Enemies Within

HOMEGROWN TERROR

Six US Army Rangers pledge allegiance to an Islamic terror group and send their manifesto straight to Washington. Their deadly demand: broadcast the declaration on all official channels, or they’ll unleash a devastating attack. Caving to the traitors is not an option. With thousands of lives at risk, the White House enlists their best hope of neutralizing this threat:

The Executioner. Mack Bolan wastes no time in tracking down the deserters. But something seems off about this case. It’s not uncommon for the occasional soldier to defect, but six? Before he can unravel the conspiracy, a string of deadly strikes on civilians has him racing along the Eastern seaboard, trying to head off the worst of the carnage. The Executioner will stop at nothing to blaze a fiery path to the truth...and retribution.

Also By Don Pendleton

#375 Salvador Strike

#376 Frontier Fury

#377 Desperate Cargo

#378 Death Run

#379 Deep Recon

#380 Silent Threat

#381 Killing Ground

#382 Threat Factor

#383 Raw Fury

#384 Cartel Clash

#385 Recovery Force

#386 Crucial Intercept

#387 Powder Burn

#388 Final Coup

#389 Deadly Command

#390 Toxic Terrain

#391 Enemy Agents

#392 Shadow Hunt

#393 Stand Down

#394 Trial by Fire

#395 Hazard Zone

#396 Fatal Combat

#397 Damage Radius

#398 Battle Cry

#399 Nuclear Storm

#400 Blind Justice

#401 Jungle Hunt

#402 Rebel Trade

#403 Line of Honor

#404 Final Judgment

#405 Lethal Diversion

#406 Survival Mission

#407 Throw Down

#408 Border Offensive

#409 Blood Vendetta

#410 Hostile Force

#411 Cold Fusion

#412 Night’s Reckoning

#413 Double Cross

#414 Prison Code

#415 Ivory Wave

#416 Extraction

#417 Rogue Assault

#418 Viral Siege

#419 Sleeping Dragons

#420 Rebel Blast

#421 Hard Targets

#422 Nigeria Meltdown

#423 Breakout

#424 Amazon Impunity

#425 Patriot Strike

#426 Pirate Offensive

#427 Pacific Creed

#428 Desert Impact

#429 Arctic Kill

#430 Deadly Salvage

#431 Maximum Chaos

#432 Slayground

#433 Point Blank

#434 Savage Deadlock

#435 Dragon Key

#436 Perilous Cargo

#437 Assassin’s Tripwire

#438 The Cartel Hit

#439 Blood Rites

#440 Killpath

#441 Murder Island

#442 Syrian Rescue

#443 Uncut Terror

#444 Dark Savior

#445 Final Assault

#446 Kill Squad

#447 Missile Intercept

#448 Terrorist Dispatch

#449 Combat Machines

#450 Omega Cult

#451 Fatal Prescription

#452 Death List

#453 Rogue Elements

#454 Enemies Within

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Enemies Within

Don Pendleton

For Sergeant First Class Leroy Petry, US Army Rangers. Congressional Medal of Honor winner, July 12, 2011.

ISBN: 978-1-474-08238-9

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

ENEMIES WITHIN

© 2018 Harlequin Enterprises Limited

Published in Great Britain 2018

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

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“Grenade!” Grimaldi snapped, already easing off the gas.

“Saw it.” Bolan braced himself for the explosion that was sure to come in four...three...two...

The blast from the bed of the pickup in front of them rocked their car. It must have scared a good year off the driver’s life, then he was back to business, swerving left, then right, trying to get his ride under control while smoke poured from the back. Something had happened to the rear axle as well, but the real danger now was fire.

Finally, the driver gave it up, veered toward the highway’s grassy shoulder and bailed as soon as he’d slowed down enough to make it practical.

“Bikers. Ten-four,” Grimaldi barked.

The pickup detonated when they were a half block past it, already following the Harleys toward Centreville. Bolan reached under his jacket, drew the black Beretta M9 from its shoulder rig and thumbed off the safety.

“You want to take them off the road?” Grimaldi asked.

“Find out if we can catch them first.”

Grimaldi nodded and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

Betray a friend, and you’ll often find you have ruined yourself.

—Aesop

There are many kinds of betrayal that can rot a man from the inside out. It’s my job to keep the collateral damage in check and seek justice for the victims of treachery.

—Mack Bolan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Quotes

The Mack Bolan Legend

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

Prologue

Topsail Beach, North Carolina

Within the United States Army, there is a separate and autonomous military force that investigates serious crimes committed by active-duty service members. The special agents of the Criminal Investigation Command, or CID, are led by the Commanding General, who reports to the Chief of Staff of the Army and to the Secretary of the Army.

