattack, sending sentries into the storehouse to clear it out. Bolan scooped up the dead Egyptian’s pistol and spare magazines, adding them to his web belt. The soldier hadn’t been able to bring his customary Desert Eagle with him across various borders. Its ammunition had been depleted and he couldn’t get more .44 Magnum rounds to feed it here on the Horn of Africa. Mubarak had been armed with an Egyptian army–issue Beretta 92-F. The spare magazines would feed Bolan’s own machine pistol easily.

He also had the FAL rifle slung across his shoulders, but after listening to Masozi and Mubarak’s brief argument, he knew that he’d need something to give him equal footing with dozens of heavily armed pirates.

A solid kick snapped open the container for the stolen Carl Gustav rocket launcher. The meter-long weapon was heavy, but still remarkably handy. He took the time to stuff a variety of 84 mm shells into a bandolier provided for them, and went back to the window he’d entered through. The front of the storehouse suddenly erupted as AK-47 rounds tore through the front door and wall.

Bolan didn’t bother to slither through the window. He leaped, the butt of the rocket launcher leading the way, crashing through the glass. The chatter of a dozen rifles covered the noise, and his sudden appearance stunned the two guards sent around the back. The Executioner had seen them through the window, and laden with nearly seventy pounds of extra weaponry, his weight was enough to plow through the two Somali pirates, shoving them to the ground hard enough to stun them.

Bolan jammed his elbow into the throat of one of the gunmen, collapsing his windpipe. He reached out with his other hand to sink his fingers into the nostrils and eye sockets of the other guard. With the clenching of his fist, he blinded the Somali thug as fingernails popped eyeballs and tore bloody rifts through flesh. With a powerful wrench of his arm, Bolan snapped the stunned pirate’s neck using the holes in the man’s face as leverage. The death shriek that issued forth was drowned out by the thumps of two grenades thrown through the doors of the storehouse.

The pirates were so frightened of the intrusion by the Executioner that they were willing to risk their delivery of antiarmor rockets by using the minibombs on the storehouse. Bolan fished out another of his hand grenades and aimed the bomb at the crate of illicit firepower. Dropping the fragger in the midst of the 84 mm ammunition, Bolan whirled and ran from the building. The hand grenade would set off the armor-smashing shells, and the explosion could bring the building crashing down atop him if he didn’t gain some distance from the structure.

Thunder split the night, and the storehouse seemed to swell, heaving with a gigantic sigh. Chunks of masonry and other shrapnel flew from the front of the building, the roof collapsing under its own weight. The two bodies that Bolan had left behind the storehouse were crushed as the wall collapsed on them. The guards were already dead, but Bolan’s suspicion that he would have been pulverized was proved correct. He set down the Carl Gustav and its bandolier. It was too heavy, too much to move quickly with, but he still tucked it beside a vehicle for future usage.

Bringing the FAL to bear, he spotted Kamau and Masozi barking out orders, directing traffic as Shabaab pirates and militiamen scrambled, dealing with their wounded and searching for signs of their escaped opponent. Bolan announced his presence with a rapid-fire string of single shots into the crowd, the 7.62 mm NATO rounds piercing bodies, popping internal organs like balloons and sending gunmen on the fast track to oblivion. The 20-round string collapsed thirteen of the Somali compound guards, but Bolan left the men actually tending to the wounded alone.

The Executioner often struck ruthlessly, but he was no cold-blooded murderer. As long as the men acting as medics sought to save lives, and the wounded men appeared incapable of putting up a fight, he would allow them to live. Helpless and nonhostile people weren’t Bolan’s enemy. There were still plenty of riled Shabaab killers to keep the warrior busy, however.

After a quick magazine change for the FAL, Bolan scurried to another position as rifles snarled in the darkness, dumping bullets toward where the blaze of muzzle-flashes had issued. Though he was only moving from one end of a pickup truck to another, the change in location gave Bolan a new angle on the enemy forces.

The Shabaab militiamen took the lull in return fire as an invitation to break from cover and stalk toward the vehicle that they’d hosed with their automatic weapons. Bolan let them get to within two yards of the Peugeot’s rear bumper before he cut loose with the big Belgian rifle. The leader of the security detail stared down at the smashed crater in his chest where his heart had once been. Blood sneezed from his nostrils, soaking his shirt with even more crimson before his legs folded beneath him. The second and third gunmen didn’t have time to register the death of their partner, Bolan’s next rounds spearing through their skulls.

The remainder of the squad spun and retreated, so the Executioner turned his attention toward Somali riflemen who had stayed back to provide cover. He took down the two snipers after he flicked the selector switch to full-auto. Most people wouldn’t have been able to handle a 7.62 mm NATO rifle at 600 rpm, but Bolan’s 220 pounds of finely tuned muscle and sinew, as well as years of experience, allowed him to drill tri-bursts into the Shabaab gunners who had opened up on him.

Pivoting, Bolan turned his fire toward the enemy troopers who had halted their retreat and turned their AKs toward him. The soldier had good cover, and better aim than the Islamist fanatics, but there were enough of them, spread out, that he wouldn’t be able to take them all down in one burst before they threw a wave of deadly steel-cored torment at him.

Moments later the Somalis jerked violently under gunfire from some unknown source. Bolan almost took it as a sign that a new player had entered the fight on his side.

The pickup truck Bolan crouched behind suddenly heaved as the unmistakable bulk of a .50-caliber rifle round smashed into its fender, seeking the Executioner’s flesh.

The death raining down on the Shabaab pirates came for Mack Bolan, as well.

CHAPTER TWO

Bolan leaped from behind the Peugeot’s fender as a second .50-caliber antimatériel round sliced through the vehicle as if it were made of paper. Had he not moved, he would have been caught in the path of the metal-crushing round and churned into froth by the passage of the irresistible bullet. He swept up his FAL, looking for the shooter who was concentrating on him, but couldn’t see a thing in the darkness.

The Shabaab gunmen were in a panic as they swept their AKs in all directions, opening fire on every shadow and flicker that caught their eyes. They had gone from warring with a one-man army to being surrounded and gunned down mercilessly. Bolan could see Kamau tuck Masozi under one arm and take flight once more, just as he’d done when he threw the first grenade through the storehouse window. Bolan was tempted to cut the two men down, but he needed answers. Everything had gone wrong, and the only way to salvage the situation was to get some inside information. That meant that suddenly, Bolan was on Masozi’s side.

Without a target, the Executioner was going to have to apply his razor-sharp intellect to determining where the new enemy was firing from. He couldn’t use muzzle-flashes, since whoever was firing utilized suppressed weaponry. It was disconcerting that the .50-caliber antimatériel rifle was also wearing a can, dampening its dragon’s-breath belch of flame down to a dull red glow that wouldn’t carry far in the night. However, there was no way for the riflemen to hide the angle at which their bullets impacted the ground, or the dust kicked up when they hit. The rounds impacted the dirt at an acute angle, meaning that the elevation of the enemy gunners had been between eight and twenty feet off the ground. That ruled out warehouses neighboring the Shabaab compound, which were thirty to forty feet tall with no windows.

Bolan swung back to the Peugeot and ducked below the fender. He put his eye to the cavernous tunnel that the enemy Fifty had torn through the metal, and saw shadowy figures crouched atop one of the small barracks buildings inside the complex. The enemy was dressed in black, making them almost impossible to see if they remained still, but because the Shabaab scattered under the onslaught of stealth weaponry, they had to change positions.

Bolan popped up over the pickup’s hood and triggered his FAL at the rooftop, raking the night sky. Drawing on his limited, halting Arabic, he shouted, “Over there!”

The big American pointed at the rooftop. Four Somali gunmen turned and saw what the Executioner had indicated. The young radicals hoisted their Kalashnikov rifles and opened up on the rooftop, as well.

The soldier sidestepped and sought new cover, this time behind the bed of the Peugeot. He’d moved just in time as the front of the pickup truck was clawed by a storm of automatic fire punctuated by the muffled thunderbolt of the enemy heavy antiarmor rifle. Bolan grimaced and knew that the Shabaab pirates who were aware of the mysterious marauders wouldn’t last long, and any hopes of additional forces following their cue were slim because of the death toll and terror inflicted upon the Somali militiamen by both Bolan and the hidden squad of killers.

The 84 mm rocket launcher and its bandolier sat at the wheel well of a Mercedes four-wheel drive, just where he’d left them. A mad dash across open ground drew the snipers’ attention, but Bolan was too swift, his own dark form flowing through the shadows, keeping ahead of the lines of bullets chasing him. He skidded to a halt, snatched up the launcher and swung behind the bulk of the jeep. Bullets hammered into the Mercedes’s frame as Bolan swung open the launch tube and stuffed a black, serrated warhead into the breech. Closing the action, he now had a weapon capable of evening the odds against the hidden gunmen. Rather than aim across the hood of the Mercedes, Bolan swung around the front fender, locked onto a spot at the top of the wall and triggered the Carl Gustav. The range was a mere twenty meters, but it was enough for the warhead to arm itself, and when it struck just below the roof, the explosive impact split the building, carving out a terrible furrow. Screams resounded from the marauders’ vantage point, at least two of the enemy shrieking as shrapnel reduced their limbs to bloody stumps.

