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

The Executioner®

Agent of Peril

Don Pendleton

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 soldier. 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 to 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.

In an instant, the point of the rocket struck the treads of the Abrams tank. On impact, the shell went off. The explosion wasn’t the earthshaker that the Executioner started the show with, but Bolan saw one of the Hezbollah moneymen go skidding away, his feet turned to greasy streaks in their wake. He cried out, pistol in hand, clawing toward a suitcase full of money and firing aimlessly in rage.

The Hezbollah group had been chopped in two. Bolan had seen the fifteen-man force brought down to nine by the warhead’s explosion. If he was going to get any answers on the tanks, he needed to start taking the moneymen alive.

One was firing off the contents of his weapon into the wounded RPG gunner, stitching him with 9 mm pistol rounds. Bolan tagged him in the shoulder, blowing the back out of the joint with a .303 round and knocking him down. He swiveled and punched a second round into the face of a gunman who noticed the moneyman go down. Gunfire sizzled back and forth as the Executioner turned his weapon and aimed at the crates that the RPG gunner drew his shells from. The .303 round sailed and hit wood, but nothing happened. Bolan cycled the action and shifted his aim slightly.

This time RPG shells shattered the earth and sky in a chain reaction, one hammering explosion after another, sending shrapnel, flame and splinters flying in an ever growing cloud of devastation. Bolan rose, slinging his war bag. He ran hard toward the caldron of chaos and confusion and cut the distance between himself, and the destruction by half.

After reloading Bolan dropped to one knee. He snapped the rifle to his shoulder and burned off ten shots as fast as he could. The first rounds went into the tires of a jeep whose driver was trying to get himself, some customers and their goods, either bought or to be sold, the hell out of Dodge. The vehicle swerved hard and flipped.

The unlucky driver’s passengers went flying from their seats, and crushed crates vomited out rifles that were ground and shattered between the overturned jeep and unyielding asphalt. A desperate buyer froze in the headlights as the vehicle went skidding out of control at him, and found himself pinned as it slammed into him and crushed him under the tail boom of a Dauphin helicopter.

As Bolan was reloading, he spotted the drumlike extension on the wing stub of the Dauphin, reminiscent of the artillery rocket launchers of the old Vietnam helicopter gunships. On a hunch, the Executioner swung and aimed at the drum and pumped four .303 rounds into the launcher. The fourth shot gave the Executioner results as the helicopter disappeared in a massive shock wave.

The sales ground was sprayed with even more shrapnel and fire. Panicked buyers and sellers raced about, security men and bodyguards firing brutal bursts into one another.

A little panic goes a long way, the Executioner thought, scrambling closer to the battleground after feeding the Enfield some fresh rounds. A spray of bullets smashed into a rock off to the soldier’s right and he went to the ground, feeling pebbles stab into his ribs and knees, elbows barking on stone.

Bolan shouldered the Enfield and spotted a half dozen men working their way toward him. A second spray of autofire was a massive sheet sweeping through the air, pounding and deflecting like copper-jacketed rain on the barren hillside. In a heartbeat, the front sight of the Enfield was on the lead gunner, a .303 round punching through his chest and bursting out his spine in a single gore blast at a range of seventy-five feet.

Bolan threw the bolt and turned on another gunman. Slugs from the security man’s Uzi sliced the air, kicking up chips of slate and granite as they bounced off the ground short of Bolan’s position. The soldier took care of that situation with a single decapitating .303 Enfield round that hit the killer’s throat. Bolan rose and was moving hard to the left, bullets chasing him.

The Enfield dropped on its sling around the Executioner’s neck as he swept up the Skorpion from where it hung and held down the trigger. The 9 mm rounds spit at the enemy hardforce, four men scrambling for their own cover as they sent lead his way.

Unfortunately, the Skorpion rattled apart in a savage, recoil-induced field stripping that left the Executioner’s right hand numb with shock. He should have known the knockoff would prove useless. None of his rounds hit anything, though they did drive the enemy to cover.

Curling his right hand to his belly for protection, Bolan snaked his left hand around, freed one Taurus and straight-armed the 9 mm pistol at one of the Pakistanis who was rising again. A chopped-off AK-47 in the gunman’s hands swung toward Bolan’s midsection as he saw the tall, powerful terrorist charging him.

The Executioner’s sole saving grace was to get within bad-breath distance of the enemy fighter. He tripped the trigger on the Taurus twice, bullets slamming hard into the hollow of the terrorist’s throat and his chin. Jaw shorn away, the guy whirled, his AK tumbling from lifeless fingers. By the time the others were adjusting their aim against Bolan, he went to the ground again right in the middle of the three remaining men. Bullets swept the air from one overanxious machine gunner, autofire ripping like a steel storm through his two comrades as he tried to track his executioner.

Bolan rewarded the wild man’s efforts with two bullets through his groin and one in his stomach.

It was about then that Bolan started getting feeling back in his right hand. It hurt like hell, but he could move the fingers, and looking around, he saw three severely wounded gunmen, their fight gone, blood pumping out on charcoal-colored rock. Testing his weight on the right hand, Bolan got back on his feet and spared a single 9 mm bullet into each dying man’s head, granting them a swift release from their pain. Bolan was not a man to leave an enemy to suffer, no matter what they did.

A quick reload, and the Taurus went to Bolan’s right hand. He crouched and grabbed the chopped-off AK of the man he charged, as well as a pouch of magazines. Satisfied the weapon was in working order, he holstered his pistol and found the rifle was an AKSU in 5.45 mm Soviet. With the stubby barrel of the chop job, the rounds would put out a fireball the size of a watermelon, but wouldn’t have much more punch than a Magnum pistol, and have very limited range.

But the gun wasn’t going to shake to pieces and bruise Bolan’s battered hand any worse.

The Executioner looked over and saw that the Hezbollah hardforce had picked up a bunch of new shooters, and they’d noticed the conflict on the hillside. The range couldn’t have been more than sixty yards, and even for the most ill-educated thug, the math couldn’t have been difficult.

There was a stranger approaching in the wake of the destruction.

He was armed.

Bolan hit the ground again, using a large piece of debris for a shield as bullets raked the side of the hill. Sparks flew as copper jackets hit granite and flint, and crimson puffed skyward as slugs impacted on stilled corpses. The Executioner fisted the AKSU and poked it over the piece of metal, firing the contents of the clip already in place. It was a full load, and three seconds of mayhem swept in response to the crackling salvos downhill.

A bullet hammered into the frame of the AKSU and sent it flying again from the Executioner’s hand before he could pull it back to reload. Not wasting a moment, Bolan tucked tight and rolled, rocks stabbing along his body as he scrambled behind a flat plate of stone. Another wave of hellfire hammered a nearby corpse, reducing the lifeless body to a pulpy stew. Surrounded and outgunned, Bolan didn’t have many options. He took a look at the slab of granite he was behind and felt its thickness with his fingertips. Thick enough to stop enemy bullets for a while.

