Casualties of Peace
When rebels take a Chechnyan town hostage, Russia stands poised to annihilate the threat—in spite of the United Nations’ opposition—refusing to even consider the terrorists’ demands. The dire peacekeeping situation tops the U.S. government’s priorities after it comes to light that American mining surveyors had been invited there to investigate an enormous mineral deposit. Unfortunately, the rebels also know why the surveyors are in the country and demand all the intel they can wring from them…or they will proceed to kill them one by one.
Russia is the only player unaware of the land’s rich potential, and the President needs to get his citizens back without letting the truth come out. Mack Bolan and a team of mercenaries must extract the Americans before the stakes go through the roof—a task made harder when Bolan has to deal with betrayal among his teammates. But if there’s one thing the Executioner knows, it’s how to deal with betrayal.
“Cooper, do you think we have a chance of getting out alive?”
Mack Bolan eyed the wiry fighter. “A mission is a fifty-fifty proposition. Lady Luck can screw up any plan. If you think I’ve been feeding you a line, then you know where the door is.”
“You’d go a man short?” Basayev asked.
“Better five men at one hundred percent than six when you’re carrying one who isn’t.”
The Chechen shrugged. “Okay. For the money, I’m in.”
As Grimaldi lifted the chopper into the air, the Executioner settled into his seat, wondering if having to settle for the men he could get at such short notice would result in more problems than he could handle.
They were a motley crew, and this was going to be more of a difficult mission than he had envisioned.
The Executioner
#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
#418 Viral Siege
#419 Sleeping Dragons
#420 Rebel Blast
Rebel Blast
Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary…. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.
—Jean Baudrillard,
1929–2007
The U.S. may not negotiate with terrorists, but she will never abandon hostages, leave her citizens in harm’s way. In their darkest hour, they will have a champion.
—Mack Bolan
The
Legend
Nothing less than a war could have fashioned thedestiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned theExecutioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.
But this soldier also wore another name—SergeantMercy. 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 prematurelywhen 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 Bolanhad broken society’s every rule. That same societystarted gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.
So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the systemagainst terrorism. This time, as an employee of UncleSam, 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—wagedrelentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.
But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the handsof the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties withEstablishment 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 inhis Everlasting War.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter One
Viktor Adamenko remembered that time. Not well, but rather with the imprecise and impressionistic memory of the young. If he closed his eyes, it flooded back to him in a tidal wave of sound, sight and smell that threatened to engulf him. He had once read of a French writer for whom the taste of a small cake could conjure up a lifetime of experience. Adamenko felt much the same, though he thought it effete to be so influenced by a cake. Still, that was the French for you. Only a man schooled in a world where life was cheap and yet the striving to prolong it so expensive could appreciate that there were elements that were far more evocative.<
br />
For Adamenko it was the smell of tear gas. CS, perhaps, or any other chemical formula designed to have the same effect. Only the slightest aroma in the nose, tickling at the back of the throat and bringing forth that almost exquisite rawness that presaged the tears and the pain: that was all it would take to transport him back to that time, when he had been young. That time when he had discovered, with the kind of jolt that would make a lesser man bleat to his superiors about counseling and stress, that life was tenuous and random, likely to be snatched away on nothing more than whim or error.
Sometimes, in the middle of an attack situation, he would delay slipping on his gas mask for the briefest of seconds, wanting to catch just the faintest wisp of CS on the breeze before common sense prevailed. It was not just the memory and all that it meant: it was the result it had on him.
The Vikings had Beserkers, men driven into a bloodlust fury where they were nothing more than killing machines. The Chechen National Socialist group had Adamenko. When the memories came back to him, they triggered within him the rage of impotence that he had felt at that time. The guilt, anger and fury that he had kept barely contained within him for the intervening years, and for which he now found release in his commitment to the cause.
Adamenko was a useful tool. He was a weapon that could be used with the certain knowledge that the only thing to stop him would be his own death.
He never said why this happened when the CS was in the air. No one knew of his past; he never spoke of it. There may have been some who had guessed, but they were wise enough to keep their own counsel. Adamenko was not a man who encouraged idle chatter or conversation of a personal nature. He was a bear of a man, and amiable in his own way, but not someone who could be engaged on any level other than the superficial or the abstract. There was something about his demeanor that warned against trying.
But the man remembered, the intermittent memory of the child who could not assimilate the events around him. The intermittent memory of the child who had been injured, whose brain had been partially damaged by wounding and more: the memory of the child who had lost his parents and had spent his early teenage years in orphanages, fighting off the abuse of those fellow inmates who found him slow, and the more sinister abuse of those staff who sought to take advantage of that very slowness. This was the intermittent memory of the man who had so much that he wanted to block out, and yet was compelled by his own psyche to remember some of the most painful parts of that past.
It had been a visit to the theater, on a family trip to Moscow, a rare treat in a time when there was little money to fritter on luxuries. It had been only a few years since the Communists had crumbled, and even fewer since the Russians had finally complied with the request for the Chechen Republic to part company with the old patronage. Even so, it was still a time of change, and a time when things were in flux.
He could not remember what he had seen; only that he had been happy. This, he had come to realize over the years, was a fragile state that could so easily be snatched away by chance or design. As it had been that night: from the back of the hall, there had been a wave of confusion and panic, the noises of men shouting while others screamed. Turning in his seat, he could still feel the arms of his mother smother and engulf him as she sought to shelter him. He could remember seeing, from an obtuse angle as he twisted to free himself, the men coming down the aisles. Balaclavas hid their faces, and they were in black. Guns were leveled on the audience, sweeping over them in threatening arcs, and he could smell the sweat of fear as it seeped from the pores of those around him. There had been no gunfire at this stage, but the threat of it had been enough to keep people in their seats.
