Rebel Trade

Deadly Plunder

A red flag goes up in Washington after pirates murder the innocent crew of a U.S. merchant vessel off the coast of Namibia. Backed by certain authorities and protected from the law, the African rebel group behind the attack believes they are untouchable...but Mack Bolan is about to change that.

Sent in to restore balance, Bolan is on a seek-and-destroy mission—eliminate the key players one at a time and burn the organization to the ground. But victory will be no easy feat, as the rebel leader, with no intention of surrendering, quickly calls in reinforcements. Yet the group makes one fatal error—not seeing the Executioner coming.

It was a gamble, but Bolan made his decision

He moved out, scuttling through the darkness where he knew a deadly snake or scorpion might strike at any second. But venom was way down the list of Bolan’s concerns at the moment.

He crawled until he reached the riverbank, then slithered down its muddy slope into the water…and the crocodiles. But if they were there, none found him as he struck off toward the line of tethered speedboats, focused on the machine gunner in the second craft.

The man behind the weapon wouldn’t hear anyone coming, but he’d likely feel the speedboat dip as Bolan hauled himself aboard. That would be the crucial moment. Do or die.

No time to waste—the warrior clutched the speedboat’s rail and lunged out of the murky river, dark water streaming off him. Boarding took both hands, leaving Bolan effectively unarmed as he set foot on the deck—but he was never truly defenseless.

As the pirate turned to face him, gaping, Bolan lashed out with the long edge of his flattened hand. He caught the shooter by the throat, cracked something vital and swept him overboard.

Crouching behind the NSV, the Executioner grabbed his pistol grip and swung the weapon’s smoking muzzle toward his enemies. Every last one was going down.

Rebel Trade

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

—African proverb

I plan to hit the ground running in Africa. I will move faster, strike harder and react smarter than my enemies. And when the sun goes down, we will see who is still standing.

—Mack Bolan

The Mack Bolan Legend

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

For Corporal Loren M. Buffalo

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

Prologue

Skeleton Coast, Namibia

Bushmen once called Namibia’s coastline The Land God Made in Anger. Later, Portuguese seafarers dubbed those barren shores The Gates of Hell.

It was a natural mistake.

Namibia’s winds blow from landward, sweeping most of the country’s rain out to sea. The pitiful one-third of an inch that reaches soil in any given year cannot relieve the stark aridity of the Namib Desert, sprawling over 31,200 square miles of sunbaked desolation. And if that were not enough to give the coast an evil reputation, there remains the cold Benguela Current, rising as it moves along the shoreline to produce dense ocean fogs the natives call cassimbo. While that haze obscures the coast, a constant heavy surf draws boats toward land—and to their doom, if they cannot escape it.

Hundreds of ships have left their shattered, rusting bones on the Skeleton Coast—among them the cargo ship Eduard Bohlen in 1909, the Blue Star Line’s MV Dunedin Star in 1942, the Otavi in 1945 and South Africa’s Winston in 1970. Some of those hulks were still on shore, grim warnings to the skippers of another generation, but the Skeleton Coast had earned its nickname from the sunbleached bones of whales and seals slaughtered for profit by human predators.

So much death.

This morning, with the first gray tentacles of mist already visible to starboard, Captain Jake Mulrooney was determined that he would not add his crewmen or the MV Cassowary to the local tally of disasters. Fog and the Benguela Current were enough to deal with, but Mulrooney also had to think about the danger posed by pirates now, while navigating African waters.

The MV Cassowary’s cargo wasn’t anything exotic. It included lumber, mining gear and pharmaceutical supplies—any of which might draw the interest of a pirate crew while they were churning north from Cape Town toward another pickup at Port Harcourt before they started the long westward haul toward the States. Reported incidents of piracy were escalating everywhere along the coast of Africa, and while Namibia still couldn’t hold a candle to the mayhem of anarchic Somalia, it was catching up.