Long enough, Bolan realized, for his enemy to flank and kill him.

The hollow that he rested against was curved. The soldier could work with that. He wouldn’t have much of a chance, but it was a thread of hope. He began packing C-4 into the hollowed cavity, flattening the kilogram blocks like putty in three strips, kneading them like dough. Bolan pulled a radio detonator and plugged a wire into each strip, sticking it to the center patch of explosive.

Bolan poked up his head and saw the enemy was charging. He pulled both Taurus pistols and dived backward away from the rock, scrambling in frantic retreat. The pistols barked out hot 9 mm pills until the left one ran dry. A couple slugs plucked at the Executioner, and one bullet hammered into the Enfield’s stock, cracking it against the soldier’s ribs. A bullet creased Bolan’s elbow skin, not touching bone. He probably had as much accuracy as his enemy.

On the run, the enemy had no aim as they charged, a small favor to the Executioner as long as they were at a decent distance. If they got closer, though, he was hamburger.

The nearest gunman was almost at the rock that Bolan had mined.

The soldier dropped his left Taurus and slapped the radio detonator’s switch. The hill shook before him, and the shock wave nearly blew out his eardrums.

While Bolan was slammed by a pressure wave, his enemies fared far worse. The granite slab that the plastic explosives were jammed into fragmented instantly, shattering like a fine crystal goblet under the force of a sledgehammer. The shards of the slab didn’t just sit around, however. Thrown at 1500 feet per second, in a widespread cone of bloody murder, the pulverized stone became a gigantic shotgun round.

Whether the chips of granite were blunt pebbles or razor sharp, they still went through human flesh like hot knives through butter. The lead gunner, jumping onto the rock, sailed through the air over Bolan’s head, slamming into the hillside headfirst.

Where once there were men, suddenly there were ghosts, the debris wave flashing at them, then passing on, bloody stumps standing in the wake of the improvised Claymore. The whole scene was a panoramic widescreen display in Bolan’s pressure-wave-shocked brain. His perceptions warped in time and space so that he could see the pulped cores that used to be humans pouring and melting down to the ground, any pretense at being a solid long stripped by the brutal death wave that crushed through them.

Bolan felt the back of his head, scalp split, blood flowing hotly down the neck of his black BDU blouse. He sensed a concussion, but he sat up, reloading his last remaining pistol. The other Taurus had been lost, swept away in the shock wave. He looked for signs of the enemy.

Everything was still, except for one squirming figure, trying to crawl up the side of the Abrams tank. Staggering to wobbly feet, Bolan got up, feeling weak and dizzy. He had business to attend to before he could tend to his own scratches and scrapes.

Bolan pressed some gauze against the back of his head, looking around at the spread of bodies. Anyone left standing had run like hell. They had to have been convinced that missiles were raining down on this little bazaar of death. Sure, the terrorists were escaping to fight another day, but for now they were frightened.

And being frightened was three-quarters dead. Good enough for a bleeding, limping Executioner.

Bolan recognized the guy climbing the tank. It was the Hezbollah moneyman who’d lost his feet. There was something familiar about the guy who scrambled like a drunken spider. Getting to the tank, Bolan casually reached up under the man’s suit coat and grabbed his belt.

“Come here,” he growled, yanking the terrorist off the tank. The footless killer squealed as the back of his head bounced on the flattened and cracked concrete.

“Bastard…”

“That’s what they call me,” Bolan said. He knelt on the hardguy’s chest, lifted the stainless-steel Taurus and let swing with a savage stroke. Already, his brain had cleared enough to recognize Bidifah Sinbal.

“A long death or a short death,” Bolan said. “Your choice.”

“Generous offer. I give you nothing.”

Bolan looked down at Sinbal, then realized that droplets of blood were pouring onto the guy’s face with every exhalation of his own breath. The soldier put the back of his hand to his nose and came away with a glove of sticky, slick fresh blood.

“Looks like you overdid the explosives, punk.” The terrorist chuckled, lying on his back, wheezing as he finished off his laugh.

Bolan sighed. He was too dizzy and hurt to conduct a proper interrogation on Sinbal. The Hezbollah savage wasn’t going anywhere.

The Executioner got to his feet and climbed up the side of the tank, calling back to the wounded terrorist.

“Sit. Stay.”

Inside, the mystery of the first generation M1’s origins were revealed.

Outside, flags and insignias were scoured off and replaced with desert paint that broke up the graded and scaled camouflage pattern of the metallic beast. Inside, however, the writing on the controls was in Arabic.

The Executioner knew only one modern Arab military force that used the U.S.-built armored vehicle.

Egypt.

Hezbollah was in Pakistan, selling three Egyptian tanks. Bolan crawled up through the hatch once more, wiping his nose. The bleeding had stopped. He was still hurt, hammered and beaten.

But someone was moving top of the line tanks around like they were common contraband.

That was a someone the Executioner had a vested interest in shutting down—permanently.

It was time to call the Farm.

2

The flat LCD screen popped up a still image of the Executioner’s hawkish features, giving Barbara Price something to visually focus on as the satellite phone connected them vocally.

“Did I catch you after a full night’s sleep, or are you delusional from Bear’s coffee?” Bolan asked.

“Mix and match.” Price sighed. “What’s wrong?”

“Lots. I’ve got three M1 Abrams tanks. I’m thinking they’re U.S. military aid package tanks because they have the old 105 mm cannon instead of the new 120 mm tubes,” Bolan told her.

“Abrams tanks?”

“The Hezbollah operatives I followed had them transported here for the auction.”

Price summoned recent intel-footage on her second monitor. “We had three M1s roll into a Gaza Strip settlement and kill a few hundred people.”

“A tank attack on the Gaza strip? Where?”

“Nitzana.”

Bolan paused a moment. “If I remember my map of the space between Israel and Egypt well enough, it makes sense to strike there. Nitzana is far from any other major settlements. Vast expanses of empty hills, desert, and desert farmland surrounded the settlement.”

“It took twenty minutes for the Israelis to scramble aircraft.”

“A few hundred people?” Bolan asked.

“The count is 249 dead, another three hundred missing, and over twelve hundred injured. They blew up buildings…Hell, they even blew an F-16 out of the sky. That crash killed almost fifty people by itself,” Price said.

“Three hundred missing, which means that we could see the death toll get over four hundred as a conservative estimate,” Bolan said.

“Most of those missing are from a school and a hospital that the tanks shelled,” Price told him.

“Children and the infirm.”

Price knew the tone in Bolan’s voice—grim and torn. He was getting ready to revisit hell on the kind of savages who would drag the innocent and helpless into their petty political games.

“Striker, how many tanks did you say you had?”

“Three here. With Arabic writing on the controls. I’m looking for a good way to dispose of them, but I don’t have the kind of firepower needed to take them out.”

Price turned. “Hunt, I need a way to dispose of three M1 tanks without bringing the entirety of the Pakistani military down on whoever’s blowing it. They might think it’s India.”

