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Another muzzle-flash from the pursuit car—the shot went wild

The hunters didn’t give a damn about potential bystanders. Professionals. Nothing but victory or death would stop them.

Except, Bolan was determined they wouldn’t win.

Which left one option.

He had to find a killing ground that minimized the prospect of collateral damage. There, he’d make a stand and see what came of it. If he could—

Suddenly another pair of headlights glared from behind the chase car.

Reinforcements maybe? If that were true, there could be anywhere from two to five, or even six guns in the second vehicle. The odds against survival might have just doubled.

But Bolan had beaten worse odds in the past and walked away. Even if death was certain for himself, he would fight until his last round had been fired, then take it hand to hand.

The hunting party’s scarred survivors would not soon forget their meeting with the Executioner.

The Executioner^®

Survival Mission
Don Pendleton’s

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Specialist Salvatore Augustine Giunta “Unwavering courage, selflessness and decisive leadership while under extreme enemy fire.” Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, 25 October 2007

And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

—Matthew 18:5–6

Forget about millstones. This time, the cleansing fire.

—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

Chapter 16

Epilogue

Prologue

The stranger was out of his element, running on animal rage and a vestige of hope that grew fainter with each hour’s passage. He didn’t know the city but could read a map. He didn’t speak the country’s foremost language but had drilled sufficiently in German and Russian as a younger man to get along. Locals would take him for a tourist if he didn’t push his luck too far, come down on them too hard.

That was the rough part, trying to act casual when every instinct he possessed was telling him to run amok and burn the goddamned city down if that was what it took to reach his goal. How many lives was he prepared to sacrifice in the pursuit of one he still held precious?

Pick a number. Any number. Were there seven billion people on the planet yet?

The only one that mattered was beyond his grasp so far, but he was getting closer.

He could feel it, with the ache inside that marked her loss.

He didn’t know if she was still alive, or what condition he would find her in, if she was. Had she been lost beyond all doubt, there would have been no reason for the marginal display of calm he somehow managed to project. Under those circumstances, he could have let his fury off its leash and slaughtered everyone he met, until he found the ones responsible.

And introduced them to a taste of living hell on earth.

But for the moment, he was still Joe Tourist, soaking up the sights, dropping an offhand question into conversation here and there. His face was not a memorable one; the mirror in his hotel room confirmed it. If he hit no panic buttons, sounded no alarms, he should be able to get closer.

Maybe even close enough.

The first real hurdle had been finding the specific tools he needed in a foreign city, but he’d managed. Anywhere you went, worldwide, the managers of seedy bars and brothels were the secretkeepers. Taxi drivers could direct you to the action for a fee, and once you wormed your way into the pulsing heart of decadence, debased yourself enough to rule out any thought that you might be an undercover cop, the only thing that mattered was the price tag.

Anyplace on earth, a man—or woman—with sufficient cash in hand could find the means of degradation or the weapons of destruction. Name your poison. If a twisted mind was able to conceive it, currency could make the nightmare real.

So he was armed, not necessarily as well as he’d have liked, but adequately. He could kill a small battalion if his luck held, and he clung to the advantage of surprise. They shouldn’t know that he was hunting them, not yet, but in the real world nothing could be taken on blind faith.

The arms dealer, for instance, would have underworld connections. Absolutely, beyond doubt. If he was talkative, told someone of the hardware he’d furnished to a foreigner—more to the point, a westerner—the ripples might begin to spread. Nothing that would identify the hunter yet, but once suspicion had been raised, the creatures dwelling in the city’s netherworld would be alert. Watching and listening, reporting back to someone at the center of the loathsome spiderweb.

It was the spider that he wanted. Maybe more than one. But he’d be satisfied to save the gnat they’d snared, if only he could rescue her unharmed.

But if he’d come too late, as he feared—if she had been defiled, or worse—the stranger reckoned that a life or two in recompense might not be satisfactory.

He’d have to wait and see, after he checked the address he’d obtained from a young woman of the streets. She hadn’t been insulted when he told her that seventeen or eighteen years placed her beyond the pale of his desires. In her profession, he supposed that she had heard and seen it all. Of course, he had to pay the normal hourly rate and more besides, but once the deal was struck she had been happy to oblige.

Or simply bored and sending one more pervert on his way.

Whatever.

Motive didn’t matter to the stranger. All that counted was the end result.

The street was named for some war hero of a bygone century who would have been forgotten, otherwise. He didn’t rate a statue, but they’d loaned his name to seven seedy blocks that boasted tattoo parlors, pawnshops, hot-sheet hotels and diners whose special was ptomaine roulette.

