Righteous Fear

HOLY TERROR

The Executioner once saved Dr. Annis Hassan from a right-wing Muslim attack in the Afghanistan desert. But when a Christian extremist gunman attacks the heroic doctor’s women’s health center in Mobile, Alabama, Mack Bolan knows Annis is now the target of two lethal fanatic groups. And no one goes after the Executioner’s friends without hellish payback. Battling squads of brutal mercenaries and terrorist soldiers, Bolan homes in on the megalomaniacal leaders of both factions—they’re determined to spill more innocent blood to sate their twisted sense of salvation. But this time, the Executioner will be smiting down these fanatics with his own explosive brand of fiery payback!

#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

#421 Hard Targets

#422 Nigeria Meltdown

#423 Breakout

#424 Amazon Impunity

#425 Patriot Strike

#426 Pirate Offensive

#427 Pacific Creed

#428 Desert Impact

#429 Arctic Kill

#430 Deadly Salvage

#431 Maximum Chaos

#432 Slayground

#433 Point Blank

#434 Savage Deadlock

#435 Dragon Key

#436 Perilous Cargo

#437 Assassin’s Tripwire

#438 The Cartel Hit

#439 Blood Rites

#440 Killpath

#441 Murder Island

#442 Syrian Rescue

#443 Uncut Terror

#444 Dark Savior

#445 Final Assault

#446 Kill Squad

#447 Missile Intercept

#448 Terrorist Dispatch

#449 Combat Machines

#450 Omega Cult

#451 Fatal Prescription

#452 Death List

#453 Rogue Elements

#454 Enemies Within

#455 Chicago Vendetta

#456 Thunder Down Under

#457 Dying Art

#458 Killing Kings

#459 Stealth Assassin

#460 Lethal Vengeance

#461 Cold Fury

#462 Cyberthreat

#463 Righteous Fear

Righteous Fear

Don Pendleton’s

ISBN: 9780008907464

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Phil Elmore for his contribution to this work.

RIGHTEOUS FEAR

© 2020 Harlequin Books S.A.

Published in Great Britain 2017

by Worldwide Gold Eagle, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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“You psychotic bastard! You’ll burn us alive?”

Come out into the bullets,” Bolan answered. “It’ll be quick and painless.”

Gunfire blazed into the mini-mart. In answer, the Executioner unleashed two more bursts; two hardmen collapsed from the deadly salvos. Quiet descended.

A shadowy figure stepped tentatively out of the smoky garage. Bolan didn’t see any movement behind him. This fight needed to end fast. He rose and stepped back, the red dot optic framing the shadow. It was Asada, armed with a rifle.

Bolan held down the trigger, firing a burst that punched open the Taliban veteran’s chest. Asada staggered, pulled the trigger of his weapon. The gun’s payload drilled into the floor before the weapon tumbled from weakened hands. The gunner collapsed, a lifeless heap.

Majnuna could be dead, but he also could be alive. As Bolan pushed through the doorway, he knew that he had to be prepared for anything.

Carl Lyons would have to step up to protect Annis Hassan.

Then the Lord said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart.

—Jeremiah 14:14

Far too often cold-blooded killers rally to the summons of false prophets. Someone has to take these fakers down before the innocent get hurt. There is no question that I’ll always answer that call.

—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

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Introduction

Quotes

The Mack Bolan Legend

Prologue

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

Epilogue

About the Publisher

Prologue

Helmand Province,Seven years ago

The snap of bullets through the improvised tent hospital gave Dr. Annis Hassan the speed and strength to scoop up her patient and carry him to ground. Rabah Kabir, an orderly, had no such luck, his chest stitched with a line of .30-caliber holes. Even with half a dozen fresh wounds, the man gasped, fingers clawing at the tarp that served as the hospital floor. Brown, tear-filled eyes met the physician’s. His lips moved weakly in an effort to beg for help, but with the first breath, blood bubbled from his mouth. He shuddered. Kabir was not the first gunshot victim she’d seen die.

Much of her medical gear remained at chest level. She had scissors and other equipment jammed into her pockets, as well as a stethoscope looped over her neck. A sucking chest wound needed much more than gauze and alcohol wipes.

Hassan checked on the patient, a young man with the majority of his right leg missing. Afghanistan, despite the American liberation and subsequent occupation alongside British troops, was still turbulent, but here in Helmand, the war was fought most fiercely. Afghan citizens and foreign soldiers alike risked life and limb with steps on hard-packed dirt roads, improvised explosive devices—IEDs—placed for the sole purpose of making Afghanistan hospitable only to the violent psychopaths known as the Taliban.

Hassan watched AK-47 bullets rip through the metal examination tables as if they were tin cans. Flipping them would do little to protect the other patients or her staff. Handguns cracked off single shots in counterpoint to the oncoming storm of violence, but the brutal chatter of assault rifles smothered them. The guards who fired those pistols would likely fall silent forever, too, each loss of life bringing the unarmed people in the tent closer to extinction, as well.

The teen she’d rescued, despite his leg being severed by an IED, crawled to get out from under her.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“Getting a gun. Giving us a chance.”

