Killing Ground

Before Bolan could put out a distress call, a faint popping sounded from atop the peak behind him, followed by an ominous whoosh and the harsh glare of two igniting flares. The clouds turned a bright shade of ochre that illuminated the ridgeline, exposing Bolan and O’Brien.

“Go!” O’Brien feebly reached for the compress and pushed Bolan away. “Now!”

The flares touched down, landing close enough that their sparks made the Americans an even clearer target. Two more rounds rained down on Bolan and O’Brien. One glanced off the Executioner’s M-16 mere inches from his trigger finger. The other tore through O’Brien’s neck, just above his flak jacket. The recon officer went limp, blood spurting from a severed artery.

Given the trajectory, Bolan knew the shots were coming from the distant peak behind him, well beyond the range of his assault rifle. It also seemed a safe bet that there were at least two snipers.

Bolan had to make a quick decision. Staying at O’Brien’s side meant certain death, but venturing any farther along the ridgeline would only court the chance he’d trip another land mine. That left one option.

The Executioner took it.

They are dead; but they live in each Patriot’s breast, And their names are engraven on honor’s bright crest.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

1807–1882

Every soldier who fights for freedom and justice deserves honor and peace in death. Anyone who threatens this right will have to answer to me.

—Mack Bolan

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 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

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

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

1

Safed Koh Range, Afghanistan-Pakistan Border

Fifty miles southeast of the Afghanistan capital of Kabul, Mack Bolan steeled himself against the harsh, cold wind that swept up through the moonlit mountains, stirring a clot of low-hanging clouds that partially obscured the steep, jagged slopes stretching before him. He was nearly ten thousand feet above sea level, positioned along a battle-scarred ridgeline just below the highest peak in this stretch of the Hindu Kush, lying prone on a bed of pine needles. Under better conditions, he would have had a clear view of the trails below, along which, according to all available intel, Taliban forces would most likely attempt to slip into the country from covert bases in the tribal lands of neighboring Pakistan.

The intermittent cloud cover made this an ideal night for the terrorists to make their move. To tempt them farther into the open, an attractive bait had been set two miles to the north, atop a plateau several thousand feet below where Bolan held his vigil. There, U.S. and NATO forces had begun to erect a new base for their joint military operations. It was a familiar modus operandi for the Taliban to take advantage of such situations, staging predawn raids in hopes of capitalizing on uncompleted fortifications manned by security personnel not yet acclimated to their new surroundings.

In this case, however, the half-built site was merely a red herring. Once the Taliban crossed the border and closed in on its target, their advance would bring them into the crosshairs of a half-dozen Special Ops teams lying in wait at key points along every known access route. Bolan was one of those who would likely sound the first alarm. If he had his way, by the time the ambush was underway, he would have already made his way downhill to lend a hand in helping crush those from whose ranks America had been subjected to the moment of infamy now known, with grim simplicity, as 9/11. Granted, it would take more than one such victory to eradicate the black-turbanned sect once and for all, but after weeks of making little headway against the terrorists, both U.S. and NATO forces were anxious to boost their morale and at least match the recent success of their host confederates, the Afghan National Army.

The Executioner had come to Afghanistan intent on a solo mission against the Taliban, but once apprised of plans for the ambush—which Pentagon spin doctors had optimistically christened Operation Rat Trap—Bolan had quickly realized that prowling alone through the mountains would more likely draw friendly fire from the commando squads than bring him face-to-face with the enemy. He’d grudgingly allowed himself to be thrown into the established mix, and when he’d set out for his lofty surveillance post, it had been in the company of a recon specialist from the Army’s 25th Infantry Division deployed at Bagram Air Base.

The man at his side, as the stakeout dragged into its third hour, was Captain Howard “Howitzer” O’Brien, a beefy, gray-haired veteran halfway through his third tour of duty in Afghanistan. Prior to that, the Cleveland native had served in the Gulf War, and his cumulative experience had brought with it a hardened cynicism surpassed only by the officer’s apparently incessant need to vent his notions as to how the U.S. military brain trust had mismanaged both conflicts.

“Y’know, if we’d done things right from the get-go, we wouldn’t be stuck here doing this kinda shit,” O’Brien murmured as he, like Bolan, peered downhill through night-vision goggles that, for the moment, did little more than deflect grains of sand periodically whipped up by the late-October winds.

“Back in ’91 we had Hussein and his fucking Imperial Army dead to rights,” he went on. “All we had to do was march into Baghdad and finish the job. But what do we do instead? We call it quits and head home so those scumbags can regroup and pick up where they left off. Real smart, huh?”

