Annotation
Mack Bolan agrees to bury the hatchet with the CIA to help an imperiled Company mole in Moscow.
Under official U.S. sanction the Executioner penetrates the Kremlin with a personal vendetta in mind.
Bolan ends the blood fued when he buries the hatchet deeper than anyone expects: right into the heart of the troubled KGB high command.
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Don Pendleton's Executioner
The Mack Bolan Legend
Prologue
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Don Pendleton's Executioner
Mack Bolan
Moscow Massacre
Dedicated to the sixty dead, victims of the hijacked Egyptian Boeing 737 at Luqa Airport, Malta, November 1985.
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Stephen Mertz for his contributions to this work.
The Mack Bolan 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 hellgrounds of Vietnam, for his skills as a crack sniper in pursuit of the enemy.
But this supreme soldier also wore another name — Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.
Mack Bolan's second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family. Bolan made his peace at his parents' and sister's gravesite. Then he declared war on the evil force that had snatched his loved ones. The Mafia.
In a fiery one-man assault, he confronted the Mob head-on, carrying a cleansing flame to the urban menace. And when the battle smoke cleared, a solitary figure walked away alive.
He continued his lone-wolf struggle, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Mack 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 international terrorism. This time, as an official employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan wore yet another handle: Colonel John Phoenix. With government sanction now, and a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, he and his new allies — Able Team and Phoenix Force — waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB and all it stood for.
Until the inevitable occurred. Bolan's one true love, the brilliant and beautiful April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine.
Embittered and utterly saddened by this feral deed, Bolan broke the shackles of Establishment authority.
Now the big justice fighter is once more free to haunt the treacherous alleys of the shadow world.
Prologue
It was no place for death.
Myriad twinkling stars encrusted the endless night sky that surveyed the rolling, forested wilderness of the Stony Man Mountain region of rural Virginia, eighty air miles south of Washington, D.C. The darkness was muted by a natural peacefulness, broken only by an occasional nocturnal birdsong and the incessant crackle of night insects.
This was a place for life, not death.
The big man who stood motionless, pensive, in the gloom carried death with him. He had faced the Grim Reaper many times and had always walked away from him. But there were others, friends and foes alike, who had not been so lucky on the hellfire trail. And the aura of mankind's common denominator seemed to follow this man everywhere, clinging, a tangible thing.
Mack Bolan knew it would be so until his turn came.
He had been standing for the past ten minutes, staring down at a simple headstone in the center of a grassy clearing bordered by hardwoods and conifers.
Not a place for death.
And yet Bolan felt strangely comfortable with the knowledge that the dead one, buried beneath this simple marker, rested forever amid pastoral beauty and quiet.
Her name had been April Rose.
She had been the love of Bolan's life.
She had died violently in his arms from a bullet meant for him.
Bolan had killed her slayer in the heartbeat following her death, but it meant nothing now.
Increasingly there were only two things that mattered anymore to a man who had waded mile after mile down Blood River against seemingly impossible odds for all of his adult life.
Two things mattered: the emptiness at the center of his being left by the passing of the woman buried here and the war of attrition he continued to wage — the fighting of a personal war that gave his life meaning. When he thought about what his war had accomplished — the gains made for those who could not fight for themselves — it was the one thing he had left that filled the ever-present ache inside. And Bolan knew that without his kind of help, the good, the meek, would never inherit this savage world.
He wore a dark jacket, sweater and slacks, civilian attire that merged with the shadows of the tree that he stood beneath, indiscernible from the gloom cloaking this scene of a man and his memories.
A shoulder-holstered 9 mm Beretta 93-R nestled beneath the jacket, which remained unbuttoned for fast, easy access.
His thoughts centered on his past and on a spirit that seemed to permeate this place. A spirit that had lived large.
Had lived.
His senses flared at the approach of someone who made no attempt at stealth.
Bolan hit a combat crouch and faded deeper into the murk at the base of the hardwood. His right hand dipped in to palm the butt of the Beretta, unleathering it to fan the night, finally homing on the direction from which a man approached up a starlit incline to the clearing.
Bolan relaxed and reholstered the Beretta when he recognized the stocky figure in a rumpled suit as Hal Brognola. Brognola always appeared uncomfortably out of place away from pavement and offices, like now.
Bolan straightened, materializing out of the shadows.
"Hello, Hal."
Brognola reacted with a small start at those softly spoken words, his first indication of Bolan's presence. Brognola was White House liaison for Stony Man Farm, this well-camouflaged, heavily guarded 160-acre base of operations for the U.S. government's covert antiterrorist operations.
The two men exchanged a firm handshake, and Brognola's grin flashed in the starlight.
"How the hell you do it is beyond me, guy. The security here ranks with the Company site in Langley and the Man himself. How do you do it, Striker?"
