Читать книгу Rebel Trade - Don Pendleton - Страница 14

Chapter 4

Windhoek

“Slow down,” Oscar Boavida said. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

His caller, still excited to the point of hyperventilation, paused to bring his voice under control, and started again from the beginning. It was even worse the second time.

“The river camp has been attacked, sir,” he explained. “Unless someone escaped in the confusion and has run away, I am the only one alive.”

The cell phone may as well have been a scorpion in Boavida’s hand. He fought an urge to fling it, terminate the call before some eavesdropper could hear the rest and use it as a basis for indictment. Did his men still fail to grasp that when you used a cell phone, you were basically broadcasting every word you spoke over a kind of radio? Those words, free-floating in the atmosphere, could be plucked from the air at any point between transmission and delivery, recorded, used in evidence.

But this was news, goddamn it, that he had to hear. If he had lost two dozen men, the odds were good that law enforcement or the military knew about the raid already. It stung to think that Boavida was the last to know.

“We need to speak about this privately,” he told the shaken caller. “Say no more now. Come to meet me at the place. You know the one I mean?”

“I think so,” his soldier said. “On the—”

“Say no more!” Boavida snapped. “We don’t know who may be listening!”

That was incriminating in itself, but if compelled to answer for it later, he could always claim that he was worried about airing party business on an open line. In fact, that much was true. He simply would not say which business was involved. There was no need to mention piracy, for instance, much less homicide.

“I understand, sir. I will—”

Boavida cut the link before his caller could spill any more sensitive details. Seething at the soldier’s indiscretion and the grievous loss he had reported, Boavida placed the cell phone on his desk top, slumping back into his padded swivel chair. He closed his eyes and tried to organize his furious, chaotic thoughts.

The raid his man described could not have been official, that much Boavida knew without enquiring any further. He had friends in the Namibian regime, and while they might not always have the power to prevent a raid on this or that facility, they always gave him warning in advance. Likewise, the army or police would not send one man by himself—if that, in fact, turned out to be the case. Both outfits loved a show with vehicles and flashing lights, aircraft if they could spare it, and men in body armor shouting till their throats ached while the television cameras rolled.

Whatever had befallen Boavida’s river camp, it clearly had not been a normal operation by Namibia’s Defense Force or the smaller, less well-organized Namibian Police. Even that body’s Special Field Force, formed in 1995 for paramilitary missions, would not hit and run this way. They had a penchant for detaining and abusing prisoners, not simply shooting men at random and retreating into darkness.

In which case…who?

The MLF had many enemies, both in Angola and Namibia. This raid smacked of a grudge that might be personal, something outside the law, but Boavida couldn’t prove that, either, since it seemed the gunman had never spoken a word amidst his killing.

What in hell was up with that?

It worried him, and Oscar Boavida did not like to worry. He had plenty of important things to occupy his mind, without the vision of some rogue fanatic hiding in the shadows, waiting to attack his people when they least expected it.

And if the man was not a rogue, was not alone, so much the worse for Boavida.

In that case, he would be forced to go out hunting for another enemy.

And crush him like a piece of garbage when he found the man.

* * *

HEADQUARTERS FOR THE Mayombe Liberation Front occupied a two-story cinder-block building on Bloekom Street, on the borderline between Windhoek’s Southern Industrial District and the neighboring Suiderhof suburb. The surrounding shops and housing blocks were lower-middle-class, at best, leaning toward poor, despite their close proximity to aptly named Luxury Hill.

Bolan had swapped his digicam field uniform for urban casual, a navy T-shirt over jeans and running shoes with Velcro tabs in place of dangling laces that could trip him when being sure-footed was essential to survival. On the VW Jetta’s shotgun seat, a khaki windbreaker covered the duffel bag that held his AK-47 and grenades. The loose shirt worn outside his jeans hid the Beretta tucked inside his waistband.

Watching. Waiting.

Bolan made a point of never rushing into anything if there were time and opportunity to scope a target and evaluate the best approach. That didn’t always work, of course, but in the present case he had some time to spare.

Not much, but some.

The MLF made no attempt to hide in Windhoek, proud to sport a flag outside its rundown headquarters. From all appearances, the setup was on ordinary office not unlike those operated by the ruling SWAPO party—short for the South West Africa People’s Organization, which has carried each election since Namibia secured independence in 1990—or its smaller rivals: the Congress of Democrats, the All People’s Party, Democratic Turnhalle Alliance or the South West Africa National Union. MLF Central was smaller and shabbier, true, as befit an exiled band committed to opposing government activities in neighboring Angola, but a passerby would have no reason to suspect that anyone inside was a conspirator in murder, piracy or terrorism.

Not unless they knew the MLF’s peculiar bloody history.

Bolan had studied up on that, via the internet, while he was airborne over the Atlantic and while flying down from Lisbon to Windhoek. The short version was a familiar story. Rebels in Angola had joined forces to defeat and oust the Portuguese during a war for independence that had raged for fourteen years. Then, as so often happened in the grim affairs of humankind, the native victors had almost immediately set to fighting one another for supremacy, sparking a civil war that bled the new republic white across a quarter century. The main contestants, backed by smaller allied groups, had been UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola). During the worst of it, when one-third of Angola’s population was displaced, Russia and Cuba backed the MPLA’s cause, while the U.S. had joined Red China and South Africa to aid UNITA. Today, the MPLA was Angola’s dominant party, claiming eighty-odd percent of the popular vote, and the losers were predictably dissatisfied. Unused to anything but bloodshed, they fought on—some of them from Namibia.

Which was where Bolan came in.

In most cases, he would not be assigned to tip the scales of any civil war in one direction or the other. While the CIA still fought its share of proxy wars, with mixed results, The Executioner preferred to target individuals or groups that led an unapologetic life of crime, more often killing for their own amusement or for profit than for any cause. He’d started out with mobsters who had crushed his family, and Bolan’s war had grown from there, encompassing the terrorists, drug barons, human traffickers and other parasites who thrived on human misery.