Mercy Mission Read online

  The War Everlasting had consisted of a thousand battles

  But rarely had the Executioner been pushed so hard, bludgeoned and bruised and battered like he had this time.

  But he pushed himself. He had become too personally invested in what started out as a favor for Aaron Kurtzman.

  The reason? The nature of the crime struck a powerful chord in Bolan. He had seen war. He knew men who were captured by the enemy.

  It was to a nation’s shame that it failed to bring back its prisoners of war. But for a man of power to deliberately abandon his nation’s soldiers to the enemy was so dishonorable to those men that it was a personal affront to Bolan.

  That was why he had fought and fought and struggled to keep going despite the pleas of his body to rest.

  Bolan the Patriot had been incapable of permitting the stain to linger uncleansed.

  MACK BOLAN®

  The Executioner

  #231 Slaughter Squad

  #232 Jackal Hunt

  #233 Tough Justice

  #234 Target Command

  #235 Plague Wind

  #236 Vengeance Rising

  #237 Hellfire Trigger

  #238 Crimson Tide

  #239 Hostile Proximity

  #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

  Don Pendleton’s

  The Executioner®

  MERCY MISSION

  Nothing can excuse a general who takes advantage of the knowledge acquired in the service of his country, to deliver up her frontier and her towns to foreigners. This is a crime reprobated by every principle of religion, morality and honor.

  —Napoleon I

  There is no greater crime than when men of power buy amnesty for themselves. I am here to deliver justice to those men. I am here to make them pay.

  —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

  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

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  1

  The big man in the wheelchair stared at the phone, then allowed his eyes to wander to one of the flat-screen computer monitors. Several windows on the display silently tracked the progress of various high-level global spiders. The spiders, the man’s creations, were cybernetic monsters—among the most sophisticated network cataloging and analysis applications ever invented. They hacked indiscriminately into high-level secure systems the world over. The man in the wheelchair wasn’t interested in their progress. He was looking at the tiny blue numerals in the top right corner of the screen: 12:23 a.m.

  Just four hours to go.

  Seven more minutes was all he could give it, and then he was going to have to start involving the others. That would launch all of them on a course of action he would prefer to avoid if at all possible.

  This was a matter that had to be handled quietly, ideally by someone who could and would ignore the repercussions.

  The big man wasn’t the nervous type—not by a long shot—but when the phone chimed he jumped. The phone was in his hand before the ring was complete.

  The voice on the line said only, “It’s me.”

  “Striker, thank God,” the man in the wheelchair said. “You still in the vicinity?”

  “I just checked into a hotel in Providence,” the caller said. “What’s wrong, Bear?”

  “I need you to handle something. If you will.”

  “Of course. Just tell me what,” the caller said.
r />   “I’ll explain while you drive. There’s just four hours to go.”

  The man on the other end of the line did not ask, “Four hours until what?” Instead, without hesitation, he said, “I’ll check out and call you from the car. What’s my destination?”

  “Head west. Pennsylvania.”

  “I’ll call you back in five.”

  As the line went dead, the man in the wheelchair felt eyes on his back. He spun and found himself being scrutinized by a beautiful blond woman with intelligent eyes, dressed in jeans and a casual shirt. She was leaning on the door frame.

  They were old friends, and the silence communicated volumes. The big man said, “Don’t even ask. Please.”

  The beautiful blonde nodded and left.

  AT 4:39 A.M. the south gate of the Fairchilde Federal Penitentiary opened. An extended Chevrolet delivery van rolled through, and the driver waved to the guard at the post. The gates slid shut as the van drove slowly along the access road. The land outside the prison was pancake flat and was lit up like a night baseball game. Finally the van pulled onto the highway, leaving the penitentiary behind it.

  The driver had his window open, straining to hear some sound of alarm from the prison, but there was only the rush of wind.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said the hawk-nosed giant in the passenger seat, who was poking his head out the window to look for pursuit while monitoring an emergency radio scanner with a plug in one ear.

