Another muzzle-flash from the pursuit car—the shot went wild

The hunters didn’t give a damn about potential bystanders. Professionals. Nothing but victory or death would stop them.

Except, Bolan was determined they wouldn’t win.

Which left one option.

He had to find a killing ground that minimized the prospect of collateral damage. There, he’d make a stand and see what came of it. If he could—

Suddenly another pair of headlights glared from behind the chase car.

Reinforcements maybe? If that were true, there could be anywhere from two to five, or even six guns in the second vehicle. The odds against survival might have just doubled.

But Bolan had beaten worse odds in the past and walked away. Even if death was certain for himself, he would fight until his last round had been fired, then take it hand to hand.

The hunting party’s scarred survivors would not soon forget their meeting with the Executioner.

The Executioner®

Survival Mission
Don Pendleton’s

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Specialist Salvatore Augustine Giunta “Unwavering courage, selflessness and decisive leadership while under extreme enemy fire.” Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, 25 October 2007

And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

—Matthew 18:5–6

Forget about millstones. This time, the cleansing fire.

—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

Epilogue

Prologue

The stranger was out of his element, running on animal rage and a vestige of hope that grew fainter with each hour’s passage. He didn’t know the city but could read a map. He didn’t speak the country’s foremost language but had drilled sufficiently in German and Russian as a younger man to get along. Locals would take him for a tourist if he didn’t push his luck too far, come down on them too hard.

That was the rough part, trying to act casual when every instinct he possessed was telling him to run amok and burn the goddamned city down if that was what it took to reach his goal. How many lives was he prepared to sacrifice in the pursuit of one he still held precious?

Pick a number. Any number. Were there seven billion people on the planet yet?

The only one that mattered was beyond his grasp so far, but he was getting closer.

He could feel it, with the ache inside that marked her loss.

He didn’t know if she was still alive, or what condition he would find her in, if she was. Had she been lost beyond all doubt, there would have been no reason for the marginal display of calm he somehow managed to project. Under those circumstances, he could have let his fury off its leash and slaughtered everyone he met, until he found the ones responsible.

And introduced them to a taste of living hell on earth.

But for the moment, he was still Joe Tourist, soaking up the sights, dropping an offhand question into conversation here and there. His face was not a memorable one; the mirror in his hotel room confirmed it. If he hit no panic buttons, sounded no alarms, he should be able to get closer.

Maybe even close enough.

The first real hurdle had been finding the specific tools he needed in a foreign city, but he’d managed. Anywhere you went, worldwide, the managers of seedy bars and brothels were the secretkeepers. Taxi drivers could direct you to the action for a fee, and once you wormed your way into the pulsing heart of decadence, debased yourself enough to rule out any thought that you might be an undercover cop, the only thing that mattered was the price tag.

Anyplace on earth, a man—or woman—with sufficient cash in hand could find the means of degradation or the weapons of destruction. Name your poison. If a twisted mind was able to conceive it, currency could make the nightmare real.

So he was armed, not necessarily as well as he’d have liked, but adequately. He could kill a small battalion if his luck held, and he clung to the advantage of surprise. They shouldn’t know that he was hunting them, not yet, but in the real world nothing could be taken on blind faith.

The arms dealer, for instance, would have underworld connections. Absolutely, beyond doubt. If he was talkative, told someone of the hardware he’d furnished to a foreigner—more to the point, a westerner—the ripples might begin to spread. Nothing that would identify the hunter yet, but once suspicion had been raised, the creatures dwelling in the city’s netherworld would be alert. Watching and listening, reporting back to someone at the center of the loathsome spiderweb.

It was the spider that he wanted. Maybe more than one. But he’d be satisfied to save the gnat they’d snared, if only he could rescue her unharmed.

But if he’d come too late, as he feared—if she had been defiled, or worse—the stranger reckoned that a life or two in recompense might not be satisfactory.

He’d have to wait and see, after he checked the address he’d obtained from a young woman of the streets. She hadn’t been insulted when he told her that seventeen or eighteen years placed her beyond the pale of his desires. In her profession, he supposed that she had heard and seen it all. Of course, he had to pay the normal hourly rate and more besides, but once the deal was struck she had been happy to oblige.

Or simply bored and sending one more pervert on his way.

Whatever.

Motive didn’t matter to the stranger. All that counted was the end result.

The street was named for some war hero of a bygone century who would have been forgotten, otherwise. He didn’t rate a statue, but they’d loaned his name to seven seedy blocks that boasted tattoo parlors, pawnshops, hot-sheet hotels and diners whose special was ptomaine roulette.

He’d spotted the red door, confirmed its street number. No sign on the filthy brick wall to explain what went on inside the three-story building. But then, he supposed, if you had this address there was no explanation required.

He rang the bell, waited and kept his face deadpan as someone scrutinized him through a peephole. Thirty seconds later the door opened to reveal a bullet-headed, no-neck slab of muscle in a pin-striped suit who glowered at the new arrival from behind an often-broken nose.

“Kdo jste?” he inquired. “Co chceš?”

Tone dictates meaning, and the stranger on the stoop replied in German.

“Ich bekam diese Adresse finden sie ein Mädchen.”

The man with the bullet-shaped head considered it, then stood aside. He switched to German.

“Hereinkommen.”

Stepping past him, waiting for the door to close, the stranger timed his move, drawing his pistol, turning on his heel to swing it as a bludgeon. But the target had already moved, a big fist looping toward the gunman’s face to strike him with explosive force. He fell, half-conscious, clinging to the pistol for a moment, until more men suddenly surrounded him and wrenched it from his grasp.

The man with the bullet-shaped head leaned close enough for drops of spittle to make impact as he spoke. English this time.

“You’re one dumb bastard, eh? Who helps your little girlie now?”

1

Prague, Czech Republic

The Vltava River winds through Prague’s heart like a bloated, indolent serpent, winding under eighteen bridges, gliding past squatting warehouses and spires of classic architecture, passing stately homes and tenements. At first glance it seems lazy, placid, but its name derives from the Old German phrase wilt ahwa—and it still claims lives and property from time to time, as when it overflowed its banks in August of 2002.

Mack Bolan watched a ferry pass beneath the Palackého Bridge, checking his watch, then turned away and crossed a nearby street on foot. Sparse traffic let him take his chances without blaring horns. Orange streetlights lit the bridge and avenue beyond, while side streets made do with old-fashioned lamps on the corners and whatever light spilled from windows or small neon signs.

It was a seedy neighborhood, not criminal per se, but savvy residents of Prague knew better than to walk its streets alone by night, if that could be avoided. Muggers and pickpockets were a problem in the Czech Republic’s capital and largest city, but they didn’t worry Bolan. If his size, attitude and the expression on his face did not dissuade such people, he was carrying an ALFA semiautomatic pistol—the Defender model, used by many Czech police and military officers—chambered in .40 S&W with a twelve-round magazine and one round in the chamber. Extra magazines were slotted into Bolan’s pockets, and he also carried a collapsible baton that added twenty inches to his normal reach.

His destination was a boxing gym called Oskar’s, situated half a block west of the the Palackého Bridge. He wasn’t looking for a sparring partner, and in fact was hoping that the place might already be closed. Civilians made things awkward and potentially disastrous, a fact his very presence in the city verified.

It was a rescue mission, plain but not so simple, since it currently involved two captives in distress, presumably confined at different locations. That is, if both were still alive.

The whole trip might turn out to be a waste of time, for all its planning and the hours that he’d spent in transit. If he reached the scene too late, there’d be no happy ending. Only payback, which was one of Bolan’s specialties. Failing to save the day, he could at least do everything within his power to make sure the predators responsible did not survive to go on and commit such horrors again.

