Don Pendleton - Extreme Justice

Blanca Herrera advised Bolan, as if she thought he might be unaware of the pursuit.

“I see them,” he replied. “Hang on.”

Almost before she could react to his warning, they cleared the alley and he cranked the Ford into the sharpest left-hand turn he could manage, startling a pair of jaywalkers who squealed and ran for safety on the sidewalk. Gunfire echoed from the alley at his back, even before the first chase car emerged. The pedestrians went prone.

Bolan was making all the haste he dared on residential streets, watching the sidelines where his own headlights and those closing behind him cast distorted, moving shadows. Any one of them might mask another late-night rambler, possibly a child, and Bolan had to balance that thought with the threat of death that rode his bumper. At the same time, if he drove too fast and lost control, smashed up the Ford, he and his passengers were facing sudden death, and the failure of his mission.

“Could you distract them for me?” he asked Herrera.

“How?”

“Shoot back!” the Executioner said.

The Executioner ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

—Pierre Corneille,

1606–1684

Horace

Sometimes we have to match evil with evil. It’s a fact, and I’m prepared to pay the toll.

—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

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Crooked Island, Florida

June 14

Armand Casale rose from the midnight surf, water streaming from the neoprene wet suit that covered his athletic body like a second skin. He spit out the mouthpiece of his scuba breathing apparatus and reached back with his left hand to interrupt the flow of oxygen. Leaving his face mask snug in place to spare his eyes from dripping saltwater, Casale shed his swim fins, hooked them to his belt and crossed the narrow strip of moonlit beach with long, determined strides.

He couldn’t help the moon, but a mad sprint across pale sand to reach the tree line would only invite the notice of the guards.

When he reached the trees without a siren going off or shouting men rushing out to cover him with automatic weapons, Casale reckoned he was halfway home. The hardest bit was still ahead, of course, but other members of his team had worried that he wouldn’t even survive the trip ashore.

Casale knew what he was doing. That was why he’d come alone, against the odds, instead of dragging half a dozen shooters with him like some kind of ragtag army launching an amphibious invasion.

Done right, it was a one-man job.

And if he failed, why take the others down with him?

His target lay a hundred yards inland. The small two-bedroom house would’ve sold for seven figures if it had been offered for sale. A buyer would’ve paid not only for the proximity to the ocean but also for the isolation, which was rare indeed wherever sand met surf around the Sunshine State.

The property was not for sale, however. Hadn’t been since Uncle Sam had snapped it up during World War II for naval exercises. More recently, the Justice Department maintained the property and used it as an outpost of the WITSEC program.

Witness Security, that was.

Casale didn’t know how much his boss had paid for information regarding the location of the Crooked Island safehouse, and he didn’t care. He had his orders, and he meant to execute the plan without a hitch.

Four guards, at least, and one primary target. Casale was authorized to kill them all, if necessary, and to hell with any heat resulting from the deaths of federal agents.

It was perfect.

Casale wasn’t sure exactly how his adversaries would be armed. The Smith & Wesson .40-caliber had been standard issue for the FBI since 1990-something. Shotguns were more than likely, though Casale couldn’t rule out lightweight automatic weapons.

Never mind.

Casale was prepared for anything. In lieu of backup, he was carrying a Spectre submachine gun and accessories inside an airtight plastic bag. The weapon measured only fourteen inches with its shoulder stock retracted, twenty-two if he attached the fat suppressor to its threaded muzzle. Fifty-round four-column magazines gave the Spectre an ammo capacity surpassing any other SMG, while its cyclic rate of 850 rounds per minute bested even the classic Heckler & Koch MP-5.

The Spectre was Casale’s last resort, however. He would hold it in reserve, in case the plan started to fall apart.

His two primary weapons were a customized Walther P-38 pistol, also fitted with a suppressor and hand-loaded subsonic rounds, and a brand-new toy that dangled in a scabbard on Casale’s belt.

He had only used the WASP injector knife once before on a human being—call it a field test—and the results had been dramatic. The WASP carried a 12-gram cartridge of CO2 gas inside its handle, triggered at the touch of a button through a tube in its 5.5-inch blade of razor-edged surgical steel. Upon release, forty cubic inches of gas were injected into the target’s flesh at minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit, expanding to basketball size and instantly freezing soft tissue on contact.

The WASP was created as a self-defense weapon for divers confronted by sharks. Injection of the freezing gas not only killed the shark, but also caused it to rise at dangerous speed, bursting open as it reached the surface and distracting other predators while the diver escaped, forgotten.

The knife retailed for six hundred dollars, but Casale’s hadn’t cost him anything. One of Don Romano’s thieves had stolen a case of them back in July, and Casale had appropriated two for himself, with enough gas cartridges to see him through a busy year. He had tried his new toy on a homeless man in San Francisco, two weeks earlier. Police were still puzzling over the case, while tabloid journalists beat the bushes for satanic cultists or black-market-organ harvesters.