It was an old argument, one Bolan had tired of the first few dozen times he’d heard it. When he didn’t respond, however, O’Brien took it as a cue to forge on.

“Then, boom, ten years later we blow in here to Binladenstan looking to kick some Taliban ass for 9/11. We rout ’em out of Kabul and have ’em right where we want ’em—running scared up here into the mountains. But do we finish the job? Hell no. Instead we get ourselves sidetracked going back after Hussein. By the time we yank him out of his hidey-hole and see that he gets a necktie party, these dipshits have retrenched themselves so we gotta come back and start from square one again. You see a pattern here?”

Bolan wasn’t about to let himself be dragged into the officer’s diatribe. He kept his eyes trained on the mountains below, looking for signs of movement through the shifting clouds. The only visible stirring was a gentle rippling on the surface of a small glimmering mountain lake situated at the base of a steep slope extending downward from his position. There’d been a time when the entire length of the slope had been a sheer, vertical wall of solid rock, but years of bombing, first by the Soviets and then the U.S., had pulverized sections of the precipice, turning them into collapsed mounds of loose rock and gravel. The ripples were caused by the occasional plop of small stones pulled down into the lake by gravity.

“What, you think I’m exaggerating?” O’Brien taunted. “Or maybe you think Washington knows what they’re doing and aren’t just dicking around for votes and kickbacks from whoever’s making the money off this fiasco. Is that it?”

Bolan remained silent. Much as O’Brien’s diatribe rankled him, it also took him back to a time when he’d taken issue with his government to the point where he’d gone rogue. It had been a dark period in his life, and though the wounds had healed, the scars remained.

O’Brien broke the silence.

“You know I’m right,” he said.

Bolan felt his patience wearing thin. He also sensed that O’Brien wasn’t about to let up until he got some kind of response out of the man he knew only as Special Agent Cooper—one of several code names the Executioner used to safeguard his identity as well as that of the covert agency he worked for.

Finally Bolan turned to the captain and raised his goggles long enough to level the officer with a cold look.

“I like politicians about as much as I do hindsight,” he replied tersely.

O’Brien stared back into his cohort’s withering blue eyes and chortled, then flashed a begrudging smirk.

“Touché,” he said. “Okay, okay, memo received. I’ll shut up.”

Given that the officer had been ranting almost nonstop since they’d set out from the makeshift base camp shortly after nightfall, Bolan doubted O’Brien would keep quiet. On the bright side, after glancing along the ridgeline that tapered away to their right, the recon officer finally told Bolan something he didn’t mind hearing.

“I’m gonna contact the other teams to see if they’ve spotted anything,” the captain said, rising to a crouch. He reached to his thigh and pulled a checkbook-size Jorson 278 microcomputer from his cargo pocket. “I’ll duck in the bushes to shield the LCD.”

“Good idea.”

O’Brien snickered again, gathering up his M-16. “Just don’t rat me out as a hothead when you report back to CIA or whoever the hell it is you’re working for,” he said. “I’ve got a pension waiting for me at the end of this, and I don’t want it mucked up.”

“Deal,” Bolan promised as he lowered his goggles.

O’Brien hunched low and headed off toward a cluster of overgrown hawthorn shrubs farther down the ridgeline, his thick-soled boots crunching on loose gravel. Clouds spilled up over the crest and within a matter of seconds the officer had vanished into their ethereal mist. Grateful for a moment’s silence, Bolan turned from O’Brien’s location and peered through high-powered binoculars at a patch of mountainside near the lake that had been laid clear by the moving clouds. He was focusing on a narrow ribbon of switchbacks when the night air resounded with a sudden blast, followed quickly by a curdling howl.

O’Brien.

Bolan was quick to his feet, forsaking the binoculars in favor of his Army-issued carbine. He raced down the ridgeline, careful to follow the same route O’Brien had taken. He had a hunch as to what had just happened, and when he came upon the writhing officer, his suspicions were borne out. O’Brien’s right leg had been severed just below the knee and blood spurted from the mangled stump into a fresh, shallow crater gouged out of the soil.

“Land mine,” the officer moaned weakly.

Bolan shed his goggles and reached for the obliterated mess that had once been O’Brien’s right calf. He tugged free the largest available scrap of torn pant leg and pressed it against the officer’s wound, hoping to staunch the blood flow.

“Try to stay put,” Bolan advised. Blood seeped through the compress, warming his fingers.

“Looks like I get that pension sooner than I thought,” O’Brien whispered hoarsely. His ruddy complexion had turned ashen, and he began to shiver. Bolan knew the man was going into shock. He shifted his grip and cupped the severed stump with one hand, freeing the other to reach for the microcomputer O’Brien had dropped. The device had a built-in walkie-talkie, and Bolan knew the captain’s only chance would be a medevac airlift back to the base.

