Deep Recon

The only way to avoid a collision was to stop smashing against the guardrail

Swerving left long enough to disentangle the two vehicles, Bolan put his right foot on the brake, causing the Mustang to decelerate sharply.

The assassin’s car continued to scrape against the guardrail for several seconds before the assassin also swerved left. But unlike the Executioner’s maneuver, the assassin went too far and spun around counterclockwise. Tires squealed as the car went into an uncontrolled spin.

The truck didn’t slow down.

Bolan slammed his foot on the brake, bringing his car to a screeching halt. The truck did likewise, but had considerably more momentum on its side, and so did not stop immediately.

Bolan watched as the truck smashed into the other car.

I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I only love that which they defend.

—J.R.R. Tolkien

(1892–1973)

The Two Towers

I will protect the people of this nation from all traitors, whether by gun, sword, arrow—or my bare hands.

—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 autumn winds blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and kicked up outside the midnight black car. It was windy enough that the twenty-five-year-old car creaked and squeaked and even shook at times.

It didn’t matter to Agent John McAvoy. He loved both the autumn season and his old retired police car, a 1982 Crown Victoria. There were better cars, but McAvoy loved things with problems and faults. He preferred to work with things and figure out what went wrong, then make them right. Often, he joked that that was why he married his ex-wife, only to learn that things could be fixed—people, not so much.

Back when he was a detective for the Chicago Police Department, McAvoy was that rarest of detectives who actually liked a good mystery, a stone-cold whodunit. McAvoy relished the cases his fellow detectives loathed. They all wanted the slam dunks, the easy arrests, where there was a reliable witness and plenty of physical evidence, plus minimum paperwork.

But not McAvoy. He wanted to solve things. It gave him a greater sense of accomplishment, the feeling of a job well done. That trait made him well-suited to the more complicated work done by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He’d moved over to BATF after only ten years with CPD, having grown weary of Chicago’s weather and politics, and having needed a change after his divorce. Not that the politics were any better in Florida—in fact, they were worse, as hard to believe as that was—but at least there was more sun and no winter.

Best of all, no ex-wife and a lot more pretty women. It definitely had been the right move.

It had been months on this particular undercover case. Last May, he’d become Donald Kincaid, a Key West–based gunrunner. It was miserable, cozying up to the scum of the Earth, having to pretend to be their pals. However, the months of work had gained him valuable information.

He hoped it would all be worth it.

McAvoy sat at his steering wheel, a burning cigarette dangling from between his lips, reading the file on a former Marine lieutenant turned gunrunner named Kevin Lee. The BATF agent had read it all before, of course—Lee was one of the major players in South Florida—but McAvoy couldn’t get over Lee’s impeccable service record with the Corps, ending with a tour in Afghanistan. He had no reprimands, no bad behavior, no warning signs at all—it was spotless. Sometimes, he thought, people just flipped a switch.

It had taken him months to get the lead on this warehouse. McAvoy was sure that he was close to the jackpot, finally—the light at the end of the tunnel that would get him back behind his desk at the BATF field office in Miami.

He could see men were wandering aimlessly in and out of this warehouse on Stock Island, the penultimate of the islands that made up the Florida Keys, the last being Key West, the southernmost point in the continental United States.

McAvoy had parked his Crown Vic in the lot of a scuba diving place next door. The dive shop had several cars and SUVs present, as it was running a night dive, so McAvoy’s car didn’t stand out.

The warehouse was supposed to be shut down, but Kevin Lee had taken over the property through a shell company. That was the thing about illegal operations—nothing was legit or permanent.

Peering through his Bushnell 8x30 Imageview Instant Replay Binoculars, McAvoy saw that the guards were fairly lax. There were only two of them, and they patrolled the perimeter once every hour or so—if they even remembered. One was wearing an MP3 player, while the other had been paging through a skin magazine, occasionally holding it up for his music-listening partner to share in the joy of the airbrushed, Photoshopped, silicone-laden female form.

Their rifles were slung unceremoniously across their shoulders. McAvoy was seriously tempted to take the warehouse now, but he didn’t have any backup. Using the Bushnell’s five-megapixel camera, he took several more pictures, then checked the memory.

The only thing he still needed was Lee himself. If he’d enter the building, and McAvoy got a picture of him doing so, that, along with all the other intel he’d gathered, would be enough probable cause for a warrant to hit the warehouse.

McAvoy’s plan was to wait until the night dive ended, and leave along with the other cars in the lot. If Lee hadn’t shown up by then, he’d try again tomorrow night. He’d been at this for months, and while he was eager to close the case, he was equally eager to do it right. It wouldn’t do after all this to get tripped up on some picayune piece of procedure just because he was in a rush to stop being Kincaid.