More fog ahead, driven by winds from shore. Captain Mulrooney was about to issue orders for a change of course, putting more space between the MV Cassowary and the coastline, when his first mate, Don Kincaid, spoke softly, urgently.

“We have a bogey on the radar, sir,” he said. “Approaching from the northwest at a speed of thirty-five knots. Collision course, unless they spot us and veer off.”

Thirty-five knots was translated to forty miles per hour in landlubber’s terms, a respectable pace when compared to the MV Cassowary’s top speed of twenty knots. The unknown craft could overtake them from behind with no great effort, and approaching from the bow, to cut across their path, the intercept was guaranteed.

Coincidence? A boater out for sportfishing or laughs, who hadn’t seen the MV Cassowary yet? Maybe. But Mulrooney couldn’t stake his life and cargo on a theory of coincidence.

“How long to contact at our present speed?” the captain asked.

“I make it thirteen minutes, sir,” the mate replied.

“Hail them and ask for an ID,” Mulrooney ordered.

“Aye, sir.”

Staring into mist and spitting rain with Zeiss binoculars, Mulrooney listened while Kincaid broadcast the call. He was disturbed, but not surprised, when no reply came through the speakers mounted on the MV Cassowary’s bridge. Another try; the same result.

Kincaid stated the obvious. “They’re running silent, sir.”

“Okay,” Mulrooney said. “Identify us one more time, alert them that they’re traveling on a collision course…and warn them that we’re armed.”

Kincaid frowned at the order but acknowledged it, and did as he was told.

The MV Cassowary was a merchant vessel, not a battle wagon, but that didn’t mean she was defenseless. Any captain sailing into so-called third-world waters without guns and ammunition stashed aboard these days would rate the designation of a world-class idiot.

When Kincaid’s warning brought no answer from the smaller, faster craft, Captain Mulrooney said, “Break out the hardware, Don. All hands to duty stations, just in case.”

“Aye, sir!”

The hardware came to half a dozen 12-gauge riot shotguns, one semiautomatic AR-15 rifle and Mulrooney’s .45-caliber Colt Combat Commander. None of the crew was trained in handling firearms, as far as Mulrooney knew, but how much skill did it take to point and fire a shotgun at close range?

There’d be no shooting, anyway, unless the MV Cassowary was attacked. In that case, he and Kincaid would try to block any attempted boarding. Failing that…well, they could turn the ship into a floating Alamo, if need be, but Mulrooney prayed it wouldn’t come to that.

The trouble these days was that you could never trust a pirate gang to loot a ship and leave, or even take the craft and put its crew ashore. At last count, according to the International Maritime Bureau, pirates in Somalia alone had been holding more than five hundred hostages, demanding ransom from the owners of their vessels under threat of death.

And Mulrooney wasn’t winding up that way.

Not while he had a trigger finger left.

“Visual contact, sir,” Kincaid said.

Mulrooney found the strange boat with his glasses, spotted the armed men along its rails. His stomach tightened, hit him with a sudden rush of unaccustomed nausea. Mulrooney fought it down and told his crewmen on the bridge, “We won’t be stopping. If they try to board, they’ll have to do it at top speed and under fire. Worse comes to worst, we ram them. Leave them sinking.”

“Aye, sir!” came the chorus from his men.

They seemed almost exuberant, as if it was some kind of game. Damned youngsters, raised in video arcades where players gunned down everything from gangbangers and cops to alien invaders with no consequence besides the loss of pocket change. It shouldn’t be that easy—and it wasn’t, in real life, as Jake Mulrooney had discovered during Operation Desert Storm. The trick to surviving a firefight was—

“Sir!” Kincaid’s tone quickly focused the captain’s attention. “They seem to have some kind of rocket launcher.”

“That’s an RPG,” Mulrooney said, as he observed the pirate at the speedboat’s prow. “Rocket-propelled grenade.”

Call it the modern version of your grandfather’s bazooka or the German Panzerfäust from the Second World War. He couldn’t judge the warhead’s size or nomenclature from the MV Cassowary’s bridge, but if they scored a hit… .