The sniper fire had died out immediately, but Bolan swung back behind cover anyway. He took the lull to feed the FAL rifle another magazine, and just for good measure, he popped a fresh 84 mm warhead into the Carl Gustav. He’d come to stop the flow of illicit diamonds into Somalia, and he had been determined to give another crew of pirates a crippling blow.

The discovery of a batch of raw materials for processing a particularly toxic strain of ricin and the intrusion of a mysterious party of well-equipped and stealthy commandos had altered the mission. It didn’t take much imagination for Bolan to realize that Mubarak had gone rogue, taking a secret supply of deadly biological poisons to the black market in exchange for a suitcase full of illicit diamonds. The dark-clad assassins had all the earmarks of a retrieval team.

At least, that was the hope Bolan harbored. The gunmen had opened fire so quickly on the Shabaab militiamen and Bolan, that it had to be a shock-and-awe strike.

The suppressed antiarmor rifle was the thing that gave Bolan the most consternation.

“White man!” someone called.

Bolan turned at the sound of the voice. He spotted Masozi and Kamau, crouched behind the corner of a building. They were armed, but they hadn’t leveled their weapons at him.

Yet.

“What?” Bolan asked.

“Who was that shooting at us?” Masozi asked.

Bolan settled quickly into the role of lone mercenary. “Not a damn clue. I was just here to get the Egyptian back for shorting me.”

Masozi’s eyes narrowed.

Bolan patted the Carl Gustav launcher. “I was supposed to get six of these.”

“He promised me four,” Masozi answered. “You made a mess of my people.”

“I just came for the cheater,” Bolan said. “I may have fired on a couple of your boys in self-defense, but I nearly got flattened when they blew up half your storehouse.”

Kamau glared. “That so?”

“You might have bought his story about magic beans,” Bolan began.

“What’s your name?” Kamau cut him off.

“Matt Cooper,” Bolan replied. “You?”

“Orif Masozi,” the Somali answered. “This is Kamau, my chief of security.”

Bolan stepped into the open, keeping the launcher at low ready. There was the chance that there was a second squad of sharpshooters among the rooftops, but there hadn’t been a shot fired in the minute that Bolan was conversing with the Shabaab. “I think it’s clear.”

“What the hell was that?” Kamau asked. “And never mind the name, who are you?”

Bolan didn’t lie with his answer. “I’m a free agent who needs a lot of firepower. What say we grab the diamonds and get the hell out of this place.”

Masozi pointed at the storehouse. “If you can sweep them up and sift them from the ashes, they’re all yours.”

Bolan grimaced looking at the gouts of smoke pouring out of the shattered warehouse.

“So much for that plan,” Bolan grumbled. “Let’s get a closer look at the guys who shot at us then.”

Kamau frowned, but after a moment of consideration, he nodded in agreement. Leading he way, Uzi locked in his massive fist, he approached the half-wrecked barracks. Through the shattered wall, Bolan and his companions could see the bullet-riddled bodies of Shabaab militiamen, slumped on their cots or strewed across the floor. It was a complete slaughter, and Bolan felt better.

The kind of commandos that Bolan could consider soldiers of the same side wouldn’t engage in wholesale execution of unarmed opponents. The corpses were evidence of bottomless ruthlessness that trained U.S. special operations forces wouldn’t resort to. None of the Shabaab gunmen had even gotten close to a sidearm. It was one thing to end the life of an armed sentry on patrol, even after knocking him out, but shooting unarmed, half-naked, half-awake men as they lay in their berths was a sign of brutal, cold-blooded murder.

Kamau sneered as he looked at the carnage. “Bastards. What kind of coward shoots a sleeping man?”

Bolan looked at the tall Somali and held his tongue. He had to remember that the Shabaab had declared that they would execute any American sailors they encountered after the United States Navy executed several pirates who’d held a U.S. merchant captain hostage. Looking back at the littered corpses in the barracks, he remembered that these sleeping men could easily have taken another ship and gunned down unarmed crew members.

Their loss wasn’t one that the Executioner would mourn, even if he would have waited until they were awake, dressed and armed to put bullets into them.

“Give me a boost to the roof,” Bolan said. “I’ll help you up then.”

The Somali giant nodded and laced his fingers together, lifting Bolan to the top of the building. It was empty except for a couple of fallen weapons and a stripped-off load-bearing vest. Bolan reached down and gripped Kamau’s massive paw. Had not the Executioner’s muscles been honed by countless hours of exercise and almost daily combat, the three-hundred-pound bulk of the Somali giant would have proved a strain. Even so, Bolan was glad that Kamau dug the waffle tread of his boots into the wall to assist in getting to the roof.

“They grabbed their wounded and dead and ran,” Bolan noted. “They left behind a vest and a couple of weapons, though.”

Kamau pulled a flashlight from his belt, and Bolan did the same. It was to examine the evidence left behind by the mysterious marauders, but it was also to look for weakened sections of roof. Neither man relished the potential of crashing to the ground if he took a misstep.

Bolan crouched by the vest and saw that it had been sliced off. Blood soaked into the ballistic nylon of the shell showed that one of the commandos had shorn off the garment in order to reach a chest or neck injury. Kamau, on the other part of the roof, prodded an assault rifle with the tip of his machete, just in case the weapons left behind were rigged with booby traps.

“They were too busy trying to escape to leave us a surprise,” Bolan said.

“Not that you’re taking chances by pawing that assault vest,” Kamau noted.

Bolan nodded. “Whoever it was unsnapped the pouches of spare ammunition and took them with when they bugged out.”

“That’s very odd,” Kamau said. “No spent casings.”

Bolan frowned. “They probably had brass catchers hooked up to their guns.”

Kamau squinted at the circle of light as he ran it across the rifle. Bolan recognized the gun as a Steyr-AUG, an A-3 model, from the rails mounted on it. The compact bullpup allowed a full-length barrel on a short, handy rifle. The weapon was the size of a submachine gun yet had the punch of a rifle. Bolan had used the Steyr quite a few times in the past. Its plastic furniture was dull, dark slate gray, in variance with the usual olive-drab shell that the AUG was adorned with. Kamau flipped over the rifle, and in the glow of the flashlight beam, Bolan could see frayed fabric hooked to a collar around the ejection port.

“They took their brass with them,” Kamau noted. “Probably will ditch it off a pier.”

“Those are paranoid levels of operational security,” Bolan said. He picked up the Steyr and worked the spring-loaded bolt handle. The chamber was empty. Whoever had sanitized the weapon had thought to take the round in the breech, as well as the remainder of its magazine. “We won’t get fingerprints off this, nor do we have serial numbers on this thing.”

“Fingerprints,” Kamau noted. “You have your own crime lab or something, Cooper?”

“I’ve got a few friends who can look through Interpol databases for relevant information.”

“How do we know you’re not a policeman?” Kamau asked.

“Would a policeman drop a grenade in a suspect’s lap?” Bolan countered.

“This is Somalia, Cooper. We chop off thieves’ hands and hurl rocks at the heads of women who won’t let their husbands have their way with them,” Kamau answered. There was a hint of a sneer on the big Somali’s lips, a hint of disgust at the behavior of the men who claimed to be the law. “Blowing the hell out of a man with a grenade would make you a saintly police officer, because you at least give a quick death.”

“I’m as much of a cop as you are, Kamau,” Bolan said. In all likelihood, the Executioner figured he hadn’t told the man a lie. Bolan was no officer of the law. He wasn’t some civil servant with a .44 Magnum. The Executioner was his own man, a warrior who haunted the shadows of the world, seeking out the criminals and psychopaths who haunted decent citizens of every country. Kamau, with his hint of moral indignation at the abuses of the Shabaab and the Islamic Courts Union in Kismayo, was someone who was more likely a policeman, working undercover. If he wasn’t working for a government law-enforcement agency, then he was likely a lone crusader, much like Bolan himself.

Kamau looked at Bolan under a heavily hooded beetle brow, suspicion dancing in his eyes like reflected firelight. It was a moment that the Executioner had experienced many times before, facing down a man who could have been either friend or foe. Though Kamau could easily have been mistaken for a muscle-bound brute, he had a sharp awareness in his gaze. The Somali strongman buried his glimmer of curiosity and extended a hand. “You mess with Masozi, I’ll tear you apart.”

Bolan nodded. “I don’t doubt that. The Egyptian…”

“Mubarak,” Kamau interjected.

“Mubarak cheated me. I only came to show him my displeasure,” Bolan said.

Kamau looked around at the spatter of blood. “You were displeased by these people?”

“Yeah,” Bolan answered.

“Then let’s file our complaint together,” Kamau suggested, a grin forming on his lips.

Bolan nodded. That Kamau offered Mubarak’s name indicated that there was a foundation of conspiratorial trust between the two men. Cop or crusader, the big man was offering a shred of cooperation.

“You two done up there?” Masozi asked.

“Cooper’s rocket launcher sent the bastards packing,” Kamau called down from the roof. The pair hopped off and landed on the ground, crouching deep enough to absorb the impact of their fall.

“Whoever they were, though, they were interested more in Mubarak than they were you,” Bolan told Masozi.

“Perhaps,” the Somali said, derision dripping from the term. “They brought a fight to my doorstep.”

Bolan looked at the storehouse. “And whatever they did, they were done with this place. They could have stuck around, but since the storehouse and Mubarak’s magic beans were destroyed, they bugged out.”

