Face Of Terror

“I will kill this girl immediately!”

The man’s high-pitched voice threatened to shatter the eardrums of everyone in the Learjet. “You fill a suitcase with old magazines and think we will not open it before we release the woman?”

“Well, Moe,” Bolan said, holding the mike up to his mouth again, “it was all I could think of to do. We didn’t have a million dollars to give you.” Now was the moment of truth. The woman would live or die.

“You have not heard the last from us,” Moe screamed. “And the blood of this young woman is on your hands!”

The radio suddenly went silent.

Bolan saw a woman wearing a red dress—her hands and feet tied together—being shoved out of the Cessna just below them.

“Parachute!” he yelled at the top of his voice as he snapped open his seat belt.

With the unopened parachute clenched in his fist, Bolan never even broke stride as he raced out the door and into the open air thousands of feet above the earth.

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Jerry VanCook for his contribution to this work.

What is left when honor is lost?

—Publilius Syrus: Sententiae 1st century B.C.

There is no greater dishonor than when a soldier turns traitor. I will make sure those traitors cannot win.

—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

Epilogue

Prologue

Susan McDonald could not have been happier.

As she stood proudly behind her shelf at the teller’s window, she felt the hard granite press lightly against her swelling abdomen. The baby—ultrasound images had already assured her husband and her that it was a boy—was kicking lightly. Susan’s doctor had warned her that soon he’d be kicking like a professional soccer player, that he’d wake her up at night and make her jump in the middle of sentences.

The baby was almost the only thing she could think of these days. Almost. But the other thing was too ghastly to think about, and so unlikely to happen at her branch of the First Federal Bank that she easily pushed it to the back of her mind.

Frank Dutton, the loan officer in charge of this branch office, walked to the front door, where several customers waited to conduct their early-morning banking. Frank selected a key from the large ring he’d produced from his pocket, unlocked the door, then held it open as the customers filed inside.

“Good morning, Mabel. Hello, Tim. Hey, Charlie, how’s the book coming?”

Frank knew every regular customer by name, which was one of the reasons the First Federal Bank’s outpost on South Western had more customers, and did more business, than any of the other branches.

Susan looked down the row of smiling women’s faces at the other tellers’ windows. Most were blond and all were beautiful. That was another reason the customers—at least the males—never seemed to switch banks.

The customer Frank had called Charlie limped toward Susan, leaning on his cane. He had a white beard beneath his well-worn brown fedora, and a tie-dyed T-shirt bearing a picture of Janis Joplin riding a motorcycle covered his chest. Susan knew he was a veteran of the Vietnam War, a former cop and still taught self-defense clinics on occasion. He’d recently taken a medical retirement from the police department because arthritis had set into almost every joint he had—most of which had been broken or dislocated at one time or another during his life of adventure. Now he wrote articles for magazines and was working on a book about his experiences in Southeast Asia.

Susan’s mind flashed back to the one problem that even her baby couldn’t force from her mind, and she knew the sight of Charlie limping forward had forced it to her consciousness. A rash of violent bank robberies had plagued almost all of the major cities surrounding Chicago. And it appeared to be the work of the same gang. The police suspected that the robbers were actually members of an Arabic terrorist cell. Any people inside the bank during the robberies who showed even the slightest sign of resistance were immediately murdered.

Charlie dropped a checkbook on the counter and began endorsing several checks. “Morning, Susie,” he greeted. He passed the checks and deposit slips through the hole at the bottom of the glass that separated them, and was about to speak when the front door suddenly burst into flying shards of glass.

Everyone inside the bank froze.

Susan watched in horror as, one by one, five men dressed in multicolored Army camou outfits with black ski masks covering their faces crunched over the glass inside the bank.

Susan and the others were still glued into position as Charlie produced a silver-colored gun from beneath his T-shirt and turned to face the robbers. He got off three quick shots—all of which looked like they’d hit their targets in the chest by the robbers’ reactions—before another of the men turned some kind of machine gun on Charlie and shot him three times. One of the bullets made the elderly customer drop his pistol, but he suddenly pulled a thin sword out of his cane and staggered toward the men in the Army shirts and pants.

It took only one more round to drop Charlie to the floor.

Susan screamed, which made the other tellers scream. Then the loan officers and customers began screaming, too.

The five robbers were trying to shout over the shrieks in some kind of foreign language. It was probably Arabic, Susan thought. She was about to drop down to her knees behind the counter when one of the men switched to heavily accented English. “Do not move! If you do as I say, no one else will be harmed!”

