Ramrod intercept, p.12
Ramrod Intercept, page 12
And he was gone, armed and out the door as soon as the three Arab soldiers disgorged from the Hummer. It happened so fast, Nhoubaff couldn’t believe he was a witness to such lightning slaughter.
The soldiers were out, bringing their French-made FAMAS assault rifles to bear on Cooper when the dark stranger hit them at near point-blank range with a raking burst from the AK-47. He nailed them, left to right, mowing them down like torn and hapless stick figures, not flinching. It was incredible, he thought, the stranger just one fluid motion of dispensing death in about the time it took to blink. Next he claimed their weapons as the spoils of the massacre then was back in the shotgun seat, depositing the French assault rifles on the floorboard in the back.
“Get us some distance, then stop so I can inventory what you brought. Drive in the direction of the Iranian camp west of here.”
So that was it, Nhoubaff thought, dropping the van into gear and lurching ahead. This man had come to Sudan to declare war on terrorists and their sponsors.
A disturbing thought settled like a cold chill over Nhoubaff as he glanced at the three sprawled corpses. The Angel of Death, he thought, had just landed in Sudan.
WHEN THEY FOUND a wadi suitable enough to keep any watching eyes out on the desert from wondering about them, Bolan checked his weapons. Two AK-47s, a dozen clips. There was also an RPG-7, four spare warheads. He was inspecting what he guessed was in the neighborhood of fifteen pounds of plastic explosive, checking the timers, when Nhoubaff said, “The C-4, that came from who I believe was the CIA.”
Bolan stowed clips for the assault rifle in a small satchel along with the C-4. He climbed back into van, took a close measuring of the Company contract agent, decided it was time to spell it out.
“Here’s the deal,” the soldier began. “American weapons are finding their way into Port Sudan. I have a shopping list of potential suspects. I’m not here on any mission of mercy.”
“I would have gathered as much.”
“Just so you understand where I’m coming from. You bail on me at a critical moment, leave me twisting someplace, I have my own sources in the country. I will find you. If you stab me in the back, you had better hope I go down and stay down for good.”
“I have seen you are not a man to be taken lightly.”
“You’re right, because I am heavy and I’m not your brother.”
“I think we understand each other.”
“Now, when I hit this camp, keep the engine running and wait for me to get back.”
“You’re talking about twenty-five, maybe thirty Iranian fanatics.”
“I’ve faced tougher odds than those.”
“Somehow I can believe that.”
“I’m in the business of making believers of the bad guys.”
“You are asking for my undivided loyalty?”
“A simple yes or no.”
Nhoubaff paused, and Bolan could see the wheels spinning. The man was putting it all on the line for a foreign stranger, an American, no less, a representative of the Great Satan. At some point, the soldier would be leaving Sudan, but if word got around that Nhoubaff had paved the road to hell for his own countrymen…
“If I help you, you understand if I am discovered as your ally and thought of as a traitor, then there will be no hole big enough for me to crawl into and hide.”
“Life’s full of risk that way.”
“Indeed. Very well. I will help you, whatever it is you require. No strings, as you Americans might say.”
And Bolan settled back in his seat as the Sudanese Arab drove on, taking him for an engagement with Iranian fundamentalists. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and already the soldier knew it was going to be a long and ugly day.
AS FAR AS A CAMP for the training of Iranian terrorists it wasn’t much, in terms of the number of tents or the size of the motor pool. It was basic, primitive at best.
From his perch on a ridge on the hills to the north, the soldier counted three large tents, spotted two sentries nodding off where a satellite dish marked what he assumed was the command post. Three military-style jeeps, a Hummer, parked near a fuel bin. And somewhere between twenty and thirty sleeping hardmen.
The motor pool and the fuel bin would mark his starting place to get the fireworks launched with some planted plastique. AK-47 in hand, the RPG-7 slung across a shoulder, Bolan took a look in the direction where Nhoubaff waited in a wadi with the van. This was the first of many tests, he knew, where Nhoubaff would or wouldn’t show his true colors. If he pulled a rabbit act when the shooting started…
Well, it was a long walk to Port Sudan.
