LITMIR.BIZ

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      I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I only love that which they defend.

      —J.R.R. Tolkien

       (1892–1973)

       The Two Towers

      I will protect the people of this nation from all traitors, whether by gun, sword, arrow—or my bare hands.

      —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.

      Contents

      Prologue

      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

      Epilogue

      Prologue

      The autumn winds blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and kicked up outside the midnight black car. It was windy enough that the twenty-five-year-old car creaked and squeaked and even shook at times.

      It didn’t matter to Agent John McAvoy. He loved both the autumn season and his old retired police car, a 1982 Crown Victoria. There were better cars, but McAvoy loved things with problems and faults. He preferred to work with things and figure out what went wrong, then make them right. Often, he joked that that was why he married his ex-wife, only to learn that things could be fixed—people, not so much.

      Back when he was a detective for the Chicago Police Department, McAvoy was that rarest of detectives who actually liked a good mystery, a stone-cold whodunit. McAvoy relished the cases his fellow detectives loathed. They all wanted the slam dunks, the easy arrests, where there was a reliable witness and plenty of physical evidence, plus minimum paperwork.

      But not McAvoy. He wanted to solve things. It gave him a greater sense of accomplishment, the feeling of a job well done. That trait made him well-suited to the more complicated work done by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He’d moved over to BATF after only ten years with CPD, having grown weary of Chicago’s weather and politics, and having needed a change after his divorce. Not that the politics were any better in Florida—in fact, they were worse, as hard to believe as that was—but at least there was more sun and no winter.

      Best of all, no ex-wife and a lot more pretty women. It definitely had been the right move.

      It had been months on this particular undercover case. Last May, he’d become Donald Kincaid, a Key West–based gunrunner. It was miserable, cozying up to the scum of the Earth, having to pretend to be their pals. However, the months of work had gained him valuable information.

      He hoped it would all be worth it.

      McAvoy sat at his steering wheel, a burning cigarette dangling from between his lips, reading the file on a former Marine lieutenant turned gunrunner named Kevin Lee. The BATF agent had read it all before, of course—Lee was one of the major players in South Florida—but McAvoy couldn’t get over Lee’s impeccable service record with the Corps, ending with a tour in Afghanistan. He had no reprimands, no bad behavior, no warning signs at all—it was spotless. Sometimes, he thought, people just flipped a switch.

      It had taken him months to get the lead on this warehouse. McAvoy was sure that he was close to the jackpot, finally—the light at the end of the tunnel that would get him back behind his desk at the BATF field office in Miami.

      He could see men were wandering aimlessly in and out of this warehouse on Stock Island, the penultimate of the islands that made up the Florida Keys, the last being Key West, the southernmost point in the continental United States.

      McAvoy had parked his Crown Vic in the lot of a scuba diving place next door. The dive shop had several cars and SUVs present, as it was running a night dive, so McAvoy’s car didn’t stand out.

      The warehouse was supposed to be shut down, but Kevin Lee had taken over the property through a shell company. That was the thing about illegal operations—nothing was legit or permanent.

      Peering through his Bushnell 8x30 Imageview Instant Replay Binoculars, McAvoy saw that the guards were fairly lax. There were only two of them, and they patrolled the perimeter once every hour or so—if they even remembered. One was wearing an MP3 player, while the other had been paging through a skin magazine, occasionally holding it up for his music-listening partner to share in the joy of the airbrushed, Photoshopped, silicone-laden female form.

      Their rifles were slung unceremoniously across their shoulders. McAvoy was seriously tempted to take the warehouse now, but he didn’t have any backup. Using the Bushnell’s five-megapixel camera, he took

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