It was an old code name from the days when Bolan had taken assignments from Brognola officially.
"I busted those security perimeters, too, Hal, remember? I'm the one who put this operation together."
"You're also the best damn infiltration and combat specialist this country has ever produced," Brognola put in. "It's good to see you, Mack. Been a while since the trial."
Bolan gave Brognola a look that suggested the soldier would rather forget that time. Then he turned toward the grave of the woman he had loved. Still loved.
"You've kept it up real nice, Hal. Thanks."
"Least I could do. She died defending Stony Man Farm that night," Brognola growled. "We take care of our own. Wish we could take care of you. I have the President's ear..."
Bolan had headed the Stony Man operation until not long ago.
"We tried having me play by the rules and it didn't work, Hal," Bolan gently reminded his buddy. Brognola had worked closely with him since the beginning, albeit covertly since Bolan had gone back "into the cold."
Brognola had continued to feed B
olan intel; a top Fed in cahoots with a "vigilante," and only a few highly classified people knew anything about it.
Bolan trusted Brognola all the way.
The Stony Man operation continued its global antiterrorist campaigns via Phoenix Force and Able Team, paramilitary units created by Bolan before he had crossed the line and gone outlaw to find justice in the wake of April Rose's supreme sacrifice.
And justice was at hand now.
It had brought Bolan to this after-midnight rendezvous between two living friends and echoes of a spirit.
"You have what you need," Hal said. "I fed you everything through standard channels. You're risking the whole ballgame coming back here like this."
Bolan's cold blue eyes broke contact with the Fed's gaze, lingering another moment on the unassuming headstone in the clearing. Then he looked at the man from Justice.
"I had to come back. To say goodbye. This one won't be like the others. This one's for the jackpot. When the stakes go that high, anything can happen, even when you've got a handle on it. I had to say goodbye."
Hal's expression softened. "I know, Striker. And I also know what the odds are. Dammit, man, if I could think of any other way to pull this one together..."
"I don't want it any other way, Hal. Strakhov is the target this time. I'd tear myself a piece of this one if you didn't hand it to me."
Hal chuckled without humor. "I know that, too. That's why I asked you in. You'll be taking heavy fire from every side. A headshed hit on KGB headquarters in Moscow. Sure, I can understand you wanting to come back here one more time. The thing between you and Strakhov was born here the night of the attack on the Farm, the night April died."
April had been mission controller and supervisor of the Stony Man operation, centered in the nondescript collection of farmhouses and outbuildings of this "Farm" that camouflaged a sprawling subterranean complex.
Bolan had been the soul of Stony Man Farm.
April had been its heart.
"We should have sized it up from the start," Bolan grunted. "All those terrorist initiatives we fought were connected from the beginning."
Brognola nodded. "That's right. The IRA, the PLO, Armenian extremists. Dozens more, dozens of causes all around the world."
"With one thread connecting them," Bolan finished. "The KGB. And the payback came home to us, and a good woman lies buried here because of it. Strakhov set up that operation — the planting of a deep cover sleeper inside the White House to erode our intelligence services. And they decided to start with a hard hit right here."
"I've gone over it a thousand times in my mind," muttered Brognola. "Maybe we could've done more if you'd stayed on the team, Striker. After you found out who the mole next to the President was and took him out, we could have gone after Strakhov together."
"We are going after him together. And it's my way after all."
"Don't think the irony is lost on many people," Brognola growled. "Okay, guy, you did what you had to do. The Company didn't want that KGB sleeper hit-disinformation potential, all of that — but you took him out anyway. For April, for all of us. I understand that. nd I know you well enough to know why you couldn't turn back even when your name went to the top of terminate-on-sight orders for the KGB, the CIA and every other spy agency. You're creating havoc in areas of classified operations with your unsanctioned activities. You declared a one-man war against the KGB for what happened to April, and they and the CIA have declared their own war on you."
"I can't play by the rules anymore, Hal. I was a team member once, and it got April killed. There's an enemy that has to be stopped. The rules don't work. The fact that Strakhov was able to plant a mole at the White House level in the first place is proof enough of that."
Brognola almost took a pace backward at his friend's impassioned outburst. The man from Wonderland knew that Bolan was not given to fiery speeches. For just a heartbeat Brognola wondered if thoughts of revenge were driving the soldier on.
"I just hope they — our side or theirs — don't stop you before this operation is over," Hal muttered. "One man, even if he is you, taking on the whole damn KGB! And crippling their operations around the world!" Brognola shook his head as if he still had trouble grasping what Bolan had accomplished since his split from Stony Man. "If I wasn't in on it with you, I'd think the whole thing was unbelievable. Hell, sometimes I think that anyway!"