  “We pulled it off,” the driver said, his excitement growing. “Congratulations, Khalid. You’re a free man!”

  Khalid al-Jabir crouched in the back with a broad grin on his face. “Congratulations go to you. That was a fine piece of planning and your timing was perfection,” he replied.

  The driver beamed. Once it was known he was the man behind the breakout he would achieve an instant high level of esteem. He would reap the benefits from this success for years to come.

  Then he glimpsed something on the road, like a wood plank, suddenly visible out of the blackness. It was too late to swerve around it. The van went right over it and all four tires burst noisily.

  The driver swore and wrestled for control of the van while the others shouted in alarm, not understanding what had happened. The van loped sloppily across the four empty lanes, then swerved across the other way.

  “Use the brakes, you idiot!” snapped the man in the back.

  The driver didn’t have time to defend his driving skills. “I am!” he cried.

  He dragged on the steering wheel as the shoulder loomed but couldn’t steer the van away from it. The ruined, soggy tire rubber rolled into the gravel, and what little control the driver had was lost. Still traveling more than thirty miles per hour, the van felt as if it were sliding on polished ice. Its rear swung into a ditch and one of the rims found a shallow drainage depression, not even six inches deep, but deep enough to grab the rim and not let go. The inertia lifted the van’s outermost rims off the ground, while the front rim dug into the gravel and for a half second the big, ungraceful truck was pivoting on the one rim. Then gravity took it, pulled it over, and the passenger side of the van slammed into the opposite earthen wall of the drainage ditch with a bone-jarring crunch of metal.

  An instant later came silence and darkness so abrupt that the driver thought he was dead until the pain told him otherwise.

  The van was lifeless, lights out, the engine stalled. There were no highway lights here. No nearby glow of a town. Even the crickets had stopped chirping. Then he heard a groan from the back seat.

  “Are you injured, Khalid?”

  “I don’t know,” was the terse response.

  The man in the passenger seat was slumped against the door, where the window was now filled with grass and weeds and broken glass. When the passenger turned to look at the driver zombielike, his face was a mass of blood and torn flesh. “What happened?” he slurred, mouth hanging open.

  “A trap,” the driver said.

  “What?” the man in the back seat demanded.

  “Someone put a piece of wood in the road with nails to blow the tires. There was no time to go around it.”

  “Let’s go!” al-Jabir ordered. The driver heard him climbing over the empty pallets, then one rear door opened.

  “Come on,” the driver urged as he unlatched the seat belt that held him dangling at a strange angle. He crawled through the rear after al-Jabir, not giving voice to his doubts that the man in the passenger seat was capable of even standing, let alone extracting himself from the wreck. But the passenger followed him and a minute later they were all clambering up the drainage ditch, where they marched through a dark field of wildflowers.

  “If it was a trap, then where are the police?” al-Jabir asked, panting.

  “I do not know,” the driver whispered. “It is strange.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t drive into a pothole?” demanded the bloody passenger, who acted oblivious to his wounds but strained to keep up with the fast pace set by al-Jabir.

  “No pothole will flatten four tires at one time,” the driver retorted. “Look, we’re just a mile from the rendezvous point.”

  He ignored the pain in his shoulder. He knew if he started thinking about it he would feel its full intensity. Broken shoulder, maybe. The ground sloped away, the going was easy and the fugitive al-Jabir matched him step for step.

  The driver and al-Jabir marched through a weed-filled depression in the field, then the driver glanced over his shoulder to check his lagging partner. He was just in time to see the man plod into the depression. For a moment the man was hidden from view by the tall plants and ground-hugging darkness.

  Then the moment turned into seconds.

  “Os?” the driver called.

  Al-Jabir halted. “What’s the problem?”

  “Osman collapsed. I’ll help him.”

  “We can’t afford a delay. If he’s too weak to continue…” Khalid al-Jabir shrugged.

  “I understand.”

