CHAPTER ONE
Kinbuvu Gaungalat considered the monster holed up in the apartment, and images of predators on the high savage end of the food chain leaped to mind. The former UNITA colonel may have staked his surveillance point from the dark end of an alley in Old Madrid, somewhere deep in the maze of cobbled streets choked with adobe apartment buildings, plazas, restaurants, bars, monasteries and convents, but numerous visions of feeding frenzies seemed to burn, alive and thrashing, the longer he stared at the wrought-iron balcony, nursing hatred, craving revenge.
And there it came, in living color, it seemed, as he felt the fire searing out from the core of his soul.
He envisioned the lioness on the savanna, her jaws clamped on the throat of a zebra as she took it down in a blast of dust and spewing blood. Then he pictured the crocodile, erupting out of brown waters in a great spume as its razor-sharp teeth clamped the neck of a gazelle that had fallen behind the pack in the river crossing, dragging it beneath the surface, drowning it in a death roll, the beast’s throat filling with the blood of its victim before the real devouring began. He imagined next the white shark, its massive dark shape boiling, a torpedo with teeth the size of celery stalks, as it surged up from the depths of the waters around South Africa’s Seal Island, a crimson cloud spraying the air before the creature splashed down to consume its meal in a frothy scarlet maelstrom.
Ultimate predators, driven by primal instinct to consume flesh to survive.
All of which, he decided, was simply the beautiful brutality of nature sorting out the food chain, the larger, more aggressive and dangerous animals ruling supreme, deciding, for the most part, what would live, what would fall prey to fill its belly. Something always, it seemed to him, had to die so something could live. And that held especially true, he concluded, in the world from where he came.
Only the predator he wished to kill had never displayed even a scintilla of such courage, much less any skill in those death hunts of wild animals. No, the monster in hiding was a mass murder, he knew, a coward who wallowed in the lap of obscene luxury while others risked their lives to carry out his homicidal dictates, swell his coffers with money earned on the blood of those he oppressed.
That in mind, Gaungalat reached into the dark vault of the gruesome past. For a moment he felt a stab of pain and bitter remorse as he weighed the awful truth about the living hell that was Angola. Like many of his countrymen he was Christian, a Roman Catholic, in fact, his ancestors converted by European missionaries who had passed on the teachings of their faith and their Bible down through the generations. Thus, recalling the Book of Revelation, he couldn’t help but picture the former Portuguese colony as a vast and eternal plague of death, war, starvation and pestilence, delivered unto all—in spirit, if nothing else, as far as he was concerned—a terrifying preview of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But had he not played a small part in the madness of genocide, razing villages where rival MPLA rebels were suspected of hiding large weapons caches, only to slaughter their women and children? he wondered. Had he not turned a blind eye when his soldiers vented anger and hatred through orgies of rape, torture and mutilation on helpless victims? Had he not, as overlord of the diamond mines of Cuango, personally flayed with bullwhip the impoverished miners and near to death?
He had, in time, aborted the course of the Four Horsemen, at least in his private corner of command and control, but not before dipping his hands into figurative rivers of the blood of the innocent.
So, then, was he any better than the monster he had come here to slay?
Oh, but he was, he told himself as he grasped the mini-Uzi hung in webbed nylon rigging beneath his long coat. Had he not turned his back on his old ways, rebelled against the monster, and nearly at the cost of his own life? Was he not sickened for years after by the mere thought of how he could have done what he did for so long to so many? Was it not all he could have done, in feverish dark nights of the soul, weeping alone, begging the God of his understanding for mercy and forgiveness, to have not taken his own life?
He fingered the compact subgun with his left hand, then shucked the other side of his coat higher up, feeling the empty space where his right arm should have been, grinding his teeth at the memory of the amputation, delivered to him for dereliction of duty, or so according to the monster. In his own war-torn nation he knew he wouldn’t present himself such an aberration, where, he heard, it was estimated by the Red Cross and World Health Organization that almost forty percent of eleven million Angolans were missing a limb—or limbs—either blown off in a land estimated to be planted with twenty-five million mines and other boobytraps, or hacked off.
He shuddered, wondering about the horror, the why of it all.
Perhaps, he then decided, God had merely punished him for his vile transgressions, only to spare his life, guiding him here to deliver both justice and grant him redemption.
If that was true, he would find out soon enough.
Shoving the howling ghosts to the catacombs of memory, he watched as the doors opened and a white man stepped out onto the balcony. Feeling the added weight of the 9 mm Makarov pistol snug in his waistband and the machete sheathed against his thigh, he melted back into the deeper shadows. As the raucous noise of the city in high-gear search of the night’s good times swirled into the mouth of the alley, Gaungalat studied the face of one of the monster’s mercenaries. The man had a hard glint in his wary eyes, framed in a lean face swathed in scruff, as if he had just retreated back to civilization after spending weeks in the African bush. There was a noticeable bulge beneath his buff-colored camou jacket, the slender shape of a commando dagger in sheathe poking out just beneath the left side. The whole picture simply confirmed in his mind this was just another whore of war, paid to murder blacks while the paymaster raped his country of diamonds or oil.
Which left Gaungalat wondering just how far and how much he could trust his own source of intelligence.
It was strange, he briefly reflected, why the white men who had found him in his apartment in Luanda would plant him on the trail of the monster. There were many—indeed, too many of his countrymen to count—who wished to see the monster die
