Lethal Payload

The helicopter was completely out of control

Dr. Mohammedkhani was not going to be terminated, nor even arrested. She would unknowingly do her job and make sure the upcoming launch went off perfectly.

Dr. Seth was the enemy. Bolan suspected he was not who he pretended to be. The Bear was right. There had been no modifications to the rocket nor any special reentry vehicle built. The weapon was the satellite itself. It would fall with much less accuracy than a guided rocket—but even if it missed Washington completely, some part of the U.S. eastern seaboard would be turned into a radioactive wasteland.

Nothing was going to interfere with the upcoming launch.

Bolan knew that he was about to die in a tragic helicopter accident.

MACK BOLAN®

The Executioner

#239 Hostile Proximity

#240 Devil’s Guard

#241 Evil Reborn

#242 Doomsday Conspiracy

#243 Assault Reflex

#244 Judas Kill

#245 Virtual Destruction

#246 Blood of the Earth

#247 Black Dawn Rising

#248 Rolling Death

#249 Shadow Target

#250 Warning Shot

#251 Kill Radius

#252 Death Line

#253 Risk Factor

#254 Chill Effect

#255 War Bird

#256 Point of Impact

#257 Precision Play

#258 Target Lock

#259 Nightfire

#260 Dayhunt

#261 Dawnkill

#262 Trigger Point

#263 Skysniper

#264 Iron Fist

#265 Freedom Force

#266 Ultimate Price

#267 Invisible Invader

#268 Shattered Trust

#269 Shifting Shadows

#270 Judgment Day

#271 Cyberhunt

#272 Stealth Striker

#273 UForce

#274 Rogue Target

#275 Crossed Borders

#276 Leviathan

#277 Dirty Mission

#278 Triple Reverse

#279 Fire Wind

#280 Fear Rally

#281 Blood Stone

#282 Jungle Conflict

#283 Ring of Retaliation

#284 Devil’s Army

#285 Final Strike

#286 Armageddon Exit

#287 Rogue Warrior

#288 Arctic Blast

#289 Vendetta Force

#290 Pursued

#291 Blood Trade

#292 Savage Game

#293 Death Merchants

#294 Scorpion Rising

#295 Hostile Alliance

#296 Nuclear Game

#297 Deadly Pursuit

#298 Final Play

#299 Dangerous Encounter

#300 Warrior’s Requiem

#301 Blast Radius

#302 Shadow Search

#303 Sea of Terror

#304 Soviet Specter

#305 Point Position

#306 Mercy Mission

#307 Hard Pursuit

#308 Into the Fire

#309 Flames of Fury

#310 Killing Heat

#311 Night of the Knives

#312 Death Gamble

#313 Lockdown

#314 Lethal Payload

The Executioner®

Lethal Payload

Don Pendleton

Honor et Fidelite (Honor and Fidelity)

Legio Pastria Nosta (The Legion Is My Home)

—Motto of the French Foreign Legion

A solider who betrays his comrades is the worst kind of traitor. He will have no honor when he faces his Executioner.

—Mack Bolan

MACK BOLAN®

THE LEGEND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

1

“Death to the United States!”

The words were spoken in Arabic, but the Executioner had heard them before, all too often. They were being chanted in such an orgiastic frenzy that Mack Bolan could hear them clearly on the lagoon. Drums and other percussive instruments beat in rhythm to the thundering chant.

“Death to the United States!”

Bolan’s canoe slid through the rollers and crunched to a halt in the sand. He stepped into the foam of the Java Sea and dragged the outrigger out of the surf and onto land. The beach was a patchwork of grays, greens and blacks in his night-vision goggles. The chants grew louder and even more excited. There was exultation in the voices of the chanters, and beneath that, expectation. A clear baritone called out and was met by at least thirty voices in answer.

“Death to the United States!”

The call and response grew more and more savage. Bolan smiled grimly. The pandekar was in fine form.

“Death to the Great Satan!” a new voice shouted.

Bolan shook his head. The mullah was not willing to be outdone.