He’d spotted the red door, confirmed its street number. No sign on the filthy brick wall to explain what went on inside the three-story building. But then, he supposed, if you had this address there was no explanation required.

He rang the bell, waited and kept his face deadpan as someone scrutinized him through a peephole. Thirty seconds later the door opened to reveal a bullet-headed, no-neck slab of muscle in a pin-striped suit who glowered at the new arrival from behind an often-broken nose.

“Kdo jste?” he inquired. “Co chceš?”

Tone dictates meaning, and the stranger on the stoop replied in German.

“Ich bekam diese Adresse finden sie ein Mädchen.”

The man with the bullet-shaped head considered it, then stood aside. He switched to German.

“Hereinkommen.”

Stepping past him, waiting for the door to close, the stranger timed his move, drawing his pistol, turning on his heel to swing it as a bludgeon. But the target had already moved, a big fist looping toward the gunman’s face to strike him with explosive force. He fell, half-conscious, clinging to the pistol for a moment, until more men suddenly surrounded him and wrenched it from his grasp.

The man with the bullet-shaped head leaned close enough for drops of spittle to make impact as he spoke. English this time.

“You’re one dumb bastard, eh? Who helps your little girlie now?”

1

Prague, Czech Republic

The Vltava River winds through Prague’s heart like a bloated, indolent serpent, winding under eighteen bridges, gliding past squatting warehouses and spires of classic architecture, passing stately homes and tenements. At first glance it seems lazy, placid, but its name derives from the Old German phrase wilt ahwa—and it still claims lives and property from time to time, as when it overflowed its banks in August of 2002.

Mack Bolan watched a ferry pass beneath the Palackého Bridge, checking his watch, then turned away and crossed a nearby street on foot. Sparse traffic let him take his chances without blaring horns. Orange streetlights lit the bridge and avenue beyond, while side streets made do with old-fashioned lamps on the corners and whatever light spilled from windows or small neon signs.

It was a seedy neighborhood, not criminal per se, but savvy residents of Prague knew better than to walk its streets alone by night, if that could be avoided. Muggers and pickpockets were a problem in the Czech Republic’s capital and largest city, but they didn’t worry Bolan. If his size, attitude and the expression on his face did not dissuade such people, he was carrying an ALFA semiautomatic pistol—the Defender model, used by many Czech police and military officers—chambered in .40 S&W with a twelve-round magazine and one round in the chamber. Extra magazines were slotted into Bolan’s pockets, and he also carried a collapsible baton that added twenty inches to his normal reach.

His destination was a boxing gym called Oskar’s, situated half a block west of the the Palackého Bridge. He wasn’t looking for a sparring partner, and in fact was hoping that the place might already be closed. Civilians made things awkward and potentially disastrous, a fact his very presence in the city verified.

It was a rescue mission, plain but not so simple, since it currently involved two captives in distress, presumably confined at different locations. That is, if both were still alive.

The whole trip might turn out to be a waste of time, for all its planning and the hours that he’d spent in transit. If he reached the scene too late, there’d be no happy ending. Only payback, which was one of Bolan’s specialties. Failing to save the day, he could at least do everything within his power to make sure the predators responsible did not survive to go on and commit such horrors again.

Time was not on Bolan’s side. Before he’d even taken off from the United States, one of the prisoners he sought to liberate had already spent two days in hostile custody. The other had been gone for nine days, and he didn’t want to think about what might have happened to her in that time.

He didn’t want to, but the thoughts were unavoidable.

The ideal outcome of his mission would be the extraction of two living, healthy captives from whatever hell they’d been consigned to by their kidnappers. Bolan would settle for the living part, and cherished no illusions that the pair he’d come to find were being pampered by their captors as the days and nights went by. Whatever he found waiting for him at the end of his grim journey, Bolan understood that he was not responsible for healing. Saving lives—or ending them—was all that he aspired to on this night in Prague.

Business as usual.

Employing Bolan was a last resort for any situation. He was only called when every other means had failed and time was absolutely of the essence. And planning could only reach so far in the situations he found himself dealing with. The rest came down to raw audacity and ruthlessness.

He was the cleanup man.

The Executioner.

On this night, in Prague, he still had hope, but it was frail. He harbored no illusions about what might lie in store for him at Oskar’s gym, or wherever the journey took him after that. He felt a sense of urgency, restrained by long experience, and had already steeled himself against the worst possible news.

Which wasn’t death. Not even close.

Bolan had seen the worst—or some of it, at least—and it was always with him. Humans found more ways to torment one another than a sane mind could imagine, but the minds he dealt with on a daily basis only qualified as sane within a narrow legal definition. If a predator knew right from wrong and went ahead regardless, having the capacity to curb his cruelty, he was considered “sane.”

