Threat Factor Read online

  Then the gates of hell opened up

  The game was on, and the only way to win it was to charge on, straight ahead.

  Bolan went through the curtain in a fighting crouch and dropped another adversary as his target tried to cock his AK-47. Shock was written on the gunman’s face as he went down.

  The others started firing then, mostly without direction, making lethal noise as soldiers often did to keep the enemy at bay until they worked out what in hell was happening. The walls were being chipped and scarred by bullets, drilled through completely in places by the larger calibers.

  Bolan had claimed the table of the second man he’d shot, flipped it to make a shield of sorts, but knew it wouldn’t serve him long or well. The first hits showered him with splintered wood, which meant that at least a couple of his enemies had seen him go to ground.

  It was time to move.

  But first, a little shock and awe.

  MACK BOLAN®

  The Executioner

  #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

  #316 Poison Justice

  #317 Hour of Judgment

  #318 Code of Resistance

  #319 Entry Point

  #320 Exit Code

  #321 Suicide Highway

  #322 Time Bomb

  #323 Soft Target

  #324 Terminal Zone

  #325 Edge of Hell

  #326 Blood Tide

  #327 Serpent’s Lair

  #328 Triangle of Terror

  #329 Hostile Crossing

  #330 Dual Action

  #331 Assault Force

  #332 Slaughter House

  #333 Aftershock

  #334 Jungle Justice

  #335 Blood Vector

  #336 Homeland Terror

  #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

  Don Pendleton’s

  The Executioner®

  THREAT FACTOR

  The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

  —Journals

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  1803–1882

  Sometimes we have to fight evil with evil, fire with fire. Violence is the only language some predators understand, and I speak it fluently.

  —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

  Indian Ocean

  Captain Danilo Andreychuk was worried. He had watched a trawler keeping pace with the Vasylna for the better part of two hours. Examining the rusty hulk through his binoculars from half a mile away, he could not escape a sense that he was being stalked.

  It was entirely reasonable that Captain Andreychuk feared treachery. These waters, off the east coast of Somalia, teemed with hijackers and pirates who liked nothing better than to prey on merchant ships—stealing their cargo, sometimes offering it back for ransom to the rightful owners and frequently committing acts of needless violence against the transport crews.

  And the Vasylna was a prime target.

  Her cargo was supposed to be a deep, dark secret, but Andreychuk knew that every ship afloat sprang leaks from time to time. Some leaks let water infiltrate the cargo holds, while others provided information to the sea wolves who paid well for tips involving profitable merchandise.

  With the exception of his first mate, Mykola Shymko, the captain didn’t trust the other members of his crew as far as he could throw them—preferably overboard. They were a mixed lot, competent enough as long as he was watching them perform their duties, but he assumed that most of them were ex-convicts. Their crude tattoos spoke volumes with respect to lives pursued outside the law.

  Andreychuk noted that the trawler had drawn closer while he was distracted by his private thoughts. He had been debating whether he should hail the other ship, when a gruff voice behind him asked, “Is something wrong?”

  The captain turned to face his latest client, known to him as Grigory Glazkov. The man was Russian, with a military look about him—flinty eyes and roughly chiseled features set beneath a graying crew cut that was thinning at the crown.

  “I hope not,” Andreychuk replied. “But maybe so.”

&n
bsp; Glazkov had seen the trawler now and recognized its flag. “Liberian,” he noted.

  “Maybe,” Andreychuk said. “Maybe not.”

  Glazkov had to have known that many vessels listed in the Liberian International Ship & Corporate Registry were Liberian in name only, logged as a matter of convenience that frequently included tax evasion and concealment of the true owner’s identity. The trawler’s flag—resembling that of the United States, but with only one star in its blue canton, and eleven red-and-white stripes in its field instead of thirteen—told Andreychuk nothing.

  “Can we outrun them, if need be?” Glazkov inquired.

  Andreychuk shrugged and said the obvious. “She’s keeping up so far.”

  They were two miles offshore from Bargaal, still some thirteen hundred miles from their intended destination of Mombassa, Kenya. Andreychuk had no idea how fast the nameless trawler could travel—and now he saw that it didn’t matter. “Speedboats!”

