Predator Paradise. Don Pendleton

      CHAPTER FOUR

      They were teenagers, fourteen, eighteen tops, but Bolan knew all too painfully well youth received no special consideration in a world where anarchy and savagery dictated who lived to steal a few more years on the planet. With the average life expectancy of a Somali male roughly two decades, if famine or drought or disease didn’t get them, they were snapped up by warlords to shoot it out with rival clansmen, profit somehow off the misery of their countrymen or marched out to commit genocide when there was no food or medicine to plunder from relief aid. An education on the hard facts, the dark side of life came by way of the sword. If they didn’t want to fight, they were killed on the spot.

      Simple as that.

      But who was to blame in the final analysis? Bolan had to wonder. The one who handed them the weapon, or the one who freely accepted it? Both?

      No matter really, he knew, since a bullet would kill him no matter who fired it, whether a raving sociopath, a frightened kid threatened by elders to do murderous deeds, or a warrior fully seasoned with the blood of other warriors on his hands.

      One of the boys was dead before he hit the ground, cradling something, the other standing, capping off another and unnecessary burst into unfeeling flesh, then taking in what he had done, head cocked halfway toward the Executioner, oblivious to all else, eyes twinkling mirrors of the firestorms. Was that pride in the eyes? The boy satisfied? Whatever sick drama had played out here, Bolan would never know but he could venture a guess. The soldier glimpsed the shredded ruins of the small child, butchered alongside with what he assumed was his potential rescuer, then he pounded a burst of autofire up the back of their killer. The boy never knew what hit him, and it was just as well, Bolan thought. Mercy, if any was due, was reserved for the afterlife.

      There would be time enough, assuming he walked out of here in one piece, to feel hot anger later. Even still, he knew there could never be any reasoning—or mercy shown for the guilty—for the madness he found here. The Executioner briefly felt a curious, distant, otherworldly sense, as light as the wind, slightly disembodied even as he waded deeper into this horror. It was as if he’d been here before, and he had, too many times, in fact, to tally. It struck him—as he heard the Apache unload Hellfire missiles, the stutter of weapons fire from the Black Hawk mowing down illegal combatants—all of this murder of innocents strewed before him, a zenith of man’s inhumanity to man, had always been here, somewhere in time and place, one way one or another, throughout the ages. Human nature was the only one constant, and sad but true, that went double for animal man.

      The guilty had to be punished, no exceptions, no mercy. High time, he decided, for a little Old Testament vengeance.

      Bolan melted into, then swept out of the drifting smoke, his gut knotted with a grapefruit-size chunk of raw anger, despite the intention to roll into this a stone-cold professional. Unless he was a psychopath or simply evil, Bolan knew no man could fully digest without the first flicker of wrenching emotion the atrocity that had happened here. With the full slamming force of death in his face, the bile squirmed in his gut for a moment, urging him on to wax as many armed killers as quickly and mercilessly as possible. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed the dead; vultures, brazen and impatient to gorge, descending now on bodies. He could ill afford to concern himself with unfeeling flesh, dwell on the full, hideous impact of all these lives snuffed out so callously. And if there was contagion here, he was willing to risk infection, if only to avenge this monstrosity, Collins be damned.

      They were running everywhere dead ahead, trying to flee certain death from above, haphazard human—or inhuman—traffic rearing up in his sights as he came out of the thickest patch of smoke. Closing on the hungry bonfires consuming diseased flesh, a few of the gunmen fired wild bursts at the warbirds, squawking in panic and confusion over this sudden final judgment of their deed. Three, then four hardmen wheeled around the corner of a firewall dancing up a hut that used to provide the most meager of shelter, he assumed, for the late occupants. They skidded to a halt, ten or so paces from Bolan, sandaled feet kicking up dust. Figure the horrific pounding of explosions and the sight of their own getting a heavy-metal dose of their own poison was too much for them to stomach, fleeing now to save themselves.

      There was nowhere for them to run or hide.

      Two of them stared at the sight of the tall white man who had marched out of nowhere, staring ahead as if he were some avenging angel of doom that had materialized out of the smoke. Their eyes wide, the soldier read the looks, then heard the muffled cries from behind bandannas. It sounded as if they wanted their lives spared, a show of mercy from the lone invader. It was all just some terrible mistake. Two of them were on the verge, it looked, of throwing down their arms.

      How could they expect that which they had never shown? Bolan decided, and blew them off their feet, a raking blast of steel-jacketed projectiles down the line, flinging them back toward other running and doomed killing brethren being gored and gutted from the sky.

      There was no point, Bolan knew, in engaging in a long and protracted sweep of the village and its perimeter. Fire was eating up anything left standing. The smoke was so thick, so putrid it left little doubt to Bolan the savages had completed their task.

      What was left of the hardforce was pretty much chopped up or blown into the firewalls next as a Hellfire missile ripped through a motor pool, ten or more broken dark figurines taking to the air above the crunching blast. A half dozen far from the epicenter were sent staggering about from the shock wave, howling next, flinching, darting from renewed bursts of terror no doubt kicking them into high gear as wreckage hammered home.

      Ducking under a winging slab of metal, Bolan hosed down a few more Somali killers, then changed clips on the advance, began searching the hellgrounds.

      The evil fumes pouring into his senses was enough to nearly knock even the most battle-hardened soldier off his feet, and Bolan knew he wasn’t above any queasy roil in his gut. He swiveled, searching, attempting to control any deep intakes of the foul air. He spotted an armed runner to his nine, hit the trigger on his M-16. The Executioner drove the gunner into his comrade, who was minus an arm just above the elbow from the Hellfire amputation. A mercy burst, and the amputee dropped in his tracks in an ungainly flop, face plastered to earth.

      All done?

      Bolan listened to raging flames, scoured the dead for wounded or live ones, bodies strewed and stacked in what was a fairly tight but wide circle where the warbirds had unleashed their final ring of doom, two or three flaming technical carcasses seeming to float back to Earth like some ghastly magic act.

      Keying his com link, scanning the carnage, peering into the smoke