Collision Course

“Give me the code,” the Executioner said.

“Give me my final release. It is the only thing I ask.”

“What is the code?”

“Give me your word. What is on that flash drive is time sensitive. Open it in time and you’ll have an intelligence coup that could save lives, perhaps as many lives as I’ve destroyed in my hubris. Take too long and the window closes.”

“How do you know I’ll keep my word once you give me the code?” Bolan countered.

“Faith is all I have left. Give me your word and I’ll give you the code.”

Bolan looked at the former analyst. The man looked back at him. Tears made his eyes look weak and shiny in the unforgiving brightness of the lamp. His head shook with his suppressed emotion.

“Please,” the man whispered.

The Executioner looked at the traitor. He nodded once.

Collision Course

The Executioner™

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Nathan Meyer for his contribution to this work.

I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

—Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900

The good must have claws—for the battle of good against evil is always fought tooth and nail.

—Mack Bolan

THE MACK BOLAN LEGEND

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

1

Mack Bolan had parked in the shadows under the New Jersey freeway overpass. The low-slung black Honda Prelude had heavily tinted windows and boasted a nitrous-augmented engine. Inside the vehicle the Executioner waited, a cell phone and a silenced Beretta 93-R machine pistol on the seat beside him.

The parking lot was hidden from the major urban arterial by an abandoned factory, its windows broken and graffiti covering its walls in a dozen hues of paint. A sour wind, smelling strongly of the ocean, pushed garbage around the vacant lot.

A scrawny one-eyed dog emerged from the mouth of a secondary alley and trotted across the broken asphalt. It nosed around a refuse pile, then lifted its leg against an overturned garbage can.

Bolan shifted inside the car and the dog’s head came up, the animal wary and feral. It growled low in its throat, then lazily trotted back toward the safety of the alley it had emerged from.

Ten minutes later a silver TrailBlazer with government plates rolled out of the same alley through the chain-link fence and came to a stop beside the Prelude, nose pointed in the opposite direction.

The driver’s window on each car powered down smoothly, and Bolan nodded to the man his old friend Hal Brognola had sent to meet him. The guy was big, with a shaved head and a bristling goatee. Despite the leathers he was wearing, something about the cool appraisal the man gave Bolan screamed “Cop.”

“I’m Danson,” he said in a gravelly voice. “A friend of mine told me to come see you. Said helping you would clean the slate between us. Since I owe the son of a bitch from way back, I came and brought what he asked.”

“What do you have?” Bolan prompted.

Danson lifted a manila envelope from the seat beside him. As he handed it through the open window, Bolan could see the word Hate had been tattooed across the scarred knuckles of the man’s big fist.

The envelope wasn’t very heavy, and Bolan quickly opened the flap to check its contents.

“Robert Scone. Goes by the street name Sideways. Biker thug. Did a stretch in Attica a couple years ago for aggravated assault on his old lady, a dancer named Shayla. Did a pretty good number on her and got three years,” Danson stated.

Bolan grunted and gently shook the contents of the envelope out into his lap. There was a stack of photocopied sheets held together by a paper clip, a police rap sheet from the City of Newark and a blowup of an official mug shot. There was also a pint plastic bowl with a sealed lid. When Bolan held it up he saw the pink of ground hamburger and two horse pills filled with white powder. He looked at Danson.

“Read on,” Danson said. “You’ll figure it out. Anyway, Sideways was connected to the Outlaws motorcycle gang as a prospect member when he went into Attica. Inside he made his bones against the Black Gangsta Disciples. Typical swastika-wearing bullshit.”

Bolan placed the plastic container beside his Beretta and held up the mug shot picture. He let his gaze roam across the photograph, memorizing every detail. His eyes flicked to the information typed beneath the snapshot. Sideways was a big man, six-five and 260 pounds at the time of incarceration. His priors included a DUI, simple assault, several counts of possession of a controlled substance and domestic violence.

“After he made his bones,” Danson continued, “he got serious about his career as a criminal. When he got out, he freelanced as muscle for a couple of the Jersey syndicates, arson for hire, collections, extortion, that sort of thing.”

Bolan nodded and slid the picture to the bottom of the pile of paperwork he held. He scanned down the page until he found the annotation for Scone’s current address. He memorized it.

“The organized-crime squad put some of their confidential informants in his path and started hearing that Sideways was making a rep for himself as a real gunslinger, hijacking freight trucks and teamsters coming out of the Newark airport.”

“They nab him?” Bolan asked.

“Yes and no. A cigarette truck on its way into the city gets nabbed. The Newark police finger our man Sideways and do a takedown on the address I just gave you there.”

“He was holding?”

