HOLY TERROR

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

#375 Salvador Strike

#376 Frontier Fury

#377 Desperate Cargo

#378 Death Run

#379 Deep Recon

#380 Silent Threat

#381 Killing Ground

#382 Threat Factor

#383 Raw Fury

#384 Cartel Clash

#385 Recovery Force

#386 Crucial Intercept

#387 Powder Burn

#388 Final Coup

#389 Deadly Command

#390 Toxic Terrain

#391 Enemy Agents

#392 Shadow Hunt

#393 Stand Down

#394 Trial by Fire

#395 Hazard Zone

#396 Fatal Combat

#397 Damage Radius

#398 Battle Cry

#399 Nuclear Storm

#400 Blind Justice

#401 Jungle Hunt

#402 Rebel Trade

#403 Line of Honor

#404 Final Judgment

#405 Lethal Diversion

#406 Survival Mission

#407 Throw Down

#408 Border Offensive

#409 Blood Vendetta

#410 Hostile Force

#411 Cold Fusion

#412 Night’s Reckoning

#413 Double Cross

#414 Prison Code

#415 Ivory Wave

#416 Extraction

#417 Rogue Assault

#418 Viral Siege

#419 Sleeping Dragons

#420 Rebel Blast

#421 Hard Targets

#422 Nigeria Meltdown

#423 Breakout

#424 Amazon Impunity

#425 Patriot Strike

#426 Pirate Offensive

#427 Pacific Creed

#428 Desert Impact

#429 Arctic Kill

#430 Deadly Salvage

#431 Maximum Chaos

#432 Slayground

#433 Point Blank

#434 Savage Deadlock

#435 Dragon Key

#436 Perilous Cargo

#437 Assassin’s Tripwire

#438 The Cartel Hit

#439 Blood Rites

#440 Killpath

#441 Murder Island

#442 Syrian Rescue

#443 Uncut Terror

#444 Dark Savior

#445 Final Assault

#446 Kill Squad

#447 Missile Intercept

#448 Terrorist Dispatch

#449 Combat Machines

#450 Omega Cult

#451 Fatal Prescription

#452 Death List

#453 Rogue Elements

#454 Enemies Within

#455 Chicago Vendetta

#456 Thunder Down Under

#457 Dying Art

#458 Killing Kings

#459 Stealth Assassin

#460 Lethal Vengeance

#461 Cold Fury

#462 Cyberthreat

#463 Righteous Fear

Righteous Fear

Don Pendleton’s

ISBN: 9780008907464

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

RIGHTEOUS FEAR

© 2020 Harlequin Books S.A.

Published in Great Britain 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jeremiah 14:14

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

—Mack Bolan

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Introduction

Quotes

The Mack Bolan Legend

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

About the Publisher

Prologue
Helmand Province,Seven years ago

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“Getting a gun. Giving us a chance.”

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

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

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

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

Who was this one-man cavalry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who are you?” Hassan asked.

“Matt Cooper,” he answered, using one of his cover IDs.

“And how many fingers am I holding up?” she asked.

“I know the symptoms of a concussion. I’ve had a few of them,” Bolan said. “I’m cut from shrapnel and stone splinters, but luckily not rocket grenade shrapnel.”

“You still should get a more thorough examination—”

“I don’t have time for that right now.” Bolan handed her a card. It was something he kept on hand, an electronic message dead-drop that he could access away from his missions for Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group based at Stony Man Farm, Virginia. “There’s a patrol on its way to help you take care of the wounded. But if you need further assistance, that’s how you contact me.”

Hassan nodded, accepting that the man was too stubborn to let a few dings and a nosebleed stop him.

Bolan wished the doctor safety and continued success in her healing endeavors.

Returning to the ATV, the Executioner paused just long enough to retrieve his machine gun and the grenade launcher. He’d need the firepower to stop the conspiracy he’d come to fight.

Chapter One
Mobile, Alabama, present day

The detective took a sip of coffee, as if to wash one bitter taste away with another. The squad room was a mess of activity and Dr. Annis Hassan sat numb, looking at the flecks of blood that had dried on her hands.

