Agent of Peril Read online

  Bolan was pressed hard

  At least three more shooters were on the other side of the pickup truck. He’d been in this position before and he wasn’t about to panic.

  He drew back from the Peugeot, putting ten yards between himself and the vehicle to get a better view of what was going on. Four gunners were making slow advances. They were concentrating on the truck, and not beyond it. He unleathered the Beretta, slipping a fresh magazine into it. He was going to get as many of them off guard as he could, and the pistol, though at the extreme of its range, was the only tool for this bloody trade.

  This mission wasn’t finished, but the Executioner was back on the road to seeing justice served.

  MACK BOLAN®

  The Executioner

  #240 Devil’s Guard

  #241 Evil Reborn

  #242 Doomsday Conspiracy

  #243 Assault Reflex

  #244 Judas Kill

  #245 Virtual Destruction

  #246 Blood of the Earth

  #247 Black Dawn Rising

  #248 Rolling Death

  #249 Shadow Target

  #250 Warning Shot

  #251 Kill Radius

  #252 Death Line

  #253 Risk Factor

  #254 Chill Effect

  #255 War Bird

  #256 Point of Impact

  #257 Precision Play

  #258 Target Lock

  #259 Nightfire

  #260 Dayhunt

  #261 Dawnkill

  #262 Trigger Point

  #263 Skysniper

  #264 Iron Fist

  #265 Freedom Force

  #266 Ultimate Price

  #267 Invisible Invader

  #268 Shattered Trust

  #269 Shifting Shadows

  #270 Judgment Day

  #271 Cyberhunt

  #272 Stealth Striker

  #273 UForce

  #274 Rogue Target

  #275 Crossed Borders

  #276 Leviathan

  #277 Dirty Mission

  #278 Triple Reverse

  #279 Fire Wind

  #280 Fear Rally

  #281 Blood Stone

  #282 Jungle Conflict

  #283 Ring of Retaliation

  #284 Devil’s Army

  #285 Final Strike

  #286 Armageddon Exit

  #287 Rogue Warrior

  #288 Arctic Blast

  #289 Vendetta Force

  #290 Pursued

  #291 Blood Trade

  #292 Savage Game

  #293 Death Merchants

  #294 Scorpion Rising

  #295 Hostile Alliance

  #296 Nuclear Game

  #297 Deadly Pursuit

  #298 Final Play

  #299 Dangerous Encounter

  #300 Warrior’s Requiem

  #301 Blast Radius

  #302 Shadow Search

  #303 Sea of Terror

  #304 Soviet Specter

  #305 Point Position

  #306 Mercy Mission

  #307 Hard Pursuit

  #308 Into the Fire

  #309 Flames of Fury

  #310 Killing Heat

  #311 Night of the Knives

  #312 Death Gamble

  #313 Lockdown

  #314 Lethal Payload

  #315 Agent of Peril

  Don Pendleton’s

  The Executioner®

  AGENT OF PERIL

  A glorious death is his Who for his country falls.

  —Homer

  Iliad c. 1000 BC

  I am the Executioner. I have done what no soldier has ever done. My wrath is turned against those who are the enemy of the innocent. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me.

  —Mack Bolan

  To the soldiers who gave their lives in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The critics and the cynics can debate the why, but your how was impeccable.

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Prologue

  The soldier did a flip over the slab of cracked, pockmarked stone, heartbeats ahead of the slashing rain of incoming fire. Bullets hammered the rock with incessant fury, trying to reach the flesh that had escaped them only moments before. Glancing around, he realized he was in a bad situation, surrounded on all sides by grim, determined enemies. Rubbing his gravel-stung cheek, he saw the shell of an old building, but his enemies, armed with grenades and assault rifles, would blow him out of that ruin easily, if they didn’t slice him in two in the first place. This was nothing new to the grizzled veteran, muscles drawn tight as he prepared for yet another brutal clash.

  He pulled the clip from his Uzi and saw it had only five shots left. He poked up his head, but his enemy was out of sight. He narrowed his eyes, knowing that they were gathering courage to make their move.