The Executioner was wary of rescue missions. They threw every single advantage into the hands of his opponents. He was always outnumbered, always outgunned, and savvy enemies always had multiple opportunities to kill their captives or use them as shields. Bolan, himself, was always in dire risk of killing those he had come to save. The fact was that in the past two years hostage rescues in the Pacific had not all gone according to plan. American and Australian rescue missions in the Philippines and Indonesia had resulted in dead hostages. It seemed as if fate dealt from the bottom of the deck and gave all the high cards to the goblins. It was the same old situation. Bolan was one man, and he held but a single card.

In special operations circles it was spoken of with awe. It was known as surprise. It trumped everything, and there was nothing sweeter when it was achieved.

The chanting from beyond the tree line degenerated into wordless howls and screams of rage. Bolan wasted no time as he marched up the beach.

The voice of the pandekar boomed forth. Pandekars were master teachers of pentjak-silat, the national martial arts of the Indonesian archipelago. Along with the great technical skills they developed, they were renowned spiritualists, famed for their supernatural powers, rumored to include telepathy, mystic healing and clairvoyance. They were thought to be invulnerable.

Pandekar Binpadgar Regog was a master of the Jokuk style, and was considered by his followers to be a mystic. When the Taliban mullah Abu-Hamid al-Juwanyi had fled Afghanistan during Operation Anaconda, Regog had welcomed the refugee mullah as a divine sign. Al-Juwanyi’s teachings of jihad against the United States had been welcomed and were taken on with religious fervor by Regog and his followers.

Suddenly a woman’s scream cut across the chanting. Bolan moved quickly through the thin jungle. A two-story hut dominated the clearing. A number of smaller huts arced out on either side of the big house in a horseshoe shape. A bonfire burned in the middle.

Beside the pyre a pair of posts had been sunk in the soil and Famke Ryssemus was strung between them. She was a famous European fashion model who came to Java annually to help her uncle with his missionary work. That was enough to make her a target of the pandekar. Bolan could see she was bruised and her blond hair was disheveled, but there was no obvious blood or serious wounds yet.

The real fun was clearly about to begin.

A half-naked man leaped into the sand near Ryssemus and shrieked. He wore only a red turban, and a white breechclout tied with a red sash around his hips. Foam flecked his lips. His wiry musculature stood out in high relief as his hips and shoulders jerked with the drumbeats. He tossed away his AK-47 rifle. The cries of the mob rose as he reached both hands into his sash and withdrew two Javanese kris. The sinuous handles of the daggers were carved into the shapes of dragons. The mob moaned expectantly as he reversed the twelve-inch undulating blades in his hands. His eyes glazed over as he aimed the quicksilver weapons at his chest. Sweat streamed down his torso in rivers. Spittle flew as he let out a horrific groan. It was matched by the captive woman’s scream of horror as he stabbed both blades into his own chest.

The crowd roared.

Roughly forty people formed a circle around the fire. Regog and Al-Juwanyi sat on raised divans. A half-dozen men sat cross-legged in the sand at their feet pounding drums and cymbals. The rest of the gathering stood swaying to the music and chanting. All carried bladed weapons, and most also clutched rifles, pistols, or submachine guns. Many in the throng were working themselves into a trance like that of the dancer. They called out wordlessly as the dancer stabbed himself again. The blades stuck between his ribs, and he yanked them forth with a howl.

No blood ran down the dancer’s sides.

A man in a trance was said to be unstoppable. Bolan had faced opponents armed with mystical powers on more than one occasion. Around the globe, martial artists and mystics used rigorous training, ritual and special breathing techniques to manipulate their personal energy and aspects of the autonomous nervous system that were on autopilot in most humans. Such people were capable of almost inhuman feats. But most mystical fighting had been rendered obsolete in a modern world of high-capacity automatic rifles and helicopter gunships. Bolan did not believe in magic, but he had long ago learned not to sneer at sorcerers.

Facing such opponents made his one-man rescue operation just a little more nightmarish.

