The President spoke to the senator. His voice was hushed.
"They want me to go on television, to broadcast worldwide via satellite, and announce that the U.S. will unilaterally withdraw its forces from every allied nation on Earth. They want us to abandon every ally, every commitment. Total surrender."
"Tell them to go straight to hell!"
"At what cost, Senator? They have proved what they can do to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington. We surrender, or else millions of Americans die. That's what we face."
"But we spend billions on defense!" agonized the senator. "We cannot surrender without a fight!"
"So we will fight them," the President said. "And it will be merciless. We cannot honor the Geneva Convention. We cannot respect national borders. We will have ourselves a dirty war!"
MACK BOLAN
The Executioner
#39 The New War
#40 Double Crossfire
#41 The Violent Streets
#42 The Iranian Hit
#43 Return to Vietnam
#44 Terrorist Summit
#45 Paramilitary Plot
#46 Bloodsport
First edition June 1983
First published in Australia February 1984
ISBN 0-373-61401-2
Special thanks and acknowledgment to
Dick Stivers for his contributions to this work.
Copyright © 1982 by Worldwide Library.
Philippine copyright 1982, Australian copyright 1982,
New Zealand copyright 1983.
Cover illustration copyright (c): 1982 by Gil Cohen.
Scanned by CrazyAl 2012
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 118 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, NSW. All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
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"Who has to take a life
stands alone
on the edge of creation.
—Adele Wiseman
"I am Phoenix, from the Greek for crimson.
purple, all the colors of blood ...
akin to phonos, which means murder,
and theinein, to keep away. A paradox,
yeah. Like the mind and the sword:
opposites that are in truth one.
Such an enigma is at the root of my creation."
—Mack Bolan a.k.a. Col. John Phoenix
To the President of the United States
My Testament
NINE. OF THE BEST MEN IN THE WORLD may die in this hour.
And I will have sent them to their deaths.
The enormity of that responsibility shakes me to the core of my being.
To you I am known as John Phoenix. Colonel John Phoenix, Retired—which only tells you I am a soldier.
The real story of who I am, and who my men are, is buried deeper—in my true identity, Mack Bolan.
When I am in combat, I see the same look flash across the face of each and every person I confront, one stricken glance that always asks the same question: what in hell is this?
The answer to that silent scream begins in war.
Ours would be a sad society indeed if the army was everyone's road—but it was mine. I became a soldier, a marksman, and an armorer. It was in Vietnam that I became enlightened: I discovered I had certain qualities that were not shared by many others. I found a place for myself behind a sniper's scope.
I became a weapon for my nation's army.
Sniping is personal. You know your target close-up. I was one of the few who could do the job day in and day out.
Only because it had to be done could I bear the pain of doing it.
Then came the news about my family. Devoured by Mafia loan sharks, the sanctity of his life despoiled, my father turned a gun on his own family and then on himself.
After that, I could not return to a war ten thousand miles away. My guts were being chewed right here at home. I engaged the most immediate enemy. I took on the vermin responsible for my family's catastrophe. The Mafia.
Mack Bolan, Mack the Bastard, The Executioner—all faces of the same warrior, from whom the jackals scattered in fear.
I did not expect to win that war, nor even to withdraw with honor. In the minds of the vermin, I was already dead. In the minds of the police, too. And perhaps in my own mind as well. My intent was to take as many of them with me as I could. That simple.
Two thousand homicides later, I was done.
One of the first major battles in that war nearly proved my undoing. It was a trial by fire, a fire that cleansed all the deepest avenues of Hell, for it raged internally as well as externally. It raised the question again: what in hell is the apparition called The Executioner?
There were ten of us, the Death Squad, every man a veteran who could not ignore his country's enemy within. We crushed the enemy that time, but only I, Hermann Schwarz and Rosario Blancanales survived.
The death of seven others burned my soul. It was only then that I learned, in the crucible of mortal combat, to let my friends die.
Today I fight with nine warriors again. Able Team and Phoenix Force and G-Force. They live large. They live hard. They live!
So I have another squad now. And I have another weapon: Stony Man Farm, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is no ordinary farm. It is my command center for these nine very dangerous men. It is a stronghold of extreme complexity and formidable power, and it is run by the finest and bravest woman I will ever know, April Rose.
Yeah, I think of the farm all the time. . .
For the record, the Stony Man operation was set up for me by Hal Brognola. Only Hal was big enough to dream up such a drastic—and successful—strategy. A strategy that gave me a new name and brought me, through much war, to these deadly waters off Cuba.
Hal was top covert operations man back in the first days of my bloodletting against crime, and he secretly fed me logistical support. It was he who saw that I was self-destructing. It was he who needed me for this bigger war. It was Hal who connected me with the President of the United States. I owe Hal.
