Don Pendleton: Suicide Highway

Once more, Bolan had proved his willingness to take a bullet for an ally

The Land Rover lurched, and with the odd plunk of a bullet striking the hardened skin of the big off-road vehicle, they were charging away from the battle scene.

The enemy had set up an ambush. It had taken alertness, luck, shooting skill and bald audacity to escape the attack.

But not before putting a few dozen into his enemies first.

The Land Rover charged over the broken road, escaping to let its occupants fight another day.

But Bolan knew the worrisome truth.

MACK BOLAN®

The Executioner

#246 Blood of the Earth

#247 Black Dawn Rising

#248 Rolling Death

#249 Shadow Target

#250 Warning Shot

#251 Kill Radius

#252 Death Line

#253 Risk Factor

#254 Chill Effect

#255 War Bird

#256 Point of Impact

#257 Precision Play

#258 Target Lock

#259 Nightfire

#260 Dayhunt

#261 Dawnkill

#262 Trigger Point

#263 Skysniper

#264 Iron Fist

#265 Freedom Force

#266 Ultimate Price

#267 Invisible Invader

#268 Shattered Trust

#269 Shifting Shadows

#270 Judgment Day

#271 Cyberhunt

#272 Stealth Striker

#273 UForce

#274 Rogue Target

#275 Crossed Borders

#276 Leviathan

#277 Dirty Mission

#278 Triple Reverse

#279 Fire Wind

#280 Fear Rally

#281 Blood Stone

#282 Jungle Conflict

#283 Ring of Retaliation

#284 Devil’s Army

#285 Final Strike

#286 Armageddon Exit

#287 Rogue Warrior

#288 Arctic Blast

#289 Vendetta Force

#290 Pursued

#291 Blood Trade

#292 Savage Game

#293 Death Merchants

#294 Scorpion Rising

#295 Hostile Alliance

#296 Nuclear Game

#297 Deadly Pursuit

#298 Final Play

#299 Dangerous Encounter

#300 Warrior’s Requiem

#301 Blast Radius

#302 Shadow Search

#303 Sea of Terror

#304 Soviet Specter

#305 Point Position

#306 Mercy Mission

#307 Hard Pursuit

#308 Into the Fire

#309 Flames of Fury

#310 Killing Heat

#311 Night of the Knives

#312 Death Gamble

#313 Lockdown

#314 Lethal Payload

#315 Agent of Peril

#316 Poison Justice

#317 Hour of Judgment

#318 Code of Resistance

#319 Entry Point

#320 Exit Code

#321 Suicide Highway

Suicide Highway

Don Pendleton

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment.

—William Cowper 1731–1800

The Task

Hatred and vengeance are my eternal companions, not because I choose to give in to them, but because I oppose them. When my body falls and my soul is seized, hatred and vengeance will have one less wolf at their heels.

—Mack Bolan

To our soldiers still standing guard and giving their all around the world. Come home safe to your families.

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

Sofia DeLarroque shook her head. The wounds from an AK-47 couldn’t have been more obvious if the shooter had circled each ragged hole in black marker and wrote “AK hit” with an arrow pointing to it.

The entry wounds were big enough to stick a finger into, and the bullets had cut completely through the body, their sharp steel cores plowing through muscle and bone like a boat hull through water, no deflection. Thankfully, there was little fragmentation or shrapnel. Truly dangerous bullets hit flesh and tore themselves apart, spinning missiles off the main track of the wound path. As it was, the child she was working on was bleeding badly, and she was running short on gauze to apply pressure bandages.

Welcome to day 216, she reminded herself.

Two hundred sixteen days in Afghanistan.

The American government claimed to have decisively beaten the supporters of the Taliban. So why did Americans and Afghans and international relief workers still come under attack on a daily basis?

Sofia wiped her brow, aware of the smear of gore she left on her platinum blond hair and her smooth, porcelain-like forehead. She could have been a model if she’d chosen to stay in France. She was tall, leggy, with just enough fullness of figure to give her deadly curves in all the right places. Crystal blue eyes that people said were perfect for seducing the camera instead were busy trying to evaluate how to best keep a psychopath’s victim stable long enough to make it to a surgical table.

Same stuff. Different country.

Ethiopia.

Palestine.

Afghanistan.

All the lands she’d chosen held the same things in common. Thugs and violence causing pain and suffering to the weak and helpless.

The thought flashed across her mind like lightning, and she tried to put aside the mental image of other children, the same age as this one, screaming and twisting terribly as bullets ripped into them.

Shame crushed Sofia as she gripped the girl’s hand, looking into her big, watery brown eyes. Tears glistened on the girl’s olive cheeks as thin, weak lips moved noiselessly.

“It’s all right,” Sofia whispered. She stroked a few strands of thick, black hair from the girl’s forehead, fighting off the memories that had been dogging her heels for exactly two hundred thirty-eight days and nine hours.

Images of grim murderers dressed head-to-toe in black, sweeping automatic weapons across fleeing, unarmed refugees in a Palestinian camp. The sound of cloth tearing echoed the distant sounds of bullet-spitting slaying machines as bodies were swept off their feet and flung cruelly, mercilessly into bloody rags.

Her body tensed against the sound of the shredding fabric, trying to fight off the memories of the murders she’d witnessed.

Murders she’d witnessed while huddled under the wreckage of a tent, flames licking all around her, as she muffled the face of a child against her bosom. Around them, shadows charged and darted, backlit by flames.

There was no mistaking it.

The men were on a mission of retribution. Only days before, a restaurant had been blown to hell by a suicide bomber. One madman’s act taking almost two-dozen lives and injuring tens more. A temporary cease-fire ended with rock throwing and riots and an assault on the refugee camp at Shafeeq.

When asked later she claimed not to have seen any faces.

She hadn’t been convincing enough because a salvo of gunshots only barely missed her. The UN pulled her and the other workers out as quickly as they could, finding a new territory for them to work.

It was unlikely anti-Palestinian forces would find refuge and assistance in Afghanistan.

Sofia held the girl’s hand as the doctor checked on her anesthesia’s progress.

It was unlikely that the hard-faced men she saw in the shadowy camp would follow her halfway across a continent, but she still sweated with terror each day, more intensely in recent times.

“THIS IS THE FIRST ONE we’ve even gotten anything on,” Greb Steiner said softly as he threaded the sound suppressor onto the muzzle of his Beretta. Olsen Rhodin often wondered at the mannerisms of the hard-core soldier, a man whose face and hands betrayed the violence of his life in a road map of scar tissue. He never raised his voice and rarely expressed anger or hostility. At times, Rhodin wondered if Steiner lived in a constant state of sadness, his brow bent with guilt.