Don Pendleton: Enemies Within

Rankin was set to blow the kitchen door when someone on the inside tripped a charge and blew it outward. The sergeant was quick enough to duck and dodge the flying door, but Malvern wasn’t, grunting as a corner struck his shooting arm and shoulder, spinning him, disarming him and sprawling him supine across the sloping lawn. Rankin triggered a deer slug and pumped the Mossberg’s slide-action to put another in the shotgun’s chamber when the gaping kitchen doorway came alive with muzzle-flashes. Automatic weapons spit full-metal-jacket rounds at the two would-be intruders.

Rankin guessed the shooters had M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons or some other light machine guns on the same pattern. He couldn’t match their cyclic rate of fire with his shotgun. It hardly mattered since the next two slugs doubled him over, nearly disemboweling him.

The sergeant collapsed onto the grass, saw Malvern struggling to rise before another burst sheared off his face and finished him.

Before he died, Rankin rasped into his Bluetooth, “Two down, southeast. Abort if possible.”

* * *

“Abort, my ass!” Captain Larkin broadcast to four dead men, catching a gloomy nod from Corporal Luce, stationed at his side. “We finish it or go down trying.”

“Yes, sir!” Luce answered without hesitation.

“Load an HE round in your launcher,” Larkin ordered, watching as Luce obeyed him with an easy, practiced motion. “No more talk of bringing any subjects in alive.”

“No, sir!” The young man sounded braver than he most likely felt.

“On my mark. Three...two...one...”

They sent both HE rounds hurtling toward the structure’s front windows, aiming for a space the floor plans labeled as its living room. The rounds shattered glass within a split second of each other, vanished into darkness, then exploded with a double flash and clap of man-made thunder that cleared out the window frames and left the front door sagging on its hinges.

“Forward!” Larkin snapped, trusting the corporal to keep pace on his left as he advanced. They only had each other now, and while he couldn’t picture any happy ending to the raid, Larkin was bound to see it through.

It was the only way he knew to soldier, after all.

The light machine guns caught them in converging streams of fire when they were still a dozen yards or so from the house, hot streams of bullets wobbling and crisscrossing in the night.

Larkin heard Luce cry out in pain but didn’t see him fall. By then he was too busy stumbling, going down himself, two shattered legs unable to support his weight for another shambling step. He hit the grass chin-first, surprised it wasn’t softer on impact. Before he had a chance to raise his M-4 and return fire, bullets rippled past and through him, putting out his lights with only time enough to hope that Luce’s end would be as relatively merciful.

* * *

As dogs began to bay and yammer through the neighborhood, two figures left the smoky split-level house and stood over the bodies of their last two kills.

“MPs?” one asked the other.

“Have to be. You see the weapons.”

“Want to search for ID?”

“Screw it. We need to get the hell away from here, right now. Tomorrow is a busy day.”

Chapter One

The Tomb of the Unknowns

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, stood some fifty yards south of the marble monument and waited for the changing of the guard.

The flat-faced monument, begun in 1921, had changed somewhat in shape and style over the years, reaching its present height of ten feet six inches, twelve feet long, and mounted on a base of two hundred cubic feet. In front of it, a US Army soldier, clad in full dress uniform but lacking any rank insignia—to keep him from outranking the “unknowns”—went through his measured paces: twenty-one paces due west along a black mat laid before the tomb, a sharp turn with a pause of twenty-one seconds, then back eastward with another twenty-one paces. At each turn, he switched shoulders with the obsolete but fully functional M-14 he carried, keeping his rifle between the tomb and any visitors, thus demonstrating his ability to deal with any threat against the sleeping dead.

Bolan had lost count of his visits to the monument, and to Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres of rolling, carefully tended greenery established in 1864, presently housing more than four hundred thousand graves of persons from America and eleven other nations. That total did not count the lost “unknowns,” believed to number nearly five thousand.

Bolan had friends buried at Arlington. Some he had served with during active duty as a Green Beret. Others he’d known in passing had gone to their rewards after he’d left the service to begin his one-man war against the Mafia. From there, his War Everlasting had rapidly expanded to consume his life.

He visited the sites to commune, reflect, and speak with the dead. And sometimes, like today, to take a meeting with one of his oldest living friends.

Hal Brognola, a high-ranking official of the Department of Justice, chose meeting places where they could blend in, could avoid public scrutiny and be certain that their words would not be overheard, short of a drone soaring on high.

Bolan could not surmise what the big Fed might have in mind this time. Upon receiving the terse text, with nothing listed but coordinates and time of day, he’d gone online to scan the breaking news in search of incidents that might require his special skills to set things more or less back on an even keel.

He’d found the usual drug busts in Florida and Arizona, cartels fighting for their lives in Mexico, feuding between the Mafia and rival ’Ndràngheta over turf in southern Italy and Western Europe, plus a bevy of always plentiful corruption scandals.

Elsewhere, in the outcast state of North Korea, Kim Jong-un was rattling his long-range missiles, threatening destruction to a world of enemies from his Pyongyang palace. French voters had stopped short of choosing a neo-Nazi as their next prime minister; no problem there. The European Union might or might not be disintegrating, but there was nothing he could do or wanted to do about it either way.

Afghanistan, still occupied by US troops after a grueling eighteen years, continued producing some 93 percent of the world’s non-pharmaceutical-grade opium and heroin, uninterrupted since it was the livelihood of Afghan farmers—and the nation’s avaricious leaders. Next door, Pakistan and India still fought a version of the same old border war they’d waged since 1947 when their British overlords had drawn lines on maps to separate the two and hoped for peace. The Middle East, of course, would always be the Middle East, divided on religious lines, with Arabs raging at the occupation of ancestral lands condemned by the United Nations—not that Israel gave a damn.

A world of woes, but nothing had jumped out to demand Bolan’s attention here and now. He knew Brognola would explain the problem. A glance at his watch told him that explanation should begin in five, six minutes, tops.

Reluctantly he turned his back on the unknowns and scanned the acreage of green with its tidy rows of bright-white marble headstones. Each was inscribed in black with more than sixty approved religious emblems for soldiers of faith, an atomic whirl circling an “A” for atheists, and others bearing military emblems, infinity symbols, landing eagles, sandhill cranes, even pomegranates.

Far off, drawing gradually closer, was a husky figure Bolan recognized instinctively, bringing a twitch to lips that rarely smiled these days.

They’d met the first time during his campaign against Miami mafiosi, then again in Vegas, when they’d nearly joined forces. But Bolan had resisted government entanglement until the wrap-up of his “final mile” against the Mob, ending with his faked death in New York City’s Central Park, the alteration of his game face—not the first—and purging of all his records, just in case his fingerprints surfaced somewhere down the road.