Suicide Highway

Once more, Bolan had proved his willingness to take a bullet for an ally

The Land Rover lurched, and with the odd plunk of a bullet striking the hardened skin of the big off-road vehicle, they were charging away from the battle scene.

The enemy had set up an ambush. It had taken alertness, luck, shooting skill and bald audacity to escape the attack.

But not before putting a few dozen into his enemies first.

The Land Rover charged over the broken road, escaping to let its occupants fight another day.

But Bolan knew the worrisome truth.

MACK BOLAN®

The Executioner

#246 Blood of the Earth

#247 Black Dawn Rising

#248 Rolling Death

#249 Shadow Target

#250 Warning Shot

#251 Kill Radius

#252 Death Line

#253 Risk Factor

#254 Chill Effect

#255 War Bird

#256 Point of Impact

#257 Precision Play

#258 Target Lock

#259 Nightfire

#260 Dayhunt

#261 Dawnkill

#262 Trigger Point

#263 Skysniper

#264 Iron Fist

#265 Freedom Force

#266 Ultimate Price

#267 Invisible Invader

#268 Shattered Trust

#269 Shifting Shadows

#270 Judgment Day

#271 Cyberhunt

#272 Stealth Striker

#273 UForce

#274 Rogue Target

#275 Crossed Borders

#276 Leviathan

#277 Dirty Mission

#278 Triple Reverse

#279 Fire Wind

#280 Fear Rally

#281 Blood Stone

#282 Jungle Conflict

#283 Ring of Retaliation

#284 Devil’s Army

#285 Final Strike

#286 Armageddon Exit

#287 Rogue Warrior

#288 Arctic Blast

#289 Vendetta Force

#290 Pursued

#291 Blood Trade

#292 Savage Game

#293 Death Merchants

#294 Scorpion Rising

#295 Hostile Alliance

#296 Nuclear Game

#297 Deadly Pursuit

#298 Final Play

#299 Dangerous Encounter

#300 Warrior’s Requiem

#301 Blast Radius

#302 Shadow Search

#303 Sea of Terror

#304 Soviet Specter

#305 Point Position

#306 Mercy Mission

#307 Hard Pursuit

#308 Into the Fire

#309 Flames of Fury

#310 Killing Heat

#311 Night of the Knives

#312 Death Gamble

#313 Lockdown

#314 Lethal Payload

#315 Agent of Peril

#316 Poison Justice

#317 Hour of Judgment

#318 Code of Resistance

#319 Entry Point

#320 Exit Code

#321 Suicide Highway

Suicide Highway

Don Pendleton

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment.

—William Cowper 1731–1800

The Task

Hatred and vengeance are my eternal companions, not because I choose to give in to them, but because I oppose them. When my body falls and my soul is seized, hatred and vengeance will have one less wolf at their heels.

—Mack Bolan

To our soldiers still standing guard and giving their all around the world. Come home safe to your families.

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

1

Sofia DeLarroque shook her head. The wounds from an AK-47 couldn’t have been more obvious if the shooter had circled each ragged hole in black marker and wrote “AK hit” with an arrow pointing to it.

The entry wounds were big enough to stick a finger into, and the bullets had cut completely through the body, their sharp steel cores plowing through muscle and bone like a boat hull through water, no deflection. Thankfully, there was little fragmentation or shrapnel. Truly dangerous bullets hit flesh and tore themselves apart, spinning missiles off the main track of the wound path. As it was, the child she was working on was bleeding badly, and she was running short on gauze to apply pressure bandages.

Welcome to day 216, she reminded herself.

Two hundred sixteen days in Afghanistan.

The American government claimed to have decisively beaten the supporters of the Taliban. So why did Americans and Afghans and international relief workers still come under attack on a daily basis?

Sofia wiped her brow, aware of the smear of gore she left on her platinum blond hair and her smooth, porcelain-like forehead. She could have been a model if she’d chosen to stay in France. She was tall, leggy, with just enough fullness of figure to give her deadly curves in all the right places. Crystal blue eyes that people said were perfect for seducing the camera instead were busy trying to evaluate how to best keep a psychopath’s victim stable long enough to make it to a surgical table.

