Prairie Fire

by Don Pendleton

  Annotation

  Mack Bolan, wounded and run to earth, is trapped in an isolated Kansas farmhouse. Outside, the dogs of death are waiting for nightfall before they rip him apart.

  As a hired killer, "The Cowboy" sells his service only to the highest bidder. Although he has his mark cornered, he knows this hit is the toughest yet. By morning he'll deliver the targets head to his demonic employer.

  The Executioner rediscovers, in the indomitable spirit of a struggling farm family, the eternal dream of the American heartland - his land, his dream. These are the people he always fought to protect — the good and the innocent.

  But his very presence makes them certain victims - unless he destroys the slavering menace.

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  Don Pendleton's

  Prologue

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  First Kill***From Mack Bolan's journal:

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  Don Pendleton's

  Prairie Fire

  All the great struggles of history have been won by superior willpower wresting victory in the teeth of odds or upon the narrowest of margins.

  Winston Churchill

  Maybe I'm the ultimate optimist. I believe my sword hand is guided by thoughts of victory. I command myself to win. Therefore. I have the advantage.

  Mack Bolan

  To the eighteen U.S. Marines who died tragically during the "Team Spirit '84" military maneuvers. God keep.

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Mike Newton for his contributions to this work.

  Prologue

  Death was no stranger to Mack Bolan. The Warrior and the Reaper were old acquaintances, with a grim accommodation reached across the years. Sometimes they worked in concert, other times at odds, no friendship or enmity between them. Death was neutral, first cooperating with the soldier, then conspiring to defeat him, both with fine impartiality. In time, Death would consume him as it had so many others on the hell fire trail.

  In time. Perhaps today.

  This soldier had no fear of death. A realist, Bolan had resigned himself to the inevitable ending of his Everlasting War, but resignation was a far cry from surrender. In the face of death, he was living large and making every moment count, determined to inflict the fullest measure of destruction on his enemies before the end. While life and strength remained, his war continued.

  And the warrior's personal crusade had come full circle. Launched in anger, as a quest for private vengeance, it had grown into a holy war against the Mafia's killer legions. From a limited engagement to a global power struggle, Bolan had applied his expertise at jungle warfare to a rather different wilderness. The urban jungle's denizens had come to know and fear him, elusive and indomitable, as he fought against the odds.

  In the end he had achieved a victory regarded by the experts as impossible, but his achievement bore a price.

  On a rainy afternoon in Central Park, the soldier had surrendered his identity, to be reborn as Colonel John Macklin Phoenix, human spearhead in another everlasting war.

  The enemy was terrorism now; the killground was anywhere fanaticism sought to throttle freedom with bloody hands. Committed to his war and supported by a team of dedicated allies, Bolan took the battle to his enemies on every front, continuing the brushfire struggle of attrition that had begun for him in Vietnam so many lives ago.

  Belatedly, with countless provocations on the record, Bolan's land of liberty was going hard, fighting back. And for the first time, in a decade marked by losses and humiliation, she was winning — thanks to Bolan and his Stony Man teams. Cautiously, and then with greater confidence, America began to hope.

  Then seemingly from nowhere, polluting everything it touched, a lethal human parasite had undermined the war on terrorism and brought the holocaust to Bolan's Blue Ridge Mountain sanctuary. In a single stroke this faceless adversary had signed the Phoenix death warrant, driving Bolan back into the murky underground without cover, without official sanction.

  The Executioner was on his own again, one man against the savages. And once more he had a private score to settle — for the death of April Rose, his lady love, and for all the other damage to his friends. But the stakes transcended any personal vendetta. Compared to Bolan's current foe, the Mafia and urban terrorists diminished into paltry insignificance.

  The Soviet KGB had run afoul of Bolan and his warriors several times before its undercover operative engineered the firestorm at Stony Man Farm.

  For months before the final strike, there had been indications of a guiding hand behind the random acts of terrorism that had slaughtered hundreds, held a frightened world in thrall. And finally, as the battle smoke was lifting from the shambles of his Virginia haven, Bolan recognized the hand, identified its owner and the sinister design behind its machinations.

  He was up against the KGB, damn right, and all the varied rumors had been verified in spades. Of course, the plan had never been for Bolan to confront the global threat alone, but he had learned to play the cards as they were dealt, to bet the limit every time and never fold. He would identify the evil and cauterize its deadly tentacles anywhere they could be found — behind the Iron Curtain, inside war-torn Afghanistan, or in America itself.

  Without official cover, Bolan's reentry to the States had been a problem in itself, but one the Executioner had solved before. In another life, the world's most wanted fugitive had mapped the hidden highways of the underground, used them more than once when mafiosi had attempted to escape his wrath by traveling abroad.

  He knew this shadow world as the postman knows his route, every twist and turn memorized, and he was privy to the messages that traveled there by word of mouth.