Time was not on Bolan’s side. Before he’d even taken off from the United States, one of the prisoners he sought to liberate had already spent two days in hostile custody. The other had been gone for nine days, and he didn’t want to think about what might have happened to her in that time.

He didn’t want to, but the thoughts were unavoidable.

The ideal outcome of his mission would be the extraction of two living, healthy captives from whatever hell they’d been consigned to by their kidnappers. Bolan would settle for the living part, and cherished no illusions that the pair he’d come to find were being pampered by their captors as the days and nights went by. Whatever he found waiting for him at the end of his grim journey, Bolan understood that he was not responsible for healing. Saving lives—or ending them—was all that he aspired to on this night in Prague.

Business as usual.

Employing Bolan was a last resort for any situation. He was only called when every other means had failed and time was absolutely of the essence. And planning could only reach so far in the situations he found himself dealing with. The rest came down to raw audacity and ruthlessness.

He was the cleanup man.

The Executioner.

On this night, in Prague, he still had hope, but it was frail. He harbored no illusions about what might lie in store for him at Oskar’s gym, or wherever the journey took him after that. He felt a sense of urgency, restrained by long experience, and had already steeled himself against the worst possible news.

Which wasn’t death. Not even close.

Bolan had seen the worst—or some of it, at least—and it was always with him. Humans found more ways to torment one another than a sane mind could imagine, but the minds he dealt with on a daily basis only qualified as sane within a narrow legal definition. If a predator knew right from wrong and went ahead regardless, having the capacity to curb his cruelty, he was considered “sane.”

Bolan didn’t care.

The best way he had found to treat a brain seething with malice and contempt for all humanity was with a quick pointblank lobotomy.

Patients were waiting for him in the dark heart of Prague.

And the doctor was in.

FOUR HOURS HAD ELAPSED since Bolan’s touchdown at Prague Ruzyn International Airport, traveling from Paris on Czech Airlines for the last leg of his twelve-hour trip from D.C., counting time spent in various terminals. Before he left the States, he’d put a Volvo S80 on hold with Europcar in Prague and found it waiting for him on arrival, waiting for delivery to Matthew Cooper. That name appeared on Bolan’s primary passport, Virginia driver’s license and the fully paid-up Visa Platinum card that covered any damage to the car while he was using it. He traveled light, a simple carry-on to dodge the extra baggage fees most airlines charged these days, but Bolan also needed tools to do the job at hand.

His first priority, therefore—like that of many other visitors to Prague—was shopping.

Bolan came prepared with a short list of names for suppliers gleaned from Stony Man Farm. He never knew exactly who compiled the lists, nor did he care, as long as there was inventory standing by when Bolan needed it. The list, three names in all, came with specific passwords that should open doors for Bolan as required.

His first stop was a bust, the shop in question vacant, with a placard in the window that directed him to Zorka Geislerová Ltd., presumably some kind of rental agent. Moving on, he found the second vendor just about to lock up for the night, but Bolan’s coded phrase—ryba je ervená, translated as “the fish is red” for reasons that he didn’t bother pondering—bought him the time required to make his purchases.

He went for one-stop shopping, stocking up on everything he thought that he might need to do the job in Prague. The ALFA pistol was an easy choice, dependable and widely circulated in the Czech Republic, guaranteeing that its ammunition would be readily available. Next up, he chose a Vz. 58V assault rifle chambered in 7.62×39 mm, a folding-stock version of the country’s standard-issue infantry weapon. It resembled the venerable AK-47, but internally it operated on a short-stroke gas piston the Czechs had designed for themselves, providing a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute and a maximum effective range exceeding four hundred yards, depending on the sights available.

In practice, though, the Vz. 58V was a close-range weapon. Thinking that he might have to reach out and touch someone at longer ranges, Bolan chose a Dragunov SVD-S sniper’s rifle with a folding stock and standard PSO-1 telescopic sight. The piece was chambered in 7.62×54 R—the R standing for Russian—and in Bolan’s expert hands it could bag targets out to fourteen hundred yards.

For heavy hitting when it counted, Bolan also bought a dozen URG-86 “universal” grenades, another Czech model combining both timed- and impact-fuse functions. Both were activated two seconds after release of the grenade’s safety lever. From that point onward, any impact would produce a detonation—or the lethal egg would go off on its own in 4.6 seconds. Each URG contained forty-two grams of high explosive, with a pre-fragmented casing to ensure distribution of death on the fly.

The rest came down to odds and ends. Spare magazines and extra ammunition, a suppressor for the ALFA’s threaded muzzle and a black steel reproduction of the famous Mark I trench knife widely issued in the First World War. Bolan paid for the mobile arsenal and duffel bags to hold the varied items using cash donated by a pimp in Baltimore who had no further use for money, velvet suits or the vintage purple Caddy Coupe de Ville he’d driven until very recently.

Under the circumstances, Bolan thought his contribution was appropriate.

And he would put it to good use.

BOXING HAD BEEN ASSOCIATED with the underworld for generations in America, and Bolan guessed it must have been the same in Europe. Violent men engaged in blood sport, managed—if not owned outright—by men whose penchant for mayhem made anything done in the ring seem G-rated and tame. Farther east, it was the same for wrestlers in Bulgaria, as Bolan understood it—and, in fact, the term wrestler had come to denote mobster. Then again, so had businessman, proving that no field of human endeavor was safe.

At one time or another, Bolan had been called upon to cleanse them all.

Approaching Oskar’s gym, he saw a light burning upstairs, third floor, behind a pane of frosted glass. No view inside from where he stood. He found the metal staircase bolted to the back wall, accessed from an alley lined with trash cans, strewn with rubbish that had never made it to a bin.

Bolan had a choice. He could go in through the back door, which he found locked, or climb the fire escape and pick a window, maybe hope for entry from the roof as an alternative. He’d never seen an urban tenement that didn’t have some kind of rooftop access from inside. The question was: What kind of access, and how well secured would it turn out to be?

The back door Bolan faced was steel and double-locked, a dead bolt and a keyhole in the doorknob. He could likely pick the latter with no problem, but the dead bolt would take longer, if his picks could open it at all. If there were other locks or bolts inside that Bolan couldn’t see, it would be wasted time and effort, leaving him exposed and perhaps attracting someone from the inside who’d object to uninvited visitors.

That left the fire escape.

He jumped to grab its lowest section, seven feet above ground level, pulled it down and grimaced at the squeal of rusty metal. Bolan waited one full minute for the racket to evoke a curious reaction, then began to climb when no one showed. It didn’t mean the noise had gone unnoticed, but at least security for Oskar’s gym did not include a swift-response team for the alley.

On the second floor—which Europeans call the first, distinguished from the ground floor—Bolan found the windows painted over on the inside. Also locked, which made him wish he’d brought a glass cutter along. Too late to worry over that, and he moved on to find the same precautions against spying on the next two floors. He listened at the topmost windows, on the floor where he had seen light from the building’s street side, but heard nothing to betray human inhabitants.

So, they were quiet at the moment. Or they’d moved the hostage, possibly disposed of him by this time. There was a slim chance, Bolan calculated, that the address he’d been given had been wrong from the beginning, though he doubted it. The only thing to do was to proceed and find a way inside. See who—if anyone—was home and what they had to tell him if he asked persuasively.

A Bolan specialty.

The roof was flat, with two old-fashioned television aerials protruding from the northeast and the southwest corners. Roughly in the middle stood a boxy structure resembling an outhouse, which he knew would grant him access to a flight of stairs descending to the tenement’s top floor. That door was locked as well, of course, but Bolan jimmied it with his knife blade and seconds later breathed the pent-up atmosphere of Oskar’s gym.

