Don Pendleton: Collision Course

“Give me my final release. It is the only thing I ask.”

“What is the code?”

“Give me your word. What is on that flash drive is time sensitive. Open it in time and you’ll have an intelligence coup that could save lives, perhaps as many lives as I’ve destroyed in my hubris. Take too long and the window closes.”

“How do you know I’ll keep my word once you give me the code?” Bolan countered.

“Faith is all I have left. Give me your word and I’ll give you the code.”

Bolan looked at the former analyst. The man looked back at him. Tears made his eyes look weak and shiny in the unforgiving brightness of the lamp. His head shook with his suppressed emotion.

“Please,” the man whispered.

The Executioner looked at the traitor. He nodded once.

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Special thanks and acknowledgment to Nathan Meyer for his contribution to this work.

I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

—Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900

The good must have claws—for the battle of good against evil is always fought tooth and nail.

—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.

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

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Mack Bolan had parked in the shadows under the New Jersey freeway overpass. The low-slung black Honda Prelude had heavily tinted windows and boasted a nitrous-augmented engine. Inside the vehicle the Executioner waited, a cell phone and a silenced Beretta 93-R machine pistol on the seat beside him.

The parking lot was hidden from the major urban arterial by an abandoned factory, its windows broken and graffiti covering its walls in a dozen hues of paint. A sour wind, smelling strongly of the ocean, pushed garbage around the vacant lot.

A scrawny one-eyed dog emerged from the mouth of a secondary alley and trotted across the broken asphalt. It nosed around a refuse pile, then lifted its leg against an overturned garbage can.

Bolan shifted inside the car and the dog’s head came up, the animal wary and feral. It growled low in its throat, then lazily trotted back toward the safety of the alley it had emerged from.

Ten minutes later a silver TrailBlazer with government plates rolled out of the same alley through the chain-link fence and came to a stop beside the Prelude, nose pointed in the opposite direction.

The driver’s window on each car powered down smoothly, and Bolan nodded to the man his old friend Hal Brognola had sent to meet him. The guy was big, with a shaved head and a bristling goatee. Despite the leathers he was wearing, something about the cool appraisal the man gave Bolan screamed “Cop.”

“I’m Danson,” he said in a gravelly voice. “A friend of mine told me to come see you. Said helping you would clean the slate between us. Since I owe the son of a bitch from way back, I came and brought what he asked.”

“What do you have?” Bolan prompted.

Danson lifted a manila envelope from the seat beside him. As he handed it through the open window, Bolan could see the word Hate had been tattooed across the scarred knuckles of the man’s big fist.

The envelope wasn’t very heavy, and Bolan quickly opened the flap to check its contents.

“Robert Scone. Goes by the street name Sideways. Biker thug. Did a stretch in Attica a couple years ago for aggravated assault on his old lady, a dancer named Shayla. Did a pretty good number on her and got three years,” Danson stated.

Bolan grunted and gently shook the contents of the envelope out into his lap. There was a stack of photocopied sheets held together by a paper clip, a police rap sheet from the City of Newark and a blowup of an official mug shot. There was also a pint plastic bowl with a sealed lid. When Bolan held it up he saw the pink of ground hamburger and two horse pills filled with white powder. He looked at Danson.

“Read on,” Danson said. “You’ll figure it out. Anyway, Sideways was connected to the Outlaws motorcycle gang as a prospect member when he went into Attica. Inside he made his bones against the Black Gangsta Disciples. Typical swastika-wearing bullshit.”

Bolan placed the plastic container beside his Beretta and held up the mug shot picture. He let his gaze roam across the photograph, memorizing every detail. His eyes flicked to the information typed beneath the snapshot. Sideways was a big man, six-five and 260 pounds at the time of incarceration. His priors included a DUI, simple assault, several counts of possession of a controlled substance and domestic violence.

“After he made his bones,” Danson continued, “he got serious about his career as a criminal. When he got out, he freelanced as muscle for a couple of the Jersey syndicates, arson for hire, collections, extortion, that sort of thing.”

Bolan nodded and slid the picture to the bottom of the pile of paperwork he held. He scanned down the page until he found the annotation for Scone’s current address. He memorized it.

“The organized-crime squad put some of their confidential informants in his path and started hearing that Sideways was making a rep for himself as a real gunslinger, hijacking freight trucks and teamsters coming out of the Newark airport.”

“They nab him?” Bolan asked.

“Yes and no. A cigarette truck on its way into the city gets nabbed. The Newark police finger our man Sideways and do a takedown on the address I just gave you there.”

“He was holding?”

“No. No cigarettes, nothing to connect him to the heist. Still, it looks like they got him on a parole violation because the team found some crystal meth and a handgun in the house.”