Detective Brock Jackson grimaced, tapping on his keyboard as he transcribed her last answer into his computer. The monitor smeared ugly blue highlights on his mahogany skin as the track lighting above equally disrespected his bald head. Harsh, artificial lighting almost made her forget his handsome complexion from when she’d first seen him during the day.

“So what did the suspect say again?” Jackson asked.

Hassan winced. “He said ‘your kind ain’t welcome here, Sand N-word.’”

She refused to repeat the slur, and saw Jackson’s eye twitch at the implied name the South would seemingly never be free of. He reassured her that she was as much a victim of racism as he was, and smiled slightly. It was a simple act, and it put that slice of nerves and pressure away.

But there was still the shooting. The ugly threat. The flash of a gun. Hassan’s hands covered in blood as she applied pressure to a student nurse’s gunshot wound. The Foster Portman Women’s Health Center wasn’t officially affiliated with a hospital, but Mobile nursing schools knew that the WHC was one of the best places to send someone to learn the ropes of a clinic.

The racist killer with a blazing gun had hit too many of the young men and women in his frantic shooting spree.

It was bad enough that he’d called the WHC a “baby slaughter factory” and dropped an n-bomb on her ethnicity, but so far, two were dead. The young woman she’d helped had survived, but even as she’d kept the woman from bleeding out, other victims had died. This was like a punch in her heart; an echo of an older time when religious and racist intolerance had threatened her workplace.

Hassan gritted her teeth, willing the tears not to come.

“We’ve got enough video of him doing this that we won’t need your testimony if you feel uncomfortable about it,” Detective Jackson told her. “With him behind bars—”

“We’ll be safe from him personally. But what about the other intolerant monsters who call us a force of genocide? Who aren’t afraid of leaving bombs or sitting outside the clinic with a sniper rifle?” she asked. “We don’t even perform abortion services at the clinic.”

Jackson took a deep breath and sighed. “Asking for logic from that crowd is like asking for blood from a stone.”

Hassan controlled her feelings. America was a land of opportunity, and Mobile, Alabama, was a place that needed health care professionals. She’d left Afghanistan behind, a distant memory as bitter as her youth in Saudi Arabia. Bitter because of superstition and adherence to a toxic, murderous philosophy of manhood and holy entitlement that meant the feelings, the potential, even the bodies, of women were unimportant.

America was a land of freedom and a place where the treatment of females as second-class citizens was not tolerated. But Alabama was a hard place for a female doctor, especially a brown woman. There was enough of a progressive presence in Alabama that African Americans could get good jobs. But the slithering, persistent echoes of the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan were a metastasized infection. The Confederate Battle Flag was plastered on at least one of every four cars she saw.

It wasn’t a sign that the drivers and owners were racist, but it was still the banner under which a nation had torn itself apart. It was a reminder that states had broken away to form their own country just to buy and sell human beings.

Yet there were so many good people in Mobile and the surrounding environs, she had come to love the city.

A loud pop resounded, followed by another, pulling Hassan out of her musings. Jackson rose from his seat at the desk, drawing his department-issue Glock. “Stay here.”

“Was that a gunshot?” she asked, but Jackson was gone.

Hassan fought the urge to get up, but her body tensed, ready to spring. Despite Jackson’s order and the rush of armed men into a hallway, she had to know what was happening. She rose and followed the others. The men and women, some in uniform, others in suits, looked back at her, a few with surprise in their eyes, others with worry.

She drew closer to the end of the hallway, already guessing what could be wrong as one side of the corridor was lined with cells. This was where they held suspects until they could be sent to the city jail for processing. Each officer brandished at least a handgun. A couple had shotguns.

“Let me through! Who is hurt?” Hassan asked. She pushed and cops parted.

A cell door stood open. A man in uniform lay on the floor, blood pooled around his head. Inside the cell was the man who’d attacked the clinic personnel. His head was bloody, face torn by a single .40-caliber bullet. Blood bubbled from his shattered nose. At first glance, the domestic terrorist had apparently put the gun under his chin and must have flinched. Instead of death, he’d been left with a shattered jaw, blown-out teeth and a chasm between his mouth and his nose.

He was a bloody mess and he was having trouble breathing, but that might have been panic or shock. Hassan rushed toward him, her instincts taking over. She had a small amount of gauze, which she put on his bloody face in an effort to control the flow of blood. She didn’t apply pressure, because that would turn his jaw into a further mangled mess, and if he survived...