It smelled like sweat, leather and canvas, mildew and some kind of astringent.

Maybe just a whiff of blood.

And then, a sound. It was a man’s voice, distant in relation to the place where Bolan stood, growling what could have been a question. Seconds later, in the place of a response, there came a gasping cry of pain.

Drawing his pistol, Bolan started down the stairs.

EMIL REISZ WAS TIRED. His fists ached, even though he’d worn a pair of lightweight boxing gloves while hammering the prisoner. His punches had been interspersed with questions that—so far—had gone unanswered but for curses. It was time to pass the gloves, he thought. Let Alois or Ladislav try their hands with the sphinx who would say nothing.

Or, perhaps they ought to try some other tools.

There’d be a mess to clean up afterward, but Oskar’s gym had seen its share of blood over the years. A bit more wouldn’t change the ambience significantly. Truth be told, it might help some of Oskar’s fighters find their courage for a change.

In fact, they didn’t need much information from the prisoner. Reisz knew his name and where he’d come from, not to mention why he’d come. No secret there. But orders had come down to find out whether anyone had helped the fool in transit, fed him any inside details of their operation to support his hopeless quest. If there was someone else behind him, sponsoring the effort, measures would be taken to eliminate that threat.

But only if they could obtain the names.

And so far, nothing.

He was fluent in profanity, this one. During the ordeal of interrogation he had cursed them up and down in English, German, Russian, not forgetting to include their mothers, grandmothers and all the smallest branches on their family trees. It was inspiring to a point, his tolerance for pain, the grim defiance even when he must have known he was as good as dead.

But then, beyond that point, it just became a tiresome exercise. Reisz thought he might as well be pounding steak for dinner. That way, at the very least, his efforts would produce a meal instead of aching knuckles.

Time for pliers, possibly. Or a truck battery with alligator clips.

Reisz checked his watch after he had removed the boxing gloves. Another fifteen minutes until change of shift, but their replacements could arrive any second. Let them pick up where he’d failed, and if some criticism fell upon him, then so be it. Three days, and no one else had managed to wring answers from the stubborn pia they had duct-taped to a straight-backed wooden chair between the third floor’s pair of fighting rings.

If Reisz was criticized, there would be plenty of blame to go around.

“Enough for me,” he told his two companions standing by. “Somebody want to have another go at him before we leave?”

“Forget it,” Alois Perina said. “Let Jií and his men finish the job.”

“And mop up when they’re done,” Ladislav Seldon said.

“Suits me,” Reisz answered as he tossed the bloodied gloves aside. “I think he’s nearly finished, anyway.”

“If there was someone else behind him, he’d have said by now,” Perina opined.

“Probably,” Reisz said, still not convinced. “I doubt we’ll see this one again, regardless.”

“And good riddance,” Seldon said.

“All right, who wants a drink?” Reisz asked.

“What are we celebrating?” Perina asked.

“Who needs an excuse?” Seldon chimed in. “Make mine a double.”

Reisz was moving toward the liquor cupboard, something that had always struck him as incongruous for a gymnasium, when he was suddenly distracted by a shadow in the doorway to his left. Jií arriving early for a change, he thought, instead of twenty minutes late as usual. But when he turned to face the door, Reisz did not recognize the man who occupied the space.

He was tall and well-proportioned, dressed in dark clothes, with a solemn face that Reisz was sure he’d never seen before. Vaguely Italian in its aspect, but that could mean anything or nothing. More important was the pistol in his hand.

“What’s wrong with you, Emil?” Perina asked, then tracked his gaze to spot the stranger watching them. Reisz didn’t have to issue any orders. All three reached for guns at once, Reisz hoping he could draw his own before the grim-faced prowler fired.

BOLAN HAD NOT ATTACHED the ALFA’s silencer before he left his hired car for the trek to Oskar’s gym. It didn’t matter at this late hour, on the top floor of a gym surrounded by commercial buildings that had shut down for the night.

He shot the seeming leader of the three men first, drilling his chest an inch or so off-center from a range of twenty feet. The guy went down without a whimper, slack and boneless when he hit the concrete floor. It seemed to take his backup by surprise, but neither faltered in attempts to pull their weapons.

Bolan ducked and tagged the shooter on his right, who seemed to be the faster of the two remaining on their feet. Not quite a perfect shot, but Bolan saw him lurch and stagger from the impact, then lose his footing, tumbling. If he managed to recover, it would cost him precious time, and Bolan used that breather to take care of number three.

The last man had his weapon drawn, some kind of automatic with a shiny stainless frame and blue-steel slide, maybe a Czech CZ 75. The piece was moving into target acquisition when the third round out of Bolan’s ALFA struck its owner just below his left eye socket, snapping back his head and ruining his aim forever. Even then, the dead man got a shot off as he toppled over backward, setting free a rain of plaster dust from overhead.

Bolan rose from his crouch, surveyed the fallen and discovered that the second man he’d shot was still alive. Crossing the room to reach him, Bolan kicked his gun away and made a quick assessment of his wound. It would be fatal without treatment, but he couldn’t pin it to a deadline. Rather than take chances, Bolan put another .40 S&W round between the shooter’s eyes and finished it.

That done, he moved to stand before the bloody figure of a man dressed in only a pair of boxer shorts, secured to a wooden chair by strips of silver duct tape wrapped around his torso, wrists and ankles. He was conscious, barely, using some reserve of energy to hold his head up, watching Bolan through the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. Mouth-breathing since his nose was flattened from repeated blows.

Bolan knelt on concrete, outside the ring of blood spatters, and peered into the mottled face, which at present was barely recognizable from photographs he’d seen before he left the States. Playing it safe, he leaned in closer and addressed the human punching bag.

“Andrew Murton?”

The head bobbed once, then sank onto the captive’s chest. Bolan worked quickly with his knife, slitting the duct tape, peeling it away. There was no way to spare the prisoner that ripping pain, but Murton barely seemed to feel it.

“Clothes?” Bolan asked.

Murton nodded vaguely to his left and answered, “Ober dere.”

Bolan recovered shirt, slacks, socks and loafers from a corner of the gym and brought them back to Murton, helped him dress himself, acutely conscious of the fact that they were wasting precious time. Whether his gunshots had been noted in the seedy neighborhood or not, there was a chance that reinforcements might arrive at any moment. If that happened…

Murton wobbled on his feet as Bolan held him upright, then took baby steps in the direction of the exit. “Godda go,” he said. “Somebud comin’.”

Bolan didn’t question that, assuming there’d been some form of communication with his captors during Murton’s ordeal, or that Murton had a rough idea of when new torturers arrived to spell the old. Whatever, it was time for them to hit the street.

The prisoner would need a medic, then they’d need to talk about the other prisoner whom Bolan had been sent to rescue, if that still was possible. In either case, his job was half-done, more or less.

If they could only make it back to Bolan’s car alive.

He helped Murton limp down three flights of stairs to the ground floor, led him to the main street exit and unlocked it from inside. The cool night air seemed to refresh Murton a little, helped him to pick up his lagging pace. They’d covered half a block when headlights washed across them, from behind. Doors slammed, and Murton turned back toward the sound.

“Shid!” he exclaimed. “Run now!”

Bolan glanced back in time to see four new arrivals on the sidewalk, staring after them and jabbering together, one of them already reaching underneath his jacket for a weapon.

Murton had it right.

Run now!

2

Half carrying the man he’d rescued moments earlier—one-ninety if he weighed an ounce—Bolan reached the nearest corner, ducked around it and stopped there. Propped Murton up against the rough brick wall and peered back toward the place they’d come from, gun in hand.

“Why stoppen?” Murton asked him, slurring.