Bolan didn’t care.

The best way he had found to treat a brain seething with malice and contempt for all humanity was with a quick pointblank lobotomy.

Patients were waiting for him in the dark heart of Prague.

And the doctor was in.

FOUR HOURS HAD ELAPSED since Bolan’s touchdown at Prague Ruzyn International Airport, traveling from Paris on Czech Airlines for the last leg of his twelve-hour trip from D.C., counting time spent in various terminals. Before he left the States, he’d put a Volvo S80 on hold with Europcar in Prague and found it waiting for him on arrival, waiting for delivery to Matthew Cooper. That name appeared on Bolan’s primary passport, Virginia driver’s license and the fully paid-up Visa Platinum card that covered any damage to the car while he was using it. He traveled light, a simple carry-on to dodge the extra baggage fees most airlines charged these days, but Bolan also needed tools to do the job at hand.

His first priority, therefore—like that of many other visitors to Prague—was shopping.

Bolan came prepared with a short list of names for suppliers gleaned from Stony Man Farm. He never knew exactly who compiled the lists, nor did he care, as long as there was inventory standing by when Bolan needed it. The list, three names in all, came with specific passwords that should open doors for Bolan as required.

His first stop was a bust, the shop in question vacant, with a placard in the window that directed him to Zorka Geislerová Ltd., presumably some kind of rental agent. Moving on, he found the second vendor just about to lock up for the night, but Bolan’s coded phrase—ryba je ervená, translated as “the fish is red” for reasons that he didn’t bother pondering—bought him the time required to make his purchases.

He went for one-stop shopping, stocking up on everything he thought that he might need to do the job in Prague. The ALFA pistol was an easy choice, dependable and widely circulated in the Czech Republic, guaranteeing that its ammunition would be readily available. Next up, he chose a Vz. 58V assault rifle chambered in 7.62×39 mm, a folding-stock version of the country’s standard-issue infantry weapon. It resembled the venerable AK-47, but internally it operated on a short-stroke gas piston the Czechs had designed for themselves, providing a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute and a maximum effective range exceeding four hundred yards, depending on the sights available.

In practice, though, the Vz. 58V was a close-range weapon. Thinking that he might have to reach out and touch someone at longer ranges, Bolan chose a Dragunov SVD-S sniper’s rifle with a folding stock and standard PSO-1 telescopic sight. The piece was chambered in 7.62×54 R—the R standing for Russian—and in Bolan’s expert hands it could bag targets out to fourteen hundred yards.

For heavy hitting when it counted, Bolan also bought a dozen URG-86 “universal” grenades, another Czech model combining both timed- and impact-fuse functions. Both were activated two seconds after release of the grenade’s safety lever. From that point onward, any impact would produce a detonation—or the lethal egg would go off on its own in 4.6 seconds. Each URG contained forty-two grams of high explosive, with a pre-fragmented casing to ensure distribution of death on the fly.

The rest came down to odds and ends. Spare magazines and extra ammunition, a suppressor for the ALFA’s threaded muzzle and a black steel reproduction of the famous Mark I trench knife widely issued in the First World War. Bolan paid for the mobile arsenal and duffel bags to hold the varied items using cash donated by a pimp in Baltimore who had no further use for money, velvet suits or the vintage purple Caddy Coupe de Ville he’d driven until very recently.

Under the circumstances, Bolan thought his contribution was appropriate.

And he would put it to good use.

BOXING HAD BEEN ASSOCIATED with the underworld for generations in America, and Bolan guessed it must have been the same in Europe. Violent men engaged in blood sport, managed—if not owned outright—by men whose penchant for mayhem made anything done in the ring seem G-rated and tame. Farther east, it was the same for wrestlers in Bulgaria, as Bolan understood it—and, in fact, the term wrestler had come to denote mobster. Then again, so had businessman, proving that no field of human endeavor was safe.

At one time or another, Bolan had been called upon to cleanse them all.

Approaching Oskar’s gym, he saw a light burning upstairs, third floor, behind a pane of frosted glass. No view inside from where he stood. He found the metal staircase bolted to the back wall, accessed from an alley lined with trash cans, strewn with rubbish that had never made it to a bin.

Bolan had a choice. He could go in through the back door, which he found locked, or climb the fire escape and pick a window, maybe hope for entry from the roof as an alternative. He’d never seen an urban tenement that didn’t have some kind of rooftop access from inside. The question was: What kind of access, and how well secured would it turn out to be?