This is a survivable wound. The cold, detached medical mind in her spoke. A broken jaw and a torn face are easy to fix. There was also no way that this damage had been self-inflicted, Hassan thought. Not aiming outward from his skull.

The doctor, in her time in war zones, had seen people who’d attempted suicide with handguns. The angle was completely wrong, no matter how the body contorted, unless the dying man stretched his jaw outward and neck forward. It was an impossible, not to mention uncomfortable, position to put oneself in, when the side of the head would produce certain death, as would the Glock if pushed between his lips.

It was not a legitimate suicide attempt, she thought, though she wouldn’t say anything out loud. She was surrounded by people with guns, and someone had tried to manipulate this man’s death. With the mass shooter out of the picture, the cops could drop the case.

She looked at Detective Jackson, at other faces, seeing genuine concern, genuine shock, genuine confusion painted across their features. Nobody in the front of the milling crowd of cops seemed like a cold-blooded killer, not with a dead uniform on the ground and a badly injured suspect.

“I need towels and gauze. The bullet missed everything vital,” Hassan said.

“What about...?” one of the other officers began to ask, nodding toward the fallen cop.

Hassan knew that her face melted into a mask of grief and agony; she was never good at pronouncements. The lawmen present knew the toll. The huge flap of skull blown off by a .40-caliber hollowpoint round, the excavated brain matter on the floor and the lack of pumping blood were all signs of zero-zero-zero: no pulse, no breathing, no brain function. Readings that told a paramedic or other first responder that nothing could be done for a victim.

“Cuff him!” Jackson ordered. “We were supposed to have this bastard under suicide watch. How the hell did he get the drop on Gomez?”

Uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives looked at each other, hoping for answers to spill from someone’s mouth. Hassan looked away. She was a doctor, not an investigator. She wanted to say something, but someone had just broken into a police station and murdered a police officer. If she spoke up, there was a good chance that she’d be the next target.

The injured shooter’s arms were yanked behind his back, cuffs snapped shut on his wrists. Hassan was torn between concern for the injured man and the part of her hoping that he wasn’t in such shock that he couldn’t feel his rotator cuffs under stress or the hard, unyielding steel grind his wrist bones. Her Hippocratic oath meant that all patients required the best care and her solemn vow of “First, do no harm” was being tested to its limit.

This wounded creature had murdered her coworkers, unarmed coworkers whose only sin was to work in a place the community associated with abortion. No, those people were without sin. This thing...

More gunshots rang out as the killer was lost within a tangle of bodies. Cops squirmed, fighting among themselves, pushing each other out of the way. Jackson clutched his arm, blood darkening his shirtsleeve. Another officer was bent over, a bullet having gone through him.

Hassan didn’t have to look to see the injured shooter, knees curled to his chest.

“He grabbed Jackson’s piece! He was gonna try to shoot his way out!” a lawman, his pistol held by trembling hands, said.

“You better hope this fool can survive all of this!” Jackson snapped.

Hassan rushed to the detective, pressing gauze on either side of his through-and-through wound. “Can you wiggle your fingers?”

“Someone get some proper paramedics here!” Jackson shouted. “I’m not gonna use up our witness’s wits on taking care of everyone!”

Hassan looked at the female police officer who’d folded. Her features were sweaty, but her eyes were clear, and the part of her chest she held was not seeping lifeblood.

“Vest stopped it,” she rasped. “I’ll be okay.”

“Check for broken ribs first,” Hassan stated. The officer’s name tag read Juarez. The doctor smiled at her.

“Is he alive?” Jackson demanded, making it difficult for Hassan to keep his wounded arm wrapped.

“Hold still.” She saw his fingers clenching. That was a sign that his upper arm wasn’t broken. “Hold still!”

Jackson glared at her. “Why aren’t you helping him?”

Hassan froze. Some officers had torn open the clinic shooter’s shirt, a bloody smear across the middle of his torso. When one officer began CPR compressions, a squirt of blood came out of the wound. There was no pooling, no pumping, no spreading unless an outside force was applied to his torso.

“Because he’s gone already,” she said.