“To see if I can end it here,” Bolan replied, his index finger on the ALFA’s trigger.

But it wasn’t meant to play that way, apparently. Instead of giving chase, the four goons from the car—it could have been a Citroën, maybe something manufactured locally—were piling back into their vehicle. It bought Bolan a little time, but precious little. And none to waste on conversation with a man who was barely conscious.

Bolan made his choice. He half crouched and drove his shoulder into Murton’s gut, already bruised and aching. With a whoof! the battered man slumped over Bolan’s shoulder, perfectly positioned for a fireman’s carry. Bolan flexed his legs and bore the weight, turned toward the nearby darkened side street where he’d left his Volvo S80 and broke into the fastest run that he could manage under the circumstances.

It reminded him of combat on another battlefield, retrieving wounded comrades under fire. He’d always done his best to keep faith with the Special Forces credo that no soldier stays behind. That wasn’t always possible, of course—sometimes you had to make the choice of dying with a corpse or moving on to fight another day—but his record was better than average.

And leaving Murton alive with the men who’d abducted him wasn’t an option.

Bolan heard an engine growling as he reached the Volvo, used its tab to pop the door locks from a distance, and upon reaching the vehicle he began the chore of putting Murton in a seat. He chose the rear, where Murton could lie down and be out of sight, though not entirely safe from any bullets slicing through the Volvo’s coachwork. At the very least, a backseat ride would keep him out of Bolan’s lap and clear from Bolan’s line of fire.

Murton cooperated to the best of his ability, huffing and groaning as he rolled onto the Volvo’s rear bench seat and drawing in his legs as Bolan slammed the door. A quick dash to the driver’s side, key twist, ignore the chime that warned him of a shoulder harness left unfastened, and they pulled out from the curb just as the other car found them with its headlights, closing in.

The Volvo’s five-speed automatic transmission left both of Bolan’s hands free for driving—or for fighting, if it came to that. The duffel bags containing most of his new weapons were concealed in the sedan’s trunk, out of reach for the moment, but he still had the ALFA autoloader with nine rounds remaining and four extra magazines secured in pockets. If he couldn’t stop the chase car and its occupants with fifty-three live rounds…well, then, what good was he?

But Bolan’s first choice was evasion and escape.

He’d killed three men already, in their lair at Oskar’s gym, but that was vastly different than a running firefight through the streets of Prague. Even at night, the city never really slept. A fair share of its approximately 1.2 million inhabitants had work to do at any hour of the day or night, including a municipal police department with fifteen district headquarters spotted around the 192-square-mile metro area. He could meet one of their silver Škoda Octavia prowl cars at any turn, and since his private code barred any use of deadly force against police, most of his options would be lost in that event.

He drove without a plan so far, aware that he was winding toward Old Town, the ancient heart of Prague where early settlers had put down roots nearly twelve hundred years ago. It was the last place where he wanted to be trapped, surrounded by the landmarks that drew tourists, with a greater likelihood of meeting the police, and so he scrolled a street map of the city that he’d memorized while he was airborne, seeking options.

If he had it right, they were about to exit Prague 5—one of Prague’s twenty-two administrative districts—and enter Prague 4, specifically a suburb known as Kunratice. If he could lose the Citroën in its winding streets, so much the better. And if not…

It would be time for drastic action.

JI Í KOSTKA CLUTCHED his pistol tight enough to make his knuckles ache, bracing his free hand on the Citroën’s dashboard as they swerved around another corner, entering a residential street. The Volvo they were chasing showed no signs of slowing down, so Kostka snapped an order at his driver, Ivan Durych.

“Overtake them, will you? If you can’t do that, pull over now and let me drive!”

“This is a DS4,” Durych reminded him, keeping his eyes locked on the target. “Not a goddamned Maserati.”

“Can you get us within shooting distance, or is that too much to ask?” Kostka demanded.

“Don’t you think I’m trying?”

“Well, stop trying, then, and do it!”

Kostka realized his anger was misplaced, but he was known for his explosive temper, one of several qualities that had resulted in his elevation to the post of squad leader within the Werich syndicate. Unlike some blowhards he had met, Kostka’s bite was worse than his bark, a fact well recognized by everyone who knew him. He would strike without a second thought and kill without remorse.

So why, in God’s name, had he let the runners slip away from him outside Oskar’s gym?

Something about the tall man, when he turned to glare at Kostka on the sidewalk, had persuaded Kostka in a heartbeat that they would be wise to let him think he had escaped, then run him down and kill him while his back was turned, and either retrieve their prisoner or eliminate him at the same time. That would leave important questions still unanswered, but Kostka thought that was preferable to the American’s escape.

No one could blame him for the breakout. That would fall on Emil Reisz—who, if he had an ounce of luck at all, was lying dead at the gymnasium with his two stooges. Kostka had been early to relieve Reisz, and for that reason alone had caught the prisoner and his still-unknown benefactor at the scene. Five minutes later, and they would have gotten clean away.

Still, if he lost them, there would be no one else Kostka could blame. They were in hot pursuit, well armed, but if they could not salvage the debacle he would be the loser. Might wish he was dead himself when time came to deliver the bad news.

Just make it right, he thought, and hissed at Durych with a fresh demand for speed.

“We’re gaining,” Durych snapped. “Be ready!”

In the backseat, Kostka heard his other soldiers—Michal Lobkovic and Zdenk Vojan—cocking pistols. They were both fair shots, but Kostka didn’t like the thought of either firing past him from the rear while they were racing through the streets. Half turning in his seat, he said, “Be careful if there’s shooting. I don’t want a goddamned bullet in my ear from one of you!”

Vojan grinned back at him and said, “I never shot a man by accident.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” Kostka answered, turning back to watch the Volvo as it swung around another corner, vanishing from sight.

“Will you—”

“I know,” Durych said, interrupting him. “Speed up! Get closer! Work a miracle!”

“I need a driver, not a priest!” said Kosta.

“Hold on!” Durych warned as they reached the corner, rounding it in a skid that was barely controlled.

Cursing came from the backseat as momentum threw Vojan and Lobkovic together for a second, banging shoulders. Kostka powered down his window, sight wind whipping at his face and ruffling his short hair as he thrust his shooting arm outside the car. Another half block closer, and he could attempt a shot. One of the rear tires, or perhaps the driver, if he got a lucky break.

Where was the passenger? Kostka saw nothing of him, guessed that he was probably slumped over, maybe rolling in the backseat. Either way, it helped to have him clear of any shot that Kostka tried to make. Retrieving him alive would be a bonus; catching both runners alive would be sweet icing on the cake.

But he would settle for a pair of corpses if it was the only way to stop them.

Dead men couldn’t answer questions, but neither could they squeal to the police.

ANOTHER BLOCK, and Bolan heard a heavy, restless shifting in the seat behind him. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw Andrew Murton’s head block out the glare of headlights from the chase car.

“Better stay down,” he advised his passenger. “They could start shooting anytime.”

“Ah wanna hep.”

“You want to help?” Bolan said. “Lie back down so I can use the mirror.”

“Gimme guh.”

Not likely, Bolan thought. The last thing that he needed was a punch-drunk shooter blasting out the Volvo’s windows, peppering the houses that lined both sides of the street.

“I say again—”

He saw the muzzle-flash before his lips could form the order, jigged the steering wheel and knew they’d literally dodged a bullet in the night.

“Get down!” Bolan barked, relieved to see the shadow figure in his mirror disappear. Bolan knew Murton had endured an ordeal that would break a lesser man, but that would not prevent him from knocking Murton cold if it became a matter of survival.