Before Bolan could put out a distress call, a faint popping sounded from atop the peak behind him, followed by an ominous whooosh and the harsh glare of two igniting flares. The clouds turned a bright shade of ochre that illuminated the ridgeline, exposing Bolan and O’Brien. A second later, sniper fire began to chew at the earth around them.

“Go!” O’Brien feebly reached for the compress and pushed Bolan away. “Now!”

The flares touched down, landing close enough that their sparks made the Americans an even clearer target. Two more rounds rained down on Bolan and O’Brien. One glanced off the Executioner’s M-16 mere inches from his trigger finger. The other tore through O’Brien’s neck, just above his flak jacket. The recon officer went limp, blood spurting from a severed artery.

Given the trajectory, Bolan knew the shots were coming from the distant peak behind him, well beyond range of his assault rifle. It also seemed a safe bet that there were at least two snipers.

Bolan had to make a quick decision. Staying at O’Brien’s side meant certain death, but venturing any farther along the ridgeline would only court the chance he’d trip another land mine. That left one option.

Bolan took it.

2

Casting aside the microcomputer, Bolan dived sharply to his left, then rolled on his side until he reached the point where the ridgeline gave way to the steep-pitched incline. He’d abandoned his carbine, as well, leaving both hands free as he went over the side. The dying flares cast light on a few likely footholds and Bolan put them to quick use, lowering himself enough that the next sniper rounds skimmed off the crest and caromed far above his head. O’Brien remained an open target, and as shots continued to rain down, Bolan suspected the assailants were ensuring that the recon officer had joined the ever-growing list of U.S. fatalities in the prolonged Afghan conflict.

Bolan considered his next move. Off to his right, just beyond reach, a young, hearty spruce jutted through a seam in the precipice. The Executioner looked for a way to inch within reach, but there was nothing between him and the tree but a bald expanse of sheer granite. For that matter, all around him there was little more in the way of footholds, and directly below it was a forty-foot drop to a boulder-strewed stretch of land separating the cliff from the small lake. Bolan realized he’d reached a dead end.

Eventually the flares were spent and darkness once again settled over the mountains. The sniper fire trailed off as the clouds fell back on themselves and wisped past Bolan, increasing his cover. He stayed put but shifted his weight until he felt secure enough to free his right hand. Unsnapping the clasp on his web holster, the Executioner unsheathed a 9 mm Beretta. Much as he loathed fighting battles on the defensive, there was little for him to do now but wait for the enemy to come to him. He stayed put, forcing himself to remain patient.

Bolan’s eyes had readjusted to the darkness when a gust of wind swept across the ridgeline, stirring up loose dirt and showering it down on him. Forced to avert his gaze, the Executioner turned his head and glanced downward. Doing so, he caught a fortuitous glimpse of activity thirty yards past the rubble heap trailing down into the lake. Three men armed with assault rifles were stealing their way up the winding trail by which O’Brien and the Executioner had reached the ridgeline. Their backs were to Bolan, but he knew they had to be Taliban.

The Executioner slowly torqued his body to give him more range with the Beretta. When one of the footholds gave way under his shifting weight, Bolan scrambled to keep his balance. Dislodged bits of rock clattered down the facing and thunked ominously off the larger rocks below.

The gunmen down on the trail were about to make their way around a bend that would have carried them out of view when the last man in the column stopped and glanced over his shoulder, raised his AK-47 and shouted to the men in front of him. Bolan didn’t need a translator to realize he’d been spotted.

The Executioner had secured himself enough that he was able to unleash a 3-round burst before the other man could fire. The shots were hurried, but one of them struck home and his would-be assailant crumpled to his knees, carbine slipping from his lifeless fingers. When the next closest Taliban dropped to a crouch and drew a bead on Bolan, the Executioner fired again. There were no kill shots this time, but he drew blood and the other man wailed as he staggered backward. The third gunman reached out and quickly pulled his colleague to cover behind an escarpment buttressing the bend in the trail.

Overhead, far up near the top of the peak from which the original shots had been fired, Bolan heard more muffled shouts, followed by the rattle of falling stones he’d been listening for earlier. At least one of the snipers was coming down after him. When the clamor grew louder and small rocks began to tumble over the edge of the ridgeline, Bolan figured the attacker had bypassed trails and was sliding down the loose bed of choss. If that was the case, he’d reach the ridgeline in a matter of seconds.