  From Glazkov’s lips, it sounded like a curse.

  And so it was.

  Three sleek powerboats—one red, two white—had suddenly appeared from the trawler’s starboard shadow and were racing toward the Vasylna at full speed, fairly skimming across the ocean’s surface. Each carried five or six men, and Andreychuk didn’t need his binoculars to know they were armed.

  “You can repel them, yes?” Glazkov demanded.

  “Perhaps.” Andreychuk’s tone left no doubt of his skepticism.

  Even as he spoke, the first speedboat reached the Vasylna, one of its passengers raising a stubby weapon to his shoulder and squeezing its trigger. With a muffled popping sound, a grappling hook hurtled over the Vasylna’s port-side railing and caught hold, trailing a crude rope ladder behind it.

  “We must fight back!” Glazkov barked at him, reaching underneath his jacket to produce an automatic pistol.

  “Not so fast, Comrade,” another voice said from behind the Russian.

  Glazkov and Andreychuk turned as one, to find a stocky figure standing in the wheelhouse doorway. Mykola Shymko held a pistol of his own, aimed at the Russian’s head.

  “Full stop, Captain, I think,” the first mate said.

  So much for trust.

  1

  Mogadishu, Somalia

  Mogadishu—or Muqdisho, in Arabic—was the crossroads of East Africa. Local natives opened seafaring trade with India in the first century, and later welcomed Portuguese merchants and seamen. Ali bin Said al-Busaid, the fourth sultan of Zanzibar, leased Mogadishu to Italy in 1892, while his successors sold it outright to Rome in 1905. Kenya captured the city in 1941, then yielded control to Great Britain from 1950 to 1960, with the advent of chaotic independence. But Somalia’s capital retained its Italian flavor, at least in the names of its streets. Italian coexisted with English, Arabic and Somali as one of Somalia’s four official languages.

  Which explained why Mack Bolan, driving west from Aden Adde International Airport in a rented car, made his first turn on Via Medina, proceeding southwestard from there onto Via Londra and Via Roma.

  He was headed downtown, toward the teeming heart of a city whose population exceeded two million. A recent sitrep out of Langley estimated that Mogadishans owned at least one million assault rifles, making their city the most heavily armed on Earth.

  And they weren’t afraid to use those weapons, either. Street battles between rival warlords and criminal gangs were routine—so common, in fact, that the Western media rarely bothered to report a skirmish or bombing with less than a dozen slain victims.

  In short, Bolan was headed into an active war zone—unarmed.

  Fortunately, he should have no trouble finding military hardware in the city.

  His destination, as luck would have it, lay at the very heart of Mogadishu’s urban battleground. The Bakaara Market was Somalia’s largest open market, and while relatively new—created under the Mohamed Siad Barre regime, in 1972—it had compiled an impressive record of outlaw activities. Aside from the selling of daily essentials, such as dietary staples, medicine and gasoline, the market had become a virtual arms dump since the Somalian revolution of 1986-92 and the ensuing civil war that had continued to the present day. Aside from standard small arms and explosives, Bolan understood that antiaircraft guns, mortars and other heavy weapons were available upon demand, for those with ready cash.

  No problem getting strapped, then, even with his relatively pale skin working to his disadvantage in a country where Caucasians were often regarded as the enemy, regardless of their nationality.

  The Bakaara Market’s other offerings included forged passports and other vital documents, prepared within minutes for buyers in a hurry, and counterfeit currency produced in such abundance that it sparked the collapse of the Somali shilling and forced a brief closure of the market in 2001. For months after the market reopened, its vendors had demanded U.S. dollars in place of their own nation’s worthless money.

  Small wonder, then, that the Bakaara Market had witnessed repeated, brutal acts of violence. Sporadic firefights and RPG attacks made the market hazardous for merchants and patrons alike, while a series of combat-related fires had swept the ramshackle stalls between 2001 and 2007, claiming dozens of lives.

  It sounded like a little bit of hell on Earth.

