Executioner 059 - Crude Kill

by Pendleton, Don

  Bolan takes his war to sea and washes the decks of scum

  The Executioner stood at the controls of a water cannon, hitting the enemy with a high-pressure blast.

  And it was working—in the darkness of night, the heavy stream pummelled down on the ship, cleansing it of terrorists.

  Bolan believed, for one short moment, that he had the bastards beat.

  But the terrorists had already emptied massive amounts of crude oil onto the ocean's surface. Now they put a torch to it.

  The night lit up. The sea was set ablaze. And Mack Bolan felt the weight of crushing defeat....

  Also available from Gold Eagle Books, publishers of the Executioner series:

  Mack Bolan's

  ABLE TEAM

  #1 Tower of Terror

  #2 The Hostaged Island

  #3 Texas Showdown

  #4 Amazon Slaughter.

  #5 Cairo Countdown

  #6 Warlord of Azatlan

  #7 Justice by Fire

  Mack Bolan's

  PHOENIX FORCE

  #1 Argentine Deadline

  #2 Guerilla Games

  #3 Atlantic Scramble

  #4 Tigers of Justice

  #5 The Fury Bombs

  #6 White Hell

  First edition November 1983

  First published in Australia February 1985

  ISBN 0-373-61059-9

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to

  Chet Cunningham for his contributions to this work.

  Copyright © 1983 by Worldwide Library.

  Philippine copyright 1983, Australian copyright 1983,

  New Zealand copyright 1983.

  Scanned by CrazyAl 2013

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 118 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, NSW. All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  The Gold Eagle trademark, consisting of the words GOLD EAGLE and the portrayal of an eagle, and the Worldwide trademark, consisting of a globe and the word WORLDWIDE in which the letter "o" is represented by a depiction of a globe, are trademarks of Worldwide Library.

  Printed in Australia by

  The Dominion Press-Hedges & Bell North Blackburn. Victoria 3130

  "Keep ye the law—be swift in all obedience. Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford. Make ye sure to each his own, That he reap where he hath sown.... "

  —Rudyard Kipling

  "A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green…"

  —Francis Bacon

  "Revenge is fruitless. Revenge is hollow, offering petty change to the victor—and even the change is plastic, worthless. To clear the world of evil itself is the ultimate task, the only fitting path for men such as myself. "

  —Mack Bolan

  In memory of Robert Clayton Ames, Middle East analyst, killed in the terrorist bomb blast that demolished part of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983.

  1

  The eyes of a furious zealot tracked Mack Bolan as he slipped silently into the darkened Milan residence courtyard. The man stared along his pistol sight, his finger curved around a blued trigger, and squeezed smoothly.

  The Executioner's keen night vision helped him catch the slight movement in the shadows of the first doorway ahead. He jolted to one side, dropping low into the deeper blackness just as the night exploded with three shots. Muzzle-flashes pinpointed the gunman in the entranceway. The nightfighter had swung up his silenced Beretta 93-R machine pistol as he dropped. It coughed three times, the suppressor choking down the blast of steel-jacketed 9mm death messengers. All three tore into the ambusher's head, slamming him backward against the wall already splattered with the gunman's hot blood and brain tissue.

  Before the body slumped to the dusty entrance, Bolan was running alongside the house. A light blinked on at his left but died at once. He kicked open a door and moved into the room, the Beretta in his right hand scanning the space from end to end. Two candles flickered on a small table. The room was empty.

  Ahead he saw a doorway covered by a beaded curtain. Beyond was a hallway. Bolan ran toward it.

  The Executioner carried weapons for a hard hit on this rattlesnake's nest. On his right hip hung the unstoppable .44 AutoMag he called Big Thunder. Under his left arm rested the Beretta 93-R. Hardpunching C4 plastique, detonators and special surprises nestled in pockets hung from his combat webbing. Three U.S. Army fragmentation grenades rode on the straps as well as one Willy Peter white phosphorous grenade, two knives and various ammo pouches.

  Ahead of the nightscorcher, a man wearing white pants without a shirt jumped from a doorway into the hall, spilling light around him. He swung a long gun toward Bolan. The Beretta chugged once and the guy thundered into permanent retirement, a hole blossoming in his heart. The sound of retreating footsteps came from the courtyard.

  The Executioner kicked open the next door down the hall and stormed inside. The room was empty. Around a corner to the left were three more doors. The first room was vacant. In the second he noticed someone had been sleeping but had obviously left quickly.

  Bolan heard a groan.

  The sound came from the third room. The door was locked. He concentrated his weight behind his boot and slammed it against the door. The casing inside splintered and the panel burst open. In the dim light the Executioner saw a man lying on a bed, reaching with a wavering hand for a military .45 automatic beside him.

  Bolan's Beretta centered on the form. His trigger finger tightened, then eased off. He saw that the man was critically wounded and did not have the strength to lift or aim the weapon.