“He’s not breathing. We’ve got no pulse,” one of the responders noted. “This asshole was determined to die, and die he did.”

Hassan pursed her lips tightly, keeping her suspicions to herself.

This wasn’t a determined case of suicide. This was a determined case of eliminating a loose end. The threat the clinic shooter represented was still viable because someone closed his mouth.

The killer hadn’t even cared that he’d assassinated cops in his murderous efforts. One cop dead and two alive only by the grace of bulletproof vests and through-and-through biceps injuries. She looked at the man who’d cut down the shooter. He was in adrenaline shock, and he wasn’t white. Hassan glanced at the Glock that had been torn from Jackson’s holster. Given the crush of officers in the hall and the mayhem of the moment, anyone could have pulled the weapon and stuffed it into the clinic shooter’s hand.

Juarez helped Hassan wrap Jackson’s arm, keeping pressure on the gunshot wounds. The detective was still sitting, fussing as the body of the shooter was loaded onto a stretcher and wheeled out. The dead officer was treated with greater care, with silent acknowledgment and mourning. But the man they’d thought killed him? They glowered at the slab of lifeless flesh under a sheet.

Hassan didn’t care about the murderer’s life or death, drew catharsis from his suffering, but with the criminal dead, suddenly his activities didn’t warrant immediate investigation. Who had helped him and who had silenced him?

“Dammit.” Jackson wasn’t complaining about his injured arm. Immediate shock shut down those nerves. No, he was still laser-focused on the dead prisoner, the murdered cop and the yet-to-come snarling of a high-profile screw-up in the media.

A racist terrorist attacks an “abortion clinic” then dies. Thousands of Alabamans would quickly call this a self-resolving problem, thanks to blue suicide, resisting cops and getting shot. Politicians would sweep it under the carpet.

Jackson blinked, eyelids heavy. “I...”

“Adrenaline has faded,” Hassan told him. She and Juarez sat the detective down. “Get him on an ambulance and IV fluids. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

The paramedics weren’t long arriving. The EMTs had the detective on a stretcher in minutes—over his complaints—and were rolling him to the elevator.

Another detective had taken over looking at Jackson’s paperwork for her testimony.

“Everything looks right,” the new detective, Ethan Bradshaw, told her. “We’ll file this, but like Jackson told you, we have enough video to make this case. With him dead, we won’t need a trial or testimony.”

“And if he had friends?” Hassan asked.

Bradshaw, a white man, looked at her with sad brown eyes. “We won’t know until they take a step forward.”

“That’s it?” she asked.

“I wish we had the manpower for more. I’d throw our tech department at his social network footprint, for example.” Bradshaw pushed an index card toward her. “If he had like-minded shooters on his friends list...”

Hassan gritted her teeth for a moment, but any doubt she had toward Detective Bradshaw’s motives quickly disappeared. He’d literally pushed her a lifeline. He knew there was the possibility of something more than just the unnamed shooter.

She looked down at the index card. Anderson Williams. That was his name.

“Good luck,” Bradshaw told her. “Keep in touch if you find anything worthwhile.”

Hassan gave him a sad smile and left the police station.

The cops dropped her off at the health center’s parking lot and as soon as she was behind the wheel of her car, she knew that staying awake after the day’s emotional roller coaster would require a quick infusion of caffeine. She pulled into a nearby market and trudged through the doors. Her eyes quickly scanned the interior. It was late, past midnight, but there were a couple of customers present. Neither of them looked armed, or as if they were waiting for her.

Hassan headed to the beverage coolers and pulled out a couple of coffee-flavored energy drinks. She was tempted to pop one open and chug half of it, but set aside that thought.

She waited behind a man who was buying a case of beer. Her mind drifted to how the situation at the health center might just be the beginning, that there could be more incidents. She had to do something, but where did she start? She thought about Anderson Williams, an animal who’d wounded multiple people, who’d killed innocent clinic staff and blown out the brains of a Mobile, Alabama, police officer. She didn’t give a damn about Williams, except for whether he had friends waiting in the floorboards, ready to scurry into the open like cockroaches and spread their filthy hate across the city.

It was enough for a detective to slip the killer’s name and social media address to her on a card.

