“Are they all dead?”

Bolan nodded. As an afterthought, he picked up a pair of empty water bottles and cut open a vein on two of the bodies. He hoped the blood samples would reveal what types of toxins were used to turn humans into weapons.

“Who were they?” Rudd asked.

“Someone’s pawns,” the soldier replied. “Most likely, they were kidnapped tourists, harmless people sparked to insanity by some biochemist.”

“Who’d do such a thing? And who’d let them loose here, where there’s just kids?”

“If there’s a clue in the blood, I’ll use it. I’m going after them,” Bolan stated grimly.

“Alone?” Rudd asked.

“Alone. With an army. It won’t matter. I’m going to find the people behind this,” the Executioner said.

Grave Mercy

Mack Bolan®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Age after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and the innocent…

—Robert Green Ingersoll 1833–1899

I have witnessed the innocent being ground into the earth by heartless monsters. Enough! They will be avenged.

—Mack Bolan

CONTENTS

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

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER ONE

Mack Bolan, running at full speed, speared his foot into the door of the laboratory and was stopped cold. Usually the Executioner’s 220-pound frame and the forty pounds of gear he wore were more than sufficient to easily splinter a door. Bolan grimaced under the impact as he rebounded from the heavy panel. It took a few steps for the soldier to recover his balance. The stench of incinerating heroin was heavy in the air, impenetrable cloying clouds obscuring the burning processing tables sprawled throughout the long room. The soldier’s brilliant, tactical mind was unaffected by the airborne opiates, as his face was masked. He doubted that he’d been physically affected by the gases filling the room, so without muscular impediment, he realized that the door was reinforced. Under the usual set of circumstances, such a kick would have loosened the crossbolt from its mooring in the doorjamb, but the door was locked from the outside, which made sense.

No drug lord wanted his drug processors to have a free way out when they could slip packets into their mouths or other orifices. Locking the lab from the outside was a means of control. Only Long Eddy himself made the profits, not some emaciated, poor, jittery lackey with a rectum full of heroin-stuffed condoms. That’s why Bolan kept a 12-gauge shotgun—a Masterkey—under the barrel of his rifle. He triggered the stubby blaster, and a cylinder of lead powder turned the locking mechanism to scrap.

With a push, the door flew wide open. Even as the first shafts of sunlight and fresh air rolled in through the crack, Bolan realized that he’d made a mistake. With a new supply of oxygen rolling into the burning laboratory, the flames flared even hotter. The process was called a backdraft, and it was one of the most terrifying traps that professional firemen could walk into.

The Executioner had made a mistake—he was only human—and now his nerves were screaming at him, announcing the harm the blast of superheated air around him was causing. It was survivable. The heat rose, air rumbling behind him and igniting under superheated force. His legs pushed, long limbs releasing coiled energy as he sprung out onto the sand, trying to push himself prone and let his heavily protected back and boots absorb most of the damage that vomited into open air. Flames seared the back of Bolan’s head, his hair curling up and snapping off instantly, his scalp singed. Something struck him hard between his shoulder blades, the Kevlar back of his armored, load-bearing vest and the trauma plates inside sucking up much of the force. Something hot and painful seared across his right shoulder, flesh parting under the impact.

Bolan hit the sand and buried his face in it as the gush of superheated air created a vacuum. The walls of the corrugated aluminum and plywood laboratory crumpled inward, the implosion crushing the building like a beer can. Twisted, and spewing smoke in the sand behind Bolan, the Jamaicans’ drug laboratory was history. He knew that he had left wounded enemy gunmen inside, and by now, those people were dead. There was a pang of regret. While he was known as the Executioner, Mack Bolan wasn’t a cruel man. The wounded he’d left behind were knocked out of the fight, no longer a threat to him. They’d have received medical aid once the battle was over, just small fry who didn’t deserve to suffer after they’d been put out of the fight.

It had been Long Eddy who’d set off the conflagration, and the dreadlocked crime lord had little concern for the people under his command. Right now, the Jamaican was racing along the beach toward a long pier where a couple of cigarette boats had been moored. His legs looked skinny and now completely black in contrast to the pristine white shorts that flapped above his knees like a skirt.

Bolan surged to his feet and whipped off the mask covering his nose and mouth, the collar of his blacksuit grinding painfully against the tender skin on his neck. He realized that his right shoulder wasn’t responding, though his hand was still clamped around the pistol grip of his M-4 rifle. He tried to pull up the muzzle of the weapon, and he knew that his nervous system had shut down, trying to suppress the pain of his injured arm.

Tentatively, Bolan reached to his shoulder, feeling the hard edges of broken glass shards sticking out of his deltoid and right biceps. One particularly large spear was jammed into the muscle just below his neck and behind his collarbone. He let his head droop, then his eyes locked on Long Eddy as the cop murderer leaped into his boat.

“Jack!” Bolan called over his throat mike. “I need a pickup, fast!”

“I saw the lab go up just now,” Jack Grimaldi, one of Bolan’s oldest surviving friends and allies, answered. Instants later, the bulbous form of a Hughes 500 helicopter rose over the trees, its downward rotor wash buffeting the Executioner with heavy winds.

“Jesus, Sarge!”

Bolan threw the M-4 onto the floor of the passenger cabin, then dragged himself into the back seat. “Do you see Long Eddy’s boat?”

“You need medical attention first. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” Grimaldi countered.

“I’ve come this far to bring down Eddy, I’m not going to let a couple of flesh wounds stop me from finishing the job,” Bolan said. “Go.”

Grimaldi was torn between obeying his friend’s order and concern for his health. “Take care of yourself while we catch up, damn it. I don’t want you bleeding to death—this is a rental, after all.”

It was one of those rare moments when the Executioner would have smiled, suppressing a chuckle at Grimaldi’s smart-ass remark, but the pain of wrenching off his load-bearing vest had overridden that bit of levity. The blood-smeared ballistic nylon shell dropped to the floor in a clump, and Bolan could see multiple deep gouges and burns where shrapnel and flame had tried to reach him. He gently touched his shoulder again and felt for the biggest pieces of broken glass. There were four jagged shards, and he’d have to take care of them before peeling himself out of his blacksuit top.

The largest piece of glass had plunged into Bolan’s shoulder muscle and come out far too easily for Bolan’s taste. He grimaced as he saw bits of human tissue—his muscle fibers to be exact—clinging to the blast-sharpened tip. The soldier let it tumble out into the wind. The other three pieces were smaller, but Bolan had to explore the wounds with his fingertips. He felt the ragged gash, wincing as he carefully advanced deeper into the rift of flesh, looking for any remaining bits that might not have come with the big shard. The cut was wide, and deep, so the soldier reached into a pocket of his vest for a packet of coagulant powder. The moment the compound hit the cavity of his shoulder wound, it turned into a semisolid gel that conformed to the shape of the injury, sealing off severed capillaries and damaged veins.

It wouldn’t last long, but Bolan could hold on long enough. Now that he’d stopped the bleeding, he plucked out the other square pieces of glass. A splinter at the top of his right biceps slid out with sickly stickiness, but none of these lesser lacerations were going to be a problem. The soldier slapped gauze and tape on the smaller cuts, then laid a thicker pad of sterile dressing on top of the shoulder wound, with medical tape sealing the clotting agent in place.

“Sarge, that boat must be rocket-powered,” Grimaldi said. “I’ve got this baby up to 110 miles per hour, and he’s still holding his distance.”

“Are you saying you can’t catch up with him?” Bolan asked, shrugging into the bloodied load-bearing vest. He winced as the shoulder wound took the pres sure, but the field dressing would stay in place, ironically thanks to the added weight. A fast pat-check showed him that he had three magazines left for the M-4, and the Beretta 93-R stored in a holster clipped to the side of the vest. Usually the Executioner liked having a shoulder rig for the sleek 9-mm pistol, but with heavy kit like the armored vest, he didn’t have space beneath the shell to fit his holster straps.

He zipped up the armored vest, tugging on its side vent straps to accommodate the lost layer of clothing. He didn’t need his gear bouncing and jiggling around, possibly doing more damage to his injured arm. Bolan flexed his right hand, then bent the arm a few times. He had movement, enough to handle his weapons, but it would be a temporary thing. He’d taken serious injuries before, and experience taught him that anything more than a few minutes of activity would sap the strength from the wounded limb.

Bolan transferred the M-4 to his left hand. While he was born predominantly right-handed, years of warfare had made him ambidextrous. He was glad he hadn’t taken a bullpup rifle into this fight because he didn’t have the time now to shift an ejection port for left-handed use. The M-4, as it was configured, was relatively friendly to left handers, especially with its selector switch and magazine release on both sides of the receiver. He adjusted the holographic scope atop the weapon, adjusting it for his “off-side” eye, knowing that the settings for his normal use would be way off target for his left eye. The new parallax was perfectly aligned now, enabling Bolan to put every bullet where he needed it to be.

He put Long Eddy in his sights, the red holographic dot centered on the Jamaican’s spine. Bolan pulled the trigger, but the physics of the helicopter and the cigarette boat over choppy waves sent his bullets careening over the side of the speedy watercraft. The tall Jamaican whipped his head around as fiberglass was chewed by autofire so close to his spine. Though there was no magnification on the holographic sight, Bolan knew that Long Eddy was shouting something. There was someone else on the boat.

“Jack! This has got to end!” Bolan roared. Grimaldi checked over his shoulder. Even through the dark visor of his pilot’s helmet, the soldier could see the look of concern on his friend’s face.

“You’re hurt!” Grimaldi called back, but already the sleek helicopter nosed down, its bulbous front locked on to the rapid, dartlike boat. “Too hurt for close quarters!”

“But not hurt enough to accept collateral damage,” Bolan growled. “He’s got someone down there.”

Grimaldi’s sigh hissed over their intercom. The Executioner knew that the pilot, his faithful friend through countless wars, had given himself over to the orders he had received. The two men had been working with relentless urgency in an effort to stop the Jamaican drug dealer, especially since Long Eddy had taken captives. For a brief few minutes, before Bolan had turned the heroin lab into a blazing funeral pyre for contraband and bandits alike, he had been under the impression that he had rescued all but one of the USO performers who were contributing their time and effort to American servicemen engaging in humanitarian aid in Haiti.