  Unfortunately, it was also Bolan’s point of contact with a native ally he had never met, but whose local knowledge might prove critical to Bolan’s latest mission.

  Might being the operative word.

  Experience had taught the Executioner to deal with strangers at arm’s length, regardless of their prior endorsements by those whom he had cause to trust. That was true in the States, true in Europe, and doubly true in a place like Somalia, where decades of savage internecine warfare had replaced civilization with something close to anarchy.

  As he approached Mogadishu’s Hamarwein Old Town, rolling north on Via Morocco, Bolan considered stopping off before his meet to buy a pistol and some ammunition, maybe add an SMG to his preliminary shopping list, but he was running late already with a flight delay in Cairo, and he didn’t want to leave his contact hanging any longer than he absolutely had to.

  He’d memorized a recent photo of the man he was supposed to meet, Dirie Awaale Waabberi, and hoped he would be able to quickly spot his face out of a mob at the Bakaara Market. But Bolan knew from personal experience that Third World slums and marketplaces could overwhelm strangers without even trying.

  Bolan himself was no stranger to Africa, per se, but he couldn’t pretend to pass for a native or long-term resident. He had been in and out of the continent on varied missions through the years, but governments and causes changed like the seasons. Africa’s only constants were physical beauty and stone-cold indifference to human survival.

  So Bolan passed on pistol-shopping for the moment, and instead took his chances with mobility and instinct as he drove to meet a stranger who would either help him or betray him to his enemies.

  As for those enemies themselves, a cautious man would say that they had Bolan hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. But those who leaped to that conclusion didn’t know the Executioner.

  DIRIE WAABBERI HAD a pistol of his own, but he wasn’t sure by any means that it would keep him breathing through the night. Dusk was approaching, and the floodlights mounted over the Bakaara Market were already lit, but he saw menace in the shadows between market stalls and in the eyes of strangers passing by on either side of him.

  It was easy to die in Mogadishu. Anyone could sidle up to Waabberi in the crush of shoppers, slip a blade between his ribs or shoot him in the head, and who would care? Beyond a momentary ripple as he crumpled to the pavement, who would even notice?

  On his way to the Bakaara Market, Waabberi had passed a small contingent of AMISOM—African Union Mission in Somalia—peacekeepers, instantly recognizable wearing their green berets and green armbands. They carried weapons but were virtually barred from using them except in the last straits of self-defense. Yet, even then, b
eing outnumbered some 750 to one by Mogadishans who often possessed superior weapons, what chance did they have? If they kept any peace in the city, Waabberi had yet to observe it.

  They would not save him, if he had been marked for death by enemies.

  Waabberi had survived to celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday, just two weeks earlier, but he was ever conscious of the fact that it might be his last. The course of action he had chosen, working with a foreign stranger to defy powerful foes, could prove to be a fatal mistake.

  But he was hopeful, all the same.

  A man had to do something when confronted by such wickedness, or else humanity itself was lost.

  Waabberi had never experienced peace. Somalia’s last elected government had collapsed four years before he was born, eclipsed in turn by military dictatorship, rebellion, civil war and eventual chaos, but he understood that some nations—even in impoverished, strife-torn Africa—enjoyed a measure of stability. If he could help his homeland move in that direction, even if he did not live to see it triumph, then Waabberi felt his life would at least count for something.

  But dedication did not exempt him from fear.

  Of late, Waabberi had felt that he was being followed. Granted, he could not have proved it. Stopping suddenly on sidewalks, peering into windows for reflected glimpses of a stranger stalking him, he had seen nothing that would stand as evidence. Perhaps he had grown paranoid, which on the deadly streets of Mogadishu was no more than a survival mechanism.

  Still, Waabberi had a sense of being watched and shadowed. He was doubly cautious in communicating with his CIA control agent, avoiding any face-to-face contact, shunning even the use of public telephones. When messages were passed, he went the long way around to dead drops, using every trick at his disposal to get rid of followers. Sometimes he felt absurd, and yet he persevered, fully aware that enemies could strike the moment he relaxed his guard.