Patriot Strike

TEXAS BLAST ’EM

After the murder of a Texas Ranger, Mack Bolan is called in to investigate. Working under the radar with the dead Ranger’s sister, he quickly learns rumors of missing fissile material falling into the wrong hands are true—and the terrorists plotting to use the dirty bomb are die-hard Americans determined to remove Texas from the Union, no matter what the cost.

Following a trail of cold bodies, Bolan finds himself always one step behind the oil tycoon funding the deadly plot and his New Texas Republic army. But as the countdown to D-day begins and millions of Texans are oblivious to the target on their backs, time is running out. The only option is to take the bait of the superpatriots and shut them down from the inside. You don’t mess with Texas. Unless you’re the Executioner.

“Out!” Bolan snapped

Sergeant Granger bailed out on the passenger’s side. Bolan crouched behind his open driver’s door and Granger found cover between two semitrailers.

Any second now…

The chase car roared into view, headlights lancing toward the parked RAV4. They had to see it, but the black car sitting there, stopped dead, would confuse them long enough for Bolan to begin the fight on his own terms. A slim advantage, but he would take what he could get.

Which, at the moment, was a clean shot through the Yukon’s tinted windshield. Bolan didn’t count on hitting anyone with that first round, but it forced the larger SUV to swerve away, tires screeching on the asphalt.

Breaking from his own partial concealment, Bolan sprinted in pursuit of the Yukon. He was the hunter now, whether the Yukon’s occupants knew it or not. The game had turned around on them, but there was no change in the stakes.

Still life or death.

Patriot Strike

Don Pendleton

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of

malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

—Aldous Huxley,

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

and Tomorrow (1956)

We fought one civil war for the Union already. I’m shutting down the second one.

—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 com-mand 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 inhis 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

Epilogue

Prologue

Lubbock, Texas

The Golden Sage Motel stood on Highway 82 west of town. Also known as the Marsha Sharp Freeway—named for the former coach of Texas Tech’s Lady Raiders basketball team—the highway is Lubbock’s primary east-west access road, providing greater access to the university and downtown Lubbock.

But no one would ever know it from the Golden Sage.

Built when the freeway was still just plain-old Highway 82, the motel squats beside six lanes of asphalt, blank-eyed windows watching traffic pass. A few cars stop, inevitably, but a glance at fading paint, cracked cinder blocks and spotty neon signage on the fake saguaro cactus out in front quickly reveals that business isn’t thriving.

Jerod Granger didn’t care.

He’d checked in looking for a place to hide, taking a room around in back where passing drivers couldn’t see his six-year-old Toyota Camry XV30 sitting by itself. He’d told the clerk he couldn’t sleep with too much highway noise outside his window and accommodating his desire was easy, since the Golden Sage had only two guests registered when Jerod had arrived.

Three bodies for two dozen rooms. So much for economic stimulus.

He had one night to kill before tomorrow’s meeting, couldn’t push it forward any further. He’d said the deal was urgent, but he’d balked at saying life or death. That part would have to be explained in person, face-to-face, tomorrow morning.

Lubbock’s FBI office, on Texas Avenue, watched over nineteen of the state’s 254 counties. Lubbock, in turn, was supervised from Dallas, one of the bureau’s fifty-six regional field offices scattered nationwide. Granger didn’t trust the Dallas office and in fact had been advised to seek out only one of Lubbock’s resident agents.

Hence the delay.

If he could trust just anyone, he could have strolled in off the street last week, sat down and told his story to the first G-man or G-woman available. That wouldn’t fly, however. Not with the explosive secret he was carrying, the stakes that he was playing for. He’d asked the only person that he really trusted for some advice and had received a single name.

Case closed.

Now all he had to do was make it through the next—what? Thirteen hours and change?—to have that talk, give up his evidence and breathe a huge sigh of relief over a job well done.

A job he’d never wanted, obviously, but it made no difference. Sometimes a circumstance reached out and grabbed a guy by the throat, and wouldn’t let him go.

So here he sat, on his bed in Room 19, watching a crazy show about a woman with six personalities, while he ate his KFC meal with a Ruger Super Redhawk .44 Magnum revolver beside him. It was the “small” model, with a 7.5-inch barrel versus the maximum 9.5-inch, still bigger and badder than Dirty Harry’s Smith & Wesson Model 29. It would kill anything that walked on two or four legs.

And Granger hoped it would keep him alive.

By this time tomorrow he would be in protective custody—assuming he lived that long and that any such thing still existed. Granger wasn’t even sure the FBI could protect him.