It had been a reckless firefight in an arena where there were plenty of volatile chemicals, but the one hostage that the Executioner had thought he’d failed was a young woman whose stage name wasn’t much different from the one she’d used when they’d first met in Japan. Punk singer Vicious Honey, despite her nearly anarchist lyrics and music, was still an artist who gave her all for the U.S. military. With the thought that Honey might have been dead in a ditch somewhere, Bolan had shut down and became an unstoppable killing machine. Only the blast of burning lab chemicals hurling him to the sand had snapped him out of his numbed warrior state.

For a moment Bolan wished that he’d still been in that war fury, as pulled muscles, bruises, burns and lacerations were weighing heavily on his shoulders. A flash of the familiar mix of pink-and-blond hair appeared in the cockpit of the speedboat.

“She’s alive!” Grimaldi spoke up. “But you already knew that.”

“Get me close,” Bolan said, discarding the M-4. In the tight quarters of the racing watercraft, even its compact length would be too unwieldy. This fight was going to need speed and brutality, so the Executioner drew his Beretta, removing its blunt suppressor so it would move even faster in his grasp. He wrapped his right hand around the handle of his combat knife, his teeth gritted as he knew that violent activity wasn’t going to do his injured arm any good.

Pain and convalescence were going to have to wait until a life was saved.

Bullets peppered against the bottom of the helicopter as Grimaldi swung the aircraft close enough for the warrior to jump. With a kick, Bolan hurled himself toward Long Eddy and the renegade Rasta who held Honey by the back of her neck.

For a brief heartbeat the world came to a stop, the roar of the rotor, the chatter of autofire, the rush of wind. Bolan was free from gravity, sailing to a spot between the tall masts of the cigarette boat’s airfoil spoiler. Even as he hung weightless, traversing from air to watercraft, he saw Honey’s blue eyes lock on him with recognition.

The shock of the diving Executioner left Long Eddy’s man staring at him, agape. Long Eddy himself, clutching the wheel of the boat with one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in the other, was also frozen in surprise.

The audacity of Bolan’s attack had bought him vital moments as his waffle-treaded boots slammed hard into the fiberglass shell between the spoiler’s supports.

Long Eddy recovered his wits, swinging up his shotgun up as Bolan pushed himself forward. Honey twisted, lowering her head, making herself even smaller than her petite five-foot-one. The Rasta struggled to keep Honey’s head up with his forearm under her chin, the Uzi in his other hand still aimed up toward the helicopter. The Executioner knew that he was going to take some pain, but he had committed to this, his lightning-fast mind plotting out the angles even as his forearms uncrossed.

The knife in his right hand struck the barrels of the stubby shotgun that Long Eddy raised, steel clanging on steel just a moment before the twin 12-gauge shells within detonated, launching their payload. Struck with twelve .36-caliber pellets just above his ribs, Bolan willed himself past the pain that slashed him from shoulder to right hip. The Beretta 93-R’s extended 6.5-inch barrel touched the captor in control of Honey, and as soon as Bolan felt that spongy contact, his finger closed on the trigger.

A 3-round burst tore through the gunman’s face, emptying his head of brains as if it were a gore-filled piñata. Honey snaked herself loose from the dead man’s grasp, pushing herself away from Long Eddy, who was still in the fight.

His shotgun’s payload expended, the Jamaican drug lord sneered and whipped it around like a club, the hot double-muzzle slicing open skin on Bolan’s cheek. The twin barrels and their wooden furniture continued swinging after the bloody impact, cracking against the soldier’s left wrist. It was almost painful enough for the Executioner to drop his Beretta, but all it succeeded in doing was stopping the gun from aiming at Long Eddy. The only weapon Bolan had was in his right hand, and his right biceps had taken two pellets from the shotgun, the bare limb pouring blood from the injury. Agony seemed to be crushing half of his body, but the Jamaican drug lord was looking to make a far more impressive dent in his adversary’s skull with the empty shotgun.

It felt as if Bolan were pushing his knife-wielding fist through molasses, muscles screaming at him to stop even as the double-bladed dagger’s tip struck Long Eddy in his chest, between the fourth and fifth buttons of his vividly colored shirt. There was resistance as the knife encountered a Kevlar vest underneath the linen shirt, but Bolan pushed hard with both legs, using their tremendous strength to add to the penetration power of the knife. The Kevlar’s ripping gave way to the squishy parting of flesh and the grinding rustle of bone cut by steel.

Blood poured over Long Eddy’s lower lip, his big brown eyes bulging in horror.

“Fuck…er…” Eddy gurgled as the Bokor Applegate-Fairbairn fighting blade twisted in the man’s chest, tearing arteries and bronchial tissue.

Bolan didn’t respond except to bring up the Beretta. A stroke of the trigger left the would-be king of Jamaican crime without half of his face and skull. Bone snagged the knife blade between ribs, and Bolan didn’t have the strength to yank it out. He simply released the blade’s handle, and Long Eddy’s corpse toppled backward over the rail, gangly limbs flying in the air as he struck the water.

Honey had figured out how to work the throttle and had killed the boat’s engines, then turned to Bolan. “You came for me?”

Bolan nodded weakly, collapsing into the pilot’s seat now that the danger was over. Less than a hundred yards away, black dorsal fins broke the surface around the splashy froth where Eddy had gone into the Caribbean Sea. “It let me take care of two birds with one stone.”

Honey chuckled nervously. “What do I call you now?”

“Friend is good enough,” Bolan answered. The trembling young woman gave him a tight hug, her eyes clenched shut so she couldn’t see him silently redden as she aggravated his broken rib.

“They were going to sell us,” Honey whispered. “The bastards were going to sell us.”

Bolan stroked the frightened young woman’s hair. “You’re too rebellious to be for sale, Honey. You’d have found a way out.”

Sooner or later, Bolan was going to have to start the engines and head for land, but right now, he had to soothe a young woman’s trauma and recover enough strength to pilot the craft. Above, Jack Grimaldi orbited the Hughes over the speedboat. With luck, Bolan would have a week or three to recover from the injuries he received today, but Long Eddy, the King of the Caribbean, was dead.

Bolan put enough breath together for four words as he watched a shark swim past, a gangly leg in its jaws. “Long live the king.”

CHAPTER TWO

Three couples were entwined in each other’s arms on the bobbing yacht that was anchored at sea. They were watching the Caribbean sunset, yet seemed more interested in their partner’s curves and supple warmth.

It was an idyllic interlude, the soundtrack provided by an MP3 file pumping out tropic island tunes over the yacht’s sound system.

Pierre Fortescue felt a pang of regret for ruining such a perfect romantic vacation, but it was quickly subsumed as he remembered that these were Americans, the people who had withdrawn their approval and allowed the Duvaliers’ ceaseless control of Haiti to disappear. Since the end of Papa Doc’s and Baby Doc’s reign, Fortescue’s home nation had fallen into a sewer pit. The worst insult was when the earthquake that he and the rest of his cult had prayed for was misread as the punishment of God against the nation that had bartered their freedom to the Devil.

Fortescue snorted. The gods that he and the Black Avengers spoke with predated the quaint humanist concepts of a supreme being weak enough to let his son be nailed to a tree. The loa were no sniveling pacifists, no way in heaven or hell. When the Fortescue family’s first Haitian ancestors called them down, their vengeance against France was a total emasculation that had allowed the British, an insane emperor, the Nazis and now the Muslims to overrun them and bring them ruin. The loa didn’t caress their enemies, they scourged the fools until they were hollow echoes of their former selves.

France was but one crippled victim of the dark lords of voodoo. And now, America and Haiti would feel the harsh caresses of voodoo magic.

The motion of the yacht wasn’t sufficient to make it hard for the tall, dark-skinned Fortescue to hop up, grab the rail and haul himself over. There were two young people on the deck, a swarthy young man with black hair, nuzzling into the neck of a young blond woman who looked emaciated except for a pair of swollen breasts too large for her bony torso.

Fortescue, crouching out of sight behind the deckhouse, sneered as he realized that those were probably some of the best breasts that money could buy. Typical whites—so frightened of having an ounce of body fat on them, and yet they were envious of the voluptuous curves of healthy women.

One of his fellow Black Avenger raiders had slipped aboard as he observed the scene, then opened up a small duffel to retrieve the inoculator pistols. Fortescue loaded the first twin-dart cartridge into the breech of the inoculator. The tiny weapons were designed for dealing with animals, and had been stolen from a Florida wildlife ranger station.

Fortescue walked onto the bow, staying low so as not to betray his position, yet craning his neck to see if there was any semblance of alarm on the part of the two couples on the port deck. They, like the couple closest to him, were oblivious to the presence of dark raiders on their craft. Fortescue cleared his throat, and the man looked up in his direction.

Fortescue could see that the young man was a Hispanic, and the young Latino grunted as Fortescue’s first dart caught him under his pectoral muscle. The dart wasn’t actually an anaesthetic but a quick-acting paralytic. The dose froze the young man, rendering him inert, yet not strong enough to stop his lungs. The blonde woman was about to squeal when Fortescue punched his second dart into her, striking her in the stomach. He wasn’t certain that if the dart had struck one of those silicone-inflated bags on her chest that it would reach her bloodstream.

The blonde stiffened in paralysis, the paralytic effects of the tubocurarine hitting her like a ton of bricks. The toxin was one of the main chemicals from the primitive jungle poison curare. The young woman’s eyes widened with horror as she was unable to move. She was too small, too light, for the dose of toxin that Fortescue had put into her, but as long as her diaphragm was paralyzed, she couldn’t make noise. It was better to let her die here, on the yacht.

The young man beside her was strong enough that his chest still rose and fell, lungs working despite the complete loss of strength in his arms and legs. He’d likely survive the dosing with tetrodotoxin, leaving him mentally malleable. It wasn’t as if a scrawny, ninety-pound girl would have provided as much of a threat as a 180-pound man, not with the plan proposed by Morrot, the Black Avengers’ leader.

Blue eyes looked up pleadingly at Fortescue. The young woman looked as if she wanted to move her lips, minor twitches, but the power of the tubocurarine was just too much for her. It would take upward of a minute or two more for her to suffocate. The young man twitched, able to influence his own body that much, staying alive. He could sense his lover’s distress, or at least see that she had stopped breathing.

