At best, his "victory" against the Mafia had been a temporary one, but at the time he had been grateful just for that. Brognola had arranged a secret pardon for the Executioner, conditional upon his "death" and subsequent "rebirth" as Colonel Phoenix, spearhead of the SOG's new war on terrorism. Given all the evidence of daily headlines, it had seemed the thing to do, another angle of attack against the savages who preyed on humanity around the globe. It was another war devoid of any possibility of final victory, but he had known that going in, and Bolan had approached the problem with his eyes wide open, knowing he could fight a holding action. But in the end…
There was no end of course. No end to terrorism, as there was no end to syndicated crime. He might as well have tried to stop an avalanche with a plastic pail and shovel, but the ultimate impossibility of a decisive win didn't intimidate the Executioner. His war wasn't a futile effort. One man could make a difference, and if he saved a single life, undid a single rotten scheme before they cut him down, then he had done enough. Sometimes it was enough to make your stand regardless of the final outcome. Others might be moved to stand by the example of a single sacrifice, and Bolan knew that his crusade had altered other lives — some for the better, some for worse.
It would not do to think about the dead just now, not with another confrontation looming on the horizon. Concentration on the fallen was the first step in defeatist thinking, and he knew that frame of mind could get him killed. The Executioner wasn't afraid of death — had been prepared for it from the beginning of his private war — but neither did he court the Reaper needlessly. The soldier knew that he would need a mental edge for the assignment that awaited him, and he wouldn't allow preoccupation with the past to dull that edge.
Time to concentrate on here and now, he thought, his steps already turning back in the direction of the ranch house. By this time tomorrow he would be among the enemy, two thousand miles from Stony Man. Two thousand miles from home?
Not anymore. As Bolan scanned the grounds, he felt a certain bittersweet nostalgia, tempered with the barest trace of longing, but the farm was no more home to Bolan now than Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he had been born and spent his childhood, where he had buried his family. Home is where the heart resides, according to the poets, and Mack Bolan's heart was on the firing line, committed to the struggle that had chosen him so long ago. There might be fleeting sanctuaries in the hell-grounds, but he knew there could be no final resting place while he survived. His destiny was written on the wind, in battle smoke.
War everlasting with no holds barred, no quarter asked or given. No retreat and no surrender. War to the knife, and the knife to its hilt. Mack Bolan's war was to the death, and if, inevitably, that must spell his own destruction, he was ready.
Someday.
But not tonight.
The sun had disappeared while Bolan prowled the grounds alone, replaced by winking stars and a moon that fell just short of being full. He walked by moonlight, comfortable with the darkness, conscious of the fact that he was doubtless being scrutinized by sentries, television cameras and electronic sensors. Kurtzman or his staff would know the soldier's every move while Bolan roamed the grounds, but he didn't begrudge them their security. It was a necessary fact of life for stationary warriors, minimal insurance that the sun would rise again for all of them tomorrow.
Bolan let himself into the farmhouse, and the door locked automatically behind him. Every guest in residence and member of the staff possessed a key, which never left the grounds; they would be counted in the morning prior to departure, and a missing key would bring the bloodhounds out in force. However trivial it seemed, the key check was a symptom of the necessary paranoia that was part of life at Stony Man. The house crew, like Mack Bolan, lived within a world where one mistake could get you killed; the only difference was that Kurtzman's team had no real combat stretch, no place to run.
He climbed the stairs, turned left, then right, to reach his room. The others might be in the dining room or den below, but Bolan wasn't feeling social at the moment. Sometimes on the eve of mortal combat, it felt good to be alone.
He hadn't bothered locking the bedroom door; it opened at his touch, and Bolan left the lights off as he padded toward the bathroom for a shower prior to turning in. He couldn't wash the smell of death away, of course — it was a part of him by now, exuded from his pores — but showering would help him to relax. He turned the water up as hot as he could stand it and stood beneath the scalding spray until the pent-up steam began to threaten suffocation. Then he cut off the hot water and switched back to cold, which raised gooseflesh on his arms and chest. When he was shivering, he killed the shower, stepped outside and pulled a towel down from the rack.