Masozi sneered. “Mubarak was pretty convincing about the potency of those seeds.”

Bolan shrugged. “Neither of us have what we wanted, and it’s not like this remaining rocket launcher is going to satisfy the both of us.”

Masozi tilted his head. “What do you mean?”

“Mubarak had a stash that he was parceling out to us,” Bolan answered. “We want our gear.”

“So we head to Egypt and grab Mubarak’s weapons?” Masozi asked. “With what army? My Shabaab has been decimated. Did you find anything at all?”

“They left nothing. No casings, and a completely empty rifle that we won’t be able to trace,” Kamau told his boss. “But since they had lots of firepower, and came here after Mubarak, if we find out where the guns came from, we will not only get that for ourselves, but hit back against the scum who hurt our operation.”

Masozi looked around. “We don’t have a lot of resources.”

“I could help,” Bolan offered. “I generally operate solo, but I’m not going to be able to haul a lot of stuff by myself.”

“What makes you think we’d let you take anything?” Masozi asked.

“What makes you think Mubarak’s people don’t have more than all of your people could carry, and then some?” Bolan asked. “We go there, we hit the mother lode.”

Masozi looked to Kamau. “This sound like a good idea?”

“I’m just in this to get some payback,” Kamau replied. “Those were my men murdered by these sneaky bastards. Can’t hurt to get some free weapons in the trade-off.”

Masozi nodded. “All right. Let’s get some order back in this compound. We’ll need whatever boats we can scrounge to transport the men to retrieve the guns, and to bring them back here.”

Kamau and Bolan looked at each other.

Something bigger had just replaced the destruction of the Shabaab militiamen under Masozi. Something dark and ominous that threatened more than just the shipping lanes around the Horn of Africa.

The incinerated remains of jars full of ricin seed, buried in the collapsed storeroom, were the portent of an apocalyptic threat.

CHAPTER THREE

Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, two days later

Blunt fingers clamped around Rashida Metit’s upper arm as she was hauled out of the tent where the women of the archaeological expedition had been held hostage. She struggled to break free of the ham-handed grasp, but her captor slammed a handgun slide across her cheek. Metit could feel a trickle of blood dribble from the cut on her face.

When the man tugged again, she went along without further resistance. Metit recovered enough of her senses to do no more than put one foot in front of the other, and when her captor shoved her into another tent, she stumbled headfirst through the flaps, crashing to the sandy floor.

The structure she was in had become the official “rape tent.” It stunk of sweat, sex, blood and vomit. Metit and all the other female archaeological students on this dig had been on this floor at least twice in the past four days, dragged there by bored and angry terrorists who had grown tired of waiting for Ibrahim Mubarak’s return from Somalia.

Metit clawed at the sand and scurried a few feet deeper into the tent. Her tormentor chuckled at the sight of her desperate attempt at escape, and walked over to the trunk. The heavy lid and combination lock would prevent the hostages from getting to their captors’ weapons when the rapist dozed off in postcoital exhaustion. He spun the dial on the lock, rolling through the tumblers in order to open it, then dropped his AK-47 and Glock 17 into the trunk. The two simple guns and their ammunition would prove problematic if they fell into the hands of even a novice like the pretty twenty-three-year-old Rashida Metit. The Glock had no thumb safety, and was always ready to fire, while the AK-47 had been designed so that even untrained irregular militiamen from Angola to Zimbabwe could use them.

Her captor took one stride toward her, and Metit kicked out. Barefoot, she didn’t have much of a chance of causing him harm, even if he hadn’t danced lithely out of the path of her driving foot.

“Still have some fight, eh, bitch?” the rapist asked, chuckling as he unbuckled his belt.

“Get away from me,” she growled.

His chuckle turned into a deep guffaw as he slipped the belt out of its pant loops. He wound the leather around one fist, the cured hide creaking as it was drawn tight into an improvised fist weapon, the buckle hanging across the top of his knuckles once he was done. Metit knew what punches from that felt like. “Get undressed, girl. It’s fun time.”

Metit gritted her teeth, showing no intention of following his orders. He was going to have to work for what he wanted, and she lashed her foot out again. Only the rapist’s reflexes had protected his testicles from being smashed, her kick instead landing on his muscular thigh. The belt-wrapped fist came down hard on her shin and pain seared from ankle to hip, the leg gone numb from the brutal, jarring impact.

She grabbed at the side of the tent, her splintered fingernails clawing for a handhold, and her tormentor stepped in closer to her. Her fingers ached from the days of abuse as a prisoner, the nails cracked and worn down to the quick as she and the other women had scratched at the ground in order to dig an escape tunnel from their prison tent. It was when the terrorists had discovered their efforts that the rape tent had been initiated.

The wound belt bounced off Metit’s jaw, and her brain spun helplessly inside her skull. The impact hurled her against the canvas, which was taut enough to hold her hundred-and-five-pound weight without tearing. Then she crumpled to the ground.

Moments later, a rough hand squeezed her chin, holding her limply bobbing head still for a moment, and a second later, blessed unconsciousness descended upon her.

REALITY BROKE THROUGH her fever dreams of unconsciousness, and Metit managed to rise to her elbows before her stomach contracted violently. Bile coughed out between her blood-caked lips, and the acid in it burned the puckered wound on her inner cheek. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she rolled onto her side, instantly regretting the decision as she put her weight on her injured leg. Metit righted herself, lying on her back to alleviate her injuries.

Numbly, she reached down to take inventory of herself with her fingers. Her T-shirt was still intact, only having been shoved up and out of the way to bare her breasts. Her shorts and panties were gone from her hips, however. The sob she released transformed into a pained cough from a dry, blood- and bile-clotted throat and she turned her head to spit out the choking glob.

She took several deep breaths. Her leg ached badly, but gently flexing her foot and toes, she knew that no bones had been broken. It was a small mercy. Metit grimaced and saw that her shorts and underwear were still wrapped around one ankle. Stiffly, she slid her hurt leg through them, and pulled them up.

Getting dressed took on a new level of discomfort, every movement aggravating aching muscles, spearing her pain receptors mercilessly.

Her rapist was still in the tent, lying not far from her, his pants open and his genitals exposed. Metit was tempted to jam her thumbs into his closed eyes, gouging them out and blinding him for the horrors he’d inflicted on her, but as she had trouble even tugging her shorts over her hips, such aggression wasn’t in the cards for now.

Something was wrong. The way the terrorist lay was unusual. Her pain and nausea had been so distracting that she had missed the fact that he wasn’t breathing. A closer examination in the dim light of the rape tent showed that his throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Metit bit her lower lip and she crawled away from the corpse of her tormentor.

Emotions conflicted in her. She felt nothing but disappointment that she didn’t get to see the actual execution of her rapist, but if she had been rescued, then why were there no medics around to tend to her injuries? She closed her eyes in an effort to focus on her hearing. Even with the normal day-to-day routine of the Sinai archaeological dig disrupted by the presence of hostile riflemen, there had been sound, from chatting guards to sobbing hostages, as well as the smell of cigarettes and coffee percolating on the fire.

Silence and old, stale odors were all that answered her reaching senses. Metit’s stomach turned, but there was nothing down there to come up. Filled with a bottomless well of dread, she struggled to her feet and took a tentative step to the flap of the rape tent. Peering through the slit, she couldn’t see anyone, and the silence was thick and ominous. Her rapist had dragged her to the tent around noon, and she could see that the sun had dropped considerably in the sky. Since the terrorists had taken her watch, and she didn’t know the exact time of sunset by memory, all she could guess was that she’d been out for at least half the afternoon.

Metit was hesitant to leave the tent alone and unarmed. She also didn’t want to make a lot of racket smashing open the trunk that the hostage-taker had stashed his weapons in. The eerie silence may have sounded empty, but it all could have been a trick.

Maybe, she thought, the rapist had his throat slashed because the other terrorists thought he’d killed her, ruining the fun for the rest of the group. It was a grim, morbid thought, and she was acutely aware of the foul taste of her bile still in her mouth, as if it was punctuating the realization that she had been counted among the dead.

It would probably explain the inactivity of the camp. With one of their own having killed off a valuable hostage, there would have been enough of a panic to evacuate the dig site, moving to another area so as not to be associated with her murder. Metit rubbed her cheek, and looked at her hand, watching the dried flakes of blood and vomit tumble like dust off her skin. She didn’t have a mirror available, but she could easily imagine that she appeared like death warmed over.

The belt had been discarded by her rapist, tossed casually aside after Metit had been battered into unconsciousness. She picked it up and wrapped the strap around her fist just as her rapist had. She could only get half the belt around her hand, as it was smaller than his, and the buckle dangled like the ball of a flail. Metit nodded. It was a better weapon than a glorified fist load. She weighed a little over a hundred pounds, so her punches wouldn’t have the same benefit as a full-grown man’s fist and body mass. However, centripetal force would amplify the strength of her swing, enabling her to cave in a cheek or gash an eyeball from a socket easily. She felt a moment of uncertainty, shocked by how swiftly she had descended into a kill-or-be-killed state of mind, determining the lethality of one form of weapon over the other.

She remembered what an anthropologist once told her. The will to survive was universal human nature, but what needed to be done to achieve that survival often seemed to go beyond what most people called civilization. Every animal engaged in brutal conflict to survive, and combat was hardwired into each and every human. Going into a murderous state of mind was natural.