At 0315 on an early summer morning, with the crack of dawn still hours distant, CID Task Force Benedict Bravo was embarked on a top-secret mission code-named Quisling. The six special agents in attendance were prepared to drop the net.

The trail had led them, after fits and starts, to Topsail Beach, the southernmost town on Topsail Island, with a year-round population of 383. The team was focused on a summer rental home, a split-level with four bedrooms and a finished basement prone to flooding during hurricanes. The special agents watched the second hands on their jet-black Smith & Wesson military watches, synchronized before assembly at the strike point where, they hoped, the mission would be finished with no one outside the CID any the wiser.

The mission agents were dressed identically in midnight black: knit watch caps, balaclavas covering their faces, modular tactical vests, and rip-stop trousers bloused into their combat boots. Each member of the team wore a Beretta M-9 pistol chambered in 9 mm Parabellum rounds, with fifteen rounds in a detachable box magazine and one live in the chamber, with the pistol’s safety off. Besides sidearms, each carried sundry pyrotechnics, mostly M-84 flash-bang stun grenades, and various long guns approved for service with the CID: selective-fire M-4 carbines chambered for 5.56 mm NATO rounds—one with an M-203 under-barrel grenade launcher—and Mossberg 590 12-gauge pump shotguns with a 20-inch barrel and extended combat magazines, loading double 0 buck and 1-ounce rifled slugs.

Any heavier munitions would be locked inside the team’s civilian-style Humvee, painted matte-black and parked a block downrange from their intended target on this early morning without moon or stars.

Benedict Bravo’s commanding officer was Captain Sedgewick Larkin, a sixteen-year veteran, fitted like his other special agents with a set of ATN PVS-7 standard military-issue night-vision goggles and a Bluetooth communication device that permitted conversation at whisper level with the other members of his team. He understood what was at stake and had impressed it on his men: Lieutenant Gregory DuBois, Staff Sergeant Richard Malvern, Staff Sergeant Leo Edwards, Sergeant Edgar Rankin, and Corporal Payton Luce.

They were the best he had available.

Larkin could only hope they were good enough.

Another quick glance at his watch showed the time as 0329. “Sound off,” he ordered, and stood waiting while five voices in descending order of rank confirmed that each was standing by, ready to move.

That used the better part of half a minute, whereupon Larkin told his strike team, “Do it now!”

* * *

Staff Sergeant Edwards had the long split-level’s back door covered, facing South Shore Drive and the Atlantic Ocean, surging dark and vast beyond. His Mossberg 590 weighed close to ten pounds, fully loaded, fitted with ghost ring sights and a bayonet lug for close-quarters combat, though Edwards had passed on mounting the steel, opting instead for Shock Lock breaching rounds to take the door down.

After the order to advance, he crossed the fifteen yards of grass and pavement in a rush. Angling his Mossberg’s muzzle toward the door lock, a round already chambered and the safety disengaged, Edwards triggered the first shot, then was blinded as the green field of his NVGs suddenly flushed brilliant white.

The door exploded, some kind of propellant charge behind it, striking Edwards with sufficient force to rip the shotgun from his grasp, slamming him over backward in a daze, blood gushing from his broken nose to soak the woolen balaclava. Groping for his M-9, he had nearly reached it when the hazy figure of a man approached, stood over him and aimed a sound-suppressed assault rifle at the staff sergeant’s face.

“Night, night,” the stranger said. “You lose.”

* * *

Lieutenant Gregory DuBois heard the explosion, knew their setup on the split-level had gone to shit, and went ahead regardless. He still had work to do—they all did—and until the captain called them off, he would proceed as planned.

His target was a set of sliding-glass doors that granted access to the layout’s finished basement on the north end of the house. The lieutenant rushed it, triggering a 3-round out of his M-4 carbine, braced for anything he could think of since the first explosive detonation on the premises. So far, he didn’t know if it had been a booby trap of some kind, planted when their targets flew the coop, or if the men they’d come to take down still remained inside.

In either case, until he had eyes on the enemy or empty rooms, he had to play his hand the same. Assume there was trouble of the life-or-death variety lying in store for him and the other members of his team, fight through it and, for God’s sake, come out on the other end alive.