“No. No cigarettes, nothing to connect him to the heist. Still, it looks like they got him on a parole violation because the team found some crystal meth and a handgun in the house.”

At the mention of handgun Bolan looked up. He knew where Danson was going now and realized why Brognola had organized the meet with the undercover cop.

“So he’s cooling his heels in lockup?”

“No. His girlfriend, Shayla, took the rap. Copped to it, said both were hers.”

“Shayla? The girl he beat up?”

“Same one. A regular Romeo and Juliet, this pair. Only Shayla has a prior herself. A pandering charge that went to probation she got while the love of her life, Sideways, was upstate in prison.”

“So she’s in jail now?”

“Exactly, Sideways is drinking beer and screwing her little sister as we speak at the address that’s in his file.”

“And the handgun Newark copped on the raid?” Bolan asked. The question was rhetorical.

“An HS 2000 Croatian pistol,” Danson confirmed.

Bolan nodded curtly. His finger found the button on the armrest of his car door and he began to power up the window.

“Looks like I need to pay our friend Sideways a little visit,” he said.

“You tell Hal we’re square now.”

Bolan nodded before the window went up and then pushed the accelerator down on his car. Within a minute he had connected to the arterial and was gunning it across the overpass above his rendezvous site.

Jersey Shore

BOLAN LEFT THE CAR behind and merged with the night.

Sideways had made it easy for him. Or rather Shayla had. The house was surprisingly isolated. She’d taken her money from dancing and put it into a rundown, one-story Cape Cod overlooking the shore. It had been a fixer-upper with potential when she’d made the down payment on the house, but nothing had been improved and Sideways obviously wasn’t the handyman type. Now the little white house merely looked shabby, with a weed-choked lawn and three Harley panheads parked under the lean-to that served as a garage.

Bolan moved up from the trees along the road, his movement masked by the droning of the cicadas and the sound of night surf battering the gray sand forty feet behind the old house.

Low lights were on in the house behind drawn shades, and the hard riffs of Metallica bled out through the closed windows and doors. The volume was surprisingly subdued given the biker stereotype.

Bolan, dressed in a blacksuit, crouched in the tall weeds at the edge of the yard. A massive pit bull was curled up on the front steps. It made soft snuffling noises as it slept. From where Bolan knelt the animal looked upward of eighty pounds of solid muscle. The soldier carefully unbuttoned the flap of the cargo pocket on his right pants leg and pulled out the plastic container Danson had given him and opened it.

Bolan took the two horse pills that had come with the meat and pried them apart, one after the other, and gently sprinkled their contents into the hamburger. Once he had spilled the tranquilizer powder into the meat he rolled it into a ball and held it loosely in his right hand.

He checked the wind coming in off the ocean, felt it push into his face. Satisfied, Bolan rose out of the weeds like a liquid shadow and lobbed the meatball in an arc over the thirty yards toward the front door of the one-story house.

The hamburger hit the walkway in front of the stairs with a muted little splat, and Bolan instantly folded himself back down into the weeds. The pit bull got to its feet in the blink of an eye, and Bolan could hear its deep-throated growl clearly. It sounded like the idling engines of one of the Harleys parked in the lean-to behind it.

The guard dog descended the wooden stair on stiffened legs, back hair bristling and teeth bared. Bolan remained motionless, draped in the night.

The dog suddenly stopped growling. Bolan saw the beast’s snout suddenly shift as it caught the scent of the meat. Again the dog moved almost too fast to see, lunging forward and snapping up the ball of raw hamburger in a single chomp.

The dog worked the food around in its mouth, then swallowed it. With a last, suspicious glare into the night, it turned its nose and returned to the porch. It curled up again and went to sleep.

Bolan counted off the minutes on his wristwatch. He watched the dog’s breathing first slow, then lengthen and deepen until he was sure the animal was securely drugged. Confident, Bolan rose and ghosted across the lawn toward the back of the house. The silenced Beretta was out from its shoulder holster and ready in his hands as he came up alongside the building.

He crept forward and reached a window, its blind not fully drawn. He stopped at the edge and slowly bent at the knees and lowered his body until he could peek under the shade and into the house through the dirty window.

Empty beer bottles were lined up on the end table four deep. Just beyond them he saw flickering images on a TV screen. A bed was positioned in front of the TV and Bolan recognized the woman on it from the file Danson had given him as Sheila, Shayla’s younger sister and Sideways’s current girlfriend. She was so skinny Bolan thought the pit bull might have outweighed her.

She opened her mouth and released the rubber tubing held between her teeth. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she pulled the empty hypodermic from her arm.