Metit pushed the tent flap aside and stepped into the open, the buckle of the belt dangling heavily from the end of its leather strap. She couldn’t decide if the wobbly tremors of her knees were weakness and pain from the abuse she’d suffered at the rapist’s hands, or if it was from the adrenaline overdrive of fear. It helped to concentrate on walking, every movement of her battered right leg sending a spike up the length of her side as she took a step.

“Keep going,” she whispered to herself. She closed the prison tent, a breeze whipping across the camp. The rush of air flipped up the unfastened opening, and she saw glimpses of shadows within, just enough to see bodies strewed across the floor. Metit froze, her heart hammering inside her ribs.

More slow, tortuous steps, a few more yards before she could hook the tent flap with her free hand and tug it aside. As she did so, the light spilled over her shoulder, illuminating the scene she’d only briefly glimpsed moments before. Hostage and terrorist alike lay in crumpled heaps on the floor, bodies twisted and mutilated by bullets. Flies buzzed around the open, sticky wounds on the corpses, crawling over faces stretched out in fear and surprise. Her best friend, Rani, had died with her eyes open, and the sight of insects walking across the white surface of her orbs would have brought up a torrent of sickness had Metit not emptied her stomach earlier.

Her knees gave out at the sight of Rani. Metit curled forward, her forearms crossed in front of her face, trying to block out the sight. Her heart felt as if it wanted to explode with the horror of the atrocity before her. Unarmed, bound women, all of them shot to death. Metit could understand if someone had just killed the thugs holding them all hostage, but there was no reason to kill a bunch of archaeology students on a field study.

Metit tried to hold in the sobs, but she didn’t have the will or strength. Her body had been denied its impulse to vomit, so it took its solace elsewhere. Deep, ragged breaths were sucked in between the torrent of tears and wailing over the brutal murders. She called upon God, begged for all of this just to be a nightmare that she would awaken from. She wanted the hell she was stuck in to melt away, evaporate like spilled water on hot sands. Metit asked what she had done to warrant such torment. The rapes were survivable, even if they had left wounds on her heart and soul that would never heal. But Rani, her face spattered with the blood of another woman, her chest riddled with bullets, was something that she couldn’t bear.

She looked around the tent and saw that one of the terrorists had gotten his handgun out. It had fallen from his lifeless fingers before he could pull the trigger, his existence ended with as much violence as those of Metit’s friends. She reached for the pistol’s butt, fingertips running along the Glock’s plastic handle.

This is too much, she thought as she curled her grasp around the gun. Suicide may be a sin, but hell cannot be worse than this…

Metit tilted the muzzle up to her chin, and her thumbs felt for any levers on the weapon. She pressed a small tab she’d found, hoping it was the safety.

Rough hands suddenly grabbed her, prying the pistol out of her hands. Reflexively, Metit pulled the trigger and the 9 mm round exploded past her face, hot gases and powder burning her cheek, striking her deaf in one ear, but she was still alive.

Strong arms wrapped around her shoulders as tears flowed, and she clawed at the man who’d grabbed her. One squeeze and her arms were pinned against her chest, between them. Metit thrashed her head, her one good leg kicking at the ground in an effort to get leverage. That’s when she heard the whispered words in her good ear.

“Relax. Relax,” he said in English. “You’re safe now.”

“Safe,” she repeated. She let out an anguished shriek, and through tear-blotted eyes, she could see the tanned face of a white man, American by his accent. Cool blue eyes looked into hers, and her rage subsided.

This man wasn’t like the thugs who had taken to rape when they’d gotten bored. He held her not to dominate her, but to prevent her from hurting herself, to console her. Muscles in her shoulders bunched, trying to push away from him, but slowly, she was more aware that this was a helper, not a murderer. Metit also noticed that they had moved away from the carnage of the prison tent, both of them standing in the middle of the camp.

“I know it’s hard, but you’re safe,” he told her in a deep voice.

“Everyone’s dead,” she whispered.

Those blue eyes softened with empathic sadness. “I know.”

Metit let herself relax, resting her head against his broad, muscular chest. “Why?”

“That is what we’re here to find out,” Mack Bolan told her softly. He caressed her reddish-brown hair, a gentle touch that soothed her nerves. She wanted to sleep again, but Bolan cupped her chin and looked into her eyes.

“Sit down. You look like hell,” Bolan told her. “You might have a bad head injury.”

“I just want to sleep,” Metit replied.

“Not yet,” Bolan said. He pulled a pencil flashlight from a pouch on his belt and shone it in her eyes. He looked relieved as her pupils dilated under the glare. “No concussion.”

He ran his fingers through her hair, and Metit could tell that he was examining her scalp. When he reached the bruise that her rapist had inflicted on her to knock her out, she winced, shoulders trembling at the touch.

“The skin’s not broken, your eyes dilate and there’s no sign of blood from your ears or nose,” Bolan said.

“Does that mean no concussion?” Metit asked weakly.

Bolan nodded. He gave a low whistle and called, “Kamau!”

Metit noticed Bolan’s companion for the first time. He was a black African, well over six and a half feet tall, with powerful arms jutting from the sleeves of a khaki shirt that stretched tautly across a barrel of a chest. Kamau’s head was shaved bald, but he wore a bushy mustache and a scruff of chin growth. The African was laden with weaponry, much as her savior was, but she still hadn’t gotten a feeling of menace off either of the men.

“Not another living soul in sight,” Kamau reported as he reached into his pack for a medical kit. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s beat to hell and back,” Bolan replied, “but she doesn’t have a concussion or any other signs of a skull fracture.”

“Small mercies,” Kamau said grimly, looking around.

“Who are you?” Metit asked as Bolan put a wet compress to her forehead. He also slipped some painkillers between her dry lips and gave her a sip from the straw attached to the hydration bladder on his backpack. The straw kept her from gulping the water, but she suckled for a minute before her thirst was sated. Her stomach was no longer empty, but water and pain pills wouldn’t make her heave more. Metit’s nausea had dissipated.

“Matt Cooper,” Bolan answered.

“Kamau,” the big African added.

“Names don’t explain why you’re here,” Metit said.

“No, they don’t,” Bolan told her. “This looked like an archaeological dig. Who were the goons with the rifles?”

“Terrorists who hit us a few days ago,” Metit answered. “We were looking for the hidden tomb of a fabled Egyptian sorcerer.”

Kamau looked at her, then to Bolan. “That explains where Mubarak got the seeds.”

Metit blinked, her brain starting to clear. “They were waiting for Mubarak to come back.”

Bolan’s lips drew into a tight line. “He’s the reason we came here. Someone followed Mubarak to Somalia and tried to kill us.”

Metit wrinkled her brow. “Are you…”

She looked at some of the murdered riflemen.

“No,” Kamau said. “I’m an undercover agent. Cooper, he hasn’t said. But we are here with the support of people Mubarak wanted to sell the sorcerer’s seeds to.”

“Undercover agent?” Metit asked.

“I’m Ethiopian,” Kamau confessed. “Our country is not thrilled to have a bunch of radical fundamentalists controlling a large part of a neighboring nation.”

“And I’m not thrilled to see any terrorists trading diamonds for military weapons,” Bolan told her.

Metit shook her head numbly. The clarity she’d felt when she’d recognized Mubarak’s name was fading. “Is it all right for me to lie down? My name, by the way, is Rashida Metit.”

Bolan nodded in acknowledgment of her introduction.

“Kamau?” he said.

“I’ll check the perimeter again,” Kamau replied. “Whoever did this left to get into the catacombs your people were exploring. They could be on their way back any moment and they have guards at the cave entrance who could have heard you.”

Metit shuddered. “I’ll stay awake. And quiet.”

Kamau gave her a warm, reassuring smile, then stalked toward the entrance to the catacombs that had been built into the side of a mountain.

Bolan rested a calming hand on Metit’s shoulder. “I’ll see what medical attention I can provide, and you fill me in on this sorcerer.”

“Set Akhon,” Metit explained. “He was a master of death according to the few hieroglyphic references to him in the prepyramidal tombs.”

“Prepyramidal era?” Bolan asked. “It makes sense. More than a couple of ancient peoples had developed poison sprayers and chemical flame projectors around that time.”

“You know your ancient history,” Metit answered.

Bolan looked toward the catacombs, then to the bodies strewed around the camp and sighed. “Only because some people don’t see humankind’s greatest mistakes as anything other than inspiration for more madness and carnage.”

The Executioner tended to the young woman’s injuries. The psychotics who had wrought this destruction in the name of an ancient weapon were bound to return to camp sooner or later. Bolan needed Metit in peak health and able to fend for herself.

Then, Bolan would be free to deliver justice to a ruthless squad of murderers.

CHAPTER FOUR

Isoba Kamau thought about the twisting journey that had brought him from his youth as the child of ethnic Somali parents in Addis Ababa to the Sinai Peninsula, specifically the most recent stretch. The Ethiopian army Intelligence Division had sent Kamau undercover into Somalia, since his physical features and the Somali and Arabic taught to him by his parents enabled him to blend in, despite his great size and strength. Working his way through the ranks of infighting among the radical Islamists who had dissolved into competing factions with the defeat of the Islamic Courts Union in 2006, Kamau had risen to a position of trust under one small unit leader of the Shabaab. With his strength and fighting ability, he had proved himself to Masozi, and managed to limit his violence to rivals of the Shabaab splinter. Uncovering the pipeline of illegal Liberian diamonds that helped the young militia commander had been Kamau’s goal.

