Devil's Horn Read online

  Annotation

  America's most horrible plague is given new life when a deadly batch of heroin hits the streets of New York.

  Mack Bolan traces the source to the Golden Triangle and finds himself in the clutches of a powerful syndicate in Thailand. This ruthless empire is ruled by a CIA agent who turned druglord when Saigon fell.

  But even captivity in a nightmarish jungle hell cannot stop the Executioner as he unleashes raw fury to destroy the enslavers of America's youth.

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's Executioner

  Prologue

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  Epilogue

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  Don Pendleton's Executioner

  Mack Bolan

  Devil's Horn

  "Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers."

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  "What then is your duty? What the day demands."

  Goethe

  "Duty lies in standing firm against the enemy, whomever or wherever he may be. I have no options in the game at this point. I must do my duty, take each day as it demands."

  Mack Bolan

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Dan Schmidt for his contribution to this work.

  Prologue

  A black fury stoked the fire spreading in Mack Bolan's guts. A virulent cancer was eating away at the vitals of American society, festering right before the eyes of the night's denizens. Drugs were being bought and sold on every corner of Houston Street. And no one seemed to be paying the least bit of attention to that malignant disease. No one seemed to give the first goddamn. It was business as usual, Bolan thought, as a streak of sadness sliced through his mounting rage.

  The night hitter sensed the deadliness of the environment, an insidious concrete jungle made even worse by the indifference of the inhabitants to human suffering and to the monsters that suffering spawned. The big guy was just another deadly player on that ugly ground. The Bowery. The Lower East Side of Manhattan Island.

  The big warrior was togged in combat blacksuit, the silenced Beretta 93-R snugged in its holster beneath a black leather bomber-style jacket. He knew he was just seconds away from turning this stone-and-brick labyrinth into a battle zone. In the black duffel bag he had just taken from the trunk of his rental car — which had been stowed in a nearby garage during the two weeks he had spent in the neighborhood — the instruments he needed to wage the fight here in a new but very old and very familiar hellground. He was heading back into the fire.

  Into the devil's grip.

  Give me your tired, your poor...

  Into hell on earth.

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...

  Into another blazing doorway of the War Everlasting.

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send those, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door....

  And Mack Bolan, briefly thinking of those immortal words inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, was counting down the numbers in his head. Zero hour had dawned.

  "Hey, Lonnie! Where ya been hidin', ol' boy? L-long time... no see, baby cakes. Ya gotta come 'round more often, eh? Got some good Night Train here. Wanna sip?"

  Combat senses on full alert, Bolan turned his head, the chilly night air feeling like a whiplash against his face for an instant. The voice that had beckoned him came from the shadowy niche of a tenement building. In the darkness, the Executioner could just make out the filthy, tattered bundle of cloth that held together something that appeared less than human. Something that had once been human, yeah, but now hovered on the edge of the abyss, having finished that terminal walk down the road to nowhere. Bolan passed that testament to living death without another look.

  The drunk babbled on, as if the man in black were some long-lost friend, and Bolan heard a strangled wail of grief, like the cry of a wounded animal. But the shadow that was Bolan forged ahead, his ice-blue eyes glittering as they stayed fixed on the corner of Houston and Bowery. His sights were set on two men, one white, one black. Two pieces of scum cut from the same tub of shit. Pushers. And the scum didn't notice the boot that was about to step on them. Good, Bolan thought. He wanted to launch this blitzkrieg with a good and sudden peal of thunder.

  Even at this early-morning hour, the streets were alive with the teeming refuse of failure; disappointment and shattered dreams. A dark inferno of zombies. An open wound of frustration and despair. For two weeks Bolan had done his damnedest to look like just another dead-end loser in the Bowery, but his face and manner now suggested a grim determination, a predatory wariness that was hard to ignore. He was a man with a mission, and the pretense was over.