“A Force Recon off the USS Stennis is stationed in Tora Bora. They can chopper in hot and fast, set daisy cutters on each vehicle and be out before anyone knows what’s going on,” Hunt Wethers stated. He managed a grin. “I’ve got Captain Hofflower on speed dial.”

“Send them on in,” the Executioner said.

Price heard a wet sniff on the other end of the phone. “What’s wrong? You sound…sick.”

“Got too close to an improvised Claymore mine I made. Or rather, didn’t get far enough away from it,” Bolan answered. “The shock wave broke blood vessels in my nose and I’m bleeding all over.”

“Why can’t you get nasal drip like most people?” Price asked.

“Just get the team here quick. I’ve got a live prisoner, and he’s Hezbollah.”

“Striker, you’re going to hand over a member of Hezbollah to a Marine?” Price asked.

“This animal’s buddies killed a few hundred people. Including children. I don’t care what the Marines decide to do with him.”

With that, the phone went dead.

PUSHING HIS TONGUE between his upper and lower molars, General Nahd Idel forced his lower jaw to relax, but the clenching muscles were relentless. His personal physician had tried all manner of muscle relaxants and therapy, but that didn’t help. A mixture of stress and old rooted pain from a botched wisdom tooth removal had given him a case of lock-jaw that he couldn’t kick.

Idel jammed several sticks of gum into one cheek and looked at the aide who was finishing his report about the “terrorist raid” on Nitzana.

“They’re saying that at least a quarter of the dead were Egyptian or Palestinian,” Major Pedal Tofo concluded. “Hezbollah won’t be so darling with some of their friends because of this.”

“No concern,” Idel replied. “Why did they only attack with three tanks? Didn’t we give them a dozen?”

Tofo shook his head. “We have people who are in Lebanon. They were watching Sinbal and his men leave Beirut on a cargo freighter with six oversize boxcars. He only left three in Alexandria, and stayed with the freighter. Records list the ship en route to Gwadar, Pakistan.”

Idel bit his tongue, muscles swelling and straining. Outwardly, his face remained impassive, but inside, he was strung as tight as a bear trap. He sat up and squared off a stack of paperwork on his desk, making sure the corners were sharp on the pile. Come to think of it, the jaw clenching could have just been another symptom of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that drove him to be the perfect officer, and kicked him through the ranks of the Egyptian military.

“Sinbal took three of our fucking tanks out of the country?” Idel asked.

“We gave him the tanks. Any money he’d get selling them would be pure profit,” Tofo answered.

Idel stood and walked to the window. Sunlight burned outside, flaring off the almost white sands surrounding his base’s compound. He took a deep breath, then spit out his gum, lighting a cigar to chew on. Grinding his teeth into the fat tobacco roll made him feel better, the sponginess cushioning his aching jaw muscles.

“Do we have anyone who can do a wet operation on Sinbal when he returns to Lebanon?” Idel asked.

“Affirmative,” Tofo stated.

“Make sure Sinbal doesn’t spend an evening more in Beirut without a bullet in a major part of his anatomy.”

“A pleasure.”

“That said, how did the three tanks do?” Idel asked.

“Reports have 375 dead so far, 250 missing, and thirteen hundred injured,” Tofo reported. “The border between Egypt and Israel has been locked down, and the Gaza Strip and West Bank are under heavy military patrols at this time. Combat aircraft are on constant patrol, too.”

“Their armored divisions?”

“They’ve brought up two divisions, in the north and the south to cut off access to their coastal settlements.”

“Only two?”

“Others are in motion, and a third is passing by Nitzana and has set up temporary camp across the Nitzala River.”

Idel smirked. “They’re wondering if Cairo had anything to do with an attack on their stolen territories.”

“Or they’re simply not taking chances. Israel might be outgunned by her enemies, but she makes up for it by not fucking around.”

“Good. Good.”

“Have we been given any green light by Cairo, sir?” Tofo asked.

Idel looked over his shoulder, pulling the cigar from between his lips and stretching out his jaw. He let his ears pop before continuing. “Would it make you feel better if we had our benighted leaders’ support?”

“I’m already dedicated to the cause of getting back Egypt’s lands from the Israeli thieves. I merely worry that…”

“We will be seen as traitors and thieves if we are caught. I understand, Pedal,” Idel said, clapping his aide on the shoulder. “We won’t be tied to the events that turn the cold peace between Egypt and Israel into a hot war. But we will be there at the forefront when it is time to be heroes and take back what is rightfully ours.”

Tofo nodded. “I do not doubt you, or this plan.”

Idel smiled and took a drag on his cigar.

But if Tofo truly didn’t doubt the success of the plan, he was the only one in that room.

THE STRAPPED FOR COMBAT SH-60 Seahawks tore over the landscape, penetrating deep into Pakistani airspace. Captain Carlton Hofflower perched in the doorway of the lead chopper, eyes sweeping the horizon for an angry response coming over the horizon. Nothing, however, was turning its attention toward the quintet of helicopters this day.

The message from HQ was quick, simple and terse.

“Retrieve Colonel Stone. Bring lots of explosives. Coordinates to follow.”

“Captain. We have smoke,” Lieutenant Charles Ellis, the pilot, reported.

Hofflower’s hazel eyes focused like lasers on the spiraling rub of charcoal smearing upward into the blue over the rolling hills. He didn’t need a map to equate the billowing smoke to the location of Colonel Stone. “That’s our guy, GPS be damned.”

Ellis glanced back at Hofflower, and then returned his attention to guiding the Seahawk.

In moments, the sharklike chopper was splitting the sky over the smoldering battlefield, and Hofflower could see a conflagration. Two major blast craters, and a half dozen minor smoking pits plumed smoke skyward, while one man stood with an old-fashioned bolt-action rifle over an injured man.

“That’s Stone?” Ellis asked.

Hofflower nodded.

“Who’s the wounded?”

“I don’t know, but he doesn’t look like a friendly. Tell the other choppers to land in a diamond around this airfield,” Hofflower said.

Hofflower gave Ellis’s helmet a tap, and the SH-60 dropped to the ground, landing with a light bump. As always, the six-foot-six Marine captain “unassed” first, hands resting on the M-249 hanging from his neck and massive shoulders.

“I have a present for you,” Bolan stated in lieu of a greeting.

“I see. Middle Eastern, Lebanese by chance?” Hofflower asked.

“Yeah,” Bolan returned.

“Bidifah Sinbal. Works for Hezbollah,” Hofflower said. The Marine grinned and cracked his knuckles. “Colonel Stone, this is a wonderful gift.”

“I want to know where Sinbal got his tanks from, and if it was his people that were behind Nitzana,” Bolan said.

An interesting question, the Marine thought.

He intended to make Sinbal squeal and spill his guts.

IT TOOK TWENTY MINUTES for a medic to clean and dress all of Bolan’s injuries, but during that time, the Marine Force Recon platoon was busy wiring up the M1 Abrams tanks with enough explosive power to chop them to splinters.

