Night's Reckoning Read online

  Dead Men Don’t Talk

  All hell breaks loose after a Balkan warlord escapes from prison days before his trial. But the right-wing group behind the breakout doesn’t want him alive. They want him as their dead martyr–and they aren’t the only ones. Sent to retrieve the man before they can kill him, and keep him safe until his court date, Mack Bolan has a big job on his hands.

  The war criminal could cause trouble for the world leaders who funded his cause, and they will do anything to keep their skeletons in the closet. With enemies coming at him from all sides, Bolan knows he can trust no one, as his opponents possess intel only someone inside the system could have. Whatever the obstacles, the Executioner will stop at nothing to guarantee justice is served.

  Bolan cautiously opened each door in turn

  There were signs of habitation, but no guards...and no Grozny. Had they somehow got wind of an attack and moved the target?

  Reaching the last door, Bolan listened. He heard the sound of breathing. More than one man, though one of them was breathing more heavily. He stepped to the side before opening the door.

  He was greeted with silence. Bolan paused, nerves on alert, but calm enough to play the waiting game.

  “You may come in, whoever you are. But carefully. I warn you I am armed.”

  Bolan recognised the voice. Slowly, holding the uzi at a nonthreatening angle, he turned and stood in the doorway.

  Two guards lay on the floor, unconscious. Seated on the bed, legs crossed, an AK-47 nestled on his lap, Vijas Grozny, Balkan warlord, took in the man facing him.

  “So, we meet again,” he said. “You know, I like your style, but I have no idea what you want. Just that you keep turning up where I am held prisoner. So, in case we don’t get the chance again—what is your fascination with me, man in black?”

  “I’m here to make sure you reach trial—and that justice is served.”

  Mack Bolan

  The Executioner

  #337 Tropic Blast

  #338 Nuclear Reaction

  339 Deadly Contact

  340 Splinter Cell

  #341 Rebel Force

  #342 Double Play

  #343 Border War

  #344 Primal Law

  #345 Orange Alert

  #346 Vigilante Run

  #347 Dragon’s Den

  #348 Carnage Code

  #349 Firestorm

  #350 Volatile Agent

  #351 Hell Night

  #352 Killing Trade

  #353 Black Death Reprise

  #354 Ambush Force

  #355 Outback Assault

  #356 Defense Breach

  #357 Extreme Justice

  #358 Blood Toll

  #359 Desperate Passage

  #360 Mission to Burma

  #361 Final Resort

  #362 Patriot Acts

  #363 Face of Terror

  #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

  The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

  —Martin Luther King, Jr.

  1929–1968

  When the arms of the law are tied, and there are no other roads left to go down, I will be there to deliver the final blows of justice as only the Executioner can.

  —Mack Bolan

  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

  Prologue

  The trucks came from the west. They rolled into a village nine miles from Srebrenica, where the battle had been raging for days. The villagers had not wanted to take sides. They were majority Bosniak, and had little time for the Serbs and Croats who wished to rend their lands. Let them kill each other and leave tilling of the land and surviving the hard winters to those who had lived in the region before they had come, and would be here after they had left.

  For over three years—since June of ’92—the war had raged around them. They were in the hills, hard to reach by road and in many ways left behind by progress. While Yugoslavia disintegrated and blew itself apart in a slow and bloody way, they carried on living as they always had. Electricity was new and was still a luxury. Running water was a stream for some. Their wagons were horse-drawn as much as they were petrol-driven. The land was how they lived, and they avoided the larger urban centers as much as possible—barter and sale being their only reasons for venturing there.

  Tito’s life and death had meant little to them. The Communist manifesto that most knew by heart—on pain of death—was a mumbled oath that usually ended with a shrug. They had been left alone, and they left anyone else alone. That was how it had always been.

  Not anymore.

  It had been possible to hear the wagons from a distance, the engines whining and complaining almost as much as their drivers as they took the steep and narrow tracks that passed for roads, skittering gravel and rock down on the scrub that littered the mountainsides, disturbing the leisure of goats and their herders.

  By the time the trucks hit the central part of the village, most of the children were cowering around their mothers’ skirts, curious eyes peering out less with fear than with the expectation of excitement to break the monotony. Their mothers had impassive faces, stoic but hoping that their monotony—and thus their safety—would be maintained. The men of the village had been gathered from the hills where they farmed and tended their sparse flocks, the last few stragglers timing their arrival with that of the leading vehicle.