  The grapevine had alerted him to danger on the home front, and Bolan had responded with alacrity. He carried the advantage of surprise — and very little else — against his stateside enemies, and it could be enough. If they were careless. If they let their guard down for a fraction of a second.

  If.

  And he had blown it.

  His enemies were getting better at it, learning swiftly from their past mistakes — or perhaps his luck was simply turning. Either way, the Executioner had faced a grim reminder of his own mortality, and he was far from being out of danger.

  Quite the opposite, in fact. From all the indicators, he was looking at the worst of it ahead and moving into dead collision with the storm.

  But he was not afraid of dying in the cause, of joining April and the others who had gone before him. He could accept the thought of death with equanimity — but he could not surrender.

  Compromise with Evil was unthinkable, and he would die as he had lived — with fire and thunder — rather than allow himself to be diverted from his course.

  Bolan chose the purifying flames, and he would bear the torch against his enemies relentlessly until the fire consumed them all together. And with that decision made, he took the only path available.

  The fire was waiting.

  1

  It was dry and dusty in the corn. A gentle breeze had risen from the south, rippling the living stalks, but its caress escaped the man who lay facedown between the rows.

  He had lain motionless for half an hour, since the final burst of desperate energy ran out, and cursory examination would have passed him off as dead. But small, persistent signs of life remained: the shallow rise and fall of lab
ored breathing; beads of perspiration that collected on his brow and underneath his eyes before they joined to trickle down the dust-caked cheeks; a rusty stain against his ribs that glistened now with fresher, brighter crimson at its center.

  He was still alive, but time was running out. Another night outside would finish him.

  He had to move or die where he lay.

  An eyelid flickered, opened. Glazed eyes focused. Time to move, and damn the pain of battered flesh, exhausted muscles.

  The fallen runner struggled up and off his belly, supporting his weight on knees and knuckles, biting off a ragged moan as pain assaulted him in nauseating waves. He waited for the worst of it to pass, aware that it was now or never. He was losing it, and there would be no second chance.

  The wound beneath his arm had opened up again, and he could feel the blood oozing against his ribs, already soaking through the fabric of his skinsuit. A bullet crease along his thigh was superficial, crusted over where the slug's passage had released a scarlet stream. Manacles had lacerated the flesh around his wrists, but the runner's hands were numb from lack of circulation. Before he lost the use of them completely, he would have to lose the cuffs, and soon.

  Priorities, a tiny voice reminded him from somewhere close at hand. First things first. He had to put some ground behind him, find a temporary haven. Hands would be the least of it if he was overtaken there, exposed, defenseless.

  The hunters would be running grids behind him, scouring the countryside and homing on the scent of blood. His spoor was plain enough, and they would have him soon, unless...

  A superhuman effort brought the runner staggering to his feet. He kept his balance with the force of willpower alone. Exhaustion and the loss of blood were dragging at him, threatening to pull him down, but grim determination drove him stumbling on. His scuffling passage raised a cloud of Kansas dust between the rows of seed corn.

  The wall of silent stalks on either side was taller than his head, obscuring his view beyond the narrow alleyway. Overhead, the sun had passed its zenith, indicating that it was early afternoon and that his dusty runway stretched along an east-west axis.

  Southward the Interstate — alive with danger now — extended like an asphalt scar across the landscape. They would be waiting for him there, expecting him to flag a ride, and so he put the sun behind him, trudging to the east.

  He had a chance — a slim one — if he could intersect an access road, pursue it undetected to the nearest farmhouse. Then he could get his hands on tools, perhaps a car. Wheels would give him a slight edge on his pursuers.

  Moving doggedly along the irrigation trench, he dismissed the defeatist train of thought. He concentrated on the simple task of walking, his bleary mind trying to grapple with time. It was the second day since his escape and he reckoned he had been averaging a dozen miles a day, avoiding major roads and open country where he could.

  The fields of corn and wheat had slowed him down, but they provided necessary cover from his relentless trackers. Once — the previous afternoon — he had discovered a slow-moving stream and slaked his thirst, but he had eaten nothing since breakfast on the morning of his capture.

  His hunger was the least of all his problems. He would collapse from loss of blood long before he starved to death. And if he tried to save some time by taking to the roads, he could expect a similar result — the silent death-stroke of a sniper's bullet.

  So it would have to be the fields, whatever happened there. At least until he found a better hiding place. Exposure at the moment would be suicidal, and the runner still retained a working sense of self-preservation.

  The hours ran together in his fevered mind, hallucination merging with reality to yield an endless waking nightmare. Faces and remembered incidents appeared and vanished until the cornstalks themselves loomed forbiddingly, transformed into lurking enemies. He recognized the warning signals of collapse, but realized that if he stopped to rest, he would never rise again.

  If luck had spared his life initially, it would require a special kind of stamina to make the save complete.