No firearms presented themselves at floor level, but the youth continued to search, continued to squirm out of her grasp.

Hassan was torn between helping him and keeping him out of the line of fire. She’d shield her patient to her last breath. Each extra heartbeat would be a victory against these agents of hatred.

The snarl of an engine jarred her from her fatalistic vow. A shadow whipped past the tattered canvas next to her, deep, heavy booms punctuating its rapid passage like a god hurling thunderbolts.

She didn’t dare to fan a spark of hope, but the rattle of assault rifles faded with each thunderous blast.

Who was this one-man cavalry?

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, held on to the ATV, the ground disappearing beneath its four fat tires as he gunned the throttle. Up ahead, gunfire crackled. An outpost under attack wasn’t part of his mission here in Afghanistan, but he’d flown over the region, seen the refugee camp and knew the roar of weapons wasn’t one of battle but massacre.

He’d come to this corner of the world chasing a conspiracy threatening American soldiers, but intel gained at a local militia’s headquarters pointed toward an attack on healers and their charges. He loved his country and his brothers and sisters in arms, but a threat to the injured and the unarmed was a clarion call. Bolan figured the countdown to violence against the service men and women in Afghanistan could afford a brief detour. Especially utilizing the speed and power of the Polaris MV850 he’d borrowed from a Special Forces’ forward operating base.

Bolan drew the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle holstered on his right hip. Through his goggles, he made a quick appraisal of the battle. There were more than a dozen men with rifles visible on the nearest side of the camp. Bolan was confident this force would not be asymmetrical in its assault. The odds skyrocketed with his assessment.

He revved the Polaris. Rear wheels rooster-tailed sand behind him before they caught traction and threw Bolan at the besieged Afghans at almost 70 miles an hour. The snarl of his ATV drew the attention of a couple of the Taliban fighters ahead of him as the distance between them disappeared.

With a stab of his thumb, the Desert Eagle was live and unleashed to strike. Bolan almost tore the head off one of the terrorists, spearing the man’s chin with 240 grains of lead that ripped open muscle and neck bone alike.

The other Taliban killer struggled to track the Executioner, but Bolan had already zoomed past the searching muzzle. The big American adjusted for relative motion between them, planting a .44 Magnum seed within the breastbone of the terrorist. The hollowpoint round grew into a gore-blasting flower that shredded heart and lung tissue before exiting through the enemy gunner’s back.

Bolan bounced the Polaris off a small berm of sand and landed beside one of the larger tents. He fired the Desert Eagle rapidly, emptying the rest of the magazine and making four solid kills on the marauders. Briefly, he noted a large red cross on a section of tent.

These murderous thugs had zero qualms about shooting up a hospital tent. Ragged tears in the canvas provided his quick mind all the testimony required that his diversion had been a necessity.

Stuffing his Desert Eagle into its holster and switching to his Beretta 93-R, Bolan charged the Polaris through the fire zone to the other side of the camp. En route, he burned off the twenty rounds in the extended magazine and the one in the breech of the machine pistol. Bursts ripped from the vented muzzle at 1230 feet per second and trios of Parabellum rounds smashed chests, shoulders and faces.

Ten confirmed kills, but what the Executioner didn’t know was the full size of the assault force or if there were incoming reserves. A quick glance at the far side of the encampment showed that the forces attacking were indeed symmetrical. They were also highly trained. The two groups of gunners worked and fired at right angles, keeping the groups out of each other’s lines of fire.

Riflemen retreated and shifted positions. They covered one another with deft swiftness, their guns spitting hot lead and fire. The only good thing about their response to Bolan making himself a target was that more than a score of rifles once aimed at unarmed civilians was now focused on him.

The Executioner kicked the Polaris into a tight turn and shot to the perimeter of the camp. Gunfire scorched the air where he once had been. As the enemy gunners struggled to track him, he kept the ATV at full throttle, finding a section of ground at the perimeter that provided a waist-high dune and some rocks for cover. As soon as he got a boulder between himself and the shooters, he pulled a war bag off the vehicle.

Before he’d left on this errand of mercy, he’d obtained some battlefield pickups and sorted them into a couple of duffel bags. First out of the sack was an RPKS-74 light machine gun. Bolan cut loose, short pulls of the trigger that launched four and five rounds in tight, precise bursts. The “slow” fire rate of 650 rounds per minute helped with that, keeping the weapon’s firepower on target, rather than spraying potential survivors with a sloppy sweep. The weight of the RPKS’s 100-round plastic drum also contributed to the deadly accuracy of the Executioner’s onslaught.

Bolan used the packed berm of earth and the rocks atop it to full effect. Shielded from incoming fire, he shifted position quickly simply to keep his head on his shoulders. The Executioner still heard and felt the snap of bullets chase him. Their supersonic passage cracked the air, sonic booms buffeting his head and shoulders with deadly persistence.