  As it pulled up in a cloud of dust, the men raised their few arms, a motley collection of aging shotguns, WWII relics, and some even from the first war. It was a warning, a show of defiance...it was a token. But it was pointless in the face of a convoy that had obviously left the city some little time before, and carried ar
med men who were soldiers.

  There was a moment’s silence while the village faced the first of the trucks. Its windshield was an impassive mask of dust and watersplash that rendered it opaque. To its rear, the other trucks pulled up in a line, their engines whining, grinding and then falling to silence. Their noise was replaced by a sound that was more disturbing: the wailing of women in pain and distress, and the occasional violent sound of suppression.

  The Bosniak villagers stayed impassive, facing the line of trucks, even though the sounds caused ripples of fear to run through them. Even the inquisitive children were somehow not so curious.

  The passenger door of the lead truck creaked as it slowly swung open, and the first sight they had of the man who would become a terrible legend among those who’d survive was of his combat-booted foot as it hit the dirt, raising a small cloud of dust.

  The door swung closed, and they could see him fully for the first time. He was six foot four, broad and barrel-chested, with his sweat- and bloodstained shirt open, revealing the still-livid weal of a scar that ran from his left shoulder down across his chest, bisecting the nipple and ending just above the navel. His tightly curled hair and beard were black and greasy, and his black eyes glittered as he took in the villagers with a leisurely sweep of the head. He held an AK-47 knockoff, butt resting in the crook of his arm, barrel angled up to the sky.

  Hawking, he spat a glob of phlegm onto the dry earth.

  “Yes...this will do,” he said softly, almost to himself. Then, louder, he directed at the group of villagers, “Which one of you is in charge here?”

  A middle-aged man, scrawny but with the wiry toughness of hard years spent farming, stepped forward. He held a shotgun of indeterminate age, with too many repairs to be anything other than a rabbit gun. But still he held it down, in a show of deference.

  “I speak for us,” he said quietly.

  “And what is your name, man?” the soldier inquired in equally soft tones.

  “Bogoljub. I am leader, such as we have it. And I’ll tell you this—we have kept out of this shit-crazy war. Life is hard enough on this land without crazy Serbs and Croats wanting to kill each other. You want to do that, that’s fine. You choose to do that, we won’t stop you. But we don’t want anything to do with it. We just want to get on with our lives and be left alone. That’s not too much to ask. So whatever you want, if we have it to spare then you can have it. If not, then we can’t help. That simple. So just ask, take and go. We want no part of this, and we’ll say the same to anyone else who comes here.”

  The soldier nodded sympathetically as he listened to this. When the scrawny man had finished, he said, “That’s a nice speech, Bogoljub. Very pretty. Good sentiment. And fair enough, you don’t want to be dragged into someone else’s war. That’s understandable.”

  He let the AK-47 drop until it was leveled at the man, then tapped a three-shot burst that stitched Bogoljub from chest to stomach. There was still a look of surprise on the man’s face as he fell back to the ground, his chest cavity mangled by the impact of the bullets.

  One of the children—a boy of eight—broke from his mother’s grasp and, crying and yelling, tried to make the dead man on the ground respond. The other men stayed frozen, the women gathering their children to them.

  “Now, you have a simple choice. You can go along with what I’m going to do here, help my men and not be stupid. Or you can die, like little Bogoljub there,” the soldier said in a loud voice, intended to carry to the back of the small crowd, as he gestured with his AK-47. “You can be sure that you won’t simply be killed. For fuck’s sake, I could have done that as soon as I drove in here. No, you can be of use. The choice is yours. What is it going to be?”

  The men looked at each other from the corners of their eyes. They knew what their only real option was. One by one they placed their weapons on the ground. They did not look at their womenfolk. The women, for their part, kept their eyes on the bearded stranger, and did not look at their men.

  The soldier grinned. Broken spirits were the easiest to use.

  “I knew you’d see sense,” he said with a soft and sinister chuckle.

  * * *

  WITHIN TWO DAYS, the village was unrecognizable. The villagers lived in tents and shacks that had been constructed on the edges of the settlement, while the buildings had been taken over by the soldier and his men. Apart from one: this was the largest building, and it housed as many beds, pallets and mattresses as could be gathered. Two doctors who doubled as guards took duty in rotation, while the other soldiers under the bearded man’s command secured the territory around, rested up and waited for their next plan of action. The women who had been contained within the trucks were in the building, awaiting their certain fate with trepidation, their spirit already broken.

