Lethal Vengeance

MISSION: PAYBACK

When Stony Man chief Hal Brognola is kidnapped, Mack Bolan vows to find him and wreak explosive vengeance on those responsible. But first he must find his shadowy enemy. For deep in the drug cartel hellscape of Ciudad Juárez, Hal is prisoner of the city’s most legendary and secretive serial killer. To uncover his identity, Bolan wages war on Ciudad’s biggest narco-traffickers, battling their merciless soldados and sending their empires up in flames. But with the clock ticking down, the Executioner must face a cunning foe in an arena where justice will only be found in total annihilation.

#375 Salvador Strike

#376 Frontier Fury

#377 Desperate Cargo

#378 Death Run

#379 Deep Recon

#380 Silent Threat

#381 Killing Ground

#382 Threat Factor

#383 Raw Fury

#384 Cartel Clash

#385 Recovery Force

#386 Crucial Intercept

#387 Powder Burn

#388 Final Coup

#389 Deadly Command

#390 Toxic Terrain

#391 Enemy Agents

#392 Shadow Hunt

#393 Stand Down

#394 Trial by Fire

#395 Hazard Zone

#396 Fatal Combat

#397 Damage Radius

#398 Battle Cry

#399 Nuclear Storm

#400 Blind Justice

#401 Jungle Hunt

#402 Rebel Trade

#403 Line of Honor

#404 Final Judgment

#405 Lethal Diversion

#406 Survival Mission

#407 Throw Down

#408 Border Offensive

#409 Blood Vendetta

#410 Hostile Force

#411 Cold Fusion

#412 Night’s Reckoning

#413 Double Cross

#414 Prison Code

#415 Ivory Wave

#416 Extraction

#417 Rogue Assault

#418 Viral Siege

#419 Sleeping Dragons

#420 Rebel Blast

#421 Hard Targets

#422 Nigeria Meltdown

#423 Breakout

#424 Amazon Impunity

#425 Patriot Strike

#426 Pirate Offensive

#427 Pacific Creed

#428 Desert Impact

#429 Arctic Kill

#430 Deadly Salvage

#431 Maximum Chaos

#432 Slayground

#433 Point Blank

#434 Savage Deadlock

#435 Dragon Key

#436 Perilous Cargo

#437 Assassin’s Tripwire

#438 The Cartel Hit

#439 Blood Rites

#440 Killpath

#441 Murder Island

#442 Syrian Rescue

#443 Uncut Terror

#444 Dark Savior

#445 Final Assault

#446 Kill Squad

#447 Missile Intercept

#448 Terrorist Dispatch

#449 Combat Machines

#450 Omega Cult

#451 Fatal Prescription

#452 Death List

#453 Rogue Elements

#454 Enemies Within

#455 Chicago Vendetta

#456 Thunder Down Under

#457 Dying Art

#458 Killing Kings

#459 Stealth Assassin

#460 Lethal Vengeance

Lethal Vengeance

Don Pendleton

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

ISBN: 978-1-474-09778-9

LETHAL VENGEANCE

© 2019 Harlequin Books S.A.

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

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

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

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A stream of cartel soldiers burst from the building.

When one of the gunners removed a cell phone from his pocket, Bolan drilled him with a single 5.56 mm round, then ripped a series of three-round bursts along the line of gunmen limned by a streetlight.

The Executioner sent another grenade downrange, an incendiary round that blew on impact, loosing flames that spread from wall to wall, rolling through the open doorway, setting fire to bodies lying on the pavement.

He could have kept on firing, making sure that everyone within his line of sight was dead or dying, but he was literally burning up Brognola’s time now, painfully aware that the odds of finding him declined precipitately after twenty-four hours.

If he wasn’t dead already, Brognola had roughly two hours left. El Psicópata didn’t keep his prey alive for any longer than it took to butcher them. But Brognola didn’t fit the killer’s victim profile, which meant there were no rules.

All Bolan could do was put the pedal to the metal and keep rolling on, full speed ahead. And God help anyone who stood in his way…

Nor is there any law more just than that he who has plotted death shall perish by his own plot.

—Ovid

I speak the only language predators understand. I fight fire with fire, and damn the consequences.

—Mack Bolan

For Special Agent Samuel S. Hicks. Drug Enforcement Administration

End of Watch: November 19, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Introduction

Quotes

Dedication

The Mack Bolan Legend

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

About the Publisher

Prologue

El Paso, Texas

The big man—stocky, fiftysomething, with gray hair that nearly matched the color of his suit—moved easily along a second-story hallway in the Gateway Rio Grande Hotel, a plastic bucket in one hand, the key to room 209 in the other.

