Triangle Of Terror

The Executioner hung the M-16 over his shoulder, filled his hands with the Blaster and caressed the trigger, sending the first missle streaking downrange with a loud chug.

As the toxic brew showered armed shadows charging for a nearby pocket, banshee shrieks flaying the air, Bolan jacked the handle, rotated another projectile into place and pumped out another hell bomb. No point in pulling punches, he decided, no sense fretting about noise and police swarming the block.

The Executioner was moving in to run and gun. Another batch of drums puked away toxic loads on a roaring ball of fire to douse a few more cannibals in what amounted to the fires of hell on earth.

There went the neighborhood.

MACK BOLAN

The Executioner

#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

#322 Time Bomb

#323 Soft Target

#324 Terminal Zone

#325 Edge of Hell

#326 Blood Tide

#327 Serpent’s Lair

#328 Triangle of Terror

The Executioner®

Triangle of Terror

Don Pendleton

Nothing can excuse a general who takes advantage of the knowledge acquired in the service of his country, to deliver up her frontier and her towns to foreigners. This is a crime reprobated by every principle of religion, morality and honor.

—Napoleon I, 1769–1821

Maxims of War

There is no lower form of treachery than to betray your fellow citizens in the name of greed and power. I will not rest while traitors plot their moves. I will be one step ahead of them and will make sure they get their due.

—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

Prologue

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

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Epilogue

Prologue

Only the guilty paid for silence. After nearly two decades of searching out, recruiting or buying contacts and informants from the adversarial side, Robert Dutton knew few darker truths existed in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering. Wisdom, though, did little to calm the brewing tempest in his gut. And he suspected a storm—invisible, silent, murderous, and in the flesh—was on the way.

He cursed the static buzz in his ear, fear sweeping away the impulse to fling the cell phone across the study. Whoever was coming—and he had some notion, albeit vague, as to the identity of the opposition—had electronically severed the secured frequency to the American Embassy. The National Security Agency called it hot-wiring, their classified super-tech miniature boxes emitting laser or microwave beams through triangulation, once the source—or target operator—was identified. The interloper, however, had to be in a general proximity of fifty yards to pull off the black magic act, which told Dutton the compound had already been breached. Likewise, he found his computer screen streaked with lightning jags. He felt his guts clench with the bitter awareness that all communications to the outside world had shut down. With no chance to e-mail his wife, warn her of imminent danger, to stay put until he rounded her up.

Damn it!

Knowing there was no hope of any Marine cavalry storming the compound, he chambered a 9 mm Parabellum round into the Beretta M-9 and stowed the weapon in shoulder rigging. No, he told himself, it wasn’t entirely true he was alone. His three-man team was still in the Command and Control Room, all of them armed, all of them sure to be staring at monitors jumping haywire with countertech malfeasance, alert to the sabotage. But, he wondered, was one or all three part of the plot to see he went deaf and blind? That prospect had earlier urged him to keep them in the dark, until he learned more about a possible conspiracy that could topple the administration in Washington.

Raw nerves screamed he needed to get to his wife immediately and whisk her out of Amman, a short chopper ride across the border to the relative safety of Israel where he had Mossad contacts. If he was marked as a CIA operative, he knew it stood to grim reason the opposition had most likely smoked her out as something more than a diplomatic attaché. They might kidnap her as a bargaining chip to buy his allegiance. They were compromised, no question, and that came straight from the shadow who had offered him the brown envelope only hours ago.

Briefly, he recalled the twilight encounter in the desert. He had gone there to rendezvous with an informant inside a cell of rejectionist radical Jordanians aligned with Iraqi militants. A military Humvee sat in the distance, watching the encounter, while the shadow—a Westerner brandishing an M-16—materialized out of the lengthening dusk, putting it to him to go deaf, dumb and blind, or else.

“Forget what you have learned. Take this, await further instructions…or suffer consequences.”

No sale. He didn’t know whether it was a setup. The Company was infamous for playing head games, separating wheat from chaff, lamb from lion, but he was a patriot, loyal to only God, country and family.

With the ultimatum now come to collect, he knew there was no point, nor time to waste shredding documents, gather the latest intel on what he’d learned from informants the past two days on what his team had tagged the “great vanishing act.”