“Four sixty,” a man said in front of her. Hassan blinked and looked him in the eyes. She fished in her pocket, pulled out a five and then placed it in a dish beside the register.

“Sorry, long day,” she muttered. He pushed a black bag through the slot under the Plexiglas stop-and-rob window. She dumped one of the energy drinks into the sack, then one-handed the pop top on the other. Fizz bubbled over her fingers, and she slurped off the top. She ignored the thought of “all those rats crawling over these cans.”

“Sure,” the clerk said. He didn’t look like he gave a damn, just as long as she laid down the money and got the hell out of the store.

Hadib Asada couldn’t believe that she had walked into his market after all this time. She didn’t recognize him, but he remembered her.

Dr. Annis Hassan had shot down his brother nearly a decade ago in Helmand Province, killing him to save a stranger, one who might have been an American. The man who’d stopped their cleansing of the unbelievers could have been from the United States, simply because of a nearby US base, but his visible skin had been almost as dark as any desert-dwelling Afghan.

Whoever he was, he’d disappeared. Asada and his surviving brothers in arms had escaped into the desert. Originally, Asada had left Saudi Arabia to help Afghanistan fight against the evil Americans who’d violated the divine Islamist state established by the Taliban. After the assault by the stranger had torn the heart out of Asada’s unit, he’d made his way back to Saudi Arabia. The defeat and humiliation were a weight around his neck.

He’d failed his faith. He’d failed his comrades. Only after a few years of his brooding over the fiasco was he asked to once again take up the cause.

Thus, he was here in the heart of the Bible Belt, serving caffeine to and ringing in groceries for the very people he had wished to drive from a Muslim country. The Christians paid him no attention; he was invisible. The filthy dollars they spent were funneled to operations within the United States, the slow, inexorable encroachment of the New Islamic Revolution striking at the black heart of America.

And now, the doctor he’d been sent to kill seven years ago in Afghanistan had just walked out of his store. Like the Christians, she’d ignored him, disregarded his presence, but Asada remembered her.

His hand hovered near the pistol he kept under the counter, but she was gone. He’d blow his cover for a message that no one would understand. All the resources spent on creating this money funnel, to have him disappear behind enemy lines and stay hidden from the bigoted Christians, would be wasted with a single gunshot.

Asada reached for his phone instead.

Time to get the killing crew back together.

Chapter Two
Stony Man Farm, Virginia

It was late. Barbara Price had settled in at a work station in the Annex’s Computer Room. The daytime cyberwizards were off duty, taking time to decompress and relax. Even with no action teams in the field, someone had to pull night shift during the week, and this time around it was Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s turn. While the wheelchair-bound cyberboss took a late dinner up at the farmhouse, Price was keeping an eye on various hotspots in case Stony Man received an emergency alert.

Computer towers hummed as they ran search algorithms and monitored activity in other agencies’ surveillance systems. It was quiet. Calm. Giving Price time to read after-action reports or undertake some political analyses of current events from the most fact-based, opinion-neutral sources available. Such reads would allow her, as the Farm’s mission controller, more insight into the danger zones she would send the Stony Man action teams.

Price glanced toward the screen and saw two programs spark into activity. She set aside the report she held and opened up one of the alerts. It was a “lookout” program that registered the names of people Mack Bolan had added to the database. News and law-enforcement alerts were consistently scanned for specific names from an ever-growing list of contacts. The Executioner was no longer a full-time member of Stony Man Farm, but he was the founder of the Sensitive Operations Group. As such, he was allowed leeway for suggesting monitors of different folks. This way he could keep a watch on those who had helped him in the past, as well as seek out their aid in the future.

Mack Bolan was a man who had altered his identity many times over his career. He’d been Sergeant Mack Samuel Bolan in the US Army before going AWOL to avenge his family. He’d been the Executioner, rampaging against organized crime to prevent others from suffering the losses he’d had. He’d been Colonel John Phoenix when he was the founding member of Stony Man Farm in the wake of his incredible successes in his personal vigilante war. He’d returned as the Executioner, standing at arm’s length from the Sensitive Operations Group, after an assault on Stony Man had resulted in the death of April Rose, the love of his life, and Andrzej Konzaki, the Farm’s weaponsmith.