Moments later, as he was ashing his cigarette out the rolled-down window, he saw movement near his Crown Vic, and his plan suddenly changed.

McAvoy knew that whoever was out there would be easier dealt with in the open space of the parking lot. He put out his cigarette in the car’s ashtray and just as he was about to reach into the well between the seats where he kept his Walther PPK .380 a voice sounded from the passenger side.

“I wouldn’t move, if I were you Mr. Kincaid.”

The voice belonged to Kevin Lee.

“Or, rather,” Lee continued, “should I say Agent McAvoy?”

The BATF agent’s blood froze. He’d been so careful, worked so hard for months. How the hell had his cover been blown?

Still, he had to keep it up for as long as he could, especially since the other person he’d seen moving was now fully visible outside the driver’s door. It was one of Lee’s goons—a bulky Cuban named Jiminez—pointing a police-issue Glock 17 right at McAvoy’s head.

“Kevin? The hell’re you doin’ here? I’m just waitin’ on Lola, she’s supposed to be back from her freakin’ night-dive by now.” His partner in this undercover was a former Monroe County Sheriff’s Office deputy turned freelance operative named Lola Maxwell, and her cover was as a woman who, among other things, loved to scuba dive.

“For an undercover BATF agent, you don’t play dumb very well, Agent McAvoy. I was hoping that it wouldn’t come to this. But I suppose that’s how it has to be.” Lee nodded to Jiminez.

At the same time as the nod, McAvoy threw his shoulder to his left, the metal of the suddenly open door slamming into Jiminez’s midsection, denying him the opportunity to pull the trigger.

McAvoy rolled out of the car on his left shoulder, coming up on one knee. He hadn’t had the chance to grab his Walther out of the car, and Jiminez was still holding his Glock.

McAvoy wasn’t worried about Lee. Despite having led a rifle company in Afghanistan—or perhaps because he had—Lee never carried. That was what he had goons like Jiminez for.

Pivoting on the leg whose foot was flat on the ground, McAvoy rose and thrust his other foot out toward Jiminez, catching the large Cuban in the solar plexus.

Jiminez doubled over, trying to catch his breath. With someone as big and well-muscled as the Cuban, you had to go for something that would hurt no matter who you were. One place was the solar plexus, where a good hit would knock the wind out of you.

Of course, McAvoy had actually been aiming for his balls. That always worked, too. But he kicked too high.

Unlike slamming the door into the Cuban’s body, kicking him in the stomach got him to drop the Glock. McAvoy snatched at it, even as a bullet whistled loudly by his head from behind.

Whirling, he saw another one of Lee’s guys—the Samoan guy, whose name McAvoy didn’t know, but everyone called him “Pooky” for some reason. The man was holding a Desert Eagle .50 Action Express, pointed right at where McAvoy’s head had been before he dived for the Glock.

The Desert Eagle had serious recoil, so it was hard to squeeze off multiple rapid-fire rounds. Gripping the Glock with both hands and turning so he was sitting on the ground and leaning against his Crown Vic to prevent his own recoil issues, the agent fired off six rounds.

Or, rather, tried to. The weapon jammed after the third shot. McAvoy aimed unpleasant thoughts at people who didn’t maintain their weapons.

One of the Glock’s bullets had sliced through Pooky’s left arm, shredding bone and muscle and cartilage. Blood had exploded from the wound, dripping onto the asphalt of the parking lot.

Unfortunately, Pooky was right handed, so he still held the Desert Eagle. And he didn’t even flinch from the bullet wound. McAvoy wasn’t sure if that was because Pooky was tough or because Pooky had more heroin than blood flowing through his veins.

The Samoan squeezed off another shot from the Desert Eagle one-handed, and stumbled backward from the recoil.

McAvoy only barely registered Pooky’s issues, though, as the .50-caliber round tore into his left thigh, pulverizing arteries and veins, destroying flesh and shattering bone. Blood gushed from the wound, and McAvoy realized with certainty that his femoral artery had been hit.

Blinking away the tears of pain that welled up in his eyes, he managed to clear the misfire and squeeze off another shot with the Glock, one that went right between the Samoan’s eyes.

That, though, was his swan song. He could feel the life draining out of him, his limbs growing weaker and weaker, his thoughts getting fuzzier, his vision getting cloudier. The only thing that remained vivid and constant was the agonizing pain emanating from his destroyed left leg.

The last thing Agent John McAvoy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would ever hear was Kevin Lee saying the words, “Goodbye, John.”

LOLA MAXWELL wasn’t on the dive boat, of course. She was in a bar on Duval Street, clutching the same pint of beer she’d been nursing for over an hour, wondering where the hell McAvoy was.