Time to fight or fly.

He marched for the double doors, briefly confounded and angry, wondering how four years of hunting down and flushing out the mystery of the weapons of mass destruction—so close but seeming like light-years away—was swirling in the bowl. The attempted bribery confirmed two critical items in his mind. First, the WMD was real, it was out there. And someone, supposedly on the side of the angels, did not want it found. The latter conclusion begged the obvious question.

Why, indeed?

He hit the door when the lights blinked out. For several moments he crouched at the barrier, heart thundering in his ears, as he silently urged the generator to kick in. Nothing. He freed the Beretta and twisted the door handle, wondering why the others were not scrambling down the hall, barreling into the study. He was out the door, weapon extended, listening to the silence, peering into the darkness in both directions down the hall when the auxiliary generator flashed on the emergency overhead lights. Heart pounding, aware he was exposed in the sudden glow, he flung himself against the wall, Beretta whipping, twelve and six. The corridor was empty, but he sensed a presence, his combat instincts torqued up, warning him the invader was close.

And the faint acrid stink bit his nose.

Ahead, he saw the pneumatic door to the Command and Control Room open. Sliding on, checking the gloomy murk to his rear, the coppery taint clawed deeper into his senses. That the door was open, however, the red light on the keypad blinking, confirmed the identity of the opposition.

Only the five men had access to the Storm Tracking Central.

Taking a deep breath, Dutton threw himself into the doorway, charged three steps in, angling hard left for the deep shadows of the corner, the Beretta sweeping the room. His stomach cramped. Peevy was slumped over his monitor, blood pooling beneath his arms, a dark ragged hole in his temple. Waters and Groome were sprawled on their backs, swivel chairs dumped on the floor. Side arms holstered, they obviously never knew what hit them. But why, he thought, should they expect to be murdered by one of their own?

Dutton shoved down his rising anger over this brutal act of treachery. He vowed to the dead they would be avenged. Danger, he knew, was part and parcel of intelligence work, but they were essentially intel brokers—Storm Trackers, tagged so because they gleaned, bought, bartered or stole information on terror operations. In short, they mapped the future of operations on both sides, predicted strike patterns, stamped flashpoints well in advance of critical mass, often war-gaming terror and counterterror scenarios on computers for Langley. They were not gunslingers, steely-eyed black ops who combed the world’s hellzones for the most wanted militants, though Dutton had fired a shot in anger more than once in his day.

Retracing his path to the door, he sensed the invisible killer was nearby and closing the gap. Dead ahead, the north corridor would take him to a stairwell, which led to the subterranean garage. Trouble was, that hall bisected another corridor that circled back to his study, leaving him to wonder if the killer was laying in wait, no doubt armed with a sound-suppressed weapon.

Poised to start blasting, Dutton bolted and glimpsed the silhouette at the end of the southern hall. He saw the dark object in the killer’s hand, the assassin darting for cover at the corridor’s edge, then he tapped the Beretta’s trigger twice on the fly. A double crack sounded, the whine of bullets ricocheting off stone in the distance, and Dutton launched himself into a full-bore sprint, the tall snake-lean figure of the killer forcing the man’s name to mind like a curse word. It suddenly occurred to Dutton there could be more than one assassin under the roof, but he reached the stone door before the fear of this realization sank in. Turning the iron handle, he hauled open the massive block to the stairwell. Shooting one last look over his shoulder, he descended the narrow passageway, weapon out and ready to take down any threat as he wound his way around the first of two corners.

He hit the concrete deck running, palmed his remote box and beeped open the door locks to his GMC vehicle. Nothing unusual about the garage, as he scanned the shadows around the stone pillars, the vehicles of his dead comrades fanned out beside his ride, but there was another entrance to this underground lot, and he was sure the assassin knew of its existence. Certain he heard the faint scuffle of feet over stone toward the north exit, he flung open the door, jumped behind the wheel, scanning the garage. Determined he would shoot or bulldoze his exit out of there, he was keying the ignition when he spotted the inert figure on the shotgun seat in the corner of his eye. He was cursing himself for what might prove a fatal oversight, gun up and tracking, when he turned and faced the unmoving shape.