Same stuff. Different country.

Ethiopia.

Palestine.

Afghanistan.

All the lands she’d chosen held the same things in common. Thugs and violence causing pain and suffering to the weak and helpless.

The thought flashed across her mind like lightning, and she tried to put aside the mental image of other children, the same age as this one, screaming and twisting terribly as bullets ripped into them.

Shame crushed Sofia as she gripped the girl’s hand, looking into her big, watery brown eyes. Tears glistened on the girl’s olive cheeks as thin, weak lips moved noiselessly.

“It’s all right,” Sofia whispered. She stroked a few strands of thick, black hair from the girl’s forehead, fighting off the memories that had been dogging her heels for exactly two hundred thirty-eight days and nine hours.

Images of grim murderers dressed head-to-toe in black, sweeping automatic weapons across fleeing, unarmed refugees in a Palestinian camp. The sound of cloth tearing echoed the distant sounds of bullet-spitting slaying machines as bodies were swept off their feet and flung cruelly, mercilessly into bloody rags.

Her body tensed against the sound of the shredding fabric, trying to fight off the memories of the murders she’d witnessed.

Murders she’d witnessed while huddled under the wreckage of a tent, flames licking all around her, as she muffled the face of a child against her bosom. Around them, shadows charged and darted, backlit by flames.

There was no mistaking it.

The men were on a mission of retribution. Only days before, a restaurant had been blown to hell by a suicide bomber. One madman’s act taking almost two-dozen lives and injuring tens more. A temporary cease-fire ended with rock throwing and riots and an assault on the refugee camp at Shafeeq.

When asked later she claimed not to have seen any faces.

She hadn’t been convincing enough because a salvo of gunshots only barely missed her. The UN pulled her and the other workers out as quickly as they could, finding a new territory for them to work.

It was unlikely anti-Palestinian forces would find refuge and assistance in Afghanistan.

Sofia held the girl’s hand as the doctor checked on her anesthesia’s progress.

It was unlikely that the hard-faced men she saw in the shadowy camp would follow her halfway across a continent, but she still sweated with terror each day, more intensely in recent times.

“THIS IS THE FIRST ONE we’ve even gotten anything on,” Greb Steiner said softly as he threaded the sound suppressor onto the muzzle of his Beretta. Olsen Rhodin often wondered at the mannerisms of the hard-core soldier, a man whose face and hands betrayed the violence of his life in a road map of scar tissue. He never raised his voice and rarely expressed anger or hostility. At times, Rhodin wondered if Steiner lived in a constant state of sadness, his brow bent with guilt.

Then again, Rhodin had watched Steiner shoot weeping mothers point-blank in the face just to send a message to their husbands.

Maybe it was guilt that weighed on Steiner’s face and voice. But it never stopped him from doing the job of protecting their country.

“We’ll find the others. Don’t worry,” Rhodin said. “We have the whole team here. They’ll find the others.”

Steiner chambered a .22-caliber slug into the Beretta, then holstered the piece. He was to be the executioner, again.

It was a role that Steiner was suited for. This was a man who would die before he talked, if ever he could be captured alive. A brick of a man, square, hard and rough, he towered a couple of inches over six feet, and his dark eyes seemed reddish, as if swimming in the blood he’d spilled over the course of his career. He slipped out of the truck with an agility that belied his blocky form.

Rhodin dropped down. He didn’t dramatically check the chamber of his rifle like the men with them did. He was a professional, and had locked and loaded the weapon as soon as he’d received it back at their improvised headquarters. Rifle shells pinged from breeches as “veteran” Taliban soldiers made themselves feel good with a spit of macho masterbatory gun manipulation.

“A waste of ammo,” he said under his breath, in English so the Afghans wouldn’t understand.

Steiner heard him and shrugged. “What? The rounds on the ground, or them?”

