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Syrian Rescue
Don Pendleton
Critical evacuationA secret meeting with antigovernment leaders ready to negotiate peace in Syria backfires when the plane carrying UN diplomats to the war-torn country is shot down. Tasked with finding–and extracting–the diplomats before word of their disappearance gets out, Mack Bolan drops into the Syrian desert.But Bolan isn't the only one looking for the crash site. The rebels and the Syrian military each have their own agendas, and UN officials would make valuable hostages for either side of the conflict. With the plane's tracking device mysteriously disabled and hundreds of miles of desert to search, Bolan is in a deadly race against fighters who are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their cause. The Executioner won't stop until he leaves his enemies in the dust of their own destruction.
CRITICAL EVACUATION
A secret meeting with antigovernment leaders ready to negotiate peace in Syria backfires when the plane carrying UN diplomats to the war-torn country is shot down. Tasked with finding—and extracting—the diplomats before word of their disappearance gets out, Mack Bolan drops into the Syrian desert.
But Bolan isn’t the only one looking for the crash site. The rebels and the Syrian military each have their own agendas, and UN officials would make valuable hostages for either side of the conflict. With the plane’s tracking device mysteriously disabled and hundreds of miles of desert to search, Bolan is in a deadly race against fighters who are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their cause. The Executioner won’t stop until he leaves his enemies in the dust of their own destruction.
Bolan leaped from the Niva carrying the RPG-7.
Behind him, he heard Sabah Azmeh jump out and make a run for it, as instructed. Not that it would help, if the advancing chopper’s searchlight fell on either one of them.
Whether it was a Hind or Hoplite helicopter, neither could shrug off a direct hit from one of Bolan’s 93 mm rocket-propelled HEAT warheads. He could bring down whichever helicopter it turned out to be—if he hit it.
He’d have to do this right the first time. He hadn’t grabbed a second rocket from the Niva’s backseat, and he likely wouldn’t have time to reload the launcher anyway, if his first warhead missed its mark.
The searchlight found his ride, swept to the pilot’s right and froze on Bolan.
He recognized the stutter of a heavy machine gun and saw its muzzle flashes winking at him from the helicopter’s chin. That meant he had a Hind to deal with and would have to make a clean hit with his HEAT round when he let it fly.
First, though, Bolan had to dodge the storm of bullets streaming toward him. He hit the ground and rolled, took a beating on his shoulder from the launcher’s tube, and came up in a crouch, squinting through its sight into the searchlight’s blinding glare.
The Executioner: Syrian Rescue
Don Pendleton’s
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Is not every war between men, war between brothers?
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Borders will not keep me from hunting down those who kill their brothers and sisters for personal gain. Willing or not, those criminals are at war with The Executioner.
—Mack Bolan
THE (#ulink_d1ebc1be-c61b-582a-baf0-d57bc902c0f8)
MACK BOLAN (#ulink_d1ebc1be-c61b-582a-baf0-d57bc902c0f8)
LEGEND (#ulink_d1ebc1be-c61b-582a-baf0-d57bc902c0f8)
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.
For Staff Sergeant Melvin Morris
Contents
Cover (#u27f631af-5aaa-5fcb-b39c-745e0c1abd5e)
Back Cover Text (#u1072a17c-85b7-5250-b3dc-b80dee446dfd)
Introduction (#u442668c0-59e2-5799-aec7-bd93b48fb6e2)
Title Page (#u19f61844-8920-5d07-bc31-e55b7fca7cae)
Quotes (#ue51fb671-479d-5cd2-9d15-510ba5de090f)
The Mack Bolan Legend (#u61ac08c2-7db5-56b5-947e-14459ed22bf2)
Dedication (#u05081149-9711-5008-9d3f-3233a528ad37)
Prologue (#u7c139e13-7e17-554a-8c55-42ddc5d7df91)
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Prologue (#ulink_d9a48d1d-25a2-51e0-81d9-ec96281d0a3d)
Deir ez-Zor Governorate, Syria
Yaser Jenyat was sick of waiting. It was miserably hot and the dry earth underneath his buttocks was scorching. When he checked his Rolex replica, it seemed the hands were frozen. Had they moved at all since he had checked them last?
“They’ve changed plans, or itineraries,” he suggested. “Maybe someone warned them.”
“Who?” Ziad Dalila asked him.
“How should I know?” Jenyat answered. “Someone.”
“We have orders,” said Malek Hakim.
“We have obeyed them,” Jenyat shot back. “We came, we waited. No one said we have to take up residence.”
“You want to leave,” Hakim replied, “start walking.”
Jenyat tried to spit but found his mouth had suddenly gone dry. “I didn’t say that.” His voice cracked like the sunbaked soil. “We all should go, before a damned patrol turns up.”
“You know these Westerners,” Tawfiq Jandali said. “They’re slow with everything.”
Until they want to kill you, Jenyat thought. Shifting where he sat, his back against the left rear tire of their UAZ-469 off-road vehicle, his elbow grazed the AKM assault rifle standing beside him, almost toppling it before he lunged and caught it, just in time. He glanced around to see if any of the others had observed his clumsiness, but they were busy squinting at the eastern skyline, toward Iraq.