  Having holed up in a flophouse, camouflaged as a down-and-out vagrant, he had done a thorough reconnaissance on the streets and the people of the Bowery and the Lower East Side. He had hung around the pool halls and saloons, canvased the streets, watching the drug trade and sizing up the action. He had some names, and he knew some faces. He had seen something else, too, something that surprised him very little but still made him wonder about the chunk of wall around the heart of man.

  Life here was dirt cheap because anything alive was just another number, another cog in the clunking machinery, another human obstacle in the way, filling space and draining the machine. This was a breeding ground for savages. But, he concluded, like just about any other part of New York City, a swirling bowl of humanity that was home to the best and the worst of some eight million people, the cannibals were always sharpening their claws. Always the weak got weaker, while the strong got stronger. And it was the blood of the weak and the innocent that fed the beast called Animal Man.

  The black guy in the purple two-hundred-dollar sweat suit suddenly spotted the shadow stepping straight toward him. There was a steely determination in the grim eyes of the shadow that alerted the drug runner that Bolan wasn't just another buyer. Nor a cop. The runner froze, the crisp wad of hundred- and twenty-dollar bills in his hand crinkling from the sudden tension in his arms. The ounce man in the BMW poked his head out into the night. His fat, bulbous nose wrinkling, his nostrils twitching as if he smelled shit in the air, the ounce man stared at Bolan for a second.

  Then curiosity gave way to suspicion, which turned to realization born from a sixth sense that could only develop after years of hard-earned experience among the savage animals. Panic struck, then terror, and the ounce man in the Armani suit turned into a slab of quaking fat when the silenced muzzle of Bolan's Beretta snaked out of nowhere.

  "Get in," Bolan growled at the runner. "Open the door and let me see that right hand."

  "Hey, man, what the fuck's this shit? I thought you said you wasn't tagged, man. I thought you said this act was clean. What's this bullshit? I thought..."

  "Shuddup! That's the trouble with you fuckin' punks — you think too much," the ounce man snarled. The Beretta had confirmed what his instinct had told him as soon as he saw the big man in the black jacket — the dude was not someone to cross swords with. Carefully, showing his free hand, he opened the door, then grunted sharply as Bolan shoved the runner onto his lap like a sack of garbage.

  "Move over," Bolan ordered the runner in the fancy running suit. "Crawl. Now!"

  "Get the hell off me!" the ounce man rasped, pushing the punk in the ass. Before the runner
, cursing, had wiggled off his lap, the shadow moved off the sidewalk and into the back seat of the BMW in less time than it takes to blink an eye.

  Bolan locked all the doors. Roughly, he frisked the ounce man.

  "Hey, pal, those are three-hundred-dollar threads you're rubbing your stinking hands over. Easy, huh. I'm clean, pal, awright? Jesus Christ!"

  Finding no weapons on the ounce man, Bolan settled back into the seat. "Like a bull's ass. You're about as clean as the East River... pal. And you're going on a one-way ride to the bottom of that river unless you start talking."

  "About what?"

  The guy was starting to sweat, Bolan noticed, the first beads popping up on his bald dome. Both pushers knew instinctively that he wasn't the long arm of the law. They feared he was something worse.

  "We'll talk on the way there." Bolan said in a graveyard voice, his face a dark death's-head in the rearview mirror as the ounce man met his gaze.

  "On the way where, goddammit!"

  "To the top. I'm taking you boys all the way to the top. Where you want to be. Where you belong."

  The ounce man and the runner exchanged bewildered looks. Then it dawned on the dealers just where it was they were headed.

  "You're crazy, pal."

  "And you're dead unless you get these wheels rolling. And one more thing," the Executioner said, pressing the silencer against the base of the dealer's skull.

  "Y-yeah... wh-what?"

  "I'm not your pal. Let's get that straight. To me, you and your buddy here are nothing but parasites. You're maggots that feed off the hell of other people's lives. And I'm here to wipe you off the face of the earth. You can go slow. You can go fast. If I get who I want, you may get lucky and not go at all. It's up to you."

