Don Pendleton: Blood Toll

“Uh-uh.” The Hawaiian shook his head. “You want the knife, you have to take it.” Then the giant whipped the kukri underhanded right at the Executioner’s face.

Bolan ducked. The kukri slammed into the wall behind him, handle-first, leaving a dent in the drywall. The Hawaiian was already on the run again, slamming into the fire door fronting the stairwell. Bolan grabbed the kukri and dropped it into his canvas messenger bag, hurrying after the escaping native.

When he rammed open the stairwell door, the first barrage of gunfire rang out. Bolan ducked back as heavy slugs ricocheted in the metal-and-concrete stairwell. The Hawaiian continued to fire blindly up the stairwell.

Bolan pulled out his secure phone and speed-dialed Stony Man Farm. “Barb,” he said quickly, “get in touch with our liaison. Tell her to keep her eyes open for a big Hawaiian, over three hundred pounds. He’s armed and dangerous and we need to stop him before he kills someone.”

The Executioner ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The Cold War isn’t thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn’t sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.

—Richard M. Nixon,

1913–1994

Men with power, seated comfortably in rooms far removed from the battlefield, play their games of brinksmanship believing their opponents will blink first. They are always surprised when the enemy pulls a gun instead of blinking.

—Mack Bolan

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Phil Elmore for his contribution to this work.

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

Epilogue

Mack Bolan slammed the steel hilt of his Cold Steel combat dagger against the back of the Chinese sentry’s head. The guard crumpled without resistance, making a choked moan deep in his throat as he folded. His micro-Uzi fell to the asphalt.

The Executioner checked to make sure he was not merely playing possum, then secured the man’s hands and feet with plastic restraints and dragged him out of sight.

The loading dock of Cheinjong Industrial Supply was located among a cluster of commercial buildings just off Mokauea Street, in the shadow of the Kapalama Military Reservation. Shifting the OD canvas messenger bag slung over his shoulder, Bolan pulled himself up onto the dock before sheathing his knife in the custom Kydex rig on the chest harness of his formfitting blacksuit. The black composite grips of the suppressed Beretta 93-R machine pistol filled his hand as he drew the trusted weapon from its shoulder holster and moved the selector to 3-round burst.

The instructions from Brognola and Stony Man Farm had been clear, the mission seemingly straightforward. Jimmy Han, a federal investigator nominally attached to Brognola’s Justice Department, had been dispatched to investigate suspicious commercial shipments. Cheinjong Industrial Supply had, over the past eighteen months, received numerous shipments of machine parts, electronics and chemicals that could conceivably be used to build everything from bombs to EMP and jamming equipment. Taken separately, the shipments were not noteworthy. As a whole, they added up to a potential security risk.

Han was an experienced field agent, but three days ago he had disappeared. The local authorities had been alerted discreetly, but there was no sign of Han in the local hospitals or morgues, nor could he be located anywhere else in Honolulu. Worse, Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman and his cyberteam at the Farm had turned up links between Cheinjong and a series of holding companies associated with the People’s Republic of China. A new cold war was ratcheting up between the United States and the ChiComs, as Brognola put it. The big Fed’s voice, when he finally contacted Bolan to put him on Han’s trail, had been grim.

“The Man has ordered this information classified at the highest levels,” Brognola had told the Executioner, “so I’m not telling you this. Seventy-two hours ago, a pair of Russian-made, Chinese-operated Sukhoi Su-30MK2 Flanker jets engaged a patrol of Navy Hornets in Taiwanese airspace.”

“Casualties?”

“None,” Brognola said, “but one of our pilots had to eject after his plane and one of the Flankers clipped each other. As far as we know, the Chinese plane landed safely.”

“What’s the fallout?”

“It’s not good. The Chinese are calling it a deliberate act of provocation and talking about withdrawing their diplomatic personnel from American soil.”

“So what’s the connection?” Bolan asked him.

“The timing is suspicious,” Brognola said. “Hours after the incident, Han missed his check-in. We lost touch with him and haven’t been able to locate him since. Aaron and his people have found connections to the highest levels of the Chinese government’s covert-ops groups. There’s something China doesn’t want found—and I think Han was in the right place at the wrong time. That’s what makes this so delicate.”

“So you want me to find out what happened.”

“Barb is working with the locals on my authority,” Brognola told him. “Once she settles down all the egos involved, we’ll have a liaison assigned to you. In the meantime I’ll have Aaron vet whomever the locals assign.”

“That will work.”

“Bring Han out, Striker,” Brognola said, using Bolan’s Stony Man code name. “We need to know what he’s discovered.”

Twelve hours after that phone call, Bolan was infiltrating the Cheinjong Industrial Supply building. Bolan crept through the loading dock and eased open the crash bar of a metal fire door. The access corridor beyond was dark. Unclipping a combat light from a pocket of his blacksuit, Bolan swept the corridor with the powerful light held below the Beretta in a supporting grip. At the end of the hallway, another fire door waited. The soldier paused and listened at the doorway.