Inside, even more insidious devices were being planted. The insides of the tanks would be able to survive the destruction of the hull and engine section. Nothing short of a nuclear weapon would pulverize every component of the tank in one shot, and even then, the M1s were designed during the Cold War. Their very design was meant to get the massive steel beasts through a nuclear-explosion blasted war plain and continue fighting, even as atomic artillery shells created football field-sized craters all around them.

The Marines were putting miniature Fuel Air Explosive charges inside the tanks. The mini-FAEs were designed for house clearing the easy way. First, a burst would spread a cloud of fuel through a space as large as a single floor of an apartment building. With the air saturated with explosive fuel, a second burst would spark and ignite the atmosphere. Everything within the space would be vaporized.

Bolan had seen entire mountainsides crumbled with a Fuel Air Explosive device improvised from a simple propane tank.

The mini-FAE would smash every ounce of valuable electronics and design inside the M1 to useless pulp. The last thing the world needed was a reverse-engineered version of the U.S. Army’s best tank.

The Marines were meticulous in setting the charges on the armor, though. That was the one thing that Bolan was most concerned about. Abrams armor, indeed any modern tank armor, was a secret design, and each nation had its own proprietary formula. Having that secret drop into the lap of even an ally was considered a disastrous development.

“I’m done,” the medic said. “You can stop the Zen meditation.”

Bolan managed a weak smile. “I was just thinking about the tanks.”

“How the hell did these get here?” the medic asked. “I mean, Pakistan uses old Soviet T-72s.”

“They were brought by the Hezbollah, and the Hezbollah somehow got them from Egypt,” Bolan answered. “How they got them, I intend to find out as soon as I get some intel.”

A gunshot rang out and Bolan turned his head. The sudden reflex action filled his head with sloshing, hot liquid pain, but it was dying down and his equilibrium swiftly returned to normal. It took a moment for his brain to register the sound as a .45-caliber pistol. Captain Hofflower was returning, stuffing his MEU (SOC) custom 1911 into its holster with one hand, holding a small black box with the other hand.

“I recorded everything,” he said, tossing over the digital recorder. Bolan caught it with one smooth motion.

“Make sure that someone sends me a new recorder. With all the features,” the Marine captain said.

“How much did he have? Nutshell version,” Bolan said.

“Well, he helped load the van with explosives for the 1983 Marine barracks attack.”

“That was more than two decades ago.”

“He’s forty-three. And he’s been Hezbollah since he was a teenager,” the captain explained.

“The tanks?”

“Given to him by his commander. He doesn’t know exactly where they came from.”

“Who’s his commander?”

“A creep named Faswad.”

Bolan closed his eyes and reviewed his mental files. Imal Faswad moved into the Bekaa Valley after Bolan rampaged through to take out a terrorist-backed drug cartel. He’d been behind some major counterfeiting of American hundred-dollar bills, approximately fifty million worth, before the U.S. Mint updated to the new bills. The Hezbollah headman was someone who was never quite on the top of the Executioner’s “to do” list because he was mostly attacking people who could, and did, fight back. Bolan’s previous interest in Faswad was derailed when the guy’s headquarters was blasted to atoms by an Israeli air strike and a dozen thousand-pound bombs.

It looked like it was time for the Executioner to pay Mr. Faswad a visit to find out why he was suddenly selling off tanks.

“Who did Sinbal come to sell the tanks to?” Bolan asked.

“Somewhere in the piles of grease you left littered all over the place, there was a party of Filipinos who are, er, were with Abu Sayyaf.”

Bolan’s jaw clenched for a moment. Abu Sayyaf was aligned with al Qaeda. Another case of unfinished business that the Executioner would have to get to.

“You sure I got them?” Bolan looked around. “A lot of guys just took off running.”

“Well, give me a good DNA lab, we’ll know for sure,” the Marine replied.

“All right. I’m lucky I got a single prisoner for you to interrogate,” Bolan conceded.

“Thanks for helping bring a little justice to the Corps,” Hofflower said, putting out one beefy paw.

Bolan took the hand, remembering what felt like a lifetime ago, his own incursion to avenge Marine blood. He could feel the bond with the fighting man before him.

“It’s time to unass and blow this Popsicle stand,” Hofflower called out, pulling Bolan effortlessly to his feet. “It’s good to have you aboard, Colonel.”

“Thanks,” Bolan answered. They got into the Seahawk and Lieutenant Ellis pulled the chopper into the sky, rising a half mile before stopping.

Hofflower handed over the radio detonator to the Executioner. “Your prerogative, Colonel.”

Bolan accepted the detonator, flipped up the safety cover on the firing stud and thumbed it down. Even through the rotor slap and vibrations of the SH-60’s powerful turbines, the shock wave from detonating the tanks was palpable. Concentric rings of smoke, indicating the rippling forces that devastated the armor, were still visible down below.

That was just the opening salvo to the scorched earth process being undertaken.

The four orbiting Marine Seahawks were armed with artillery rockets and Hellfire missiles. Pilots and gunners opened fire instantly on the ground where the terrorists sought to sell the Devil’s tools. Explosions formed a scouring cloud of devastation that swept from the four corners of the auction ground toward the middle, shredding and splintering anything in its path. Stomped flat as if under the feet of giants, the hodgepodge mixture of surviving jeeps, guns, helicopters and low-speed jets, as well as various missiles and other explosives, disappeared in a cacophony of devastation that Ellis yanked the SH-60 out of just in the nick of time.

Bolan could almost reach out the side door and touch the blossoming mushroom of smoke from the hell blitz.

An explosive start to a mission that promised more such devastation ahead.

3

It was time for the weekly mail drop, and J. R. Rust, posing as a journalist, stepped up to the cage, smiling.

“Your new cameras and printer are here, Mr. Russel,” Rudiah, the mail clerk, notified him. He was wrestling a box onto the counter.

Cameras and printer? Rust thought. The box looked fairly large. “I hope the editors thought to include an instruction manual this time,” he said.

Rudiah almost said something, and then smiled tightly.

Yeah, the Lebanese post office wasn’t at all interested in what James Russel was receiving in the mail from America, Rust thought sarcastically. He looked at the return address and saw it was from Egypt, but labeled from a blind intel dump that a man named Striker had set up with him. Rust had worked with Striker and a covert strike team on two dangerous operations, one in Pakistan, and one in Lebanon, racing to deal with forces ready to blow the Middle East wide open in a nuclear conflict.

Since then, Striker had tapped Rust personally, knowing that the CIA man had his ear firmly planted to the ground in regards to Middle Eastern politics and terrorism. Born eating and breathing the cultures of the Islamic nations from the Mediterranean through the Kashmir, Rust was an expert not only in Arabic dialects but mannerisms and mind-set. This ingratiated him to the movers and shakers of the nations he frequented. Either as an invisible part of the embassy staff, or, slightly more out there, as a journalist, Rust was able to blend in, become a fly on the wall, and get information to the ears that needed to hear it.