Bolan considered the M-16 he held. If he opened up with his rifle, the mob would blindly, suicidally rush him and he would fall beneath their knives before he managed to empty his magazine, much less reload. However, Bolan had other ideas.

The dancer turned on Ryssemus. She screamed as the man raised his knives overhead like ice picks.

Bolan reached beneath his rifle and slipped his finger around the trigger of the FN 303 Less Lethal Launcher mounted under the forestock. He flicked off the safety, and his thumb pressed down. The laser sight came to life and put a red spot on the knife-wielding dancer’s chest.

It was time to see exactly how much control of his autonomous nervous system the dancer really had.

The FN 303 was a glorified paint-ball gun that fired fin-stabilized .68-caliber projectiles. They hit the target like a fist, and breaking on contact to prevent penetration injuries. They were unlikely to stop a highly trained martial artist, much less one in self-induced trance.

But Bolan’s rounds had been custom loaded to rather unique specifications.

The Executioner squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession. The sound of the compressed air launcher was lost in the roar of the chanting and the drums. The dancer stopped at the impacts but did not fall. For a second his glazed eyes narrowed as he searched the crowd for his attacker.

No one in the mob even noticed.

But the chanting faltered as the dancer’s legs suddenly wobbled and his knives fell from his hands. The music subsided as the dancer staggered. He took three rapid steps toward his master, then fell clutching his belly. Shouts of indignation replaced the music and chanting as the dancer vomited all over the pandekar.

Bolan’s projectiles were rear-loaded with Adamsite.

Adamsite had another more colloquial nickname. It was known as vomit gas.

The dancer collapsed in the pandekar’s lap, convulsing violently.

Bolan began squeezing the trigger of the launcher repeatedly as he moved the laser sight from target to target. The projectiles carried only small loads of the irritant, but as the stunned Javanese milled and tried to help one another, the effects spread like wildfire. The soldier swiftly loaded another 15-round cassette of projectiles and resumed firing. Total surprise had been achieved. The entire mob was down or in the process of falling prey to the Adamsite.

Famke Ryssemus screamed and strained against her bonds. She was seemingly surrounded by a ten-foot halo in the sand. Everyone outside the circle Bolan had drawn lay in their own personal, intestinal hell, part of the greater sea of writhing fanatics. But Bolan could not hold off an army with Adamsite. He had to get in and get out. There were others on the island, and it was only a matter of seconds before the situation would turn deadly.

Bolan pulled on his gas mask and strode out of the trees.

A screaming man staggered into Bolan’s path brandishing a razor sharp panga. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he raised the heavy knife over his head. The soldier put a .68-caliber projectile point-blank into the side of the man’s neck, and he collapsed unconscious on the sand.

Bolan moved into the circle.

He turned and scooped up a fallen knife. Ryssemus screamed and then collapsed into his arms as he cut her bonds. The soldier leaned toward her ear and shouted through his gas mask. “Close your eyes! Hold your breath!” He lifted her over his shoulder and picked his way back through the heaving throng in the sand. He cleared the gas area and yanked up his mask as he set the woman down.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She swayed on her feet. Her beautiful blue eyes were as wide as dinner plates. She looked at Bolan like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. “I…”

“Where’s your uncle?”

“My uncle?” Miss Ryssemus jolted into awareness. “They tortured him! Oh, my God! He’s still in the big hut!”

Bolan took the woman’s wrist and pulled her into the trees outside the semicircle of huts. She stared in dull horror as he drew his Beretta 93-R and shoved it into her hands. “Stay here,” Bolan said as he flicked the selector to semiauto. “Hold the gun in both hands. Point it and pull the trigger on anyone besides me or your uncle. I’ll be right back.”

Bolan shoved her down into the bushes and ran through the trees. He skirted the outer perimeter of the horseshoe-shaped village and made for the rear of the biggest hut, which was built on a raised platform of logs. The beams of the structure were solid, but the walls were made of densely woven lengths of split bamboo. Three men with rifles spilled out of the hut and ran down the steps toward the fallen mob. Bolan stayed in the shadows. He crept around the building and stopped at the edge of the veranda.