A rustling sound from the direction of the bedroom froze him in his tracks, the towel still dangling from one hand. He blinked away a couple of droplets that were trickling into his eyes. The bathroom lights were on, the bedroom in darkness, and the Executioner felt suddenly exposed, intensely vulnerable.
Bolan dropped the towel and lunged for the light switch in a fluid motion that took him through the doorway, ending in a combat crouch beside the bedroom chest of drawers. His eyes would need another moment to adjust to the darkness, if he had the time. Moonlight filtering through the curtains enabled him to make out traces of a shape beneath the rumpled blankets of his bed.
"I hope you're not about to shoot me," Barbara Price informed him from the bed.
He straightened slowly, and the tingling that raced along his nerve ends now was unrelated to the icy shower or his momentary fright. "I wouldn't dream of it," he said.
"I'm sorry if I startled you."
"I'll live."
"I hope so." Silence spun between them for a moment, finally broken by a voice that demonstrated equal parts passion and embarrassment. "You really ought to be in bed."
"My thoughts exactly."
In the time it took for him to cross the room and slip into bed beside her, Bolan made his mind up that it wasn't necessarily the best idea to spend the eve of battle in a solitary contemplation of potential death. Sometimes it was enough to live the moment, share it with a willing comrade and forget about tomorrow.
Sometimes, like now.
10
"That slob-ass bastard! Didn't he learn anything from Pommeroy? Goddamn it, if he didn't have the common sense to keep himself alive this close to zero hour, I hope he rots in hell!"
The white-haired officer sat back, endeavored to relax and spent a moment smoothing wrinkles from the decorated tunic of his uniform. The outburst had been therapeutic in its way, releasing tensions that had threatened to evoke a screaming migraine. Now he felt the rage subsiding, bleeding slowly out of him as if a drain had opened somewhere in his psyche, letting anger, disappointment and assorted other mental garbage sluice away.
"Forget about that now," the general ordered. More than thirty years of military service had conditioned Michael John McNerney to command others. He was good at it; more to the point, he loved it. "We can run this drill shorthanded if we have to, but you might as well be on the lookout for replacements."
"Yes, sir." Major Anthony Falcone knew his place, and clearly realized that his commanding officer was in no mood for arguments this morning. "We have some replacements coming in tomorrow afternoon, including Special Forces. I'll put Rafferty to work as soon as they arrive."
"Be careful, Major. I don't want another foul-up like the mess with Charbonneau."
"I've got it covered, sir."
"I hope so, son, for your sake. Be on notice that this operation will proceed on schedule, regardless of any obstacles. Am I clear on that?"
"Yes, sir."
"We will proceed on schedule if I have to take the field myself with you beside me. Clear?"
"Yes, sir, I understand." The major's strained expression indicated that he understood McNerney's words all too well. "On schedule."
"No slob-ass bastard's going to prevent us from achieving our objecti
ve, Major. Not if every mother's son goes down in the attempt. We will succeed, and I will not be fucked around by anyone."
"No, sir."
McNerney's jaw muscles rippled when he thought of how he had been fucked around by experts in the past. But he had taken all he could stomach. From the day of his enlistment, it had been the same: the fucking spineless politicians shook their heads and mumbled into microphones on radio or television, trying to convince the populace that this or that war was, in fact, "unwinnable," a "quagmire," sapping the American vitality. Somewhere along the line, McNerney's enemies had been converted into "freedom fighters," Communist guerrillas openly compared to Washington and Lincoln in the left-wing press. The mass of voters — spineless slob-ass bastards — ate it up and howled for more, demanding cease-fires or troop withdrawals when the fighting men who risked their lives for God and country were within a few short yards of final victory.
