NARCO SOLUTION
Africa’s first narco-state, Guinea-Bissau, has become a powerful transhipment point for Colombian and Mexican cartels. But when the country’s traffickers work their way into the U.S. and DEA officers are killed trying to take them down, the President decides it’s time to put an end to the illicit trade.
Mack Bolan is unable to legally confront the drug kingpin of the country, so his mission is to go in under the radar and clean house. Striking the drug factories one by one and dodging bullets at every turn, Bolan soon learns that everyone—from the corrupt leaders in the military to the police department—is part of the drug ring. There’s only one way justice can be served, and the Executioner is determined to be the last man standing.
Diallo’s soldiers mounted a desperate assault
They came on like a banzai charge of old, shouting and with weapons a-blazing. Mansaré’s people were fighting for their lives at odds of three to one.
Bolan hurled frag grenades against the charging line. The cops blasted through the ranks, but they were taking hits, too. The men who’d stretched prone on the ground to fire their autorifles whittled down the other side, until silence finally reigned.
One of the “dead” men stirred behind Mansaré, rising on his elbows to extend a pistol. The shot from Bolan’s FAL drilled into the back-shooter’s skull, drawing all eyes to the soldier’s position.
The Executioner rose slowly. “We need to talk.”
Mack Bolan
The Executioner
#342 DOUBLE PLAY
#343 BORDER WAR
#344 PRIMAL LAW
#345 ORANGE ALERT
#346 VIGILANTE RUN
#347 DRAGON’S DEN
#348 CARNAGE CODE
#349 FIRESTORM
#350 VOLATILE AGENT
#351 HELL NIGHT
#352 KILLING TRADE
#353 BLACK DEATH REPRISE
#354 AMBUSH FORCE
#355 OUTBACK ASSAULT
#356 DEFENSE BREACH
#357 EXTREME JUSTICE
#358 BLOOD TOLL
#359 DESPERATE PASSAGE
#360 MISSION TO BURMA
#361 FINAL RESORT
#362 PATRIOT ACTS
#363 FACE OF TERROR
#364 HOSTILE ODDS
#365 COLLISION COURSE
#366 PELE’S FIRE
#367 LOOSE CANNON
#368 CRISIS NATION
#369 DANGEROUS TIDES
#370 DARK ALLIANCE
#371 FIRE ZONE
#372 LETHAL COMPOUND
#373 CODE OF HONOR
#374 SYSTEM CORRUPTION
#375 SALVADOR STRIKE
#376 FRONTIER FURY
#377 DESPERATE CARGO
#378 DEATH RUN
#379 DEEP RECON
#380 SILENT THREAT
#381 KILLING GROUND
#382 THREAT FACTOR
#383 RAW FURY
#384 CARTEL CLASH
#385 RECOVERY FORCE
#386 CRUCIAL INTERCEPT
#387 POWDER BURN
#388 FINAL COUP
#389 DEADLY COMMAND
#390 TOXIC TERRAIN
#391 ENEMY AGENTS
#392 SHADOW HUNT
#393 STAND DOWN
#394 TRIAL BY FIRE
#395 HAZARD ZONE
#396 FATAL COMBAT
#397 DAMAGE RADIUS
#398 BATTLE CRY
#399 NUCLEAR STORM
#400 BLIND JUSTICE
#401 JUNGLE HUNT
#402 REBEL TRADE
#403 LINE OF HONOR
#404 FINAL JUDGMENT
#405 LETHAL DIVERSION
#406 SURVIVAL MISSION
#407 THROW DOWN
#408 BORDER OFFENSIVE
#409 BLOOD VENDETTA
#410 HOSTILE FORCE
#411 COLD FUSION
#412 NIGHT’S RECKONING
#413 DOUBLE CROSS
#414 PRISON CODE
#415 IVORY WAVE
#416 EXTRACTION
#417 ROGUE ASSAULT
ROGUE ASSAULT
Special thanks and acknowledgment to
Mike Newton for his contribution to this work.
Conflict is created by two conditions: the evil that is sanctioned by the corrupted…and the sacrifice borne by upright men and women who choose to destroy it.
—Adam Turquine, from
Beyond Mars Crimson Fleet
We draw a line and say “No farther,” but we never find two lines in the same place. Today I draw another line and make
a stand. A sacrifice. Whose blood? Only tomorrow knows.
—Mack Bolan
THE
LEGEND
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 civili ns.
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 com-mand 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.
Contents
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Prologue
East 142nd Street, South Bronx, New York City
“Is it just me,” Clay Hollister inquired, “or is this neighborhood the shits?”
“It’s not just you,” said Devon Lang, hunched down beside him in the DEA surveillance van.
“I didn’t think so,” Hollister replied. “But you know how I like to be politically correct.”
“Yeah, right.” Lang’s smirk was almost audible.