Fortescue rested his hand on the paralyzed young man’s chest, checking for a heartbeat. You’ll forget her quickly enough, he thought. It was a pointless gesture, the youth couldn’t hear his thought, and he really didn’t care about his torment, but that brief show of compassion was something he felt the urge to give.

As soon as the Haitian had his dart gun loaded, he nodded to his companion. A third of their number was waiting in reserve, ready to hit anyone who wasn’t put down by Fortescue and friend’s darts.

Four quiet puffs of CO₂ launched their pointed, toxin-laden missiles with stealthy quickness. The two young couples were rendered immobile with little fuss or muss. One of the young men struggled, his lungs failing due to an unforeseen bout of asthmatic response, but two losses abovedeck were little loss to Morrot’s operational plans. Fortescue waved his assistants on to scoop up the unconscious ones, ignoring the flopped corpses on the decks.

“How many belowdecks?” Fortescue asked.

“Register says three crew and another couple,” his ally, Cornelius, said, looking at the laminated paper. “Do we take the crew?”

“They’re strong and will be useful,” Fortescue said. “Besides, these men aren’t true believers. Just because they share the same skin color means nothing. They are pagans, adherents to heathen gods.”

“They think the same about us,” Cornelius answered. “So, it’s only fair.”

“It is unconscionable that they consider us savages, worshipping carcasses impaled to planks or a burning shrubbery,” Fortescue replied. “When we make our move, their world’s streets will run with their blood.”

Cornelius’s smile was broad and infectious. “Blood shed by their own hands.”

Fortescue nodded sagely. “Reload, and we’ll head belowdecks. Get Gallad.”

The three Black Avengers headed below the deck.

THE STRAPS CUT into Guillermo Rojas’s wrists as consciousness returned to him, his arms twitching futilely in response to his feeling of restraint. Rojas wanted to turn his head, but a leather thong across his forehead and gripping his chin kept him still.

All he could remember was Stephanie, her gorgeous blue eyes alit with horror, foam streaming over her lips. Then there was the black shadow, wielding a strange, sci-fi-looking handgun, that reached out to touch his chest, as if to soothe his worries over the gurgling, drowning girl who trembled beside him. Rage and grief spun in his strap-bound chest, his fury an impotent storm as he didn’t know where the midnight-skinned marauder was, and grief over the sweet, blue-eyed creature he’d fallen for. Stephanie Coulton, tiny and privileged, had found him as beautiful as he’d found her, and had brought him down for a spring getaway despite her father’s disgust that she was consorting with someone that the man felt was destined to be a pool boy or a gardener, not her social equal.

She’d loved him, she’d defied her father, and now he knew what her face looked like when her lungs shut down, jammed with histamine. He knew the symptoms of bronchoconstriction well—Rojas was a medical student, only a year away from his first internship. His mind reeled as he searched for a reason why he’d just lain there, helpless as she died, suffocating.

His mouth was dry, and he wasn’t able to speak. His pharmaceutical knowledge simply wasn’t enough to determine what had happened, but he was certain that it wasn’t any form of anaesthetic. No “knockout drug” acted so quickly against a person, but he knew that there were toxins out there that were used for rapid incapacitation. He’d been present at emergency intubations, and knew anaesthesiologists utilized drugs that caused instant paralysis—which was why intubation teams acted instantly when the patients were given their injections. As soon as the subject went limp, the intubation tube was put down the windpipe and into the main bronchial tube.

Such a drug acted instantly, and was capable of stopping someone’s breathing, indeed it was counted on to prevent reflexive movement during surgery. Handled right, it could render a big man like him immobile, easily captured, but a dose that would leave him helpless was far too much for a girl who was half his weight. Muscles frozen, Stephanie was doomed the minute the toxin hit her bloodstream.

A fingertip caressed his cheek, and Rojas grimaced as his effort to turn was again stymied by the rig that held his head in place. Tendons cracked as they tried to move a completely immobilized head.

“The first one awake, good.”

Rojas tried to open his mouth, but he finally figured out the dryness in his mouth—a leather “tongue” was stuffed into it, and it was part of the multistrap system that held him immobile. All he could do was murmur past the gag.

“Yes, so sorry about not allowing you to speak, but unlike my favorite visionary, I do not care to listen to the wails and laments of my experiments,” the voice said, a lilting French accent weighing heavily on his words. His timber was deep, its resonant echo making Rojas imagine that it came not from a throat, but a bottomless gullet that would be more at home on a shark.

Rojas snorted, trying to trumpet out some form of sound. His eyes craned to see the shadowy man flitting in the darkness at the edges of his peripheral vision. His chewed on the leather pad that gagged him until his teeth started to hurt.

“Such fire. I appreciate it,” the French-accented shadow man said. “It gives me a challenge.”

Rojas’s blood chilled at the ominous sound of that statement. Dark brown eyes swiveled in their sockets, grasping for more than a blurred glimpse of the smear of motion that possessed the doom-laden French accent that taunted him. Fingernails scratched along his jawline, and the young man caught a glimpse of the man’s digits, callused and long, bearing the color of straight, strong coffee.

“Oh, you want to see me?” his tormentor asked.

Rojas managed an affirmative sound.

A face loomed into the light over Rojas’s left shoulder. The shadowy figure bore a distinguished face that was handsome with middle age’s wisdom and grace, his broad, flat nose the only sign of any imperfection as the bridge had an odd kink in the middle of it. Rojas almost felt relief that it was a fairly normal-looking man, not some chimeric predator, when dread snuck into his heart, a frightened tingle that zipped through his chest and rolled down his arms to his fingertips. Something on the other side was wrong, horribly wrong.

The man stepped out from behind Rojas’s chair and turned toward him. The oversize, milky-white eye glared out of the fused mass of flesh that was the remnants of what used to be human features. The eye, three concentric rings of varying hues of white, glared at him, and Rojas would have kicked and screamed had he retained any ability to move. Instead, a high-pitched whine blared through his nostrils, the closest approximation of a scream of horror that he could manage with a mouth stuffed with leather.

“My name is Dr. Morrot,” the man said.

Rojas had initially thought he’d awakened to a nightmare, a fever-dream where Stephanie had died slowly and horribly and where he had been kidnapped by monsters. He realized that the first of his waking moments were a respite of peace compared to the wave of insanity washing over him. Bound helpless in front of a deformed madman with a nausea-inducing orb where an eye should have been, tormented by a voice that belonged to a devil, not a human, Rojas’s arms, laden with lean, strong muscle, flexed against his restraints, but they didn’t budge. His legs tried to kick, to twist, but they, too, were thwarted by the trap that Morrot had placed him in.

Rojas could hear that others in the room had begun to awaken. Their nostrils blared and bleated as they made an effort to speak, alarm filling those nasal sounds as they realized that they, too, were immobilized.

Morrot leaned in, licking Rojas’s shoulder. “Mmm. The salty taste of fear, accompanied by the buttery scent of panic. Of course, the smell is really a byproduct of the body’s elimination of potassium, but as a medical student, you already knew that, right, Mr. Rojas?”

Rojas wanted to bellow, to throw that trivia back into Morrot’s ugly, misshapen face. He’d wondered if he were free, if he’d have the courage to punch this spindly figure standing in front of him. However, the baleful eye glaring unblinkingly at him, sagging in its socket, was as paralyzing as the dart that had taken him on the yacht.

“Good morning, children!” Morrot boomed, his slender arms spread wide. Now that the disfigured doctor had stepped back, Rojas could see the man in full. He wore a short-sleeved, olive-colored T-shirt that was covered by a maroon-and-purple-stained butcher’s apron. The slender limbs were deceptive in their thinness, as Morrot was a tall man, easily six foot six, and those arms were corded with muscle that flexed with every movement. The horrible damage to the left side of the man’s face extended down his neck and to his upper left arm, stringy tendrils of skin spiderwebbed over a raw, red surface.

Around him, Rojas’s companions from the yacht let out their fright in any way they could, from guttural throat constrictions to piercing whines through nostrils. Morrot seemed to bathe in the captives’ fear, letting it wash over him like a refreshing drizzle breaking up a steamy, hot and ugly day.

Morrot took a deep breath, then lowered his gaze to the prisoners as a masked assistant, wearing a white coat and scrub pants approached him, carrying a tray laden with syringes. “It’s time to open your minds and say ‘ah.’”

Rojas and his companions tried to scream past their gags, but all that came out were panicked whines through their noses.

THE YOUNG PUNK rocker paused as she stood beside the idling Jeep, regarding a convalescing Mack Bolan as he swung in a hammock. He could still taste the hint of cherry on his lips, the silken softness of her pink-and-blond hair a fresh sensation on his fingers. Honey’s dark red lips pursed as she blew him a kiss.

Bolan casually caught it with his good hand, and he returned a salute to the tough woman. The driver of the Jeep leaned on the horn to get Honey’s attention, eliciting a middle finger for him. She gave one last lingering look to the soldier, then jumped into the back.

Tires ground at the dirt road, kicking up a cloud that did nothing to hamper the verdant slashes of color beneath a sky as crystal clear blue as a painting. This place was paradise, so close to the beach that he could smell the salt of the sea and gentle rush of waves. Children carried surfboards from a small hut, waving to the soldier as he reclined in the hammock.

Bolan waved back to the kids. Honey had arranged for him to stay with a friend of hers, Anton Spaulding, at the Jamaican surf camp he owned. Spaulding was an exceptional host, laid back and gentle, the epitome of the surfer lifestyle, having built his dream home in the pleasant, peaceful woods.

Spaulding walked toward the hammock, clad only in blue-and-white palm-frond-patterned surfer shorts. His skin was browned from constant exposure to the sun, his hair a dirty blend of sun-bleached blond and dark brunette that fell haphazardly over his forehead and ears. His blue eyes gleaming over a broken nose.

“Shame to see her go,” he said, leaning on one of the trees holding Bolan’s hammock.

“She has things to do. Better things than looking after me,” Bolan replied with a chuckle.

Spaulding smirked. “I don’t know. Looked like leaving was harder for her than pulling a tooth.”

“Wasn’t easy for me, either,” Bolan said. Glass clinked, and he turned to see Spaulding hold up a pair of beer bottles.

“I’m not sure if these will go well with your painkillers.”

Bolan smiled. “I try to limit the chemicals that go into me. Alcohol, too, but…”

“When it’s time to relax, you got the beer.”

