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Line Of Honor
Don Pendleton
A group of American medics and dozens of refugees are held captive after a Janjaweed war band takes control of their camp in Darfur. With the president's hands bound by political red tape, Mack Bolan launches a rescue mission using his own team of mercenaries.But there is more to the terrorists than guns and violence. With the Sudanese government's support, the Janjaweed group has become an unyielding force in the region. As the enemy troops close in, Bolan soon realizes he could be leading his men into a death mission. But there's no turning back. Without him, the captives have no chance of survival–and the Executioner will not let them down.
Mercy Mission
A group of American medics and dozens of refugees are held captive after a Janjaweed war band takes control of their camp in Darfur. With the president’s hands bound by political red tape, Mack Bolan launches a rescue mission using his own team of mercenaries.
But there is more to the terrorists than guns and violence. With the Sudanese government’s support, the Janjaweed group has become an unyielding force in the region. As the enemy troops close in, Bolan soon realizes he could be leading his men into a death mission. But there’s no turning back. Without him, the captives have no chance of survival—and the Executioner will not let them down.
The tank rumbled on, seemingly unstoppable
Bolan pulled the pins on a pair of grenades and charged the armored vehicle.
As he ran into range, his progress was noted and the tank’s turret spun to put its gun on him. Bolan threw a grenade. The white phosphorus charge hit the tank square on its slanted front. The vehicle’s prow was immediately enveloped in white smoke and streamers of metal skyrocketed. Bolan took a hard left and threw himself down as the tank fired blindly at him. The sonic crack of a shell passed two feet over him, and coax fire followed, but it was scything in the wrong direction. Bolan rose.
Again he sprinted toward the tank. Waves of heat rolled off it from the burning phosphorus on the front deck, but the warrior paid no attention. He jumped and hooked an arm over the 100 mm barrel, letting it carry him toward the bow. The turret continued to turn, and he dropped onto the tank’s blackened back deck. A scorched dent the size of a trash can lid cratered the steel, and a smoking hole the size of a fist marked where the grenade had penetrated. Bolan could hear men shouting below, and chemical fire extinguisher squirted out of the opening.
The Executioner unclenched his fist and dropped his second grenade down the hole.
Line of Honor
Don Pendleton
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
If honor calls, where’er she points the way, The sons of honor follow and obey.
—Charles Churchill
1731–1764
The Farewell
Where there are people in need of my help, I will go. Because it is only in keeping up the fight against those who do evil against the innocent—no matter where on this planet they may be—that this war can be won.
—Mack Bolan
The Mack Bolan 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.
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Charles Rogers for his contribution to this work.
Contents
Chapter 1 (#u730b9800-6a6e-53ed-b76b-9f7e21bd86ba)
Chapter 2 (#u78aaed8a-4c7b-5bc6-b209-13214566948e)
Chapter 3 (#uea5a9c1e-9404-5bcc-baaa-b649ea58f46e)
Chapter 4 (#u9fa8ba10-75e9-5938-a71b-10cb74a97198)
Chapter 5 (#u9b26ab85-9277-597d-92ab-d28e94e0a76c)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
1
The Sudan
The wind roared through the open door of the helicopter cabin. Mack Bolan’s knuckles went white on the grips of the M-134 minigun as he watched the armor-piercing incendiary cannon shells streak past the cabin like green laser lines in the predawn. He shouted into his throat mike to reach Jack Grimaldi in the cockpit. “Jack! Do something!” The Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot close air support jet was flying right up Dragonslayer’s rear and seemed intent on ripping the girl a new one.
Dragonslayer screamed into emergency war power in response.