Rhodin shook his head. “Both.”

Steiner sighed, as if a greater load was added to the world-sized weight on his shoulders. “Let’s go.”

SOFIA’S HEART SANK as Dr. Gibson hung his head. Green streaks smeared across the monitor’s brownish black surface, the telltale whine of a flatline speaking the grim reality of another life lost. It wasn’t new, this horrifying change from a vibrant, living child full of the desire to play, learn and love to a cooling lump of motionless meat on a cold, metal surgical table.

“Let’s get the next one in here,” Gibson muttered, the harshness in his voice sounding like a body dragged across gravel. He was tearing off his blood-splattered gloves and pulling on fresh, sterile latex to keep infections from passing along.

Sofia looked down at the innocent face, gone from a healthy olive tone to almost bone-white from blood loss. The dead girl resembled an angel.

Les innocentes, the name for children who died with no spot of sin on their souls, going immediately to heaven, whatever heaven they believed in, if they knew that much at their age. Sofia wondered if heaven really existed, then dismissed the thought as she wheeled the body away to make room for a fresh victim.

Certainly a heaven had to exist.

Because this was hell.

She stopped as she reached the improvised morgue, leaving the table parked against a half-dozen others, lined up tightly to make the most of the space available until they could arrange burials. Their job was to make sure that the living survived. Respect for the dead would have to wait a few minutes, a few hours, until those who needed help got it.

The cart rolled as she let go of it, metal clanking dully against other metal, the tabletops covered with the wrapped-up remains of those who couldn’t be saved. Seven lost so far. That was just this day.

Sofia closed her eyes.

Seven added to the hundreds she had already seen.

Seven added to the mountain of dead she’d watched either die in the care of the medical mission, or gunned down directly by madmen on a crusade. Her jaw clenched as she tried to suppress her rage, her impotence at a world where juggernauts rolled over the helpless, smashing them to a pulp in the street, leaving dead and maimed in their wake.

She considered it a perversion of the concept of a trinity. Man fathered the gun. The gun sought to please its creator, so the gun gave man power. Man lusted after the power. Gun slew man’s children.

The unholy trinity continued to rampage across the face of the earth like a cancer. All she could do was help pick up the pieces, try to keep the wounded from being the dead and to reassemble the maimed.

It was a Band-Aid trying to cover an amputation. The stump was gushing blood, and the United Nations was holding up one sandbag in the middle, watching in despair, maybe in disbelief as currents slushed around on either side. A wave of sickness hammered into Sofia as she whispered a torrent of “damns” under her breath, pounding her hand against the trolley’s handlebars, until she realized that people in the hall were staring at her.

Her voice was hoarse, and her hand felt like someone had taken a maul to it. She’d be lucky if she hadn’t broken bones. Her eyes burned, face raw from tears.

The two staff members outside the door looked at her, a combination of fear and sympathy fighting for control of their features, and Sofia wished she were dead right then, shame and guilt boiling up into her throat, a new wave of tears ready to rise.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

One of her fellow aid workers, Charles, took a tentative step forward. “It’ll be okay, Sofia. You just need some rest—”

He never finished the sentence. His chest and head were suddenly obscured by a cloud of blood and gore, gunfire shattering the uncomfortable silence, plowing through the hallway like a rampaging rhinoceros.

Sofia stumbled back into the stretchers, screaming as her coworker smashed into the doorjamb, half his head caved in by the savage sledgehammer impacts of assault rifle fire. She lunged forward, trying to catch him, as if there were possibly some hope that a human being could take so much damage and still somehow be alive. She couldn’t hold him up. He was a heavy, limp thing, a formless blob spilling and pouring over her arms and tumbling to the floor no matter how much she tried to grab on.

Sofia looked up and saw Gerda, still out in the hall, her eyes staring up at the ceiling, her chest peppered with apple-sized splotches of red on her scrubs. But Gerda’s green eyes were bulging, her forehead literally dented an inch deep, a tiny red hole in the bottom of the crater in her face.