And felt his blood freeze.

“Oh, God, oh, God, no…”

He heard his cry trail off, feeble and distant, as he felt his heart jackhammer, believing for a moment fear and adrenaline had warped his senses, rendering the world an hallucination, spinning in his eyes, off its axis. The sound volumed into a pure bellow of animal rage, as he reached over, ready to shake her, call her name. But he had seen dead bodies, before and the blank stare and dark hole in her temple confirmed the murderous deed.

The impulse dropped over him like a wall of stone, his hand reaching for the door, ready now to fight or die, if only in the name of vengeance. But Dutton discovered he was grabbing air. The head butt shot out of nowhere. He felt his nose mashed into his face, caught his howl of agony vanishing somewhere in the blast furnace of scalding knives tearing through his brain, then number two hammer slammed him off the eyebrow. As blood stung his eyes, blinding him, he was vaguely aware of hands clawing into his shoulders like talons.

Suddenly, he was aware his own hands were empty, bell rung, reflexes for anything resembling a counterattack nearly frozen by pain. He was airborne next, wrenched from the seat, swiping at the blood in his eyes when the bastard teed off with a kick to his groin. Another grenade of white-hot pain exploded, scalp to toes, dropping him to his knees. Paralyzed, he tasted bile and blood on his lips, and strained to make out the assassin through the burning mist in his eyes.

“All you had to do was take the money and follow a few simple directions. It could have been so easy. But here we are. Me, disappointed in my fellow man. You, sucking on a final few moments of rage and grief and disillusionment.”

Dutton coughed, sucked wind, determined then not to give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing him begging for his life. Yes, he thought, here we are. He found it all so incredible; it struck him as the deluded fantasy of psychopaths. Or was there more to it? What? Greed? Power? Delusions of grandeur? He stared up at the assassin who took a step back, the Beretta held low by his side.

“What in God’s name have you done, Locklin?” Dutton asked plainly.

“Beyond luring your wife out of the embassy under the pretense of an emergency—the emergency being you—I haven’t done anything in God’s name.”

Dutton spit blood, surprised how the powerful hatred he felt toward the killer dulled the edge of physical torment. “You rotten bastard…she didn’t know anything.”

“She’s CIA, Dutton. She would have figured it out on her own, or you would have told her one night over some pillow talk.”

“What you’re doing…it will never happen.”

“Wrong, friend, it’s already happening, but what you think you found out is just a small part of the big picture. And, by the way, maybe you’re thinking the Company station chief here in Jordan will make this up to you, stabilize the situation already in play, sound the alarm from Langley to the Pentagon? Who do you think put me in charge of security at the embassy and to monitor you and your Storm Trackers? The official paper trail that put my seal of approval in your face is so back-channeled and convoluted it would take an act of God to trace it to the original source. Besides, the good CSC has already gone the way of your wife.”

Dutton felt adrenaline drive away the sludge in his limbs, fisted some of the blood out of his eyes, glanced to the open door and spotted his weapon on the seat. He didn’t think he’d make the four-foot lunge, but he had to try. If he kept the traitor talking while the cobwebs cleared, he might be able to pull off a lightning retaliatory strike.

“Okay, I give up. You sound like you’re in a talking mood, Locklin, so why not tell me why you’ve become a dirty rat bastard selling out to the enemy?”

Locklin laughed. “There is no enemy, Dutton—other than the people you think you pledge allegiance to.”

“I work for the United States government, Locklin.”

“So do I. Listen up, here’s a lesson on the facts of life. I’m sure you’ve heard how the victors in any war write history, how the winners determine who the bad guys are, how those on the winning side can tell future generations how they wore the armor of righteousness and made the world a better place.”

“That’s what this is about? Winning? Writing history?”

“Not writing it—creating it, making the future happen. You’re a Storm Tracker, Dutton. You know something about predicting the future, how to look into the eyes of tomorrow’s incubating conflicts and figure out how it will turn out, more or less. All the future is, well, it’s just an extension of the past. Men making the same mistakes. I’m just an instrument of the future and the people you so naively pledged allegiance to—the CIA, your informants, hell, maybe even the President of the United States—they’re not going to be a part of the coming future.”