McNerney had observed the syndrome first in the Korean War as a recruit of seventeen. He was a private when the yellow hordes came screaming up the slopes of Pork Chop Hill. When they retreated for the last time, broken, he had been among a handful of survivors, and the CO had commissioned him as first lieutenant on the spot. General MacArthur had confirmed his battlefield commission when he had pinned the Silver Star on Mike McNerney's uniform.
The general had made a little speech about the Communist threat to freedom, and he had allowed as how it would require more soldiers like McNerney to contain that threat and eliminate it from the earth. They would have done it, too, if Harry Truman and his crew of goddamned pinks in Washington had let MacArthur do his business. After Truman had relieved MacArthur of command, the war had been as good as lost. And for Mike McNerney's beloved America, it had been the first time in a hundred and eighty years.
McNerney hadn't been the only soldier who was bitter after Panmunjom. Enough of them had still believed in victory to see potential in a first lieutenant who had earned his bars on Pork Chop Hill. Promotions had come with startling rapidity: he was a captain nine months after cease-fire, a major six months later and a colonel two years after that. He had kept his nose clean and had waited for the day when he would have another opportunity to face the godless Communists in mortal combat.
There had been fleeting hope in 1952 when Truman had decided not to run for another term. General MacArthur, now retired, had been McNerney's candidate for President that year, but all the slob-ass liberals had pooled their strength against him, calling him a would-be dictator, comparing him to greaseballs like Peron in Argentina. It had broken Doug, the lies and slanders that were thrown at him in '52, but Eisenhower was a soldier, too, and any fighting man was better than a candy-assed civilian in the Oval Office. So McNerney had expected decent things from Ike.
So much for expectations. Under Eisenhower, Cuba had been lost to Castro. Truman had allowed the goddamned Soviets to steal the atom bomb, but it was Ike who had let them take the lead in space, outdistancing America with Sputnik and their cosmonauts. The frigging U-2 incident had been a national disgrace, and it was symptomatic of an era when Americans had lived in fear of Khrushchev's threat to bury them alive. While Eisenhower had used the army to protect black children in the schools of Little Rock, the Russians had massacred Hungarians and secretly supported Ho Chi Minh in his campaign against the French in Indochina. Revolution was a firestorm, circling the world, imperiling the very way of life Americans had come to take for granted through the years.
One benefit had come to Mike McNerney in the Eisenhower years. He had been named a brigadier in 1960 and posted to Berlin, where he could stare across the frigging wall and see the fruits of socialism every day. Sometimes there would be scattered gunfire and a body hanging on the wire, another bid for liberty snuffed out while the Americans stood back like Pontius Pilate, scrubbing at their hands.
In 1960 General McNerney had supported Richard Nixon. It had been common knowledge in the Pentagon that Nixon had had a plan for liberating Cuba, and his mini-brawl with Khrushchev had impressed McNerney all to hell. There had been rumors of irregularities in Nixon's campaign fund, some hints of underworld associations, but McNerney didn't give a shit if Nixon paid his taxes or went drinking with Italian jailbirds on weekends. Back then, as now, he'd only been interested in turning back the tide of communism before it drowned the nation that he loved. When Nixon had lost to Kennedy, General McNerney had settled in to suffer through the years of Camelot.
The Kennedys had gone ahead with Nixon's plans for Cuba… to a point. The exile army had been armed and trained by Special Forces and the CIA, but at the crucial moment, after they were on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs, the White House had denied them vital air support. Survivors of the bungled raid had rotted in Castro's prisons while the Oval Office had hedged around the question, trying to preserve deniability, admitting to involvement in the raid when it had become apparent everyone had known the truth for months. The Bay of Pigs had been another in the string of shameful episodes that had finally convinced McNerney that his country, proud America, was very likely doomed.
The pamphlet incident had followed naturally, although McNerney hadn't been braced for the fury it had evoked in Washington. With Russian missiles planted ninety miles from Florida and brushfire revolutions blazing all around the globe, McNerney had seen it as his duty to provide some education for the soldiers under his command. Countless groups had emerged in the early 1960s, born in self-defense against the President's advance toward socialism, and their literature had been readily available.
