Blood Rites Read online

  BAD BLOOD

  A gun battle between rival gangs terrorizes shoppers at a Miami mall, but Mack Bolan knows that cleaning up the mess in Florida is just the beginning. One gang’s main operation leads back to Jamaica, where its drug trafficking business is flourishing. And so is the practice of voodoo and human sacrifice.

  Infiltrating the gang on its own territory is a deadly challenge. With most of the island on the cartel’s payroll or too afraid to come forward, Bolan’s only ally is a Kingston police officer. But no matter the odds, the Executioner will do whatever it takes to bring down the drug lord and his army of killers.

  How many left?

  One man from the first car, at least three from the third, if he’d taken out its driver. Bolan still had work to do, and he was running out of time before some passing driver heard the sounds of battle and called the cops.

  The one thing Bolan would not do, regardless of the circumstances, was initiate a firefight with police. He’d made a vow that he would never drop the hammer on a cop. Law enforcement officers, in Bolan’s mind, were “soldiers of the same side.” He’d evade them by any means, but would always stop short of lethal force.

  Which meant he had to mop up his remaining enemies and get out of there before the police arrived.

  Tick-tock.

  He was about to go after the shooters from the third car when a flash of light alerted him to trouble. It was the Marauder’s dome light, coming on because one of its doors had opened. The woman bolting out of panic at the gunfire? Or had someone found her?

  Either way, he had to check it out, but he couldn’t leave enemies behind while his back was turned.

  Mouthing a curse, the Executioner moved out.

  MACK BOLAN ®

  The Executioner

  #364 Hostile Odds

  #365 Collision Course

  #366 Pele’s Fire

  #367 Loose Cannon

  #368 Crisis Nation

  #369 Dangerous Tides

  #370 Dark Alliance

  #371 Fire Zone

  #372 Lethal Compound

  #373 Code of Honor

  #374 System Corruption

  #375 Salvador Strike

  #376 Frontier Fury

  #377 Desperate Cargo

  #378 Death Run

  #379 Deep Recon

  #380 Silent Threat

  #381 Killing Ground

  #382 Threat Factor

  #383 Raw Fury

  #384 Cartel Clash

  #385 Recovery Force

  #386 Crucial Intercept

  #387 Powder Burn

  #388 Final Coup

  #389 Deadly Command

  #390 Toxic Terrain

  #391 Enemy Agents

  #392 Shadow Hunt

  #393 Stand Down

  #394 Trial by Fire

  #395 Hazard Zone

  #396 Fatal Combat

  #397 Damage Radius

  #398 Battle Cry

  #399 Nuclear Storm

  #400 Blind Justice

  #401 Jungle Hunt

  #402 Rebel Trade

  #403 Line of Honor

  #404 Final Judgment

  #405 Lethal Diversion

  #406 Survival Mission

  #407 Throw Down

  #408 Border Offensive

  #409 Blood Vendetta

  #410 Hostile Force

  #411 Cold Fusion

  #412 Night’s Reckoning

  #413 Double Cross

  #414 Prison Code

  #415 Ivory Wave

  #416 Extraction

  #417 Rogue Assault

  #418 Viral Siege

  #419 Sleeping Dragons

  #420 Rebel Blast

  #421 Hard Targets

  #422 Nigeria Meltdown

  #423 Breakout

  #424 Amazon Impunity

  #425 Patriot Strike

  #426 Pirate Offensive

  #427 Pacific Creed

  #428 Desert Impact

  #429 Arctic Kill

  #430 Deadly Salvage

  #431 Maximum Chaos

  #432 Slayground

  #433 Point Blank

  #434 Savage Deadlock

  #435 Dragon Key

  #436 Perilous Cargo

  #437 Assassin’s Tripwire

  #438 The Cartel Hit

  #439 Blood Rites

  BLOOD RITES

  Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.

  —Aesop,

  “The Swallow and Other Birds”

  Evil takes root wherever good men close their eyes. Only scorched earth can kill the seeds.

  —Mack Bolan

  THE

  MACK BOLAN

  LEGEND

  Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

  But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

  Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

  He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

  So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

  But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

  Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Dolphin Mall,

  Sweetwater, Florida

  “He’s late,” René Bertin announced.

  “I know he’s late,” François Raimonde replied. “You think I can’t tell time?”

  “Just sayin’.”

  “Well, stop sayin’, unless you got a way to hurry him.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Then shut up.”

  Raimonde had always wondered why the county named its largest shopping mall after a fish, until somebody told him it was named after a football team. That pacified him for a while, until he learned the team had no connection to the mall, which irritated him again.

  Screw it.

  The only thing he cared about right now was meeting Roger Dessalines and picking up the bag he was supposed to deliver, with twelve kilos of pure cocaine inside. Dessalines was running late, some twenty minutes now, and that was cause for worry, but Raimonde was trying not to let it make him crazy. Bad things happened when he tipped over the edge, as anyone who knew him could attest.