He was tired at half-past midnight and was running late for bed. Another round of meetings started bright and early in the morning, but the dinner he’d consumed—tamales, enchiladas, rice and beans, with one too many beers—had his stomach grumbling and he needed something carbonated for relief.

When he’d achieved that, he still had to call his wife. It was an hour later in DC, damn it, but he knew she’d be waiting up and worrying until he had her on the line, telling her everything was fine and coming off as planned.

The conference, on balance, hadn’t been as bad as he’d expected, but his time was better spent on other things. He’d be relieved to land in Washington again on Saturday, and his report to the US Attorney General could wait a day or two.

It wasn’t like the meetings would have any real-world impact, after all—not on his job, at least. He would have skipped the whole thing but his orders from the new guy running Justice had been unequivocal: show up and make us proud.

When the last USAG had bailed under fire, his new, improved replacement fell into the job without adequate briefings on all aspects of his post. When the big man returned to Washington, he would correct that oversight.

The icemaker and vending machines were right where the floorplan in his room had promised they would be, tucked into a niche at the corridor’s west end. He filled the plastic bucket first then picked a can of soda minus the caffeine and dropped the can into the ice. Because the niche obscured his vision, he was turning with his hands full when he spotted the two burly strangers in cheap suits blocking his path.

Unfriendly faces set off mental alarms, but the big man still forced a smile and said, “Excuse me, eh?”

They both rushed him at once, the bruiser on his left cursing as ice and a cold can of soda hit him in the face.

The big man fought in silence, wishing he’d brought his sidearm currently locked inside his room’s small safe. He got some licks in, but he didn’t see the needle coming until it was in his neck.

The bright world did a rapid fade to black.

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

When he came around, the big man found that he was seated in a straight-backed wooden chair, no cushion on its seat. His neck hurt from the hypodermic needle and his brain was fuzzy, but he reckoned that would pass. A burlap sack over his head smelled like potatoes and prevented him from seeing anything, but from the lighting and the sound of voices, he could tell he was in a room somewhere.

His shoulders ached because his arms were pinned behind him, zip-tied based on the chafing on his wrists. His ankles were likewise secured to the chair’s front legs. Aside from shifting slightly on the chair, or maybe tipping it over, he couldn’t move.

Three men were talking not too far away. They spoke Spanish, but that was fine. The big man knew enough of the language to get by.

“It went all right?” one man asked.

“Yes. We’re all here, eh?” another answered.

“He fought a little,” a third stated, “but nothing to it.”

“Good. Let’s get a look at him,” the first one ordered.

One of them removed the burlap hood, revealing a cheap room with shabby furniture and three men ranged before him. Two of them had jumped him back at his hotel. The third guy, clearly, was in charge.

“Shit!” the leader blurted. “Who in the hell is this?”

“The guy you sent us for?” The way Number Two said it, sounding shaky now, told the bound man the boss had been expecting someone else.

“Idiots! When I ask you who this is, I want a name, understand?”

The one to the leader’s left began to say, “Captain, we—”

Captain X lashed out and hit him with a stunning backhand. “Now you want to use my rank and name?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“I’ve never seen this gringo in my life,” the leader snapped at them. “Did you at least look in his wallet?”

The bound man could feel it in his left hip pocket, pressed into his butt cheek.

“Cap—I mean, sir,” the man to the leader’s right chimed in, “he matches the description you gave us.”

“Description? You didn’t even check to see he was the right one?”

“Once he started fighting—”

“Shut up! If we get through this, you’ll be lucky if I let you cover traffic in Chiapas!”

Traffic? Playing deaf, the bound man realized two things. First, these were cops of some kind who had snatched him. Second, he was almost certainly in Mexico.

He flexed his wrists, confirming what he’d feared. His watch was gone, either torn off during the fight or stolen while he was unconscious. With no clock, he couldn’t tell how long he’d been knocked out or how far his abductors could’ve traveled in the meantime.

And if they’d been dumb enough to snatch him by mistake...

One of the flunkies moved around behind the bound man’s chair and found his wallet, handing it off to their boss. The guy in charge opened it, stared at the bound man’s ID, furious color rising in his face.

“‘Justice Department, Washington, DC,’” he read aloud. “Can either of you two idiots think back and remember who I sent you for?”

“The name?” one of the stooges asked, proving his low IQ.

“The name, the agency he worked for? Anything?” the leader raged.