The Farm did its best to make sure that the world, the internet, would never see or remember the warrior, sweeping the truth of his life under the carpet. Bolan was a myth, a rumor, and his ability to strike anywhere in the world was simply his invisibility. Even so, the world was the world and people were people; few folks could forget his six-foot-three frame, those graveyard blue eyes and the unmistakable confidence of the Executioner. They wouldn’t know who he was, but they would know what he was about.

The contact list worked both ways: picking up information about a particular person from a news or law-enforcement event and providing a card that would lead to a randomized, untraceable dead-drop message line.

The screen laid down output.

Dr. Annis Hassan. Contacted in Afghanistan. Health professional. Possible assistance when injured in region. Charitable works may put her in the line of fire of terrorists or criminals.

A follow-up output told what had happened.

Subject mentioned in law-enforcement reports. Terrorist incident involving forced birth extremists at women’s health center. Two dead. Several wounded. Dr. Hassan witness.

“Why did you pick the term ‘forced birth extremist’?” her boss, Hal Brognola, had asked Price on one occasion.

“Because you’re not very life affirming by placing bombs to kill doctors, nurses and patients,” she’d answered. “And they sure as hell aren’t lining up at orphanages to adopt the babies they force these women to carry to term. So, why call them by the name they want to be called when they’re just extremist killers? We don’t give polite names to Hamas terrorists when they blow up children in a school bus or to Neo-Nazis when they put poison in a water supply. So why should we call a yet-unnamed extremist movement anything but what their hostility stems from?”

“Has the Pro-Life Movement pissed you off?” Brognola had asked.

“We’re all pro-life, Hal. We all wish abortions weren’t a necessity. But when you shoot doctors, you are an extremist and a terrorist. When you bomb a health center, you are an extremist and a terrorist. And our organization was founded on the necessity of killing terrorists before they harm innocent people. Be pro-life. But when you become a murderer for your political beliefs, you are a terrorist, and these terrorists have been active for too long without being tracked and shut down.”

“When you explain it that way, it isn’t political correctness,” Brognola responded.

Price recalled frowning at her friend and supervisor. “Hal, we track down mass murderers and deal out justice—usually with a bullet—for their crimes against humanity. When have we ever been close to being politically correct? Call an extremist an extremist. Communists, fascists, religious fanatics—we fight them all and take them down without a sliver of guilt because they don’t care who they kill on their way to their ‘solutions.’”

In Price’s eyes, violence was violence, and terrorism was her enemy. Seeing an acquaintance of Mack Bolan’s pop up on the lookout search engine was interesting, especially in regard to a forced birth extremism event.

Suspect attempted suicide. Deceased after taking lawman’s weapon and stopped by officer in police station.

Price grimaced as she took in the additional details. Blue suicide was not unusual, but the suspect had already shot himself through the jaw.

She took her hand, extended her index finger to form a gun and pressed it under her chin. There was no way that someone who wasn’t in a struggle could miss a major portion of their brain with a gunshot.

The second lookout alert was swiftly followed by a third.

She opened the second, an FBI surveillance tap on a suspected terrorist cell operating in the American south. Mobile, Alabama. Where Dr. Hassan’s incident occurred. A suspected terrorist was calling someone within the cell.

The readout said the two in communication were Hadib Asada and Krahiat Majnuna. Audio played from the clip.

Asada: “Remember the doctor bitch from Helmand? The one who ran the hospital for the refugee camp?”

Majnuna: “Dr. Annis Hassan. Yes, I do.”

Asada: “She is here. In Mobile. She walked into my store.”

Majnuna: “Here? Doing what?”

Asada: “Doctor shit, I suppose. She was bloody, and in scrubs.”

Majnuna: “Accursed witch... She should be dead already. We suffered grievous defeat.”

Asada: “We did. And we now have the opportunity to strike her down. It is our duty.”

Majnuna: “I want her dead more than anything. But can we accomplish this without ruining our cover?”

Price suppressed a snort of derision. They had no cover.

Asada: “We can do it without getting our faces on television.”

A moment of silence.

Majnuna: “We will gather the others.”

The phone line went dead.

Price blinked.