The two men chuckled. A convulsive twitch of muscle over one of Bolan’s healing ribs sent a spark of pain rushing through him. Still, it was a worthwhile exchange. With a twist, Bolan rolled out of the hammock. The stitch in his side started to fade as he accepted the beer bottle.

“Finally moving now that Honey’s not around?”

Bolan shot a glance at Spaulding. “What, you’re going to be my nursemaid now?”

Spaulding shook his head. “No way, man. But she must have threatened you to keep you lying down.”

“Combination of threats and pain.”

“When do you think you’ll be out to join us in the butter?” Spaulding asked.

Bolan had to remember he was at a surf camp to decipher that the bronzed young man was inquiring about when Bolan would take a few spins on a surfboard. “Once I don’t feel like I’m being kicked in the chest when I laugh. And by then, I should be on my way out of here.”

“It’d be a shame.”

Bolan frowned. “Trouble finds me easily. It’d be a shame if it landed here.”

Spaulding began chuckling again. “This place is as far from trouble as you can get. That’s why Honey dropped you off here.”

“I hope so,” Bolan answered.

CHAPTER THREE

The crystal clear waters of the Caribbean ocean felt good.

Though Mack Bolan continued to feel the lingering ache of his broken ribs, he was still capable of kicking his feet as they dangled off of the back of the surfboard. He was propelling himself through crests and furrows in the water, aiming the tip of the fiberglass “plank” at oncoming swells.

The soldier had surfed a few times between missions. The sport was one that was easy to pick up, but one of those things that took a lifetime to master. Bolan’s excellent conditioning and agility put him above the rank of rookie. The twenty-first-century board he was on was even more accommodating to his aching form as it was lightweight, but designed to support more than the weight of slight-limbed youths. Bolan could easily lift this plank, and it was shaped so that it could keep him afloat with any balanced weight on top.

The exercise provided by his efforts at balance on the fiberglass hull was at once gentle on his tender ribs yet invigorating to his shoulders and abdominal muscles. Arms and legs, constantly flexing to make the most of his momentum when the wave caught him up and hurled him on, were eating up the exertion, re-strengthening their too-long-inert spring-steel tautness.

As Spaulding soared past, hurtling along a “left”—a wave that’s tube extended from right to left—he gave Bolan a thumb’s up before he ducked down, letting the cresting wave form a pipe over his head. The soldier had seen the man tilting, pushing against the rising concave of the wave, seeming to defy gravity as he ground along the wall of water. Once inside the pipe, Spaulding was in a world that had to be experienced to be appreciated, a tunnel of serenity where a man or woman could disappear for a slice of time that seemed to last longer on the inside than outside, embraced by the ocean’s enormous power without any of the punishment of its potential death grip.

Spaulding glided along the Jamaican shore, where there were no flesh-rending reefs, no bone-shattering rocks. Here was a place where the youngest students—known in the sporting community as “groms”—and veteran surfers could frolic. It was where this particular, injured soldier could rehabilitate without risk of exacerbating his injuries.

Bolan had finally picked up one of Spaulding’s spare boards when Martin Rudd had shown him the physical rejuvenation qualities of surfing. Rudd had been a winter extreme sports photographer, a man who had skied and snowboarded down untamed mountainsides, skirting trees and boulders in search of a new day’s shot of adrenaline mixed with the majestic glory of snowcapped mountains splayed out in front of him. That ended when Rudd, skiing through a gap of boulders, snagged the tip of one ski on a jutting rock and spiral-fractured his right femur. Left with one thighbone an inch shorter than the other, Rudd had expected never to take to a slope again.

Now, the forty-something “extreme” sportsman had found renewed strength and freedom on the pounding surf, enough to get him back onto mountainsides, if not doing stunts, then at least able to keep up and photograph the new wave of somersaulting snow devils. Rudd still suffered from a permanent limp, but it was from the disparate lengths of his legs, not because of the pain of a now fused and healed femur. The truncated leg had been allowed to heal, regaining much of its lost might and vigor.

Bolan had first followed Rudd into the butter five days before, but the soldier had one pang of regret though he was no longer subjected to searing pain like a knife in his lungs after doing wind sprints on the sand. The injuries that had kept him here for this brief span of heaven were no longer a hindrance. He easily hoisted young groms onto his shoulders as they begged to see the world from eight feet in the air. Staying here for more than another day or two, healing, was no longer an option.

The Executioner hopped to a crouched position, his feet and hands on the board as he settled his balance, the sleek shell maintaining its forward momentum as it rushed into the coming swell. As he steered the board by gripping its smooth sides, he got the right angle and rose to his full height. His mass pushed the board against the opposing force of the coming wave, and in a heartbeat, he was lifted effortlessly onto the crest. The power of the ocean beneath him was akin to an Asian elephant he’d ridden in Thailand when battling a Chinese heroin ring. Like that powerful pachyderm, the wave didn’t notice Bolan’s added mass, continuing on its course without pause. In the Thai jungles, he had been able to steer the beast through a den of vicious Chinese gunmen, the mighty elephant carrying him like a living tank through the battle.

The ocean, however, dwarfed that seemingly endless might, accepting no commands from knee prods against its neck. Where Bolan had been only barely able to direct his pachyderm on its charge of destruction, the Caribbean Sea accepted no commands, took no orders. Instead the soldier had to aim the surfboard, his sharp eyes and instincts feeling for furrows and paths of least resistance as the wave rose behind him.

It was exhilarating and humbling in the same primal instant. Bolan had the freedom of a winged god, yet was at the mercy of cosmic gravitational vortices that hurled the Earth and the moon around the sun at millions of miles per hour. Balanced precariously, he skimmed over the surface of the ocean as swift as an arrow, mere pivots of his hips enabling him to adjust his course, compensating for gravity and the swelling sea beneath him. It wasn’t true flight, just like his parachuting or his free falls, it was “falling with style” to quote one movie. Still, with the wind in his face and the sea at his back, he hurled along, arms spread to take in the sun and the breeze, drinking in the wonders of the Earth before the wave’s push and gravity’s pull overwhelmed the delicate balance.

He finally ditched into four-foot-deep water, the incompressible fluid cushioning his torso and head as he dived in, pulling up before he dug his face into the sediment at the bottom. Behind him, the neoprene leash around his ankle connecting him to his board yanked the fiberglass hull into his ankle and shin. His lower legs no longer sparked sharp jolts of pain from the glancing impacts as the board cracked on them. Bolan’s bruises had developed into “surf bumps” days ago.

With a shrug of his long arms and strong shoulders, he propelled himself to the surface. The right shoulder’s cut had long since closed, and the skin fused shut without fear of opening up again after its two-week reprieve. One stroke had brought him up to suck in air, and he twisted to grab his board, scrabbling on top of it. A deep intake of air no longer was an exercise in masochism. There was still pain, but it was a dull, throbbing pulse, telling Bolan that the flexing bones of his ribs were almost good enough for him to return to duty without fear of physical failure.

A day, two at the most, and the Executioner would launch himself back into action.

Spaulding had been right, Bolan mused as he kicked out to meet more swells. It would have been criminal to have lived in this stretch of Earth where land, sea and sky intersected to form the surest proof that the universe didn’t solely exist to punish humanity. Joy and mercy were rare sights in the spheres where the Executioner traveled, and he could easily have fallen into the fallacious trap that reality held only cruelty and suffering. Even a minute basking under this sun, smelling this forest, listening to the hushed whispers of this surf, had washed away the caked layers of cynicism that had threatened to darken his heart of hearts.

Life was good here.

Bolan couldn’t feel disheartened by the duties that pulled him away from this affirming environment. The tranquil peace, broken only by the laughter of children and the crash of waves was a reminder of the things that he fought for.

This gentle realm was the spur for the Executioner’s War Everlasting. The violence that Bolan brought to bear against the savagery of criminals, terrorists and other violent predators was a firebreak. He was the wall between civilization and the corrupters who looked for an easy way to feed whatever their greedy hearts desired. A week among kids and beach bums had renewed his touch with humanity. It returned faces to what could have too easily become an abstract concept of innocence, and enabled him to return to the shadows around the world, stalking those who’d bolster themselves with pain and suffering.

Bolan mounted the surfboard, dangling a leg on either side of it as if he were riding a fiberglass horse. He ran his fingers through his wet black hair, cool blue eyes scanning the horizon where the sky drooped to meet the Caribbean Sea.

It was beautiful, another glorious sight in a world full of them. Though Bolan would soon have to leave, he kept a realistic appreciation of the seascape. He had been on every continent in the world, and had visited most of the major island chains, summoned to engagements against murderers and conquerors on every one. This was far from his first visit to Jamaica and given the piracy, drug smuggling and other pursuits of the criminal mind, the Executioner would once more come back to the island nation that held this small cradle of placid joy.

His fighting energies had been built back up, and they were trying to rush Bolan’s injured parts to heal so that they could turn themselves toward productive ventures in the Executioner’s endless crusade to protect all that was good and civilized in the world. He was thinking about the hints and whispers of trouble that hummed in the daily news, clues that would be far more blatant if Bolan had access to the threat matrix gathered at Stony Man Farm, a plug-in roster of unrest and violence that were symptoms of diseases to which he had to bring his cleansing flame.

The most blatant bit of news was the discovery of a yacht found adrift, no crew on board, and no signs of violence. Several young college students, here on spring break, had disappeared without a trace. It was nothing new in Jamaican waters as the fabled “pirates of the Caribbean” had evolved over the centuries, trading in their flintlocks for M-16s and their rowboats for Zodiac rafts with high-horsepower engines on the back. There were other small news passages about a couple of fishing boats that had gone missing. However, since the crews weren’t made up of beautiful, young American tourists, the news agencies didn’t care about them. It had been two fishing trawlers, their combined crews at thirty, also gone as if snatched by the ghosts of the sea.