The Executioner hadn’t emptied his Beretta, but he quickly swapped out the semiautomatic’s half-spent magazine for a fresh one, certain he’d need all the firepower he could muster should he find himself locked in a cross fire. If it came to that, he knew his chances were slim. The clouds had moved on, leaving him splayed against the rock, every bit as vulnerable a target as O’Brien had been after the land mine had taken him down.

There was no further activity on the trail below him, but overhead Bolan soon heard the tramp of footsteps. One of the snipers had already reached the ridge and was closing in on him.

Bolan was weighing his next move when, about a mile to the north, staccato bursts from several AK-47s suddenly drowned out the sniper’s footsteps, followed by return fire from M-16s. The Executioner craned his neck and scanned the terrain where the shots were coming from. Through the drifting clouds, he saw blips of light punctuate the exchange of gunfire close to where one of the Special Ops forces had taken up position. There was only one likely explanation. More of the Taliban had somehow managed to slip past recon and turn the tables on their would-be ambushers.

There was no time to mull over the turn of events. Bolan knew he had to act. It seemed likely that the distant firefight had distracted the enemy closing in on him, and he went with the odds. Holstering his Beretta, he coiled himself against the rock, then pushed off to his right, extending his arms toward the lone tree growing out from the cliff facing. As his fingers curled around the gnarly trunk, Bolan grabbed tight and swung forward, building momentum so that when he let go, he was able to clear the gap leading to the stretch where, as with the similar slope above, bombing had created a natural slide made up of pulverized gneiss and granite.

Bolan landed hard on his back amid the loose stone, knocking the wind from his lungs. He struggled to remain conscious as he felt himself sliding feetfirst down the incline, dislodging enough rocks and other debris to create a full-scale avalanche. There was no way to tell if the enemy was firing at him. All he heard was the thunder of falling rock and the equally loud reverberation of blood pulsing through his head.

Moments later, Bolan splashed into the lake. The icy water revived him instantly and as soon as his boots touched the shallow lake bottom, he bent at the knees and lunged forward, swimming clear of the larger boulders that had been brought crashing down behind him. Several rocks glanced off his legs and right thigh but their force was blunted by the water, and Bolan was able to stroke his way farther out into the lake.

He remained submerged as long as he could, then, lungs burning, he angled his way upward and broke the surface. There he trod water as he gasped for air. He was halfway out into the lake. A ragged peninsula comprised of fallen trees and snagged debris stretched toward him from the far shore. Bolan swam quietly toward it, relying on leg kicks to keep his splashing to a minimum. Once he reached the trees and wriggled beneath a moss-covered branch, the Executioner stopped long enough to catch his breath.

He could still hear gunfire to the north, but there were shots in the air around him, as well. Bolan wasn’t the target, however, and the most persistent firing came from almost directly overhead. Bolan peered up and saw a small AH-6J “Little Bird” combat chopper hovering in place just past the lake, directing blasts from a side-mounted .50-caliber machine gun at the Taliban gunmen on the path leading up to the ridgeline. Bolan couldn’t see the trail, but the ridgeline and distant peak were both within view, and there was no sign of fire being returned by the snipers.

There was little Bolan could do to assist those in the chopper, which he recognized as part of the U.S. aerial force based out of Bagram. At the risk of being spotted and mistaken for the enemy, he pushed away from the half-submerged tree and circled around the peninsula, then slowly swam toward the far shore of the small lake. By the time he reached it, the Little Bird had let up on its offensive. The chopper was about to drift toward the precipice when it suddenly shifted course. Its halogen searchlight swept across the lake, falling on Bolan as he pulled himself from the water. The Executioner straggled ashore, half-numbed by the cold water but still able to feel countless bruises he’d sustained since first going over the side of the ridgeline.

The chopper dropped to within a few yards of the embankment. The copilot reached out and helped Bolan up onto the skid.

“Don’t think we can squeeze you in here,” the copilot shouted over the blare of the rotors.

“I’m fine here,” Bolan replied, taking hold of the open door frame as the copter pulled away from the lake, listing at a slight angle to compensate for his added weight.

“There were a couple snipers above the ridgeline,” he told the copilot, a Native American in his late twenties.

“Didn’t see ’em,” the other man told him, “but they’ll have to wait. We’ve got an SOS from Team Five. Taliban popped up out of nowhere and have ’em pinned.”

Bolan changed the subject. “You got a dry weapon in there?”

“Sure thing.” The copilot reached behind his seat and handed Bolan a foot-long Heckler & Koch MP-5 K submachine gun. The H&K was larger than his Beretta but still fit snugly in his right palm. It packed a greater wallop, too. Bolan knew that if he kept the weapon close-bolted, he’d be able to fire from the skid with minimal kickback, ensuring better accuracy.