Under the circumstances, Bolan had no choice but to go with his gut. Nhoubaff was in the game.
The sun would be up soon, Bolan already seeing the first smudge of dirty light hitting the sky in the direction of the Red Sea.
The soldier had a name, gleaned off his shopping list from the CIA source in Sudan. With any luck, he could bag an Iranian colonel, formerly of SAVAK, put the Q-and-A torch to his pants.
No time like the present to jump-start the mission, he decided, and moved in to start the big bang.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Colonel Ehad Qassar despised his current assignment in Sudan, viewed it as a giant albatross around his neck. The jihad was spreading rapidly, a flourishing wildfire consuming infidels in Israel, Yemen, just to name a few countries currently under a renewed siege, with new targets being arranged to taste Islamic jihad vengeance by the day. His brothers in the holy war were on the front line, and it galled him to no end that he was handed off the task of training fighters for the future in what he considered the hellhole of north Africa.
But what could he do? he thought. His orders came directly from the island bastions in the Strait of Hormuz, which in turn came from Iran. And the word out of Tehran was the Saudi, bin Laden, had been fattening a few chosen bank accounts for several years, buying and selling arms, grooming contacts and gleaning intelligence, recruiting the troops for the jihad. Part of him couldn’t understand why his fellow countrymen seemed to choose Sudan as their home base away from home, but reckoned it was the strategic port city of Port Sudan along the Red Sea that inspired the temptation to stake out real estate in Sudan. And yes, Sudan was seventy percent Muslim, no problem there.
But it was a country of extremes, as heaven was to hell, with fifty different tribal groups, something like one hundred different languages, a part of the human factors that created a vast sea of turmoil, chaos and bloodshed from the border of Egypt to Uganda. Then there was nature, and an economy that was at the bottom of the barrel. A poor country that held no real interest for Western trade, with the usual obscenely wealthy few keeping the masses under their boot heel. Cotton was the main cash crop, he knew, next to the selling of arms. But rainfall had been so rare the past few years the whole country seemed to have become one vast furnace, barren and unforgiving, as if God himself was angry with the Sudanese.
And the killing of the black rebels in the south went on. Business as usual, of course, but it was intensifying as the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies smuggled in weapons and supplies to the SPLA.
Now it seemed as if part of an agreement, mapped out without his prior knowledge, much less his approval, was for the Iranians in-country to begin training their own people to aid in the slaughter of the rebels. Then there were the fantastic stories of futuristic high-tech weapons landing in Port Sudan, every other week or so. The floating rumor was the weapons were coming from Americans, the Great Satan, of all the unholy alliances. He had yet to see one of these marvels of Western technology, since he was a great distance from Port Sudan, stuck in the middle of nowhere, in command of thirty recruits, none of whom was older than twenty.
The future of the jihad.
Another annoyance was the fact he couldn’t sleep lately. He would lie in his bunk, toss and turn, mind churning with resentment over the fact he seemed to have been shuffled out to pasture by the higher brass, given a chore that any lower-ranking officer with far less experience could have performed.
Stuck, and steaming then, no options but to suck it up for the present, see it through, resentful or not. He decided to check on the two young sentries standing guard outside his tent. He rotated them every three hours, aware that guards on watch duty tended to become bored, even sleepy. And since these young soldiers for the jihad had no formal military experience, plucked out of villages on pretty much the whim of Tehran, he knew sometimes he had to watch the roost himself. Just last night he caught one of them sleeping like the dead, snoring loud enough to rouse half the camp. If that happened again…
He fired up a cigarette, trying to calm his nerves. He had grown up in a desert village outside of Tehran, long since adapted to the heat and the barren wilderness, but there was something almost sinister about the black nights of the Sudanese desert, as if some hostile threat was always close at hand.