It was the camp all over again.

Sofia looked for another exit, knowing that if she went out into the hall, she’d end up as shredded meat. Charles and Gerda had granted her a reprieve with their deaths, and she had to get out, to warn people.

It was them.

Sofia wasn’t fighting her fears, her paranoia anymore. If it was the dark men who came to slaughter the families of suspected terrorists, then they were coming after her because they knew she would willingly testify.

She threw herself across a pair of tables, feeling the lumps of flesh under bloodied linens shift beneath her. On hands and knees she crawled frantically, charging toward the window on the far side of the storage room turned morgue. Sofia hated herself as she looked back, watching the dead girl she tried to help, half spilled off her gurney, brown eyes fallen open, staring with glassy indifference toward her.

Guilt wrapped around her throat with strangling strength, but she tore away from the eye contact with the dead, slamming her palm into the base of the window to force it open. It stopped her cold. Screams and gunfire ripped horribly through the building behind her. She slapped the window frame a second time, and it budged a quarter of an inch.

“Open, dammit,” she cursed.

The gunfire went silent as she punched the window frame again. It was the same hand she’d smashed over and over again into the gurney handle, and each strike sent fiery pain shooting up her arm. Blood was pouring freely from split skin, but Sofia finally got the window levered open wide enough to squeeze through.

Something crashed behind her and Sofia froze. She looked over her shoulder and saw a sad-faced man, overturning stretchers, dumping corpses to the floor. She recognized his face from the night of slaughter that had sent her halfway across a continent to escape retribution.

Her muscles were seemingly paralyzed, though some part of her mind recognized that she was actually moving—he was simply moving faster. Fear sent her adrenaline level skyrocketing, and time felt as if it were slowing down.

It gave her a chance to feel like she could live longer as the gun in the murderer’s hand rose slowly toward her. Sofia’s hand was through the window. She was in midfall to the ground outside.

A flash of light emitted from the barrel, though there was no loud crack of a gunshot.

Time suddenly snapped back to normal as her head was driven back, crashing into the half-opened window. Glass shattered and cleaved through her scalp, turning her blond locks to a ruddy crimson.

The next shot that Steiner pumped into Sofia DeLarroque’s face didn’t bounce obliquely along the curved bone of her skull. This .22 slug hit dead on, penetrating the fragile shell of her temple, tearing deep into the UN worker’s brain.

She was alive, technically, even as her brain cells were spun into a frothy soup by the bouncing bullet. Her heart still beat, and she still had reflexes that crashed her completely through the opened window. The frame snagged her, holding her as muscles flinched, making Sofia’s corpse twitch and twist.

Steiner walked up to the dying woman, looking her up and down. Blue eyes, the color of a tropical sea, glimmered, staring into a cloudless sky, lips moving wordlessly.

“Go to sleep, girl,” Steiner said, pulling the trigger on the Beretta twice more.

The Israeli unscrewed the sound suppressor from his pistol and stowed both pieces in his gear.

This wasn’t over, the assassin knew.

Where it would stop was anyone’s guess.

2

Hal Brognola chewed into his unlit cigar so hard he felt his teeth ache, as the voice on the other end of the phone line spoke.

“I’m going on a hunting trip, Hal.”

“Dammit, Striker,” Brognola spoke up. The handset was plugged into a hardline at Stony Man Farm, a top secret facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Even with the latest encryption hardware and software protecting the call, years of experience had taught him that nothing was one hundred percent secure, and even after all this time, he was not in the habit of talking openly on the phone with the man whose voice he knew intimately.

Experience had also taught Brognola something about the man he called Striker. Once he made up his mind to accomplish a goal, nothing would stop him.

“Dammit, Striker,” Brognola repeated, “I think I know what you’re looking at.”

“You think,” came the reply. There was no mockery or challenge in his tone. Brognola and Striker were friends who respected each other too much to play word games. “There’s a big wide world out there, Hal. A world that needs me to act between the jobs you have for me.”