“We’ll wait another thirty minutes,” Hakim said. “If they’re not here by then, I’ll call in for advice.”
No one replied to that. It had not been a question.
Jenyat sipped warm water out of his canteen. He wished they had some shade, that someone else had drawn the so-called “plum assignment,” that he might be anyplace but here. The thoughts of glory he’d envisioned when his name was drawn had long since disappeared, evaporating like the sweat that drenched his shirt.
At least he would not be the one to fire the crucial shot. He understood the basics of the 9K338 Igla-S shoulder-mounted launcher and its 9M342 missile, but he was not competent to aim and fire it, thank Allah. If they had waited all this time only to fail at their assignment, Jenyat was relieved the shame would not be his.
“I see something,” Dalila said, passing Hakim his field glasses. “East-northeast.”
That covered half the godforsaken desert, but Hakim had barely raised the glasses to his eyes when he said, “I see it.” Several seconds later he added, “Yes. It’s them.”
Jenyat rose to his feet, surprised to feel a fleeting tremor in his legs, and reached for his rifle. He would have no use for it, if all went well, but he felt better holding it, sharing the AKM’s potential for explosive violence.
“Get ready,” Hakim ordered.
Tawfiq was even now hauling the Igla out of the UAZ-469’s cargo bay. The tube was painted olive drab, like everything else in the army. It was a little over five feet long, nose-heavy with its pistol grip and its bulbous infrared sighting gear. Already loaded, it weighed thirty-seven pounds, including the warheads. Its maximum operational range was almost four miles, with a flight ceiling of eleven and a half thousand feet.
They had been promised that the target, although capable of cruising at much higher altitudes, would be within the missile’s range. The flight would be a border hop, evading radar on both sides to keep the visit under wraps. Deniability was crucial to diplomacy among the states that labeled themselves civilized.
“Late as they are, how do we know it’s them?” he asked Hakim.
“I see the plane,” Hakim replied. “It has ‘UN’ painted behind the cockpit and on the tail.”
“Praise Allah,” Ziad Dalila said.
“Allahu akbar,” Jandali chimed in, as he hoisted the launcher to his right shoulder.
Jenyat could see the target now, and he heard the whisper of its twin engines drawing closer. He considered praying briefly, silently, but then decided it would be a waste of time.
Squinting, he watched the small white speck, distorted by the heat haze, moving into range.
* * *
“I WILL REMIND you that we must not set our hopes too high,” Sani Bankole said.
Seated across the aisle from Bankole, Roger Segrest almost asked, “what hopes?” but stopped himself. He was a pessimist by nature but had learned to hide it well during his long climb up the State Department ladder to his present post. Most of the people he dealt with daily lived for smiles and reassurances, not straight talk that would drive them all to drink.
Besides, he didn’t have to spell it out. Segrest was confident that everyone aboard the Let L 410 was wise enough to know the truth—namely, that Syria was in the toilet, circling the drain. The country had been bad enough, a nest of terrorists, before its latest civil war erupted, pitting a despotic government against hundreds of rival “liberation” forces. Toss in Hezbollah, the Kurds and ISIS, among other players, and what did you have?
A goddamned recipe for disaster.
Still, there was an outside chance he and the other passengers on this plane might accomplish something, he supposed. Stranger things had happened in the strange world of diplomacy, but they were few and far between.
One of the pilots spoke up on the intercom. “We’ve crossed the border, gentlemen.”
Segrest couldn’t have told the difference, peering out his window at the trackless wasteland below. All deserts looked the same to him: bleak, unforgiving, dangerous.
He idly wondered what their lodgings would be like in Deir ez-Zor. They’d be stuck in the Syrian city for three or four days, unless the talks broke down immediately—as they might, considering the endless grievances both sides advanced.
Make that all sides, Segrest thought. It might have been a relatively simple matter if the only people at the table had been government officials and the rebels who opposed them. Oil, politics and religion changed that, of course, dragging in Lebanon, Iraq, Israel and Jordan, not to mention Russia and his own employer, the United States. They hadn’t heard from China yet, or Egypt, but he wouldn’t be surprised if both of them weighed in before the year was out.
Diplomacy, my ass, he thought, only half listening to their putative spokesman from the United Nations. It was a damned chess game, with better than a dozen players making moves.
“But if we have patience—” Bankole was on a roll, but now the cockpit intercom cut through his platitudes.
“We have a target lock! Fasten your seat belts, gentlemen. Evasive action, starting now!”
Segrest looked out the window, didn’t see a damned thing but the pale blue sky they occupied and the broiling desert. “Target lock” meant someone had “painted” them with infrared to guide a rocket or a burst of antiaircraft fire, but who in the hell—
The Let L 410 shuddered, riding a blast of thunder from the clear sky. The explosion didn’t breach the cabin, but oxygen masks automatically dropped from the ceiling, dangling like weird wilted flowers in front of their faces. Segrest fumbled with his seat belt, fastening it on the third try, as the turboprop nosed over and began to fall.
Even the pilot sounded panicked. “Crash positions, gentlemen! We’re going down.”
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