Don Pendleton: The Killing Rule

Mack Bolan ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Chuck Rogers for his contribution to this work.

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

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, cat footed through the London fog. He’d already picked up a tail, which was all right with him. Bolan was spoiling for a fight this evening, anyway. In fact, it was the number-one item on his agenda. He turned up the collar of his peacoat and pulled his watch cap low over his forehead against the chill, and moved toward his target.

London was one of the most cosmopolitan cities on Earth. Nearly every immigrant group on the planet, including their organized crime and terrorist syndicates, had an enclave in the city. Since ancient times, the Irish had been one of the first and foremost.

The Irish Republican Army was on Bolan’s plate this night.

Pub Claddagh was his destination.

It was a well-known IRA meet-and-greet watering hole. Not surprisingly, Pub Claddagh was well used to visits by the English bobbies, inspectors from Scotland Yard and undercover agents from MI-5. It had also received visits from two CIA field agents in the past three months, both of whom had wound up floating dead in the Thames River with severe contusions, multiple broken bones and a .223-caliber bullet through the backs of their heads. Ballistics had shown that the bullets had come from AR-18 assault rifles, one of the IRA’s weapons of choice—one they were so pleased with they had come to nickname the AR-18 “Widowmaker.” Both CIA men had left widows behind.

Now Pub Claddagh was about to have its first visit from the Executioner.

But first Bolan was going to have to get to the door. The two men tailing him were making no more attempts at stealth. Their boots thudded on the cobblestones as they briskly caught up with him. An Irish brogue broke through the thick fog blanketing the street. “Hey! Yank!”

Bolan turned to his opponents. They were large men and heavily built. One wore his hair cropped short, the other had shaved his head. Their lumpish faces, poorly set broken noses, scarred brows and cauliflower ears only added to the “goon” effect. They looked like archetypal British soccer hooligans, only they spoke with Irish accents that could be cut with a knife. The skinhead leaned forward, jutting a jaw you could break a croquet mallet on.

“And where d’you think you’re going?”

Bolan spit casually on the pavement between them. “What’s it to you, Paddy?”

“Paddy!” The skinhead grinned happily. “D’you hear that, Liam?”

“Oh, I do, Shane.” Liam smiled like a shark. “A bold boy, this one.”

Both men were dressed in Team Ireland football jerseys voluminous enough to hide some significant weapons. Bolan suspected this was to be a beating, albeit a brutal one, rather than an assassination or a kidnapping.

“If you two are looking to beg a fiver, bugger off. If you’re looking to get buggered, you’ve got each other.”

Shane laughed delightedly. The American was being very obliging.

Liam’s eyes narrowed slightly. He was a predator, but he sensed something was wrong. The American wasn’t belligerent or filled with drunken defiance. He was showing no fear whatsoever, and his burning blue eyes were disturbing even in the dim light. Liam folded his arms across his thick chest and tsked sadly, still confident in his and his partner’s control of the situation. That was his first and last mistake.

Bolan took the opportunity to kick Shane in the shin.

During the early years of the Cold War, the OSS and other intelligence agencies had issued shoes with steel toecaps for crippling opponents in sudden struggles. Such modifications couldn’t make it through today’s airport X-ray or metal detector screenings, but Bolan had the modern equivalent made out of polycarbonate Lexan that had the tensile strength of industrial-grade cast zinc. They weren’t quite as strong as steel, but then again neither was Shane’s tibia. The bone cracked with an audible click noise.

Shane let out an amazingly high-pitched scream for a man of his size.

Liam had made the unforgivable mistake of crossing his arms and posturing when he should have been attacking. He unfolded his arms with alacrity, but he was already behind the curve.

Bolan’s hand blurred into motion, and he slapped Liam. But rather than slapping the man across the face, the soldier slapped into it. He cupped his palm as he hit Liam to create an air pocket, and the blow sounded like a gunshot. The cupped air concentrated the blow and drove the force into Liam’s Gasserian ganglion, where the trigeminal nerves carrying information from the eyes, ears and face met. Tears geysered out of Liam’s eyes and blood burst from his nose from the force of the blow. The trauma beneath the surface was far more severe. The Gasserian ganglion had a direct route to the brain, and by crushing the nerve bundle Bolan’s blow had reproduced the symptoms of facial neuralgia, which many medical resources described as the most terrible pain a human being was capable of experiencing.

Liam dropped to his knees, clawing at his face, his screams slurred by his malfunctioning jaw. Within heartbeats he collapsed and went fetal in blissful unconsciousness. Shane was still hopping around on one foot, screaming and clutching his fractured left shin, so Bolan stepped in and fractured his right.

Shane toppled, howling, to the cobbles.

Bolan took their wallets and removed their ID cards before moving on up the street. Above a green-painted oaken door thick enough for a medieval castle hung a classic tin pub sign. On it was painted a golden claddagh symbol, a heart topped by a crown and held by two hands. The heart symbolized love, the hands friendship and the crown loyalty. Bolan pushed open the heavy door and the smells of cigarette smoke and shepherd’s pie washed over him. Warmth radiated from a glowing fireplace. The interior was classic pub. The wood was ancient dark varnished oak, crushed red-velvet upholstery covered the walls and the furniture and gleaming brass was everywhere. There were about thirty patrons in the pub; most sat at tables or in booths. A few sat at the bar watching the football scores on the television.

Bolan pulled off his watch cap and walked up to the bar. The bartender was an immense man in formal bartender attire. His red hair was cut close to his skull and was the same shade as his short beard and mustache. He looked like a jolly Irish Santa. He had a lazy eye, and one eye looked at Bolan while the other one appeared to be taking note of the scorers on the television above the bar. He smiled at Bolan benignly. “What’ll it be, mate?”

Bolan ran his gaze across the taps. “Half and half.”

The bartender nodded wisely and filled a pint glass half full of Harp lager. He filled the rest of the glass with Guinness stout poured down the side of the glass over a spoon to create two distinct layers of light and dark beer. He topped it with a flourish that left a four-leaf clover shape in the foamy head. Bolan sipped his beer and acknowledged its perfect execution with a grin. He reached into his coat and produced pictures of the two dead CIA agents. “You seen either of these two in the past couple of months?”