The base at Stony Man is kept humming night and day, every month, every year, by people who share a compulsion to execute their duty that is the equal of my own.
Aaron "The Bear" Kurtzman is one of the best. He stations himself at the computer console and cracks a whip that can shiver up the cybernetic spine of every organization that has joined my war: the National Security Council, the Justice Department, the CIA, the DIA.
From this matrix of superior mind and fire, polished to perfection by Andrzej Konzaki, my master weapon smith, I launch my missions.
In some instances it is true that some of my warriors were once weapons without a target. But now they have all found their true aim in life: Justice by fire.
Let me tell you about these warriors.
"Gadgets" Schwarz is Able Team's wizard in the hellfire, a genius who came of age as a counter intelligence agent in Nam. Now he steers me straight as we zap across the crackling grid of real-world electronics.
"Politician" Blancanales is my wisdom man. He's Able Team's senior member whose Hispanic charm conceals an iron will.
Carl Lyons, Able Team's wildest hotshot, is an ex-LAPD cop who, for the sake of his country and the future of democracy, is one scary, scary guy.
Then there is Phoenix Force. Five more guys whom I may soon send to their deaths.
Phoenix Force joins me now at the peak of its legend. Its men strike with the violence of an exploding universe striking against infinity, for no glory other than the daily salvation of mankind.
Their senior member is Yakov Katzenelenbogen. Katz is the Stern Gang and the Mossad and the very wrath of God all rolled into one.
Gary Manning is a calm Canadian who can ignite the heavens when I tell him to. As in dynamite.
Rafael Encizo, the Cuban, is a survivor of the Bay of Pigs and had been looking to serve a wildcat force such as the Stony Man operation ever since. Now he does.
David McCarter is SAS. I need say no more, except that this Englishman has all the gall of Churchill and Field Marshal Montgomery beneath that fancy new London hairstyle.
Keio Ohara is my samurai, a Japanese kid six feet tall, unusual in every way. At the martial arts, he is like the name says: a knockout.
G-Force is Jack Grimaldi. He works on his own, for he has to operate his kind of machinery independently of the Farm. His kind of machinery is all kinds of planes. Jack and I go way back. Jack was a pilot for the Mob until The Executioner crossed his psychic flight path. I counselled him to change his ways. He did. He became king of the sky.
I love these men. These men fight for justice. They would fight without me. And now, I believe I am sending them to their deaths.
I want it known, and always honored, that these men have commanded themselves. Each man has lived and fought to the death as I have. Each of my warriors has stood alone on the edge of creation.
I act now under my own command, in these forbidden waters, in order to extend the limits of the possible. To hunt down and exterminate soulless monsters who, in their every imaginable horror and vileness, are the absolute obverse of my warriors.
My foes have lost any sense of soul. They killed their souls when they violated the sacredness of life.
The devouring has begun again. Death is everywhere. I am going to stop it, now, and I guess I'll have to seek your permission later.
Sir, I am a weapon that works in concert with other weapons: human weapons. Honor them for me always, please.
And I confess: I do what must be done. I am content with that. Now you know the history.
Pray for us. Soon the battle begins.
Mack Bolan
Off the coast of Cuba
1
Czechoslovakia
Monday
11:45 a.m.
(1045 Greenwich mean time)
EAST OF THE CZECHOSLOVAKIAN TOWN Of Hanusovce, only one hundred twenty-five kilometres from the border of the Soviet Union, the man slowed his bicycle to a stop. He flipped down the kickstand.
His eyes swept the farming valley around him. A kilometre away, a worker guided a horse-drawn plow, turning over a green field touched with the yellows and reds of spring wild flowers to expose rich, dark earth. The worker completed one line, turned the horse and plow to cross the field again. In other fields, wind patterns moved across the/virgin grass and the wild flowers like ocean waves. Trees swayed. Beyond the fields of the valley, a forest covered the hills. Smoke rose from a village hidden by trees.
Vyashesla Fedorenko pulled off his bright red sweater and draped it over the handlebars of his rented bike. Wandering into the roadside weeds, he waited, staring out at the fields. From time to time he looked to the east, where the road disappeared over a low hill. He saw no cars.
A man of average height and wiry muscles, wearing cheap slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt, Fedorenko might have been mistaken for a Czech on holiday from the factories except for the deep tan on his face and forearms. Squinting into the snow-glare of Afghan desolation and the furnace-brilliance of Yemeni deserts had cut deep lines into his narrow face.
Now, his eyes red-veined with the fatigue of three days jet travel and waiting in international terminals, he watched the road for a car. He glanced at the cheap Hungarian watch he wore on his wrist. He tapped it. Taking a Texas Instruments digital chronometer from his pocket, he corrected the time of the Hungarian watch, then put the American wristwatch back in his pocket.
