Don Pendleton: Line Of Honor

Mercy Mission

A group of American medics and dozens of refugees are held captive after a Janjaweed war band takes control of their camp in Darfur. With the president’s hands bound by political red tape, Mack Bolan launches a rescue mission using his own team of mercenaries.

But there is more to the terrorists than guns and violence. With the Sudanese government’s support, the Janjaweed group has become an unyielding force in the region. As the enemy troops close in, Bolan soon realizes he could be leading his men into a death mission. But there’s no turning back. Without him, the captives have no chance of survival—and the Executioner will not let them down.

The tank rumbled on, seemingly unstoppable

Bolan pulled the pins on a pair of grenades and charged the armored vehicle.

As he ran into range, his progress was noted and the tank’s turret spun to put its gun on him. Bolan threw a grenade. The white phosphorus charge hit the tank square on its slanted front. The vehicle’s prow was immediately enveloped in white smoke and streamers of metal skyrocketed. Bolan took a hard left and threw himself down as the tank fired blindly at him. The sonic crack of a shell passed two feet over him, and coax fire followed, but it was scything in the wrong direction. Bolan rose.

Again he sprinted toward the tank. Waves of heat rolled off it from the burning phosphorus on the front deck, but the warrior paid no attention. He jumped and hooked an arm over the 100 mm barrel, letting it carry him toward the bow. The turret continued to turn, and he dropped onto the tank’s blackened back deck. A scorched dent the size of a trash can lid cratered the steel, and a smoking hole the size of a fist marked where the grenade had penetrated. Bolan could hear men shouting below, and chemical fire extinguisher squirted out of the opening.

The Executioner unclenched his fist and dropped his second grenade down the hole.

Line of Honor

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

If honor calls, where’er she points the way, The sons of honor follow and obey.

—Charles Churchill

1731–1764

The Farewell

Where there are people in need of my help, I will go. Because it is only in keeping up the fight against those who do evil against the innocent—no matter where on this planet they may be—that this war can be won.

—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.

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Charles Rogers for his contribution to this work.

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

1

The Sudan

The wind roared through the open door of the helicopter cabin. Mack Bolan’s knuckles went white on the grips of the M-134 minigun as he watched the armor-piercing incendiary cannon shells streak past the cabin like green laser lines in the predawn. He shouted into his throat mike to reach Jack Grimaldi in the cockpit. “Jack! Do something!” The Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot close air support jet was flying right up Dragonslayer’s rear and seemed intent on ripping the girl a new one.

Dragonslayer screamed into emergency war power in response.

The Executioner’s stomach dropped as Grimaldi hauled back on the stick and the helicopter went nose vertical. The Sudanese jet streaked past underneath. The Stony Man pilot shoved the stick forward and kicked the collective. Bolan swung on his chicken straps like a hammock in a gale and caught sight of the glowing red lanterns of the Su-25’s twin Tumansky turbojets. He brought the minigun around and squeezed the trigger. The weapon’s motor whined, and the six barrels spun in a blur. Bolan’s own red laser lines scored the night, and he saw bullet strikes sparkle on the Frogfoot’s fuselage. The minigun could fire up to 3,000 rounds a minute as the electric motor whirled its six barrels at dizzying speed. The problem was that the Executioner was firing .30-caliber rifle bullets, and the boys at the Sukhoi Design Bureau sheathed their attack planes in titanium.

The Su-25 was firing 30 mm cannon shells and just one would light up Dragonslayer like the Fourth of July.

For this particular mission, Dragonslayer was stripped to pass foreign inspection and speed; her mission was search and rescue. Bolan’s gun station was a last-second add-on for hostile-landing-zone suppression.

They had never made it to the landing zone.

The Su-25 fighter pair had dropped out of the sky on them like God’s wrath. Fortunately these Sudanese fighter pilots had no experience in dogfighting. The Sudanese air force had spent the past two decades mostly strafing defenseless villages and refugee camps. The lead Su-25 had made the lethal mistake of trying to go low and turn and burn with Dragonslayer. Grimaldi had simply spun the chopper on its axis and given Bolan a lane of fire. The Executioner had ripped about three hundred rounds right up the Frogfoot’s port-side air intake and put paid to the Sudanese pilot’s account.

Wingman wasn’t having it.

He had intuited the situation. His plane could approach six hundred miles per hour. His 1990s vintage Russian Doppler radar was a joke, but helicopters weren’t exactly stealthy. Dragonslayer was a nice vibrating blob on his screen and the sun was coming up. The Su-25 was twice as fast than his prey and taking advantage of that fact. The Frogfoot pilot was climbing high and then screaming down for gun runs and zooming away before Bolan’s ineffectual return fire could have any effect.

The soldier watched the Su-25 bank hard around in the purple light. “Jack, we’re going to have to do this the hard way!”

“What are you suggesting!” Grimaldi shouted.

“Let’s surrender!”

Bolan could almost hear Grimaldi smiling into his mike. “Okay! Let me see, Su-25, export version, his stalling speed has gotta be, what? Eighty-five? Ninety klicks per hour, give him a nice comfortable…”

Dragonslayer dropped altitude and noticeably began slowing as the pilot throttled back. The Su-25 continued its hard turn in the distance to come up on Dragonslayer’s six again. Sunlight began to pour over the Nuba Mountains to the east. Grimaldi held the aircraft in suicidal-level flight as he continued to drop speed. Bolan had a nice visual on the Frogfoot as it began to close.