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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
Prologue (#ue3f4206c-3e5f-5761-9cd8-928f16fed865)
Chapter 1 (#u19209e11-b187-5d8c-81cf-12cdd32c5199)
Chapter 2 (#u28303b44-ce13-506e-9cb7-9ec3d350df2c)
Chapter 3 (#ua21f3d37-c9e1-568a-8342-d7d9adca1424)
Chapter 4 (#u70db1f9d-1777-5550-8c8f-77cf32a94af3)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
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)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
A cloud passed in front of the moon, and the moors became so dark Steven Oxford couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face, much less the outlines of the three men who stood in the ankle-high grass with him. The wind picked up from the east, gusting across Lake Erne, carrying with it the earthy scent of peat and a chill that penetrated Oxford’s heavy black wool sweater and the long-sleeved cotton T-shirt he wore underneath. Even in July, the moors between Donegal Bay and the lakes became uncomfortably cold at night.
In a belt holster tucked into the small of his back, Oxford carried a Glock 17, the standard handgun issued to CIA operatives.
A few months earlier, during his annual requalification, Oxford had placed ten of the seventeen 9 mm rounds into a two-and-a-half-inch circle at twenty-five yards—exactly twice the quantity required. Oxford was a man who liked to keep track of those details even more than the CIA did. His office walls at Langley were covered with citations and certifications, all arranged in precise chronological order.
The cloud passed, exposing the moon’s thin crescent, enabling the outlines of the waiting men to become discernable as blobs of deeper darkness against the sepia blanket that cloaked the moors. Oxford’s three companions were also dressed in black, their features highlighted by the silvery illumination, giving the impression that their faces floated like decapitated heads in ghostly search of their lost bodies.
A freight train rumbled in the distance, one of many that traveled the railroad tracks crisscrossing the moors. Barely audible above the clack and clatter of the passing train was the howl of a dog—a mournful sound that echoed over the wasteland to be answered a few seconds later by another of its species. Had Oxford been superstitious, the wail would have sent a shiver down his spine. But neither superstition nor fear were words in the agent’s vocabulary. Despite standing on a moor in the middle of the night in an Irish county where half the population over sixty years of age swore to personal knowledge of banshees, he was confident that he and the Glock could handle whatever came their way.
He took a swift, visual inventory of his companions. Bobbie Reegan was clearly the most dangerous, driven by a hate so fiery his eyes sometimes glowed as if lit from behind. The other two were no more than common thugs, losers drawn to the Orange Order in much the same way that Oxford thought skin-heads were attracted to organizations spewing white supremacy. Political motives, if considered at all, were secondary. Blacks, Catholics, Jews, it didn’t matter whose blood they were spilling—it was the actual hate and killing that pulled them in.
The night’s meeting with Cypher would be an important one. He’d said they’d be assigned their targets and given half the money, which meant that Oxford’s undercover assignment was coming to an end. Once Cypher doled out the actual missions, it was Oxford’s time to fish or cut bait, to convey all the intel to his superiors and move on.
Oxford felt, rather than saw or heard, Cypher’s arrival. There was a slight compression of air, and he and his sidekick were suddenly in their midst.
As they had for the previous three meets, Cypher and his companion wore ski masks that covered everything but their eyes and mouths, making them look not ghostly, but more like the Cheshire cat.
Oxford turned his full attention to the new arrivals. Even the extreme darkness could not hide the physical bulk of the man who accompanied Cypher. His widely spaced eyes and mouth floated a good six inches above everyone else’s, and the patch of deeper darkness representing his body’s volume was twice that of Reegan’s. Oxford recalled that at the group’s very first meeting, the man had moved his muscular frame in a threatening manner that told everyone he was no stranger to the martial arts. This guy, Oxford thought again while tapping his molars together as if the chilly air was making him shiver, was obviously a bodyguard.
Cypher came immediately to the point, speaking in a rustling voice reminiscent of leaves being blown across a brick courtyard in winter.
“The committee has chosen targets. Randolph’s cell is first,” he said, as if everyone in Ireland was privy to the classified knowledge that Peter Randolph was head of a special group of CIA operatives whose mission was to coordinate the defection of former Soviet scientists.