His tumbling rounds opened the broad glass doors, their tinted panes shattering and cascading like broken sheets of ice. DuBois was ten feet out and closing when he spotted muzzle-flashes well back in the basement recreation room and felt the high-velocity projectiles rip into him below his Mod Tac vest, snapping his femurs, shattering his pelvis. Stunning pain engulfed his legs as he toppled forward, sprawling facedown on the manicured grass.

Somehow he kept his grip on the M-4 and tried to spot the opposition with his carbine’s Burris Optics 5×36 mm AR-536 Red Dot Sight, but they had him zeroed first. A final muzzle-flash flared in front of him, driving a bullet into the lieutenant’s forehead, and his world went blank.

* * *

Staff Sergeant Malvern and Sergeant Rankin rushed the southeast corner of the split-level rental together, targeting a door that should grant access to the kitchen if the floor plans they’d obtained from Pender County’s clerk in Burgaw were entirely up to date and accurate.

Rankin had loaded deer slugs in his Mossberg, never mind nonlethal breaching rounds, and Malvern had an M-651 grenade in the M-203 launcher slung beneath his carbine’s barrel. The gren contained fifty-three grams of CS gas mixture with a burn time of twenty-five seconds. To defeat the gas, both sergeants wore half-mask respirators covering their balaclavas, adding to the alien appearance of their black night-vision goggles.

All they had to do was crash the door, then let it fly and make their way inside.

No sweat.

That was, until it all went straight to hell.

Rankin was set to blow the kitchen door when someone on the inside tripped a charge and blew it outward. The sergeant was quick enough to duck and dodge the flying door, but Malvern wasn’t, grunting as a corner struck his shooting arm and shoulder, spinning him, disarming him and sprawling him supine across the sloping lawn. Rankin triggered a deer slug and pumped the Mossberg’s slide-action to put another in the shotgun’s chamber when the gaping kitchen doorway came alive with muzzle-flashes. Automatic weapons spit full-metal-jacket rounds at the two would-be intruders.

Rankin guessed the shooters had M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons or some other light machine guns on the same pattern. He couldn’t match their cyclic rate of fire with his shotgun. It hardly mattered since the next two slugs doubled him over, nearly disemboweling him.

The sergeant collapsed onto the grass, saw Malvern struggling to rise before another burst sheared off his face and finished him.

Before he died, Rankin rasped into his Bluetooth, “Two down, southeast. Abort if possible.”

* * *

“Abort, my ass!” Captain Larkin broadcast to four dead men, catching a gloomy nod from Corporal Luce, stationed at his side. “We finish it or go down trying.”

“Yes, sir!” Luce answered without hesitation.

“Load an HE round in your launcher,” Larkin ordered, watching as Luce obeyed him with an easy, practiced motion. “No more talk of bringing any subjects in alive.”

“No, sir!” The young man sounded braver than he most likely felt.

“On my mark. Three...two...one...”

They sent both HE rounds hurtling toward the structure’s front windows, aiming for a space the floor plans labeled as its living room. The rounds shattered glass within a split second of each other, vanished into darkness, then exploded with a double flash and clap of man-made thunder that cleared out the window frames and left the front door sagging on its hinges.

“Forward!” Larkin snapped, trusting the corporal to keep pace on his left as he advanced. They only had each other now, and while he couldn’t picture any happy ending to the raid, Larkin was bound to see it through.

It was the only way he knew to soldier, after all.

The light machine guns caught them in converging streams of fire when they were still a dozen yards or so from the house, hot streams of bullets wobbling and crisscrossing in the night.

Larkin heard Luce cry out in pain but didn’t see him fall. By then he was too busy stumbling, going down himself, two shattered legs unable to support his weight for another shambling step. He hit the grass chin-first, surprised it wasn’t softer on impact. Before he had a chance to raise his M-4 and return fire, bullets rippled past and through him, putting out his lights with only time enough to hope that Luce’s end would be as relatively merciful.

* * *

As dogs began to bay and yammer through the neighborhood, two figures left the smoky split-level house and stood over the bodies of their last two kills.

“MPs?” one asked the other.

“Have to be. You see the weapons.”

“Want to search for ID?”

“Screw it. We need to get the hell away from here, right now. Tomorrow is a busy day.”

Chapter One

The Tomb of the Unknowns

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, stood some fifty yards south of the marble monument and waited for the changing of the guard.

