Don Pendleton: Silent Threat

He’d seen plenty of fanatics willing to die for their cause. Call it a gut instinct, but these two women didn’t seem to be the type to take their lives for an abstract slogan. In Bolan’s experience, this type of brutal self-sacrifice was committed for a dynamic personality.

This force, this entity, this malevolent being stood at the center of the maelstrom of violence threatening to storm across Germany.

Just who could inspire this kind of bloodshed?

The Executioner ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1712–1778

The true fanatic can be mesmerized by a charismatic leader, forced to harm or to kill in the name of the cause. My cause is Justice, and I’ll mete out my brand of judgment to those killers with extreme prejudice.

—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.

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

The wet streets of Berlin reflected the headlights of passing cars and the multicolored glow of countless shop signs. The clouds covering the leaden skies appeared to give no ground to the approaching twilight, but as the rain grew colder, the coming darkness closed over the busy streets like a clenching fist. Heedless of the rain, dressed in a brown trench coat and matching snap-brim hat, a man crossed the street in front of a popular coffee shop. He was one figure among many, but his presence caught the eye of one of the shop’s customers, who had taken a table near one corner. The table offered a good view of the large picture windows in front.

The man in the trench coat paused to remove his hat and run his fingers through his hair. His coat was open, and the watcher sitting in the corner noted the butt of the revolver just barely visible in the newcomer’s waistband.

“You are not difficult to spot,” said the man in the trench coat, moving to sit at the corner table without invitation.

“You’re fairly conspicuous yourself,” said Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner. “What’s with the third-rate spy novel getup?”

The man in the trench coat knew Mack Bolan as Matt Cooper, and for all his faults was probably well aware that the name was an alias. “I don’t see any reason to be insulted, Cooper,” he said.

Bolan gave him a hard look. “You don’t have something more important on your mind, Rieck?”

Adam Rieck, Bolan’s Interpol liaison, grimaced. “A fair point,” he said. He produced a folded sheaf of papers from inside his coat. “This is it.”

Bolan took the papers, glanced around and began shuffling through them under the edge of the table. There were laser-printed color photographs, a complete itinerary and some computer-generated maps indicating where the itinerary stops correlated physically. Bolan nodded.

“This will be plenty,” he said.

“Then I guess we’d better get going.” Rieck nodded in turn.

Bolan eyed him again. “Taking you along wasn’t part of the deal.” Of course, he’d known that it very well could be, and Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group, whose base of operations was at Stony Man Farm, Virginia, had said as much in describing the operation.

“Germany is in trouble,” the big Fed had said, speaking to Bolan from Washington using a secure, scrambled satellite phone.

“The whole country?” Bolan had asked.

“On certain levels,” Brognola said. “You’re aware of the push for greater security, greater governing controls on strategic industries worldwide.”

“Sure,” Bolan replied.

“The German government recently initiated a series of protocols intended to protect strategic industries from being bought out by what they call ‘locusts’—potentially hostile foreign investors, ‘undesirable’ hedge funds, and so on. In today’s political and war-fighting landscape, this is no surprise. Aaron and his team regularly monitor this type of activity.”

“I follow you,” Bolan said, knowing that Brognola referred to Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, head of the Farm’s team of computer wizards.

“While following up on the proposed controls and investigating some of the investment funds flagged as ‘undesirable’ foreign interests, Bear and his people found a subtle pattern. They tracked it and produced a very disturbing picture, something that only becomes apparent when you look at investments in strategic industries a few steps removed. Holding companies controlling holding companies influencing local German investors, in other words, but ultimately all linked to a central source.”

“Someone is buying into strategic industries in Germany. Someone with less than patriotic intentions.”

“Yes,” Brognola confirmed. “Specifically, a business entity calling itself Sicherheit Vereinigung, the Security Consortium. On its face, there’s no reason a company wouldn’t try to consolidate domestic industries when permitted, to secure a vertical hold on the market. But when that company does so but tries to conceal what it’s doing, it begs the question…why?”

“The Security Consortium. Sounds bland.”

“It’s meant to,” Brognola said. “They even have a Web site, Bear tells me. It’s completely harmless at first and second glance—just another among a seemingly endless list of financial services and investment companies. This one is headquartered in Germany, but Bear and his people have uncovered several backdoor ties to international interests. Those including rogue nations like Syria and Iran, countries that definitely do not have the interests of the Western industrialized world at heart.”

“There has to be more.”

“There is,” Brognola said. “Purchases of major German interests have gone mysteriously well for the Consortium. You might say they have miraculous corporate luck. If a local politician or businessman stands in the way of an acquisition, he either changes his mind quickly or has a perfectly explainable accident. No less than a dozen deaths, all officially classed as natural causes or freak misadventures, have been linked to chains of events that all ended in successful acquisitions by the Consortium.”