Target Response:. William W. Johnstone
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Nothing to be done for him. No man could have survived the merciless final fusillade that had all but shot him into pieces.
Kilroy was alone now. The western end of the valley was filled with troops. He went northeast across the basin’s outer slope, swinging a wide detour around the few ambushers still alive in that area. Unaware of his passage and concentrating on not being shot by their fellow troops, they were easily evaded.
Leaving them far behind, Kilroy crossed the creek, wading through listless, waist-high waters that were as warm as blood. After climbing up onto the south bank, he followed its winding course due east, into the recesses of the flooded forest.
In the distance, bursts of gunfire still sounded.
“Joseph Kilroy” was a war name assumed by he whose birth name was Sam Chambers. He’d never known his real father but he knew of him.
He was the bastard son of Terry Kovack, the supreme warrior in the Vietnam-era Dog Team. That particular cadre of elite Army assassins had been disbanded in the war’s sorry aftermath of national defeatism and antimilitary agitation.
Terry Kovack had soldiered on to fight without banners or bugles for lost causes he considered right in a succession of conflicts in global hot spots, ultimately making the supreme sacrifice in a bloody last stand in a dirty brushfire war here on the African continent.
Would history repeat itself and doom his son to a similar fate?
“Not if I can help it,” the man called Kilroy vowed to himself.
TWO
The swamp was thick with green mist; the mist was thickest in the flooded forest. Banks of greenish haze drifted through clusters of dripping trees.
The swamp by night was a noisy environment. It rang with shrill cries of animals and birds, growls, grunts, hisses, and bloodcurdling shrieks. Adding to the unrest was a constant counterpoint of splashes, drippings, creaks, and groans. All sounding against a steady background of the insect chorus: buzzing, chirping, humming, droning.
It was night of the third day. The hunt was still on.
East of the Rada River the flooded forest was fitfully lit by a number of flickering phantom lights. The ragged globes were beads of brightness widely scattered through the sprawling vastness of the morass. Fireballs that hovered over the watery avenues honeycombing the area.
One such light appeared in a winding channel at the southeast corner of the drowned jungle, floating about four feet above the surface of sluggish black water.
The channel snaked its way through the marsh, twisting and looping, filled with blind curves and sudden turnings. It was never more than fifteen feet across at its widest; its average width was ten feet and in some tight spots it narrowed to barely eight feet. Its depth varied between five feet and eight feet, with everywhere a soft, mucky bottom. No earthen banks bordered its sides.
Such was the nature of the drowned forest. A vast bowl filled with tall, straight trees, it had become submerged in recent years when a feeder stream of the Rada had carved a new channel into what had formerly been boggy marshland, totally flooding it.
The tall trees were unable to survive the constant immersion and quickly succumbed. Their cores rotted, their branches refused to put forth new leaves, and the trees died. Many of the slim, straight trunks remained standing, rising from the black lagoon like the pillars of a flooded cathedral.
But the swamp was a crucible of creation, teeming with green, pulsing life. Plants that had previously led a marginal existence thrived in the new aquatic environment, swarming it with masses of vegetation.
A variety of trees took hold in swamp water: mangroves, cypresses, and water oaks. Not tall and slender, they were stunted, dwarfed, and gnarly, with serpentine root and branch systems. Spiky.
Shaggy vines, flowering lianas, and cablelike creepers draped the dead tree columns, wrapping them with an elaborate three-dimensional webwork that screened out the sky.
Now, a ghostly light rounded the bend and came into view, hovering in midair. No will-o’-the-wisp or luminous mass of marsh gas this, but rather the crackling head of a flaming torch fixed to the bow of a boat.
Like the surrounding plant life, the boat, too, was designed to flourish in the wetlands. A slim wooden dinghy, it had a pointed bow and squared-off stern. Its low sides, flat bottom, and shallow draft fitted it for the shallows of the swamp.
A small outboard motor was attached to the transom board at the stern. The shrouded engine drove a long, slim shaft about four feet long that extended like a metal stinger from the back of the boat. The shaft was fixed so that it lay almost horizontal several inches below the surface of the water. The tip of the shaft sported four small, propeller-like fins. The motor turned the finned shaft, providing propulsive power.
The near-horizontal extension of the driveshaft and its minifinned propeller allowed it to operate in shallow water while minimizing the risk of snagging. Should the fins become fouled by reeds or underwater plants—a frequent occurrence in the swamp—it was relatively easy to clear them.
Two Nigerian soldiers manned the boat.
Ojo the steersman occupied the stern seat, operating a tillerlike handle attached to the motor housing. The motor was mounted on gimbals that let it traverse a free arc of movement away from the stern board. By moving the tiller to the right or left, the steersman altered the position of motor and driveshaft, allowing him to control the direction in which the craft was heading.
The second man sat at the bow, serving as spotter. Rasheed held a six-foot-long pole that he used to ward off floating logs and the like, break up tangles of vines or creepers, and push the boat away from obstructions pressing it too closely on either side.
Ojo the steersman was round-faced, fleshy, heavyset. A coastal dweller born and bred, he was no stranger to the marshy river deltas of the Nigerian southlands, but this miserable manhunt in the swamp had long ago begun to get on his nerves.
Not so much the surroundings but the quarry they hunted had thrown a shadow over his soul.
The spotter, Rasheed, was one of Ali Abdul Mukhtar’s militia men recruited into Minister of Defense Derek Tayambo’s elite corps of bodyguards. His hawklike features and lean body type marked his origin in the arid northern region.
These seething swamplands were doubly alien and oppressive to one accustomed to the bone-dry, desertlike plains of the north. But what Rasheed lacked in affinity for the swamp he made up for with the ferocity of his fanaticism.
He was a Believer, a Muslim jihadist who’d sworn fealty to warrior-imam Mukhtar’s holy crusade to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state governed by the tenets of ultraorthodox sharia law. The purity of his hate for the infidel allowed him to transcend the bodily and psychic discomforts of the marsh.
As for Ojo, he was a swampman and its hardships were second nature to him. He had no liking, though, for the haughty northerner Rasheed with whom he’d been partnered.
And even less liking for this grinding hunt for the elusive American…
Lighting the way forward was the torch, a wandlike length of wood whose knobbed head had been dipped in tarry pitch and set aflame. Its base was wedged into a metal ringbolt at the tip of the prow, securing it in place. It thrust forward at a tilted angle away from the boat.
It was torchlight that created the illusion of a phantom fireball drifting above the swamp.
At least a half dozen other such flickering fireballs coursed through the flooded forest this night, each one shed by a torch fixed to the bow of a similar boat coursing the waterways in search of one lone man.
Man? Devil, more likely, thought Ojo.
The American was an implacable enemy haunting the swamp, at least in the minds of the Nigerian troops who had been seeking him in vain for three days and nights. No ghost he, but a creature of flesh and blood—of that there could be no doubt.
The