The Executioner released the grenade’s safety lever and began his count. With two seconds to go, he cocked his arm and threw the bomb, which sailed down the hallway as he ducked into one of the archways. A flash of light, then the deafening explosion a second later burst by him. He raised his rifle and slid around the corner, sending a series of short bursts into the men strewed about the room.
Satisfied that all were down, Bolan keyed his mic. “Jack, eight friendlies in the basement, with unknown number of hostiles. Back my play.”
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The leader or the hired guns—it doesn’t matter to me. All evildoers will take responsibility for their actions and face their judgment. Count on it.
—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
The Gulf of AdenNear the southern coast of Yemen
A few hundred feet below, the water looked black, while the night sky was stained a variant shade of ebony. They were coming in low and fast. Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, peeled back the Velcro strap covering the face of his watch and checked the time: 0334. They were close to their estimated target time. Everything was proceeding well.
This mission had a bit of déjà vu and also more than a little irony. The man they were on the way to capture had been a prisoner in Guantanamo this time last year. Erroneously released as part of a prisoner exchange, the bureaucratic slip-up was suddenly discovered when Ali Sharif was purportedly observed playing an active role in a planned chemical weapons attack against Saudi Arabia. This sent the State Department scrambling to stop Sharif before the attack against the kingdom could be carried out, thus resulting in another can of worms being popped open in the volatile area. Of course, any open involvement by the United States would result in another round of histrionics at the UN, the standard condemnations of American interference, both in the US and around the world, and so forth. Thus, a key player in the Justice Department, Harold Brognola, was asked by the President to utilize his clandestine resources to make a field adjustment, and hopefully recapture or exterminate Sharif before anyone took real notice that he was back in the arena fighting his jihad.
As far as the mission objectives, recapture or extermination, Bolan was leaning toward the latter since the first attempt at intelligence gathering and reprogramming had been so successful.
Bolan needed a team for this mission, but Able Team and Phoenix Force had their own missions. As well as Jack Grimaldi, five young men, all former blacksuits based at Stony Man Farm, had been tapped to assist the Executioner: Elvan Johnson, Romeo Vargas, Dennis Washington, Frank Doerr and Terry Miller. They all had previous military experience in Iraq and had Ranger training, but not all had seen the brutal door-to-door combat of the early days of the war. And none had been on a special operation of this magnitude and complexity before.
Allegedly, no special ops teams were currently available, or were already encumbered with a crisis of their own in the area, and current intel had indicated that an attack was imminent. That was why Bolan had been called in for this one. But the Executioner had his own doubts. The bureaucratic bungling that had resulted in Ali Sharif’s premature release meant that somebody somewhere down the line