The Executioner’s stomach dropped as Grimaldi hauled back on the stick and the helicopter went nose vertical. The Sudanese jet streaked past underneath. The Stony Man pilot shoved the stick forward and kicked the collective. Bolan swung on his chicken straps like a hammock in a gale and caught sight of the glowing red lanterns of the Su-25’s twin Tumansky turbojets. He brought the minigun around and squeezed the trigger. The weapon’s motor whined, and the six barrels spun in a blur. Bolan’s own red laser lines scored the night, and he saw bullet strikes sparkle on the Frogfoot’s fuselage. The minigun could fire up to 3,000 rounds a minute as the electric motor whirled its six barrels at dizzying speed. The problem was that the Executioner was firing .30-caliber rifle bullets, and the boys at the Sukhoi Design Bureau sheathed their attack planes in titanium.
The Su-25 was firing 30 mm cannon shells and just one would light up Dragonslayer like the Fourth of July.
For this particular mission, Dragonslayer was stripped to pass foreign inspection and speed; her mission was search and rescue. Bolan’s gun station was a last-second add-on for hostile-landing-zone suppression.
They had never made it to the landing zone.
The Su-25 fighter pair had dropped out of the sky on them like God’s wrath. Fortunately these Sudanese fighter pilots had no experience in dogfighting. The Sudanese air force had spent the past two decades mostly strafing defenseless villages and refugee camps. The lead Su-25 had made the lethal mistake of trying to go low and turn and burn with Dragonslayer. Grimaldi had simply spun the chopper on its axis and given Bolan a lane of fire. The Executioner had ripped about three hundred rounds right up the Frogfoot’s port-side air intake and put paid to the Sudanese pilot’s account.
Wingman wasn’t having it.
He had intuited the situation. His plane could approach six hundred miles per hour. His 1990s vintage Russian Doppler radar was a joke, but helicopters weren’t exactly stealthy. Dragonslayer was a nice vibrating blob on his screen and the sun was coming up. The Su-25 was twice as fast than his prey and taking advantage of that fact. The Frogfoot pilot was climbing high and then screaming down for gun runs and zooming away before Bolan’s ineffectual return fire could have any effect.
The soldier watched the Su-25 bank hard around in the purple light. “Jack, we’re going to have to do this the hard way!”
“What are you suggesting!” Grimaldi shouted.
“Let’s surrender!”
Bolan could almost hear Grimaldi smiling into his mike. “Okay! Let me see, Su-25, export version, his stalling speed has gotta be, what? Eighty-five? Ninety klicks per hour, give him a nice comfortable…”
Dragonslayer dropped altitude and noticeably began slowing as the pilot throttled back. The Su-25 continued its hard turn in the distance to come up on Dragonslayer’s six again. Sunlight began to pour over the Nuba Mountains to the east. Grimaldi held the aircraft in suicidal-level flight as he continued to drop speed. Bolan had a nice visual on the Frogfoot as it began to close.
“You want me to turn belly-up, as well?”
“No! But let’s lose the ordnance!”
“Right!”
Grimaldi flipped a switch and the explosive bolts holding the M-134 on its mounts snapped like firecrackers. He tipped Dragonslayer just slightly to be helpful, and Bolan shoved the minigun out the door. The soldier hoped the enemy pilot was paying attention. Grimaldi held Dragonslayer steady at six hundred feet and 150 miles per hour. Bolan leaned back in his straps and lodged himself behind the cabin door frame. He reached back and slid his hand around the grips of his grenade launcher.
Bolan waited for the Russian 30 mm gun to blow him and Grimaldi to hell.
Even over the thunder of Dragonslayer’s rotors he heard the roar of the twin jet engines. The Frogfoot attack fighter pulled up alongside Dragonslayer like a traffic cop pulling over a vehicular offender. Morning light continued to spill over the mountains, and Bolan could see the Su-25 pilot pointing at Grimaldi and then pointing down at the ground.
The Stony Man pilot was waving back and grinning in a friendly fashion.