That was when the American, Matt Cooper, arrived and the Shabaab splinter was hammered mercilessly. Cooper admitted that he had been behind some of the damage wrought among the renegade Islamists, but the major issue had been where the Egyptian Mubarak had gotten his hands on potential weapons of mass destruction like ricinus seeds. Whoever the American really was, he had seen through Kamau’s position as Shabaab security chief.

It was probably Kamau’s polylinguistic ability, as well as the reaction to the deaths of his supposed comrades. Cooper had a sharp eye, and had betrayed that he was on his own mission of justice in the war-torn Somalia. Kamau was glad to finally drop the act of fanatic. Though he was familiar with Islam as practiced by his mother, the zero-tolerance xenophobic variety practiced by the hordes swarming southern Somalia was a heavy weight on Kamau’s broad, powerful shoulders.

He whispered the Lord’s Prayer, the Somali-Orthodox version of it in Amharic, thanking God for the relief of breaking away from the Shabaab on a scouting mission to seek Mubarak’s stash of deadly arms and poisons.

Masozi had whispered, before he and Cooper left for Egypt, to keep a close eye on the American. Masozi was paranoid and utterly bigoted. A white man was a devil in disguise, and Cooper’s guise as a mercenary only reinforced the Shabaab leader’s anxiety that he would betray them. Kamau, being a fellow African who knelt to Mecca five times a day, was utterly trustworthy.

Kamau smiled at the irony as he knelt behind a rock, observing the guards at the entrance to the catacombs of Set Akhon. The AK-47 gripped in his massive hands felt like a toy, but anything larger would be impractical. He noticed movement at the entrance, and in the late-afternoon sun, he was able to finally see what the enemy looked like.

Each was dressed in a black Nomex flight suit, the de rigueur uniform of special operations teams in the field. The suits had multiple pockets and were made of environmentally resistant materials that protected the wearer from anything from fire to ice. They allowed easy, unrestrained movement, and could be kept as warm or cold as necessary, thanks to the use of chemical-pack inserts. Under the jumpsuits, the men likely had on body armor, or they had incorporated it into the load-bearing vests that held their ammunition. The mystery killers were packing modern, twenty-first-century weaponry. Their black rifles were compact bullpup weapons with rail sights. Kamau wasn’t quite certain what they were, but they bore enough resemblance to the Israeli Tavor assault rifle that he had to wonder exactly whom the commandos worked for.

The Tavor had been around long enough that some models had been found on the black market, and undoubtedly, there were knockoff producers who had reverse engineered the guns to make their own versions. It was also entirely possible that these were some form of gun produced in Brazil or China, Kamau thought. The “Uzi” pistol that rode on his hip was actually a Brazilian look-alike, and the Beretta he wore in a shoulder holster had been built in South America.

Cooper was similarly rearmed, since both men had had to dispose of their weaponry to avoid undue attention by customs officials in Egypt. Unlike in southern Somalia, Egyptian law enforcement was on its toes, alert and ready for trouble at all times, being a target of extremists who thought that the rightful, democratically elected government in Cairo didn’t adhere strictly enough to the principles of Islam.

Men had appeared at the mouth of the cave, pushing a small cart loaded with crates. Kamau knew that the mystery commandos had retrieved some of their deadly cargo from within the catacombs. It was likely that more of the raiders were following with their own containers. Kamau gritted his teeth, knowing that he and Cooper were outgunned as well as outnumbered.

He turned and raced on quiet feet back to the camp. The woman student was on her feet, her long, reddish-brown hair pulled out of her face in a ponytail so that a damp bandage could be wrapped around her head. She didn’t look as if she could fight, but Bolan had given her a handgun in a belt holster that had been cinched around her hips.

Bolan nodded as he saw Kamau and turned to Metit. “They’re on their way back here. They’ll notice that you’re gone, so we need to move.”

Metit’s eyes at least looked as if they could focus. She rested her shaky hand on the grip of her pistol. “We’re going to let them get away with this?”

“No,” Bolan answered. “Kamau?”

“I saw four, but four people couldn’t take down this camp that fast. There’s at least another squad of four,” he answered.

Bolan turned to Metit. “Go with him, Rashida. I’ll make certain they don’t follow us.”

“Alone?” Metit and Kamau asked in unison.

“I’m used to long odds, and I won’t take any action until I’m certain they’re moving on us, and you haven’t gotten to a safe distance,” Bolan replied. “Inside those parameters, I won’t even have to take any action if you get moving quickly.”

“You heard the man,” Kamau said, gently taking Metit by the arm. “I’m just going to help you along.”

Metit nodded. “I know.”

Kamau shot a look to Bolan.

“She’ll be fine. Move it,” he ordered.

Kamau gave the American a small salute and led Metit toward a gully off to the side of the camp.

MACK BOLAN WAS no stranger to this situation, alone in the desert, unarmed and outnumbered, providing a firebreak in defense of allies. Luckily, the enemy hadn’t become aware of their presence yet, but once they returned to the camp, and if they happened into the tent where Metit had lain, they’d discover that the woman they thought was dead was very much alive.

The team had been sent to ruthlessly eliminate anyone involved in the archaeological dig and who knew about the discovery that was made. Mubarak had gotten away by a couple of days, so the arrival of the enemy in Egypt meant that this may have been the same group that had struck in Kismayo, and had a better means of transportation available to them than Bolan and Kamau.

Judging by the state of the corpses strewed about the camp, Bolan calculated that the students and their kidnappers had been dead for only a couple of hours. The Executioner bit off his anger and the accompanying recriminations that had delayed his arrival. Even if he had gotten here in time, there was no indication that he and Kamau could have taken down the murderers before innocents were harmed, especially if they’d stumbled onto the situation with Mubarak’s allies still holding unarmed, frightened people hostage. Two men rescuing dozens of frightened people from itchy, panicky terrorists would have been a prescription for mayhem, especially since the pair hadn’t thought to bring along secure communications. It had been a risk that they had taken, the illicit arms dealer only having weapons, ammunition and desert-survival gear.

Bolan remained hidden, crouched as he watched the mystery men as they brought out five containers from the cavern that concealed Set Akhon’s tomb. Thirteen men were in this group, and they were outfitted with all manner of equipment. Safety goggles and head wraps made determining their nationality difficult, and the way they handled their weapons indicated that they were well-trained professionals. With their index fingers straight and off the trigger, muzzles pointed to the ground, never sweeping their allies, they betrayed themselves as skilled warriors.

One of the group brought a hand unit with an antenna to his mouth. It was somewhat bulky, so that meant the man was in contact with someone far away. Cellular phones could be made tiny due to the fact that they were in contact with local broadcast networks. The bulk of the commando’s comm unit indicated that it was high-powered, able to transmit to satellites and communicate with people as far as the other side of the planet. His use of the satellite phone also indicated that he was in a position of leadership among the fighters at the tomb’s entrance. Commanders were the ones who tended to report back to whoever had financed and assigned the death squad.

Bolan knew that if he could get his hands on the mercenary’s sat phone, it was likely he’d have a handle on who was running this operation. Outnumbered, however, Bolan wasn’t certain that he could take the enemy by force. It would have to be by stealth. Luckily, the Executioner’s combat PDA had a series of universal connectors, and generally sat phones had their own ports for communication with computers, allowing the download of encryption and important information to secure transmissions. The software and hardwire links built into the Personal Data Assistant built for Bolan by Hermann Schwarz might be able to give him an edge in finding out who the enemy was.

Bolan reined in his speculative plans on intercepting the enemy’s communications. There was too much at risk with one hostage still alive, but in no condition to survive an intense fight. While the mission was important, the life of a noncombatant was too precious to endanger. There would be ways to pursue the opposition without getting hold of that sat phone. They’d be less efficient, increasing the risk that the deadly poison could be utilized before he caught up with it again, but Bolan knew that if the enemy was willing to backtrack and kill anyone aware of the ricin, they had to have had a plan that was running on its own timetable.

It was a gamble, and Bolan didn’t like it, but he decided to bide his time.

To avoid combat unless absolutely necessary was the strategy he’d plotted for now.

A conspiracy whose perpetrators were paranoid enough to pounce on Mubarak as he bartered the biological toxin in Somalia might have enough contingencies to frustrate the Executioner and his cybernetic allies back at Stony Man Farm. Protective software, dense encryption and even a simple self-destruct mechanism in the sat phone could be in place to cover the plotters.

He swept the approaching commandos with his binoculars. He’d shaded the lenses with a collar of PVC pipe duct-taped in place, preventing the glasses from creating a glare of reflected sunlight. As an experienced former Army sniper-scout, it was second nature for the Executioner to disappear, even in plain sight. Stealth was more than merely camouflage, though the soldier had unfurled a desert-pattern lightweight blanket and had fashioned it into a cloak that not only blended him in with the terrain at the edge of the archaeological camp, but also shielded him from the sun’s burning rays. His head scarf was in place to keep his head from getting too hot, absorbing any sweat he did give off, and to keep his jet-black hair from providing stark contrast, which would have betrayed his position.

As a sniper, Bolan had learned about human perception and how to avoid being noticed in the field. He could observe the commando team with relative impunity. Still, the big American knew that he could find himself in trouble if his own observational skills had failed him.