One more muzzle-flash from the pursuit car, just as Bolan swerved into a side street on his left. Again, the shot went wild, buzzing away to who knew where. With any luck, the slug would strike a tree trunk or an empty vehicle. The flip side was a bedroom wall or window pierced, a sleeper shocked awake by sudden agony—or never waking up at all.

The hunters didn’t give a damn about potential bystanders. They had a job to do and they were focused on it to the exclusion of all else. Professionals. Nothing but victory or death would stop them.

Bolan was determined that they would not win.

Which left one option.

First, he had to find a killing ground that minimized the prospects of collateral damage. There, if he could locate such a place before a bullet found one of the Volvo’s tires, its fuel tank or its engine block, he’d make a stand and see what came of it.

Back to the map he’d memorized from the internet. Off to the east, three-quarters of a mile or so, the Vltava River surged against its banks, the waterfront including warehouses for cargo shipped by barge from Germany and Austria. Deliveries might be ongoing at this hour, but the traffic should be relatively light, and there would be no tourists loitering around the docks to serve as targets in a shooting gallery.

The chase car lost a little ground to Bolan on the turn but soon began to make it up again. He gave the driver credit, wishing at the same time that he’d blow a gasket, have a heart attack, whatever might truncate the chase without a battle to attract police.

Too late, he thought.

Some neighborhoods of Prague might tolerate a shot or two around midnight, but Kunratice did not strike him as one of those. If someone—make that several someones—hadn’t called the cops already, Bolan would be very much surprised. That thought turned up the ticktock volume of the numbers falling in his mind, but Bolan dialed it back again and focused on his half-formed plan.

If he could—

Hold on, what was this? Another pair of headlights coming up behind the chase car, not dawdling like a local coming home after a night out on the town. He couldn’t call it a pursuit, at least not yet. There were no flashing lights, no siren to suggest an officer behind the wheel.

A second chase car? Reinforcements summoned via cell phone or some other means to help the first team close their trap? If that were true, there might be anywhere from two to five or six guns in the second vehicle. The odds against survival may have doubled.

And what difference did it make?

Bolan had never been a quitter, knew the meaning of surrender but had never practiced it. Eight guns—or even ten—made life more difficult, definitely. But he had beaten worse odds in the past and walked away from the situation. The bottom line: even if death was certain for himself and his companion, he would fight until his last round had been fired, then take it hand to hand. Unless they dropped him with a lucky shot, the hunting party’s scarred survivors would not soon forget their meeting with The Executioner.

He might even return to haunt them in their dreams.

“WE HAVE A TAIL,” Durych announced to no one in particular.

Kostka spun in his seat so quickly that he strained his neck and almost yelped at the onslaught of sudden, piercing pain. He saw headlights behind them, clearly following the Citroën.

“Who is it?” he demanded.

“Do prdele! How should I know?” Durych answered sharply.

“Not the policajti,” Vojan offered. “They’d have lit their Christmas tree by now.”

“Friends of the one we’re chasing, maybe,” Lobkovic suggested, sounding worried.

“Only joining in just now?” Kostka replied, half speaking to himself. “Where have they been?”

“Who cares?” Vojan retorted. “Do you want me to get rid of them?”

“Not yet. The one we want’s still in the car ahead. But watch them and be ready if they try to overtake us.”

Kostka wondered if he ought to call for help, but how would he explain the situation? Truth be told, he couldn’t say exactly where they were, so asking for a backup team would be superfluous. He wished they’d come prepared with more than pistols—automatic rifles, maybe shotguns—but it didn’t help.

What was the old saying? “Bez pen z do hospody nelez.”

Without money do not go to the pub.

Translation: Be prepared. You have to pay to play.

And who thought up this stuff? Likely someone who’d bitten off more than he could chew but lived to tell about it afterward.

Kostka could only hope he’d have the same good luck. One thing was certain, though. If he broke off the chase from fear of being trapped, his end was certain. When he took the story back to Lida Werich he would find no mercy waiting for him. Failure was not tolerated. It would certainly not be tolerated, much less favored with an amnesty.

And if survival was not one of Kostka’s options, he would choose the quick death of a bullet over anything that Werich might devise to punish him. No contest there. Be sure to save a bullet for himself, in case it all went wrong.

“They’re heading for the river,” Durych said.

“The river? Why?”

“I’m not a zasranej mind reader, am I?”

Kostka nearly pistol-whipped him then, but that would be the same as suicide, the speed at which they were traveling. Instead, he satisfied himself with muttered curses, leaning from his open window to attempt another shot.

And missed, of course. Just as he squeezed the CZ’s trigger, his intended target made another sharp turn, this one to the right, and Kostka’s bullet screamed away downrange to find some unknown point of impact in the night. As Durych made the turn, Kostka could see the waterfront ahead of them. He smelled the river, with its scent of dead fish, diesel fuel and dreams vanished downstream.

“Maybe he has a boat,” Durych said.

“Then we have to stop him now,” Kostka replied, “before he gets aboard and goes somewhere that we can’t follow.”

“Jo, jo. I’m working on it!”

“So, work harder!”

“Seru na tvojí matku!” Durych snapped, but stood on the accelerator, somehow wringing more speed from the growling Citroën. “Unless that crate can fly, we have them now!”

WITH SOMETHING LIKE a hundred yards of pavement left before he hit the water, Bolan made his move. It wasn’t complex, but it still required precision timing, with coordination of the Volvo’s brake and its accelerator. If he did it properly, the car would make a sharp one-eighty, wind up facing back in the direction they’d just come from, stopping with its high beams aimed into the chase-car driver’s face. And if he blew it, they’d go tumbling ass-over-teakettle down the dock, hammered unconscious—maybe dead—before they plunged into the water.

One chance. But that was all a soldier could expect.

“Hang on!” he warned his backseat rider, hoping Murton had the sense and strength to brace himself. A wrong move, and it wouldn’t matter if he picked up any more new bruises.

But it worked. The Volvo nosed down, slowing sharply, and began to fishtail just as Bolan cranked the steering wheel hard left and stamped on the accelerator. By the time it came to rest again, four heartbeats later, he was facing toward the chase car with the ALFA in his left hand, out the open driver’s window, while his right hand gripped the wheel. Behind him, Murton mumbled something like a curse, and Bolan let it pass.

He watched the two cars bearing down upon him, closing fast. The first, with four opponents the big American had already seen, was in his sights. The second, still an unknown quantity, was bringing up the rear, joining the play for reasons Bolan hadn’t grasped yet. Nine rounds in the ALFA, and he could reload in seconds flat if he was free and clear. Driving at speed would complicate the process, but—

Bolan attacked, gunning the Volvo forward on a clear collision course and rapid-firing with the ALFA autoloader. Three, four, five rounds through the chase car’s windshield as the gap between them narrowed. Then his enemy was swerving off to Bolan’s left, plowing into a trailer clearly built for catering, its drab facade showing a poor painted rendition of a sausage on a bun.

That left one car in line, and Bolan wouldn’t fire on it until he had at least a rough fix on its occupants. The Volvo’s high beams only showed him one man in the vehicle, but what did that prove? Bolan had no friends in Prague—this might be a cop off duty, maybe working undercover, or a journalist who stumbled on the chase by sheer coincidence. Maybe a stupid rubbernecker with more curiosity than common sense. Shooting him first and asking questions later did not mesh with Bolan’s modus operandi.

So he brought the Volvo to another squealing hault, leaped out, keeping his car between himself and the third vehicle, finally recognizable as an Audi A4 sedan. It braked in turn, the driver stepping out with no one else behind him. Watching Bolan carefully, the last arrival circled his own car, approached the Citroën and peered inside. He pulled a flashlight from a pocket of his windbreaker and played its beam around inside the car.

Blood on the dash and windshield. Huddled, vaguely human shapes.