Rust thought about the need to get information to the right ears, and thought of 2001. Maybe that was why a veteran CIA man was so willing to buck the system and risk his job by leaking information to a phantom not even the Company was sure about. Striker went to the field and actually put boot to ass.

He signed for the box. The damn thing weighed a ton.

Hauling it under one arm, he left the post office. That’s when he saw a dark-featured young man out of the corner of his eye. Rust’s alarm bells went off when he knew that the young guy didn’t fit in. There was something wrong about him, but he couldn’t place what.

Things were really tight now. Unbalanced and hindered by the heavyweight box, he couldn’t rapidly reach the tiny Glock 26 he had nestled in an ankle holster. He knew how to draw quickly with the ankle rig he wore, but that was with his hands free and his ability to turn unhindered by a big, heavy box. The CIA man was of a mind to just dump the box, but that wouldn’t be good for his health if the package contained a bomb.

“Russel,” a voice called. It had a mixed Midwestern and South Florida drawl to it, and Rust had to look twice at the man who spoke using the voice.

It was the guy who set off Rust’s instincts. The features were a little too dark for Egypt, and not hooked enough to be fully Semitic, but he did look like he fit in Lebanon, even though his manner was that of a Westerner. The hair, though, was nappy and short to his head, and dark eyes studied him carefully.

“Russel, I’m here on ranch business,” the man said. His hands were occupied, filled with a rolled newspaper in his left and a bottle of water in his right.

Rust relaxed. It was kind of an unwritten code among the agents in the area that they have their hands filled when they met, to distinguish friend from foe. Empty hands meant that the person you were meeting wanted his options open to immediately grab a weapon. The plastic water bottle and newspaper, however, were indicative of a savvy mind—they could be dropped with no hassle, and guns could be grabbed as trouble arose.

Ranch business was another clue. It was a code phrase that Striker had used with him in their private dealings.

“Let me set this hunk of crap down and we can talk somewhere,” Rust answered.

The handsome man smiled, and easily slipped the bottled water and newspaper into the deep pockets of his cargo pants. Reaching out, he took the box. “I’ll carry that.”

He could see the younger man’s dark arms ripple with corded muscle. “Oh sure. Just because you’re young, strong and agile…”

The kid grinned. “Old age and treachery will win over youth and purity every time.”

“I like your attitude, kid.”

“Just want to live long enough to get to old age and treachery, Mr. Russel.”

He nodded and led the way. “Got a name?”

“Alex Johnson, sir.”

Rust paused and looked him over. “You look like a Johnson.”

“Excellent, sir. I was barely able to detect the sarcasm in your tone.”

“Come on, Alex.”

ALESSANDRO KALID SET DOWN the cardboard box with a grunt, causing the rickety old table to wobble under the sudden impact. Kalid held his breath for a moment, but the spindly legs held. In the heat, it was heavy work, and he was glad for the breeze that pushed and puffed-up the gauzy drapes to Rust’s apartment. He didn’t know how much was in it, but knowing the man he knew as Striker, the box certainly wasn’t filled with jelly beans and Easter eggs. He looked at the seal on the box and saw the telltale signs that the tape had been stripped off and replaced.

“Someone’s been looking in Striker’s stuff,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” Rust stated. “The Lebanese have been interested in the packages that come in to me.”

Kalid flipped out his Tanto knife with a deft wrist movement, slashed open the box and returned the blade with a flourish. “If that’s the case, your cover might be blown.”

“That’s on the short list of things that are certain in life,” Rust answered.

Kalid could only shrug and pull out the contents of the box. “A laptop, a printer and some digital cameras.”

“Son of a…” Rust said.

Kalid smirked. “The printer works, but it’s twice the size it should be.”

He flipped over the unit and looked at the bottom. “No, not smuggling guns.”

“So what’s that?” Rust asked, pointing at the silver square that Kalid was removing from the printer’s plastic shell.

“Consider it the ultimate in wireless modems. State of the art. I think I’m supposed to light my eyeballs on fire for knowing about this,” Kalid said. He looked through the heavy booklet in the box. “And the manual on how to use the cameras.”

Kalid flipped through the book. “You think they’d slip something into this that could give us a clue as to what’s going on?”

Rust held out his hand, and Kalid handed over the book.

“The manual’s copyright page,” Rust spoke up after a moment. “There’s a user name and password for the laptop.”

Rust powered up the laptop after plugging it in to the modem and the wall outlet.

Kalid watched Rust type the access into the computer, then looked out the window.

More than the gauze curtains were moving. Traffic had cleared off the street, as had most of the women and children. Kalid’s brain went into overdrive as he saw two blurs flying through the air. On pure reflex, Kalid drew a shaken throwing star and flipped it at one blob, knocking it back, slowing it in midair enough to determine the identity of the object. It was a cylinder, with writing on the side, smoke spewing out the top in a gout. Somewhere in the distorted adrenaline overdrive of the moment, Alex Kalid recognized the tear gas projectile. One part of his brain wondered what the second object was. Reflex, however, threw his mouth wide open, screaming loudly to Rust.

The cry of alarm saved Kalid’s brain from a battering from the concussion grenade’s explosion. The second blurring minibomb had sailed through the window and landed under Rust’s chair. The thunderclap of pressure was brain numbing, shaking Kalid’s hyper-perception back to something resembling normal.

Rust was on the floor, his chair collapsed, eyes open and dazed, the laptop spilled across his chest.

“Yeah, your cover’s blown,” Kalid quipped, lips engaging on their own while his hand reached for his knife. He wondered where his gun was, the concussion knocking away the memory that his SIG-Sauer P-226 was back at his hotel, in a hidden compartment of his luggage. He snapped out his arms to each side, corded muscles bracing him against the disorientation.

His brain stopped sloshing in his head after a few heartbeats, his vision clearing. His gaze locked on the door, which shuddered under an impact. Dust and splinters fell from the door and its frame, and Kalid realized he had only one more smash before whoever was on the other side swarmed in and took them. He glanced around. Rust looked back at him, eyes unfocused from a point-blank concussion, then lifted one leg, trying to bring it up.

Kalid noticed the pistol in the CIA agent’s ankle holster. He lunged, grabbing it off the dazed man’s leg and swinging it up. No safeties, no bells, no whistles, even punch-drunk, Kalid knew it was a Glock of some kind and he opened fire, not even waiting for the door to crash open. The door splintered again, but the second impact didn’t have the force of the first after Kalid slammed four shots through it at chest level. A rent appeared in the top panel, a jagged shard bent out by whatever battering ram was being used. He could see the men in the hall scrambling and tending to their wounded.

Kalid opened fire again, sweeping the hallway for another eight shots before the 12-shot magazine on the Glock ran dry. With the little pistol at slide lock, the door was slammed again. This time, it buckled and burst inward. Two men rushed in and the ex-blacksuit spun the Glock in his hand and hurled it at the first one through the door. Despite being a lightweight gun with a polymer frame, the twenty ounces of steel in the gun still made a big impression on the forehead of the first thug through the door. The intruder went stumbling to the floor while the guy behind him leaped, snarling and bringing up a pistol, as if to stuff the gun in the American’s face.