The leader of the group spoke to his men in Arabic, directing them to store the containers out of sight. Bolan didn’t speak much of the language, and he wasn’t capable of determining the dialect that they spoke, pinning down their nation of origin, but he could make out what was happening with the assistance of the commander’s hand movements and phrases he did recognize. He also heard the word helicopter and knew that there wasn’t going to be much time to spy upon this group. Depending on the tent where the commandos stored their ancient prize, it was also possible that they would discover Metit’s disappearance.

Just to be certain, Bolan readied his Egyptian Beretta to buy a few more moments of time. He screwed a sound suppressor onto the pistol’s threaded barrel. He would rob the hardball ammunition of some of its velocity as the silencer baffles would trap propelling gases as well as their resistance against the bullet. Fortunately, Bolan and Kamau had picked up a supply of military-grade ammunition, loaded to much higher levels than civilian rounds. Again, experience had taught the warrior that 9 mm full-metal-jacket bullets would do the job he needed them to do, if only his accuracy was dead-on.

With Bolan’s lifetime of shooting experience, as well as his training and familiarity with the Beretta 92 platform, he didn’t think the slightly lower velocity and lack of frangibility would hinder him from making swift, decisive kills. He slithered toward the rape tent, his senses reaching out not only for conspirators heading toward the enclosure, but for indications that the enemy had noticed his presence. Luckily, the Executioner’s stealth had kept him in the shadows, just outside their awareness.

He shadowed one of the teams that had been given the task of stowing the containers that the whole group had brought with them. They rolled one toward a tent next to where they had found Metit. It was a small bit of fortune on a mission that already seemed so wrought with troubles. Bolan had only two advantages so far, one of them being Kamau, an assistant who was luckily a man of the same moral caliber as the Executioner, and who had the skills to assist him. Kamau’s knowledge of Arabic dialects as well as African languages was worth the Somali’s weight in gold. The other advantage was that his enemy was unaware that Bolan was pursuing them. It wouldn’t last long, though. His luck couldn’t hold out forever.

Bolan glanced toward the gully and saw that Kamau and Metit were long gone from sight, but he wasn’t willing to risk that the gunmen couldn’t track the pair even on the hard rocky ground. An added problem was that the small gash in the earth was the most blatant route that an escaping woman would take. If the mystery soldiers headed out to capture Metit, they’d know that Bolan and Kamau were present. He turned his attention back to the two men who were retrieving one more of the containers, the last one that was out in the open.

There was some brief conversation as the two men spoke with their commander. They pointed at the storage tent, then over to the one that Metit had been in. The leader nodded and waved them toward the rape tent. Bolan grimaced and circled to the front, the hammer on the Beretta drawn back to give him an effortless pull of the trigger if necessary. From his new angle, he saw only one of the men push the container on its trolley through the flaps of the tent. He left, leaving the trolley just inside the entrance, then turned back to his leader.

It was a moment of laziness, a lapse in judgment that gave Bolan’s allies a reprieve. He allowed himself a brief smile when the clatter of a falling crate sounded just inside the flaps. The trolley had to have been on uneven ground, or worse, it had been shoved against the corpse of Metit’s rapist, an act of happenstance that blew things for Bolan.

The flap had been pushed aside by the dolly’s back. There was a moment of grumbling as the guy bent to pick it up. He stood, his head tilted at a quizzical angle. Bolan rested the Beretta’s front sight on the commando’s goggles. The beginning of a question escaped the soldier’s lips, and Bolan applied just over three pounds of pressure. The Beretta 92 wasn’t a gun that kicked much, and with the suppressor weighing down its muzzle, the recoil impulse was nonexistent. Plexiglas imploded as the 115-grain FMJ round speared through it, driving deep through facial bones. Splinters of shattered skull exploded through the soldier’s brain and his head snapped back violently.

The sudden, violent death of one of their own froze two of the mercenaries in their tracks as they watched their comrade collapse to the dirt in a lifeless pile. Their confusion gave the Executioner a couple more targets while the rest of the group sprang into motion. The commandos’ training and experience was readily apparent as most of them broke for cover at the first sign of violence.

Bolan took one of the stunned gunmen with a second Beretta round to the throat. The sneeze of the 9 mm’s passage was discreet, but he knew that even that gentle sound would betray his position. He didn’t wait to see the effects of his shot on the second of the marauders, sidestepping to the shelter of a slab of sandstone before he rose from the ground, his camouflaging cloak fluttering behind him. The burp of 5.56 mm rifles popped through the air, and Bolan slid around the other side of the flat stone he’d swung behind. In the transition from one side of the rock to the other, Bolan had holstered the sidearm and gripped the AK on its sling. Two of the Arab-speaking gunmen were visible to the Executioner from his new vantage point, firing their bullpup assault rifles in profile to him. He shouldered his AK and triggered his own autoweapon.

The first of the enemy gunners jerked violently, his skull smashed under the hammering force of 7.62 mm steel-cored slugs. A grisly, thick soup of brains and blood slashed from the remains of his head, smearing across the goggles of his compatriot. With a curse, the other rifleman wiped his bloodied lenses and spun. Bolan triggered a second triburst from the AK, this blast of autofire crashing through the man’s shoulder and upper chest. The gunner’s arm flopped limply at his side, but his body armor had prevented serious trauma to his torso. All that mattered was that the second gunman was temporarily out of the fight.

The Executioner scanned for fresh targets as he began a short retreat to a man-size column of stone. It was a calculated move that allowed Bolan to draw the attention of the marauders away from Kamau and Metit. The chatter of gunfire would hopefully give Metit a little more pep in her step, but Bolan was concerned that Kamau might double back and assist him. Bullets smashed clouds of pulverized stone off the column, and the big American knew he had to make certain that this engagement ended quickly. Four men were out of action, but nine trained fighters were still operating, and the torrent of gunfire that they threw at him was consistent. It wasn’t panic fire, it was concentrated autofire that would pin down any lesser man.

Bolan realized that the covering fire would only have been provided by a few of his opponents, alternating their bursts in order to keep up the pace while they reloaded. He reached under his cloak, grabbing a hand grenade hooked onto his harness. He jammed his thumb through the cotter pin’s ring, then flicked the safety out of the minibomb. Once the pin was pulled, the grenade was no longer a friend to anyone on the battlefield. Bolan loosened his fingers on the fragger so that its spoon lever would pop free, beginning the countdown on its fuse. It was a process called cooking the grenade, burning off a fraction of the bomb’s timer to make it less likely that the recipients could throw it away from them. With a powerful lob, Bolan sailed the grenade high over his cover.

Bolan had heard the cry of “Grenade!” in dozens of languages over his years of combat, so he knew that the enemy saw death drop from above. The concentrated autofire that held Bolan in place sputtered and died out. The subsequent detonation of several ounces of military-grade high explosives shook the ground and filled the air with thousands of pieces of notched wire and the grenade’s broken steel shell.

Bolan kicked into the open and charged toward the next position he’d picked to take cover behind. To his right, an assault rifle opened up, chewing at the ground and plucking at the camo-pattern blanket that had given the Executioner his concealment. The flowing cloak no longer provided a stealth function now that the enemy was aware of his presence, but the cloth obscured Bolan’s body. The enemy gunners had been trained to fire at center of mass, and the concealing cape altered that target, moving it away from Bolan’s body and saving his life by a matter of inches.

With a wild dive, the Executioner returned to the column he’d previously evacuated. Bullets slammed into the ground, chasing him.

The enemy was smart and fast. The gunners didn’t have a good angle on the Executioner yet, but it would only be a matter of moments before they could get him in their sights.

The doomsday numbers tumbled as Bolan looked for a way out of this trap.

CHAPTER FIVE

Bullets slammed into the stone column Bolan crouched behind. The mystery commandos surrounded the veteran warrior. Alone and outnumbered, he scanned for an angle where the enemy’s rifles hadn’t filled the air with blazing-hot steel-cored slugs.

During his career, the Executioner had found himself backed into many corners by overwhelming enemy forces, so much so that one part of his mind always sought escape routes from any location or situation. Countless hours of practical experience had ingrained a situational awareness that would give him the means of evasion once an emergency presented itself.

The eruption of bullets against the face of one stone showed Bolan that there was a two-foot gap, close to the ground. Thought was action for the lone soldier, and he tucked his rifle flat to his chest. In another heartbeat, his long, muscular legs propelled him into that gap, his tattered cloak flapping behind him and jerking as rifle rounds tore through its fabric. Nothing struck Bolan’s back or lower limbs, and with serpentine agility and speed, he slithered along the ground and out of the path of enemy gunfire. He could hear shouts of communication among his Arabic-speaking opponents. They knew he’d moved out of the pocket they’d tried to sew him into with full-auto fire as their needle and thread.

Bolan didn’t spare their consternation another thought, seeing another furrow in the earth that would allow him to run while maintaining cover. He somersaulted into the crease and got his feet beneath him. After two long strides, he felt the air shake as a hand grenade detonated behind him. His improvised camouflage cape shuddered as it absorbed a wave of shrapnel that would have been deadly had Bolan not gotten enough distance between himself and the explosion. It was an uncomfortable set of factors that spared the soldier’s life for a few moments more, but he charged on, unhooking one of his own explosive eggs from his harness.