Brognola grunted. He tasted the buds of tobacco squeezed from the crushed cigar between his teeth and set it down on an ash tray. Spitting residue from the tip of his tongue, he looked at the desktop full of news clippings and intelligence reports that made up the hell that was tearing through the world at that very moment.

It was the same crap, just different names. Terrorists. Mobsters. Drug dealers. Murderers. Conspiracies. Threats ranging from the schoolyard to the ivory towers of governments and corporations. This was the world that Brognola looked at every day, a wall of mourning and misery that he had to pick and choose from, and apply the powerful resources of America’s most elite covert action organization against.

To have Striker, one of Stony Man’s most important allies…

That was the truth about their arrangement, Brognola reminded himself.

Mack Samuel Bolan, the Executioner, wasn’t an employee. He wasn’t a recruit. He wasn’t a member of Stony Man Farm. The Executioner was the cat who walked by himself. He chose whether to go along with the soldiers of Able Team or Phoenix Force when they needed an extra hand. And he chose when to discharge his duties elsewhere.

The career of the big soldier wasn’t one defined by pay, or orders. It was entirely personal. It had started with destroying major chunks of the criminal organization that drove his family to its death. It moved up to battling terrorists, and then to the Executioner’s realization that there was more that needed to be done than what was sanctioned by any pencil-pushing politician or even Brognola himself.

“I’m sorry. Thanks for letting us know that you’ve got other pots cooking,” the big Fed said. His cheeks burned, even though he knew Bolan would forgive him.

“If it’s any consolation, you could be right about who I might be doing,” Bolan said.

“I’m betting it’s Chaman,” Brognola said, pulling the report of an attack on a relief hospital setup near a refugee camp in Afghanistan.

“Remind me to keep you away from LasVegas,” Bolan said.

A chuckle relieved the pressure in Brognola’s gut. “I dunno. I don’t remember having much time to place bets any time we’ve been to Vegas. Besides, I’d be much more interested in catching one of the shows.”

“Well, that’s one thing Vegas and Chaman will have in common,” the Executioner said.

Brognola chuckled. “You’ve always been known for your tiger impersonation.”

“Yeah. But when I put my teeth into someone’s neck, I intend to take their head off,” Bolan said.

MACK BOLAN WENT to Afghanistan in answer to the murders of UN relief workers, but he went not to bury them, but to insure that no one else would fall. The soldier’s duty he undertook didn’t have room for feelings of hatred and revenge.

He needed assistance, and while the cyberteam he usually relied upon at Stony Man Farm might have proved helpful anywhere else, in the technological wasteland of Afghanistan, Internet evidence of the suspected Taliban perpetrators was scarce.

That meant that the Executioner was going to have to go hunting the old-fashioned way. Electronics only went so far, but human eyes and ears, and trusted old friends, could reach further and deeper than anything. When the world was still in a cold, cold war, Bolan had been to Afghanistan often and had built up a network of allies, warriors among the mujahideen, the first and finest of whom was Tarik Khan, an old ally from the very last days that Bolan had been known as Colonel John Phoenix.

Aleser Khan looked every bit the younger version of his Uncle Tarik, and though he didn’t know Bolan personally, the two men knew each other by reputation. The young leader accepted the soldier into his camp as if he were a long lost cousin, and listened to the Executioner’s reasons for being there. Aleser’s dark brown eyes flashed with outrage, not at his presence, but at the need for the Executioner’s presence. His long black hair flowed like the mane of the lion he was named after.

“My uncle and my cousin owe you their lives, Al-Askari. It matters not which name you travel under. You will always have the best Aleser Khan can provide you, in men or arms,” the young mujahideen leader told him. “Especially when it comes to righting the wrongs done by those who claim to be our countrymen.”

“Thank you.” Bolan accepted, glad at Aleser’s facility with English. While the soldier knew enough Arabic to help him get around most of the Middle East, the Dahri dialect wasn’t one he was as skilled with. “I know that the men of the Taliban are no sons of this land, just another conquering army in a long line,” he said.