Susan’s eyes darted back to the three men Charlie had shot, and she saw that they were still on their feet. Bulletproof vests, she thought. She remembered that some robbers in California had worn them a few years ago, and the police had had a terrible time trying to stop them.

The man who had spoken in heavily accented English now fired a burst into the ceiling. “Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up now, all of you, or I will kill each and every one!”

Suddenly, the main lobby of the bank went silent. Susan had planned to drop to her knees a moment earlier, but now those same knees made the decision for her. She sank to the tile floor as if she’d been given a local anesthetic in both legs, and had to force herself to slide in beneath the counter.

From where she now hid, Susan heard the same voice ordering the tellers to come around to the front lobby. Each one who passed her looked down to where she hid. Some were crying. Others were in shock.

Susan realized that if any of the bank robbers came back behind the counter they would easily find her. But the time to surrender had come and gone. Something in her heart told Susan that if she slid out and got to her feet now, she’d be immediately killed.

And so would her baby.

Behind her, through the thin wall, Susan heard the man speaking English order everyone to the carpet. A few seconds later, she heard him speaking in that strange tongue again. A moment after he stopped, she heard the sounds of doors opening and closing from the part of the bank that held the loan officers’ offices and supply rooms.

The robbers were looking for anyone who had hidden, Susan knew, and that realization made her heart pound so hard she feared she might have a miscarriage.

The half door that separated the lobby from the tellers’ area swung open, and two of the men in Army clothes appeared in front of Susan. She pulled her knees tighter against her chest, but the baby inside her kept her from getting her legs out of sight. The two men walked past her and, unless the stress was causing her to hallucinate, neither of them noticed her feet sticking out from under the counter.

The men headed for the vault in the back of the bank. They disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared at the doorway leading back to the tellers’ area. One of them was looking at his wristwatch. A little later, an explosion sounded from the vault room.

Another man wearing a ski mask now hurried through the swing door and followed the first two back into the vault room. They spoke excitedly in their foreign tongue, then came back carrying large cotton money bags.

It took them three trips to get it all.

Behind her again now, Susan could hear the crunch of the broken glass beneath their boots as they began carrying the money out to whatever vehicle awaited them. Then, evidently finished and ready to leave, Susan heard the same man who had done all of the talking speak again. “Allahu Akhbar!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Death to all infidels!”

Then the room erupted with the explosions of all of the men’s machine guns, and Susan closed her eyes again and prayed. Dear God, she mouthed silently. Please spare the life of my child if not mine. Then she began to cry.

She was still crying five minutes later when the police arrived. It took a good minute after that for her to pry her eyes open and face what had happened.

Inside her belly, her baby boy was kicking like a well-trained rooster at a cockfight.

1

They had received the exact location from DEA Special Agent Rick Jessup’s informant only minutes earlier. Which meant they had mere minutes to reach the site of the cocaine transaction before the deal would be over and the drug pushers gone.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, continued to floor the accelerator of the civilian-market Hummer. It was not the kind of vehicle he’d expected to find waiting for him when he’d arrived in Guyman, Oklahoma, earlier that morning.

With its bright yellow paint job, the only advantage it might have was that it stood out so much that no one in his right mind would believe any police agency would have the audacity to use it as an undercover vehicle.

But Bolan knew that would be a short-lived advantage. The bright Hummer might work fine for inner-city surveillance, but as soon as any action started, that advantage would disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Gun smoke.

Then again, Bolan had learned to work within the limitations of the equipment he had on hand, and he did not intend to quit doing so now.

The stakes in this game were simply too high to fold now.

Ever since Jessup’s informant indicated that a large cocaine deal was about to go down in the Oklahoma panhandle, Bolan had dressed and played the part of a wealthy Southwestern businessman. Both he and Agent Jessup wore exotic-skinned boots—Jessup’s were ostrich, Bolan’s anteater—carefully pressed blue jeans and colorful Western shirts with bolo ties of silver and turquoise.

Bolan continued to press the Hummer to its maximum speed while Jessup studied the hand-drawn map he had made while talking to his informant over the phone. “I think it’s the next turn,” he told the Executioner. “Yeah, there’s the motel my guy mentioned.” He pointed at a small set of brick buildings on the right side of the road. “Out in the middle of nowhere just like he said. Almost exactly halfway between Guyman and Boise City. That means we turn right the next time we see dirt.”

The Hummer flashed past the motel and sped on.

Oklahoma’s panhandle was known for its flatness, and the eye could indeed see for miles. The terrain was mostly prairie, with a few occasional wheat fields.