Hollister couldn’t say the South Bronx was the worst place that he’d seen in sixteen years of service as a drug enforcement agent, but it absolutely ranked among the bottom four or five. Some of the district’s blocks reminded him of photos taken in Berlin, after the bombing raids of World War II, except the old-school Nazis hadn’t scrawled graffiti on their ruins. And, the last he’d heard, they didn’t spend much time killing each other in the streets.
Okay, some parts of the South Bronx were livable, but only just. Hollist
er wouldn’t want to spend a night in any of the tenements he’d seen so far. Between the roaches, rodents and the roving gangs, he didn’t see how any decent person could relax enough to sleep. A place like this, he thought, you either made escaping from the ghetto your life’s work, or else you gave up as a kid and let it pull you down.
“It’s time,” Lang said.
Hollister spoke into the mouthpiece of his wireless headset. “Entry teams, report.”
“Team A in place and ready,” said the stolid voice of Special Agent David Jones.
“Team B, ditto,” SA Rick Patterson chimed in.
The second-floor apartment they were raiding was a stash house, nothing cooking, if his information was correct, but Hollister had called up members of the DEA’s Clandestine Laboratory Enforcement Team just in case. One thing you could predict about drug traffickers: the pricks were unpredictable.
“Hit it!” he ordered, rising as he spoke and moving toward the van’s back door. He had already sweated through his T-shirt underneath the Kevlar vest with DEA printed in yellow on the chest and back. It was like putting on a target, and the vest was only large enough to help him if he took a slug between the collarbone and navel. His head, neck, arms and everything below the waist was totally exposed, the vest a mere illusion of security.
Hollister hit the street with Lang behind him, trusting in their driver to prevent some local punk from ripping off the van. That would look great in Hollister’s report: a hundred grand and change in rolling stock evaporating while he tried to grab a handful of West Africans and—what?—fifteen or twenty kilos of coke?
Hollister felt a hundred pairs of hostile eyes tracking his progress as he crossed the street, detouring around a junker with its wheels gone and windows smashed, and hit the lobby of his target tenement. Upstairs, he heard a door crash, shouting, then the hammering of guns.
* * *
MAMADOU CISSOKO WISHED there could have been some warning that the cops were coming. At home, he knew the price of things and who to ask about connections, but the law seemed unapproachable to him in New York City. Part of that, he knew, was that the men in charge were mostly white and made no secret of their personal contempt for Africans, Asians—outsiders, in a word. Beyond that, he wouldn’t have known how much to offer, whether he was being robbed or treated to a discount rate.
And now, he realized, it would have made no difference in any case. The officers stampeding through his flat weren’t local police, but federal agents, their vests, jackets and caps emblazoned with initials for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Cissoko’s only saving grace was that he always tried to be prepared. Within an hour of arriving in the States, he had acquired his first black-market firearm, building up his arsenal as cash flowed through his hands, always prepared to fight—and die, if need be—to protect his interests and his family. While not well educated, he had memorized the penalties for cocaine trafficking in the United States: ten years to life in prison for a first offense involving five kilograms or more.
And there were thirty kilograms in Mamadou Cissoko’s shabby bedroom, bagged and ready for delivery.
The moment that he heard the raiders shouting, as his door came down, Cissoko grabbed the mini-Uzi that he always kept within arm’s reach and sprayed the doorway with a stream of 9 mm Parabellum slugs. He saw one agent drop, leaving a puff of crimson mist behind, and looked around for Victor Kalabane. He saw him charging from the small apartment’s tiny bathroom, hoisting khaki trousers with his left hand while the right brandished a .50-caliber Desert Eagle.
The raiders opened fire, then, automatic rifles chattering, stitching erratic patterns on the dirty walls. Cissoko dived behind the swaybacked sofa, lunging for the hatbox where he kept the hand grenades.
A little something extra for the Feds, to see what they were made of.
He yanked the pin from one grenade and lobbed the bomb toward the doorway, followed quickly by another, then reached up and blindly fired off the remainder of his mini-Uzi’s magazine to keep them scrambling for the last few seconds of their lives.
The double blast was music to Cissoko’s ears.
Cackling, his SMG reloaded, he leaped up and charged the enemy. He saw Victor sprawled off to his left, where slugs or shrapnel had come close to disemboweling him. No matter. They would meet again in hell, and soon, if there was such a place.
Laughing manically and firing on the run, Cissoko rushed to meet his death.
1
Osvaldo Vieira International Airport, Guinea-Bissau
Mack Bolan left the air-conditioned cocoon of his TAP Portugal flight from Lisbon and stepped into bedlam. The airport’s smallish terminal was crowded almost to the point of overflowing, damp air crackling with nervous energy. A babel of voices assaulted his ears as he wound through the crush of bodies, forging a path toward the decrepit-looking baggage carousels.
