Don Pendleton - Face Of Terror

The man’s high-pitched voice threatened to shatter the eardrums of everyone in the Learjet. “You fill a suitcase with old magazines and think we will not open it before we release the woman?”

“Well, Moe,” Bolan said, holding the mike up to his mouth again, “it was all I could think of to do. We didn’t have a million dollars to give you.” Now was the moment of truth. The woman would live or die.

“You have not heard the last from us,” Moe screamed. “And the blood of this young woman is on your hands!”

The radio suddenly went silent.

Bolan saw a woman wearing a red dress—her hands and feet tied together—being shoved out of the Cessna just below them.

“Parachute!” he yelled at the top of his voice as he snapped open his seat belt.

With the unopened parachute clenched in his fist, Bolan never even broke stride as he raced out the door and into the open air thousands of feet above the earth.

The Executioner ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Jerry VanCook for his contribution to this work.

What is left when honor is lost?

—Publilius Syrus: Sententiae 1st century B.C.

There is no greater dishonor than when a soldier turns traitor. I will make sure those traitors cannot win.

—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.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Epilogue

Susan McDonald could not have been happier.

As she stood proudly behind her shelf at the teller’s window, she felt the hard granite press lightly against her swelling abdomen. The baby—ultrasound images had already assured her husband and her that it was a boy—was kicking lightly. Susan’s doctor had warned her that soon he’d be kicking like a professional soccer player, that he’d wake her up at night and make her jump in the middle of sentences.

The baby was almost the only thing she could think of these days. Almost. But the other thing was too ghastly to think about, and so unlikely to happen at her branch of the First Federal Bank that she easily pushed it to the back of her mind.

Frank Dutton, the loan officer in charge of this branch office, walked to the front door, where several customers waited to conduct their early-morning banking. Frank selected a key from the large ring he’d produced from his pocket, unlocked the door, then held it open as the customers filed inside.

“Good morning, Mabel. Hello, Tim. Hey, Charlie, how’s the book coming?”

Frank knew every regular customer by name, which was one of the reasons the First Federal Bank’s outpost on South Western had more customers, and did more business, than any of the other branches.

Susan looked down the row of smiling women’s faces at the other tellers’ windows. Most were blond and all were beautiful. That was another reason the customers—at least the males—never seemed to switch banks.

The customer Frank had called Charlie limped toward Susan, leaning on his cane. He had a white beard beneath his well-worn brown fedora, and a tie-dyed T-shirt bearing a picture of Janis Joplin riding a motorcycle covered his chest. Susan knew he was a veteran of the Vietnam War, a former cop and still taught self-defense clinics on occasion. He’d recently taken a medical retirement from the police department because arthritis had set into almost every joint he had—most of which had been broken or dislocated at one time or another during his life of adventure. Now he wrote articles for magazines and was working on a book about his experiences in Southeast Asia.

Susan’s mind flashed back to the one problem that even her baby couldn’t force from her mind, and she knew the sight of Charlie limping forward had forced it to her consciousness. A rash of violent bank robberies had plagued almost all of the major cities surrounding Chicago. And it appeared to be the work of the same gang. The police suspected that the robbers were actually members of an Arabic terrorist cell. Any people inside the bank during the robberies who showed even the slightest sign of resistance were immediately murdered.

Charlie dropped a checkbook on the counter and began endorsing several checks. “Morning, Susie,” he greeted. He passed the checks and deposit slips through the hole at the bottom of the glass that separated them, and was about to speak when the front door suddenly burst into flying shards of glass.

Everyone inside the bank froze.

Susan watched in horror as, one by one, five men dressed in multicolored Army camou outfits with black ski masks covering their faces crunched over the glass inside the bank.

Susan and the others were still glued into position as Charlie produced a silver-colored gun from beneath his T-shirt and turned to face the robbers. He got off three quick shots—all of which looked like they’d hit their targets in the chest by the robbers’ reactions—before another of the men turned some kind of machine gun on Charlie and shot him three times. One of the bullets made the elderly customer drop his pistol, but he suddenly pulled a thin sword out of his cane and staggered toward the men in the Army shirts and pants.

It took only one more round to drop Charlie to the floor.

Susan screamed, which made the other tellers scream. Then the loan officers and customers began screaming, too.

The five robbers were trying to shout over the shrieks in some kind of foreign language. It was probably Arabic, Susan thought. She was about to drop down to her knees behind the counter when one of the men switched to heavily accented English. “Do not move! If you do as I say, no one else will be harmed!”

Susan’s eyes darted back to the three men Charlie had shot, and she saw that they were still on their feet. Bulletproof vests, she thought. She remembered that some robbers in California had worn them a few years ago, and the police had had a terrible time trying to stop them.