He had said he would call her when he was back home, which would be after the night dive at the shop next to Lee’s warehouse. But that dive had started at eight o’clock and was scheduled to end at nine-thirty. True, the water was choppy, so the dive might have run late, but surely not more than forty-five minutes or so. It was only a five- or ten-minute drive back from Stock Island to Johnny’s bungalow on Eaton Street.

Which meant that Lola should have heard from him no later than a quarter to eleven or so. It was now creeping toward eleven-thirty.

There was a band playing cover tunes at the front of the bar, and they started playing “Brown-Eyed Girl” for the third time that night. That, combined with worry over John and lack of desire to continue being hit on by drunks, caused her to gulp down the remainder of her beer and depart.

She had a bad feeling about all of this.

When she came out onto Duval Street, the autumn breeze cutting through her shoulder-length red hair, she pulled out her cell phone, hoping that maybe she hadn’t heard the chirp of the ringer over the din of the cover band.

But there were no messages, no missed calls, no sign of Johnny.

As she ambled quickly down the sidewalk, expertly weaving her way around drunken college students and the like, she called Jean-Louis, her “associate”—a euphemistic term for extra muscle, in both the physical and firepower departments—in the hopes that Johnny might have contacted him.

“No can do, Lo,” he said. There was a lot of noise in the background, so Jean-Louis was probably at the Cutter’s Wharf, his preferred watering hole.

“I’m going to the warehouse.”

Jean-Louis hesitated. “You sure that’s such a good idea, boss?”

Lola snorted. Jean-Louis only called her “boss” when he was trying to talk her out of something. “I know it’s a bad idea, Jean-Louis, but in six months, he’s never missed a scheduled call-in. He’d only miss one if something awful had happened—I have to know.”

Minutes later, she’d arrived at her own bungalow on Whitehead Street, her cherry-red, fully restored 1965 Mustang convertible in the driveway. Sliding the key into the driver’s door, she slid into the seat and turned over the 289 2V engine.

Purring like a happy cat being scratched behind the neck, the engine went smoothly into reverse at Lola’s moving of the gearshift.

This late at night, the traffic was fine on Whitehead, and moving decently on Route 1 to the bridge, though it seemed agonizingly slow to Lola.

A pit opened up in the bottom of her stomach as she turned off Route 1 onto the side road that led to the dive shop, the warehouse and the restaurant across the street.

But Lola saw none of those things. She saw only the flashing lights and the yellow crime-scene tape.

Dozens of sedans and SUVs were parked, all with the rapid-fire sequence of colored lights that indicated they belonged to law enforcement. There were people wearing the uniform of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, and plainclothes agents wearing windbreaker jackets with “BATF” stenciled in big white letters on the back.

The tape cordoned off both the warehouse and the dive shop.

The pit in Lola’s stomach grew wider.

She parked the Mustang and managed to talk to Deputy Hobart, who’d always had the hots for her, into letting her past the tape.

Several agents were standing over two dead bodies, using various pieces of crime-scene investigation equipment. One victim was a giant of a man, wounded in both the forehead and left arm, the former likely to have been the fatal shot. But Lola barely noticed that, instead focusing on the one with the mangled left thigh: Agent John McAvoy.

“Noooo!” Lola cried out as she raced toward the body, her eyes welling with tears.

One of the agents stopped her, wrapping his arms around her in a bear hug that kept her arms at her side.

“Let me go!”

Another agent stared hard at her. “Who the hell are you, lady? And what are you doing in my crime scene?”

“My name is Lola Maxwell—I was working with Johnny—with Agent McAvoy.” Then she remembered the password Johnny had given her in case she ever found herself speaking to a BATF agent about this case. “Galleria.”

The agent blinked twice, then looked at the person manhandling Lola. “Let her go.”

After she was free, Lola knelt so she could see Johnny better, years of training keeping her from actually disturbing the body and any evidence it might contain. It looked like his thigh had been hit by a large-caliber bullet that shredded the femoral artery. He would’ve bled out in moments.

The other body meant that nothing would come of it from an investigative standpoint. The Samoan—who looked like one of Lee’s goons, the one they called Pooky—killed the BATF agent, and the BATF agent killed Pooky. Lola had been a cop too long to know that this was just two murders that had conveniently solved each other. The paperwork would be clean and easy, the cases would improve the county’s crime stats, and life would go on. No one would avenge Johnny’s death because they knew who killed him.

Her heart ached from the sight of his glass-eyed stare, but she vowed that she would carry on, the cold fire of vengeance burning behind her tear-filled eyes.

1

The satellite phone had interrupted Mack Bolan’s fishing.