After an attack on a woman’s health clinic by a forced birth extremist, and mostly likely while on the way home from the police station, given the timing, Annis Hassan had incurred the wrath of Islamic fighters who’d been working alongside the Taliban.

It wasn’t much of a surprise to Price that foreign Arabs were the spine of a pro-Taliban movement.

Afghanistan, after its battle with the Soviet Union, had needed fighters and disenfranchised young men from Saudi Arabia had headed east to seek their combat glory. When the United States targeted the Taliban for their support of al Qaeda, even more Arabs had found a new crusade to battle against.

The average American thought that it was the Afghan people who’d founded the terrorist movement known as the Taliban, but in truth, the clerics who ran Afghanistan were a foreign occupational government. More commonly, it was the Afghan people who’d been robbed, executed, their children kidnapped for political indoctrination as child soldiers.

“Doc, you have to be one of the unluckiest women in the world,” Price said softly.

The third alert was from the FBI. They were in the midst of a search of Dr. Hassan’s background. The mission controller was tempted to help them look into the doctor to dismiss their concerns about her involvement with terrorism.

The Bureau’s background check for Hassan received an update. It had been terminated.

Price looked at the tag for the termination. She knew the codes, and it turned out to be shut down because it would interfere with an “ongoing undercover operation.”

Asada or Majnuna were either undercover operatives, confidential informants or something bigger. She’d need the Stony Man cybercrew to figure out which. This could even have been peripheral to a larger operation. Either way, someone at the FBI had decided to throw Dr. Hassan to the wolves.

She opened up an encrypted message window to the one man who could save Dr. Hassan from the pack of killers.

Striker. Sending surveillance logs regarding Dr. Annis Hassan. Under threat from FBE and radical Islamists.

Around the world, the communication app would find Mack Bolan and clue him in to threats that only he could respond to—or would respond to. If the American antiterrorism community decided that intel was more important than the life of a doctor helping American citizens, then the warrior would take up the challenge.

Minutes later, a response popped up.

Mobile, Alabama. Four hours out, as the Huracan flies.

Price blinked. There were no weather alerts for the Gulf of Mexico. When she realized Bolan hadn’t written “hurricane,” she knew he must be referring to a Lamborghini Huracan LP-610. It also told her that the Executioner had hit a very rich criminal somewhere along the lower East Coast or Gulf Coast. Considering the exotic nature of the sports car, and the fact that it could break 200 miles an hour easily, Price placed the man and the vehicle in Miami or its environs.

White supremacists and Islamist radicals. Seems like Dr. Hassan not only can’t escape the one but proved a lightning rod to the other.

Bolan was quick to respond.

You’ve seen these ideologies work together before. The only real difference is what they name their gods.

Gods twisted by their own personal prejudices.

Want any help?

I’ll recon scene first. Will send aid request if needed.

Will do.

Somewhere, out in the night, a dragon slayer rode a mighty Italian steed flat-out to save a maiden in distress.

Price wished him luck.

Mack Bolan worked the gears, flowing with the tach as it rose to the red line. He sat just in front of 317 cubic inches of V10 might. In the heyday of American muscle cars, the V8—four cylinders on each side of an engine—was the epitome of power and speed. The V10 increased that count by 125 percent, and in the Lamborghini Huracan, it produced double the horsepower of the biggest 7-liter Hemi or Cobra Jet.

Given his druthers, Bolan would have preferred a Dodge Hellcat, or the newer Demon, mainly because either wouldn’t have stood out as much as the Lamborghini. The Challenger would have had a back seat as well as a roomy trunk for more battle gear. The drug dealer he had just taken down hadn’t had that kind of aesthetic, however.

Bolan didn’t mind. The Italian supercar went fine with his Italian custom machine pistol, the Beretta 93-R. He wore it in a shoulder holster, balanced out by a pair of 20-round magazines. The gun belt with a tie-down holster for his Desert Eagle sat on the other bucket seat. Three extra magazines of .44 Magnum rounds in hip pouches—plus one round up the pipe—gave him thirty-three shots that could reach out to two hundred yards to tag an enemy. The gun belt and its contents were hidden beneath a light windbreaker, so as not to arouse any suspicion if he were pulled over by a state trooper.

Bolan wore his Beretta and shoulder rig under a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt. Lead washers had been sewn into the placket of the shirt, so a breeze would not inadvertently disclose his armed status.