The flat-faced monument, begun in 1921, had changed somewhat in shape and style over the years, reaching its present height of ten feet six inches, twelve feet long, and mounted on a base of two hundred cubic feet. In front of it, a US Army soldier, clad in full dress uniform but lacking any rank insignia—to keep him from outranking the “unknowns”—went through his measured paces: twenty-one paces due west along a black mat laid before the tomb, a sharp turn with a pause of twenty-one seconds, then back eastward with another twenty-one paces. At each turn, he switched shoulders with the obsolete but fully functional M-14 he carried, keeping his rifle between the tomb and any visitors, thus demonstrating his ability to deal with any threat against the sleeping dead.

Bolan had lost count of his visits to the monument, and to Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres of rolling, carefully tended greenery established in 1864, presently housing more than four hundred thousand graves of persons from America and eleven other nations. That total did not count the lost “unknowns,” believed to number nearly five thousand.

Bolan had friends buried at Arlington. Some he had served with during active duty as a Green Beret. Others he’d known in passing had gone to their rewards after he’d left the service to begin his one-man war against the Mafia. From there, his War Everlasting had rapidly expanded to consume his life.

He visited the sites to commune, reflect, and speak with the dead. And sometimes, like today, to take a meeting with one of his oldest living friends.

Hal Brognola, a high-ranking official of the Department of Justice, chose meeting places where they could blend in, could avoid public scrutiny and be certain that their words would not be overheard, short of a drone soaring on high.

Bolan could not surmise what the big Fed might have in mind this time. Upon receiving the terse text, with nothing listed but coordinates and time of day, he’d gone online to scan the breaking news in search of incidents that might require his special skills to set things more or less back on an even keel.

He’d found the usual drug busts in Florida and Arizona, cartels fighting for their lives in Mexico, feuding between the Mafia and rival ’Ndràngheta over turf in southern Italy and Western Europe, plus a bevy of always plentiful corruption scandals.

Elsewhere, in the outcast state of North Korea, Kim Jong-un was rattling his long-range missiles, threatening destruction to a world of enemies from his Pyongyang palace. French voters had stopped short of choosing a neo-Nazi as their next prime minister; no problem there. The European Union might or might not be disintegrating, but there was nothing he could do or wanted to do about it either way.

Afghanistan, still occupied by US troops after a grueling eighteen years, continued producing some 93 percent of the world’s non-pharmaceutical-grade opium and heroin, uninterrupted since it was the livelihood of Afghan farmers—and the nation’s avaricious leaders. Next door, Pakistan and India still fought a version of the same old border war they’d waged since 1947 when their British overlords had drawn lines on maps to separate the two and hoped for peace. The Middle East, of course, would always be the Middle East, divided on religious lines, with Arabs raging at the occupation of ancestral lands condemned by the United Nations—not that Israel gave a damn.

A world of woes, but nothing had jumped out to demand Bolan’s attention here and now. He knew Brognola would explain the problem. A glance at his watch told him that explanation should begin in five, six minutes, tops.

Reluctantly he turned his back on the unknowns and scanned the acreage of green with its tidy rows of bright-white marble headstones. Each was inscribed in black with more than sixty approved religious emblems for soldiers of faith, an atomic whirl circling an “A” for atheists, and others bearing military emblems, infinity symbols, landing eagles, sandhill cranes, even pomegranates.

Far off, drawing gradually closer, was a husky figure Bolan recognized instinctively, bringing a twitch to lips that rarely smiled these days.

They’d met the first time during his campaign against Miami mafiosi, then again in Vegas, when they’d nearly joined forces. But Bolan had resisted government entanglement until the wrap-up of his “final mile” against the Mob, ending with his faked death in New York City’s Central Park, the alteration of his game face—not the first—and purging of all his records, just in case his fingerprints surfaced somewhere down the road.

Since then, he’d risked his life for Hal Brognola and the team at Stony Man Farm—a covert antiterrorist organization based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—a thousand times, eliminated countless threats to the United States and civilized society around the world, but it would never be enough. No victory was ever claimed for good; no enemies were buried or incinerated who could not be easily replaced by other villains, equally as bad or worse.

In short, a warrior’s work was never done.

He started walking toward Brognola’s distant figure, planning on a meet halfway between their present places in the cemetery. At this hour, there were no tourists around, though that was bound to change since Arlington hosted some three million souls per year, or eighty-two hundred per day. It wouldn’t matter, even if they started clocking in by now, since visitors to Arlington were generally on their best behavior, leaving others to themselves, speaking in muted tones, seeking specific markers of the honored dead.

If worse came to worst, a silent glare from the big Fed or Bolan should ensure they were not disturbed. There would be no need to produce the weapons both men carried concealed beneath their jackets.

When they were close enough to speak without shouting, the two old friends greeted each other, closed the final gap and shook hands as they always did, like soldiers in a common cause, too long apart. Each knew the other’s story intimately, understood what set them on converging paths of no return.