“Firing!” Kincaid announced, as if they needed any kind of play-by-play. There were no blind men on the bridge. All of them saw the RPG’s back blast, had time to note that it had scorched the small attack craft’s forward deck, and then it was a scramble for the nearest cover as the rocket hurtled toward them, riding on a tail of flame.

A damned good shot, Mulrooney thought, with grudging admiration, as the RPG came home, smashed through the window he’d been peering from a moment earlier, and detonated as it struck the bulkhead opposite. The blast ruptured his eardrums, deafened him forever, and he saw the fireball coming for him, even with his eyes pressed tightly shut.

Too late to fight.

So this is what it’s like, Mulrooney thought, to go down with the ship.

Chapter 1

Durissa Bay, Namibia

The soldier came ashore by moonlight, solo, powering a nine-foot Zodiac inflatable by the strength of arms and back alone, its outboard motor shipped and silent. He made no more sound emerging from the water than a fish might while leaping for an insect lit by starshine in the night. No one observed him. No one heard.

Mack Bolan dragged the Zodiac above the waterline and stashed it in a patch of six-foot-tall kunai grass where it would likely pass unnoticed, barring a determined search. He thought of wiping out the drag marks leading from the surf, but then decided it would be a waste of time.

The men he’d come for did not ordinarily patrol the beach. They might have lookouts closer to their camp—in fact, he would be counting on it—but the compound lay a mile or better from the spot where Bolan stood beside his Zodiac, breathing the scents of Africa.

Some scholars said it was the cradle of humanity. Bolan had not studied enough on that score to debate it, one way or another, but he knew that a lot of what he’d seen in Africa during his several tours of duty on the continent was inhumane. From slavery and genocide, to tribal warfare that persisted over centuries, cruel exploitation by imperial invaders, rape of the environment for profit, famine, epidemics, revolution, terrorism—Africa had seen it all.

And most of it was still continuing, to this day.

Bolan’s concern, this night, involved a band of pirates operating out of Durissa Bay. They were earmarked as his entry point for a campaign designed to reach beyond their local stronghold into quarters where a combination of corruption and extremist zeal made life more dangerous than it had any need to be.

Bolan was dressed in digicam—the digital camouflage pattern adopted for U.S. Army uniforms in 2004—with war paint to match on his face and his hands. Tan rough-out desert boots and moisture-wicking socks protected his feet. His web gear was the “Molly” setup—MOLLE, for MOdular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment—that had replaced Vietnam-era “Alice” rigging in recent years.

His weapons were the basics for a job on foreign soil. To accommodate the local trend in ammunition for assault rifles, he’d picked an AK-47 rifle that was standard-issue for the Namibia Defense Force, chambered in 7.62x39 mm. The GP-30 grenade launcher attached beneath its barrel added three pounds to the weapon and fired 40 mm caseless rounds. Native soldiers and police used a variety of semiauto sidearms chambered for 9x19 mm Parabellum bullets, so Bolan had chosen a Beretta 92-FS to fill his holster, its muzzle threaded to accept a sound-suppressor. When it came to cutting, he had gone old-school, selecting a classic Mark I trench knife with a blackened double-edged blade and spiked brass knuckles on the grip. Aside from the GP-30’s caseless HE rounds, he also carried Russian RGN fragmentation grenades—short for Ruchnaya Granata Nastupatel’naya—with a kill radius of between twenty and sixty-six feet and dual fuses for detonation on impact or after elapse of four seconds, whichever came first.

Because he couldn’t trust the moonlight on a night with scudding clouds, Bolan also wore a pair of lightweight LUCIE night-vision goggles that turned the landscape in front of him an eerie green. Manufactured in Germany, where night-vision devices had been pioneered during the Second World War, the fourth-generation headgear offered a crystal-clear view of the beach and the river that Bolan would be following on foot to reach his target.

