“That’s half of them,” the ace pilot said, and Bolan hoped it wasn’t simply wishful thinking.
“Careful with Cuéllar, if possible,” he said. “I need to pick his brain while it’s intact.”
Cuéllar knew the name of the person who headed up The Office, and the Executioner was counting on him to cooperate.
Whether the man wanted to or not.
For Special Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena,
Drug Enforcement Administration
(1947–1985)
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
—Albert Einstein
Someone said that Evil never dies. That’s true. But good and evil men are mortal. It’s the first group’s task to put the second in their place: the grave.
—Mack Bolan
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 civilians.
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 command 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
Medellín, Colombia
Jairo Dueñas had come far since he’d created Los Pepes at the tender age of nineteen years. At forty-seven years old, everything he’d ever dreamed of was either already his or was within his grasp.
Los Pepes, properly, had called itself Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, which in English translates to “Persecuted by Pablo Escobar”—an image the group had adopted, seeking public sympathy, although the message was not strictly true. Los Pepes was a group of vigilantes who waged war against the former Medellín Cartel, posing as warriors of the people while, in fact, they sought to claim Escobar’s wealth and drug trade with the US for themselves.
That hadn’t quite worked out as planned, of course. Escobar had died sixteen months after his escape from La Catedral Prison, trapped by agents of Colombia’s Bloque de Búsqueda—Search Bloc—and the ever-present DEA. Some said he’d been assassinated, but it hardly mattered. Only Escobar’s death had been important, followed by the swift unraveling of his cartel. Godfathers in the cruel Cali Cartel had dominated cocaine traffic for the next five years, and then they in turn had been killed or sent to prison for their crimes.
In recent years, however, Dueñas had recouped his losses from the earlier conflict, entered politics and now served with the Office of the Inspector General of Colombia, tasked with overseeing other arms of government,