  Bolan waited a second for the ice to settle in. Then he reached over the seat, plucked up the large black briefcase between the two dealers. As Bolan eased back in his seat, the ounce man steered the BMW away from the curb, his lips twisted as if he was amused by some private joke. The Executioner could see his threat had had very little effect on either drug-pushing piece of trash. They believed they were taking their invader into the lion's den. They believed their position was invulnerable, and that they were untouchable.

  Bolan opened his satchel. He pulled out his hip holster, then filled it with the .44 AutoMag. There was a mini-Uzi in the satchel, also. Ten fragmentation grenades. A garrote. Spare clips for all hardware.

  The Executioner was all set to change some viewpoints.

  The war was on.

  The city was about to become a battlefield.

  A human hurricane of violence and fury had blown into town.

  1

  He was long overdue to jump back into this war with blazing hellfire. The Pandora's box was wide-open, he knew, and drugs were invading the U.S.A. with the strength and ominous swiftness of a Waffen SS black march, with the destructiveness of a typhoon pounding at the economic and spiritual heart of America. It didn't matter if the user addict was an executive in a three-piece suit in some major corporation, a so-called sports hero or the easy prey of ghetto zombies. The cancer was eating away at every cell of society, spreading like a goddamned raging fire storm. Okay, Bolan thought, with no small amount of cynicism, there was a lot of lip service being paid to this twentieth-century Black Plague by politicians up for reelection. Their efforts might get a few more people up off their butts in this war on drugs. But the streets were still chock-full of those breeding maggots, the pushers, and lip service didn't do one damn bit of good to the men and women being devoured by the scourge, or to their families. As far as the Executioner was concerned, there was only one cure for this disease.

  Bolan looked at the two men in front of him, the stone-and-glass canyons of Midtown dwarfing the BMW as the car slid on through the night. Bolan had given the guy behind the wheel orders to head uptown. Into the dead zone. Where the drug houses were churning out their poison. Where the big boys played their losing game.

  Bolan knew his two marks were nothing more than middlemen, lackeys looking to claw their way up through the pecking order. As far as the Executioner was concerned, though, they were all on the bottom rung of the ladder up the Superfly hierarchy. They had hitched their fortunes to an evil star. And Bolan was going to blow that star out of the sky. He had already decided to make an example of the garbage these two lackeys squirreled for. He would show these two scumbags what waited for them at the end of the line if they didn't haul themselves out of the cesspool. Fast. With no looking back.

  Bolan caught the nervous glances the ounce man kept throwing toward his runner. Through hooded eyelids, the Executioner saw the gaze that flickered toward the glove compartment. The stink of fear and sweat poured into Bolan's nostrils. It was their fear, though, and their sweat. Mack Bolan knew he was holding all the cards. Someone up front was about to deal out a losing hand.

  "It's suicide," Bolan quietly growled.

  The black dude pretended he didn't hear the warning.

  His senses on full alert, eyes boring into the heads of the two punks, Bolan took a moment to reflect on his briefing with Hal Brognola.

  It had been a grim talk with pessimistic, almost fatalistic overtones — at least on the part of Brognola. The big, grizzled Fed was in this war, with fists and fire all the way, and he was glad Bolan had been brought in out of the cold. The Bolan blitz had again been given government sanction, and for that the Executioner was grateful. They were all soldiers on the same side, and Bolan didn't need to waste time and energy dodging the bullets of the good guys as well as thwarting the potential deathstrikes of the cannibals.

  Brognola's top priority now was to take a chunk out of the rampant drug trade. A big chunk.

  "It's worse now than it ever was, Striker. It seems like we're waging a losing war. The whole goddamn thing is making me sick."

  "Tell me about it."