Not the usual sort of place radical Islamic terrorists or mafiosi would pick to do a drug deal. Then again, they might be working off the same sort of psychology the Executioner was using with the Hummer—picking a place so bereft of privacy that no lawmen were likely to even consider it.

In other words, hiding in plain sight.

Bolan saw the quarter-section road ahead and felt his eyebrows lower in concentration as he slowed. Middle-Eastern terrorists doing business with old-school Phoenix mafiosi didn’t constitute an average run-of-the-mill dope deal, either. But Bolan had seen stranger alliances form when there was a buck to be made.

Twelve-thirty p.m., which was what the Executioner’s watch read at the moment, was also a strange time of day for a drug transaction. Both the terrorists and the mafiosi had to have figured that all of the local lawmen had met someplace for lunch.

Bolan twisted the steering wheel and kicked up reddish-brown dust clouds beneath the Hummer’s tires. He leaned onto the accelerator again, driving along the packed-dirt county road only slightly slower than he had on the pavement. His eyes searched the horizon ahead, and he saw Jessup lift a pair of binoculars.

“This ground isn’t as flat as it looks,” the DEA man said. “It looks like you ought to be able to see all the way to Canada. But you can’t.”

“We’re only a few miles south of the Kansas state line and we can’t even see that,” the Executioner replied. “The terrain rises and falls so slowly and gently that it just looks flat. It can still block the view.”

Jessup nodded and dropped the binoculars to his lap. Bolan drove on.

Two and a half miles later, the Hummer topped one of the gentle rises the Executioner had mentioned and suddenly they could see a group of vehicles parked in the middle of a cow pasture. One Jeep and five pickups were parked in a circle roughly a half mile in front of them and a quarter mile or so off the road. Bolan hit the brakes and slowed to a speed that wouldn’t draw so much attention.

After all, the bright yellow Hummer was enough.

“Don’t you think we ought to hurry on in?” Jessup asked, turning toward the Executioner.

Bolan slowed even further and shook his head. “They’ve seen us,” he said. “Right about now, they’re all looking this way and speculating on who we are. Wealthy farmers with more money than good sense who bought a big yellow play toy? Or the law? The law would swoop in fast. But it wouldn’t be fast enough to keep most of them from getting away across the prairie.”

“Not to mention the fact that they’re going to start shooting as soon as it’s obvious the law is after them.” Jessup paused for a low chuckle, deep in his chest. “At least I’m the law,” he said. “I still haven’t figured out exactly who or what you are.”

The Executioner chuckled himself. All Jessup knew was that he had been assigned to work with Bolan—whom he knew as Matt Cooper—for a series of drug deals to which his snitch was privy. He had already seen Cooper bend conventional law so far as to break it. But it was always for a final good, and the end really did always justify the means.

“You’re right about the shooting,” Bolan finally said. “As soon as I turn this baby their way, it’s going to start. So the longer I can stay on the county road, the more it’ll appear that we’re just headed for someplace past them.” He paused and took in a breath. “That means I’m going to wait until we’re right across from them and then cut a hard right their way.”

“Short of bringing in air support, that’s about as good a plan as I can think of,” Jessup said. He leaned forward and slid an AR-15 from beneath the Hummer’s passenger’s seat. Pulling back the bolt of the semiautomatic version of the military’s M-16, he chambered a round, all the time keeping the weapon below the windows of the vehicle.

The Executioner knew he would need both hands on the wheel for the breakneck turn he had planned in the next few seconds, so he left his 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun where it lay near his feet. Then, as soon as he was perpendicular to the cars parked out in the cow pasture, he whipped the Hummer their way.

The Hummer fishtailed slightly as it descended into a deep bar ditch. Then it straightened again as it climbed up the other side. The sturdy personnel vehicle punched through the barbed-wire fence between two wooden posts as if it were snapping a dry rubber band. The razor-sharp barbs on the strands dragged across the Hummer’s sides, scratching deeply into the yellow paint job. A second later, they were creating another dust storm behind them. But this time, the clouds flying up through the air from the Hummer’s tires included not only dirt but long blades of wild grass.

Bolan and Jessup had been right in their assessment of the drug dealers’ reaction.

The shooting started immediately.

The Executioner heard several engines roar to life, and then the Jeep and two of the pickups fled from the oncoming Hummer. The loud, frightened mooing of several dozen cattle, who had gathered together deeper into the pasture, rose up between the other noises as the escaping vehicles headed toward them, forcing the animals to part, and causing them to stampede in opposite directions.

