"You know, Jackie, if you keep killing my men, I'm not going to have any left to fight my war with."

11

Mullin sat in a chair facing the desk and crossed his legs. He was not a large man, standing only five-foot-seven and weighing 150 pounds, but men did not often underestimate him twice.

"If they keep challenging my authority, they'll keep getting killed. It keeps the rest of them in line."

"Can't you just hit them on the head or something? That'll get their attention. Must you kill them?" Mkombu wiped his greasy hands on the front of his dashiki shirt. Then, as an afterthought, he began picking the food from his sparse brilloed chest hair and popping pieces of the debris into his mouth. Mullin looked away, through the window, out toward the clearing that was the main jumping-off point for Mkombu's People's Democratic Army of Revolutionary Liberation.

"They don't understand hits on the head," Mullin said. "They understand getting killed. If I can't do that, Jim Bob, one day they'll run off and leave you and we'll be without an army."

"But the man you killed was better than any other three men I had."

Mullin sighed, remembering how easy it had been to kill the six-foot-six, 260-pound sergeant. Mullin had removed his .45 automatic, his pilot's cap, and his black metal-framed glasses. As he reached over to place his glasses carefully on the ground atop his hat, the big man's eyes had followed him, and Mullin had kicked out with his left foot and with the hard heel of his boot stove in the other man's Adam's apple. The fight was over before it had begun. To make sure, when the man dropped, Mullin had smashed in the man's temple with the steel-tipped toes of his high regimental boots.

"If he was better than any other three men, we are in deep trouble, Jim Bob. He was slow and stupid. A soldier cannot be a soldier without a brain. The size