Don Pendleton: Path To War

“You’re insane!” Kairoush shouted.

“I’ve never been more stone-cold. The next ones are for real,” the Executioner vowed. “I want to know about the North Koreans. I want to know where the backpack nuke is, or how I can get to it. Or I shoot to kill.”

“I will talk!”

And he did, spinning a tale so sordid its magnitude was difficult to absorb. Bolan was turning toward Dawkins when autofire rang out, the soldier flinching as he glimpsed a ragged line of holes dancing across the terrorist’s chest.

Black-clad, armored storm troops surged into the warehouse.

“Freeze! Lose the guns!”

Bolan found himself staring at Commander Tachjine, the muzzle of the Moroccan’s machine gun pointed at his chest.

Inferno

Ambush

Blood Strike

Killpoint

Vendetta

Stalk Line

Omega Game

Shock Tactic

Showdown

Precision Kill

Jungle Law

Dead Center

Tooth and Claw

Thermal Strike

Day of the Vulture

Flames of Wrath

High Aggression

Code of Bushido

Terror Spin

Judgment in Stone

Rage for Justice

Rebels and Hostiles

Ultimate Game

Blood Feud

Renegade Force

Retribution

Initiation

Cloud of Death

Termination Point

Hellfire Strike

Code of Conflict

Vengeance

Executive Action

Killsport

Conflagration

Storm Front

War Season

Evil Alliance

Scorched Earth

Deception

Destiny’s Hour

Power of the Lance

A Dying Evil

Deep Treachery

War Load

Sworn Enemies

Dark Truth

Breakaway

Blood and Sand

Caged

Sleepers

Strike and Retrieve

Age of War

Line of Control

Breached

Retaliation

Pressure Point

Silent Running

Stolen Arrows

Zero Option

Predator Paradise

Circle of Deception

Devil’s Bargain

False Front

Lethal Tribute

Season of Slaughter

Point of Betrayal

Ballistic Force

Renegade

Survival Reflex

Path to War

Don Pendleton

Do not seek evil gains; evil gains are the equivalent of disaster.

—Hesiod

c.700 B.C.

Man makes his own choices. He chooses to either travel the righteous path, or to go the way of Animal Man. Without punishment for conscious and willful evil acts, Animal Man wins. My job is to level the playing field.

—Mack Bolan

To the unswerving dedication of the men and women of the Department of Justice

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

EPILOGUE

Kinbuvu Gaungalat considered the monster holed up in the apartment, and images of predators on the high savage end of the food chain leaped to mind. The former UNITA colonel may have staked his surveillance point from the dark end of an alley in Old Madrid, somewhere deep in the maze of cobbled streets choked with adobe apartment buildings, plazas, restaurants, bars, monasteries and convents, but numerous visions of feeding frenzies seemed to burn, alive and thrashing, the longer he stared at the wrought-iron balcony, nursing hatred, craving revenge.

And there it came, in living color, it seemed, as he felt the fire searing out from the core of his soul.

He envisioned the lioness on the savanna, her jaws clamped on the throat of a zebra as she took it down in a blast of dust and spewing blood. Then he pictured the crocodile, erupting out of brown waters in a great spume as its razor-sharp teeth clamped the neck of a gazelle that had fallen behind the pack in the river crossing, dragging it beneath the surface, drowning it in a death roll, the beast’s throat filling with the blood of its victim before the real devouring began. He imagined next the white shark, its massive dark shape boiling, a torpedo with teeth the size of celery stalks, as it surged up from the depths of the waters around South Africa’s Seal Island, a crimson cloud spraying the air before the creature splashed down to consume its meal in a frothy scarlet maelstrom.

Ultimate predators, driven by primal instinct to consume flesh to survive.

All of which, he decided, was simply the beautiful brutality of nature sorting out the food chain, the larger, more aggressive and dangerous animals ruling supreme, deciding, for the most part, what would live, what would fall prey to fill its belly. Something always, it seemed to him, had to die so something could live. And that held especially true, he concluded, in the world from where he came.

Only the predator he wished to kill had never displayed even a scintilla of such courage, much less any skill in those death hunts of wild animals. No, the monster in hiding was a mass murder, he knew, a coward who wallowed in the lap of obscene luxury while others risked their lives to carry out his homicidal dictates, swell his coffers with money earned on the blood of those he oppressed.

That in mind, Gaungalat reached into the dark vault of the gruesome past. For a moment he felt a stab of pain and bitter remorse as he weighed the awful truth about the living hell that was Angola. Like many of his countrymen he was Christian, a Roman Catholic, in fact, his ancestors converted by European missionaries who had passed on the teachings of their faith and their Bible down through the generations. Thus, recalling the Book of Revelation, he couldn’t help but picture the former Portuguese colony as a vast and eternal plague of death, war, starvation and pestilence, delivered unto all—in spirit, if nothing else, as far as he was concerned—a terrifying preview of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But had he not played a small part in the madness of genocide, razing villages where rival MPLA rebels were suspected of hiding large weapons caches, only to slaughter their women and children? he wondered. Had he not turned a blind eye when his soldiers vented anger and hatred through orgies of rape, torture and mutilation on helpless victims? Had he not, as overlord of the diamond mines of Cuango, personally flayed with bullwhip the impoverished miners and near to death?

He had, in time, aborted the course of the Four Horsemen, at least in his private corner of command and control, but not before dipping his hands into figurative rivers of the blood of the innocent.

So, then, was he any better than the monster he had come here to slay?

Oh, but he was, he told himself as he grasped the mini-Uzi hung in webbed nylon rigging beneath his long coat. Had he not turned his back on his old ways, rebelled against the monster, and nearly at the cost of his own life? Was he not sickened for years after by the mere thought of how he could have done what he did for so long to so many? Was it not all he could have done, in feverish dark nights of the soul, weeping alone, begging the God of his understanding for mercy and forgiveness, to have not taken his own life?

He fingered the compact subgun with his left hand, then shucked the other side of his coat higher up, feeling the empty space where his right arm should have been, grinding his teeth at the memory of the amputation, delivered to him for dereliction of duty, or so according to the monster. In his own war-torn nation he knew he wouldn’t present himself such an aberration, where, he heard, it was estimated by the Red Cross and World Health Organization that almost forty percent of eleven million Angolans were missing a limb—or limbs—either blown off in a land estimated to be planted with twenty-five million mines and other boobytraps, or hacked off.