  At least, the ones who were still alive.

  Bertin muttered something under his breath, and Raimonde felt his cheeks heating up. “What was that?” />
  “I said why don’t he call, if he’s gonna be late?”

  “You can ask him, if he ever shows up.”

  “Man, we’ve been sitting here forever. It ain’t good, you know?”

  Raimonde knew. Deals like this one were meant to go swiftly and smoothly, no waiting around. Every minute they spent in the mall’s parking lot, baking under the sun in their Lexus, raised their level of risk. Mall security circled the property every half hour or so, and they might call police if they figured Raimonde and Bertin looked suspicious. Police meant questions and possibly a search that would reveal their weapons and the gym bag filled with cash.

  Bad news, but that wasn’t the worst.

  They were in posse territory. In Raimonde’s opinion this was a stupid place for a handoff, but he hadn’t been consulted. Never was, in fact. Just got his orders and obeyed them like a soldier should. But sitting still for any length of time in posse territory was an invitation to disaster.

  “Where is he?” Bertin grumbled, not quite whining.

  “I told you—”

  “Shit! Look there! You see ’em?”

  Raimonde followed Bertin’s pointing finger and went cold inside, despite the midday heat. A jet-black Lincoln MKT was cruising through the lot, its large grille flashing sunlight like a monster’s toothy smile. The blacked-out windows hid most of its passengers, but Raimonde saw the driver and his shotgun rider plain enough, both of them sporting dreads, the wheelman wearing a crocheted Rasta cap.

  “What are we gonna do?” Bertin demanded.

  “Do our job,” Raimonde informed him, reaching underneath his seat for the machine pistol hidden there. Bertin grunted and reached under his baggy jacket to draw a Glock 18 selective-fire model, digging in a pocket to produce a 33-round magazine and swap it for the pistol’s normal clip.

  “They see us, we’re in shit,” Bertin declared.

  “More likely if we move.”

  “This is Roger’s fault.”

  “The boss said wait,” Raimonde said. “We wait.”

  And so, they did.

  * * *

  “CHECK OUT THE LEXUS,” Shabba Maxwell said.

  “Where?” Tyson Eccles asked from the driver’s seat.

  “Open your eyes.”

  Neville Bucknor chimed in, from the backseat. “I know that bastard at the wheel.”

  Eccles eyed the Lexus as they passed it, thirty yards away and rolling slowly in the Dolphin Mall’s fire lane. They were Haitians, he was almost sure, even without the word from Bucknor.

  “What are we gonna do?” Desmond Salkey asked.

  “Same thing we always do,” Maxwell said. “They’ve got no business on our turf.”

  “You gonna ask the boss?” Eccles said.

  “Ask him what?” Maxwell demanded. “He said deal with any bad boys we find comin’ up in here.”

  “Should shoot ’em dead,” Salkey chipped in.

  “You wanna ask someone,” Maxwell said, “give me the wheel and split.”

  “Ease up, man,” Eccles said. “I’m with you, brother.”

  “No more talking, then. Get out your pieces.”

  Maxwell’s weapon was a Micro-Uzi SMG. His two men in the backseat carried AK-105 Kalashnikov carbines, and Eccles had a twelve-gauge Ithaca 37 Stakeout model shotgun tucked into the map pocket of his driver’s door, ready to go.

  “Okay,” Maxwell told them. “Do this thing!”

  * * *

  “ALL UNITS, CODE 30! We have shots fired at the Dolphin Mall, multiple injuries reported, still in progress.”

  “Acknowledge that,” Corporal Tyrus Jackson told his partner. He was driving their patrol car, letting rookie Rick Lopez handle the radio.

  Lopez snatched up the microphone and answered, “Unit 31 responding. We’re two minutes out.”

  Jackson already had the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor up to sixty-five, rolling toward Northwest 117th Avenue. He’d make a right turn there, if no one slammed into their cruiser, and they’d arrive at the mall shortly.

  “The Dolphin’s massive,” he reminded Lopez. “Call back and find out where the shooting is. With multiples, we got no time to waste.”

  “Roger that.”

  Lopez raised the dispatcher, and the answer came back with a wisp of static. “Southwest parking lot.”

  “Ninety seconds, if we’re lucky,” Lopez said, and cut the link.

  Multiple casualties meant a psycho on a rampage, or some kind of gang activity. Jackson was betting on the gangs, but you could never tell. Miami wasn’t just a melting pot, it was a boiling pot, where races and religions clashed, the rich flaunted their money and the poor wanted a piece of it. In any given year, Miami Metro saw it all, from slaughters in the family to drug burns, hate crimes, even human sacrifice.

  But multiples, with a shooting still in progress, meant his day had gone to shit, barely an hour after roll call.

