Don Pendleton: Blood Tide

Bolan intended to sink the rowboat. Holding the two-handed sword like a spear he bent his legs and pushed off hard against the ocean floor. He erupted upward and arrowed for the bottom of the rowboat.

As Bolan closed in, he rammed the sword upward with all of his strength. The blade punched through the thin wood. Bolan inverted himself, putting both feet against the bottom for leverage, and wrenched the blade sideways. The aged planking cracked and split.

Yaqoob was leaning over the side and stabbing at Bolan with his own blade. The Executioner roared with effort and ripped the ancient Damascus steel free. The effort drove Bolan down into the depths as the spade harpooned for him. Bolan heard the crack as the keel snapped under human weight.

Daylight drew a ragged incandescent line across the perforated bottom of the rowboat as its spine broke.

#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

#322 Time Bomb

#323 Soft Target

#324 Terminal Zone

#325 Edge of Hell

#326 Blood Tide

Blood Tide

Don Pendleton

The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one.

—T.E. Lawrence, 1888–1935

No man has the right to harm innocent people, even in the name of his god. I will continue the fight against murderous fanatics until I meet my maker.

—Mack Bolan

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

Malay Archipelago

The killers were coming. Their outrigger canoes slid through the water beneath the starless, storm-warning-black South Pacific sky, knifing through whitecaps toward the yacht.

Mack Bolan touched his throat mike. “Contact.”

“Striker!” Barbara Price’s voice was urgent in Bolan’s earpiece. The mission controller back in Virginia was clearly unhappy. “Twenty-two minutes until satellite window! We do not have visual! Repeat! We do not have you!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bolan said.

The enemy showed up clearly in tones of green and gray in the Executioner’s night-vision goggles. They were half naked, wearing turbans and sarongs and festooned with weapons.

“They have us.”

“Striker, be advised strategic withdrawal recommended.”

The premonsoon winds moaned through the rigging of Bolan’s yacht. The craft lay anchored thirty yards from the beach. The tiny atoll was little more than a crescent of palm trees jutting a few feet above sea level. The canoes aimed for the mouth of the lagoon to cut off the yacht from the open ocean. The paddlers did not need night-vision equipment to acquire their target. The yacht’s dim deck lights marked it as a pool of radiance in the velvet dark of the shallow harbor.

Bolan checked the loads in his weapon system as the jaws of the trap closed. He was a sitting duck.

And that was just the way the Executioner wanted it.

“Noted, Control. Standby,” he whispered.

The killers would be in boarding range in less than a minute.

Across the galley Bolan’s wife checked her weapon.

Marcie “The Mouse” Mei was barely five feet tall, and the mass of highly modified, blackened steel and plastic she was toting appeared impossibly large in her tiny hands. She manipulated the weapon’s controls with practiced ease. If an Olympic gymnast and a pixie had spawned a warchild in the Philippines, Marcie Mei would be it. Only her snub nose and generous mouth showed beneath her night-vision goggles.

The CIA field agent’s big smile flashed at Bolan in the dark of the hold. “Platoon strength,” she said as she flicked off the safeties on her weapon system. “Closing fast.”

“Roger that.” Bolan spoke low. “Scott?”

Escotto Clellande nodded from the other side of the cabin. In comparison, the M-4 carbine looked like a toy in the hulking ex-Philippine special operation commando’s hands. “Yeah, I make it about forty hostiles. Heavily armed.” Scott grunted to himself with relief. “No support weapons visible.”