Trial By Fire. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ fighting had stripped Obua’s six-foot-six, 250 pound physique down to 210 pounds, which left him looking like a bodybuilder who had spent the last six months in a death camp. His body consisted of little else but muscle and sinew that crawled across his bones. Segawa’s men grew their hair and beards out to be more like Jesus, and Segawa, but Obua still shaved his head as he had when he was a boxer. Segawa ruled through religious intimidation and willpower. Obua enforced Segawa’s will through sheer physical intimidation.

      Obua’s father had been a game guide for safari hunters before Ugandan independence from the United Kingdom. There was nothing Obua didn’t know about tracking in Equatorial Africa. It was Obua’s belief that over the past ten years God had told him directly that his best quarry, and his best food, was man.

      They had found the crash site, and what Obua had discovered there intrigued him. There had clearly been a mighty battle but no trace of any of the brethren. The rain had washed away much of the evidence, but throwing the bodies in the creek was simple deduction. Obua slid into the water and pulled a corpse to him. He stuck an inhumanly long and bony finger into a bullet hole and probed. A bullet came up beneath his ministrations. “A 9 mm round, Caesar. Subsonic hollowpoint.” He turned to the next closest body and dug another mushroom-shaped bullet out his best scout’s spleen. “Another 9 mm, subsonic hollowpoint.”

      Segawa’s men had committed the worst atrocities that Africa had seen in the new century, yet several soldiers turned from the sight of Obua’s hands-on crime-scene investigation and threw up. Obua probed every last injury of every corpse. William Wagaluka had been the squad leader. The burned and bone-crushed wound in the side of his head confounded even Obua. He pulled the bullets out of the last two bodies and peered at them. “More 9 mms…solids.”

      “Brother William said he had Uncle Sam’s children in his grasp.” Segawa mentally reviewed the pictures of the cowering cadets Wagaluka had texted him. The flight attendant would be given to the men. The female cadet had intrigued Segawa particularly. The single cell-phone picture he had seen of her had painted an entirely new ritual in his mind. “You say the Americans have reached out for their children so fast?”

      Obua looked long and hard at a bloody bullet and then flicked it into the water. The more he examined the situation the more it intrigued him. “The Americans, they no use 9 mms except in their pistols. They all carbined up.”

      “English?” Segawa scowled. “French?”

      “Same-same.” Obua stared down into the face of one of the corpses. The eyes of the dead were usually flat and glassy as a fish’s. Every brother’s eyes were inflamed like blood-engorged golf balls. Obua pulled a body onto the bank. He leaned his huge hands on its belly and shoved. More men turned away in nausea and horror as Obua smelled what came out of the dead man’s lungs. “Caesar?”

      “Yes, brother.”

      “Our brothers were gassed.”

      “Gassed?”

      “That is how he overcame nine of the brethren.”

      “He?”

      “Yes.”

      “What do you tell me, Brother Obua?”

      “I tell you the children of Uncle Sam were beneath your hand, and then Satan’s child fell from the sky and took them back.”

      “One man?” Segawa looked askance at his most mighty of minions. “Truly, brother?”

      “We saw nor heard no choppers. He must have jumped from a plane, from high above the clouds.”

      Segawa shook his braids and stared up through the rain at the unforgiving, Old Testament God who approved of the old ways. His men waited for Segawa to speak wisdom. “He came from the south.”

      Obua smiled. “Yes, brother.”

      “From South Africa, only from that benighted land could he have acquired his apparel of war, and a jet to speed him here.”

      “It makes perfect sense. He is some kind of mercenary, or commando.”

      “Sent by the begetters of these pale children of privilege.”

      “Expendable.” Obua grinned. “Deniable.”

      “Alone,” Segawa added.

      “I have an idea. I think—”

      “I know what you think, brother.” Segawa stared unblinkingly up into the rain as if God on high seemed to beam him information. “You think of who would want to shoot down the plane. I ask you who hates the Americans most.”

      “The heathens who serve Mohammed.”

      “You think they will pay a pretty penny to have the children in their grasp.”

      Obua looked into the sky happily. “They would shower pennies upon us like the rain.”

      Segawa’s head snapped around. His judging finger stabbed at Obua. “You cannot serve both God and mammon, brother!”

      Obua cast his eyes down. “I thought of God’s Army, brother, and our rebuilding.” The fact was that the last open battle God’s Army had fought with the Uganda People’s Defence Force had gone rather badly. It was God’s Army’s intention to overthrow Uganda and establish paradise on Earth. At the moment, though, they found terrorizing pagan villages across the Democratic Republic of the Congo—DRC—border a safer and more profitable activity.

      Segawa slowly lowered his finger. “I, too, think of our rebuilding, brother.” He smiled unexpectedly. “I think of eight new recruits.”

      Obua straightened at the thought. “Yes, brother…”

      “God’s child-soldiers have served us so well.” Segawa gestured at several of the men who had at one time been kidnapped from their villages as children and brutally adopted into God’s Army. “But now they have grown so tall and strong!”

      The men shook their weapons and shouted their allegiance.

      Segawa turned his gaze heavenward once more. “Eight ghost-faced children of privilege! Striking down God’s enemies! The children of the colonizers! Destroying the heirs of colonialism who spoil our sweet land! What shall our enemies make of it? What shall the world make of it? This is my vision.” Segawa raised his hands and roared into the rain. “So let it be written! So let it be done!”

      Obua leaned in while the men cheered wildly. “If what we surmise is true, then he must walk east to cross the Ugandan border.”

      “Uganda, our Promised Land,” Segawa intoned. “Zion.”

      Religious fervor mixed with the sociopathic need to kill filled and inflamed Obua’s belly. “The White Satan’s servant marches with an army of children. He will be slow, Caesar.”

      “Then find him, brother. Find him.”

      “HALT!” BOLAN CALLED. The cadets sagged in place. The two cadets carrying the copilot lowered him to the ground. The flight attendant knelt and cradled Pieter’s head in her lap. Bolan glanced at the sun. They had route marched for four hours. The rain had stopped. The sun was sinking and turning orange. “Everybody line СКАЧАТЬ