There had been a lull while the crowd, cowed from their initial panicked desire to rise and run, kept low and silent. In this space, came empty shouted words, the rhetoric of politics that he now knew so well. There was aim, there was action and there were words. The first two he had time for; the latter was a waste. It had been that night.
He had no sense of the time that had followed in that siege; he knew of the scale only because of what he had later learned. All he had were snapshots. There were the men among the hostages whose patience had frayed, and who had been the first to rise and shoot off their mouths. Shots of a different kind had greeted their dissent. This had, in its turn, led to more panic, which had been quickly quelled. He was only a child, but already Viktor Adamenko had learned one thing: even the men who held the guns, who held the whip hand, were just as liable to fear and indecision as those they sought to oppress.
There had been no word from the outside. Something about full succession and a fully constituted republic had been in the barrage of words that had been yelled. No Russians would tell them what to do at any level: that was all they meant, dressed up in big words and long phrases.
Viktor was still a child to these men: yet even then he could have told them that the words were meaningless unless they followed up with action. And what action was it to take hostage the very people you were supposedly freeing? Not everyone in the theater was Chechen, but the young Viktor supposed as much. What if there were other families like his present?
These men were fools. The Russians had bigger guns, they had tanks; he had seen them on television. The Russians did not like being ordered around by those who were smaller than them. The fall of the Soviet had been a massive blow to the pride of the Russia that had been at its hub, and any fool knew that they were looking for an excuse to show how strong and important they still could be.
The smell: fear, the stench of blood and flesh as it decayed, and the urine and feces as the toilets backed up and the hours stretched to days; the smell of sweat and fear as it stayed in the clothing, welling up as people tried to keep warm and feel secure by huddling together.
The smell, mostly, of the anesthetic gas that had been pumped into the theater. The confusion and dreamlike state that followed was like being on the edge of sleep and yet still awake enough to know what was happening around him.
And then confusion, pain and fear as the world seemed to cave in around them: the pounding of the artillery outside as the theater was shelled, the choking dust and falling masonry as the building was buffeted. The men who had seemed so assured and in charge but a short time before were torn between flight and attack—but their attack was focused only on those who were their hostages, and who were supposedly their own people. Again, this was an impression of the stupidity and hypocrisy of these people that had always stayed with Viktor and had colored the way he looked at his own allies.
Through the smoke there had been a charge: gas-masked Russians, yelling incomprehensibly and firing on anyone and anything that moved. His father was already dead, killed by a chunk of ceiling that had made mush of his head. Now his mother died, killed by the raking fire of Russian soldiers who made no distinction between the captors and the captives. They only wanted to assert their power. It was another lesson for him to learn and carry with him.
His life was saved only by his mother laying herself over him, giving up her own life so that he might live. She absorbed the gunfire so that he might live. Her body stopped the anesthetic being absorbed into his lungs as it had for so many: the many who had been killed not by the gunfire, but by the gas designed to make it safe for the Russians to enter. Her double sacrifice had saved his life. But for what?
His hatred of the Russians had grown over the years to the point where it had become a mania. This, again, made him useful to some.
Alexsandr Orlov was one such man, the self-appointed leader and strategist of the Chechen National Socialists, and a man who had his own demons. He recognized in Adamenko those qualities that made for a terrorist: monomania—the desire to impose your view on others regardless of their own views, and an intolerance of anything that was not, in your view, right.
Orlov had met Adamenko in one of the many homes that he, too, had lived in as an orph
an. He had been a victim of the Chechen revolution but in another way. His family had been in the path of a Russian detachment that had been patrolling the border area. The family farm had supplied them with what they’d needed: food, vodka and women. But this had been taken against the will of the family, and so there was evidence to clear away. Bullets and the cleansing power of fire had seen to it.
Orlov, on the hills when the Russians arrived, had stayed clear and then seen it happen, powerless to intervene. That was why he understood the guilt that drove his Beserker onward.
Between them, the two young men had emerged from the hell of their childhood and adolescence with the desire to distance themselves from the Russians they hated as a driving force. So it was that the current Chechen regime, forced by economic necessity to get into bed with those who had until so recently ruled over them, was an object of hatred. They were worse than the despised Russians because they colluded with them.
To be Chechen was a thing to aspire to: not least because it meant that you were not Russian. In the same way, the group’s ideals of extreme ethnic cleansing for the Chechen people was fueled less by the desire for racial purity per se than the need to expunge any taint of Russian blood from the land.
This clarity of purpose—the very thing that both young men believed every other political group lacked—was a driving and dangerous force.
As one town was soon to find out.
* * *
“THEY CALL THIS a hotel? The water is cold and the beer is warm,” Todd Slaughter intoned as he twisted the hot faucet on the tub.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Bryan Freeman said from the adjoining room. “If you’re going to try to be Groucho, then at least learn the damn lines properly.” He wandered into the bathroom, peering over the top of his spectacles, the monitor printouts still hanging from his right hand.
“Just trying to lighten the mood and not feel so frustrated at this third world state,” Slaughter said as he let the tepid water run down the drain. “I suppose I don’t have to take a bath. I could just stink like the food.”
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