Randolph’s cell? The words took Oxford by surprise.
Although the splinter group had been formed a short three months earlier with the four members supposedly being handpicked by Cypher himself, Oxford had infiltrated the Orange Order more than a year before, and there had never been any talk of directing violence against anyone except the Catholics. What was driving this shift in tactics? he wondered.
“Reegan,” Cypher stated, “you’ll be the one to hit Randolph. He’s on holiday now, but he’ll be back at his home base in Stuttgart starting next week, and we’re thinking that will be the best place to do it. We’ll give you everything you need.”
Reegan grunted his understanding.
Accompanied by the crinkling sound of paper, Cypher said, “Here’s an envelope with half your money. You’ll get the rest when you do the job.”
Oxford heard Reegan stuff the payment into his pants pocket. He was amazed at what Cypher was saying. Not only were these guys planning to hit the CIA, they apparently had access to company information. Randolph’s supervisor should have been the only person to know when one of his active operatives was taking vacation. Was there a leak in security? And if there was, how far up the chain did it go?
Oxford tapped his molars together while contemplating the impact of Cypher’s words. If the plan was to kill everyone in the cell, he had to warn Randolph about the three operatives he knew were carried on his roster.
“Taylor, Buckley and Johnston will also be hit this week.”
Oxford heard Cypher say their names as a strong arm suddenly clasped him from behind, and in one swift move snatched the Glock from his belt holster. Too late, he realized, he had failed to notice Cypher’s bodyguard slipping behind him. He pushed with all his might, attempting to expand his shoulders to open enough space for an elbow jab, but the arm around him was like an iron vise.
The huge man squeezed, and Oxford’s breath was driven from his lungs. He saw stars and thought for a moment he was blacking out, but the moment passed, and he drew a shallow breath that kept him conscious.
“There’s a traitor in our group,” Cypher said in a dry voice.
There were two poisonous darts in Oxford’s wristwatch, each loaded with a derivative of venom produced by central eastern Australia’s inland taipan, the most lethal viper in the world. Scientists at the CIA had refined the toxin, creating a poison hundreds of times more deadly. The result was a substance powerful enough to bestow upon a tiny dart the capability to deliver almost immediate death.
Held as he was, Oxford was unable to reach the watch’s trigger button with his right hand. His mind racing, he realized that, if he could knock his shoes together, the blade inside his right heel would snap into place, and he’d be able to stab his captor’s shin.
Like a movie viewed in fast forward, the scenario flashed through the agent’s mind. Reacting to the unexpected stab to his leg, the bodyguard would release him and, in less than two seconds, both he and Cypher would feel the prick of death stored inside the wristwatch. Oxford could quickly dispatch the other three, barehanded if necessary.
As if the huge man could read his thoughts, Oxford was suddenly thrown forward into the darkness. He landed on his knees, spinning immediately upon hitting the ground while reaching for his left wrist.
Excruciating pain, the likes of which he had never exprienced, shot through Oxford’s arm and into his brain as a 9 mm round from his own weapon smashed into the watch and continued through his wrist, leaving his hand dangling by a few bloody tendons. Ever the professional, the first impression to register in his mind above the searing agony was that the bodyguard must have slipped on night goggles to make such a shot.
His second thought, coming nanoseconds after the first, was to get the hell out of there.
Oxford lunged and took two quick steps before a round caught him in the back of the knee, blowing his patella onto the ground before him in a shower of bone chips and blood. He pitched forward, writhing in pain so intense that he lost awareness of all other sensations. The cold ground rushed up as he slammed onto his face, breathing raggedly, inhaling small bits of dirt laced with a peaty residue that tasted of decay.
A heavy boot smashed into his side, taking his breath away and flipping him onto his back. Oxford fought hard to keep from passing out. He knew he was about to die, and he wanted to be fully aware when it happened, facing death head-on, the way a warrior would.
Cypher’s bodyguard loomed over him. High above the Irish countryside, the sliver of the moon shimmered, illuminating the short barrel of Oxford’s Glock as the cold steel was pressed against his forehead.
In the distance, an animal wailed. Cypher said, “We’ll see who comes for him,” and there was a brilliant flash of white light that ended the CIA agent’s life.