  “You might as well give it up! You’re surrounded and outgunned!” the invisible enemy called out.

  “Bring it!” It was a simple invitation.

  That’s when he heard the pounding footsteps. Weapons sounded on the other side of the stone, cries ringing as the enemy charged.

  He had to time it exactly right.

  The weapons stopped popping and the soldier rose, swinging his Uzi. The pause in the shooting, he hoped, was the end of their supply of ammo and they’d have to reload. Five shots, one for each pull of the trigger, flew out of the barrel. One, two, three enemies went down, screaming as their chests were stitched, but one was still left charging, struggling to recharge his rifle on the run, feet pumping as he surged forward.

  “Hey, you kids!”

  The illusion was broken in an instant. The paintball sailed wide and to the right as the pistol snapped off its pellet.

  Liev de Toth was no longer a soldier pitting his might against the forces of evil; he was just a teenaged boy on the West Bank, playing with his friends. The jolt of reality was ice water, cooling him off from gleeful excitement. As he was on the downward surge of play-induced adrenaline, fear cut in and spiked him up again.

  Old Man Strieber had to have heard the gas-powered sound of the paintball guns as they spit their pellets. Liev snapped his head around and picked up his scratched and battered Uzi. It looked like a real soldier’s weapon with duct tape and tattered cloth around the stock. The scratches only added to its character.

  Strieber was getting closer, moving as quick as his bum knee could carry him, which was still quick. He’d taken a bad fall and tore the ligaments while a paratrooper in the army. When he wasn’t busy growing apricots in the field, he still exercised and trained his farmhands and whoever else would come to learn the art of using a rifle. The old soldier didn’t approve of paintball gunning, said it wasn’t a safe way to train, but Liev and his friends liked the fun of it. The fact that Liev hadn’t been shot in a half dozen sessions, even against huge odds, added to the teenager’s feeling that running and gunning with the paintball guns was of vital usefulness.

  “C’mon Liev! Let’s go!” Raffi shouted, and Liev raced away from Strieber’s equipment shack and back toward the settlement in the valley.

  “We almost got you today, man,” Jan spoke up as Liev joined the knot of friends.

  Liev took their shared gym bag and threw his gun in with the rest of them. “When I sign up, I’m going to be one hell of a soldie
r. Look out Hezbollah!”

  Liev was going to say more when he felt a deep rumbling in the ground. He paused, looking back at the Strieber farm.

  One at a time, the five teenaged boys stopped, looking back at the three churning trails of dust snaking and writhing into the sky. There was something familiar about them that eluded the youths for a moment, but the accompanying sound, akin to some metallic beast incessantly clearing its throat, brought the knowledge to life.

  “Tanks?” Liev asked. “Here?”

  “Maybe it’s maneuvers,” Jan said, unconvinced even by his own argument.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Michael answered. “They’re coming from the south. Why are they going that way? They should be taking the main road.”

  Noah gave his friends a small push. “Look!”

  The tanks weren’t skirting the orchard; they were plowing through the center of it. Liev’s jaw dropped as they spotted the trio of tanks tear through the small grove of apricot trees, smashing their trunks to splinters under their grinding steel treads.

  “That’s insane! What do those idiots think they’re…” he shouted.

  Suddenly gunfire began flashing from the turret.

  Old Man Strieber had a half dozen farmhands on the porch of his squat ranch house, watching in shock as the orchard was ground to sawdust and pulp. They had no idea what was going on until the first muzzle-flashes erupted. Coaxial guns swept them with sheets of lead. Three undulating threads of slaughter ripped through the ranch house’s aluminum siding and flesh alike, the aluminum bursting and popping open neatly, gutting insulation and shards of wood underneath. The six men were not so neat and tidy as flesh and bone exploded, blood spraying across the front of the building, bullets continuing through, unabated by their time in a human body, to smash and puncture yet more aluminum and wood.