One part of Bolan wanted to kick his surfboard out past the breakers and carve some more waves, but the Executioner was already mentally organizing a map approximated from the missing fishermen and tourists’ last-known locations. He’d call to confirm his estimations, either pulling in favors from local law enforcement, or in a last resort, taking his inquiries electronically to the Farm to get the cyberteam’s assistance. The only other snarl in his plans to take war to the mystery kidnappers was that most of his gear had gone back to the States with Jack Grimaldi while Bolan recovered from his wounds. All he had with him right now was an Atomic Aquatics titanium dive knife in a sheath strapped to his right calf. The closest thing to firepower that he possessed were two 9-mm Beretta pistols in a lockbox, hidden from view of both children and gun thieves looking to make some money on the black market. Normally, Bolan would have tried to keep the discreet little Beretta PX4 Compact concealed, but shirtless and without a belt for his drawstring-waisted surfer shorts, he had no options.

Luckily for Bolan, among surfers, dive knives in calf sheaths were about as common as cell phone holsters in New York City.

It still wasn’t the kind of arsenal that the Executioner would need to blitz a piracy operation, but Bolan could take his first steps, making do with weapons acquired from his enemies. Low supplies did little to slow a Bolan blitz, such as when he was living hand to mouth with barely enough money to buy gunpowder to make his own ammunition.

Another wave broke over his thighs, Bolan and the board bobbing in the water. A few more waves wouldn’t hurt, and in fact, they’d complete his regimen of exercise for the day. Then, after toweling off, the soldier would have a chance to begin his research and equipment assembly for this night’s stalk. He’d be done in time for sunset, the Executioner’s time. Then he could hunt through the shadows, using darkness as his most powerful ally in dealing with the foes who outnumbered him, but rarely could outfight or outplan him.

For now, the sun was out, and as a wise man had once said, there was no disinfectant like daylight. Any effort to find the parasitic hijackers and kidnappers during normal hours would prove to be inefficient.

The Executioner admonished himself. Too often, professionals had found themselves in deadly situations, bleeding and or dying because they were “in the white,” a level of awareness that was a total lack of preparedness or consciousness of surroundings. Living that way was a sure means of finding oneself in the path of a knife or a bullet. Bolan had only survived all these missions, all these wars, because his mind was sharp, his senses peeled and his reflexes primed to go.

Movement had tripped Bolan’s instincts, the preliminary rustle of foliage indicative of a man crashing through a forest. Peripheral vision and hearing had picked up on that, and to Bolan, they were as obvious as signal flares. He turned to spot the source of the crashing—a haggard-looking figure that emerged onto the sand.

Bolan took in the details of the man, and with spine-stiffening realization, he saw the machete dangling in the newcomer’s hand.

With a kick, Bolan freed his foot from the board’s leash. He speared into the surf with lightning quickness. Even as he swam to shore, powerful chest and shoulder muscles exploding with force that thrust him to land, another detail came to the forefront of his thoughts.

The man’s eyes.

They were blank, unfocused, even though his lips were peeled back from his teeth in an enraged rictus.

Bolan had encountered chemically reprogrammed opponents before. They were driven by their orders, sanity ripped from their drugged minds. The poor, brainwashed zombies felt little pain and even less restraint, using every ounce of their strength at such a rate that even when they recovered from their altered mental states, their bodies were wrecks.

Because of that wild abandon, their strength pushed beyond their normal limits.

Even at his strongest, Bolan was hard-pressed to deal with these blank-eyed murderers.

The Executioner dug his feet into the sand, pushing toward the man. He would make no excuses for failure.

Not when children were in the path of a machete-wielding maniac.

THE CREATURE THAT HAD once been Guillermo Rojas winced as the first rays of light poured in from the opened doors of the shipping container on the back of the truck. With that first touch of day, he burst through the door with savage fury and speed. He didn’t notice the harsh gravel that sliced the soles of his feet.

What he was aware of was the extra weight in his right hand. Memories were few and far between in his chemically landscaped brain, but he recognized the object as a fearsome weapon, almost as long as a sword. He didn’t know the word for it—he had no more words for anything. He did remember the depthless joy he felt when he had sunk such a thing into human flesh, a cathartic jolt of vengeance that rolled through him.

More thoughts coalesced in his fevered mind, clearing through his fog of madness. Pain and terror washed over him in unyielding waves, phantom memories of injuries inflicted at the hands of people—blacks, whites, men, women, adults and children. All of their faces and appearances were associated with agony and impotent horror. His only anchor was a single voice cutting through the omnipresent nightmare.

“Kill them!” the resonating voice boomed. “Kill them and end the fire in your blood!”

Rojas understood only two words, but they were all he really needed now. He had to lash out and destroy everyone because they were all a part of the torture he’d been subjected to. All the addled medical student knew was that humanity as a whole had turned on him, scourging his flesh and sanity. He also had a hint, a feint trace of another loss, a beautiful golden angel.

That pushed Rojas forward, and he staggered on, hearing the lilt of music and bubbling laughter of joy. He knew the sounds of the creatures who had left him to suffer unspeakable horrors.

What Rojas hadn’t seen were his fellow brainwashed assassins, two more men and two young women, all wielding machetes. The five of them charging toward the surf camp’s sounds. Rojas had been programmed to ignore them, his psyche masterfully twisted so as to allow Morrot’s killers to work in groups without attacking each other. Injected with amphetamines and twisted by a multimedia assault that filled them with false memories of a living hell, the people were no longer human. They were dedicated attack dogs, no longer possessing pause or reason.

The trees and foliage between Rojas and his prey were little impediment to him. Despite branches and blades of tall grass gouging his chest and legs, he barreled through the undergrowth. The others were slower, or simply taking the path of least resistance.

Nothing would keep him from the bloody revenge he sought.

Not even the man who charged out of the water, naked except for surfer shorts and a black sheath on his leg.

Rojas opened his mouth, releasing a wild screech, raising the machete to attack.

CHAPTER FOUR

Any doubt that Mack Bolan possessed that the machete-wielding Latino was reduced to an animalistic state disappeared when he released an unholy howl that split the air, turning the heads of a half dozen kids lounging and listening to music on the sand. Running through water and in wet sand felt like trying to pull his feet out of the tendrils of a hungry octopus, but his long legs gave him enough of a stride to reach the edge of the water.

The attacker’s maniacal eyes flitted toward the prone children who weren’t aware of their danger. Bolan knew he only had a few moments to stop him.

“Over here!” he called, the boom of his voice pinning the drugged man’s dead, cold eyes to him.

Another bestial hiss erupted from him and he swung his machete toward Bolan. In any confrontation between human and terrain chopper, the foot-and-a-half-long blade won every time, so Bolan didn’t bother with blocking. He sidestepped, avoiding the swing that started from above the attacker’s head and ended up slicing only air.

Bolan considered drawing the Atomic dive knife, but he could see that his opponent was young and despite his scratches and blank gaze, it was possible that he was an American. It didn’t take much more than a gauge of his age to realize that this could be one of the kidnap victims, and as such, one of the many innocent lives that he’d sworn to protect.

In the Executioner’s world, there was no such thing as an acceptable loss. Once the machete reached the nadir of its arc, Bolan lunged, putting both hands around his opponent’s forearm. With a hard yank, Bolan pulled the man’s face into his left shoulder, letting the uninjured joint take the brunt of the collision. Jaws snapped shut with a sickening crunch and the drugged maniac’s eyes rolled in their sockets.

Such chemically enhanced foes were mostly immune to the pain of conventional punches, bullets and blades, but the Executioner was a master of all manner of combat. As such, he knew the weak points of the human body, and the trunk line of nerves just under the ear and behind the jaw was one such place that even in a haze of painkilling amphetamines would stop a person with one blow. The would-be killer jarred into submission, Bolan turned his attention toward disarming him.

A shriek from behind—the spine-chilling wail of a terrified child—turned him away from his attempt to render his attacker harmless. Two more figures rushed into view, blades held over their heads. Suddenly the Executioner found himself outnumbered, and his concern for the suffering of his opponent disappeared. With both hands holding the man’s forearm still, he knifed his knee into it. With a snapped ulna and humerus, the man’s grip on the machete disappeared.

That accomplished, Bolan released the limb and brought his left elbow up hard, another crashing blow across the man’s jaw that threw him into the sand, senseless and barely mobile.

He turned to see a growling young woman with ratty black hair rushing in pursuit of a ten-year-old boy, her intent to bury her blade in the kid’s back. Her rage was so focused on the youth that the Executioner was able to catch her by surprise, hammering his right forearm across her throat in a clothesline maneuver. The healed stab wound released a spike of complaint, and it felt as if the young woman had run headfirst into his ribs, but at the end of the collision, she was flat on her back and Bolan still stood.

She screeched in frustration, her blank, feral gaze locked on the man who’d stopped her. She still held on to her machete, but Bolan hopped over her and landed one heel hard into the inside of her elbow. The joint popped loudly, and she, too, was disarmed, but clawing, jagged fingernails sliced into the warrior’s right thigh, planing off ribbons of dermis.

Bolan cracked his heel against the young woman’s jaw, feeling it dislocate under the force of his back kick, and while it cut off her animalistic growls, she was still reaching up with her left arm to hook her gnarled fingers into his crotch. He sidestepped her effort to geld him and gave her another kick, this time to her temple. Even as he did so, he caught sight of his male attacker in his peripheral vision, bursting up from the sand in a rampaging rush.

The Executioner turned and met the man’s charge with his right elbow striking him in the collarbone. Through his arm, Bolan could feel the snap of his opponent’s clavicle, and the drug-crazed killer stopped as if he’d struck a brick wall. Even stunned from Bolan’s countermeasure, the man lashed out blindly with his left hand, fingers reaching for Bolan’s face where they could tear skin and burst one of his eyeballs. The soldier straightened his right arm, a palm strike deflecting those blinding fingernails as he hit the man’s other forearm hard.

A wail of frustration all but split open Bolan’s right eardrum, leaving the soldier wide open for his attacker’s next tactic. The Executioner grimaced as teeth tore into the skin of his right shoulder, splitting flesh and releasing a torrent of blood down his biceps.

With a grimace, Bolan brought up his left palm, jamming the heel of his hand between the eyes of the attacker. It took every ounce of precision not to strike the man in the nose and drive splinters of bone into his brain, but even so, the young Hispanic was going to feel the effects of his concussion for a long time. The blow literally lifted his attacker off Bolan’s shoulder and sent him crashing into the sand.