Strictly speaking, that wasn’t entirely true. He’d been on a rented boat in the middle of Bear Lake near Atlanta, Michigan, all day, but not a single salmon had taken the bait at the end of his line. Was it really fishing if you didn’t catch any fish?

Bolan rarely took downtime, as there was always something that needed his attention. He valued his R and R, and he was a practical man. He had never subscribed to the notion that the rest and relaxation was the most important part of fishing. If one wanted to rest and relax, there were plenty of ways to do it, and he wouldn’t have had to leave his rented cabin or take the small motorboat into the middle of Bear Lake.

No, he wanted to fish. But the salmon weren’t exactly cooperating.

The Executioner took very few vacations, but it was time for him to kick back and clear his mind, take time so that his body could heal from all that he’d put it through in the past few weeks.

But he’d been in Montmorency County for twenty-four hours, and he was bored, so he quickly snatched up the sat phone when it signaled an incoming call.

“Striker,” the gruff voice of Hal Brognola said, “sorry to interrupt your time off, but it’s been twenty-four hours, so I assume you’re ready to go back to work?”

Brognola knew him well. “What’s the mission?”

“There’ll be a Stony Man plane on the tarmac at Atlanta Municipal Airport within the hour to take you to Key West International Airport. The full mission brief will be there.”

“Anything else?”

“It’ll all be in the intel package. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Bolan disconnected with Brognola after his goodbyes and steered the boat back to the shore.

It took fifty minutes to return the boat, pack his few things into a duffel, check out of the cabin, and take his rental car to the airport, where he returned it. Stony Man had sent a private jet just as Brognola had promised. Bolan could see Charlie Mott, one of Stony Man’s pilots, waiting on the tarmac.

Bolan went easily through security, his credentials allowing him to bring his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 handgun into the airport without question. He had only the one weapon—he was, technically, on vacation, after all.

Boarding the plane, he saw that Brognola had anticipated his needs, as usual. An ICC aluminum case covered in black ballistic nylon sat on one of the eight comfortable chairs, and a Pelican 1780W HL Long Case on another. A quick look revealed they held a Mark XIX Desert Eagle .357 Magnum pistol and an RRA Tactical Entry 5.56 mm automatic rifle, respectively. On one of the two seats opposite where the weaponry had been placed was a laptop.

Mott quietly closed the door to the plane and clambered into the cockpit. “We’ll be in the air in two shakes, Striker. Nice to have you aboard.”

“Thanks, Charlie. Good to see you again.”

Taking the seat next to the laptop after stowing his duffel, the Executioner picked it up and opened it, settling it on his lap while the machine left standby mode.

The laptop’s desktop—which was from a proprietary operating system created by Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, Stony Man’s computer expert—had only one folder visible on it, simply labeled Striker. Bolan double-clicked on it.

For the rest of the trip south, Bolan read through every file in that folder. The latest in a series of attempts by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to get close to a Key West–based gunrunner named Kevin Lee had failed, a long-term undercover agent named John McAvoy had been found dead near an empty warehouse. According to McAvoy’s partner, an operative named Lola Maxwell, McAvoy had believed the warehouse to be one of Lee’s main stashes for illegal weaponry he wanted to move, but McAvoy was made, and the warehouse cleaned out. The forensics report from the warehouse didn’t provide any useful evidence. And a dead body was left behind to take the rap.

McAvoy had gotten much deeper than any previous undercover operative. His identity was known only to his handler, who had specifically been given autonomy to pick his own agent in the hopes of avoiding a leak. Still, he was made and executed.

BATF had a leak. Bolan’s job was to find the leak and plug it once and for all.

Bolan knew both Maxwell and McAvoy by reputation. The latter was a solid agent with a good record, including an impressive bust of an operation working out of Chicago during his days as a CPD detective, after which BATF recruited him. He would be sorely missed.

Maxwell was more of a wild card. A sheriff’s deputy in Monroe County, Florida, she moved on to the CIA and then became a freelance operative much like Bolan himself, though with less latitude, secrecy, or support than Bolan enjoyed. The CIA let her go for reasons undisclosed, at a time when the presidency changed hands from one political party to another. That meant that either she screwed up in such a way that was embarrassing to the company, or it was a political move by a new commander in chief putting his mark on things. Or, possibly, both.

According to the memo from Brognola that led off the documents in the file folder, Bolan was to work with Maxwell to uncover the leak and put Lee away. The higher-ups at BATF were not thrilled about it, according to Brognola, but knew that they had to get their own house in order first.

After the plane landed smoothly on the short runway at Key West’s small airport—it received the rather outré designation of Key West International Airport by virtue of its proximity to Central and South America—Bolan took the two cases, but left the laptop. He’d tapped the special key that would wipe the hard drive.