  "No," Bolan commanded. The man halted in his wounded haze. Bolan turned and ran back to the end of the hall where he found a set of steps slanting upward. A figure appeared at the landing above and blasted two shots at Bolan, then vanished as the Executioner sent three rounds chasing him. As Bolan rushed up the steps he rammed a fresh 20-round magazine in the 93-R and peered over the landing from shoe-top level. Ten feet away a small man holding a grenade stared back.

  Angling his Beretta upward, the Executioner blasted off a burst, stitching a three-dot message across the guy's face. The man still held the grenade, but his lifeless body fell, fingers relaxed, and the grenade rolled free. As it turned, the thin metal safety spoon flipped off and clattered on the wooden floor.

  Bolan swung away, moved like lightning, then hit the floorboards.

  Four-point-two seconds later a blast shook the building. Instantly Bolan surged up and ran toward the explosion. Now the game was search and destroy. House-to-house combat, the Army way: clear each room as you moved forward. The next room was empty. Nothing stirred in the house. But there were more terrorists here, Bolan knew. He could feel them.

  A woman's wail sounded down the hall. Bolan stopped. He moved through another empty room and down the hall to a war room. Large-scale maps had been tacked to the wall. A dozen red pushpins identified places around the world.

  Yellow pins were pressed in another dozen places. Signs in Italian were taped to the wall. A business-sized desk, littered with papers, sat at the side of the room. On the far wall a closet door jiggled. Bolan put a 3-round burst into the panel, chest high. A muffled scream rose, then
faded and died as the door swung open and a middle-aged man fell forward holding his chest. Blood seeped between his fingers and a small automatic pistol. He expired as he fell to the floor.

  Bolan searched on. The next room was vacant, then another locked door. One hard kick jolted the door inward and the Executioner stepped into a woman's room.

  Two teenaged girls, wearing blouses and blue jeans, sat on a king-size water bed; both were chained to the frame.

  "Please help us," one of them pleaded in English.

  Bolan instructed them to pull downward and hard on the chains. Big Thunder roared twice and the chains came free from the headboard. He darted to the hallway and looked out.

  "How many people live here?" Bolan asked. "Nine, ten, up to twenty," the same girl answered. "Can you help us escape?"

  The Executioner nodded curtly. "Stay right behind me." He saw no one in the hall, cleared two more rooms, then came to a rear stairway. He went down the steps three at a time, met no resistance and waved the girls out a back door into the night.

  A heavy handgun roared from the corridor behind Bolan and plaster showered on him from the wall. He turned the 93-R, spraying six rounds down the hall. He saw a foot vanish into the next ground-floor room. Bolan moved silently down the hall and peered into the room from a crouch.

  It was an armory. Dozens of rifles rested in racks. Boxes of ammunition were stacked high against the walls. Combat gear of all types lay on shelves. He spotted a pair of rocket launchers and boxes of rounds. Bolan waited. Two minutes later he heard someone clear his throat deep inside the room. Then a boot scraped across the wooden floor. The Executioner calculated where the terrorist was—behind the first row of wooden boxes halfway down the room. The nightfighter lifted his Beretta machine pistol, sighted over the top of the boxes and waited. A minute later he saw black hair rise over the box top, then an inch of forehead. The man stopped a moment, and Bolan refined his sight. A fraction of a second later the head pushed up to eye level. Bolan fired. Three kisses of death drilled through the terrorist's forehead, slamming him into a stack of army blankets on his way to eternity.

  The Executioner cleared the armory. There were enough weapons and gear there to outfit a platoon of infantry. He put a blob of C-4 plastique on a carton of hand grenades, inserted a pencil detonator-timer and set it for ten minutes. He looked at his watch, then activated the timer.

  As he moved into the hallway, a 6-round burst of hot lead splashed into the wall beside him. Bolan dived back through the open door. The fire had come from the room at the end of the corridor.

  He pushed the Beretta around the doorframe and sent six rounds into the far room. Three shots replied, one chipping the wooden frame over him. The Executioner jerked an Army frag grenade from his webbing, pulled out the safety pin, permitted the metal arming spoon to pop off and let the bomb "cook" for two seconds before he threw it into the room. The four seconds were spent by the time the grenade landed. It went off with a dust-billowing roar.

  The big guy was less than two seconds behind it, charging down the hall, chattering off 3-round bursts from the 93-R in a routine assault-fire pattern.

  Just before he entered the room, Bolan pulled the big .44. There was no need for the minicannon. The grenade had riddled the room that had once been a work area. The lifeless body of a young man in pajama bottoms had been flung over a small table by the blast that also shredded his face, escorting him into hell.

  Bolan left, cleared the last ground-floor room, then trotted back to the wounded man in the bed.

  The guy had not moved. He could not move.

  The Executioner pushed the .45 away from the weak hand and watched the Italian terrorist. He was about forty, weathered, alert, with a festering bullet hole, taken in an earlier terrorist gunfight, just below his heart. It was amazing that the man was alive.

  "I speak some English," the Italian said slowly, prepared to barter for his life.

  "Where is Lutfi?" Bolan demanded, his cold eyes boring into their target.

  The wounded man shook his head.

  Bolan took his face in both hands and stared hard at the wounded man who shivered as he looked at sudden death in the eyes of the black-suited one-man army.