A man stood with his rifle shouldered, watching the other men run to the circle of writhing bodies. Bolan watched, as well. The men ran and knelt beside their stricken comrades. Within seconds they were doubled over, contorting with nausea.

The man on the veranda stayed put, tracking his rifle for a target. Suddenly the man turned toward Bolan. The laser sight of the Executioner’s weapon system put a red dot on the rifleman’s head. The silenced M-16 coughed once, and the gunman fell.

Bolan vaulted onto the veranda, but he stopped at the door.

Every instinct screamed danger.

From within the hut a voice spoke in Dutch, a language Bolan had some understanding of but could not easily speak. He kept his body behind the heavy teak beam framing the doorway as he spoke slowly in English.

“Let Pieter Ryssemus go, now, and I will let you live.”

There was a lengthy pause before the answer came back in very thick English. “Preacher man gonna die, GI. Throw down your gun. My boy come pick it up, and maybe we talk.”

Bolan drew the 9 mm Centennial hammerless revolver from his ankle holster and tucked it into the back of his belt. He pulled his pant leg back over the empty holster and stood. He tossed the assault rifle through the door. It fell with a clatter.

“All right,” the voice beckoned.

Bolan stepped into the doorway.

The hut was a meeting place. The vast majority of the floor was woven grass matting where people sat and received instruction. A small, elevated platform near the back with a pair of cushions marked where the pandekar and the mullah held court.

A section of the matting was pulled away, revealing a hatch in the floor that led to a cellar. A Javanese man stood in the stairway leading down. He wore a red turban, and was bare chested and heavily muscled. He held an AK-74 rifle with the buttstock folded and the bayonet fixed. Bolan assessed the situation. The man was an amateur, but he was armed with an automatic rifle and the range was five meters.

The man stared at Bolan’s weapon where it lay and then at the empty holster on Bolan’s thigh. “Pistol, asshole.”

Bolan kept his hands open and down by his hips. “I gave it to Famke.”

The man sneered and stepped out of the stairwell. “Where are your Australian SAS friends?”

Bolan had immense respect for the Australian SAS, but they were on the Indian Ocean side of Java and had chosen the wrong island. When Bolan’s intel told him where the bad guys were, he hadn’t had time to wait.

“I’m alone,” Bolan said.

The man shook his head in disgust. “American cowboy asshole.”

Bolan remained silent.

The man gave Bolan’s weapon system an appreciative look and kicked it into a far corner of the room.

In a split second Bolan’s hand was behind his back. He twisted and shoved the snub-nosed Smith & Wesson forward in a fencer’s lunge. The kidnapper raised his rifle, but Bolan was already in motion. He aimed and squeezed the trigger.

The gunman’s head snapped back as if he had taken a hard jab to the jaw. His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the matting.

“Diwangkara!” a voice shouted from the cellar. The voice rose in urgency. “Diwangkara!”

“Diwangkara’s dead,” Bolan said as he crossed the matting and reclaimed his rifle. He crouched by the hatchway. “And so are you, unless Pieter Ryssemus walks up those stairs now.”

“Preacherman injured,” was the reply.

“So carry him.” Bolan put a fresh magazine into the carbine and racked the action. “Like your life depended on it.”

Bolan took a fragmentation grenade from his belt and pulled the pin. He retained the grenade with his fingers clamped on the cotter lever. He tossed the pin down the stairs and listened to it clink on the steps. He took a moment to let that sink in downstairs. “Dutch Intelligence and the Australians want the missionaries.” Bolan let that sink in for a moment, as well. “You come up right now and bring Pieter Ryssemus with you, alive, or you’ll join Diwangkara.”

Waiting for the response, Bolan monitored the noises outside. Adamsite was a persistent gas, and its effects lasted for hours, but the island was several kilometers in diameter, and he by no means had control of it.

“I come up,” the man in the cellar said.

