Don Pendleton - Trial By Fire

Bolan took Johnson’s AK. “How many of you have fired a gun?”

Rudipu, Metard, Eischen and Von Kwakkenbos raised their hands.

“How many have fired an AK?”

All hands dropped.

“This is a Kalashnikov.” Bolan swiftly ran through the manual of arms. “This is your selector lever.” He pushed the lever through the settings, “Safe. Rock ’n’ roll. Semiautomatic. These are your sights. They graduate from 100 to 800 meters. This is the fixed battle setting for all ranges up to 300 meters. This is your folding bayonet.” The squad members eyes widened as Bolan snapped out the foot-long, quadrangular spike. Bolan snapped it back and returned the weapon to Johnson.

“Set your sights to fixed battle setting. Set your selectors to semiauto. You will not change these settings without permission. Unless the enemy is directly engaging you, you will not fire without permission. Our ammo supply is extremely limited. Every shot has to count. Some of the weapons have folding stocks. You will keep them deployed at all times. You will not fix bayonets unless you are out of ammunition or I have ordered you to do so. Does everyone understand?”

“Yes, sergeant!” the squad said in unison.

“Huge.”

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“I have no time to train you. You’re going to have learn the joys of supporting fire on the fly.” Bolan pointed at the light machine gun Huge cradled. “Don’t go Rambo on me. Use your bipod. Get on and off the trigger fast. Short bursts.”

“Short bursts.” Huge nodded. “Yes, Sergeant.”

“Rude.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“So you’re a rifleman.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Bolan eyed the Dragunov sniper rifle Metard was holding. “Switch with Meat.”

Metard noted the “wad” suffix had been left off his name and smiled. “But Sarge, it’s bigger than he is.”

“He’s just going to have to grow into it,” Bolan said, as Rudipu took the Dragunov. The four-foot-long, nine and a half pound rifle nearly reached his chin. Bolan gave the cadet a meaningful look. “Fast.”

Bolan looked at several abandoned dress uniforms. “Uncle Sam still makes his full dress uniforms out of wool, Niners. You’re going to want those jackets and slacks when it gets cold.”

King glanced about as the morning mist turned to rainbowing steam in the morning sun. “Sarge?”

“Donger.”

“Where does it get cold around here?”

Bolan pointed directly west at the mist-shrouded peaks that lay between the Niner squad and the Ugandan border. “There.”

“What have you got for me, Bear?” Bolan asked. Kurtzman looked at his bank of monitors. One screen was devoted to the weather over Equatorial Africa. Three more coordinated satellite feeds as high-resolution imagery intelligence birds became available. Another screen was coordinated with signals intelligence satellites that were eavesdropping on the region. The largest screen, the one directly in front of Kurtzman, was dedicated to what he considered the “footwork” of the Computer Room—his own research and information processing.

“I have Julius Caesar Segawa.”

“Cute,” Bolan replied.

“Nothing cute about him.” Kurtzman looked at the only known photograph of the madman. With his knit cap, dreads and beard, Segawa could have passed for a reggae singer, except that reggae singers didn’t pose for portraits holding an automatic weapon while sitting on a pile of human heads. “We have very little confirmed on this guy, Striker, but what we do know is bad, and I mean bad.”

“This Caesar, he’s Lord’s Resistance Army?”

“Worse.”

“What does that mean?”

Kurtzman looked Segawa’s picture again. The Lord’s Resistance Army had been engaged in armed rebellion against the Ugandan government more or less since 1987. They believed in a heady blend of traditional African religion, spirit-medium mysticism and Apocalyptic Christianity. Kurtzman knew that the group certainly was not the first to use murder, abduction, rape, mutilation and sexual enslavement against civilian populations, but they had gone at it with an enthusiasm unseen in the twentieth century, and it is thought they had pioneered the use of child-soldiers in African conflicts.

“It seems Segawa got kicked out for going too far in his atrocities.”

“Isn’t that kind of like getting thrown out of a rock band for doing too many drugs, Bear?”

“Yeah, well, imagine if the lead singer started eating people.” Kurtzman smiled in spite of himself. “You yourself told me you have firsthand evidence of the cannibalism thing here on the ground.”

“I’ve seen firsthand that they eat hands. What else do we know?”

“Not much. Segawa split off and formed his own group called God’s Army. They haven’t had much success taking over the Lord’s Resistance Army, much less overthrowing the Ugandan government. They pulled a big fade into Congo a few years back and have been under the radar ever since. All I can find are second-and thirdhand horror stories about them that missionaries and aid workers have heard from refugees.”

“Anything pertinent?”

“He’s supposed to have some woman with him. A witch doctor. Rumor is people in the region are even more scared of her than him.” Kurtzman stared at the image of Segawa sitting on heads. “To be honest? I’m worried. I don’t think he’ll stop at just holding those kids for ransom. God only knows what he’ll do.”

“Any idea of their troop strength?”

“Depending who you listen to the Lord’s Resistance Army has an estimated strength of fifteen hundred to three thousand men at any given time. Caesar and his God’s Army are a splinter group and have been in the bush for several years. They’re strong enough to raid villages with impunity, but in recent years they’ve been strictly avoiding the militaries on both sides of the border as well as their former brethren. I’d say Caesar’s got to have at least one platoon. Possibly two.”

The math was ugly. Bolan and his little troop were outnumbered by at least five if not possibly ten to one. Bolan changed the subject. “Any clue on our shooters?”

“That is something of a poser. All we have to go on are the photos of the plane you sent and the location of the crash site itself. Walking it backward from the crash site, the air defense guys I spoke with figure Flight 499 was probably at cruising altitude. For a Challenger 604 max is about forty-one thousand feet. Flight 499 would have been well below that, and given the prevailing weather maybe half that or less, but certainly well out of range of anything shoulder-launched. Going by the pictures, put together the damage to the plane and the pilots’ ability to land it, our best guess is that 499 took a near miss by something using a proximity fuse. I’m thinking something vehicle-launched.”

“More likely towed,” Bolan surmised. “You got any probable launch sites?”

“Hard to imagine it was actually fired from the DRC. There just isn’t anything in your neck of the woods with that kind of range. Best bet would be a launch from the northeastern extreme of Uganda or the southern tip of Sudan, but they would have had to have been very close to 499’s flight path. We’re talking right under it. The other two things of interest are that the only air defense weapons the Ugandans have are obsolete Russian antiaircraft guns. But the Sudanese do have a few Russian SA-2 Guideline missile batteries. Those could have reached out and touched Flight 499.”

“But the few they have are all tasked with defending the capital and their air bases, they’re all out of range of Flight 499’s flight path, and even the yahoos in Khartoum aren’t dumb enough to start firing at commercial flights, particularly ones with a U.S. senator’s son aboard.”