Don Pendleton: Final Judgment

JUDGMENT DAY

When neo-Nazis seize a U.S. courthouse and demand the release of their leader, Mack Bolan is called to go in under the radar and eliminate the gunmen. But before he can finish the job, the WWII Nazi escapes. With hostages.

Bolan knows that more innocent blood will be shed unless he can take out the neo-Nazis—every last one. And speed is of the essence, as the war criminal has picked the leader of a holocaust remembrance group as his new target. This time there will be no escape. The Executioner is judge and jury, and he’s ready to deliver his own form of justice.

Claymore mines had been stashed in the stairwell

But Bolan was prepared for them. He skirted the stairs until the banister was at chest height, then hopped over the railing, well out of the effective kill zone of the explosives. The balcony was clear. A set of double doors took him to an anteroom.

The sentry stationed there was pressed against the wall, opposite the door. As the terrorist leveled his shotgun, Bolan swiveled, bringing up the M4.

The shotgun roared, the impact slamming into Bolan’s gut like a hammer blow. Air rushed from his lungs and he went down, landing on his back, hard.

Then all he could see was the barrel of the shotgun. The neo-Nazi racked the pump action. “Bye-bye, asshole.”

Final Judgment

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The rifle…has no moral stature. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.

—John Dean “Jeff” Cooper

1920–2006

Every man confronted with the need to correct a terrible wrong—to strike back at those who’ve taken his blood, destroyed his life—must choose. He can choose the path of revenge or he can choose the path of justice.

—Mack Bolan

THE

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 com-mand 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 Phil Elmore 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

Epilogue

Chapter 1

Mack Bolan chopped the sentry in the throat with the edge of his hand. The neo-Nazi, clad in camouflage fatigues, made choking, gurgling noises as he collapsed to his knees, his eyes wide. The plea on his face was obvious.

Bolan smashed his elbow in and down. The sentry collapsed in a tortured heap on the floor of the stairwell. The man still known to a select few as the Executioner deftly plucked a Kalashnikov rifle from the neo-Nazi’s grip, popped the cover and removed the bolt. He tossed the latter down the steps and left the disabled weapon with the unconscious man—but not before zip-tying the sentry’s hands and feet and running two layers of black gaffer tape across the man’s mouth.

Then Bolan waited.

Few men could be truly still when they needed to be. Mack Bolan was a master, and now he waited to see if the noise of his covert insertion had alerted anyone else. The access door he had used to gain entry to the District of Columbia courthouse had been guarded from without as well as by the sentry he had just removed, but the terrorists were expecting a SWAT incursion or some other force to attack en masse. They weren’t prepared for a single man, because in their minds one armed man wasn’t a threat.

They were wrong.

Bolan carried his standard complement of weaponry over his combat blacksuit and attached to his web gear. His suppressed and custom-tuned Beretta 93-R machine pistol rode in the shoulder holster under his left arm; his .44 Magnum Desert Eagle pistol rode in his waistband behind his right hip, snug in a Kydex friction-fit scabbard. On his web gear, inverted for a fast draw, was a combat dagger with a tapered, rubber-coated handle and an upswept, razor-sharp blade. The knife was the length of Bolan’s forearm.

Across his chest he wore a canvas war bag bearing more munitions and combat items, while slung on his body in a single-point harness was a heavily modified M-4 carbine. The cut-down assault rifle bore red-dot optics, and an adapted M-203 grenade launcher was slung beneath its barrel. It was also capable of full-automatic fire, not just 3-round bursts, thanks to the tender ministrations of John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Stony Man Farm’s armorer. Not for the first time it occurred to Bolan that, were he ever to cut ties with the Farm and the Sensitive Operations Group, he would genuinely miss the toys.

It was Hal Brognola, director of SOG, who had dispatched the Executioner on this mission. The call, scrambled through Bolan’s secure satellite-capable smartphone, held an edge of urgency that immediately triggered the soldier’s combat instincts.

“Striker,” Brognola had said, using Bolan’s code name, “our justice system is under attack.”

This was a sensitive point for the big Fed, for Brognola operated under the auspices of the Justice Department. Bolan knew his old friend would take very seriously any threat to the system he and the counterterror operatives of Stony Man Farm worked so hard to protect.

“I’m listening, Hal,” Bolan had said.

“Klaus Reinhardt Nitzche,” Brognola said, practically spitting each word. “Heard of him?”

“That’s the old Nazi concentration camp guard they just caught in Buenos Aires, isn’t it?”

“Nitzche was more than just a guard,” Brognola said. “He was the provisional camp commander of Schlechterwald, one of the more obscure but vile death camps established in the waning days of World War II. According to records recovered after the camp’s liberation, Nitzche assassinated the camp’s SS leader and assumed his place because Nitzche believed the SS was too soft on the prisoners. He remained in place until Hitler’s suicide, disappearing sometime during the chaos surrounding the end of the war and the collapse of Nazi Germany.”