“Do it slow.”

The timbers of the stairs creaked.

Pieter Ryssemus appeared in the hatchway. Bolan stayed stone-faced as the missionary staggered up the steps. He was a tall man, but his upper body listed in an ugly fashion from a broken collarbone. He was missing several fingers, and his body was covered with burns, bruises and wounds. The missionary had been tortured, not by professional interrogators or even amateurs wanting information. He had been tortured by those who had given in to their hatred. They had tortured the old man for the pleasure it had given them.

There was a Swedish Carl Gustav submachine gun pressed to the old man’s temple. The kidnapper stood behind the Dutchman, using his prisoner as a shield. He held Ryssemus’s injured arm cruelly twisted behind his back. Most of the terrorist was hidden behind the missionary’s body. His eyes glared over the top of his weapon, and he wore a red turban like the rest of his sect. Tattoos crawled up the corded muscles of his forearms. Ryssemus flinched as the gun muzzle was rammed even harder into his skull. The terrorist smiled and revealed missing teeth.

“Drop your gun, GI.”

The laser sight on Bolan’s carbine clicked on with pressure from his hand, and a red dot appeared just below the kidnapper’s turban.

“Drop yours,” Bolan replied.

The man’s hand whitened on the grip of the submachine gun. “Drop your gun!” he screamed.

Bolan frowned and lowered his rifle slightly.

The terrorist grinned. He did not notice the red laser dot came to rest on his gun hand. “Now, GI, you—”

Brass sprayed as the action of Bolan’s carbine clicked. The Swedish submachine gun fell from the shredded remnants of the terrorist’s hand. Ryssemus fell from his grip as the kidnapper’s eyes widened in horror at the sight of his wound.

The expression became his death mask as Bolan put a 3-round burst through his chest.

The kidnapper tumbled down the stairwell. Pieter Ryssemus collapsed on the floor. Bolan moved swiftly down the stairs. The terrorist lay sprawled in the lower chamber. Bloodstains on the floor and the fetid air of human suffering attested to what the lower room had been used for. Bolan found the pin from his grenade and replaced it. He scanned the room swiftly and took several maps, documents and a cell phone. He knelt beside the dead man and peered at his arm intently. Among the writhing tribal tattoos was a distinctive shield. An Asiatic dragon coiled across the background. Superimposed over the dragon was a very western looking cartoon owl. Above the owl was a tiny, stylized parachute canopy.

The dead man was also wearing dog tags.

Bolan memorized the tattoo. He snapped the dog tags from around the man’s neck and took the knife that was sheathed in his sash.

The soldier went back up the stairs. The old man groaned. “Famke?”

“She’s safe. She’s waiting for us.” Bolan surveyed the missionary grimly. He was in bad shape. “Sir, can you walk?”

“I prayed to God for salvation, and you came.” He clasped Bolan with his good arm and struggled to rise. Bolan had to do most of the work to get Ryssemus on his feet, but the old man steadied himself and nodded. “But God also helps those who help themselves, and I will walk from this place.” The ghost of a smile passed over Pieter Ryssemus’s mashed lips. “But I do not know if I can run.” He looked down at the submachine gun on the floor. “Swedish.”

Bolan scooped up the weapon. “Can you shoot?”

“I was a soldier in the army before I became a soldier of God.” The missionary slung the weapon over his good shoulder and took the grip in his hand. He looked back down the stairs at his torturer. “And we are among men who have fallen from the grace of any God I know. I will pray for their souls.” The smile ghosted back across the old man’s face. “But later.”

Bolan nodded. Missionary life was hard. They often went where disease, poverty and human suffering were at their absolute worst. The Executioner had only to look in the old man’s eyes to know he was about as tough as they came.

The soldier clicked on his radio. “This is Striker. I have the package. I am extracting.”

Ryssemus raised a hopeful eyebrow. “Helicopters are coming?”

“I have a canoe.”

The old man blinked.

Bolan smiled. “Come on. We have a submarine to catch.”