Osvaldo Vieira was the only international airport in Guinea-Bissau, clinging to its designation by virtue of scheduled flights to Lisbon, Casablanca in Morocco, and Dakar in Senegal. Its single asphalt runway greeted four airlines only, and TAP Portugal’s flights made the trip only three times per week. Passengers bound for Dakar aboard Cabo Verde Airlines had the choice of flying on Monday or Thursday.
Mildly surprised when his suitcase appeared on the carousel’s sluggish conveyor belt, Bolan retrieved it, showed it to a yawning attendant and moved off to collect his ride. Two agencies controlled car rentals at the airport, and he’d picked the one because they claimed to try harder. Someone apparently had failed to tell the local staff, three women seemingly infected with the same near-narcolepsy as the baggage watcher.
Drawn away from sluggish conversation with her coworkers and clearly resentful of it, Bolan’s clerk took eons to retrieve his reservation from a computer so neglected that cobwebs fluttered around its fan duct. She managed to discover it at last, to the relief of other Lisbon passengers lined up and muttering behind him. There was no question of challenging his paperwork—all in the name of “Matthew Cooper”—although the woman spent enough time reading it that Bolan wondered if she was committing it to memory.
His car was one of last year’s Peugeot 308s, a four-door family car whose silver paint had faded to something like battleship gray. That suited Bolan perfectly, as it would make him less conspicuous. Already a visible stranger in Guinea-Bissau, where 99 percent of all inhabitants were black and most of the rest were mixed-blood mestizos, Bolan needed all the cover he could get.
The car ran well enough, once he’d received the keys, located it and shown his rental contract to a scowling security guard who appeared to find it suspicious. Bolan thought the guard might try to walk him back inside the terminal, but finally he grunted and moved on to glower at the next driver in line.
The airport was small enough to make escaping from its clutches relatively simple. Bolan wedged his car into a river of departing traffic and followed its flow southwestward on the Bissauzhino highway to the heart of Guinea-Bissau’s capital and largest city. Established as a Portuguese fortress and trading center in 1687, Bissau had shipped thousands of slaves to the New World over the next 120 years, before the traffic was banned by rival nations with superior navies. Today, ships departing from its harbor on the Geba River estuary carried peanuts, copra, hardwoods, rubber, palm oil—and cocaine. Many of the city’s estimated 407,500 inhabitants lived in abject poverty, a trait shared with their countrymen in smaller cities, towns and rural villages.
The smell of war was inescapable in Guinea-Bissau. Rebels had formed the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde to expel their Portuguese masters in 1956, touching off a seventeen-year struggle that succeeded only when a coup d’état in Lisbon toppled Portugal’s military junta in April 1974. A revolutionary council ruled for the next decade, hunting and slaughtering those who ha
d opposed the rebellion, filling mass graves at Cumerá, Portogole and Mansabá. Guinea-Bissau held its first multiparty elections in 1994, then saw President João Bernardo Vieira challenged by a military coup four years later, touching off a year-long civil war. Vieira’s forces won that round, but only briefly; a second coup deposed him in May 1999. Vieira’s successor, President Kumba Ialá, left office at gunpoint in September 2003, victim of another coup, later returning to seize the presidential palace briefly in May 2005. Voters gave João Vieira another chance as president in June 2005, but army assassins removed him forever in March 2009, placing his top aides under house arrest.
The smell of blood and gunpowder, in short, was everywhere.
And Bolan would be adding to it soon.
His first stop in Bissau was an auto junkyard on Avenida do Brasil, a few hundred yards from the port’s waterfront. Bolan nosed his Peugeot in among the rusting hulks of older cars battered to hell and back by years of hard driving or seconds of crushing impact, killed its engine and stepped out. A dog the size of a small pony came to greet him, padding silently on oily dirt, and sat six feet in front of him, its yellow teeth fully displayed.
An old stoop-shouldered man came next, ignored the dog and spoke to Bolan with a gravel voice. “English?”
Uncertain whether he was asking nationality or preference of language, Bolan said, “American.”
After digesting that, the man asked him, “You want to leave that car?”
“I’m here to buy, not sell,” Bolan replied. “I was referred to you for certain special tools.”
“Referred por quem?” the older man inquired. “By whom?”
Bolan pronounced a name he had been given before he left the States. The fellow it belonged to was a total stranger, but he was available to vouch for Bolan if the dealer called to check him out. A number in Dakar, where Bolan was advised that someone could be reached around the clock.
The dealer didn’t bother, seeming satisfied to hear the name alone. “I may have what you need,” he said, “depending on your preference. If you will follow me...” He turned, not waiting for his visitor to speak. He muttered something to the dog in passing and the animal took off, soon lost from sight among the crumpled and corroded cars.
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