Both men knew how their journey would end, beyond doubt, but had not reached that point, although they would be ready for it when it came.

As they released each other’s hands, Bolan asked, “What’s up? Your short text sounded serious.”

“It’s always serious,” Brognola replied. “But this time...hell. I’m not sure what to make of it myself.”

* * *

“I guess you’re current on the US Army Rangers,” Brognola remarked as they made their way through the ranks of polished headstones, weathering to various degrees, one dating back to May of 1864 but lovingly maintained.

“I’ve trained with Rangers on more than one occasion, and fought with them in the field, before Pittsfield. They’re based at Fort Benning. That’s about the size of it.”

Brognola didn’t have to ask what Bolan meant by “Pittsfield.” It was the Executioner’s hometown in Massachusetts where a Mafia loan shark had hooked Sam, his father, and drawn Bolan’s sister, Cindy, into bondage with an escort service after Sam had been beaten, nearly crippled, for defaulting on his debt. Something inside Sam Bolan had snapped and he’d tried to spare his loved ones further shame by wiping out the family. The sole survivor had been Bolan’s younger brother, Johnny, who had shared the tragic story with his older brother, thus launching the Executioner upon his one-man hellfire trail against the Mob.

“Then would it surprise you,” Brognola said, “if I said six Rangers have gone off the grid after declaring their loyalty to ISIS?”

Bolan responded with a frown and said, “Surprise would be the least of it.”

He’d followed ISIS in the media and classified reports from Stony Man. Officially it was a virulent al Qaeda splinter group whose terse initials stood for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Sometimes the leaders called it ISIL—the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—or simply IS, the Islamic State. Their stated goal was to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate, to which end, strangely, they waged war primarily against their fellow Muslims, razing villages and cities, scourging libraries, museums and random monuments of great historical significance to the Islamic culture. All of which, to Bolan, indicated raving psychopaths in charge.

“Six Army Rangers going over?” he echoed, watching Brognola nod.

“And not just any Rangers,” said the man from Justice. “There’s a major, a lieutenant colonel, with a captain, first lieutenant, plus a staff sergeant and sergeant.”

“And we know this how?” Bolan inquired.

“Their so-called manifesto,” Brognola replied, “which they are demanding we publish through official channels, send-ups on the Pentagon and White House websites, plus all major TV networks and the top ten US newspapers, with a combined readership exceeding 8.3 million.”

“But you’ve held it back,” Bolan observed.

“So far. We’re on a ticking clock.”

“What happens when the clock strikes twelve?” Bolan inquired.

“A ‘major terrorist event,’ whatever that means. Mega casualties, no hope of disguising it.”

“You think they can deliver?”

“There’s a chance they already have,” Brognola said. “A teaser, anyway. We’ve kept a lid on it so far.”

“Particulars?”

“Some kind of noxious gas attack in Baltimore, a shopping mall. Two dead, a couple dozen treated at the hospital for symptoms that resembled sarin poisoning. We’re calling it a leak, natural gas from one of the mall’s restaurants, and squaring it with their insurance carriers. The Rangers gave thumbs-up to burying the news for now, as long as we get cracking on the broadcast of their manifesto by high noon, the day after tomorrow.”

“So much time?”

“It seemed a little leisurely to me, as well,” the big Fed said.

“I’m guessing that this outfit has a name?”

“Funny about that,” Brognola replied. “They haven’t floated one, so far. That strikes me as a clumsy oversight.”

“Unless it’s all a scam.”

“Or that.”

“I can’t help noting that this sounds like something for the MPs at Fort Benning. It’s their home turf, their people going rogue.”

“They tried already. Kicked it upstairs to the CID, a task force supervised directly by the Provost Marshal General.”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Bolan observed.

“You do. They traced their runners to North Carolina, to rented tourist quarters in a tiny town on Topsail Island. Ever heard of it?”

“Can’t say I have,” Bolan replied.

“I hadn’t, either. Anyway, they went in hard last night, a six-man strike team with a captain, a lieutenant and four noncoms. Sent up the balloon at 0330 hours, but they walked into a shit storm. All CID agents were listed KIA on-site, another story that we’ll have to fabricate before we contact next of kin. Call it a training exercise gone wrong, I guess.”

“No casualties on the other side?” Bolan queried.

“Nary a one. They walked out clean, left nothing but the rental property all shot to hell—and one more copy of their manifesto, mounted on a bathroom wall in case we missed the point.”