“It was the DEA, sir,” said Number Three.

“Correct! It was the DEA. And now you bring me what? Some pencil-pusher out of the Attorney General’s office!”

“But—”

“But nothing, idiot! I ought to kill both of you where you stand.”

They edged away from him, the slightly braver of the two nearly whispering, “What should we do, sir?”

“You mean before the FBI and every other department of the US government starts looking for him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s only one thing left we can do, thanks to your incompetence.”

“We’ll do it, absolutely. Anything.” The barely smarter of the two was almost whining.

“You two will do nothing. I must call El Psicópata.”

The Psychopath.

Without a doubt, their bound captive knew that wasn’t good.

Chapter One

El Paso International Airport

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, stood a few yards off from Runway 12, watching as the Learjet 40 approached from the east. The aircraft descended to a textbook-perfect landing, its pilot throttling back on the twin Honeywell engines. It taxied toward him, gradually slowing to a halt. The engines switched off before its exit door opened behind the cockpit, on the port side, and a built-in set of steps unfolded to the tarmac.

Barbara Price came out to meet him. Wearing a tailored pantsuit and “sensible” shoes, she barely showed the stress of flying 1,900 miles—nearly the Learjet’s top range—from Stony Man Farm in Virginia to “The City with a Legend,” as El Paso called itself.

Bolan and Price were more than friends and colleagues, but they kept the greeting to a handshake. He followed her back to the plane, mounting the steps behind her to its cabin.

“You made good time,” he said as they sat facing each other with a folding table in between.

“No time to waste,” she said, not asking how he’d beat her there when he was coming from Los Angeles. He’d covered less than half the distance she had, and Price would know that automatically.

“So how bad is it?” Bolan asked.

“It doesn’t get much worse.”

“Tell me.”

He knew some of it from their brief phone conversation hours earlier. Hal Brognola, director of the clandestine organization known as Stony Man Farm and a head honcho in the Department Justice, had vanished from his hotel in El Paso the previous night, the next-to-last day of a law enforcement conference on terrorism and drug trafficking across the Tex-Mex border.

He knew El Paso was the Lone Star State’s sixth largest city, covering 256 square miles, with some 680,000 year-round residents. Across the Rio Grande, it faced Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s eighth largest city, smaller in size than El Paso but with 2.5 million full-time inhabitants. Together they formed the second largest binational metropolitan area on America’s southern border, after San Diego-Tijuana.

“Okay,” Price said. “I told you he was taken out of his hotel, and that’s confirmed from evidence recovered from the scene. We have his fingerprints on a hotel ice bucket and soda can he dropped when the kidnappers grabbed him. Local cops found his room key, same place, no evidence that anybody got inside the room after they lifted him.”

“Security cameras?” Bolan inquired.

“One long view of the hallway, from the other end. Two men, likely Latino, but no hits from facial recognition software yet. One of them jabbed him with a hypo. We’re assuming it was just a sedative.”

“Because why poison him and carry him away?”

“Exactly. When they took him out, another CCTV feed picked up a shot of the abductors hooding him and securing his arms and legs before putting him in a car trunk. No luck with an ID on the car, although it turned up on a traffic cam two blocks away, heading south. Stolen license plates. We assume the car was hot, as well.”

“Headed for Mexico.”

Bolan already knew four bridges spanned the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez: the Bridge of the Americas, Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge, Paso del Norte Bridge and Stanton Street Bridge. Combined, they permitted some twenty-three million vehicular passages yearly. Once across the border, southbound traffic could go anywhere in Mexico.

Brognola had been gone for thirteen hours. He could’ve traveled 780 miles within that time, at sixty miles per hour, but smart money said he’d probably been taken to a hideout tucked away in Ciudad Juárez itself.

“Who knew he’d be at the conference?” Bolan asked.

“Starting from the top,” Price said, “the AG who assigned him to it—over Hal’s objection, I might add. Kelly, his secretary, would’ve made the travel bookings. Then we’ve got the folks who organized the conference and the various official delegates from Justice, ICE, the DEA, likely a couple from the CIA pretending to be someone else. That’s ninety-five registered delegates, not counting Hal. Add on hotel staff, from managers to housekeepers. The Bureau will be grilling all of them, but...”

“By the time they finish up, it will be too damned late.”

“Bingo.”

Bolan went for the long shot. “Cell phone?”

“In his room. We can’t track him by GPS.”

“So it comes down to who might want to kidnap him, and why.”