The back door Bolan faced was steel and double-locked, a dead bolt and a keyhole in the doorknob. He could likely pick the latter with no problem, but the dead bolt would take longer, if his picks could open it at all. If there were other locks or bolts inside that Bolan couldn’t see, it would be wasted time and effort, leaving him exposed and perhaps attracting someone from the inside who’d object to uninvited visitors.

That left the fire escape.

He jumped to grab its lowest section, seven feet above ground level, pulled it down and grimaced at the squeal of rusty metal. Bolan waited one full minute for the racket to evoke a curious reaction, then began to climb when no one showed. It didn’t mean the noise had gone unnoticed, but at least security for Oskar’s gym did not include a swift-response team for the alley.

On the second floor—which Europeans call the first, distinguished from the ground floor—Bolan found the windows painted over on the inside. Also locked, which made him wish he’d brought a glass cutter along. Too late to worry over that, and he moved on to find the same precautions against spying on the next two floors. He listened at the topmost windows, on the floor where he had seen light from the building’s street side, but heard nothing to betray human inhabitants.

So, they were quiet at the moment. Or they’d moved the hostage, possibly disposed of him by this time. There was a slim chance, Bolan calculated, that the address he’d been given had been wrong from the beginning, though he doubted it. The only thing to do was to proceed and find a way inside. See who—if anyone—was home and what they had to tell him if he asked persuasively.

A Bolan specialty.

The roof was flat, with two old-fashioned television aerials protruding from the northeast and the southwest corners. Roughly in the middle stood a boxy structure resembling an outhouse, which he knew would grant him access to a flight of stairs descending to the tenement’s top floor. That door was locked as well, of course, but Bolan jimmied it with his knife blade and seconds later breathed the pent-up atmosphere of Oskar’s gym.

It smelled like sweat, leather and canvas, mildew and some kind of astringent.

Maybe just a whiff of blood.

And then, a sound. It was a man’s voice, distant in relation to the place where Bolan stood, growling what could have been a question. Seconds later, in the place of a response, there came a gasping cry of pain.

Drawing his pistol, Bolan started down the stairs.

EMIL REISZ WAS TIRED. His fists ached, even though he’d worn a pair of lightweight boxing gloves while hammering the prisoner. His punches had been interspersed with questions that—so far—had gone unanswered but for curses. It was time to pass the gloves, he thought. Let Alois or Ladislav try their hands with the sphinx who would say nothing.

Or, perhaps they ought to try some other tools.

There’d be a mess to clean up afterward, but Oskar’s gym had seen its share of blood over the years. A bit more wouldn’t change the ambience significantly. Truth be told, it might help some of Oskar’s fighters find their courage for a change.

In fact, they didn’t need much information from the prisoner. Reisz knew his name and where he’d come from, not to mention why he’d come. No secret there. But orders had come down to find out whether anyone had helped the fool in transit, fed him any inside details of their operation to support his hopeless quest. If there was someone else behind him, sponsoring the effort, measures would be taken to eliminate that threat.

But only if they could obtain the names.

And so far, nothing.

He was fluent in profanity, this one. During the ordeal of interrogation he had cursed them up and down in English, German, Russian, not forgetting to include their mothers, grandmothers and all the smallest branches on their family trees. It was inspiring to a point, his tolerance for pain, the grim defiance even when he must have known he was as good as dead.

But then, beyond that point, it just became a tiresome exercise. Reisz thought he might as well be pounding steak for dinner. That way, at the very least, his efforts would produce a meal instead of aching knuckles.

Time for pliers, possibly. Or a truck battery with alligator clips.

Reisz checked his watch after he had removed the boxing gloves. Another fifteen minutes until change of shift, but their replacements could arrive any second. Let them pick up where he’d failed, and if some criticism fell upon him, then so be it. Three days, and no one else had managed to wring answers from the stubborn pia they had duct-taped to a straight-backed wooden chair between the third floor’s pair of fighting rings.

If Reisz was criticized, there would be plenty of blame to go around.

“Enough for me,” he told his two companions standing by. “Somebody want to have another go at him before we leave?”

“Forget it,” Alois Perina said. “Let Jií and his men finish the job.”

“And mop up when they’re done,” Ladislav Seldon said.

“Suits me,” Reisz answered as he tossed the bloodied gloves aside. “I think he’s nearly finished, anyway.”

“If there was someone else behind him, he’d have said by now,” Perina opined.

“Probably,” Reisz said, still not convinced. “I doubt we’ll see this one again, regardless.”

“And good riddance,” Seldon said.

“All right, who wants a drink?” Reisz asked.