  At first he thought the house and barn were a mirage, but a second glance assured the runner that his eyes were not deceiving him. His quickening pulse betrayed a new excitement, but he suppressed the rush and struggled into a prone position, peering out between the rows of corn.

  Reconnaissance was vital. He could destroy whatever chance he had with one false step.

  The farmhouse was a single-story wood frame with a covered porch in front. From where he lay, the runner noticed that wire mesh enclosed the porch, preventing him from checking out the door and windows there. And anyone who cared to glance in his direction had an unobstructed view — or shot — if he advanced across the forty yards of open ground.

  He scanned the narrow yard, populated by a dozen chickens, to the barn directly opposite. Double doors at either end were standing open, giving him a clear view of the interior. From where he lay, there was no sign of human life inside.

  The runner's mind was ticking off the possibilities. There would be tools inside the barn — an ax or hammer, maybe a hacksaw — anything to rid him of the handcuffs. Something that could double as a weapon. But that would come later...

  He decided not to approach the barn directly. Instead, he opted for a blind-side run, restricting his exposure to the final moments of approach and entry. All he had to do was shift another twenty yards to the left and he'd put the barn between himself and anyone inside the house.

  He wriggled back along the trench on knees and elbows, until he was sure that no one in the farmhouse could observe his move. Satisfied, the runner worked himself into a kneeling position, using the nearest of the stalks for support as he gained his feet. Fatigue had turned his leg muscles to jelly, scarcely able to bear his weight.

  Moving parallel to house and barn, he blundered headlong through the rows of corn. With throbbing hands he battered the stalks aside, felt them snagging at his clothing, drawing blood from arms and face. By the time he reached a vantage point behind the barn, the runner was drained of energy.

  And still there was no time for rest.

  The barn was beckoning, its cool interior inviting. There lay sanctuary and the opportunity to rest. A few more steps and he could be inside.

  The runner broke from cover, his shackled hands impeding the momentum of his progress. His equilibrium thus upset, he almost fell on his face before he found his stride. Thirty yards of open ground, and no one opposed him. Twenty, and his tortured throat and lungs were screaming for oxygen; colored flecks of light were swimming behind his eyes. Another ten and he could feel the soothing shade even before he reached it.

  There was a momentary risk before he made the open double doors, but no one tried to stop him. With a final lurching rush, he gained the haven that he sought, the welcome darkness reaching out to envelop him. He collapsed against a wall to gain his breath and bearings.

  As he had surmised, the cavernous interior was empty. Half a dozen paces before him, a wooden ladder offered access to the hayloft, and tools were ranged along the southern wall. From all appearances — the homemade workbench, oily stains upon the floor — his hiding place was more garage than livestock shelter. Guessing, he decided that it housed a pickup truck or tractor.

  But the owner could return at any moment and find him loitering. And in his present situation, that discovery could be tantamount to death.

  From where he stood, the runner spied a hacksaw on the wall above the workbench. Later, when his unknowing hosts had settled down to sleep, he would have use for it. At the moment, though, concealment was the top priority. Concealment and a chance to rest in peace.

  The irony of that did not escape him, and he grimaced, shaking off the deadly lethargy that sought to numb his senses. He would rest in peace, damn right, if he relaxed his guard too much.

  He started toward the ladder like a prisoner bound for the gallows. If they found him here, there would be no escape. Against determined e
nemies with guns, the loft was indefensible, a death trap — but it was all he had.

  He became aware of a nagging hunger, his stomach growling on empty.

  A rank of nesting boxes, for the chickens he had seen, was built against the nearest wall. Alert to any sound of movement from outside the runner detoured, rummaged briefly through the straw, and came away with three eggs. Without a moment's hesitation, he cracked the shell with his Incisors, sucking out the contents.

  The famished runner savored every drop and thought that it was enough — almost — to keep his belly quiet for the moment. Later, he would raid the nests again, or venture out with darkness to forage for some other nourishment.

  The fugitive spent a moment gathering his meager strength before he tried the ladder. Muscles in his arms and shoulders screamed, his hands like grappling hooks, devoid of feeling on the rugged wood.

  The runner concentrated on his leaden feet that felt so ponderous and unsteady on the rungs below. He struggled upward inch by inch until his elbows braced against the floorboards of the loft itself. With a final desperate heave, he put everything he had into the effort, and at last he lay facedown upon the rough boards.

  He rolled onto his back, grimacing at the pain in his side. Slowly he sat up and propelled himself with heels and elbows toward the interior of the loft until he came to rest against a bale of hay.

  He wriggled his body into his straw bed and could feel exhaustion overtaking him. The runner let himself relax, setting his mind adrift. Sleep was welcome when it came, but it was not without some perils of its own.

  And he could not escape the dreams.

  2

  First, before the pain, Mack Bolan became aware of movement. Padded upholstery with the smell and feel of leather pressed against his cheek. On the seat beside him, another body shifted heavily, the cushions squeaking beneath the weight.