“Cartels to start,” Price said. “Since 1997, the Juárez Cartel’s been under fire from both the Gulf and Sinaloa outfits, trying to control the city. That explains Chihuahua’s death toll in the Mexican drug war, and many of the killings in El Paso County.”

Bolan had crossed paths with each of those cartels at one time or another, but a nagging question still remained. “Would any of them know him? His connection to the Farm or covert missions?”

“They shouldn’t,” Price replied, “but when you’ve got billions to spend, I won’t pretend security in Wonderland is all that it should be.”

“Anything else?”

“I hate to even mention it, but yes...maybe.”

“I’m listening.”

“Most residents call Ciudad Juárez Paso del Norte and one magazine calls it the ‘City of the Future,’ but it has another nickname, too.”

“Which is?”

“The Serial Killers’ Playground.”

“The women, right?”

“Primarily,” Price said. “No two sources can agree on numbers, but at least four hundred have been murdered since the nineties, with about as many missing. There have been so many killed, in fact, they’ve come up with a special name for it. Feminicidio. Mostly young women, even girls, some of them prostitutes, the rest mainly sweatshop workers, underpaid and easy to replace.”

“You see the problem there,” Bolan said.

“Sure. Hal’s not a female and he isn’t young. Before we rule it out completely, though, remember that some serials switch-hit on victimology. They don’t all stick to one age, race or sex, much less to pattern victims who all look alike, drive the same make of car, whatever.”

“Still...”

“I grant you, it’s a long shot, but remember Mark Kilroy.”

“The kid snatched out of Brownsville by that cult in the late eighties.”

Price nodded. “One of an estimated thirty victims they took out before police caught on to them. They dealt drugs for a living, but also conducted human sacrifices, thinking that black magic made them bulletproof and physically invisible to enemies, including cops.”

“That didn’t work so well, as I recall.”

“Amen. One dipshit drove through a police roadblock, thinking they couldn’t see him or his car even when officers pursued him with their lights flashing. He led them straight back to the cult’s home base outside Matamoros, and it fell apart from there.”

“Most of them died, if I remember right.”

“Or got sent away for sixty years, the maximum in Mexico. My point is, you can have an evil person or a group of them mixing business with pleasure as the opportunities arise. And don’t forget, two of that cult’s top members were federales. One of them, the top narcotics officer in Mexico City, pulled twenty-five years at his trial. The other, who’d moved on to Interpol, murdered his second wife then shot himself. People are still debating whether his first wife committed suicide by hanging or if hubby tied the noose himself.”

“I hear you. Damn near anyone can kill for any reason. And in pairs?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, by a long shot. Cults aside, the Hillside stranglers were cousins. Same thing with Dave Gore and Fred Waterfield in Florida. In Philadelphia, Joe Kallinger would take his fifteen-year-old son along to help. Lucas and Toole were part-time lovers, traveling from coast to coast,” Price told him.

“You’ve studied up,” Bolan observed.

“Know the enemy. Never let anybody tell you they’re all carbon-copy, cut and dried.”

“So, if a pair of psychos snatched Hal, he could well be dead by now and we have no way to start looking for them. Two Latinos in Mexico? Try looking for a needle in a needle factory.”

“I know. We have to try, though.”

“Right. First thing,” Bolan observed, “will be acquiring hardware on the wrong side of the border.”

Mexico had strict laws regulating guns, at least on paper, restricting possession of most types and calibers to the military and law enforcement. The country’s only legal gun store—the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales—stood behind walls on a military base outside Mexico City. Its customers had to undergo months of background checks, involving six separate documents, and were frisked on arrival by uniformed soldiers.

That said, Mexico’s version of the US Second Amendment, written in 1857, guaranteed all citizens and legal foreign residents the right to bear arms, but stipulated that federal law “will determine the cases, conditions, requirements and places” of gun ownership. The net result: while the one and only army gun store sold an average of thirty-eight firearms per day to civilians, smugglers brought an estimated 580 weapons into Mexico from the United States. Others doubtless arrived on flights of foreign origin or passed through Mexico’s forty-one seaports on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

The results of that traffic in arms—and in drugs—had been making global headlines for the past thirteen years, since officials acknowledged their chaotic, ongoing drug war. At last rough count, the butcher’s bill included 250,000 dead and 30,000 missing, with 1.6 million persons displaced from their homes. The official body count so far included 12,456 cartel members; 4,020 federal, state and municipal police officers; plus 395 soldiers slain and 137 missing, presumed dead.

Hell on Earth, in simple terms—and that was without adding in the daily slaughter of civilians in places like Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros by human predators for the sheer love of killing.