  Strieber came running up the other side of the road. It was impossible to believe that only heartbeats earlier, Strieber had driven the boys away from the pile of stones and rotted wood he kept behind his equipment shed, where the boys had been feigning war. Feigning the hellfire that was now hammering real death, blood and thunder to the drumbeat of heavy machine guns.

  The top hatch on the right-most tank popped open. Liev tried to make his mouth move, to scream a warning to Strieber. His throat had turned to a cracked riverbed, dry and burning as he tried to get more than a hoarse whistle past his tonsils. The gunner in the commander’s cupola spun the machine gun mounted there, swung it down on Strieber and tapped off a long burst.

  Liev watched in disbelieving horror the atrocity going on before his eyes. Strieber disintegrated under the storm of .50-caliber rounds.

  “Run!” Liev shrieked, finally forcing words past his lips with Herculean effort. His friends took off, legs pumping, like bats out of hell.

  The ranch house detonated into oblivion under the impact of the tank’s main gun.

  The shock wave gave Liev an extra bit of push.

  Steel damnation was on its way.

  1

  Mack Bolan crawled across the slate, low shrubs concealing him as he pulled his improvised sniper’s drag bag behind him while keeping an eye on the temporary auction lot a half mile distant.

  The Executioner was tracking a trio of traveling Hezbollah, led by Bidifah Sinbal, a veteran organizer and moneyman for the Lebanon-based Palestinian terror organization. They had been moving a lot of cargo on a freight ship from Lebanon to Pakistan. The freight was being unveiled on a slab of granite adorned with ammunition crates and assorted military vehicles. Bolan couldn’t see into the massive cargo containers that Sinbal’s men were opening, but he saw the look of awe on the faces of the men who swung open the gates on the three massive containers.

  Something nasty was in there.

  Bolan swept the area with a field scanner, checking for motion. He slipped like a ghost along the very edges of the field, disturbing little as he crawled along the path.

  Bolan’s battle gear was limited. He’d been able to smuggle most of his nonlethal gear across borders as he raced to get ahead of the freighter. However, the Executioner’s signature pistols and his heavier weaponry were left behind. Bolan had left his usual weaponry in a diplomatic pouch, ready to be forwarded anyplace that he needed more firepower for a long-haul mission.

  This day the Executioner made do with what he’d bought at a tribal gun shop in Peshawar. He had plenty of money for some hand-built, if eccentric, weapons.

  The primary weapon was a hand-tooled Short Magazine Lee Enfield—the classic SMLE of the British forces during World War II. The weapon was topped with a Chinese knockoff of an ECLAN scope that gave Bolan some reach. The pistol-gripped rifle was a smooth shooting machine. For more hectic work, Bolan had also bought a 9 mm Skorpion machine pistol and a pair of stainless-steel Brazilian Taurus PT-92s. The Taurus handguns were almost identical to his Beretta 93-R, lacking only barrel length, a folding foregrip and a 3-round burst option. The Peshawar gunsmiths even managed to retool the Taurus to operate with the Beretta’s extended 20-shot magazines. Still, they were somewhat different from what he usually carried.

  That didn’t matter.

  It wasn’t the tools that had allowed Bolan to survive against insurmountable odds for as long as he had. But they sure helped.

  Bolan swept the fighting field and wondered what his course of action should be. He wasn’t sure what he’d find, following the trio. They’d come ashore at Gwadar, more than nine hundred kilometers south, but thankfully in the age of satellite telephones and satellite surveillance, the Executioner was able to keep tabs on the massive boxcars as they were loaded onto train tracks from Gwadar to Nok Kundi to Quetta, where they were offloaded.

  Bolan was racing to intercept them from the north, having managed to snag a transport flight into Afghanistan and stopping off with American U.S. Army Special Forces. The Special Forces operational teams were dividing their time between restoring the nation in their role as teachers and diplomats, and on the side, still hunting for leftover madmen from the Taliban. The Executioner wished those men luck, and left them to their task, knowing that it was in good hands.