Kalid grabbed his wrist and drove his palm into the guy’s elbow, leveraging him and tossing him against the wall with a bone crunching thud. The pistol went flying across the floor, but Kalid wasn’t going to give up any advantage over even a dazed enemy while he might still be able to stab him in the back. Instead, he brought up his knee hard, two quick pumps into the kidneys of the captive Lebanese, then dropped back and twisted.

The terrorist went sailing out the window, catching the half-open pane on his way out, as well as the gauzy curtains. Glass, wood and fabric enveloped the falling man as he went tumbling into the street twelve feet below. Kalid pivoted on his heel as he heard the scrape of steel on steel in the doorway.

A big, bearded man had a long curved fighting knife clenched in his fist. His face was drenched with blood, but there were no visible injuries on him. Kalid assumed he had to have been behind another guy who took a high velocity 9 mm pill.

“We were going to try to take both of you in alive, but Faswad only needs one prisoner,” the knife goon sputtered.

Kalid smirked and answered him in his own language. “Quit talking and bring it, crybaby. Papa doesn’t have all day to play with children.”

Crybaby gawked at the taunting response, and paused. That gave Kalid a half step to grab his knife from where he dropped it by Rust. Then the Lebanese knife fighter charged, swinging at chest level. Kalid dropped like lightning, first to scoop up the blade, and second to snap his foot out into the shin of the blade man. The minute his fingers met the handle of the Tanto, he brought the blade around in a fast arc, only to have his wrist trapped by the half-fallen Crybaby.

Bringing his weight to both feet in the crouch, Kalid swung up his left hand and hammered it into Crybaby’s face, feeling cartilage crunch and collapse under the impact. It seemed the complaining Lebanese was made of stern stuff, as he kept up his fight, bringing his knee into Kalid’s shin to knock his balance from under him. The curved knife arced up, but Kalid braced his forearm against the knife fighter’s forearm, the impact jangling nerves in both arms. Still, the fighting knife didn’t fall from numbed fingers, and Kalid had to wrap his hand around the bigger man’s wrist.

There was no time for a wrestling match, not when the guy could roll onto him and drive that foot-long tusk of curved steel into his chest. With a surge of strength, the ex-black-suit launched his forehead into his enemy’s nose. This time, the impact stunned Crybaby, his head rolling back onto his shoulders. Kalid hurt from the hit too, but it was minor in comparison. He slapped the knife away and pulled his own wrist free, punching forward with both fists to slam into the man’s rib cage.

The big terrorist rocked backward. Kalid scrambled to his feet and out of reach. No more wrestling against someone who had a weight and leverage advantage. It was time to employ some sharpened steel in the fight.

Kalid lunged and lashed out hard, blade poking from the bottom of his fist. The blow was a little short, the tip of the Tanto only parting skin, not muscle and bone as the slash connected with the upper torso of the guy. Crybaby grunted and brought his blade down, but Kalid had moved enough that the downward swing only nicked his shoulder, instead of plunging into his clavicle. He brought back his knife and turned away, luring the Lebanese terrorist in closer.

As soon as the first boot stomp sounded, Kalid continued with his pivot, bringing up one heel hard and fast, connecting with the knife man’s groin. As Crybaby grunted, Kalid finished his total 360, slashing savagely with the Tanto across the exposed neck and shoulder of the enemy knife fighter.

The Lebanese grunted as he clutched his wounded shoulder. The knife dropped from his numbed fingers and Kalid stepped in, carving a fatal slash across his adversary’s face and throat.

Kalid stepped back, and watched the dead man hit the floor.

He looked up. The doorway was suddenly crowded with a throng of angry-faced men, their fists filled with automatic weapons. Kalid set his jaw tight, clenched his knife tighter and glared back at them.

“My life will not be sold cheap!” he shouted.

Suddenly, the gunmen in the hall began jerking, going into what seemed to be epileptic fits as puffs of gore burst into the air all around them. Automatic weapons fire chattered in the hallway. One by one, the dead gunmen tumbled to the floor, their perforated corpses stacking atop one another in a bloody heap.

Kalid felt a moment of terror as he realized how close he’d come to death, and looked to see if he could find the lost pistol on the floor when a large form filled the doorway.

Mack Bolan dumped the empty magazine from his Uzi and fed it a fresh one. Kalid saw an array of fresh bruises and cuts on his face, but he still managed to have a smile on his face at seeing a comrade in arms.

“Grab Rust. We’re leaving the laptop behind,” he told Kalid.

“The chase is on,” Kalid said under his breath.

4

Bolan recuperated from his concussion on the flight from Afghanistan to Lebanon. What with a two-hour helicopter ride, and arranging an airplane from Kandahar to Beirut burning another three hours, the Executioner had enough time to feel the throbbing in his head come back down to a manageable level. With more hours of sleep on the plane, and years of athletic endeavor tuning his body’s recuperative powers, he felt almost healthy. None of this counted the couple hours where he was X-rayed and given a tetanus booster at a field hospital. He still ached from head to toe, and his multiple stitches tugged and pinched if he moved too quickly.

Bolan supplemented the stitches on the gunshot wounds on his arm and legs with duct tape to pin everything in place. It was a cheap way to make sure the skin wouldn’t flex and pop the stitching open, and it reinforced the closing power of the nylon loops. He couldn’t do anything about the sewjob at the back of his scalp, however. He was just glad that there was no skull fracture. The original brain swelling from the concussion was also not evident on the X rays.

Good news all around, he thought sardonically.

But now J. R. Rust was among the walking wounded, though he seemed to be getting better.

“Can you hear me, J.R.?” Bolan asked as he and Kalid loaded him into the back seat of a Toyota 4Runner in an awkward balance of speed and gentleness, neither of which was completely accomplished. The Executioner still kept his Uzi by his leg, just in case, looking up and down the alley.

“How’d you know we’d be in trouble?” Kalid asked.

“I took a look at how dead this street got when the two goons at either end of the road cleared it out.”

“What goons?” Kalid asked.

“The ones who threw the grenades and caught some 9 mm bullets,” Bolan explained.

“Ah. That’s what kept you.”

“I only cleared this side of the alley. We’re going to have to run a gauntlet,” Bolan told him.

“I’ll drive, you shoot,” Kalid said.

Bolan nodded, the desire to chuckle driven away by the dull pain in his head. He admired Alex Kalid’s acceptance of life with the Executioner at his elbow. They’d only worked together for one day some months ago, but the young agent proved he had the blood of a soldier running in his veins.

Bolan slipped into the shotgun seat next to Kalid. “Drive.”

Kalid gunned the engine and swung the 4Runner onto the street. Almost instantly, a shout went out, and gunfire popped downrange. Rust gave a loud grunt and tucked himself tight into a ball in the back seat as something hammered the side of the 4Runner. Bolan spared a glance to see if Rust was all right, and confirming his party was still unharmed, whipped up the Uzi and tapped out a short burst at the gunner sending fire at the SUV as it whirled.