  “Here we go,” he said, and swung onto the ring road that encircled Dolphin Mall. He heard the gunfire now. Snap, crackle, pop, telling him there were automatic weapons in the mix. Not one, but several, which meant this wasn’t just a random head case run amok.

  “What do we do?” Lopez asked, sounding worried.

  “Same as always,” Jackson answered. “Whatever we can.”

  * * *

  “BABYLON IS COMIN’,” Salkey said, pointing at the police car entering the parking lot.

  “I’m not deaf,” Maxwell reminded him, reloading as he moved to head off the patrol car.

  They’d pinned the Haitians down but hadn’t killed them yet, though Maxwell reckoned one was wounded. He’d seen crimson spatters when they started firing on the Lexus, but their targets both returned fire, peppering the Lincoln MKT before Eccles had swung around behind a bulky pickup truck. They’d have to strip and burn the ride when they were finished here, which pissed him off to no end.

  And now, police.

  Tracking their progress through the parking lot was easy. The siren was wailing, blue and white lights flashing on the roof rack. As they turned into the nearest lane and started toward the Lexus, Maxwell rose before the cruiser, hosing it with Parabellum slugs.

  “Die, Babylon!” he shouted as their windshield imploded, the driver’s face turning red-raw in an instant. The cruiser swerved and crashed into a station wagon, then stalled.

  The young Latino passenger bailed out, whipping a sidearm from its holster, but he wasn’t fast enough. Maxwell cut loose on him, the Micro-Uzi’s bullets ripping through his brown uniform, releasing scarlet blooms on impact.

  “Shoulda worn your vest,” he jeered, and turned back to the battle going on behind him.

  Two pigs down, two Haitians still to go. Then they’d torch the Lincoln and find a way back to the boss, to report.

  “Party time,” Maxwell muttered, and moved off to meet his enemies.

  1

  Norland, Miami Gardens, Florida

  Mack Bolan hit the ground running in Miami. He had driven down from Stony Man Farm, in Virginia, breaking up the journey with an overnight stop in Savannah, Georgia. The drive let him carry the gear he’d picked out for this mission without any hassles from airport security, and if something happened to the car—a confiscated narco-smuggler’s Mercury Marauder, whose records had been lost somewhere between its forfeiture and its delivery to Stony Man—there would be no comebacks on Bolan or the Farm.

  The warring parties were a tough Jamaican outfit called the Viper Posse, and a Haitian gang whose leaders hadn’t bothered thinking up a catchy name. Both dealt in drugs, illegal weapons, human trafficking and sundry lesser rackets. They’d been stepping on each other’s toes around Miami for the past two years, the body count increasing, but this last flamboyant battle at the crowded Dolphin Mall caused a ripple out of Washington, propelling Bolan to the Sunshine State.

  Nine dead and thirteen wounded in the latest firefight, which was probably a record, even for South Florida. The body count included three k
nown Viper Posse members, two illegal Haitian immigrants, two Miami-Dade police officers, and two shoppers caught in the crossfire. The wounded were bystanders, more cops and a couple of mall security officers. Local law and the feds were all over it, turning Miami’s Haitian and Jamaican enclaves upside-down, but cries of racial profiling had touched off protests in the streets, and when you got down to it, no police force in the States could chase the Viper Posse’s leaders once they split for home.

  That was where Bolan came in.

  He didn’t need warrants, indictments, subpoenas, or writs of extradition. He wasn’t logging evidence for use in court, and didn’t have to read a perp his rights before he brought the hammer down. He’d been hunting human predators of one kind or another from his youth until his staged death in Manhattan some years back, with nothing changed except his face and name.

  His war was still the same. The opposition’s ranks were inexhaustible.

  Most of the residents of Kendall, southwest of Coral Gables, were law-abiding people. However, those who stood outside the law had earned a reputation for ferocious violence.

  While most posse members were nominal Rastafarians, purportedly worshiping late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as a god and smoking ganja as a sacrament, the island-spawned gang also swam in a current of Obeah, a West Indian belief system with African roots, akin to Voodoo or Santeria. The practice of Obeah involved blood sacrifice. Animals were ostensibly preferred, but some practitioners were rumored to spill human blood for important rituals, or when they sent a special message to their enemies.

  Murder was all the same to Bolan, whether carried out with automatic weapons or machetes, and he normally repaid the predators in kind. He had no fear of “magick,” black or white, but recognized that many people felt its draw and thereby left themselves open to victimization. When superstition crossed the line into mayhem and became a tool for terrorists, the Executioner was ready to step in and shut the circus down.

  Beginning now.

  * * *

  GARCELLE BROUARD KNEW she was staring in the face of death as Winston Channer stood before her, showing a ghastly smile. A fall of dusty-looking dreadlocks framed his oval face, eyebrows replaced by rows of small, deliberately inflicted scars, more of them on his cheeks in tight spiral designs. His teeth were either capped or filed to points, so that his smile displayed a double row of fangs.