Grim-faced, Bolan turned away and continued toward the rear of the house. He cut through the lean-to, past the panheads and came around the corner where the smell of the sea was even stronger. He eased up to the screened-in back porch and took stock of the situation. Two men sat at a kitchen table drinking beer and shaking their heads in time to the music coming out of a boom box CD player on the counter next to a sink piled high with dirty dishes.

Bolan scrutinized the men through the open screen door. He recognized Sideways immediately. The man’s gorilla arms hung from a cut-up flannel shirt and swirled with prison tats. A spiderweb had been tattooed on his elbow. The other guy was wearing an oil-stained sleeveless red T-shirt with an Aerosmith decal on the front. His long hair was held back in a ponytail. He was small only when compared to the massive Sideways.

A piece of glass, a double-edged razor blade and a generous mound of white powder were sitting on the table between the men. There was also a pistol. Bolan narrowed his eyes and took in the details of the handgun. It was a Croatian HS 2000.

The shorter man said something and Sideways snorted with laughter. He turned his head and called something out over his shoulder, obviously meant for the woman Bolan had seen dosing herself in the bedroom. When he got no answer, the frustrated biker stood abruptly, obviously pissed off, and stalked out through the kitchen doorway toward the front of the house. The second biker laughed to himself, then polished off his beer. He set down the empty and crossed the kitchen toward the refrigerator. As he bent to reach in and snatch up a full bottle of beer, he heard the screen door slam behind him. He straightened, a puzzled expression on his face as he turned.

Bolan stood before him.

“Who the fu—?” the man began.

Bolan slammed the butt of the stolen HS 2000 downward, and the end of the magazine cracked the biker across the nose. The big man crumpled at the knees and went down. A gash opened up across the bridge of his nose and spilled blood across his face.

Stunned, the biker rolled his eyes up and looked at the nightmare figure looming over him. Bolan slapped the muzzle of the pistol across the man’s jaw, snapping his head to the side. With his face turned up like an offering, Bolan quickly snapped the Croatian handgun back then drove it forward, slamming the butt into the man’s temple and putting his lights out.

Without uttering a word, the unconscious biker bounced off the fridge door and fell face-first onto the dirty kitchen floor. Bolan produced a pair of hinge-style handcuffs from his back pocket and quickly secured the man’s hands behind his broad back. He could hear heavy footfalls approaching the kitchen from the front of the house, so he quickly moved beside the doorjamb.

Sideways stopped cold, incredulous shock stamped on his face, when he almost tripped over the unconscious and handcuffed body of his buddy lying on the floor.

Bolan stepped out and drove the muzzle of the HS 2000 Croatian pistol into the big man’s solar plexus. Sideways grunted and folded like a cheap card table. As he went down, Bolan’s knee came up and clipped him hard on the point of his chin.

Stunned by the second blow, Sideways flopped over on his back, hitting the dirty linoleum hard as he went down. In an instant Bolan was on him, shoving the gun into his face and pinning him to the floor with his other hand wrapped around the man’s neck. Sideways’s eyelids fluttered as he fought to regain his composure after the brutal ambush.

The Executioner’s voice was like a cold wind through a high mountain pass as he spoke.

“I’m going to ask you some questions about where you got this pistol,” Bolan said. “And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”

2

The squalid little Boston bar sat quiet and dark, caught between rundown residential neighborhoods on one side and the sprawling industrial wasteland surrounding a factory park on the other side.

The business was the kind of place that accepted food stamps and cashed welfare checks. On the first and fifteenth of every month it was a pretty lively place. It was early in the morning now, and the last of the homeless had been chased from the alleyway behind the one-story building. The tired old neon beer signs in the grimy front windows were turned off.

The only lights inside the tavern emanated from the crack beneath the door to the combination office and storage room in the back, just across from the entrance to the walk-in cooler. Muffled voices and sounds seeped out through the cheap wood along with the bar of pale yellow light.

Inside the room, against the far wall, crates of liquor devoid of tax stamps and cases of hijacked beer were stacked toward where Frankie Bonanno kept his desk, which was piled high with invoices, shipping recipes and defunct tax forms. A cheap accountant’s calculator sat on the desktop next to an overflowing ashtray where a cigar smoldered.

Next to the ashtray was a lady’s compact mirror with coke residue smeared across the glass and a sticky razor blade. Beside the mirror was a HS 2000 Compact Croatian handgun.

Just like Robert Scone, Frankie Bonanno was a big man. His forearms and shoulders were huge and hard from his time working the docks and cracking skulls. He was equally comfortable behind the controls of a forklift or swinging a sawed-off Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The knuckles on his hands had been broken so many times they were huge and misshapen.