The young woman he’d clotheslined took the brief moments of scuffle as an opportunity to rise into a crouch. Her hand was nearly around the haft of her machete. Bolan regretted the need to cripple her, but she was determined to carve up a fellow human being. He kicked her in the wrist, snapping it like a twig and knocking her into the sand. Her howl was not of pain, it was too forceful, and her bared teeth were poised to rip open Bolan’s calf. He pivoted and snapped his heel into her forehead with the same force he’d use to kick open a locked door.

If she survived, she’d need plenty of physical therapy to use both of her hands again, and Bolan wasn’t certain he’d restrained himself enough to avoid giving her brain damage. She was still, for now, and that was all that mattered because there was a third killer on the loose, a fourth and a fifth now in view.

It was as if someone had released a pack of velociraptors onto the beach, bestial shrieks filling the air. Bolan was already bleeding, though no arteries had been bitten, and he’d only dealt with a young man and an even smaller woman. He watched Spaulding wrestling with one of the attackers, a screeching little woman with dirty blond hair and thick legs that had wrapped around his torso.

The surf camp owner’s face was a crimson mask, and his wobbly legs betrayed severe blood loss or head trauma—perhaps both. As it was, Spaulding was still fighting, holding one at bay while the other two, both young men, were on the rampage. A fourteen-year-old boy stood his ground between one of the assailants and two eight-year-olds. His courage was admirable, but the machete severed his right hand as he held it up to the drug-crazed berserker.

Bolan didn’t have time to make choices, he charged the would-be killer who was about to take more body parts away from the teen. Three long strides turned into a leap, and Bolan hooked his arm around the head and neck of the machete swinger. Two hundred twenty pounds of lean muscle and hard-forged combat skill combined to make the flying tackle into an impact that hammered both men into the ground. Sand flew as the drugged assassin broke Bolan’s fall, and perhaps more than a few ribs.

The crash was hard enough to spin the machete out of his hand, but that only meant that he had a meth-fueled wrestler on the other side of this fight. Bolan didn’t see the looping left that whipped around and struck him in the back of his head. It was an eye-crossing blow, and because he hadn’t loosened up to roll with the punch, it felt as if his brains were sloshing around inside his skull.

Despite the recent impediment, Bolan could see the berserker’s right fist heading straight to his face. He lowered his head swiftly, swinging it into the onrushing knuckles like a wrecking ball. Fingers cracked as they struck the hard curve of bone at his hairline. That was why the Executioner had used the heel of his hand and his foot on the foreheads of his prior two opponents—the head was a tough mass of bone while knuckles were relatively fragile. Even though his foe’s right fist was now a useless jumble of bent fingers, Bolan felt the clawing fingers tearing at his nape and the back of his head. The short wisps of black hair back there were drenched with blood as nails tore skin.

“Enough,” Bolan grunted as he brought up his knee and twisted his opponent down so that he took the kick between his shoulder blades. The heavy vertebrae around his spinal cord was more than enough to prevent the man from ending up crippled, but not by much. Breath escaped his lungs in a fetid explosion.

Bolan took that brief second to slam his elbow into the attacker’s sternal notch. He tried not to let his anger over a crippled boy color his response, but the elbow chop struck the former machete marauder in his xyphoid process, another juncture of nerves and muscle that when struck properly could render a man helpless and breathless until he passed out. Too hard, and the target would die. Too soft, and with lungs full of air, it would just hurt.

The man bent backward over Bolan’s knee froze, his mouth stretched like a landed fish’s as it tried to suck in air, but foiled by unresponsive nerves and muscles. The soldier shoved the marauder off his knee and dropped him in the sand. His first instinct was to tend to the fourteen-year-old whose agonized screams echoed in his conscience, but there was another maniac on the loose with a wicked blade. He moved away from the Jamaican boy reluctantly. He had to locate the fifth of the attackers.

The Executioner turned when a strangled death cry escaped Spaulding’s throat. The dirty-blond psychotic was fighting to rip her chopper out of Spaulding’s skull where it had gotten stuck. Bolan charged toward her, knocking her off the latest addition to his collection of the friendly dead. She couldn’t have been half of Bolan’s weight, so when he shoulder-blocked her in the upper chest, it was like a freight train flattening a compact car. She flew off Spaulding, landing ten feet away, not in much condition to do anything more than gasp for breath.

He took a half of a second to evaluate her condition. Her hands were folded up into the air, twitching at the end of her forearms. Any movement now consisted of involuntary spasms as he’d knocked her completely senseless.

That would do, for now. Bolan had one more menace to stop.

A strange pop filled the air, and the Executioner turned to see Rudd holding his surfboard up, the fifth attacker’s bloody machete lodged in its body.

Bolan broke into a hard run, his long legs pistoning against the sand. Blood rushed, a torrent of thunder rolling through his brain at the same breakneck speed he charged the man attacking Rudd. It was a battle of wills between the two. The machete had been rammed into the surfboard’s fiberglass frame, and the drugged killer was trying to rip it free. It would be only instants before the assassin decided that the struggle wasn’t worth it, and he’d go at the surfer with teeth and nails.

Bolan had been on the receiving end of those savage attacks. He didn’t doubt that Rudd would end up with his throat chewed out or his eyes burst.

At the last moment, the soldier lowered his head and shoulder-blocked the drugged berserker in the small of the back, the force of his impact hurling the brainwashing victim ten feet past Rudd, landing him in the surf. The splash of water over his body didn’t do anything to clarify the killer’s mind as he leaped back to his feet with unnatural speed and strength. Bolan knew that a tackle like he’d given this man would have left anyone else writhing in pain. Even Bolan’s shoulder ached from that contact.

“Well, come on!” Bolan shouted at the blank-eyed man. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, but he appeared to have been on a football team. The youth in front of him was as big as the Executioner, and had a thicker musculature, making the soldier think of a linebacker. Tanned and blond, he was undoubtedly an American, and this one would be strong enough to twist Bolan’s head off his shoulders thanks to the chemical cocktail that had reduced him to a feral, froth-mouthed berserker.

Bolan had tried muscle, and ended up slamming into a brick wall, jarred himself by the very impact that had saved Rudd. Pure strength wasn’t going to be enough to end this conflict because if he struck any harder, he’d kill the young man. It was time to outfight, using his intellect. He summoned up his best “drill sergeant” voice and taunted the berserker again. “Kill me!”

That order spurred the linebacker-size attacker to charge, blind rage spurring him on. Bolan threw himself at the charging drug-crazed assassin, but he aimed low, striking the man across the thighs and flipping him head over heels. The berserker tumbled into the sand, throwing up a cloud, and the thud that resounded from his fall was a powerful drumbeat. The big killer’s eyes were now unfocused, dazed from the crash, and Bolan didn’t waste a single moment, scissoring his legs around his neck.

With all the leverage and strength of his calves and ankles pressing on either side of the marauder’s neck, Bolan had him locked in a true sleeper hold, not pinching the windpipe shut but pressing the knots of bone around his ankles against blood vessels that fed the brain. Deprived of fresh oxygen, the killer’s fevered brain faltered, losing consciousness even as the berserker clawed at Bolan’s shins.

The soldier grimaced, but with a proper sleeper hold applied, the would-be murderer was slumped, out cold in the sand.

“What the hell is going on?” Rudd asked, his voice shaky.

“Check on Antoine. One of these crazies chopped off his hand,” Bolan ordered.

Rudd paused, blinking at the bloodied and battered Executioner in front of him.

“Move it!”

Rudd’s senses returned to him and he rushed to the badly wounded teen’s side. Bolan knew that he’d have to find some form of cord to apply a tourniquet to the stump; direct pressure wasn’t going to work.

Luckily, the maniacal assassin had a belt on. Bolan whipped it out of the unconscious brute’s belt loops and started to stagger to Antoine’s side.

The only warning that the Executioner had of an attack were the grunts and pants of the attacking woman. For Bolan and his finely tuned reflexes, that was more than enough. The young woman had murdered Spaulding, so a gentle response wasn’t in the cards. She was within a few feet when her throat released the shrill beginning notes of an animalistic howl, but Bolan cut it off with a raised elbow that exploded her nose and tore her cheek open.

She hit the ground, and Bolan sighed. He’d let his emotions get the better of him, and now a brainwashed young woman was disfigured, bleeding and unconscious in the sand. He tore himself away from his self-reproach.

A boy needed medical attention, and Bolan’s battlefield first aid was going to keep him from bleeding to death.

BEFORE BOLAN returned his attention to the flattened, defeated machete-wielding marauders, he’d already encountered a terrible death toll in this attack. Spaulding was one of course, but there was a mother and two children slain in the violent rampage. The woman, named Anna, and her eight-year-old son were hacked apart, Anna’s life given as she provided a living shield against the rising and falling edge of the murderer’s blade. Her courage and sacrifice were in vain, sadly, as the machete’s merciless steel severed her left arm as it shielded her son’s head, taking off the limb and crushing a cruel crease in the boy’s face.

Bolan looked at the horrific carnage, his gut filled with bitter defeat. He didn’t look too hard, but he realized that he couldn’t tell where mother ended and son began, their dark, crimson-stained skin torn apart, muscle and bone so pulped and splintered that it was as if a demonic elephant had stomped a puddle into their bodies. Dread and loss were crippling emotions, but the Executioner was far too human, too humane, to be able to bottle up and dispose of those feelings. Instead, he buried them, making them the spurs that stuck into his soul that would be there to prod him along should his strength begin to fail.

Dread and loss were abstract, unfocused ideas that he couldn’t use. Pain and righteous anger, however, were the flint and steel that would ignite Bolan to go one more step, endure one more injury, throw one more punch. The horrors of this morning turned from peace to panic were the kindling, the firewood that would fuel his hunt for justice.

The last victim, a little girl whose age he couldn’t even guess, had been so violently assaulted that blood has sprayed along the sand for twenty-five feet. From the churned, bloody sand, he could tell that it had been four of the maniacs, not the one who had cut through the trees to the beach, who had grabbed her up. Her screams had disappeared into the mix of those of other children.

Bolan saw a small, rag-stuffed doll splattered with blood and he stooped to pick it up. All the while, he reproached himself for being to gentle with his attacker as the doll’s owner was being attacked.

He cast the reproach aside after a moment. He had been on alert, but his senses had only so much acuity. He couldn’t see through walls or hear the sound of the vehicle that had dropped off five armed people in the grip of chemical fury. It was a basic law of physics—the intervening strip of trees was too thick, too much of a barrier to keep him from noticing that, and even if he did know, Bolan had only his knife.