That was absurd, of course, since the Iranians were pretty much greeted with open arms by the Khartoum government. And this was northern Sudan anyway, meaning any threat of black rebel incursion was far removed to the distant south.
He was thinking he’d give it another week or so, then ask for reassignment to one of the islands in the strait. He understood there was a plan in the wings to begin attacks on oil tankers, using TOW missiles, perhaps slam one of them with a gunboat full of suicide bombers, the whole works weighted down with six, seven hundred pounds of high explosives. A plan just like that was already on the board. The way he understood it, two of his contacts in Port Sudan were waiting on a final shipment of these great weapons. Once that was done, a jihad, he had heard, would erupt in the Persian Gulf.
He was drawing deeply on his smoke, striding toward the flap when the first explosion went off. He froze in midstride, thinking some careless smoker had tossed a cigarette near the weapons depot. Some dark instinct warned him that wasn’t the case. Even if these were green recruits, no one could be that stupid.
He was picking up the pace when the explosions thundered on, sounding like a giant string of firecrackers. The way it sounded, so close the pounding was nearly on top of him, he knew the motor pool was going up.
Which meant he would really be stranded. It was a long walk to the closest army outpost, but if some invading force was storming the camp, a grueling hike across the desert sounded far better than getting shot down or blown up.
Two more steps, tossing away the cigarette and he was grabbing up his AK-47 when the tent collapsed under raining debris.
THE EXECUTIONER DECIDED to leave the sentries standing for the time being. They were both nodding off anyway, and since they were too close for comfort to the front flap the collapse of deadweight might alert the commander of the camp inside before he had finished lining up his ducks in a row for the big blast.
It had been an oversight on his previous surveillance, missing the ammo depot behind the tent on the far west edge. He planted some C-4 there first, setting the timer, then moved on, fixing more plastique to each of the vehicles in the motor pool, finally the fuel bin. With any luck, as close as the whole setup was to the tents, the series of blasts would take out a large body of armed hostiles before they had a chance to venture outside.
It went down according to the soldier’s plan.
The Executioner took up position behind a lone baobab, some fifty yards west of the coming firestorm.
He rode out the final few seconds, ticking off the doomsday numbers in his head, when the fireworks erupted. As hoped for, balls of fire and wreckage tore into the tents, some of the bigger slabs launched for the sky, then floating down to pound them from above. They were hollering inside the tent, roused from slumber into a sudden scramble, then the general stampede began as they boiled into sight, veering away from the raging flames.
Bolan kept moving, swift and certain, and began hosing down the first nine or ten with a long burst from his AK-47. The sentries were wide awake now, and the warrior, closing the gap, zipped them with a short precision burst, flinging them back into the collapsing tent of their taskmaster. Another burst of autofire and Bolan saw another four hardmen go down, all thrashing limbs and gurgled cries of pain.
The problem here was twofold. One, this sort of din of weapons fire and explosions would travel far and wide across the desert, rousing any roving army patrols to come have a look, armed to the teeth. Two, Nhoubaff could get cold feet over the sound of this slaughter, wondering if Mr. Cooper had bitten the dust, leaving him to hold the bag and explain himself to the authorities.
No time to ponder trouble that hadn’t happened yet. Whatever showed up in the near future, he’d deal with it, figure it out on the running and the gunning.
Right now it was time to turn up the heat and punch a gaping hole through a part of the jihad’s future schemes.
QASSAR THOUGHT they were under attack by a large force, wondering who in his right mind would come gunning for a campsite that was under the sanction and protection of the Khartoum government. A number of grim thoughts passed through his mind as he crawled out from under the thick canvas blanket, like some drowning rat, clawing for his AK-47. Had someone in Khartoum decided he had outlived his usefulness? But how could that be, since his training assignment had merely just begun? And why, if that was the case? Had his contacts discerned a note of resentment or hostility in his voice when he complained, maybe all of two times, about his woeful station in Sudan? Was this some lesson being taught him, that it was best to do as he was told, and like it? Was it possible even that a band of SPLA guerrillas had ventured this far north?