Bolan knew what Hal meant. He sometimes had trouble himself accepting his longevity in the hellgrounds of the world, from his infantryman days in the Vietnam war through the long bloody years of carrying his one-man war of attrition against the enemy. And, he remembered, they had come in many forms: the Mafia, terrorists and the KGB. While they all had fallen before the vicissitudes of combat, it was far more than luck alone, Bolan knew.
Hal had not exaggerated his estimation of Bolan's capabilities. Bolan had served two tours of Special Forces combat duty in southeast Asia, where he had learned all a man could about guerrilla warfare, commando tactics and staying alive when death came closing in from every Hank.
"I've been doing a lot of thinking, Hal. Another reason I wanted to make contact with you before I left the country. It's getting time to shift gears again."
Brognola's expression clouded. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, I've been concentrating most of my time and energies on the KGB."
"And getting some results, to put it mildly. You've been chipping away at the pressure points we could never reach, and there have been plenty of repercussions inside their infrastructure, believe it."
"I'm satisfied with what we've accomplished," Bolan agreed, "but after this headshed hit, if there is an after, I think it might be time to broaden the scope even farther."
"What do you have in mind, precisely?"
"I'm not sure. Call it back to the basics, maybe. This old world of ours is going to hell inch by inch everywhere I look, Hal, and the KGB has its grubby hands in most of it, but there are others. The Mafia is getting itself together again. Hell, there's plenty of unorganized crime stateside, too, that needs going after. I read what's happening to our cities today, and it turns my stomach. There's a lot that needs doing... after Strakhov."
Strakhov.
Major General Greb Strakhov.
One of the most powerful men commanding the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the KGB, the global network of death and terror merchants who liked to think of themselves as "The Sword and Shield of the Soviet Union." But, in fact, they represented the muscle, the threat, the knife point held against the throat of civilization by a far-flung militaristic dictatorship that had already gobbled up far too much of the world map.
Bolan had been unable to shake the feeling that it was his duty to do something about the threatening magnitude of the Soviet Union's plans for the world. His "outlaw" campaigns against the hydralike evil responsible for the death of April had already taken him more than once into Russia. And while there he had befriended enough Soviet citizens to reinforce his understanding that the inmates of that sprawling gulag should not be confused with the slave masters in the Kremlin who kept Russians in as cruel a set of shackles as the czars ever had, smothering the spirit of that country, garroting the lives and hopes of its people.
Bolan also recognized that the KGB's activities in the name of socialist expansion had, ironically, a very capitalistic motivation. Countless billions of dollars, he knew, were extorted annually from Soviet-occupied countries and satellites, as well as from the Soviet Union itself, and funneled through a pyramid setup similar to that of the Mafia, with a few boss terrorists like Strakhov fattening their own Swiss bank accounts.
Those billions came from people.
The little people.
The salt of the earth.
The massed hordes of decent, hardworking souls of every country everywhere who wished only to be left alone to live their lives, and maybe find some happiness.
Good people like Bolan's deceased mother, father and sister.
Mankind mattered to him.
Life mattered.
"I wish I could give you more to go on," Hal said, "but all I've got is enough to get you to Helsinki."
"Rules of the game," Bolan said, nodding. "One thing I would like to know. I still top the TOS list for the CIA and NSA. How high up does the authorization go on this?"
"The top," Hal told him. "The very top."
Bolan grimaced. "I'm not sure if that's good or bad."
"It's the only way it can be. The Chief has always been sympathetic to your situation, Striker, from the beginning, as you know."
"I also know Strakhov had a man next to the Chief."
"Not this time," Brognola assured him. "All I know about this mission is that there's an internal power struggle going on inside the KGB's Moscow headshed even as we speak, and we've got a handle on it — someone on the inside near the top."
"And you don't know who he is, only that he needs help. Only he's not supposed to know I'm helping him. That's a lot of variables, Hal. You know the reason I'm taking on this one."
Hal nodded. "A chance at Strakhov. A chance to rattle their whole damn insides upside down, the way they tried to do when they staged the assault on Stony Man Farm." Brognola paused a beat, then told his friend solemnly, "And I, uh, can see... why you wanted to come back here this one time before you leave the country. The jackpot, like you said."
"For us... or for them," Bolan said, nodding. "Yeah, Hal, I'm in. I wouldn't have it any other way."
"I don't have to tell you they're walking away with the ballgame everywhere the game's in play," Brognola grunted. "They're stealing technology from us like never before. They've pulled the strings to disarm America in the name of peace. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, our clandestine operations have been virtually hamstrung by exposure to the world. This is our one chance to turn that whole situation around, and you're our only hope. I'm sending you into the dark, Sarge, but it's the only way we could ensure the secrecy of what you're about to attempt.
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