1
Mack Bolan listened to the rhythmic signal coming through his earpiece. The cadence was strong and steady. As he got closer the beat would get faster and, during his final one hundred yards, the pitch would change if he veered off course. Judging from the spacing between notes, Bolan knew his objective was a ways off, maybe as far as three miles.
When the GPS finally led him to within one yard of the tiny transmitter implanted inside agent Oxford’s molar, Bolan’s earpiece would begin to hum a steady tone.
As he listened to the steady electronic pulse, the soldier was confident that the system would lead him directly to his goal.
In keeping with his practice for night missions, Bolan’s six-foot-three-inch frame was dressed entirely in black, from his jump boots that trod silently across the hard ground of the moors, to the knitted wool hat that covered his closely cut hair. The green-black-and-brown jungle camouflage he had smeared on the high points of his hawkish features absorbed the silvery sheen of moonlight, rendering him invisible against the dark countryside.
On his hip he wore a .44-caliber Desert Eagle and, in the pouches attached to the web belt, he carried, among other items, several clips of ammunition.
A holster on his left shoulder held a 9 mm Beretta 93-R, and a foot-long Fairbairn-Sykes combat knife rested in a weathered black leather sheath strapped to the outside of his right calf.
The man some called the Executioner didn’t know if he would actually need the weapons he carried, but he had been walking the hellfire trail too long to approach any mission unrepared. Despite the tranquil appearance the Irish countryside offered, a CIA agent had lost his life three nights earlier, and, to Bolan, that made the area a combat zone. More than once, Bolan had seen supposedly cold spots turn unexpectedly hot in seconds. He hadn’t survived all these years by being careless. Parking his rental car more than two miles away and coming in on foot was only the first precaution.
The Irish coast near the Ulster border was rugged country, with narrow, winding roads twisting through bowl-shaped contours of land extending from Lake Erne to Donegal Bay. In the daylight, views, at times, were nothing short of spectacular as the trails meandering through barren moors suddenly emerged upon sheep-studded pastures, so intensely green they were almost blinding. Immediately south of the moors, where Bolan had parked his car under the cover of a thin stand of hickory trees, the way became treacherous, perilously clinging to the sides of cliffs rising straight up from the sea where, hundreds of feet below, angry surf pounded the craggy coastline. Small religious shrines were carved at irregular intervals into the side of the rock walls to commemorate locations where fugitive priests had celebrated Mass during the British repression.
The trouble here had started, as so many conflicts in the history of man have, over religion. Protestant against Catholic, both sides killing for Christ, with the escalating violence over a period of more than two generations spawning the Orange Order, the IRA and twenty or thirty splinter groups, each with its own vision of tomorrow’s Ireland. For the most part, the rest of the world had ignored the conflict. A bunch of Irishmen killing each other on their tiny island way up in the North Atlantic didn’t threaten world stability the way an outbreak of war in the oil rich Middle East would.
Under normal circumstances, a man like Mack Bolan wouldn’t have been the one called into Ireland for a CIA find-and-retrieve mission, but the communiqué had been sent straight up the chain of command to the director of Homeland Security, who’d immediately alerted the President of its contents. The chief executive had decided he wanted someone with no traceable ties to a government agency, The call had gone out on a secured line to Hal Brognola at the Justice Department.
“They have to take it seriously,” Brognola had said later that day when he’d met Bolan on the National Mall in the shadow of the Museum of Natural History. They’d been walking west along Madison Drive, the domed Capitol building at their backs gleaming a brilliant white in the light from the afternoon sun.
The big Fed had continued. “This is much more than just an agent getting murdered, Striker. A terrorist group threatening to assassinate cabinet members? Jesus. The President wants someone to help assess how credible these people are.”
Brognola was fully aware of the Bolan’s arm’s-length relationship with the government, but he also knew that the soldier had never refused a request from his old friend. Brognola’s agenda usually was in tune with the Executioner’s. But Bolan would decide on his own whether or not to accept the mission.
Bolan had remained silent, studying the transcript he’d been reading as they’d walked.
“What’s this about another 9/11?” he asked.