  The villagers knew what was to happen—what had already been happening—to the women who’d arrived with the soldier. But the village women sneered that they were not Bosniaks, and so had brought it on themselves, while the men kept silent and just thanked God that their own wives were not considered eligible.

  Oil lamps burned into the night while the bearded man and his trusted lieutenants held council. They were a strange collection, as the Serb and his two trusted Serb aides were joined by a Bosniak and an Oriental.

  “You have handled this well,” the Oriental said over vodka and cigars—for the Serbs and the Bosniak, if not for himself. “If you can establish a camp here, then it will be the first in this sector. Such a camp would, of course, require financing, with perhaps a bonus for the ingenuity and courage of the man who established it.”

  The bearded man snorted. “Ingenuity? I wouldn’t say no to that. Courage? Where does it require courage to gather together a load of women and herd them up?”

  “Courage is more than just facing down twenty men with submachine guns when you have a rusty knife and an old pistol,” the Chinese man said slyly.

  The bearded man sniffed. “You’ve heard that story, eh? Well, let me tell you, it was true. To a degree. I was lucky. The first man to try to fire jammed his bastard gun. Gave me a chance to shoot him and get his. That gave me more firepower. They still would have had me, though, if not for some stupid bastard among them forgetting he had a grenade in his belt. One shot, man, I tell you I couldn’t have made that shot again if I’d known where to aim. Took half of them down and damn near took me down, too. Again, luck. Did this to me,” he ruminated, fingering the scar on his chest, “but at least it didn’t take my eyes or my face. I could see enough to take down those fuckers before they could take me. Lucky, that’s what they should call me.”

  “No,” another of the Serbs said, banging his vodka bottle down on the rough table, splattering it with spirit. “What they will say is that Vijas Grozny was one of our best leaders, a man who took every opportunity that fate handed him with open hands, grasping it to his bosom and exploiting it to the fullest.”

  Grozny—the bearded man—threw back his head and roared with laughter. “You hear that, Xiao?” he asked of the Chinese. “That, my friend, is what a college education will do for you. Even when you are rotting your gut with cheap vodka you can still be eloquent. You should hear Bilic on the subject of this so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ that we are accused of.”

  “There is no such thing,” the Chinese said with a tight smile. “The United Nations cannot prove their contentions.”

  Grozny shook his head. “This is me you’re talking to. It’s what I do. And why not? For generations the people in this land have been forced together to mix in a way that none of them have wanted. All sides want this so-called cleansing. They only pick on us because we have the greater numbers, and because what we do is more obvious. They’re all at it, in one way or another. The Muslim and the Christian hate each other. The Serb and the Croat hate each other. Everyone hates the Bosniaks, right, my friend?” he added,
clapping his Bosniak lieutenant on the back. “Truth is, no one gives a fuck about anyone else when they all live in their own little pieces of the land. All any of us are doing is trying to get everyone back where they belong.”

  Grozny sat back, looking dazed and exhausted by his rant.

  Xiao smiled and took another sip of the tea that he had been drinking while the others got progressively more drunk. He was content to let Grozny rage in this manner. The more he built up his anger, the more he was easy to manipulate. The warlord was building a name for himself, and there were many in the Balkans who knew him by reputation. Karadzic was the big noise in this part of the world, and the Serbs listened to him. He got that way by being bigger and badder than the rest.

  But Karadzic would not be around forever: already he was on a UN hit list, and if they could, they would let their peacekeeping forces keep that peace by illicit means. That was war. Equally, Xiao’s masters had their own worries. Tiananmen had been a black spot on international relations at a time when China was beginning to emerge from the shadows of Mao. That was six years back, and things had not improved. However, the fall of Soviet-style communism, and its ripple effects, could do much to deflect attention from the East. It focused the attention of the West on the atrocities they could create themselves, and it created a fear of what may form in the vacuum left by the collapse of communism.

  Some sections of the leadership in Beijing could see opportunities for stemming the regrowth of regimes that had not seen eye to eye with them, whilst at the same time forming a buffer between themselves and the West that was a little more oblique. Much of the Serb rhetoric in this conflict had been of the extreme right, not the left, so backing this would not be expected of the East.

  Xiao had selected Grozny for the man’s savagery, drive and his devotion to his cause. Also for his interesting mix of stupid and smart: he had the brains to lead, yet could not see when he was being guided by an ulterior motive. Perhaps in his zeal he simply did not want to see.

  No matter. He would serve Xiao’s purpose.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS AFTER THIS, the work began. It was a work of atrocity that was yet enjoyable to many of the men taking part.