The gunner wasn’t hit. Bolan knew he didn’t make the connection on instinct, but the short burst did drive the terrorist to ground, sending him out of their path. Dust kicked up on the dry street as Bolan kept watch for more gunners, but the terrorists were clearing out. The soldier knew that sticking around when the Beirut police were in the area was idiotic for both sides.

In the time since the Executioner’s last visit, the country had cobbled together again. The discord and chaos in the streets was under control, a nation unified and ready to tolerate no dissent. Sure, terrorist organizations hid among the country’s nooks and crannies, but Lebanon knew that if they didn’t control violence in its territory, Israel once more would surge across the border to do some cleaning.

And Bolan knew that cleaning didn’t involve feather dusters and furniture wax.

“Keep moving. We’ll drive around for a while,” Bolan told Kalid.

“No destination, Colonel?” the ex-blacksuit asked, using Bolan’s Brandon Stone identity.

“Yeah, but I want to check for tails first,” the Executioner explained. “Looks like Hezbollah knew about J.R.’s cover identity.”

“And they only acted when there was a big signal marker that someone was coming to see him,” Kalid replied.

“Not necessarily,” Bolan countered. “You okay, J.R.?”

“I’ll live. I’m just now getting my hearing back,” Rust answered. “Which code name are we using, Striker?”

“Striker or Colonel Brandon Stone,” Bolan answered.

Rust nodded, holding his head. His vision was still unfocused, and Bolan knew that Rust was suffering from a concussion. He sympathized with the CIA man; he’d just been there. But he still needed the sharp mind that had just taken a beating. “I heard that the Hezbollah was jumpy because Sinbal never phoned home from the yard sale he went to.”

“And then they see a possible CIA plant getting forty pounds of something at the local mail drop, something super-suspicious,” Kalid groaned. “Just perfect.”

“Your cover was already smoked, J.R.,” Bolan stated, apology flavoring his tone. “I didn’t intend for either of you to get hurt.”

“Fuck that shit,” Kalid answered. “I signed on to this to break some heads.”

“Like the chicken said, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it,” Rust agreed. “That’s why they pay us the big…er…pathetic bucks.”

Bolan nodded, accepting their allegiance. A moment of hope surged in his heart with the bravery of these two men, then he settled down to check the mirrors for signs of pursuit.

“OUR MEN TRIED TO PICK up Russel, but they met with resistance,” Cabez informed his leader, Imal Faswad.

Faswad shook his head. “Resistance? I sent two dozen men after the American.”

The Hezbollah leader took a deep drag on his cigarette, and then blew smoke out of a corner of his mouth. “Two dozen men. How many came back?”

“Six,” Cabez answered. “They think they recognized one of the men involved.”

“Really?”

“He was over six feet tall, with black hair and cold blue eyes.”

Faswad paused for a moment. “Black hair and cold blue eyes?”

“Familiar to you?” Cabez asked. “That’s the description of al Askari.”

“Not only that,” Faswad answered, “it’s the description of the man who paved my way to leadership here.”

Cabez allowed himself a moment of surprise, but then relaxed. “The Soldier has rampaged several times through Lebanon, sir.”

“Perhaps this could be the time he comes for me,” Faswad stated. “Sinbal never reported in, did he?”

“No, but we have reports from our friends in Pakistan that something happened to the weapons auction. The place was utterly destroyed, and scores were mowed down like wheat before a thresher,” Cabez stated.

Faswad flicked ash off his cigarette to the floor and glowered. “I was too late in having Russel picked up for spying on us.”

He crushed out the cigarette in an ashtray, and then weighed the consequences of hurling the heavy crystal against the far wall. It would take forever to clean up, and it would only serve to make more of a mess when what he required was more order. Faswad breathed deeply and let out his tension. It was always good to think of the consequences—that’s how he methodically crawled his way up the organizational maze of Hezbollah splinter politics until he reached his position.

Cabez waited until Faswad broke out of his train of thought. “Do you think Russel knew of our deal for the dozen American tanks?”

“He spotted something moving, we have no idea what for sure, and from the destruction in Pakistan, we’re not sure if the tanks were even uncrated. Something destroyed everything, flattening any piece of materiel to component atoms,” Cabez answered.

Faswad fired up a fresh cigarette. “And al Askari is with Russel now.”

“Al Askari and another man. Dark-skinned, spoke Arabic, younger than the Americans, and athletic. They all got away in a gold-colored Toyota 4Runner.”

Faswad frowned. “Watch them. If they try to roust us, we roust them. Burn them down. We can find what we need from a dead body as easily as we can from a live one.”

Cabez nodded. “You’re right, sir.”

KALID FINALLY PULLED the 4Runner into Bolan’s safehouse, and the Executioner helped Rust up the stairs. He had regained much of his strength, but the CIA man wasn’t going to be running and jumping or shooting and looting in the near future. That was fine with the Executioner, who preferred to be the cat that walked by himself.

Bolan spared a glance back to Kalid, who was double-checking the streets for any signs of surveillance. His own icy blue eyes swept the perimeter and found little more than daily life. Still he didn’t let down his guard. Danger signals were not going off in his brain, but that didn’t mean he could relax.

“Alex, I want you to guard Rust,” Bolan told him. “I need both of your heads working on figuring out what we’re dealing with.”

“I’d be more useful on hand, translating and interrogating,” Kalid spoke up. “But I can understand. I’ll be your baby-sitter.”

“It’s not that you’re as fragile as a teacup, Alex. But you have just been through a fight, you might have a minor concussion, and you took a beating.”

“You’re not exactly the embodiment of health yourself,” Kalid retorted. “But I’ll rest up.”

Bolan gave Kalid’s hand a shake, then slipped into a battered old leather jacket and pulled on a motorcycle helmet. A slightly rusted, but otherwise workable Kawasaki was parked beside the Toyota. The Executioner had selected the battered, but serviceable, motorcycle because it was well designed for the narrow and uneven streets of Beirut and the back roads in the countryside. A large fiberglass storage trunk on the touring motorcycle also fit the soldier’s needs. It was sized perfectly for Bolan’s war bag, with its load of a rifle, grenades and spare ammo.

“You already have a target?” Kalid asked.

“Enough suspicion for a soft probe.”

Kalid gave a low whistle. “Poor bastards.”

“Just hold down the fort. There’s some Coke in the fridge, and a machine gun propped against the sofa.”

The motorcycle kicked to life. It was time to get down to business.

THE KAWASAKI RUMBLED to a halt behind a boulder and Mack Bolan turned off the engine. He still had a hike to get to the old farm equipment factory where Rust had initially spotted the Hezbollah hellions loading up the three boxcars to send to the coast. It was no secret that the factory was used by the Lebanese-based Palestinian fighters to store their rickety old T-72 tanks. Israel had visited hell upon the compound several times in the past, and Bolan could see signs of fresh reconstruction, only made possible by Lebanon suing for peace against further Israeli air force assaults.