“That’s the part that has the President most concerned,” Brognola answered. “The CIA doesn’t need any help dealing with these guys if they’re just a bunch of crackpots trying to make a statement. But, if what we’re up against is an organized terrorist cell with the capability to carry out those threats, we have to know who they are, and we have to know it now. All the President wants you to do is to get the CIA pointed in the right direction.”
It had been the part about another September 11 that had convinced Bolan to take the assignment.
He had met with Edmund Fontes, the director of CIA activities in Ireland, who’d reluctantly given him Steven Oxford’s final field report. In it, the late agent had described Cypher and the terrorist cell the mysterious man was forming, but there was no mention of any targets other than Catholic organizations in Ireland.
“He was one of my best,” Fontes had said tersely while handing Bolan the report, “and, if it was up to me, we’d go in and get him, ourselves. This is our job, and we don’t like someone else doing it.”
Bolan took no umbrage at the CIA man’s resentment. The way he received missions all but guaranteed that he’d be treading on someone else’s turf from the minute he showed up. He’d go in, get the microchip for Brognola, the one Oxford had in a back molar, and see what developed from there.
Now, twenty-four hours after saying he’d take the assignment, he was on-site, closing in on his objective.
An animal howled in the distance, and Bolan paused to take his bearings. Close by, a freight train rumbled over tracks on its way to the industrialized areas to the north.
The homing signal’s beat suddenly picked up, and Bolan’s senses went on full alert. With the terrain’s undulating dips and swells dotted with sparse patches of tall bushes and wind-blown hickory trees, the area was perfect for an ambush.
Bolan walked quickly, his eyes scanning the darkness, his free ear processing a steady flow of sounds. Noise carried well over the moors. Not as well as over water, where the crack of a gunshot could carry for miles.
He heard them before they were aware of his presence. A metallic click lasting no more than a millisecond rode to his ears on the night’s currents. It might have been the sound of a buckle that hadn’t been taped, or a snap fastening someone’s top collar against the breeze, but to a soldier with Bolan’s honed senses, it just as well could have been a bullhorn announcing their location.
Dropping to one knee, he reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles. As he adjusted the goggles on his face, Bolan turned off his earpiece. He’d deal with the ambush first, then locate Oxford. From the signal he had been getting and the direction he thought the errant sound came from, his greeting party appeared to be positioned close to his objective.
Bolan focused the goggles, bringing the moors into sharp relief. There was a flurry of movement off to his left as a pair of jackrabbits dodged and sprinted their way through the underbrush. He scanned from left to right, pausing at every patch of bushes and trees, watching for unnatural movement. A halo of light flared briefly, the flame of a cigarette lighter magnified tens of thousands of times as its photons passed through the photocathode tube of his goggles.
Amateurs, Bolan thought. Undisciplined, untrained amateurs.
He switched the goggles to infrared mode, and the scene before him shimmered slightly as he painted the landscape with IR. Three men were positioned in a clump of trees about a hundred yards off to his right, their figures clear and distinct against the cooler foliage. A slight spiral extended upward from the man who was smoking, his cigarette heating the air directly above him.
Bolan removed the goggles and returned them to their pouch. The men waiting for him obviously knew that Oxford was wearing a transmitter that would lead someone to his remains. Did they also know that he had been a CIA plant? And, if they did, what were their intentions now for the man who came to retrieve him?
Regardless of what they had been planning, the Executioner thought they were about to get more than they’d bargained for.
He rose into a crouch and set off, as silent as an owl swooping from above to snatch unsuspecting prey. When he finally got to a point about twenty yards behind them and they became visible in the dim light, he lowered himself again to one knee and took note of how the three were set up. He figured they would be facing his objective. He switched the earpiece back on.
The beat was coming in as an almost steady tone, and the note had changed, indicating Bolan was slightly off center. Before turning the signal off, he mentally extrapolated the sound with his position and that of the ambush, arriving at a spot about fifty yards from where he thought Oxford’s body would be buried.
He withdrew a powerful penlight from his front shirt pocket and rotated the lens to produce a beam. Sliding the Desert Eagle from its holster, he stood and took a step forward.
“Everyone freeze!” he shouted in a voice full of authority as he held it out at a full arm’s length to the left of his body.