  "Ten seconds," the Executioner said softly. "Tell me where Lutfi is in ten seconds or you'll join your buddies."

  The terrorist on the bed swallowed, his glance sped to the door, then back to the intensely frigid, unreadable eyes.

  "Lutfi was here. He got out when the first shot came. He's going to London."

  "Where in London? Tell me and you live. I'll get you a doctor."

  The terrorist muttered an address in London, and another in Paris where Lutfi often stayed. Bolan memorized both. Time was falling away quickly now. He had only two minutes to get out of the house before it blew. Bolan looked around the room. It was part sickroom, part office. Near the bed lay a dozen sheets of an Italian newspaper. In a drawer he found a Largo-Star submachine gun with a full clip. Bolan slung it over his shoulder.

  A stack of newspapers on the desk caught his attention. Several papers had items circled with a wide-tipped red marking pen. He leafed through them. Halfway down he found an English-language edition. The page was anchored by a picture of a huge tanker. The tanker was not circled in red, but it caught Bolan's attention because of its size. He read the article below the photo:

  The Contessa completed her maiden voyage this week, discharging the last of more than 1.5 million tons of crude oil into waiting tanks, pipelines and smaller tankers in six different countries in Europe. She will be making regular runs from the Persian Gulf. The Contessa is nearly a half mile long and 435 feet wide. She cost the American owners over two hundred forty million dollars to build.

  Bolan checked the circled pictures in the other papers more closely and noted that they included various individuals, banks, famous buildings, even one museum. Four of the photos circled were of the Prince of Wales. Everything marked could be a potential victim of a kidnapping, or a hijack target for a terrorist.

  The nightfighter checked the rest of the desk. In a lower drawer he found samples of bomb fuses that had been waterproofed. He also discovered a complete miniaturized radio transmitter that could work as a trigger and a small receiver that could act as the receiver-detonator. To his surprise, both had also been waterproofed. They were well made, up to the state of the art. It looked like Lutfi was ready to do any job.

  The Executioner glanced back at the wounded man. He was in pain. The recent gunfire would soon bring the Italian police. The warrior picked up the wounded terrorist. The searing pain caused the guy to pass out. Twenty seconds later Bolan carried the man out the back gate of the house into the neighboring yard. He laid the unconscious man near the rear door of the house and walked toward the next street.

  Before he had gone fifty yards, Lutfi's two-story headquarters shattered into rubble as a giant explosive fist tore it apart. A dozen smaller explosions penetrated the hushed Milan sky, then flames leaped from the wreckage. In the distance the sirens of approaching police cars sounded.

  The lawmen would soon find the wounded man and he would be treated: a bargain kept. Bolan hurried toward his rented car. Jack Grimaldi would be waiting, anxious to be moving.

  Bolan had jetted out of Stony Man Farm to get to Milan that morning, even before all the details of his mission were spelled out. His immediate job was to find and terminate Lutfi, a terrorist, the most hated international criminal currently in action. Lutfi was a serious overmatch for any small nation, and Lutfi always had the advantage of a surprise attack. He was ingenious, fearless and absolutely amoral. And he could pick his time and place.

  So the Executioner had started his own personal campaign against Lutfi.

  He would use the man's own tactics and fight force with force. He would fight with a deadly, efficient weapon called The Bolan Effect.

  It was an effect that found its own enemies. Bolan's methods could intercept an individual's dark destiny of
death and turn it back on itself long before any back-up agency or force could locate the menace for him. It was almost as if terror—human horror in all its forms—became magnetized toward the night-fighter and forced his hand.

  Because of this, Bolan could act before any frontline fighters could. Indeed, Bolan already acted before the intelligence bureaucracies did. He acted before the armed services brass did. He acted before any single part of the chain of command could act, however impressive the total organization might be. And often, Bolan acted before the enemy did.

  In this case, Lutfi had escaped death and thereby won the first battle.

  But not the war.

  Not the war that Bolan, personally, had just declared.

  2

  The Executioner sat in a plush office at American International Imports of Rome, a cover operation for his latest, post-Congo activities in the Italian capital. It was a little after midnight. Bolan stretched out his long legs and looked at the standard heavy-scrambler attachment he had fitted on the telephone handset.

  The conference call to Stony Man Farm was soon in confusion.

  "Hold it," Bolan commanded softly into the phone. "I can hear only one of you at a time." He paused and the line remained silent. "Is there anything new on Lutfi?"

  April Rose's soft, efficient voice responded quickly.

  "We do have a positive ID on your man, Mack. Now we know for sure he was the assassin who wounded Walt Harrison two weeks ago and killed his two security men. Oh—" She stopped suddenly.

  For a second, only April Rose's sharp intake of breath sounded over the wire. Then Hal Brognola's steady voice filled the void.

  "I'm sorry, Striker. We didn't know about it until this afternoon. Harrison died about an hour ago. They tried everything they could."

  Mack Bolan gripped the receiver tighter and closed his eyes. A bitter taste surged into his mouth. He swallowed several times.

  "Yeah. Okay. We ... we expected it. He was just hit too bad, too often."