There were wounded besides Antoine, the young man who’d surrendered a hand in defense of others. Bolan and Rudd had tended to cuts and bruises after ensuring that the boy wouldn’t bleed to death, but now Rudd stumbled around, shell-shocked by the horrors he’d experienced. A call through to the police and for an ambulance received an answer that the small surf camp would have to wait as a beach resort two miles up the road had been the victim of similar violence.

Bolan knew that the carnage on the scene at a more crowded pleasure spot would have been horrendous.

“Rudd,” Bolan called, “help me check on the attackers.”

“The girl is dead,” Rudd said, his words coming out of his mouth in a slurred mush.

“The one who attacked you?” Bolan asked. He winced as he realized that he’d applied far too much force to her, but in the wake of Spaulding’s brutal murder, he’d let slip his kid gloves. Still, she’d been a victim of chemical reprogramming, a drug-fueled rage that had been inflicted upon her and the other four, turning them into marauders who barely felt pain and had required skeletal fractures to stop them.

Bolan stopped at another body, a killer who had gone down with a twisted arm and a kick to the head. He was a local, a young man who was all lean muscle and long limbs. The soldier checked for broken bones in the neck, but the only signs of what had killed him were dried crystals flaking at the corners of his mouth, leftovers from the froth and foam that had burbled up when his body succumbed to a hormonal overload.

The big American wasn’t a coroner, but he’d seen people killed by overdoses of drugs and it would be a good guess that the machete-armed invaders of this beach haven had all succumbed to massive heart attacks brought on by the chemicals pumped into their veins.

Five corpses, each of them brought down by the Executioner’s hands in such a way that they would live, snuffed out by the same strange fuel that had driven them to attack.

“Are they all dead?” Rudd asked, cringing at the sight of them as Bolan stacked their limp forms together.

Bolan nodded. As an afterthought, he picked up a pair of empty water bottles from a nearby recycling bin and cut open the veins on two of the bodies. He’d have to collect blood samples and hope that Stony Man Farm could supply him with someone who’d run toxicology screens. He wanted to know what kind of chemical cocktail had been utilized to turn humans into weapons, and with that bit of knowledge, he’d be able to narrow the focus of his search for the perpetrators.

“That’s grisly,” Rudd said, looking at Bolan draining blood into a bottle.

“No more than what they did,” Bolan said.

“Who were they?” Rudd asked.

“Pawns of someone. Most likely they were kidnapped tourists,” Bolan answered.

Rudd’s brow wrinkled. “Tourists?”

“Harmless people sparked to insanity by a biochemist of some sort,” Bolan added. “I tried not to cause them too much pain, but they were too violent. Even so, the measures I took against them should have left them with long-term injuries, not dead. Their hearts gave out after I rendered them unconscious.”

“Who’d do such a thing?” Rudd asked. “And who’d let them loose here, where it’s just kids?”

“That’s what the bottles are for,” Bolan told him solemnly. “If there’s a clue in the blood, then I’ll use it.”

“You’re going after them yourself?” Rudd inquired.

Bolan nodded. “Alone. With an army. It won’t matter. I’m going to find the people behind this.”

Rudd nodded.

Bolan took a deep breath. “It’s not a job I want. But I have a feeling that this was a test run. More people are going to be released on wild rampages. More innocents are going to die. I intend to end it as fast as possible.”

Bolan stalked off to get his satellite phone to contact Stony Man Farm.

Rest and recuperation was over. The chase was on.

CHAPTER FIVE

Morrot leaned on the desk, peering down at the tablet monitor that relayed footage from a digital camera video strapped to the frame of a remote-control airplane. The tiny little diesel-motored plane had long, wide wings that were shaped like those of an albatross, complete with the exact dimensions, enabling the craft to hang in the air with a minimum of fuel supply.

He looked at the group that he had released early, the one with his favorite subject, Rojas. He’d dropped the group near the Spaulding Youth Surf Camp to add to the horror—it was a place where children were in abundance. The news would find itself drawn to the slaughter of innocents. The remoteness of the little camp also ensured that Rojas and his friends would escape into the woods, free and wild murderers who would stalk and hunt for days, maybe even weeks, giving Morrot a continuing menace in the background while he strove to create more of his magnificent monsters.

Morrot had kept the camera in the air over the first surf camp to make certain that things were going according to his plan. From a height of hundreds of feet, but with a high-definition, long-range zoom camera, he was able to see Rojas taking a direct approach to the beach where the sounds of children playing had drawn him.

And that’s when the tall man on the surfboard did something Morrot had never expected—he charged a machete-wielding berserker without even pausing to pull the knife from its calf sheath. In moments, the black-haired surfer had flattened Rojas and turned his attention to one of the women.

All told, the savage squad he’d released onto the Spaulding Youth Surf Camp had been eliminated in the space of two minutes by a single combatant. There were wounded, there were dead, but one lone human had stood against five people whose nerves had been numbed to pain and whose strength had been boosted by chemical-induced ferocity.

“Should we turn the other group back?” Pierre Fortescue asked, watching the same video feed on a monitor of his own.

Morrot shook his head. His mismatched eyes were locked on the screen, looking at the man who had stood for only a brief moment over the unconscious form of the woman. “There won’t be anyone like him in the resort.”

“Who is he?” Fortescue asked.

Morrot could only see the man from the top down, but his shoulders were broad, and his arms were long and wrapped in corded cables of muscle. He was of European descent, despite the darkened tan of his skin. “That man is a professional soldier.”

Fortescue glared at the shaman, but subdued his spite before Morrot took notice. Fortescue himself was the son of one of the strongmen in the old Haitian guard, the Tonton Macoute. The Macoute wasn’t only a cadre of highly trained gunmen, it was backed by ties to superstition and the skills of houngans like Morrot himself. Though Fortescue hadn’t been one of those elite, murderous soldiers, he’d been taught by his father and had sharpened those skills in exile, being a hired gun for various Jamaican gang members.

The implication of Morrot’s words made him bristle, but Fortescue was nothing if not smart. If he’d said or done anything in response to the accusation, Morrot would find a reason and a way to eliminate him. Morrot was ruthless and too damned smart, and Fortescue wasn’t the kind of man to take unnecessary risks. Showing his temper under the one-eyed voodoo priest’s verbal abuse wasn’t just a risk, it was an invitation to slow, painful death after a horrific road of pain and insanity.

“He took down all five. There were a few casualties, but nothing truly usable to increase the panic,” Fortescue said, keeping his voice clinical and cool. “The delivery to the resort will have to bring in some major carnage to instill the proper panic in Kingston.”

“There will be blood and terror,” Morrot told him. “Do not worry, my friend.”

Fortescue looked at the half-mutilated face of the scrawny shaman in front of him. If anyone could manipulate the nations of the Caribbean Sea, it was this dark-hearted wizard of mayhem and madness.

The promise Morrot made would be backed by his programmed-for-madness minions.

WHATEVER GUILT Mack Bolan might have felt at his inability to save lives at the Spaulding Youth Surf Camp was dispelled when he saw that the Pleasant Shore Resort, two miles up the coastal road, had been turned into an abattoir. Dozens were dead, and hundreds injured, many in critical condition. The local news was inundated and trumped by international press circling the Jamaican getaway like sharks now that they had smelled blood in the water, literally.

One of the hotel’s swimming pools had been turned to the color of red wine, the badly mutilated corpses of two people staining what would have been crystal-clear water. The filtration systems were plugged by chunks of flesh, preventing the thinning of the murky pool. The work of five insane people in the resort, armed with machetes that could carve through flesh and bone, was brutally efficient. At the surf camp, their victims had been spread out, giving the Executioner time to intercept the berserkers. The crowds at poolside and on the beach had been caught unaware, and the violent fury released found dozens of targets.

There had been security guards on the scene, but Bolan knew that nothing short of a contact-range shotgun blast or a bullet right in the medulla oblongata would slow the attackers. Handguns were a poor substitute for true fight-stopping firepower, though the Executioner’s skill with his preferred pistols had made him deadly enough to survive combat against opponents with bigger, more powerful guns.

As it was, the security at the resort wasn’t equipped to deal with armed maniacs. It was there to prevent drunks from hurting themselves or harassing the other patrons. The hotels spent big money keeping the drug gangs from bringing their business squabbles into their backyard, and what handguns were available were just that—pistols. The United States military learned a long time ago, during the Moro uprising in the Philippines, the uselessness of a mere sidearm against someone who was on painkillers and in the grip of fanatical rage. The machete-wielding killers would have died from their wounds, but for the fifteen minutes of fury that they were still operating, they were rampaging machines, lashing out at everything.

It had been the Executioner’s training that had carried the day at the surf camp, and even then, there had been casualties. Too many for Bolan’s taste, enough to feel that he’d failed at the standards he’d set for himself. Bystanders were to be protected at all costs, even to the point of catching a bullet in the chest. He’d never staged a battle where civilian noncombatants were on hand, and in instances where others had been endangered, Bolan had done his best to attract attention to himself.

The blood samples that Bolan had collected in water bottles sat in the little humming refrigerator, a box with a door and its sides and front covered in plastic sheeting colored to look like wooden paneling. He’d transfer it to a cooler to take it to a laboratory for examination, but even refrigerated, the blood and the chemicals within weren’t going to last forever. Within twenty-four hours, natural enzyme breakdowns could erase traces of some toxins and drugs. Freezing the blood was an option, but then again, there was the problem of crystallization of water affecting the chemical makeup.

Bolan’s laptop screen flickered to life, an incoming call from Stony Man Farm jarring it from sleep mode. Barbara Price, her face illuminated by her monitor’s bleak, harsh light, appeared in the web camera chat box. She was mission controller at Stony Man Farm, the installation that was home to the nation’s elite antiterrorist teams. Bolan sat in front of his own camera, dressed in a black T-shirt and khaki-colored cargo pants. Price’s eyes flicked left, then right, noting the straps of his shoulder holster in place.

“You’re aware of the attack in the resort,” Price said.

“I caught a preview. It looked like someone wanted to release my marauders into the wild after they tore up a camp full of unarmed surfers and other kids,” Bolan answered.

Price pursed her lips in a frown before speaking again. “You said you’d suffered casualties.”