  The driver hurried back and descended into the depression. It was dark, but he thought he could make out a flat place in the waist-high field grass. He crouched and felt in the grass. No Osman.

  The driver was suddenly angry. Where was the man? Had he trooped off in the wrong direction? Why had everything gone so wrong? Dammit, his shoulder hurt!

  And why hadn’t he brought a flashlight? He couldn’t see a thing. But who would have thought he would need a flashlight, of all things, for this job?

  “Osman!” he whispered.

  The man was a friend, but that wouldn’t stop him from abandoning him here to fend for himself. The risk was too great to al-Jabir.

  There was something on his hands where he had touched the flattened grass. He sniffed his hand and smelled blood. He thought he saw a spot where the grass was drenched.

  Osman hadn’t been bleeding that much. Had he?

  Then something materialized out of the blackness where there had been nothing before. It was inhuman, a walking nightmare—nothing else could have come through the night so silently, passing among the plants without moving them. The thing was somehow blacker than the darkness, a phantom that absorbed light. Every one of the supernatural night creatures in his grand-uncle’s folk tales came true in this thing that came at him now.

  In his moment of terror, the driver saw Osman sprawled at the feet of the phantom, his neck opened from ear to ear. The phantom had begun to feed.

  The driver opened his mouth to scream and raised his handgun, his last wish to be the instrument of his own death rather than allow his soul and body to be consumed by this American specter.

  The phantom reached for him like the flitting of a shadow and the same blade that killed Osman sliced the driver’s neck wide-open, cutting off the scream.

  The driver’s last heartbeat of life was spent trying to reconcile superstition and reality. If it moved like a spirit it had to be a spirit. But why would a spirit use a mundane steel blade for
killing?

  KHALID AL-JABIR BECAME suspicious. Something was wrong, and all that fool had brought him was a handgun to defend himself! He aimed at the place where the two men had vanished, holding the weapon in both hands.

  A sound came from the dark place, almost like a whisper, strange yet familiar. Al-Jabir felt his blood grow cold when it came to him: it was the wet wheeze of breath from a freshly cut throat.

  The murderer cursed silently. He was alone, he was pursued! Two men dead in two minutes!

  Al-Jabir ran.

  THE SPECTER USED UP precious seconds retrieving the wallets belonging to the dead men, then crept out of the depression in time to see the fleeing figure of Khalid al-Jabir. The specter raced after the fugitive, taking care on the uneven ground. Al-Jabir was a gaunt, long-legged giant who ate up the distance and was lucky or skilled enough to avoid a twisted ankle.

  But his luck didn’t last.

  AL-JABIR SAW THE CAR, tucked out of sight of the highway behind the shelter of a small copse of roadside trees. He poured on the speed, ignoring the needlelike sting of the grass that whipped against his arms. He yanked at the door, snatching the key from under the seat and stabbing it into the ignition. When he cranked the key hard he heard an ominous silence.

  Someone swept out of the trees, and al-Jabir understood the trap in an instant. The car’s battery was disconnected. Another figure moved in from the rear, coming to the passenger door. They were just waiting for him.

  “Don’t move! Hands on the wheel!” The first man had a shotgun aimed through the open window and moved sideways to take a safe position over al-Jabir’s left shoulder.

  Al-Jabir came up with a plan and knew it had to go into effect instantly, before the second man had him fully in view and before the shotgunner was unreachable.

  “Okay! Okay!” al-Jabir said, but then he twisted in his seat, yanked up his feet and propelled them against the unlatched passenger door. It slammed into the shotgunner’s groin and abdomen. The shotgunner went flying. Al-Jabir twisted and thrust a hand at the rear window, triggering the Glock at the second ambusher. There was an explosion of glass, and the figure disappeared from view.

  “Son of a bitch!” the shotgunner exclaimed. Al-Jabir sought him in the blackness, but the man was behind a tree, still armed. “Team Beta, I have a man down! Get over here!” the shotgunner cried.