He had more clothing in the trunk of the Huracan, including his blacksuit, a piece of high-tech fabric that made him harder to see in the shadows and provided protection from both heat and cold. The heat protection extended to fire; flame-proof Nomex. The midnight-dark suit had seen material upgrades across his career, but it had maintained the same attributes all around—no snag, low-profile pockets with plenty of storage, and elasticity for plenty range of motion. It was like his second skin, and it made him look leaner, meaner, far more intimidating.

Along with the blacksuit, the trunk held a load-bearing vest festooned with munitions and tools for infiltration, sabotage and destruction. Under that, in a Pelican gun case, were two long guns. One was a Brügger & Thomet MP-9, 20.6 inches long unfolded, lightweight, with a sturdy folding stock. It could spit out 9 mm Parabellum rounds at 900 rounds per minute. Once folded, the weapon was a mere 11.9 inches long, able to be secreted in a shoulder holster like his Beretta 93-R. It even shared the forward pistol grip, though it didn’t fold like the Beretta’s.

The other was a Fabrique Nationale SCAR-L. It was a rifle designed to replace the M-4 carbine for the US Army. Unlike the M-4, the SCAR-L could fold its stock, making it easier to store while still providing firm shoulder support for accurate fire. Folded, it was slightly more than two feet long, which fit inside the Huracan’s trunk readily. Even with the stock extended, it was under three feet, handy and quick in combat.

Bolan looked at the phone resting in its cradle on the supercar’s dashboard. Not only did it have a GPS, thanks to the technology and algorithm programming of Stony Man Farm, it had a map of all the speed traps between his current position and Mobile, Alabama. As it was late at night, there was very little traffic to contend with, and the highway stretched long and clear ahead of him.

A fraction over seven hundred miles was about ten hours doing the speed limit. Even 110 miles an hour wasn’t a stress on the Lamborghini’s engine. Bolan revved it up to 150 miles an hour on the straightaways. He’d only had to stop for gas three times, but by the time the sun cracked the horizon behind him, Bolan was just a few miles outside of Mobile.

He took a sip from a thermos full of coffee. Now just after dawn, he was doing 55 on the interstate.

Earlier, he’d reserved a motel room using the smartphone on the Lamborghini’s dash. He pulled into the lot and parked. He caught a weary, curious glance from an old man sweeping the sidewalk.

“Nice car,” the elderly man told him.

“Thanks. It’s borrowed, though,” Bolan answered. “I needed a quick ride.”

“Where’s the fire?” the old man asked.

Bolan paused for a moment then replied, “The Foster Portman Women’s Health Center.”

He nodded. “Yeah, there’s been trouble. Heard about that on the news.”

“Heard anything else?” Bolan asked.

“If I did, I’d tell ya, son. You look like you could put out a few fires here.”

“Yeah?” Bolan said.

The old man grinned. “Yeah. You must be the guy who phoned ahead with that motel app.”

“I must be,” Bolan returned.

“I’ll get you the key,” he told the Executioner. “Nice thing about those programs, you can pay by credit card right on the phone.”

“Makes cross-country travel easier,” Bolan admitted.

The old man smirked. “Y’all look like a rambling man.” He ducked into the office.

Bolan left his Pelican case in the Lamborghini, but did take out his more conventional luggage before the man could see the weapons bag. The clerk came back and underhand lobbed the room key to Bolan. “I’ve been known to wander.”

“Thanks, Mr. Cooper,” the clerk said. “I’m Joseph. I’m the one who keeps the odd hours running this place. Jessica works mornings and Baxter does afternoon to evening.”

“Thanks,” Bolan said. He offered Joseph a handshake. The older man smiled and gripped the Executioner’s hand firmly.

“Just so you know, Mel’s Diner is the one with the best coffee and bacon and eggs. It looks greasy, but it’s cheap, it’s good, and what it doesn’t put into decoration, it makes up for with good food. And the health inspector doesn’t need bribes from the owner.”

“Thanks.”

“Mel’s also has the best gossip, if you sit for a bit.”

Bolan nodded and gave a slight salute to the clerk before heading to his room.

Right now, it was time to unpack and organize.

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