“What are we celebrating?” Perina asked.

“Who needs an excuse?” Seldon chimed in. “Make mine a double.”

Reisz was moving toward the liquor cupboard, something that had always struck him as incongruous for a gymnasium, when he was suddenly distracted by a shadow in the doorway to his left. Jií arriving early for a change, he thought, instead of twenty minutes late as usual. But when he turned to face the door, Reisz did not recognize the man who occupied the space.

He was tall and well-proportioned, dressed in dark clothes, with a solemn face that Reisz was sure he’d never seen before. Vaguely Italian in its aspect, but that could mean anything or nothing. More important was the pistol in his hand.

“What’s wrong with you, Emil?” Perina asked, then tracked his gaze to spot the stranger watching them. Reisz didn’t have to issue any orders. All three reached for guns at once, Reisz hoping he could draw his own before the grim-faced prowler fired.

BOLAN HAD NOT ATTACHED the ALFA’s silencer before he left his hired car for the trek to Oskar’s gym. It didn’t matter at this late hour, on the top floor of a gym surrounded by commercial buildings that had shut down for the night.

He shot the seeming leader of the three men first, drilling his chest an inch or so off-center from a range of twenty feet. The guy went down without a whimper, slack and boneless when he hit the concrete floor. It seemed to take his backup by surprise, but neither faltered in attempts to pull their weapons.

Bolan ducked and tagged the shooter on his right, who seemed to be the faster of the two remaining on their feet. Not quite a perfect shot, but Bolan saw him lurch and stagger from the impact, then lose his footing, tumbling. If he managed to recover, it would cost him precious time, and Bolan used that breather to take care of number three.

The last man had his weapon drawn, some kind of automatic with a shiny stainless frame and blue-steel slide, maybe a Czech CZ 75. The piece was moving into target acquisition when the third round out of Bolan’s ALFA struck its owner just below his left eye socket, snapping back his head and ruining his aim forever. Even then, the dead man got a shot off as he toppled over backward, setting free a rain of plaster dust from overhead.

Bolan rose from his crouch, surveyed the fallen and discovered that the second man he’d shot was still alive. Crossing the room to reach him, Bolan kicked his gun away and made a quick assessment of his wound. It would be fatal without treatment, but he couldn’t pin it to a deadline. Rather than take chances, Bolan put another .40 S&W round between the shooter’s eyes and finished it.

That done, he moved to stand before the bloody figure of a man dressed in only a pair of boxer shorts, secured to a wooden chair by strips of silver duct tape wrapped around his torso, wrists and ankles. He was conscious, barely, using some reserve of energy to hold his head up, watching Bolan through the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. Mouth-breathing since his nose was flattened from repeated blows.

Bolan knelt on concrete, outside the ring of blood spatters, and peered into the mottled face, which at present was barely recognizable from photographs he’d seen before he left the States. Playing it safe, he leaned in closer and addressed the human punching bag.

“Andrew Murton?”

The head bobbed once, then sank onto the captive’s chest. Bolan worked quickly with his knife, slitting the duct tape, peeling it away. There was no way to spare the prisoner that ripping pain, but Murton barely seemed to feel it.

“Clothes?” Bolan asked.

Murton nodded vaguely to his left and answered, “Ober dere.”

Bolan recovered shirt, slacks, socks and loafers from a corner of the gym and brought them back to Murton, helped him dress himself, acutely conscious of the fact that they were wasting precious time. Whether his gunshots had been noted in the seedy neighborhood or not, there was a chance that reinforcements might arrive at any moment. If that happened…

Murton wobbled on his feet as Bolan held him upright, then took baby steps in the direction of the exit. “Godda go,” he said. “Somebud comin’.”

Bolan didn’t question that, assuming there’d been some form of communication with his captors during Murton’s ordeal, or that Murton had a rough idea of when new torturers arrived to spell the old. Whatever, it was time for them to hit the street.

The prisoner would need a medic, then they’d need to talk about the other prisoner whom Bolan had been sent to rescue, if that still was possible. In either case, his job was half-done, more or less.

If they could only make it back to Bolan’s car alive.

He helped Murton limp down three flights of stairs to the ground floor, led him to the main street exit and unlocked it from inside. The cool night air seemed to refresh Murton a little, helped him to pick up his lagging pace. They’d covered half a block when headlights washed across them, from behind. Doors slammed, and Murton turned back toward the sound.

“Shid!” he exclaimed. “Run now!”

Bolan glanced back in time to see four new arrivals on the sidewalk, staring after them and jabbering together, one of them already reaching underneath his jacket for a weapon.

Murton had it right.

Run now!