His thin, greasy hair was swept back and plastered into place with the liberal use of gel in a vain attempt to cover an emerging bald spot the size of a tea saucer. His ruddy, acne-scarred complexion matched his alcoholic’s broken-veined nose. His pig eyes were scrunched tightly in pleasure as the skinny blond woman’s head bobbed up and down in his lap.

Suddenly the door to the office swung open in a swift arc and a living shadow rushed into the room. There was a whirl of dark fabric as a black overcoat came open and the masked specter’s arms snaked out. The gloved hands were filled with deadly technology.

One hand swept downward and leveled a sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R on the huddled form of the cowering blonde. The left hand swung out from the intruder’s coat and tracked straight onto the fat jowls and flabby chest of Frankie Bonanno.

Behind his mask Mack Bolan smiled.

There was a small mechanical click as Bolan’s finger depressed the trigger on the stun gun and twin electrode darts fired out and hammered into Frankie Bonanno. There was a crackle as 2,000,000 volts sizzled into the big mobster. Immediately the sickly sweet stench of charred flesh filled the cramped little room.

Bonanno’s shriek of pain morphed into a choking gurgle as he began to spasm and jerk in his seat, pants still down around his thick, hairy ankles. Blue bolts of electricity arced from the fillings in his teeth in an uncanny effect that produced a mouthful of fire.

Bolan hit the juice again and pushed another charge into the mobster.

The fat man looked up and saliva dribbled from his gaping mouth. Then there was a pause, two heartbeats long, as Bonanno slumped helpless in his chair.

Bolan turned his balaclava-covered face toward the cowering woman. “Get out,” he ordered.

The woman looked up at the Executioner in stunned disbelief. Mob hitters were not known for compassion, and she clearly suspected some trick.

“I said get out!” Bolan snapped.

This time she did not hesitate. The woman scrambled to her feet and scurried to the door.

From the chair Frankie Bonanno lifted his head, still confused by the events unfolding around him.

“Who are—?” he began.

“Shut up,” Bolan snapped. He pressed the cold muzzle of his Beretta against the oiled expanse of Bonanno’s forehead. “If you so much as twitch I’ll splatter your brains across the wall.”

Frankie Bonanno froze. The mobster was deeply afraid. When the masked gunman had burst through the door, his first thought had been the Feds. But one man did not make up a SWAT team, federal or otherwise. A lone man meant a freelancer, and if that was true then Frankie wondered why he was still alive.

Bonanno watched as the figure in black pulled a pistol from behind his back. The handgun was identical to the weapon already sitting on the desk, a factory-new Croatian HS 2000 pistol. The man dropped it with a clatter that shattered the overflowing ashtray and spilled cigarette butts across the desk and onto the floor.

The man dropped something smaller onto the desk between the two HS 2000 pistols. It was the size of a quarter and when Bonanno saw it lying there, an involuntary groan escaped him. His eyes showed sullen fear as they moved from the microprocessor chip on the desk back up to the intruder looming above him.

“Three months.” Bolan said, voice harsh. “Three months ago a six-man team took down the supply dock of Las-Tech in Jersey. They got away with a shipment of chips just like that one. Chips that can run the supercomputers needed to control the centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, say in Iran. Microprocessors sophisticated enough to turn scud missiles into guided munitions.”

“I—I—” Bonanno’s mouth worked uselessly as he tried to force his brain to come up with some lie that might save his life.

“Then suddenly a capo in Palermo has those same microchips on the open market and they go to an arms dealer in Bosnia, then multiple loads of Croatian pistols start flowing back through Palermo out of Sarajevo and into Jersey. And look, you happen to have one.”

“Sarajevo is in Bosnia, not Croatia,” Bonanno muttered.

Bolan stepped forward and cracked the butt of his Beretta across the mobster’s face. His nose exploded and sprayed blood. His hand flew out and struck the open bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey sitting on the desk and knocked it over. Amber fluid gurgled out of the bottle and began to spread across the desk.

“You think I need geography lessons from you?” Bolan asked, his voice flat. “Next time you get funny I put a bullet in your kneecap.”

“I don’t know anything—”

Frankie Bonanno’s denial was cut short by the cough of the silenced Beretta in Bolan’s hand. The slug slammed into the armrest of the mobster’s chair, shattering wood with a sharp crack and driving splinters into the man’s beefy arm.

Bonanno howled in agony.

Bolan stepped in close and leveled his pistol against Bonanno’s broken, mashed nose.

“The name. Who facilitated the transfer through the Palermo capo and into Sarajevo?” Bolan’s voice was soft.

Bonanno rolled his eyes toward the shiny, factory-new HS 2000 sitting on the desk just a few feet away, he knew it would do him no good. He inhaled breath through his pain and began to talk.