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dungeons. There they changed his nickname from Voodoo to “Slang,” Afrikaans for Snake. And it also was from there that he led a sabotage op to disrupt Namibia’s plan to free itself from South Africa’s grip by poisoning its drinking water with cholera bacteria. That added to his earlier fame gained when he rigged the headphones of a tape recorder that blew apart the head of Attorney Thabiso Magabana, an anti-apartheid activist. Those operations built his reputation as an effective slaughterer of targeted individuals or mass groups. Boyko was drawn to him, knowing that he could use those fierce skills. Calling in some IOUs, he rescued him from the brutal Communist faction in Nelson Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe , Spear of the Nation. Boyko’s intervention saved Vangaler from being “necklaced,” a ritual acted out on hundreds of suspected government collaborators.
    The practice involved soaking a tire in gasoline, draping it over a suspect’s shoulders and setting it on fire, the macabre “necklace.” He was a born lunatic. Boyko considered that one of his chief attractions.
    None of that, however, fazed Vangaler.
    The glass conference table gleamed in the fluorescent light, sullied in its sterility by a cell phone, a laptop, and a pad of blank legal paper. Jungle décor adorned the office. Hung from the ceiling, a huge spider plant looked like it was about to devour several scraggy ferns. Overhead, three sword bromeliads and several crimson Birds of Paradise hogged the scant sunlight that streamed in from the lone window. A floor-to-ceiling aquarium filled one entire corner with a school of ragged piranha struggling for life under a slimy film. The remains of several dead rats lay rotting on the gravel at the bottom of the tank.
    Vangaler scowled.
    “How could your man have been so clumsy?” he asked his temporary aide.
    The man was dark and bearded. He wore a black and white checked keffiyeh scarf held in place on his head by a ropy black agal . Abu Mahmoud al-Ebrahyim, an Iranian militant Islamist and chief deputy to Osama bin Laden, had escaped death in Diyala, Iraq, in October 2008 when American and Iraqi forces took out twenty-four high-level al Qaeda terrorists and captured more than 4,600 others. Instrumental in Libya’s 1988 Lockerbie bombing, he was now, after Bin Laden’s death, the most-wanted man by the FBI. He was in Cabinda to provide his expertise to Vangaler in the development of ricin poison weapons and explosives in return for diamonds and access to Boyko’s U.S. Stinger missiles.
    Al-Ebrahyim turned to his assistant and screamed out the Islamist war cry, “‘Allahu akhbar!’ you scum-sucking, corpse-fucking eater of dog puke!”
    He was yelling at Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, born Omar Hammami in Daphne, Alabama, of a Syrian-born Muslim father and an American Southern Baptist mother, an American citizen. He emigrated, however, to Timbuktu, Mali, in 2008 to join the Intifada after being radicalized for the Islamist bombings. Now he was the chief recruiter for al Shabaab, the Mujahideen Youth Movement that had spread across North Africa, the Maghreb and the Levant. He joined Vangaler’s Ninjas to recruit aspiring young terrorists. He reported to al-Ebrahyim.
    Under al Amriki’s leadership, Vangaler’s young butchers had massacred every villager in the refuge camp of N’kisinbango. The NGO observers of the U.N. were also camped out in that same village. The Ninjas had insisted on taking the young American women, all idealistically beatific, as hostage slaves to their hidden outpost. It was those hostages in that rebel camp that General Luster had sent Maran’s team to rescue. In another masterful stroke of deception, al-Amriki and Vangaler’s Ninjas had left behind the PFLEC flag and packed the pockets of the corpses with false documents identifying them as members of PFLEC. Now, however, they had been close to losing everything. If Maran’s mission had succeeded, Vangaler would have been