Bolan didn’t answer.

“Hal and the President have been going over this. They know that you’re in the region, but they aren’t certain that the situation warrants your involvement,” Price said.

Bolan still remained quiet, his slitted eyes providing the only sign of a response, a show of annoyance that the Sensitive Operations Group and the White House were able to dictate where and why the Executioner would take action. He finally spoke. “They don’t have to be. I’m certain.”

Price nodded. “Hal knows better than to deny you your choice of operations.”

“I’ve got refrigerated blood samples from the berserkers I encountered. Is there a lab handy where I can get this looked at?” Bolan asked.

“We’ve been checking local laboratories and most in the country don’t have the kind of toxicology skills you’d need,” Price replied. “But we have help in the area.”

“Hospital ships off Haiti,” Bolan surmised. “U.S. Navy? I don’t want to pull personnel off of the relief effort.”

“No problem in that regard. We have someone on hand who is a trained medic,” Price said.

“Is Cal coming to pick me up himself, or do I meet him on the ship?” Bolan asked.

“A navy helicopter’s coming to get you and the samples to meet him,” Price replied. “Since there’s no need for forensic toxicology, the facilities on board the aircraft carrier devoted to that won’t take away from things.”

“Good,” Bolan returned. “What’s my cover?”

“Colonel Brandon Stone,” Price returned. “We’ve already set it so that you can be armed on the carrier, but you do have to carry concealed.”

Bolan shrugged. “Even military brass can’t be armed on a Navy ship.”

“Not everyone believes in the inherent goodness of the U.S. Armed Forces,” Price replied. “Unfortunately that includes many commanders in the Navy, the Army…”

“I’ll deal with it,” Bolan said, tugging on a BDU overshirt, concealing the Beretta 93-R in its holster. As a soldier in the field, and years of interacting with servicemen abroad, the soldier had learned that the Pentagon policies about disarming troops when not in direct contact with the enemy had lead to countless being left vulnerable to ambushes. The death toll, thanks to those policies, was high, a level of loss that caused suffering among families at home and crippling deficiencies among active-duty personnel.

“The helicopter is coming to the camp, correct?”

“The less you have to travel with the blood before it can be brought to the lab, the better,” Price told him.

Bolan nodded. “ETA?”

“Ten minutes.”

The soldier looked up from buttoning the jacketlike uniform blouse. “I’ll be ready. Any news on who is claiming responsibility for the attack?”

“No word per se,” Price said. “Though the zombie-like rage exhibited by the attackers have people talking about voodoo. Someone leaked videos through the internet and they have hit cable news stations.”

“That may be the point,” Bolan replied.

Price tilted her head. “How so?”

“Phoenix, Able and I have had plenty of encounters with real-life voodoo zombies over the years,” Bolan said, referring to Phoenix Force and Able Team, Stony Man’s two action units. “Some were just makeup and bulletproof vests while others were people whose minds were destroyed by traditional houngan treatments, either as cheap slave labor or purpose constructed.”

Price frowned. “No one is taking responsibility because the targets of this attack will know who was behind it.”

“It could be part of the local Jamaican drug war, trying to fill in the void I recently knocked in the status quo,” Bolan added. “Or it could be something political, because I can’t see the cocaine cowboys on this island making a mess of their target demographic.”

“Tourists looking for nose candy and herb,” Price said.

Bolan nodded. “If they scare off tourism, a lot of their local dealers lose customers. With no income, they can’t bribe the hotels to let them hang around and deal, and the addition of violence in the hotels makes them really out of luck.”

“That doesn’t mean that the local gangs aren’t helping in some manner,” Price said. “Someone would have to provide ingredients to the chemical cocktails that set off the berserkers.”

“Calvin and I will look into that if we get a chance,” Bolan told her. “I’d prefer to have him working with me here in the islands because he fits in better than I do.”

“That’s part of the reason why Calvin is riding a Tomcat to the carrier out of Langley AFB,” Price said.

“He’s not on hand yet?” Bolan asked.

“By the time your helicopter drops you off, he’ll be on deck,” Price replied. “They caught a tailwind off the coast of Georgia. Do you want any other help?”

Bolan shook his head. “If the President doesn’t think this situation warrants my attention, I’m not going to pull in any more official Stony Man personnel than Cal. And how did he get free?”

“He took some time to meet with an old SEAL buddy,” Price replied. “Building more unofficial relations, so to speak.”

“What does the buddy do now?” Bolan asked.

“Security firm,” Price said. “So now, Phoenix Force has more friends in the New York area…just in case.”

Bolan nodded with approval. “Shame to interrupt that.”

“Cal made the call to me that he was going down to meet you,” Price replied. “One helicopter transfer to Langley…”

“I’ll be sure to tell him I appreciate this,” Bolan said. “I hear the chopper coming.”

“Striker.” Price spoke up, her voice grown soft, losing its hard business edge for a moment.

Bolan looked into the web cam, knowing that it was the closest that he could get to looking into her eyes over their cybernetic link. “Barbara?”

“I’m sorry that your…time off…had to end this way,” she said.

“No need to feel sorry for me,” Bolan returned. “You may want to spare some concern for the men who caused the deaths of children.”

Price looked down. She’d heard the icy grating in his voice, like a whetstone over a combat knife.

Mack Bolan was on the hunt.

CALVIN JAMES pulled off the oxygen mask and flight helmet before he crawled out of the rear seat of the F-14 Tomcat. The Mach 2 fighter had torn through the skies like a guided missile, delivering the former SEAL to the aircraft carrier in time to meet up with the Executioner. The pilot of the plane had pointed out Bolan’s chopper, looking as if it were hovering still in the air compared to the breakneck pace of the long-range jet.

James was glad to be out of the cockpit. He was two inches too tall for the Tomcat at six foot two, and his legs and head had been squashed in on the supersonic flight. The aircraft had traveled for an hour at full speed, but an hour in the claustrophobic backseat was just too much for him. The only consolation was that James had ridden in planes too small for him before and had learned how to bend and twist so he wouldn’t end the flight with muscle cramps.

That’s what he’d told himself as he rubbed his neck, wincing as sleepy shoulder muscles protested at the excessive stretching.

A crewman withdrew James’s duffel from its small storage locker just behind the seat. There wasn’t much inside it other than for a case containing his personal Beretta 92-F, two of his favorite knives and a Glock 26 backup pistol, with holsters and accessories for everything. Price had informed James that clothing would be provided at the other end of the flight, so his combat gear would be all he needed.

The captain, Timothy Bannon, was waiting across the deck, observing as his crew tended to the newly arrived Tomcat. With a simple turn, Bannon would be only moments from the bridge in case of an emergency. This carrier was his responsibility, and he hovered over it as if he were guarding his own toddler. Bannon was six feet even, with broad shoulders, and his baseball-style cap couldn’t conceal the clean-shaved sides and back of his head. Blue eyes, looking out from blond, nearly invisible eyebrows, scanned the tall black man who approached him.

“Calvin Farrow,” James introduced himself, using one of his cover names. “Permission to come aboard.”

Bannon extended his hand. “Permission granted. The Justice Department needs my ship?”

“Just a small part, sir,” James returned. “We have a man coming in by helicopter, and I need to take a look at the blood samples he collected.”

“So you’ll use our sick bay, rather than take up room on a hospital ship,” Bannon surmised. “We’re not doing anything on board, but we do have a good phlebotomy laboratory. Sadly, it’s something that’s needed in the modern Navy.”

“Mandatory drug testing, among other things,” James said. “I know the kind of stuff that people get into on duty on a carrier. Amphetamines to stay on extra duty when coffee stops working…especially for pilots.”

James could tell that he’d struck a sore point with Bannon, but the former Navy SEAL had also struck a chord that resonated with the Captain. Both were Navy, and James’s understanding of the unfortunate zeal of their fellow personnel was a salve to that soreness. “Here comes the chopper.”

“The communiqué said that Stone is, well, was U.S. Army,” Bannon noted. “Is he a good man?”

“There’s not a lick of interservice rivalry in his entire body,” James replied. “You won’t find a more staunch supporter of the military in the world.”

“A real supporter? Or a war hawk?” Bannon asked.

James looked at Bannon. “Real. He didn’t earn his colonel rank because of an accident of birth or a lot of money.”

Bannon’s broad shoulders relaxed. “Good. You see these ex-military contractors, and you start to wonder where their real sympathies lie.”

“He’s his own boss. This way, he gets to work without a lot of red tape sticking to him,” James said.

The helicopter settled down, and Bolan stepped off. His black BDU top didn’t match the digital camouflage BDU pants he wore, but the effect was a sharp blend, and the darker fabric was better at concealing the handles and bulges of his sidearms. If James hadn’t known that the Executioner rarely went unarmed, he wouldn’t have known that the man had at least two handguns and an assortment of other tools tucked away in pockets on his person. Bolan gave Bannon a sharp salute, then shook James’s hand.

“I’ve got your presents,” the soldier said.

James took the small cooler, giving its plastic side a soft slap. “Permission to head to your lab, sir.”

Bannon nodded. “Granted, Farrow. Ensign, escort him, and get him there double time.”

The ensign that Bannon addressed snapped to, and James turned, leaving Bolan and the carrier’s captain to talk.

BANNON HADN’T exaggerated about the extensive technology in the lab. James not only had an assortment of regular and electronic microscopes, but there were centrifuges and spectrometers for looking at the chemicals within the bloodstream. The final item that James had brought on the flight, aside from his personal weapons, was his personal laptop, which had the spec-profiles of hundreds of drug and toxin combinations.

The Phoenix Force medic was also familiar with the kind of alchemy practiced by the “zombie lords” of the Caribbean, and thus would be able to direct the search for the kinds of atomic chains left behind in the blood samples. Fortunately, the blood hadn’t been kept so cold that ice crystals had formed in its water content, making separating it into test tubes easier.

James knew that he was in for the long haul, and looked forward to the intellectual challenge ahead. He blanked the origins of the blood sample from his mind, burying his emotions over the violence the berserkers committed so that he could focus on the biochemical mysteries in front of him.

Once he narrowed down the origins of the maniacal tourist murderers, then James would switch into Phoenix Force commando mode and assist the Executioner in bringing hot lead and righteous retribution down on the murderous manipulators.

For now, the lab machines would hum and do their job.

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