McNerney had sampled widely from the John Birch Society, the Christian Anticommunist Crusade, the Minutemen and the Sons of Paul Revere. He had stayed away from outfits like the Klan, which had already earned a place on the subversive list, even though he had privately agreed with their positions on the issues. His discretion had only proved that Mike McNerney was a reasonable man — a moderate, in fact. The furor over distribution of "extremist literature" had taken him completely by surprise, and it had very nearly ruined his career. At the same time, though, what had begun as a disaster had finally proved to be the most important moment of the general's career.
McNerney had been posted briefly to the Pentagon before his transfer to the south, and he had been approached by fellow officers who had shared his view of world affairs, specifically the role of the United States in stopping communism before it had a chance to devour the world. He had learned that they were organized and had been discussing means and options since before the Bay of Pigs. They had been opposed to Kennedy's pathetic stance in Vietnam and his concentration on the cause of civil rights when everybody had known the Reds were backing Martin Luther King. A change was coming, and America would one day soon regain its primacy among the other nations of the world, but she wouldn't achieve that goal without some sacrifice.
The sacrifices had begun in Dallas, and while Mike McNerney had been surprised by Kennedy's assassination, he hadn't shed any tears. The man had been a gigolo, at best; at worst, he'd been a dupe of leftist forces bent on the destruction of America. There might be certain questions of propriety regarding Lyndon Johnson, but there was no doubt about the Texan's grit and his willingness to tackle dirty jobs and see them through.
The dirty job in 1964 was Vietnam, and it had been too long deferred already. After Tonkin and Pleiku, when Johnson had committed ground troops to the fighting, General McNerney was among the first to volunteer for Asian duty. Friends in Washington had helped arrange the transfer, and for seven years McNerney had done everything within his power to win a war devoid of clear-cut enemies and battle lines. Again, as in Korea, spineless politicians had lacked the courage to declare a state of war, but when your ass was on the line and hanging out a mile, you had no doubts about precisely what was happening. If Calley and his boys had gotten somewhat overzealous at My Lai, you had to understand the enemy was everywhere, concealed behind each passive face. You never knew for sure until they pitched a hand grenade or came out shooting, and
by then it was too late.
They might have pulled it off in Vietnam but for damned civilian interference. His health in ruins, Lyndon Johnson had begun to weaken after Tet, and his successor, Richard Nixon, had proven to be no more consistent. Every escalation of the bombing had been immediately followed by a cease-fire, which Americans had observed without cooperation from the enemy. With Watergate and ruination looming just around the corner, Nixon had set out to earn himself a reputation as a statesman, visiting the goddamned Communists in Moscow and Peking, negotiating trade agreements when he should have been at home, lining up preemptive strikes against the enemy. That crap about a "peace with honor" had been aimed at pacifying voters, but it hadn't cut a bit of ice with fighting men in Vietnam. McNerney had lingered in Saigon until the bitter end, attempting to convince Westmoreland — anyone — that they should stand and fight.
In retrospect, it was undoubtedly his telex to the White House that had done McNerney in. He didn't feel that he had overstepped himself in speaking generally of sabotage and treason; what else do you call it when a nation's leader tramples on the interests of his people, selling lives for votes in a pathetic bid for reelection?
It had been the telex, almost certainly, that had gotten him posted to Honduras, but McNerney hadn't minded in the long run. Pausing briefly at the Pentagon to get his final orders, he had learned that certain officers agreed with him in principle, and while they wouldn't jeopardize their stars by speaking out, they had some concrete strategies in mind. A man like Mike McNerney could be useful to them in Honduras, the way things were shaping up in South America. Allende's revolution of the ballot box in Chile had been the overture for general upheaval in the Latin countries, and Americans committed to the preservation of democracy would have to act, regardless of the President's reluctance to involve himself.
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