He straightened, said something in Czech. Stood waiting for an answer until Bolan told him, “Sorry. Failure to communicate.”

“American?” the stranger asked, his English sharply accented. When Bolan offered no reply, he said, “You’ve killed the driver, and it looks as though his friend up front may have a broken neck. These two,” he went on, waving vaguely toward the backseat, “could wake up at any time.”

Bolan still couldn’t read the stranger, so he asked, “You want me to take care of that?”

“It’s better if we leave them as they are, I think. They’ll have a devil of a time explaining this. It ought to be amusing.”

Bolan watched the stranger moving toward him, held his ALFA lowered but prepared for instant action. “This is your idea of humor?” he inquired.

The Audi’s driver shrugged. “Not normally, but I have learned to find amusement where I can,” he said. “One never knows when life may suddenly present a spectacle.”

“And you just happen to be there,” Bolan said.

“Ah. It was not a coincidence. I think you understand this, eh?”

“It’s sinking in,” Bolan replied.

The stranger’s draw was smooth and fast, his pistol aimed at Bolan’s forehead even as the ALFA centered on his chest.

“And now, what you would call the punch line, I believe,” he said. “You are under arrest.”

3

Baltimore, Maryland

Two days earlier

The sixth victim, another working girl, had been discovered floating in the Chesapeake off Locust Point, near Fort Henry. As with the five preceding kills, her throat was slashed back to the spine, a case of near decapitation after a savage beating and a list of signature indignities well recognized by homicide investigators. FBI agents were working on the case, inspiring all the usual resentment from embarrassed local cops. The newspapers and smiling TV anchors babbled on about a “Ripper” in their midst, a stalker who had psych profilers baffled.

The truth, as usual, was rather different.

At Baltimore P.D., they knew that all six victims were employed—read owned—by Luscious Luther Johnson. Thirty-six years old, imprisoned twice for pandering and living off the proceeds of prostitution, Johnson was an aging dog who’d never managed to learn any new tricks on the street or in the joint. He liked controlling women, playing God in lives blighted by sexual abuse and drugs. He liked the money, too, of course, but that was secondary to the kick he got from reigning over female serfs.

Before his second prison term, Luther had disciplined unruly girls with belt lashings, a wire coat hanger sometimes, but nothing permanent. Something had changed inside him while he served his time at Roxbury Correctional, perhaps a hardening of attitude precipitated by the fact that two of Luther’s “bitches” had been brave enough to testify against him at his trial. One of them left the state thereafter, while the other kept working the streets around Patterson Park as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

Big mistake.

Divine Jones had been first in the series, succeeded by others who balked at the offer to join Johnson’s stable or held back too much of the cash they’d received from their johns. No disrespect of any sort was tolerated.

Police had questioned Luther at least a dozen times so far. But knowing he was probably involved and proving it were very different things. A team from Vice had worked on putting Johnson back in stir for pimping, using Maryland’s three-strikes law to send him up for life, but Luscious Luther wasn’t quite as careless as he’d been in the past. He kept no records of illicit business, paid his taxes on a chain of coin-op laundries and had generally kept his nose clean in the public eye.

Bolan had been passing through “Charm City”—also known to some as “Mobtown”—with no plans to hang around beyond a night’s rest at a local Motel 6, when he heard about the case on CNN. He’d made a couple calls, stayed over for an extra night of observation on the scene and saw a chance to do some good.

Like any other pimp who has a thriving urban racket, Johnson paid his dues. He tithed religiously to the Peruzzi family, which Bolan thought might rate a visit at some future date, along with bagmen from the Baltimore P.D. and City Hall. None would protect him if the Feds collected evidence to try him as a six-time psycho killer, but until that evidence appeared Johnson was golden.

And he wasn’t hard to find.

His second night in Baltimore, Bolan had followed Johnson on the pimp’s rounds, collecting cash from go-betweens, glad-handing people who appeared to be his friends, drinking at half a dozen bars where songs with indecipherable lyrics threatened long-term hearing loss. Bolan was on him when he spent an hour with his number-one old lady at her place, waiting for Johnson in the shadows when the man emerged.

From that point on, Johnson’s night of celebration went downhill. His bluster vanished with a glimpse of Bolan’s cold eyes and a close look at the sleek Beretta in his fist. Disarmed and cuffed with plastic zip ties, Johnson had directed Bolan to a small apartment that he called his bank. Inside it, with his hands freed to accommodate the combination lock on a wall safe beside a small desk, he’d given up roughly a quarter-million dollars gleaned from others’ suffering and degradation, smiling all the while.

“I jus’ keep that aroun’ for incidentals, yo. Man like you’self know how it is.”

“You’re right,” Bolan replied. “I do.”

“So, we good here, o’ what?”

“Almost. About the women…”

“Riiight. You want a lady now? I’d say you can afford a fine one.”

“The six women that you killed.”

“Whoa, man! You trippin’ now. Pigs axed me all about that, and I done been cleared, awight?”

“Well,” Bolan said, “there’s cleared, and then there’s cleared.”

“Man, what you tryin’ to say?” Johnson asked, trying to prolong the conversation as he quickly reached into an open drawer of the desk and pulled out a small gun.

But Bolan was faster with his response, letting the Beretta speak for him, with one sharp word that brooked no contradiction. Johnson hit the deep shag carpet with a look of dazed surprise in all three eyes, shivered a little, then lay still.

Bolan secured his loot, all hundred-dollar bills, in a valise he borrowed from the late and unlamented pimp, locked the pad behind him and was on his way downstairs when the soft vibration of his cell phone took him by surprise. No more than half a dozen people in the world had Bolan’s number. He had never fallen prey to random telemarketers.

A quick check on the screen showed him that it was Hal Brognola calling from his office at the Justice Building in D.C., well past the normal span of business hours.

“Go,” Bolan said without preamble.

“How soon can you be here?” Brognola asked. “Well, let’s say Arlington.”

“I’m forty miles away,” Bolan said, “give or take.”

“I’ll see you there,” the big Fed said. “ASAP.”

BROGNOLA DIDN’T HAVE TO specify which “there” he had in mind. They’d met on previous occasions at Arlington National Cemetery, and while that facility closed to the public from 8:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., there was an all-night restaurant on Marshall Drive, near the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, that served as backup outside of visiting hours. Bolan found Brognola’s Buick Regal CXL already waiting in the parking lot when he rolled in, his second-oldest living friend ensconced with coffee at a corner booth.

“You made good time,” Brognola said in greeting.

“It wasn’t all that far,” Bolan replied, taking his seat across from the man.

A red-haired waitress came and took their breakfast order, filled a coffee cup for Bolan, then retreated.

“So, what’s the squeal?” Bolan asked, when they were alone.

“It may upset your appetite,” Brognola said.

“Try me.”

“Okay. What do you know about the child-sex trade?”

“Broad strokes,” Bolan replied. “It’s global. There’s a UN protocol designed to stop it, written ten or twelve years back, ratified by something like a hundred countries all around the world.”

“One hundred seventeen,” Brognola said. “For all the good it does.”

“No teeth in that, of course,” Bolan continued, “but most countries have their own laws penalizing human trafficking, child prostitution and pornography.”

“Again,” Brognola said, “for all the good they do.”

A nod from Bolan as he said, “Enforcement’s spotty, sure. Big money in the trade, and some of that sticks to official hands.”

“You’ve heard of child-sex tourism, I guess,” he said.

“Junkets for pedophiles,” Bolan replied. “They catch a flight to someplace where the cops and courts are paid to shut their eyes.”