With a deft turn and a hard throw, Bolan sailed his grenade at the torso of an enemy gunman who scrambled into view. The baseball-size knot of steel and RDX crunched against the man’s goggles, cracking them and knocking him onto his back. Moments later, the fuse ticked down to zero and detonated. Arms and legs were thrown into the air in a grisly display of carnage. Shreds of human tissue vomited upward in a column of debris that would rain down once gravity overcame their initial acceleration.

Bolan knew he’d taken down one more of the enemy, but given the skills of the group, he wasn’t going to take that as a major victory. They were simply too good to take for granted. He skidded to a halt and dropped prone while facing the direction he’d just come from. The collapse to the dirt was swift, and his tattered blanket settled over his flat form. The crunch of racing boots sounded in the distance, and Bolan swung the barrel of his AK toward the noise. He had his weapon aimed, and one eye on the front sight, but his ears were open and his peripheral vision was peeled in order to keep from being flanked. He was still outnumbered and outgunned.

A crunch off to Bolan’s left spurred him to roll onto his side, transitioning from the rifle to one of his sidearms. Aside from the AK and the Beretta, Bolan liked to have a handgun with considerable penetration and power. Normally, that was the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, but the rapid trip to the Sinai had left him needing a locally acquired alternative. His substitute was a Smith & Wesson .45 Military and Police with a 10-shot magazine. A hooded, goggle-wearing commando head appeared where Bolan had aimed the hand cannon, and he pulled the trigger, spearing a 230-grain round-nosed slug through his pursuer’s face. The goggles vaporized, along with the man’s eyes, and he flopped backward out of sight.

The bellow of the polymer handgun’s discharge slowed the approaching boot stomps. Unfortunately for the pair of mercenaries, their forward advance hadn’t halted soon enough to save both of them. Bolan had kept his AK trained on the spot he’d expected them to appear, and now that the enemy was in sight, he held down the trigger on the Kalashnikov. A snarl of full-auto fire raked across the upper thighs and groin of one of the mystery gunmen. Heavy, steel-cored slugs shattered the rifleman’s femurs and pelvis while other rounds tore through femoral arteries. The sputtering roar of the AK was a death sentence for the gunner, and he toppled into a thrashing heap.

The second of the killers managed to throw himself back toward cover. His reflexes had helped him to avoid the relentless, merciless slash of bullets that had taken down his partner. Bolan would have been tempted to go after the escaping gunman, but a hand grenade clanked on the stone furrow he was in, thrown by a third mercenary who hadn’t jolted out into the open. With his own reactions honed by countless battles, the Executioner hurled himself out of the gully, rolling on the flat ground as the fragger went off. In his tumble to escape the shrapnel and shock wave, the AK was torn from his grasp.

Bolan didn’t bother to retrieve the assault rifle, both hands clasping around the grip of the Smith & Wesson .45. He rolled to one knee, maintaining a low profile out in the open. Two more grenades sailed from the crack, and Bolan scrambled to the cover of a low mount of stone. Thunderous booms resounded from the double blast, jarring the soldier’s ears, but the concussive energy wasn’t strong enough to do more than momentarily disorient him. With practiced wisdom, Bolan lay still behind the mound, allowing the plumes of dust and smoke from the explosions to obscure his presence.

He heard the enemy conversing, wishing he had enough of a grasp of Arabic to pinpoint the style of speech. They could have been emissaries of any of a half-dozen governments, from Syria to Pakistan, and only their cold-blooded execution of hostages had dispelled any qualms Bolan would have had for gunning them down. Even if they were a “friendly” government’s death squad, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, they were heartless murderers, and as such had earned the cleansing flames of his wrath.

Bolan noticed the man he’d shot in the face, sprawled on the ground not far from him. To replace his fallen rifle, he made a crablike scurry on all fours toward the fallen assault weapon. With a quick scoop, he retrieved it, a Steyr AUG A-3. He tore the pouch holder off the dead man’s thigh. It felt half-empty, but it was still more ammunition than none at all. With the straps clattering on the stone, he made enough noise to draw the attention of the enemy riflemen, but by the time they focused on the sound, Bolan had reached the cover of the outcropping he’d initially hidden behind. Bullets speared into the ground where he’d been only seconds earlier.

The Executioner shouldered the rifle and tapped the trigger lightly. Unfortunately, the assault rifle he’d acquired had no selector switch; only the position of his finger on the trigger shifted the cyclic rate from semi-auto to full-auto. His tap on the trigger was to release a 5.56 mm round on a single shot. He needed to conserve ammunition, and at this close range, he was able to kill an opponent with a single shot, though he wasn’t going to stick around for long. He popped a round toward a standing figure, causing him to retreat. Another pair of quick taps induced a salvo of enemy rifles to erupt, spraying the area where they had seen his muzzle-flash.

Bolan faked an agonized cry. It was a convincing ploy, and the warrior slithered along the ground. The enemy commandos had unintentionally kicked up new, thicker clouds of debris and dust that concealed Bolan as he slithered back into the gully. The sun had descended lower in the sky, and the long shadows cast by the ridge to the west had given the battleground between the Executioner and his enemy plenty of places for Bolan to conceal himself. The patches of darkness and the obfuscating clouds worked both ways, unfortunately. He needed to keep his senses sharp in order to continue his retreat.

Bolan needed some information, which meant one more retrieval. He stayed low and rushed toward where he’d seen a specific part of a grenade-blasted corpse drop. While the enemy was busy making certain that the Executioner was down for the count, Bolan decided to give himself a hand. Specifically, he grabbed up the severed forearm of the commando he’d taken out with a high-explosive blast. The tattered remnant would give him some fingerprints in order to identify at least the origins of this enemy force. He didn’t need the whole limb, but for now, he’d carry it.

It was time to get back to Kamau and Metit, before the Somali giant’s sense of duty brought him back to pitch in on this fight. Bolan wasn’t a moment too soon as he spotted the tall, powerful form of Kamau crouched in the shadows, AK at the ready. The two men made eye contact, and Bolan hand-signaled his colleague to remain concealed. Kamau nodded.

Behind him, Bolan could hear the commandos as they conversed with one another. They had halted their advance on Bolan’s former position. The clouds had dissipated, and he could see them clearly, despite his presence in the shadows providing his own concealment. It wouldn’t last long.

Kamau looked anxious, but he held his ground. This was going to be a stealth extraction. Rotors thumped in the distance, indicating that the mystery commandos were about to extract. They had to make a choice between finishing off Bolan, or grabbing the weapon they had killed dozens for.

The enemy began an orderly retreat back to the camp, making their decision quickly apparent. From the shape of the helicopters in the sky, Bolan could tell that there was at least a transport as well as a smaller, more agile craft with lethal armament providing escort. The presence of the escort bird or birds would mean trouble for Bolan and Kamau if they had infrared optics on board, but it wasn’t an insurmountable problem.

Bolan rushed to Kamau’s side, holding his grisly prize. “Where’s Metit?”

“I dropped her off in a cave fifty yards that way,” Kamau said. “Those helicopters convinced me that I made the right choice.”

“Is it big enough for the three of us?” Bolan asked.

“And then some,” Kamau answered.

“Then let’s get out of sight of any eyes in the sky,” Bolan offered.

The two men didn’t have to debate it further. Already, both Bolan and Kamau could see the dark, bug-like forms of the enemy helicopters in the distance. The Executioner had been tempted to pull out his binoculars to get a better glimpse of the three aircraft, but to do so would be to court death. Even without advanced optics, the helicopters would be able to see him once they advanced, getting closer to the two men on the ground. Right now, their only saving grace was that they were out of naked eyesight range and in the shadows of the swift-flying specks in the sky.

What he did see, however, was disheartening. There was one transport helicopter and two smaller escorts. The smaller craft were undoubtedly armed or packing more commandos to replace the several that Bolan had eliminated. If they were of the same caliber as the ones the Executioner had battled, then there was no doubt that he would be pushed harder, especially with eyes in the sky assisting in tracking down the warrior and those he’d sworn to protect.

The difficulty of dealing with enemy aircraft was just too much to surmount with the firepower and numbers he had on his side. Right now, all he could do was hide, and hope that he could catch up with the opposition later. He had the hand and the fingerprints, which hopefully would give him an indication of who the enemy was.

Bolan and Kamau scurried into the cave, Metit watching them wide-eyed in shock as the two were in full retreat. She bit her upper lip and looked at Bolan.

“I hear helicopters,” she whispered.

“We’re staying out of sight,” Bolan said. “It doesn’t look as if we’ve got to worry about too much trouble sticking around.”

“The gunfight?” Metit asked.

“It was touch-and-go for a while. I did enough to convince them to evacuate as soon as possible,” Bolan explained.

Outside, the unmistakable thunder of a heavy machine-gun salvo slashed down from the sky. A storm of lead tore at the ground, eventually a line of bullets clawing up the ground in front of their cave. Bolan and Kamau shielded Metit from the flying debris kicked up by the bursts of heavy slugs striking the earth. Bolan gritted his teeth as rocks and pebbles bounced off his back, pelting him relentlessly. Kamau grimaced as the leaden rain ceased. “Fifties.”

“Something in that range,” Bolan agreed. He looked at the roof of the cave, and gave a silent thank-you to the cliff that had shielded them. “If they swing around and go on a second strafing run, we don’t have enough cave to get out of its way.”