The more his vision cleared, the more sickened Dutton felt at the face of pure evil looming over him. He knew he would never leave the garage breathing, the veil of darkness shadowing Locklin’s face warning him the killer’s blustering stance was over. The Beretta was rising.

It was over.

Dutton launched himself off the ground, hand streaking out for his weapon. He braced himself for the bullets to start tearing into him. It was either a miracle of speed and brazenness on his part or Locklin simply toying with him, but he had the Beretta in hand, heart pumping with lethal intent. Dutton wheeled, instinct shouting he wouldn’t make it. But a distant faint voice in his head told him that someone, somewhere would stand up to this monstrous evil before it unleashed its abomination on the world. At near point-blank range, he felt the cracking thunder lance his eardrums, a nanosecond before the 9 mm hammer drilled his forehead and doused the lights.

1

The blinding light usually broke them before he came in to close the game. Of course, he thought, there was prep work before the hardball questions were fired off, something extra for Task Force Talon’s time and trouble having to hunt some of them down in the first place. Plus, getting it straight up front, their will would be little more than wet dung to be molded in his hands. For instance, the detainee—or, in the private parlance of interrogators, the chum or the contaminants—seemed to always come to him requiring warm up where it hurt most—on the mug. A shot or two to the nose, squelching beak to crimson mash potatoes while pinballing those firewheels through the brain, was a decent jump start to poke a chink in defiant armor. It let them know right off whatever they’d heard about the Geneva Convention was simply the whiny nonsense of Western journalists who couldn’t fathom the real world. Naturally, before the festivities started, they were stripped naked, strapped to the cold steel chair, humiliation hard at work right away to rob the chum of any pride. He let them stew for, say, anywhere from thirty-six to forty-eight hours like that, no food or water, no sleep.

Alone, seething, shamed and frightened, pinned by the light.

The problem was, the white light could break a man down to a gibbering idiot. No longer, then, did he leave them with eyelids forced open by clamps. He needed hard intel from lucid tongues, not raving lunatics fit only for a straitjacket. Consider the murdering rabble he had to deal with and break, though, he figured it was forgiveable if they lost one or two along the way, learning from their own mistakes how far to push it as they went.

The rock music and the air conditioner mounted on the white wall were the newest additions, both of them personal touches. Piped in at jumbojet decibels, the guard monitoring the 8x10 cell—the Conversion Room it was called—had the discretion to decide how long to blast the detainee with screeching guitar riffs and primal drumbeats. He could grant the prisoner whatever period of blessed silence he chose before blaring back the same godawful song. With the transfer complete, the worst of the worst militants from Guantanamo Bay found themselves in a remote jungle hellhole. Smack on the Brazil-Paraguay-Argentina border, few human beings knew it existed and even fewer wanted to know.

It was his show.

Zipping up the bomber jacket, he pulled the door shut behind him, then slipped on the leather gloves. Even with the black sunglasses he squinted, taking a few moments to adjust to the white glare. Two steps across the polyethylene tarp, the plastic crinkling beneath rubber-soled combat boots, and he saw the detainee flinch at the sound. Good, he thought, no permanent ear damage. If possible, he liked to keep his style of interrogation more low key, direct, friendly even, unlike the shouting and barking his two comrades enjoyed.

He took a moment to inspect the damage his starter and middle relief had inflicted earlier, stepping into the halo, shielding the battered face with his shadow. The swollen eyelids fluttered open as best they could, then cracked to slits, the detainee groaning, shivering so hard in the restraints around his arms and legs it made him wonder if the bolts would hold down the chair. They’d done quite the hit parade on the ribs, he saw, both sides a quilt work pattern, layered in black and purple. And the strained wheezing told him every breath the Iraqi drew was like taking a hot knife through the torso.

He fired up a cigarette, inhaled a healthy lungful through it and blew the cloud in the prisoner’s face, meshing smoke with pluming breath. Though he had his closing mentally scripted he still wondered where to start. Whether Kharballah al-Tikriti was the bastard son of the Burrowed Bearded Rat—as rumor indicated—was of minor importance, as long as that knowledge remained a secret shared only by those closest to him.