The men escaping, Bolan knew, had to be the sellers, who already had their money. The buyers of the cocaine were still loading cardboard boxes into the backs of their vehicles from piles on the ground. But now they were forced to postpone that task and turn toward Bolan and Jessup.

“We can go after the guys with the money,” Bolan said. “Or we can get the guys with the dope right here.” He paused for a second, then added, “But we may not be able to get them both.”

“Let’s go for the dope,” Jessup said without hesitation. “At least we can keep it from getting onto the streets.”

“You’re right,” Bolan agreed. Reaching inside his light jacket, he drew the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R. In the corner of his eye, he saw Jessup kneel his right leg on the seat, then wrap the seat belt tightly around his calf. As Bolan extended the Beretta out the window with his left hand, Jessup leaned out with his entire torso.

Both men began firing simultaneously.

As the Hummer crested a short rise in the pasture, it went momentarily airborne. Both the Executioner and the DEA agent waited for it to settle on flatter ground, then pulled their respective triggers.

A trio of subsonic, nearly inaudible 9 mm hollowpoint rounds rocketed from Bolan’s Beretta. One round struck the shoulder of a man wearing a charcoal-gray suit and striped tie. Bolan frowned slightly, then nodded. The pickups the Mafia gunners had chosen fit right in with the landscape, but their clothing made them stand out.

Next to him, the Executioner heard Jessup pop off three semiauto rounds from his AR-15. They were still at least an eighth of a mile away, and none of the .223-caliber rounds seemed to find a target.

By now, the mafiosi in the field had taken cover around their pickups—three almost identical Toyota Tundras. One was burgundy colored, another green and the third one blue. All were parked with their beds facing the oncoming Hummer, the tailgates were down and the cargo areas roughly half-filled with cardboard boxes.

Cardboard boxes that, the Executioner knew, had to contain kilo after kilo of white powdered cocaine.

A rifle round struck the Hummer’s windshield, then skimmed up off the bullet-resistant material. Only a tiny speck appeared on the glass to show where it had hit. Bolan drove on, squeezing the trigger of his Beretta yet again. This time all three rounds of automatic fire struck the right front fender of the green pickup as the same man he’d hit in the shoulder a little earlier ducked back behind the engine block.

Jessup fired again, and Bolan saw the rear windshield of the blue pickup shatter into thousands of tiny pieces.

“Dammit!” the DEA man shouted as he pulled his rifle back inside the Hummer.

Bolan glanced his way as he sped on toward the pickups. The still-smoking brass case from the last shot Jessup had fired stood straight up out of the breech of the weapon. Such a jam was called a stove pipe and it could come from a faulty magazine, a faulty round or a faulty gun.

Jamming the stock of his AR-15 back against the car seat, Jessup pulled back the bolt and brushed brass out of the weapon with a sweep of his left hand. His eyes stared down into the opening, and when he released the bolt again a fresh round was shoved into the chamber.

“I’m going to drive right through them,” the Executioner said just as Jessup began to lean out of the window again. “This Hummer’s the best cover we’re going to get.” His eyes narrowed as the brows above them furrowed. “And we may take out some of them in the crash.” He paused for another quick glance over at Jessup. “Better stay in here and put your seat belt on right.”

The DEA special agent understood. Taking a sitting position, he snapped his seat belt and shoulder harness into place, then rested his AR-15 across his lap with the barrel pointing at the door.

The mafiosi behind the pickups didn’t realize what was going to happen until it was almost too late. They continued firing toward the Hummer, their rounds doing little more than make more specks on the windshield.

Then, suddenly, the fact that the huge civilianized military vehicle wasn’t going to stop or even slow suddenly sank into them all at the same time. Six men suddenly emerged from behind the pickups and began running in different directions across the cow pasture.

The Hummer crashed into the tailgates of the burgundy and green Tundras, folded them up into a mangled mass of steel, then blew out all four of the rear tires. The burgundy truck was thrown out and to the left, directly atop one of the fleeing mafiosi.

The man’s lone scream abruptly cut short as he was crushed to death. As soon as they were past the vehicles, the Executioner twisted the Hummer around in a breakneck U-turn and started back toward the crumpled green pickup. It had been knocked onto its side, and one of the mafiosi dived back behind the cab, not seeing any other possible escape.

But the overturned green pickup was no cover for the Hummer, either. Bolan turned the wheel slightly and a second later he and Jessup bumped up and over the wreck, squashing the Mafia soldier below their wheels and what remained of the green Toyota Tundra.

There had been a total of six men—two to a pickup.

The Hummer had taken care of two of them.