  The Hezbollah trio was a danger that he had taken unto himself. They had picked up a good-sized bodyguard force during their train trip. Now the three moneymen were accompanied by a dozen well-armed men. Bolan didn’t know them by their faces, but if he transmitted their images back to Stony Man Farm, he was certain that he’d come up with local al Qaeda loyalists.

  Bolan wanted to take another close look at the Hezbollah bunch.

  They were talking, moving out of the way as the contents of the first container came rolling out.

  It wasn’t the chill of the Pakistani spring winds that Bolan felt in his bones as he saw the familiar boxy frame of a tank rolling out of the boxcar. He wanted to believe it was a Soviet tank, or some Chinese knockoff, but his eyes and mind were already placing the unique frame and shape of the armored vehicle. His stomach curled into a knot. He didn’t want to believe what he saw, but there it was.

  An M1A1 Abrams tank. The main cannon was disassembled, and from the range Bolan was looking, it was an older model, with the old 105 mm gun instead of the newer 120 mm gun that was the mainstay of the United States armed forces. This was cold comfort, as the tank was still an almost unstoppable war machine, capable of laying waste to an entire city before an air strike or other tanks could be brought to stop it.

  Three boxcars.

  Three tanks.

  The terrorists could easily barter themselves up to seventy-five million dollars for the sale of these war machines to anyone who wanted a small armored force. And it wouldn’t take much effort to convert the old 105 mm cannon into the more modern 120 mm pieces that could cut through an entire building with one shot. Bolan set down the SMLE and checked his arsenal. He didn’t have a single thing that could make the odds anywhere close to equal against even an empty Abrams with half a tank of fuel. The forty pounds of C-4 explosive might be able t
o dent one tank, but to destroy all three…

  The waiting game was over and Bolan swiftly began setting up his first shot with the SMLE.

  Destroying tanks with a .30-caliber rifle wasn’t something he planned for, but he did have eighteen stripper clips of .303 ammunition for the SMLE and he was mentally setting up the long shots to cause mayhem and destruction. Armor-piercing rounds were filling the magazines.

  Bolan brought the scope to bear on a stacked crate of 67 mm artillery rockets. He reckoned the distance as around 400 meters, and brought the rifle’s point of aim up enough to compensate, then pulled the trigger. The SMLE shoved against the Executioner’s shoulder. Thick cedar burst apart like flimsy plywood as the 124-grain tungsten-cored slug slammed into the contents of the wooden crate. What happened next shook the ground, but the Executioner was already looking for new targets, throwing the bolt back to feed a fresh .303 into the breach.

  With both eyes open, he saw the bowl of smoke rising, a blast zone easily forty yards across. Screams of panic rang out as the terrorists ran for cover. Spotting a fresh target, Bolan pumped a second round through the fuel tank of a motorcycle. Fuel sprayed wildly from the burst bladder, and the gunman atop the bike slipped, tumbling to the ground. Bolan dropped his aim and sent off a second round almost immediately after the first, skipping the third .303 round off the fuel-soaked tarmac. The bullet hit with a flaring spark, and gasoline flashed in a fireball, washing over the guard.

  Panicked bodyguards whipped out weaponry from wherever they had it stored and more than a few began blasting at each other. Bolan swept along, burning off the rest of his first magazine, taking shots that nicked or sparked close to already hyper alert gunners.

  A few bullets here and there got the maddened gunfight going. Bolan threw back the bolt one last time, then stuffed down ten fresh rounds and closed the rifle, swinging for more new targets. One of the weapons auctioneers was screaming, pointing frantically toward him. The Executioner might have ignored him except for the RPG-7 rocket launcher being aimed in his direction.

  With a single stroke of the trigger a bullet slammed into the rocketeer’s groin, tearing through his pelvis with sledgehammer force. In the same instant, the severely injured gunner squeezed the trigger on his weapon, bending halfway over. He skipped the 77 mm warhead off the ground, firing too soon to slam it point first into the earth. The teardrop-shaped warhead deflected and went skidding along the tarmac, giving the detonator time to arm.