Bolan’s Mark I severing his larynx and carotid arteries. The young man couldn’t whimper, but he spluttered for a bit before he died.
In passing, Bolan claimed the 40-round detachable box magazine from his first kill’s Kalashnikov, and two more thirties from his saggy pockets. Done with that, he pitched the empty AK down the river’s bank and watched it vanish with a muffled splash. There was no point in leaving guns behind that might be used by enemies to kill him, and the extra ammo might be useful, too.
If he’d had all the bullets in the world, it might have been a safer place.
Closing on the pirate camp, Bolan could hear the normal sounds of men conversing, doing chores, bitching about the work. Something was cooking, but he couldn’t place the smell. Some kind of bushmeat he supposed, and put it out of mind. Whatever they had in the pot, these murderers and poachers were about to miss their final meal on Earth.
Bolan had primed his GP-30 launcher with a high-explosive caseless round before he left the Zodiac inflatable. He’d heard that Russian soldiers called the weapon Obuvka (shoe), while dubbing its predecessor models Kostyor (bonfire) and Mukha (fly). All three were single-shot muzzle-loaders, chambered for the 40x46 mm low-velocity grenades designed for handheld launchers, rather than the 40x53 mm rounds fired from mounted or crew-served weapons. You could mistake them at a glance, but that mistake would cost a careless warrior dearly—as in hands, eyes or his life.
Today, Bolan’s “shoe” was loaded with a VOG-25P fragmentation grenade, average kill radius twenty feet. The projectile’s warhead contained thirty-seven grams of TNT, plus a primary charge that bounced it anywhere from three to six feet off the ground before the main charge blew. It was a “Bouncing Betty” for the new millennium, designed to make the art of killing more efficient.
Just what Bolan needed here—at this time.
The pirates—some of them Namibian, the rest Angolan refugees—had four boats moored along the river, with their tents set back some distance from the water’s edge. It could have passed for a large safari’s camp, until you saw the automatic weapons everywhere and noticed that the men in camp all wore tricolor armbands: red, black and yellow, with a red star on the center stripe.
Small versions of a banner flown by the Mayombe Liberation Front.
The GP-30 had sights adjustable to thirteen hundred feet—call it four football fields and change—but Bolan was within one-quarter of that distance when he chose his target, picking out the farthest boat from where he stood in shadow, half a dozen men engaged in working on its motor. When he fired, the AK-47 barely kicked against his shoulder, and the launcher made a muffled pop that could have been mistaken for a normal sound around the camp.
Until his fragmentation round went off.
Four men went down in the initial blast, shot through with shrapnel, dead or gravely wounded as they fell. Two others suffered deep flesh wounds but managed to escape under their own power, diving for weapons they had laid aside when they took up their wrenches, screwdrivers and other tools.
The screaming started then, Bolan deliberately deaf to it as he advanced, using the forest near the river to conceal himself. A mile or so to the north or south, and he’d have been exposed to view as he crossed desert sand, but there was shade and shelter at the riverside for pirates and the man who hunted them.
The hunt was on, and it would not end until all of them were dead.
* * *
JACKSON ANDJABA SCANNED the treeline, searching for the enemy who had discharged the blast among his men. He’d recognized the sound of the grenade launcher—most of the weapons issued to Namibia’s armed forces had been made in Russia, after all—but one pop did not help him place the shooter, and the detonation told him only that the camp was under fire.
Not from the army, though. Andjaba knew that if a team of soldiers had been sent against them, they’d be charging from the forest already, spraying the camp with automatic weapons, shouting for surrender even as they shot his scrambling men without remorse. War in Namibia had never been an exercise in surgical precision. Winners claimed their victory by standing on a heap of corpses, satisfied that no one had survived to challenge them.
Andjaba shouted orders at his men: the obvious, commanding that they look for cover, watch the trees, control their fire until they had a target. They were well supplied with ammunition, but could not afford to waste it blasting trees and shadows while their adversaries used the night against them as a weapon.
“Douse that fire!” Andjaba bellowed. “And those torches! Keep your damned heads down!”
He heard another pop, and braced himself for the explosion that he knew was coming, no way to prepare for it or save himself except by dropping prone with arms over his head. More screams followed the detonation, and his men were firing now without a trace of discipline, spraying the night with their Kalashnikovs, one blasting with the NSV heavy machine gun mounted on the second boat in line, shredding the darkness with its muzzle-flashes and its 12.7x108 mm rounds. One in every seven bullets was a tracer, drawing ruby arcs across the weapon’s field of fire.
Seen from a distant bird’s-eye view, the camp might have appeared to be engaged in a frenetic celebration, but it was hell at ground level and getting worse by the second. Andjaba’s soldiers couldn’t hope to hear him now over the racket of their guns. And what would he have told them anyway? Keep firing? Cut and run? Offer a prayer to gods they’d long forgotten and ignored?
Crawling on his belly like a lizard, any trace of pride abandoned in that moment on the killing ground, Andjaba searched the treeline for a muzzle-flash that would betray one of their enemies. He could not separate incoming fire from that which his men were laying down, but after seeing first one pirate drop, and then another, he knew that the enemy was using something besides just grenades.
Where were they? How had they approached to killing range without a warning from the guard he’d posted on the river?
That was easy. They had killed the lookout, young Paolo Alves, without making any fuss about it. Andjaba would find his body later, if he managed to survive the trap that had been sprung against him. In the meantime, though, survival was his top priority.
Survival, and elimination of his foes.
Or was it wiser to attempt escape?
Three of their boats were still unharmed. If he could rally his surviving men in time to board and flee, their enemies—who clearly had approached on foot somehow—could only stand and watch them disappear into the night. The river flowed another fifty, maybe sixty miles inland, to Lake Mbuende. He could ditch the boats there and lead his people overland, a forced march to the nearest town, where they could pick up any vehicles available and make good their escape.
But first, he needed some way to communicate amidst the hellish racket in the compound. Some way to reassert command and turn his panicked men into a fighting force once more.
Which meant that he would have to take a risk.
Andjaba bolted upright, daring any sniper in the woods to cut him down. He stalked among his men, cursing and shouting at them, striking those who still ignored him in their urgency to waste more bullets on the hostile night. A third grenade exploded in the camp, sent shrapnel whispering around him, but Andjaba braved it, rallying his men.
They won’t believe this later, he decided, but it made no difference. They had to get away. Nothing else mattered at the moment.
