Terror had seized the free world in a grip of fear, filling its cities with the paralyzing hopelessness that only hostages can know, scarring the countryside with toxic despoliation that could last for millennia.
This fire cauterized that poisoned reality.
Mack Bolan moved to Yakov Katzenelenbogen's side, away from Phoenix Force and Able Team who stood or sat in a long line in the glow of the fire, their weary faces shining from the crackling light, their weapons held at ease at last.
Bolan knelt on one knee and spoke softly to the seated Yakov. Phoenix Force's senior member worked on a mechanical problem inside his prosthetic arm.
Yakov handed a small screwdriver to Bolan. "I guess it's grit in one of the drives," he said wearily. "Can you see it?"
Bolan peered into an open access plate within the artificial forearm. Yakov rested the arm on Bolan's knee, and Bolan began working to clear the grit from a small nylon cam. The Stony Man commander talked to Yakov in a husky voice.
"Sometimes, my good friend," he said, "when men are thrown together, and every one of them is strong in his own way, it happens that each gets weaker where another is strong, each becomes dependent on his teammates to provide the missing abilities and character traits. But this is not true of Able Team, and it is not true of Phoenix Force. For that I thank you, because I don't have the words to thank all of these men in turn. You must tell that I thank them with my life."
Bolan paused, carefully put a tiny screw under his tongue so as not to lose it while he worked.
Yakov looked at his commander's profile, then at the flames that boiled into black smoke, then over to his partners on the hillside.
"It is we who thank you," he said slowly. "For you know a vital secret. The effectiveness of any army is that a few strategically gifted minds can move many men. You allow us to be as gifted as we are able, and because of that you move the earth."
Mack's eyes were distant, either absorbed in fiddling with Yakov's arm or looking inward at deeper events. "I know only this about leadership," he confessed to the Israeli veteran. "I know that a soldier is critically wounded in his soul when he obeys an order that he does not find just. He will do it, but he will not think it right—he will simply think it is more right than the disintegration of the command system. "Tell me, Yakov. Are my orders just?"
Mack Bolan's blue eyes flickered with reflected flame and shards of blue sky as he looked directly at Yakov, at the man who had lost his only son in a battle that he, the father, had led.
"All over the world," answered the older man, "children are born who will never get to do their best. They will either be killed by cowards who want : to hurt their parents, or they will be made into slaves , if their parents give in to the terrorists. It is only your orders that will give them their chance. Their only chance."
Bolan finished reassembling the curved metal gates of Yakov's killing arm, and rose to stand upright beneath the drifting black and gray smoke of the fire. , "Then may those children grow to be hard," Bolan . said, "and may they be ready for competition, and may they win."
He looked down at the man in the red beret. Yakov was staring into the dying fire, his eyes thousands of years—as many miles away.
Bolan strolled over to Blancanales, nodding to each Phoenix Force warrior as he passed, locking eyes with theirs. McCarter and Manning were both confined by their injuries, unable to move much except their faces, but they responded to Mack's look with all the spirit they could muster. McCarter's long hair blew from his face in the hot breeze. Encizo and Keio stood above them as if to protect them from anything that moved.
Blancanales was the most grievously wounded. He lay on his back at the far end of the line of men, his head propped up on a satchel. At his side sat Carl Lyons and Gadgets Schwarz.
Gadgets spoke as Bolan approached. "I've been remembering something, Mack."
"What's that?" Bolan asked genially, standing over Blancanales and looking at him attentively. "Remember when you called Pol and me at the Able agency, before the terrorist wars began?" "Yeah, I do."
"All this time we forgot to give you a message. Your call to arms took us just a few seconds to digest. Then we told Pol's sister of our decision. 'We're going to help the man,' we told her. 'You run the detective agency.' And all Toni said was to take care, and to give a message to you."
The narcotic-numbed voice of Blancanales broke in.
"She said, 'Give him my love,'" murmured the Stony warrior. Despite his wound and his dulled wits, Blancanales forced his eyes to convey the message with the brightest clarity.
Mack Bolan ran his hand through his hair. He could not show his face to the graying Chicano hero.
He had two things to say as his gaze rested on the burning base, and on the forbidden waters beyond. He said them to himself.
"We have survived again," he whispered. "By God, there is a future."
About The Author
The story of Don Pendleton's success reads much like the fiction he has created. A native of Arkansas, Pendleton left home at fourteen to join the navy. "I didn't falsify any documents, I simply told the recruiters I was 18 and they signed me up." He saw action in World War II—in the North Atlantic, North Africa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa—and, later, in Korea. After war service, he completed his high-school equivalency and worked as a railroad telegrapher, air-traffic controller and as an executive in the aerospace industry.
Married and the father of six, Pendleton describes himself as a self-taught writer who is "simply a storyteller, an entertainer who hopes to enthral with visions of the reader's own innate greatness."
The exploits of his hero, Mack Bolan, have sold more than 30 million copies in North America and 65 million worldwide, having been translated into 12 languages and sold in 125 countries.
There are times when a man will make his stand for what is right. To be truly alive, you must be ready to die. More difficult still, there are times when you have to be willing to kill. I am both ready to die and willing to kill.
—Mack Bolan, a.k.a. Col. John Phoenix, THE EXECUTIONER
Bolan earned the name The Executioner for his successful handling of dangerous and delicate sniper missions behind enemy lines. Thus began the incredible one-man crusade that brought him to his peak of action as John Phoenix, the free world's top anti-terrorist, a fighter for our freedom from fear. The measure of public support that The Executioner has earned is unique. In a time when people often feel helpless, without control over their lives, the vision of a being such as Mack Bolan who is the essence of independent man is a powerful and appealing one, vastly successful in terms of reader enjoyment and loyalty. Bolan is not a superman; he is a warrior who achieves magnificent results in extreme situations, and he achieves them in an entirely realistic manner. He remains at the far forefront of all heroic-adventure writing.
"Mack Bolan's struggle is a personification of the struggle of collective mankind from the dawn of time. He is a consecration of the life principle. He proclaims that life is meaningful, that the world is important, that it does matter what happens here—that universal goals are being shaped on this cosmic cinder called Earth.
"The guy cares. The whole world is Bolan's family. He reacts to the destructive principle inherent in the human situation, and he's fighting it. The goons have rushed in waving guns, intent on raping, looting, pillaging, destroying. And he is blowing their damn heads off, period, end of philosophy. And that is a high and heroic idea."
—Don Pendleton
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