A Skoda sedan came over the hill. Fedorenko turned away, but looked back as the car approached. He recognized the driver, the driver recognized him. Striding to the edge of the road, he gave the driver a salute as the Skoda rattled to a halt.
The middle-aged driver, a pink-faced Russian with sagging jowls, wearing an overcoat over his huge gut, struggled from the small car.
"You have the tan of a movie star!" the fat driver addressed Fedorenko in Russian. "Travel agrees with you."
Fedorenko cut off the small talk with a bitter laugh. "Fifteen airports in seventy-one hours. Such travel is not a pleasure. Here." He gave the fat driver a cassette tape.
The Russian looked at the cassette, read the label in accented English. "The Beatles? Magical Mystery—"
"I have encoded the changes since my last report. New gangs, their leaders, the numbers of fighters, their countries of origin. Liquidated informers. Changes in the shipment routes. Movements of weapons. The Directorate must have all that information."
"And the attack?"
Fedorenko closed his eyes, intoned like a saint describing a vision. "The Hydra moves.. . . A thousand fighters, the terror of a thousand nameless fighters . . . striking alone, striking in gangs, striking in armies . . . armies of silent death. . . Death coming with the wind . . . The cities of America are dead places, mausoleums to the Fall of Empire. . ."
"Colonel, you are a poet!"
"No." Fedorenko's black eyes turned to the other Russian. "A killer. Go. Take that tape. The Directorate must have the information. After Hydra, all of the Palestinians, all the Cubans, all the fighters must be destroyed."
"But there will be no failure. Without total victory—"
"Don't talk like a commissar! Total victory is impossible. You think the Americans have no security forces? But if we destroy one city, two cities, they will surrender. They will withdraw their international forces. All the people of the world will know. That will be our victory."
"Then why destroy the fighters? They will be heroes."
"They are only cheap weapons," Fedorenko sneered. "They are insects, lice on the face of my dream. After Hydra, they must die, or else they will betray me—us, our country. You hear my words? Liquidate all of them."
With a quick salute, the fat Russian pocketed the tape and returned to the car. Revving the old Skoda's engine, the Russian turned the car and drove away in the direction he had come, toward the border of the Soviet Union.
Alone again, Fedorenko stood at the roadside, his fists clenched at his sides, his back ramrod straight as if he stood on parade. He closed his eyes to the quiet farms and forested hills, focused on an image seething in the darkness of his mind, a vision of a plain of skulls, of an army of men and women rising from the skulls, howling, screaming, their necks and heads becoming tangled snakes that weaved and knotted, and whose scorpion-fang teeth glistened with poison. . .
2
Idaho
Tuesday
11:30 a.m.
(1930 Greenwich mean time)
THERE WAS A YELLOW SMEAR ON the forest.
On the southeast slope of the mountains, the yellow glowed with the early-morning light, as if autumn had colored the trees. But Nat Blair, high over the Salmon River Mountains in a war-surplus Huey helicopter, knew that pines and Douglas firs and hemlocks did not change co
lors with the seasons. He looked for smoke or flame but saw only the splotch of unnatural yellow set amid the undulating green slopes of the mountains. He pointed it out to his co-pilot.
"Hey, Dean. Look at that."
"What?"
"That yellow patch. The whole mountainside."
Peter Dean peered at the unnatural splotch through binoculars. He passed the binoculars to Blair. "Looks like some kind of blight. A fungus maybe."
"Wasn't there last week. What's that look like, a quarter-mile across? If we have a disease that moves that fast, the company's got a big problem."
"Maybe they dumped some Silvex down there." "Why would they do that? Besides, the Feds would have the company in court by now."
"I say it looks like a slop job of Silvex."
Blair watched the yellowed pines pass below him. He flicked on the switch of his radio. "Northwest International helicopter shuttle Charlie Three. Charlie Three to Center. Calling Center. . . "
"Center. You got a problem, Nat?"
"Negative. No problem. We're at coordinates—" he read off a series of numbers indicating their position on the maps of the corporation's pulp and lumber forest "—and it looks like somebody did one hell of a Silvex job out here."
"That ain't possible. Don't even say it, friend. We'd have two thousand Forest Service investigators on our backs, them and those hippies—"
"Then we got a disease killing the trees. It's all died out down there. I'm circling it, taking a look. Over."
Watching the boughs of the pines, Blair eased the Huey down. The pines and ferns had a grayish-yellow color. Spots of black stained some branches. Blair saw nothing green.
Rotor wind whipped yellow forest debris. Dead needles and cones fell from the pines in sheets of yellow. Single needles and flecks of leaves stuck to the helicopter's Plexiglas. The skids touched the granite slab.
Dean snapped off his safety harness, then slammed open the co-pilot’s door. Gripping the frame, he stepped down onto the skid.
Bits of dead vegetation swirled into the cockpit.
Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine Page 1