Whatever the case, it sounded like a full-scale slaughter was under way. Two more yards of digging himself out of the tent, and he came to witness his recruits getting mowed down as they emerged from the tent, which was now engulfed in flames. Two fiery scarecrow figures came shrieking outside and they were chopped down where they flailed about.
Qassar gave the grounds a search, wondering where the hell was the small army of shooters, when he spotted a tall shadow with an AK-47 on the move, going for cover behind the firewall. It was impossible, he thought, one man had wreaked this destruction, laid out this carnage at his doorstep? He looked all around, but couldn’t find any other enemy gunners.
Secondary blasts were now belching off as fuel tanks ignited from the motor pool. He was moving off to the side, lining up the shadow with his assault rifle when a great weight slammed off his shoulders, knocking him off his feet to a curtain of sparking white stars.
AZIZ AHAD DIDN’T HAVE any interest in dying at the ripe old age of seventeen. He had been recruited, paid and, of course, promised a great future by the imam’s man out of Tehran, but he hadn’t signed on to get slaughtered in a foreign country he wasn’t so sure he cared much about to begin with.
He was gripping his AK-47, running out the flap, ducking the tongues of fire, trying to will the shaking from his limbs, when he saw his fellow Iranians dropping all over the grounds. He wanted to fire back, on instinct to simply save his own skin, if nothing else, but there was no visible sign of any target.
Then he spotted the tall dark shadow, his assault rifle flaming on, drilling his comrades on the run. He couldn’t accept the idea they were all being cut down by a single gunman. It was beyond incredible, he thought; it was obscene. Even if that was the case, the shooter had seized an edge by blowing up the motor pool, dropping raining debris on their tent as they slept.
He didn’t think that was very fair.
He considered holding his ground and shooting it out, then good sense told him they had lost this fight to…
One shooter?
There had to be a way out of this disaster, he thought, but what?
The general chaos and exchange of automatic-weapons fire bought him precious few moments to flee the scene. He found a gap between the tents, slunk back, hoping he was far enough out of the firelight to become little more than a dark silhouette. He reasoned that when this was over, someone of authority in the Sudanese army would want a report, maybe a description of the shooter. But what could he tell them? A tall dark man with an AK-47, who seemed to move like a ghost, all fluid swift strides, not hesitating as he poured out death.
How many men like that were wandering around Sudan, anyway? He hoped the authorities would buy his version of events, that also would carry a tale of how he stood his ground under fire, but the stranger melted off into the night as he went hunting for him.
Seventeen, and so much yet to live for, he figured it was best to live to fight another day. The jihad was calling, and he was too young to die on the parched earth of Sudan.
The shooting went on behind him as he hastened his strides, urged along by the sudden deaths of his countrymen. The stranger, whoever he really was, may live out the night, but he determined the man would pay. Only an enemy of Islam, a devil in human skin, would carry out the kind of slaughter he had seen.
And there was no way a lone gunman could move at will and at large around Sudan. No way in hell, and hell, he thought, was exactly where the stranger deserved to go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Youth held no distinct advantages on the killing field of this particular predawn hour, not in terms of speed, reflex action and certainly not combat experience.
The truth was, youth was a disadvantage.
The Executioner took full and merciless initiative, unleashing all the skill and experience at his disposal, no exceptions, no mercy granted whatsoever for the reckless foolishness of the Iranian young here who had sold their souls in the hopes of becoming tomorrow’s mass murderer and international headliner for the Islamic jihad.
By now, maybe a half-dozen shooters were left standing out front of the burning tents. A few of the more brazen were now winging around the autofire, but the soldier was skirting behind the shield of flaming debris, their tracking lines of rounds flying high and wide. Any miss, especially a close shave under these conditions, didn’t go unpunished.