  Brognola snorted. What could he possibly tell this hellfire warrior about the arena that he didn't already know. Maybe he'd just go ahead and blow off some steam anyway, he thought. All that bottled-up frustration. All that... Hell... Brognola had popped an antacid tablet into his mouth, washed it down with water. It was a new habit for the old warrior, and Bolan knew that the strain of duty, when it looked like good men were doomed to bash their brains out in futility while all hell kept breaking loose, threatened to chew up Brognola's guts.

  "It's full-scale war out there, Mack, and the Justice Department and the DEA are losing this one hard and fast. The pushers, the Mafia, the growers in foreign countries seem to be multiplying like flies on shit. Hell, you know how it goes, dammit. Ten go down, and ten times ten rise up to take their place. Crack, heroin, pot. The country's degenerating, trying to cut its own throat. If you stop and really think about it, it's frightening. And, yeah, it makes me sick."

  Brognola shook his head, a dark scowl etching his face like the inscription on a headstone. "What we've got now looks worse than this lousy crack. A new batch of heroin has hit the streets. By the tons. The number of heroin addicts has doubled in the past eight months alone, and it's estimated there are at this moment more than one million users. The dope is purer now, it seems, either because there's more of it coming into the country and the pushers can afford to bring down the street price, or they're being ordered by the head cocks to step up the grade — or both. More smack, stronger grade, means more addicts and bigger bucks for the scum peddling the garbage, and that means somebody is producing a better grade of heroin in larger quantities. The pushers are cutting a lot of the heroin with crack, and they're reeling in the users like one giant catch of fish. Guys are willing to kill and die for this heroin, and that's exactly what they're doing. In every major city, all over the country. In New York, burglaries and armed robberies have tripled in the past month alone, the cops are stacking prisoners on top of prisoners, and the courts are turning the punks right back out onto the streets because the caseloads are overwhelming them."

  Then, Bolan r
ecalled, Brognola had mentioned something that pricked icy needles at the base of his neck. The drug trade had become more organized, more efficient, more deadly than ever in the past year. This "revamping," according to Brognola, had begun about the time the new heroin had hit the streets. The Mafia was involved, yeah, but arrested pushers claimed there was somebody else, another organization pulling the strings on the Mob.

  The Devil's Horn, they called it.

  The Devil's Horn was Bolan's mission. That raging human virus, those poisoners of mind and body, who thought they were safe somewhere behind the fortressed walls of their drug empire, were the main targets of the Bolan blitz. But just who were they? And where were they? The best place to start, he had figured, was at the bottom of the pecking order. But he wanted to go to the top in a hurry, a lightning flash. He wanted to lop off the Hydra's head. He wanted the top dog's blood, and he wanted them to eat their own poison, choke on their own evil vomit. He wanted to blow the cancer right out through their goddamn guts. He was every bit as sick and tired of this drug crisis as Hal Brognola, and he intended to do something about it.

  This was his mission alone, and in his mind it could be no other way. He had asked Brognola to sit tight on this one, and the big Fed had complied, offering all intelligence, any assistance the warrior needed for free movement in the field. Even though he was in from the cold, Bolan still liked free rein, with no strings. He didn't need stumbling blocks, human obstacles, on this one.

  There was one exception. One very important exception.

  Jack Grimaldi, he knew, was on standby at an airstrip in New Jersey. There, the ace pilot waited with his new, heavily armed, armored Lear jet, and Bolan carried a miniature radio transmitter that could reach Grimaldi in a heartbeat and have that warbird ready for action. The mission, Bolan knew, would go hard quickly and with little warning, and the Hydra's head was somewhere overseas. But where? Somewhere in South Asia, most likely, he knew. Yeah, it was time for an assault on the Golden Triangle. But first Bolan needed hard intel on who and what he was up against. He had already gotten the ominous rumblings out of Washington on this one, and warning bells were sounding in his mind. Louder by the minute. The black siren of doomsday was wailing for somebody unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of the Bolan fury.