Bolan pulled some camouflage netting across the Kawasaki and wrapped it around the vehicle, not wanting to lose his transport back to the safehouse. He paused for a moment and evaluated what he should take along, and knew that the sound-suppressed Uzi was the head weapon for this night. He wished he had more familiar hardware, but unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to get his usual war bag. Instead, he had relied on the kindness of Captain Hofflower’s armory. The Peshawar customized Taurus 92 was replaced with a brand-new Marine-issue Beretta M-9 pistol, complete with several 15- and 20-round magazines and a Gemtech suppressor. A .45-caliber Heckler and Koch SOCOM pistol was also given to the Executioner as his “heavy hitter.” Hofflower had informed Bolan that the big .45 was loaded with MagSafe rounds—capable of punching through a windshield, but they wouldn’t punch clean through a terrorist and hit a hostage if Bolan was stuck in a hostage situation. Hofflower gave the soldier a big stack of MagSafe ammo in 9 mm as well.

“If you’re going to shoot a 9 mm, you might as well shoot something that’ll tear the insides up on someone,” Hofflower admitted. “And this does the trick.”

Bolan put the SOCOM where he normally kept his Desert Eagle and the M-9 with its 20-round magazine where his 93-R usually went. He felt almost balanced—thunder and whisper together.

There was a Robinson Armament VEPR in the Kawasaki’s storage trunk. The Executioner debated overburdening himself with too much firepower when he was only moving in on a stealth assault. But he had been on too many soft probes that had gone hard, and the VEPR was made of enough polymer to make it light enough to carry as a backup to his suppressed Uzi. Besides, there was also the chance that Bolan wouldn’t be able to get back to the bike. The American-built AK and its ammo would come along.

Taking to the high brush, Bolan scurried to where he could get a good view of the factory and withdrew a pair of minibinoculars. Sweeping the compound, he could tell that there was some serious activity on hand.

Mobilization, perhaps, in the wake of discovery?

Bolan went over the layout of the place, running it against the digital photographs that Rust had taken and transmitted to the Executioner. It was Rust’s discovery of strange cargo that drew the Executioner in the first place. This was the first time Bolan was viewing the compound personally, and the fencing alone—two kinds of barbed wire and “flycatcher” barbs—told him all he needed to know. The perimeter was only the first part. Bolan could see a second, shorter fence, and this was on the other side of a dog run. Even now, a pair of Dobermans were racing along the channel between the two fences.

Bolan respected any guard animal.

Usually they were trained to a frenzy point through abuse and just enough malnutrition to cause blood lust, but not to impair the killing power of the predators.

It wasn’t the first time Bolan would face jackals who cowered behind wolves.

Darkness descended as the soldier advanced across the scrub-and-stone-covered terrain around the perimeter fence. By the time he reached the compound, the countryside was a murky dusk. The compound’s lights were slow in activating, allowing Bolan a chance to slip into their shadows before they burst into blue-white brilliance. Dropping to a crouch, he brought up the binoculars again and swept the compound. Activity was concentrated at the far end of the facility.

Bolan hoped that the constant motion and sound would draw the attention of the patrol dogs. Sweeping to his left, he realized he had no such luck as they came racing toward him. The Executioner lowered the binoculars and brought his hand to the silenced Beretta, drawing it swiftly. The sleek pistol came up to firing position in a reflexive heartbeat.

As much as the soldier hated hurting animals, the dogs would raise too much alarm. These were trained missiles of flesh, rocketing at him at nearly twenty-five miles an hour, and would slash him to ribbons the moment he tried to breach the fence. They would never allow him a moment’s peace. As it was, Bolan planted his first shot in the lower jaw of the first dog. The Doberman folded over, tumbling like a soccer ball and slamming into the fence.

The fence shattered where the dog slammed into it, and the Executioner and the remaining dog were both taken off guard, turning to see tinkling chain link come apart like delicate crystal. Both soldier and guard dog returned their gazes to each other then broke for the gap in the fence. Someone had started to make a hole to get into the base themselves.

Now, the Executioner and the animal were in a race to see who would get to the hole first. Bolan tapped off single rounds at the dog, but it was moving too quickly. The Doberman leaped and twisted, and finally, it was at the hole, hopping and doing a twist in midair. With a single push of its powerful legs, it would be through the hole and at the Executioner’s throat in mere heartbeats. Bolan dropped to the ground, elbows striking the dirt and he fired three fast rounds. The Doberman bounced through the hole, charging, but an explosion of crimson slowed the dog by a couple steps. Bolan triggered another round, this one striking the center of the sleek, black-furred mass, and the dog crumpled.

Bolan slipped through the fence and into the dog run, pausing to look at a piece of the chain link. It was as he’d suspected—someone had weakened the fence. With a quick scan of the area he saw a spray can under a shrub. He slipped back and picked it up.

Still full. He tried a test squirt at the branch of the plant it was under and watched as the wood and leaf whitened and snapped as a breeze blew past it.

Liquid nitrogen. It made sense—after years in the heat, suddenly supercooled metal would snap apart. Balancing the weight of the spray can in his palm, Bolan realized its owner had to be inside the compound somewhere. He squeezed through the hole in the fence again, taking the liquid nitrogen with him. It was a tight squeeze. The original user had to have had a smaller frame than Bolan.

The soldier moved to the other side of the dog run and sprayed a larger circle of brittle chain link for himself. He pushed it through, watching the fence part before him, grabbing the falling section and pulling it back through the hole before it could clatter on asphalt and alert his enemy. A quick crawl, and he was on the other side, crouched and scanning.

His brief conflict with the dogs, and the breaking of the fence hadn’t sent enough sound to alert anyone at the far end of the compound. Nearby, presumably empty trailers and boxcars sat on their jacks. The Executioner kept to the shadows, crawled under a trailer and brought up his binoculars again.

A cab for an eighteen-wheeler was rolling out of a warehouse and making a crawl toward the trailers. He saw it was a Mack truck. A small smile crossed his face as he figured out the way to get closer. Turning away from the truck with his name on it, as Bolan swept the compound some more, he saw a small commotion. Two men were pulling along a woman toward a loading dock.

Focusing the binoculars tighter, he managed to make out her features. Her hair was dark, either auburn or having a tint of some red keeping it from being otherwise black. She was also compact. Not tiny and fragile, but small and toughly built, yet still maintaining a decidedly feminine form. Her eyes were covered by the checkerboard pattern of a kaffiyeh, her wrists knotted together. Even with the binoculars, he couldn’t make out what language she was cursing in, but she was talking up a storm.

Bolan knew this had to have been the person who used the liquid nitrogen. She was the right size.

The Mack truck finally rolled up and made its hairpin turn to start backing into one of the trailers. Bolan knew it was now or never to try to get the woman out in one piece.

Bursting from his hiding spot, he surged forward, Beretta leading the charge this time. The driver paused, looking over and starting to cry out, but Bolan was up on the running board, gripping the door handle and shoving his suppressed Beretta through the window.

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