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The well-worn AK-47 felt a little strange in his hands as he swept it along the tree line and listened to his team touch down at thirty-second intervals. When he counted four, he activated his throat mike.
“Sound off. Everyone okay?”
These kinds of jumps were impossible to fully control, and he felt a little of the tension in his stomach ease when all his men checked in uninjured.
Rivera moved silently through the jungle, the roar of the wind now replaced by the buzz of insects and the screech of tropical birds. They’d picked this area because the brutal terrain discouraged people from settling it. About twenty miles into the hike out he imagined he’d be cursing the choice, but right now the fact that no one was chasing them with red-hot machetes was a big check in the plus column.
His team coalesced into an optimally spaced line as they moved north. Rivera fell in behind a short, wiry man wearing a black sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves revealing arms streaked with green paint. The Israeli machine gun in his hands swept smoothly from left to right as he glided over terrain that would have left a normal man stumbling hopelessly from one tree to another. But he wasn’t a normal man. None of them were.
Their equipment and clothing were a patchwork collected from around the world. None of them had any tattoos or other identifying marks—even their dental work had been altered to make its country of origin indeterminate. If they were captured or killed, there would be no fanfare or place in history. No heroic stories for relatives and friends to take comfort in. Just a tiny headstone over an empty grave.
“Approaching rendezvous point,” the man on point said, his voice slightly distorted by Rivera’s over-the-counter earpiece. “Approximately ten meters.”
The neat line of men dissolved into the jungle again, surrounding a small patch of land that had been recently burned by a lightning strike. Rivera peered through the foliage at the blackened trees, finally spotting a tall Ugandan standing alone in the ash. He was completely motionless except for his head, which jerked back and forth at every sound, as though the earth was jolting him with leftover electricity.
“Move in,” Rivera said into his throat mike.
He’d seen it a hundred times in training, but watching his men melt from the jungle always made him feel a twinge of pride. On neutral ground, he’d put them up against anyone in the world, be they the SAS, Shayetet 13, or hell’s own army.
The man in the clearing let out a quiet yelp at the ghosts materializing around him and then threw an arm over his face. “Take off your night-vision equipment,” he said in heavily accented English. “It was our agreement.”
“Why?” Rivera said, peeling his goggles off and signaling for his men to do the same. It had been a bizarre precondition, but it was indeed part of the deal.
“You must not look at my face,” the man replied. “Bahame can see through your eyes. He can read minds.”
“Then you know him?” Rivera said.
The Ugandan was only a shadowy outline, but he sagged visibly as he answered. “He took me as a child. I fought for many years in his army. I did things that ca
“But you escaped.”
“Yes. I chased a family that ran into the jungle when we attacked their village. I didn’t harm them, though. I just ran. I ran for days.”
“You told our people that you know how to find him.”
When he didn’t respond, Rivera dug a sack full of euros from his pack and held it out. The Ugandan accepted it but still didn’t speak. He just stared down at the nylon bag in his hands.
“I have six children. One—my son—is very sick.”
“Well, you should be able to get him help with that money.”
“Yes.”
He held out a piece of paper and Rivera took it, sliding his night-vision goggles in front of his eyes for a moment to examine the hand-drawn map. The level of detail was impressive and it seemed to more or less match the satellite photos of the area.
“I have done my part,” the Ugandan said.
Rivera nodded and turned back toward the trees, but the man grabbed his shoulder.
“Run,” he said. “Tell the men who hired you that you could not find him.”
“Why would I do that?”
“He leads an army of demons. They ca
Rivera shrugged off the man’s hand and slipped back into the jungle.
Hell’s own army.
TWO
Northern Uganda
November 12, 0609 Hours GMT +3
The light of dawn was begi
The condensation on the leaves was already starting to heat up, turning into mist that weighed down his clothes and felt thick in his lungs. He eased up a steep, rocky slope, dropping into a prone position at its crest. More than a minute passed as he sca
He started to move again but froze when a voice crackled over his earpiece. “Keep your eyes on the sky.”
Rivera pressed himself against the broad trunk of a tree and looked up, putting a hand to his throat mike. “What have you got?”
“Bahame could swoop down on us at any minute shooting fireballs from his ass.”
The quiet snickers of the men closest to Rivera were audible in the silence and he started forward again, trying to decide how to respond. “Radio discipline. Let’s not forget what happened to the other guys.”
An African Union team had gotten a tip on Bahame’s location and come after him about six months ago. All that was left of them was an audio recording.
Rivera would never admit it to his men, but he could still hear it in his head—the calm chatter and controlled fire devolving into panicked shouts and wild bursts on full automatic, the screams of attackers who sounded more animal than human. And finally the crash of body against body, the grunts of hand-to-hand combat, the bloody gurgles of death.
After he and his team had listened to it, they’d blown it off with the expected bravado. African Union forces? Hadn’t they gotten taken down by a Girl Scout troop in Cameroon? Weren’t they the guys whose mascot was a toy poodle?
As team leader, though, Rivera has seen the dead soldiers’ files. They weren’t reassigned meter maids from Congo, as one of his men had suggested after polishing off the better part of a twelve-pack. They were solid operators working in their own backyard.
Rivera threw up a fist and crouched, aiming his AK through the trees at a flash of tan in the sea of emerald. Behind him, he could hear nothing but knew his men were fa
He eased onto his stomach and slithered forward, controlling his breathing and being careful not to cause the bushes above him to sway with his movement. It took more than five minutes to cover twenty yards, but finally the jungle thi
The woven straw wall of the hut in front of him was about the only thing that hadn’t been burned—and that included the residents. It was hard to determine precisely how many blackened bodies were piled next to what may have once been a soccer goal, but forty was a reasonable guess. It seemed that their intel was good. This was Bahame country.
Behind him, he heard a quiet grunt and something that sounded like a body hitting the soft ground. Swearing under his breath, he headed back toward the noise, finger hooked lightly around the trigger of his gun.
“Sorry, boss. Nothin’ I could do. She came right up on me.”