Don Pendleton: Devil's Bargain

Peering into the gloomy shadows below, he caught a whiff of the miasma, an invisible blow to his senses. It was a sickening mix of blood, cooked flesh, loosed body waste. He heard the sharp grunts, then a scream echoed up from the pit. He slipped off his shades, braced for the horror he knew was down there, waiting.

Then Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner, began his descent.

HER NAME WAS Barbara Price, and it was rare when she left her post at Stony Man Farm. She was, after all, mission controller for the Justice Department’s ultra-covert Sensitive Operations Group, her time and expertise on demand nearly around the clock. It was both her present role in covert operations at the Farm, however, and her past employment at the National Security Agency that now found her moments away from rendezvousing with a former colleague.

She watched the numbers on the doors fall, striding down the hallway, looked at a couple pass her by through sunglasses, her low-heeled slip-ons padding over wall-to-wall carpet. She couldn’t shake the feeling something felt wrong about this setup. She hadn’t survived, nor claimed her current position with the Sensitive Operations Group, by taking anything in the spook world at face value.

Since being informed by cutouts she often used to gather intelligence that Max Geller sounded desperate in his attempts to reach her, a dark nagging had hounded her for days. She hadn’t seen, heard from or thought about the man in years, and there he was, hunting her down for undeclared reasons, popping up on the radar screen, out of nowhere.

Finally she returned his call through a series of back channels she arranged. It was the worst of times to leave the Farm, Able Team and Phoenix Force in the trenches, with Mack Bolan, the Farm’s lone-wolf operative and a man she was, on occasion, intimate with, in the field. But Geller claimed to have critical information about what the Stony Man warriors were up against, likewise alluding to a threat so grave to national security the entire world could be changed forever. No, he didn’t dare speak on any line, no matter how secure. They had to meet.

She had run it past Hal Brognola, the big Fed at the Justice Department who was director of the Farm and liaison to the President. He had given her three hours’ leave, but she was to call the time and place for the meet, give him the particulars before she set out. The chopper had ferried her from the Shenandoah Valley to Reagan National, where the Justice Department maintained a small hangar, kept its own vehicles on-site for quick personal access, instead of using “invented” credit cards for rentals. From there in the GMC, a short drive to the hotel in Crystal City, where the feeling she was being followed intensified. It was nothing she could put her finger on, though. Crystal City swarmed with the work force that early-morning hour, a lone blond woman sure to grab the attention of men. Taking extra precautions, just the same, she sat in the hotel lot for fifteen minutes, her instincts flaring so bad she almost called off the meet. A short drive around Crystal City, then she parked in an underground garage, wondered if she was being paranoid. Follow through, she decided. She’d come this far, maybe Geller had something worth hearing. She was grateful, just the same, that the Browning Hi-Power with 13-shot clip was shouldered beneath the windbreaker, two backup clips leathered on her right side.

She found the door to the room where he’d registered under James Wilcox. It had been years since she had worked with the man, both of them gathering signals intelligence and human intelligence for the NSA in a classified program that often involved her directing wet work. Geller was the best at what he did. Tagged the Sphinx, he still was, she knew, the NSA’s best code breaker.

She knocked, waited, glanced both ways down the empty hall, removed her sunglasses. The door opened so quickly that she wondered if he had X-ray eyes or had been standing on the foyer, waiting, listening.

“Thanks for coming.”

The whiskey fumes swarmed her senses, the first red flag warning her again this felt all wrong. He wasn’t the slim, sharply dressed, well-groomed man she remembered. He had aged terribly, gained weight, lost hair. But it was the eyes, sunken with dark circles, unable to focus on her, brimmed with so much anxiety she could smell the fear in the sweat soaked into the collar of his sports shirt. She almost turned, walked away, but he beckoned her to enter.

She did.

“AND JUST WHO the fuck might you be?”

Bolan looked at the ghoul, said, “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

The soldier found it was every bit as messy down there as James warned, and then some. Bolan felt a ball of cold anger lodge in his belly at what he saw in the bastard’s torture chamber. It was gruesome devil’s work to the extreme, and he couldn’t even begin to tally how many laws the butcher had broken. He was fairly certain, though, whichever agency the man pledged allegiance to had given him the green light to do whatever it took to break the prisoners, that he was backed and covered by superiors who would, most likely, wash their hands of this horror show. Yes, Bolan knew the argument—extreme times demanding extreme measures and so forth—but torture in his mind only reduced a man to the same soulless animal level as the enemy. It sickened him to know Moctaw worked for the same government he did. Then again, it occurred to him Moctaw had bulled ahead, aware someone else was on the way to take the reins, the butcher running some personal agenda. Gain information, or threaten the prisoners about talking to the Feds? Every instinct Bolan had earned over the years—fighting every ilk of backstabbing homegrown traitor—warned him something didn’t jibe with the man or his methods. Something else lurked behind the mask, he was sure. Any front Moctaw would put on that this was all done in the name of national security was a ruse. Whom was he protecting? What was he hiding? Or was this simply an extreme solution to the dilemma of fighting terrorism on American soil?

Bolan looked at the prisoners. Naked, they were strapped to thick wooden chairs, which were bolted down to the concrete floor. There were two bodies, a dark hole between their eyes. The soldier figured they were the lucky ones. The other two prisoners had some sort of steel vise holding their heads erect, clamps fastened to their eyebrows, their eyes bulging with terror, flicking around like pinballs at their tormentor. Whoever this Moctaw was, Bolan saw he was good with the Gestapo tactics. The black bag, opened on the table, had been emptied of a series of shiny surgical instruments, one of which was a bloody pair of shears. Tourniquets, Bolan saw, were wound around the wrists and ankles of the dead men, all of their fingers and toes strewed in the blood still pooling on the floor. At some point, the bastard had castrated his first two victims, genitals adding to the gory mess at the stumps of their feet. It was obvious where the cigar in the butcher’s hand would have gone next. One glance at Moctaw, and Bolan pegged him as little more than a thug. Six-six at least, the muscled Goliath swelled out the black leather apron, blood speckling his craggy features, red drops still falling from a dark mane of disheveled hair. In the tight confines of mildewed brick the stench alone was damn near enough to make even a battle-hardened soldier like Bolan gag. Then he saw the series of oozing burn holes running up the torsos, necks, cheeks, the bastard working his way up, letting them know they were seconds away from having their eyes seared out.

Bolan produced his credentials, thrust them in Moctaw’s face. The butcher grunted, unimpressed, or disappointed, the soldier couldn’t tell. “Your fun’s over.”