Don Pendleton: Devil's Bargain

Sight, breathe deep, let it out. How many times had he dropped an enemy from a distance, an invisible shooter? So many killing fields, he briefly considered, since he was a Green Beret sniper in Southeast Asia.

Yesterday’s victories and spilled enemy blood to save innocent lives didn't mean a damn thing, he knew, and never guaranteed success in the present. Dwelling on the glory days—believing reputation and prior success would carry a man through the day’s trials—was best left for fools, wanna-bes and has-beens.

The future, Bolan thought, was now.

And in his hands.

Lethal Impact

Deadfall

Onslaught

Battle Force

Rampage

Takedown

Death’s Head

Hellground

Inferno

Ambush

Blood Strike

Killpoint

Vendetta

Stalk Line

Omega Game

Shock Tactic

Showdown

Precision Kill

Jungle Law

Dead Center

Tooth and Claw

Thermal Strike

Day of the Vulture

Flames of Wrath

High Aggression

Code of Bushido

Terror Spin

Judgment in Stone

Rage for Justice

Rebels and Hostiles

Ultimate Game

Blood Feud

Renegade Force

Retribution

Initiation

Cloud of Death

Termination Point

Hellfire Strike

Code of Conflict

Vengeance

Executive Action

Killsport

Conflagration

Storm Front

War Season

Evil Alliance

Scorched Earth

Deception

Destiny’s Hour

Power of the Lance

A Dying Evil

Deep Treachery

War Load

Sworn Enemies

Dark Truth

Breakaway

Blood and Sand

Caged

Sleepers

Strike and Retrieve

Age of War

Line of Control

Breached

Retaliation

Pressure Point

Silent Running

Stolen Arrows

Zero Option

Predator Paradise

Circle of Deception

Devil’s Bargain

Don Pendleton

It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win.

—Douglas MacArthur,

1880–1964

However much enemy blood I need to spill, whatever degree of pain is required to inflict on the vipers and jackals, I will be part of this war, without limit, without consequences. There will be no concession. There will be no compromise.

—Mack Bolan

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

Jaric Muhdal was waiting for the miracle to happen.

Word of the alleged breakout had been written in Kurdish on a wadded note tossed into his lap five days ago by his Turk captor. Muhdal had been ordered to eat the missive once he’d read it. Or was it six days, a week since the encounter? And was this simply mental torture, taunting him with false hopes of escaping the hell on earth called Dyrik Prison? One last sadistic blow by his tormentors to break his spirit, and days, he believed, before he was marched out to the courtyard to be beheaded?

It was nearly impossible to track time or grasp insight into mind games played by his tormentors, he concluded as he hacked out a strand of gummy blood, wincing when his tongue ran over the craters inside his mouth. Rage building, he felt the slime ooze down over his bare chest and stomach, pool to a warm slither against exposed genitals. Time was frozen, but his hatred felt as if it could last an eternity.

How much more could he take? Daily he was hung upside down, pummeled by fists, flogged by a metal studded belt. A slice of moldy bread, a cup of tepid water a day—he was a withered sack of drooping flesh. For endless hours he sat naked and bleeding from his scalp to the soles of his feet in the blackness of a six-by-four concrete-block cell, breathing the stink of his own filth and fear; waiting for execution. Still, solitary confinement was respite from torture.

He knew plenty about deprivation, suffering, cruelty—his people, after all, had been savaged by the Turks for eighty years—but even those who believed they carried the heart of a lion could long for death under such brutal conditions.

Only they wouldn’t break him, he determined. No begging to be spared when the time came, no crack in the armor of his will. He would take what he knew about his fellow PKK freedom fighters with him to the grave. As leader, there was no other way, the warrior’s ego also dictating he stand an iron pillar, an example of unwavering defiance in the enemy’s face. With the imprisonment of Abdullah Ocalan, the disappearance of his younger brother, Osman—previous heir to power—he hadn’t climbed the ranks of the Workers Party of Kurdistan by showing mercy, either to friend or foe. Why expect anything now but the worst at the hands of a savage, hated enemy? He would die the way he had lived. At worst, he could take comfort not even his death would cripple the dream of a Kurdistan nation.

Muhdal felt the pain dig needles of fire through every nerve ending. For some strange reason, agony seared to mind images of his wife and three children, murdered many years ago by Turk soldiers, leaving him to wonder how much they had suffered before they were beheaded, their bodies dumped in a mass grave with the other villagers. The ringing in his ears, his brain jellied and throbbing, smothered by darkness, and he found himself suddenly drifting away into warm darkness. Muffled by the steel door, the screams of other prisoners, whipped and beaten down the corridor, some of them, he knew, with testicles plugged into generators, echoing the cry of anger and hatred in his heart.

Pain was good, he decided. So was hate.

So was never forgetting.

Focus, he told himself, perhaps the Turk was being truthful. Hold on.

“Hope!” Escape first, then dip his hands in more enemy blood. Perhaps freedom was on the way, but at what price? he wondered. After all, the guards, like many Turks here, he knew, were Boz Kurt, members of a secret netherworld of militants, all of whom were hardly resigned to carry out the Ankara regime’s wishes without personal gain. Their treachery and brutal ways were legendary, even by Turk standards. The Gray Wolves—or so went the mythical nonsense, he knew, fighting to pull thoughts together inside the crucible of his skull—believed the first Turk was suckled by a wolf on the Central Asian steppe. Whether or not the milk of a wild beast spawned a bloodline of ferocious warriors, Muhdal only knew all Turks were devils in human skin. As for the Boz Kurt, they weren’t only considered terrorists by Ankara, but they were also drug traffickers.

Which was why he and fifteen of his fighters had been arrested in the first place.

Revolutions required money to purchase weapons, even loyalty. Briefly he thought back eight months, the Turks catching them asleep, but the question lingered as to how the Turks had found them, slipped so easily into the gorge. Of course, he never expected a trial, a just legal system all but an alien concept in Turkey. His crimes—so the Turks claimed—ranged from murder to drug trafficking, too many, in fact, to count.

Killing the enemy, he believed, was acceptable in the eyes of Allah. So was stealing from Turk thieves and murderers, a holy decree, spoken directly to him from God in dreams, God telling him the spoils of war were to be used to gain an edge against the enemy. How could he, in all good conscience, have stood idly by anyway, watch the Turks use the southeast corner of the country to fatten their own coffers with truck caravans of heroin funneled from Afghanistan, hashish from Lebanon. And when the Ankara regime, faceless butchers who marched their killers out to Anatolia, had declared a campaign of genocide against them generations ago, and soon after the treacherous Brits reneged on their promise to give the Kurds their own country…?