“That’s it in a nutshell,” Brognola granted. “Fifteen years ago, the International Labor Organization estimated that child-sex tourism produced two to fourteen percent of the gross domestic product for half a dozen Asian countries—Thailand, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Indonesia. Since then, it’s been picking up in Mexico, Central America and Eastern Europe. The U.K. and the States have laws in place to punish nationals who go abroad to prey on children, but it’s tough to make the charges stick.”

Bolan had dealt with human traffickers before and rated them among the lowest forms of parasites, but shutting down the trade was an impossibility. As long as there were customers with cash in hand, there’d be suppliers to provide whatever they desired.

“Go on,” he urged Brognola.

“So, let’s flash back to the so-called Velvet Revolution. Nineteen eighty-nine,” Brognola said. “Czechoslovakia divides into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Assume they’ve always had their share of hookers. Overnight, the business takes off like a house on fire. The Czech Republic’s parliament banned any kind of organized sex trade—brothels, pimping, anything that smells like mob involvement—but they left the working girls alone, free to work under license. The net result—last year, reporters counted eight hundred sixty dedicated brothels nationwide, with two hundred in Prague. Hookers advertise in the newspaper classifieds section, charging an average sixty dollars an hour.”

“Someone’s greased the cops,” Bolan said. No surprise.

“Big-time,” Brognola said. “Two years ago, the state police investigated thirty suspected traffickers. Prosecutors took nineteen to trial and convicted a dozen. Facing maximum terms of twelve to fifteen years, three were sent up for three-to-five. The other nine had their sentences suspended and are back in business as we speak.”

“It sounds familiar,” Bolan said, thinking of every place where organized corruption put down roots. And that meant everywhere.

“Getting back to the kids,” Brognola said, “they come into Prague from all over. Eastern Europe and the Balkans, on to Vietnam and China. Some pass through the Czech Republic on their way to operations in the West, and others never make it out. If they survive, they’ll age into the adult trade or wind up on the streets, burned out and drug addicted, living hand to mouth.”

“This must be going somewhere,” Bolan said.

“You’re right. It is. Seems like the scumbags aren’t content to buy their kids from so-called parents anymore. It still goes on, of course, especially in Asia and some parts of South America, but kidnapping is cheaper. Why fly buyers halfway round the world, when you can cruise the streets of Prague, Brno or Ostrava and snatch them off the sidewalk? Slash your operating costs on one hand—on the other, keep enough white kids in stock to balance out the ethnic inventory. It’s a win-win situation for the sons of bitches.”

“And?” Bolan knew there was more to come.

“And,” Brognola replied, “that brings us to the reason why we’re here.”

THE WAITRESS BROUGHT their meals, topped off their coffee mugs and went away. Brognola pushed his scrambled eggs around the plate, sampled a piece of toast, then set it down.

“Last week—four days ago, to be precise—somebody grabbed a ten-year-old girl in Prague. Her name is Mandy Murton. She’s American.”

“Odd place to find her,” Bolan said.

“School trip, if you can believe it,” Hal answered. “It’s the sort of thing rich parents do these days, I’m told. Instead of summer school or family vacation time, you send the kiddies off to Europe or wherever in a small, select group with teachers from their private schools as guides, tutors and chaperones. Supposedly, most of the trips come off without a hitch, aside from minor illness now and then.”

“But this one didn’t.”

“Right. It’s still unclear what happened to the girl, exactly,” Brognola went on. “Another kid swears Mandy wasn’t taken from the room they shared. Seems she went out to get a Coke instead of calling room service. The vending machines are on alternate floors, so she had to go up or down one. She never came back.”

“Security cameras?” Bolan asked.

“The hotel’s equipped,” the big Fed confirmed. “Exits and elevators covered, but it’s spotty on the hallways. There’s no tape of Mandy leaving, on her own or with an escort. Two things clicked as possibles. First up, a food delivery around that time, downstairs, with crates of goodies coming in and empties going out. Second, a bellhop with his face averted from the CCTV, wheeling out a laundry cart.”

“How many people on the food delivery?” Bolan asked.

“Two came with the truck,” Brognola said. “A couple from the kitchen helped them with unloading.”

“Have they been cleared?”

Brognola shrugged and tried the toast again, then answered with his mouth full. “They’ve been questioned by the cops in Prague and by the PCR—those are the Feds, Police of the Czech Republic. No evidence of any criminal activity has been discovered, quote, unquote.”

“The faceless bellhop, then.”

“More likely,” Brognola agreed. “A shot, some chloroform, a blackjack—take your pick. One guy could shift a ten-year-old without backup, much less involving two hotel employees.”

“So, she’s gone,” Bolan said. “Four days, Hal.”

“I know, I know. There’s been no ransom call, so that’s a wash. Whoever snatched the girl had other things in mind. Whether it was a trafficker or just some random psycho off the street, it’s all bad news.”

Bolan tried to decide which might be worse and couldn’t make the call.

“I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a heartbreaker.”

“I hear you,” Brognola replied. “But here’s the rub—her daddy is a well-connected chief of corporate security at GenTex Oil. Any given year, he earns more than the President of the United States.”

“He’s making noise,” Bolan surmised.

“I wish it were that simple,” Brognola replied. “Before he took the GenTex job, he was a Navy SEAL for sixteen years. Won every decoration they could pin onto his wet suit, except the Congressional Medal of Honor, and that was a close call. On his last time out—in Pakistan, no less—he saved a wounded teammate’s life. The other guy happened to be the grandson of a Texas senator with tons of GenTex stock in his portfolio.”

“Which nailed his present job,” Bolan observed. “A hero with connections.”

“And with skills,” Brognola stressed. “He’s not just making noise. When no one from the FBI, the Company or State could satisfy him, he went over there.”

“By which you mean—”

“To Prague,” Brognola said. “I shit you not. It’s Death Wish Seven, or whatever, and the film crew isn’t using blanks.”

“Has there been contact?”

Brognola sipped his coffee, grimaced—too much sugar.

“There’s no way to verify it,” he told Bolan. “This guy— Andrew Murton—may be middle-aged and rusty, but he’s still a player. Flew on bogus papers to the Czech Republic, and he likely has at least one spare ID on tap for when he’s ready to come home. If he comes home.”

Bolan waited for Brognola to tell it his way, in his own good time.

“Could he find guns in Prague?” the man from Justice asked rhetorically. “Hell, yes. Has there been trouble since he landed? Cops report that one suspected trafficker’s gone missing, but he had a court appearance scheduled for next month. Could be a simple bail jumper. The thing is, Murton had been talking to his wife something like five, six times a day. Updating her, you know. And now he’s stopped.”

“How long?” Bolan asked.

“Half a day. It spooked her bad enough for her to call the Hoover Building. They reached out to me.”

“And here we are,” Bolan said.

“Right. What do you think?”

“About the girl? I told you, Hal—”

“I know. But what about the dad? If there’s a chance that we could pull him out…”

“It plays out one of two ways,” Bolan said. “He either found the traffickers who took his daughter, or he found somebody else. With option B, the only reason for not killing him straight up would be a ransom bid.”

“Again, there’s been no call,” Brognola said.

“Okay. He’s either dead or being held by someone with another reason not to put him down. Maybe interrogation. Maybe using him for leverage somewhere down the line.”

“Bad news, no matter how you look at it,” the man said.

“The worst,” Bolan agreed.

“All right,” Brognola said. “It’s your call. Want to go and have a look around, or not?”

THE FLIGHT FROM Dulles International to Paris-Orly Airport spanned seven hours and forty-eight minutes. Orly to Prague consumed another hour, plus the downtime Bolan spent waiting to make his Czech Airlines connection. Bolan had used the time efficiently, to study Brognola’s file on Andrew Murton, then erase it; to memorize the Google map of Prague; and finally, to catch up on the sleep he’d miss when he had reached his destination.