He ducked and returned to the war bag, pulling out his ace in the hole, a backup for the light machine gun. A GP-25 Kostyor rose from the zippered flaps of the duffel and Bolan shoved its fat barrel toward a group of gunmen. They abandoned their proximity to the refugee camp’s tents, seeking sturdier cover in the face of a machine gun. The Kostyor held only one shot, as opposed to the RPKS, but that single round was plenty. Bolan fired a 40 mm grenade from the weapon, and it arced and landed a few yards from the group of Taliban fighters. Bodies not shredded by razor-sharp splinters of wire and ball bearings had their blood vessels burst by concussive force.

The sudden detonation halted the chatter of enemy rifles. Bolan slipped another shell into the grenade launcher and then transitioned to his RPKS. Two of the attackers paused out in the open. He dropped them. Short bursts shredded flesh and bone with brutal efficiency.

The sudden deaths of two of their own spurred the Taliban gunmen into action once more. Bolan’s grenade and LMG fire had both been from the same position, which drew them to him.

The Executioner lingered a moment more before diving under the crackling wave of automatic rounds. He quickly scanned the battleground, counting fifteen active killers. With at least twenty dead in the space of a minute, the Executioner could sense their indecision. They were no longer invincible.

Half tossed their rifles aside and retreated, making a show of their surrender. Bolan allowed them to flee, but kept their movements in mind even as the rest chose to stand and fight. Bullets whipped over his head and thudded into dirt and stone as he scrambled for cover. The Executioner slung the grenade launcher and rose, Soviet machine gun at his shoulder. He laid down a swathe of devastation from the remnants of the RPKS’s 100-round drum, then slapped the drum away and pushed in a 40-round banana magazine.

Training and concentration made the reload swift, barely interrupting Bolan’s response to the enemy. Faces and chests exploded as high-velocity 5.45 mm projectiles ripped into them.

A burst of rapid motion drew Bolan’s gaze, his machine gun pivoting only slightly behind his recognition of the cloud of sand vomited by an RPG shell. Too late for anything, the warrior hurled himself to the ground. Overpressure slammed into the big American, shaking him from scalp to toes. He survived only by the grace of the berm of dirt and rock he’d used as cover. Bolan avoided shrapnel from the warhead, but sound and pressure rocked him hard. Despite that, he lurched to his feet.

The overbalance of the explosion had knocked his machine gun from his hands. His grenade launcher was on his shoulder, dangling from its leather sling. His head still reeled from the near detonation, while his ears rang with the aftershock of the blast. His Desert Eagle had one round in the pipe and an empty magazine. Time for a combat reload. The weapon’s magazine flew free as his other hand slapped a spare into the well in its place.

The killer with the RPG was out of sight, though Bolan could see the smoke trail of the rocket, which gave him a general direction. A second rocket man rose with his own fat-nosed warhead. Bolan punched him in the face with a .44 Magnum hollowpoint round. His target dropped backward; a death spasm launching the rocket grenade skyward. Bolan’s sudden rise caught the attention and chatter of half a dozen rifles, but the Executioner dropped to the ground, retaking cover. Rocks and sand rained atop him, sprayed skyward by bullet impacts.

Bolan backtracked along the berm, head low. In a flash, he rose to his full height, scanned for a target and saw the first grenadier waiting, aiming for him. A woman screamed from near the medical tent and reflex pulled the rocket man’s aim off. Pistol fire cracked and the enemy shuddered under multiple impacts. There was an ally in the fray—and she’d just made herself a target.

A trio of remaining Afghan hardliners rushed to take her, perhaps as a captive.

The Executioner brought up the GP-25 grenade launcher in a single fluid movement. Aiming behind the group, he fired off his charge. The fragmentation grenade spun and struck the ground, spraying shrapnel. Fortunately, the three Taliban holdouts served as a perfectly good wall between the blast and his new ally.

Struggling to reload her pistol, a relatively young woman suddenly scrambled into view. Bolan snatched up his Desert Eagle and vaulted the berm.

One of the last few Afghan attackers took aim at the woman.

Despite being armed with a blood-caked handgun, she was clad in scrubs. She was not a trained combatant, though she’d done an admirable job taking out the first grenadier. She was completely oblivious to her next attacker. Fortuitously, the Executioner intercepted the killer with a .44 slug to the heart. The hardliner collapsed to the sand with a ruined chest.

“Get down!” Bolan shouted to her in Arabic. The woman dropped to the ground an instant before the air above her filled with high-velocity lead.

The Executioner spun and tracked the last killer on the field, firing a pair of heavy slugs into the gunman. He scanned the immediate area, wary and vigilant for signs of more enemy hostility as people slowly exited tents and trailers. Some were bleeding, but none appeared to be in immediate distress.

Bolan reloaded, put the Desert Eagle on safe and holstered it, moving to the woman’s side. He noted her name tag: Dr. Annis Hassan.

“Are you hit anywhere?” Bolan asked in his passable Arabic. He knew some key words and phrases in both Dari or Pashto from his experience in-country, and he hoped that the physician might have trained elsewhere with a common language.

“I’m fine,” she replied in English with a slight British accent. “Are you all right? You’re bloodier than I am.”

Bolan ached from diving for cover and being too near an RPG blast, but he hadn’t lost any range of motion and his senses weren’t dulled. Despite the ringing in his ears, he had kept going.