Don Pendleton - Predator Paradise

There was none.

And the pain bit deeper into his belly. This was madness, this was…what, he wondered—wrong? Evil?

Nahbat was unaware Omari had ground them to a halt, as he witnessed a small baby ripped from the arms of its wailing mother, a pistol leaping in the hands of her executioner, a bullet through the brain abruptly silencing her pleas. Though he had to follow orders under threat of execution, and related as he was to Habir Dugula—a distant cousin of one of the leader’s countless sons and daughters by various wives and mistresses—what he felt whenever they cleansed a village went beyond horror and pain.

He felt his heart ache, a swollen lump in his throat threatening to shut off air the more he watched. He wanted to weep.

Nahbat fought back the tears. He suddenly longed to be a twelve-year-old boy again, a simple goatherd, ignorant to the horrors of his country. That seemed like only yesterday, when, in fact, it was just a little over a year ago his cousin had shoved an assault rifle in his hands, and life had changed forever. Strange, he thought, in this one year of being an armed combatant in the war for Mogadishu and the campaign of genocide against those deemed unfit to live, he felt like a tired, sick old man. He was too young, he thought, to feel such pain. Worse, he was helpless to do anything but carry out his part in the atrocity, thinking himself a coward for being unable to stand up and shout how wrong this was.

He tried to focus his distress on another baffling matter, failing to will away the nausea as the first wave of the stench of diseased flesh, the sickly sweet taint of bodies being doused by gasoline and torched, ballooned his senses. What was this business with the white men and the rival clan? Why were they involving themselves in some mysterious affair with foreigners that not even their great leader had the first clue was all about? They had lingered at the compound after the departure of the black hoods and Hahgan’s mooryan, while he assumed Habir Dugula made some attempt to verify the existence of the cutout, their supposed marching orders. Then there was a briefing by their great leader, all orders, no questions allowed. Simply put, he recalled, Dugula told them they would do whatever the white men’s bidding, that they would be paid in time, far more, or so promised, than their weekly handful of shillings. The future was more than just in doubt, he feared; the time ahead was in peril. He wondered if he would live to see his fourteenth birthday.

He was out the door somehow, Omari barking in his ear to get moving. The AK-47 began to slip from his fingers, bile shooting up into his throat. He heard the wailing, pleas for mercy, the braying of animals in terror. The din alone might have been enough to bring him to his knees, retch and cry, but the stink was overpowering by itself, threatening to knock him off his feet. The world began to spin, legs turning to rubber when a rough hand clawed into his shoulder, spun him.

“Take this!”

It was Omari, eyes boring into him over the bandanna wrapped around his nose and mouth.

The slap to his face rang in his ears like a pistol shot.

“What is wrong with you!”

“I…I feel sick, my cousin.”

“Get over it! We have work to do!”

Omari wound the bandanna around his face, knotting it tight against the back of his skull with an angry twist. He had another disturbing thought right then, as the veil seemed to do little to stem the tide of miasma assaulting him, mind, senses and soul. What if he fainted, flat on his back, the vomit trapped by the bandanna, strangling him?

The screaming, shooting and the awareness Omari was watching him closely, perhaps questioning his resolve, put some iron in his legs. He was turning toward the Russian transport truck, where they were hauling out more ten-gallon cans of gasoline, when Nahbat spotted their great leader.

Resentment flared through him, another dagger of pain and confusion to the heart. Dugula was standing in the distance on a rise. Surrounded by twenty or more of his men, he watched through field glasses, making certain they did as they were ordered. When he appeared satisfied the job would get done, he hopped into his jeep, the others falling into an assortment of technicals, Hummers. That the great man wouldn’t dirty his hands with this hideous chore inflamed him with great anger, leaving him to wonder if Somalia would ever know justice, much less peace.

He lingered by the technical, watching as the convoy kicked up clouds of dust, all of them gone to greet the UN plane flying in from Kenya.

Another wall of grief dropped over Nahbat. He knew what they would do when that plane landed. It sickened him. There was an answer, he believed—no, there was an answer he knew and felt in his heart—a way around this insanity, one far greater, a solution most certainly noble and humane and merciful, but the afflicted, the doomed he heard wailing around him would never see it.

All that medicine and food, he thought, on board the UN plane. Doctors, with skill and knowledge, who could, if not save the afflicted, perhaps ease their pain and suffering until a cure was delivered.

It would never happen.

He had seen it before, too many times.

“May God have mercy.”

“What was that?”

Wheeling, startled, he found Omari glaring at him. He watched, holding back the tears, fighting down the bile, his cousin marching toward him, holding out a can.

Nahbat shook his head, muttered, “Nothing.”

And took the can.

If it was true a man learned more from failure than success, Ben Collins knew he was in no position to test that theory. In his line of work, there were no second chances. Failure wasn’t an option; failure spelled death. In black ops, he made it a point to see losing was for the other guy.

The stack of boxes stamped CARE, deep in the aft of the C-130, would be the last thing the warlord’s frontline marauders saw when they hit the ramp. The ruse didn’t stop with this first strike, but what others didn’t know, he thought, wouldn’t kill them. At least not yet.

It was just about time to get down to dirty business, murky waters, he knew, that had been chummed since the first bunch of al-Qaeda and Taliban criminals had been dumped off at Gitmo. There was blood in that water again, he thought, flesh to consume, but it all went way beyond waxing a bunch of thugs and terrorists in some of the most dangerous, godforsaken real estate this side of Hell. Sure, there were bad guys to bag, chain, thrust under military gavel. There was a trial to consider, arranged to go down in secrecy….

Whoa, he told himself. This was only the first giant leap; the goal line was way off on the distant horizon. No point in getting ahead. There were still details to nail down and he could be sure, given the nature of black ops, not to mention the usual chaos and confusion of battle, more than a few problems would crop up along the way.

The ex–Delta Force major raked a stare over the six black ops under his command of Cobra Force Twelve. Seven more commandos on the ground were moving in right then, on schedule to help light the fuse. According to radar monitoring the two Hummers’ transponders, the sat imagery, piped into his consoles amidships from an NRO bird parked over and watching the area in question—AIQ—they were three miles out, closing hard, with Dugula and twenty-one henchmen rolling across the plain, the latest round of the Exterminator’s methods of population control framed, live and in color, on another monitor. Behind his ground force, two Black Hawks and one Apache were picking up the rear, covering all bases.

All set.

No blue UN helmets, doctors, or relief workers were on board. This was no mission of mercy, or another group of unarmed do-gooders from Red Cross or UNICEF, he thought, getting ripped off by Dugula.