Don Pendleton: Shadow Hunt

His hands and feet were tied together and he was strung up between two willow trees that were slowly bending with his weight. Blood dripped from the cut on his scalp into the water below, carrying his scent to the alligators that infested the area.

He scanned the water for the telltale ripples of an approaching gator and spotted not one, but several, slowly closing in on him. For the moment, Bolan was safe, though it was only a matter of time before the branches gave way.

One alligator was getting more curious, and as it swam around below Bolan, a trickle of blood hit the water. Large jaws snapped out and slashed through the murky swamp.

The tree limbs creaked as Bolan tried to inch his body away from the reptile, and the Executioner knew that his chances of survival were diminishing with every second. Using all his strength, he pulled on the limb that seemed most likely to break. The tree groaned in objection, but finally relented. As the gator surfaced again, Bolan reached up and grabbed the sagging branch. It lowered inch by inch as he struggled to free his arm. The gator swam beneath him, his tail flicking Bolan’s boot as a subtle reminder that his time was just about up.

Bolan strained harder at the branch, while watching the gators on final approach. One of them circled and dived below the surface, and Bolan wondered if the creature was going to come leaping out of the water to snatch him in its jaws, like he was a worm on a hook.

The Executioner’s premonition proved accurate.

The Executioner ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Every man has his price…

—English 18th-century proverb

There may not be much in this world that comes free, but there is one thing that nobody can put a price on—human life. And I will challenge anyone who tries!

—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.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

U.S. Marshal Jack Rio did his best to get comfortable in the too small seat of the rental car. He wasn’t muscle-bound or obese, but he had broad shoulders and stood a few inches over six feet tall. With the exception of a full-size truck or an SUV, not too many vehicles on the road were made for someone his size, so getting in and out of the black Nissan Sentra for him felt like he was getting in and out of a clown car. On the seat next to him was a slender briefcase, and his sweat-stained cowboy hat that had about as much business in New Orleans as he did.

Rio pulled another cigarette out of his hard pack, lit it and blew the smoke out the open window. He tossed the remaining pack into the console and mentally reminded himself that he should quit when he got back home. Overhead, the sky threatened rain, but so far as he’d seen, it did that almost every day here. Maybe it was the season, he thought, but it was no wonder the city worried about floods and hurricanes—if it was any lower, it’d been under the damn Gulf, not next to it.

The door to the restaurant he was watching opened, and he tensed, then relaxed as a young couple came out holding hands, laughing, and headed for their car. Mosca’s was busy this night, and despite its nondescript white exterior and plain sign, the food was reputed to be outstanding.

The fact that it had been the epicenter of organized crime in the area until the early nineties hadn’t apparently done much to harm business. New Orleans was really the beginning of organized crime that started with two Matranga brothers in the late 1800s and ended with the last-known leader of the Matranga Family, Carlos Marcello. He died in 1993, but he’d worked out of Mosca’s as much as anywhere. Which made the whole damn situation that Rio was in even more strange.

The marshal shifted in his seat, flicked ash out the window, and tried to ignore the trickle of sweat that slid free of his short-cropped black-and-gray hair and down the center of his back. Everyone in New Orleans was sweaty. It was always hot and humid, just on the edge of raining. Under his navy blue sport coat, his .45-caliber Smith & Wesson was heavy and uncomfortable, molding his dress shirt permanently into his skin, but there was no way he was going to take off the coat—or the gun. A lot of experienced shooters carried a 9 mm pistol for personal protection, but Rio’s experiences as a U.S. marshal had taught him the value of a weapon powerful enough to a blow a hole in an engine block.

Rio believed in many things, but the existence of both true evil and pure human fuckery convinced him to load his .45 magazine with hollowpoint rounds, and to carry the weapon at all times when he was awake and have it close at hand when he was asleep. So far, his approach had kept him alive in spite of assignments hunting down very bad men from Mexico to California and all over the American Southwest: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and even southern Nevada. As a “floater” for the U.S. Marshals Service, Rio traveled wherever the higher-ups decided they wanted him to go, working on cases ranging from missing persons to drug runners to vicious killers that they’d prefer the media never heard about.

Sighing, Rio opened the door of the rental car and climbed out, continuing to watch the restaurant. The entire situation felt wrong, and his instincts weren’t something he took lightly. Why in the world would that shine boy from the DA’s office want to meet here? He had to know that Marcello had been using this same restaurant as a front and a meeting place back when he was running things down here. Maybe the attorney just had a twisted sense of humor, but that didn’t quite fit, either.

The real bitch of it was that he was totally on his own here. This wasn’t an official case, and he sure as hell wasn’t on duty. He was supposedly on vacation, but like some other law-enforcement officers he knew, there were no real vacations for him—just times when he worked a case out of his jurisdiction because it smelled funny and he wanted to try to figure it out. That’s why he was here, sweating through his shirt and his sport coat, instead of drinking cold beer and fishing in the Gulf with his brother.