After a quick stop to make last-minute preparations on the river’s southern bank.

Wildlife did not concern Bolan as he moved inland. The largest four-legged predators in residence were brown hyenas, shy of men unless they caught them sleeping in the open and could bite a face off in a rush. He did keep an eye on the ground for puff adders and cobras, but met no reptiles on his way to the river. Once there, he gave a thought to crocodiles, but, with his LUCIE goggles, saw none lurking on the bank or in the water.

He was good to go.

A mile or less in front of him, the district’s most ferocious predators had no idea they were about to host a visit from The Executioner.

* * *

JACKSON ANDJABA HAD not planned to be a criminal when he was growing up. A member of the Himba tribe, born in the Kunene Region of northwestern Namibia, he had quickly tired of tending goats and cattle in a hamlet consisting of round thatched huts. At fifteen, he had fled the village for a town of some twelve thousand souls, Opuwo, but it had still seemed too small for him. Another year had found him in the capital, Windhoek, with twenty times Opuwo’s population and no end of opportunities for a young man.

Or so it seemed, at first.

Andjaba had discovered that his rural background and his relative naïvete made him unsuited for survival in the city. He had learned that friends were vital, and had found them where he could, among the young and tough slumdwellers scrabbling to exist from day to day. In their society, no stigma was attached to theft or acts of violence broadly defined as self-defense. The missionaries who had visited his childhood village in Kunene had it wrong. The Golden Rule should read: do unto others first, and do it right the first time.

His first killing had been accidental, grappling for a knife an enemy had planned to gut him with, but it secured Andjaba’s reputation as a fighter who would go the limit, no holds barred. He graduated after that to more elaborate and dangerous conspiracies—hijackings, home invasions, theft of arms from military transports. Soon, he was recruited by a mixed troop of Angolan exiles and Namibians who liked a little revolutionary politics mixed with their looting.

Perfect.

It pleased him to go sailing on the ocean he had never seen until his twenty-second birthday, and while doing so, to terrorize the high and mighty captains with their cargos bound for places he would never visit, meant for selling on behalf of masters who already had more money than their great-grandchildren’s grandchildren could ever spend. It made him feel…significant.

Andjaba still preferred the city life, but he endured the camp behind Durissa Bay because it was his first full-fledged command, located midway between Ugabmond and Bandombaai, two coastal fishing villages where the young women were impressed by men with guns and money, while their elders understood the risks involved in any protest. No one dared speak to the authorities, since Andjaba had removed the nosy mayor of Ugabmond and dropped him down a dry well in the desert, where his bones would lie until the end of days.

In theory, Andjaba and his men were hunted by the army and Namibia Police Service, but neither seemed to have much luck locating them. In part, he knew that was because of bribes paid to authorities in Windhoek. On the other hand, he knew that some of those in power also sympathized with the Angolan refugees who led the movement that Andjaba served. Drawn by the lures of politics and profit, men often behaved in unexpected ways.

They would go raiding once again tomorrow, when a British oil tanker was scheduled to be passing by. Its course was set from Lagos, for the pickup, to delivery at the SAPREF refinery, ten miles below Durban, South Africa. The ship was a VLCC—Very Large Crude Carrier—still smaller than the ultra-large ULCCs, but capable of loading 320,000 deadweight tonnage. New, the tanker cost around $120 million, while its cargo—or the threat of spilling it at sea—was vastly greater.

In the morning, early, they would—

The explosion shocked Andjaba so much that he dropped his bottle of Tafel lager, half-full, and nearly fell off his camp chair. Someone screamed, a drawn-out cry of agony, that sent Andjaba scrambling for his rifle, feeling panic clamp its grip around his heart.

* * *

BOLAN HAD FOUND ONE sentry lounging on an overlook, along the river’s southern bank, apparently convinced the compound he’d been set to guard was out of bounds for any adversary. By the time he recognized that critical mistake, he had forgotten how to breathe, the process interrupted by the blade of 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.