“Tell me more about the killers’ playground,” Bolan said.

“Feminicide covers a world of kinks and fetishes,” Price said. “As I mentioned, no one really knows how many girls and women have been killed or when it started ramping up. Local authorities downplay it with an eye toward tourism and foreign investment in factories, and the victims never found go on the books as runaways. Officially, Chihuahua police admit 260 murders since they started keeping track in 1993, claiming only seventy-six fit ‘serial’ parameters with rape, torture and mutilation. But that’s ridiculous. Women’s groups peg the total somewhere between four and fifteen hundred when they add in missing persons.”

“How bad is it, really?” Bolan asked.

“Amnesty International counted 370 by 2005. Chihuahua prosecutors finally admitted 270 murders statewide in 2010, with 247 inside Juárez. They logged another 300-plus in 2011, with 59 percent in the state capital. Since then, the yearly stats go up and down like yo-yos, depending on who you trust.”

“With no convictions?”

“Sure, a few. In 1996 Omar Sharif—a bus driver from Egypt, not the actor—went down for three murders, sentenced to thirty years, but the killings escalated after he went away. At that point, cops claimed he was part of a gang called Los Rebeldes—that’s ‘The Rebels’—who kept killing after he was put away. Police arrested five of his alleged accomplices then cut them loose for lack of evidence. Sharif died during his fourth year in prison.”

“Any others?”

“A few. In 2001, police nabbed an alleged pair of team killers and charged them with eight homicides. One died during interrogation. Then his buddy confessed but later recanted, claiming police torture, and out goes that case.

“In 2008, prosecutors charged Sergio Barraza with killing one teenage girl, but the court acquitted him for lack of evidence and he split for parts unknown. They later tried him again in absentia—that’s a thing down here, no double jeopardy—and he was convicted, but they still haven’t found him. Meanwhile his victim’s mother was assassinated by an unknown gunman while picketing the governor’s palace—shot once in the head at point-blank range.”

Bolan rarely swore but now said, “Sounds like a steaming crock of shit.”

“And still continuing today, although most of the press in Mexico has tried to play it down,” Price said.

“Sounds like they need a wakeup call.”

“I’d say. And then some.” She frowned and asked, “What are you packing?”

“Flying in from LA?” he replied. “Not a thing.”

“Just as well. We’ve got a friend at the US Consulate in Ciudad Juárez. He’s CIA, name’s Tim Ross.”

As she spoke, Price handed Bolan what appeared to be a passport photo of a white man, late twenties, with hair a little on the long side and a well-trimmed Vandyke. Bolan committed the face to memory and passed the photo back to her, asking, “What does he know?”

“Nothing about the program, you or Hal. He helps us out from time to time with hardware, paperwork, whatever. He pulled two tours in the sandbox with the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines before he joined the Company, but I’d discourage getting him involved beyond delivery of gear when you arrive.”

“You’ll make the contact?”

“That’s affirmative. Just let me have your wish list.”

There were cocktail napkins in a slot beside the folding table. Bolan took out a pen, filled up half of one and then handed Price his list.

She read it over. “You’re pulling out all the stops.”

“I don’t see any other way to play it.”

“Right,” she said. “You’re driving over, then?”

“I’ve got a rental in the airport’s short-term parking lot.”

“Okay. I’ll set a meeting on the other side for you and Ross, then text you an address.”

“Sounds good.”

“Thoughts on the process, once you’ve gone across?”

“No suspects and no motive,” Bolan said. “The only way I see to play that hand is to bet the limit and keep raising until somebody folds.”

“You know we can’t help with the federal or state police across the line. Even if we could tell them what you’re doing over there, who knows which officers are trustworthy?”

“I know of at least one. But for this mission I’ll figure none of them and work from there,” Bolan replied.

It was, he knew, a decent rule of thumb for Mexico. The federales were divided into two departments. The Federal Judicial Police, founded in 1928, was disbanded in 2002 due to its own rampant corruption and criminal activity. It was replaced by the Federal Investigative Agency and attached to Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Safety as a “preventive” force against crime. Its counterpart, the Federal Ministerial Police, an investigative force tasked with fighting corruption and organized crime, was created in 2009 along FBI lines, directed by the Attorney General’s Office. Bolan would be ignoring the country’s third federal force: the Mexico City Police, which had no national reach, its officers confined to handling matters inside the Federal district. It would take a crystal ball to tell which members of the policing agencies were also drawing paychecks from the drug cartels.