Finding Murton in the urban jungle that was Prague seemed like a nearly hopeless task to Bolan, but he knew that nearly wasn’t absolute. Someone had seen the missing father. Someone knew what had become of him, whether he was alive or dead. Someone would talk, if the correct inducement was applied.

The problem: Bolan was a stranger to the Czech Republic and its capital, clearly a foreigner. Unlike the vanished former SEAL, he spoke neither German nor Russian, much less Czech, Slovak, Croatian or Bulgarian. The good news: according to his Fodor’s guidebook, ten percent of all Czechs spoke at least some English. In Prague, the number supposedly rose to fifty percent for residents aged nineteen to thirty-five, and hit eighty percent for those eighteen or younger.

So all I have to do, he thought, is keep asking directions from kids on the street.

It was a joke at first, then soured on him when he thought about the people he was hunting and their chosen trade. Whether or not he could find Andrew Murton—much less the aggrieved father’s child—Bolan vowed to wreak havoc among the Czech merchants of misery.

Scorched earth, if he could pull it off.

If not, at least a healthy dose of cleansing fire.

Bolan had never been a moralist per se. He didn’t care who slept with whom, or why, as long as all concerned were consenting adults or roughly equal in age. He didn’t mind if sex was sold or bartered, either. What repulsed him was the domination of illicit prostitution by a breed of predators who victimized the helpless to enrich themselves. Slave traders, in effect, and Bolan owed them nothing but a bullet, which, in most cases, was long years overdue.

He harbored no real hope of saving Mandy Murton. Even if he found her still alive, in Prague or somewhere else, and managed to extract her from the hell that had consumed her life of privilege, what would be left of her? Would years of therapy undo the trauma she had suffered at the hands of her abductors and their paying customers?

Bolan knew how her father must have felt. His own long war against the Mafia had started with a tragedy at home, akin to Andrew Murton’s. Bolan had exacted justice on his own, using his military skills, when there’d been no one left to save. He didn’t have to speculate over the depth of Murton’s rage, the guilt that haunted him for failure to protect his own from half a world away.

He found that Brognola was right. It didn’t take a master spy to find black-market guns in Prague. In fact, it only took a name and Luscious Luther Johnson’s contribution to the cause. Bolan was pleased to spend the cash he’d taken from a killer pimp in aid of tracking and destroying other predators. If not exactly karma, it still felt like some kind of poetic justice.

As for information, that came down to asking questions. Brognola had gotten him started with the name of Murton’s suspected first victim—an indicted trafficker, one Mikoláš Zeman. The vanished man had known associates, and Bolan, having duly armed himself beforehand, went in search of them.

The first, a twice-convicted brothel boss named Stanislav Karpíšek, managed to convince Bolan that he knew nothing.

The second, František Patoka, had avoided felony indictments to the present day, which proved that he was slick and knew the value of connections spanning both sides of the law. He didn’t want to talk, took some persuading, but he’d finally admitted hearing that a certain rude American with strange ideas of justice had been causing ripples on the streets of Prague. Past tense, that was, since he’d been lured into a trap and neutralized.

Dead or alive?

Patoka couldn’t say, but if his life depended on it he would have started seeking answers at a sweaty hole called Oskar’s, where prizefighters, the boxeprize bojovníci, trained for their bouts under syndicate tutelage.

Bolan had thanked Patoka in the only way he could, after the thug came at him with a concealed knife—he released him from the distasteful toil of life. Then Bolan had moved on to see a man about a man at Oskar’s gym. The rest was history, and he was staring down a pistol’s muzzle with a badge behind it.

Busted, dead to rights.

4

“So, what now?” Bolan asked the cop who had him covered.

“First, I suppose, we introduce ourselves,” the cop replied. “I am Jan Reynek, a sergeant in the PCR Agency for Organized Crime. You know the PCR, yes?”

Bolan nodded, thinking back to Hal Brognola’s briefing. “Police of the Czech Republic,” he said.

“That is correct,” Reynek said. “I know your friend already,” he continued, nodding toward the Volvo, where Murton was crawling from the backseat.

“He’s had a rough couple of days,” Bolan said.

“So I understand. His daughter even more so, possibly.” Reynek’s sharp eyes returned to Bolan’s face. “And you are…?”

“Won’t they cover all this at booking?” Bolan asked him.

Staying well beyond arm’s reach, Reynek lowered his pistol. “I am undecided as to that,” he said. “This case has…complications.”

“Oh?”

“Indeed. Your name?”

“Matt Cooper.”

“With papers to support it?”

“If you’d like to see them,” Bolan answered.

“Maybe later. You’re American, like Mr. Murton. Sent, no doubt, to rescue him where Czech police could not?”

“Before you take offense,” Bolan replied, “that’s how it played.”

“You’re right again. And I take no offense. Nor do I take responsibility for others when they fail. You represent the FBI? Perhaps the CIA?”

“Neither,” Bolan answered. Walking on the razor’s edge of truth as he said, “I’m a private contractor.”

“Ah, Blackwater!”

“Without a private army or religious motivations,” Bolan said.

“A purist. I salute you for succeeding where so many of my colleagues proved inadequate.”

If that was meant as sarcasm, Reynek needed to work on his delivery. He’d come off sounding too sincere, a feeling reinforced by the expression on his dour face. He glanced back toward the Citroën, seeming relaxed and heedless of the ALFA autoloader still in Bolan’s hand.

“These kreténi, I suppose, are Mr. Murton’s kidnappers?”

“Some of them,” Bolan said.

“Where might I find the others?”

Bolan saw that he had nothing left to lose. He said, “Check out a place called Oskar’s. It’s a gym for boxers.”

“It’s a pigsty,” Reynek said. “Owned by the Werich syndicate. You know them?”

“Not offhand,” Bolan replied.

“If we had time, I might enhance your education,” Reynek told him. “But your friend needs medical attention and he needs to leave the country.”

Murton’s shuffling footsteps closed on Bolan from behind. “Not goin’ anywhere widout my daughter,” he told Reynek.

“In which case,” Reynek said, “I shall be forced to place you in protective custody. You are, at the least, a material witness to multiple crimes. Perhaps you’re a suspect yourself. When we find Mikoláš Zeman—”

“You won’t,” Murton replied, voice growing stronger, clearer by the second.

“And now, a confession of murder.” Reynek shrugged at Bolan. “I’m afraid your companion leaves me no choice.”

Murton came forward in a stumble-rush, growling, but Bolan intercepted him and marched him backward to the Volvo. “Stay right here and keep your mouth shut,” Bolan ordered. “We might walk away from this if you don’t screw it up.”

“I’m here for Mandy, damn you!”

“And you blew it!” Bolan answered harshly. “Get your mind around that, will you? You’re half-dead, about to be arrested, and you never came within a mile of her. If anything, you’ve made her situation worse.”

“The hell are you talking about?” Murton challenged.

“She had value on her own,” Bolan replied, voice lowered almost to a hiss. “It’s hard to live with, but you know it’s true. Now, thanks to you, she’s turned into a fatal liability. Get it? She may be dead, thanks to your vigilante-daddy act.”

The words took Murton down like body blows. His knees sagged, leaving him to clutch the Volvo for support. Bolan could hear him sobbing as he leaned in and repeated, “Right here. Mouth shut.”

Back with Reynek, he asked, “So, what comes next?”

“It’s getting late,” the sergeant said. “If I deliver you and Mr. Murton, I’ll be lucky to see home again this time tomorrow. I propose we take him to a doctor known for personal discretion, then arrange for Mr. Murton’s safe return to the United States. His wealthy friends will no doubt wish to hold a grand reception.”

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