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boulder. Leaped. Too late.
    The blast lifted him, hurled him over the boulder. Shards of shrapnel ripped his legs. The impact tore his helmet off. It blew the Heckler & Koch MP5K auto-fire out of his hands. His head and shoulders smashed into the rock and his body tumbled over, arched in pain. He whipped his hands up to his head. Everything blended. He felt the air rush through his tightly-curled hair, whistle past his ears, his body swirling like a kite twisted by paranormal forces. Colors kaleidoscoped, whirling through his brain. Then‌—‌nothing.
    Blackness.
    When he came to, he lay still. He waited, then felt his hands tremble. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious. The first sounds he heard were the lyrics from the headset on the Kevlar helmet lying next to him. The blast had switched his iPhone playlist to the music he had been listening to in the helicopter before they inserted into the area: Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” Slowly, carefully, he moved one hand to his face. Blood oozed through his fingers, but he had no pain, no feeling whatsoever. Hesitatingly, he felt for his mouth, his nose, and finally his fingers probed into the slippery chasm above his right ear. He looked down. His legs. Worse. As his vision cleared, he struggled to regain equilibrium. He crawled to the edge of the rock. All around him. Carnage. Every man. Butchered.
    The Animal. Before whatever was left of his God, he vowed to track the monster down. If he had to kill him with his bare hands, it would not be the first time. He only wished he would have the chance.
    It didn’t take them long to get there. A Search-and-Rescue team from the 535th landed one of their Pave Low- equipped helicopters. They secured the area. Alerted by gagging sounds behind Maran’s redoubt, two medics rushed to his side. They wrapped him in applied-pressure-bandages and tightened the bonds on critical points to stop the blood. It was apparent, however, that bleeding was far from the worst problem. He suffered from brain trauma that threatened a terrifying price. They tied him to a backboard and immobilized his neck with a collar brace. To stop him from choking on his own blood and keep his mouth open so he could breathe, they fitted his throat with a soft tube and strapped him into the split basket suspension stretcher that rode under the belly of the helicopter. They had no sooner hoisted him up and pulled out of the landing area when four more Pave Lows hovered in over the treetops, coming in to the hideous clearing to bring home the KIAs.

Chapter 4

    Four
    Cabinda, Angola
    S everal days later, Vangaler raged at his cadre over a fiasco in his own operation, the village assault that led up to Maran’s mission. “ Ag man. You idiot!” he screamed. He stood at the head of a conference table at the Strategic Solutions’ regional business office in Cabinda.
    Vangaler’s odd spiritual development had started out when he became a Catholic altar boy at the Church of the Ten Commandments in his home town of El Segundo, Uganda. Impressed with the respect offered to the clergy within the Holy Spirit Movement there, a witchcraft cult devoted to ritual child sacrifice as a route to wealth and salvation, he turned to Voodoo and ordained himself a high priest. His success led to his recruitment as an officer in the infamous Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, a breakaway group of occultists from the Ugandan Acholi tribe on the DRC border who were also terrorizing the area. Maximizing lessons learned from the LRA and a corrupt parish pastor, he traveled south to join the mercenaries in South Africa willing to sell their souls to the devil or to the instigators of apartheid. It was a perfect fit. Already fluent in Afrikaans from his father, in English from his mother, and in several tribal dialects, his torture skills had been honed to a scalpel’s edge by the LRA. He was an ideal interrogator as well as an executioner for the Vlaakplaas