Metit’s lips had drawn tight into a bloodless line. She was getting close to the breaking point. This was going to be too much for the young woman, so close on the heels of her torturous captivity and the murders of so many of her friends. Bolan reached out and squeezed her hand, giving her an emotional anchor. Her smoldering, beautiful eyes glinted in the shadows of the cave, and he nodded to her. He’d shield her against the nightmares swarming outside on the plateau.

He allowed the young woman to bury her face in the crook of his neck, his strong, muscular arm wrapped around her shoulders like a cape, providing warmth and comfort against the maelstrom of horror that plucked at her nerves. The rumbling thud of helicopter rotors made the shadows vibrate, and he could feel Metit whimper.

Though it was just an arm, muscle stretched tautly over bone, sheathed in tough, rip-proof nylon, Bolan’s embrace was a spiritual fortress for Metit. The shudder of her sobs had disappeared, and even the clawlike grasp she had dug into Bolan’s sides had loosened.

It was several long, nerve-racking minutes that finally faded with the retreat of the helicopters’ rotors.

Kamau looked toward Bolan. “Stay with her. I’ll take a look outside.”

Bolan made a face at the suggestion, but the big Ethiopian held up his hand. “She’s practically glued to you, Cooper. I’ll be careful.”

“All right,” Bolan replied. His jaw set as he waited. Metit finally pried her face from where she’d buried it against his chest.

“You can go if you want to,” she whispered.

Bolan shook his head. “Too many scouts can betray our presence here. I’ll let Kamau do his recon.”

“I’m sorry,” Metit offered.

“For what?” Bolan asked. “You did fine.”

“I’m a wreck,” she explained.

“You’re human,” Bolan told her, cupping her chin gently. “It’s normal to be scared, especially with all of that racket going on.”

Metit’s teary eyes glistened as she looked at Bolan.

Kamau returned, kneeling at the mouth of the cave. “The helicopters are gone, but they shot up our wheels.”

Bolan sighed. “How badly?”

“They saw through the little bit of concealment we tossed over the vehicle,” Kamau explained. “We’ll have to hike it, because I’m sure they didn’t leave any of the archaeological crew’s vehicles in any condition to use.”

“I’ll double-check,” Bolan said. “Look for supplies just in case we do have to go. We leave as soon as the sun sets, regardless of how we have to leave.”

“One more thing, Cooper. While the one helicopter was hosing down the area around our cave, the other one fired rockets into the opening of the tomb that Metit’s people had discovered,” Kamau added.

“Totally caved in?” Bolan asked.

“There’s no way the two of us could dig into there to see what’s left,” Kamau replied.

Bolan frowned. “Meanwhile, if they did need more of their ricin, they could bring in digging equipment by helicopter.”

“And enough men to make the job worthwhile,” Kamau said. “That is if they’d left anything behind.”

“It’s unlikely they could have taken all that’d been stored in there,” Bolan replied.

“Very,” Metit spoke up, her voice brittle. “We found an entire cavern lined with pots like the ones they removed, loaded with an unusual-looking form of castor bean. We had only just begun to catalog the contents when the terrorists attacked. Ricin?”

“Yes,” Bolan answered.

“That’s a deadly poison, isn’t it?” Metit asked numbly.

“It can be, but it takes a lot of processing,” Bolan explained. “Even the best military minds of the twentieth century couldn’t weaponize it.”

Metit’s brow wrinkled. “The ancient Egyptians had over a thousand years to think of something. And there are indications that they did use poisons as defenses of their tombs.”

“That kind of chemistry would have been lost to antiquity,” Kamau interjected.

“Maybe,” Bolan said, cutting off the conversation. “Kamau, we don’t have time to talk now. We’ll discuss this later.”

Kamau noted that the American’s attention was focused on the sky where the helicopters had originally approached from. The implication of his urgency was unmistakable. As soon as the transport helicopter had returned to base with its precious payload, the escort craft would race back to the camp and scour the desert in order to hunt down the lone stranger who had somehow stumbled onto their operation.

Three humans, hiking in the desert at night, would be like beacons to eyes in the sky equipped with night-vision goggles. That, plus the firepower mounted on the small, swift gunships, would outmatch even a warrior of Bolan’s skill.

Kamau realized that he’d have to work quickly in gathering gear while Cooper sought to salvage whatever transportation that they could find. Flight across the desert would have to be taken as fast as conceivably possible.

“Rashida, what kind of transportation did you have?” Bolan asked her.

“We had two large military surplus trucks to haul gear out here and whatever we found back to the university,” she answered. “The rest of us traveled by SUV.”

“All one style?” Bolan asked as Kamau busied himself searching through the camp for leftover water. Hydration was just as important as speed of escape. In the desert, especially with the kind of stress Metit had endured, the human body couldn’t maintain its performance without a fresh drink every few hours. Food wouldn’t be an issue for over a week, and Bolan and Kamau didn’t intend to take that long to get back to Alexandria.

While Kamau filled canteens for the upcoming journey, Bolan had Metit lead him toward the SUVs and the truck. The vehicles had been stored at the bottom of a cliff, but the stench of burning fuel and metal assaulted Bolan’s nostrils. The commandos had crippled the vehicles at the back of the canyon, saving their ammunition. A two-and-a-half-ton truck blocked most of the passage, nearly impossible to squeeze past. The other vehicles were in running condition, but nearly three tons of slag formed an impassable dam for them to pass. Bolan sighed and looked through the pouches in his gear.

He had several grenades, but they wouldn’t be enough to move the deuce and a half. It would take at least twenty-five pounds of C-4 to shove the truck, or at least break it down into small enough pieces to drive around. Just to be certain, Bolan examined the other two-and-a-half-ton, grimacing as his flashlight revealed damage to the truck’s electrical system. It wouldn’t start, and it was the only thing strong enough to plow past the wrecked hulk blocking their swift exit.

Kamau came down to join them, laden with three rucksacks. “We’ve got five gallons of potable water.”

Bolan nodded. “We don’t have a way out of this canyon with this junk blocking the way.”

“How about we drive over it?” Metit asked. “We’ve got wood and planks back at the camp. Just make an improvised ramp.”

Bolan and Kamau shared a grin at the simplicity of the woman’s suggestion. “We don’t have time to tell you that you’re brilliant, Rashida. Just know that you are.”

The two big men ran back to the camp after they made certain that there was at least one well-fueled vehicle that could start. Secure in the knowledge that they had a working set of replacement wheels, Bolan and his partner checked the two trucks. They managed to find four sturdy planks of wood used as loading and unloading ramps for the transports. Kamau tested one of them with his weight, knowing that if it flexed under only three hundred pounds of human, it’d be useless for the Peugeot jeep they’d chosen as their escape vehicle.

“Did it bend?” Kamau asked.

“Just a shade,” Bolan said. “But we can brace it if we move quickly. We’ll also lash two of the planks together for one wheel.”

“Good idea,” Kamau replied. “How long do you think we have before the helicopters return?”

Bolan frowned. “Judging by the rigor of the victims, the commandos struck about three hours before the other craft showed up, but we could simply be dealing with perhaps a two-hour lead time so that they could do their job.”

“They may have been dropped off by the same helicopters. Call it twenty minutes to a staging area?” Kamau asked.

“Most likely,” Bolan said. He tipped over a drum, then placed one plank atop it. Kamau immediately set to work wrapping cable around it and a second plank sandwiched to it. Bolan walked up the ramp, feeling how solid it was beneath his feet. “Looks solid enough.”

“A forty-minute round trip, and we’ve burned about twelve minutes so far,” Kamau replied. “Give us another eight to work up the next ramp?”

“Add in refueling time,” Bolan said. “No way the escort birds are going out on a sortie to gun us down without enough fuel for a wide-ranging patrol. We may have more than a half hour to get moving.”

“And out of range, but this isn’t a paved road,” Kamau mentioned.

Bolan and Kamau planted a second drum, taking two minutes to brace it in place with dirt before they struggled their other ramp into position. “Whatever the case, we’ll have wheels. I’ll drive.”

“You’ll drive, but what could I shoot at a helicopter on our tail?” Kamau asked.

“If it gets to shooting, we’re as good as dead, but I’ve got the captured Steyr and you have your AK,” Bolan offered. “It’ll be nothing compared to the range of the helicopters’ guns, so we need to get far away.”

“So you drive like a madman,” Kamau returned.

Bolan frowned. The Somali didn’t seem convinced. He didn’t want to risk Metit’s life, even if he were callous enough to be cavalier with Kamau’s safety. “Think these will last for three SUVs over them?”

“What are you thinking?” Kamau asked.

“The aircraft will be flying the same route back to this camp, so they’ll be coming from the north,” Bolan explained. “You get a head start, and I’ll lag behind, playing lame duck.”

“You’ll be bait,” Kamau stated.

“You need to get Rashida to safety. I’ll meet with you in Alexandria.”

“You’re not coming with us?” Metit asked, walking up on their conversation.

“You’ll be in good hands,” Bolan told her.

“I don’t like it either, but I’m not going to change his mind,” Kamau told the woman. “We don’t have time to debate this.”

Metit looked to Bolan, then threw her arms around his neck, hugging him. “Be careful.”

“You too, kiddo,” Bolan answered. “Godspeed, Kamau.”

He turned to prepare his SUV for the coming trial.

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