Bolan swung out on his straps. The M-32 Multiple Grenade Launcher was a 6-shot weapon. The soldier put the reflex sight slightly in front of the Su-25’s port-side air intake and fired. The fragmentation grenade hit the Su-25 wing about six feet back and detonated harmlessly. Bolan dragged his sights forward to increase his lead and fired again. His second frag grenade detonated against the pilot’s armored cockpit glass. Its only effect was to make the man nearly jump out of his seat. Bolan split the distance as the pilot yanked on his stick and fired the launcher four times in rapid succession. The soldier had front-loaded the M-32 with four frag grenades followed by an antiarmor round and white phosphorus.
The third frag missed.
His fourth bomb, the antiarmor and the incendiary grenades arced in the flight and were sucked up by the turbojet one-two-three like golf balls being eaten by a wet-dry vacuum. The Su-25 pilot had the unwitting decency to dive for the deck and take Dragonslayer out of collateral-damage range. Bolan had seen more explosions in his life than most men had had hot dinners. His eyebrows rose slightly as the Frogfoot shot a fifty-yard tongue of white fire from its port-engine nacelle.
Seconds later the Sukhoi disappeared as 3,000 liters of jet fuel came into violent contact with superheated gas, molten metal and a cloud of burning white phosphorus expanding in her belly to fill every internal crevice. Bolan watched as a ball of orange fire and white-and-black smoke fell from the sky like a slow-motion meteor. Bits of jetfighter with less drag fell from the fiery mass in little smoldering black streamers.
“Gosh…” Grimaldi observed. “Nice shot.”
“Thanks.” Bolan leaned back in his strap, broke open the smoking grenade launcher and reloaded. “I don’t suppose we have a fix on our target anymore.”
“No.” Grimaldi sighed. “We lost our window. We’re going to have to wait until target reestablishes contact.”
Bolan snapped his weapon shut on a loaded round. Odds were they weren’t going to get too many more chances. “Take us home.”
“Copy that.”
The Executioner glanced backward and watched the molten mess that had once been an airplane become a smoking hole in the dust of the Sudan.
All of this begged the question of just how exactly two Su-25s had gotten the jump on them. The Sudanese air-defense grid wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art. Grimaldi had flown them in out of Uganda well under their 1980s vintage Soviet radars. For that matter, Dragonslayer had the most sophisticated electronics suite of any helicopter in existence. If the Sudan had been hammering the sky with their radar, Grimaldi would have known it. They hadn’t detected anything until the Su-25 duo had suddenly swooped out of nowhere. Bolan and Grimaldi had been caught flatfooted. There was really only one explanation and it wasn’t a happy one.
Someone had tipped off the authorities.
Lokichogio Airport, Lokichogio, Kenya
GRIMALDI WAS INCENSED. “Okay, someone tattled!”
Bolan pulled a sweating brown bottle of Tusker lager out of the ice chest and wiped it across his own sweating brow. The U.S. Military General Purpose Tent didn’t have climate control. He cracked the bottle and shrugged. “Wasn’t me.”
“Somebody did.”
“You checked her for bugs?”
The pilot scowled. He had gone over every inch of the aircraft before takeoff and triple checked after the Sudanese dogfight debacle. “Nah, you’re right, I should have thought of that.”
Bolan tapped the sat-phone icon on his tablet. He had already given Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman a debriefing and was hoping for some follow-up.
“Bear, what have you got for me?”
Kurtzman came on the line instantly from the Computer Room at Stony Man Farm, Virginia. “Not much. That was a very interesting story you told me. I’d have to say the most interesting development is that there have been no new developments.”
“No reaction from the Sudanese?”
“Not a peep. Nothing about unauthorized incursions into their airspace, much less any fuss about losing two of their attack fighters.”
“So the question is, who knew about us?”
“Someone tattled!” Grimaldi muttered.
Kurtzman had clearly heard the pilot. “Striker, unless you think Farm security has been compromised, I’m putting tattling on the low-order-of-probability list.”
“Then we were spotted, raised red flags, and someone put the tell-tale on us,” Grimaldi stated.
“That’s the way I see it, too, but I’m finding it kind of hard to fathom. Did you check Dragonslayer for bugs?”