Still it was the best chance he had left. His only chance.

The wacky chick on TV was dressed like a man now, drinking a longneck Corona and scratching herself like a truck driver in a strip club. Hell, she was in a strip club, paying ten bucks for a lap dance. Granger scowled and switched it off with the remote, not minding nudity but put off by what he regarded as the program’s sheer absurdity. He reached out for his soda can, ready to wash down some of the colonel’s original recipe—and found it empty.

“Crap!”

The pop machine was four doors down from Granger’s room, tucked into an alcove with an ice machine at the motel’s northeast corner. He didn’t like going outside in the dark, not tonight, but the chicken was stuck in his throat now. There went another dollar fifty for a can of fizzing syrup that he used to get for half a buck.

He took the Ruger, tucked it inside the waistband of his slacks as best he could and donned a jacket to conceal it. Desert nights were cold, so no one would think twice about the jacket, and he didn’t plan on meeting anybody, anyway. He was the only tenant on the backside of the Golden Sage, nothing but open land and scrub brush stretching away into the night.

Granger made sure to take his key, the beige door locking automatically behind him. No surprises waiting for him when he came back with his overpriced drink in its plastic ice bucket. A short walk, out and back. No problem.

Until the black Cadillac Escalade rolled into view, its high beams nearly blinding him.

Granger didn’t react at first, telling himself it might just be another guest arriving, then his brain kicked into gear, asking him why in hell the owner of a brand-new Escalade would spend five minutes at the Golden Sage Motel.

No reason in the world, unless he happened to be hunting.

As the Caddy’s doors swung open, Granger dropped his empty bucket and started hauling on the Ruger. Snagged its front sight on his Jockey shorts but ripped it free, aiming the big wheel gun with trembling hands. He noted four men flat-footed by the Escalade, its driver still behind the wheel, and fired once at the nearest of them, praying for a hit. It felt miraculous, seeing the big man topple over backward, going down.

Granger was running then, with gunfire snapping, crackling and popping in the night behind him. He ran past his room and kept on going past his Camry, since the keys were in the motel and there was no time to get in the car anyway. Running like his life depended on it.

Which, of course, it did.

The first rounds struck him when he’d covered all of twenty yards. They lifted Jerod Granger and propelled him forward, airborne, arms and legs windmilling as he found that he could fly. It was a freaking miracle.

But landing was a bitch.

The sidewalk rushed to meet him, struck the left side of his face with force enough to crack the cheekbone. Granger scarcely felt it, going numb already. He could barely find the strength to feel for his Ruger, but the gun had slipped beyond his reach.

Like life itself.

Footsteps approached him, voices muttering as if from miles away and underwater. By the time his killers started firing down into Jerod’s back and skull, he was already gone.

Chapter 1

San Antonio, Texas

Midnight at the Alamo. Not dark—spotlights shone off the old mission’s facade—but, hanging back a hundred yards, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, still found shadows to conceal him as he walked a circuit of the battle site.

Once upon a troubled time, the Alamo had stood on San Antonio’s eastern outskirts. Today it commands a plaza downtown, surrounded by streets named for marytrs: Bonham, Bowie, Crockett, Travis. Men who had stood their ground and had died for an idea called Texas.

Bolan’s first impression of the place was mild disappointment. He had expected more, somehow, from a national shrine. Something larger, perhaps, than the squat adobe-brick structure before him. Sixty-three feet wide and twenty-three feet tall, besides the parapet, extending back one-hundred-odd feet from the plaza in front.

Not much to it, until factoring in 189 defenders, mostly civilians, fighting to the death against some eighteen hundred trained regulars, both infantry and cavalry.

Remember the Alamo? San Antonians don’t have much choice.

Bolan wasn’t here to study history or pay his personal respect to heroes, though he did that automatically, at any battleground or military graveyard. He was at the Alamo to keep a date, obtain some information, maybe save some lives.

How many? That was still an open question, which he hoped to answer as soon as he spoke to his contact.

A Texas Ranger, no less. How perfect was that?

Bolan had flown into San Antonio International Airport from Dulles, in Virginia, and then rented a silver Toyota RAV4. His ID—a more-or-less genuine Texas driver’s license in the name of Matthew Cooper—had served him well at his previous stop, a store with broad, barred windows whose tall neon sign promised Guns! Guns! Guns!

Thanks to Texas’s lax firearms legislation, Bolan’s purchases included an AR-15 rifle, the civilian semi-auto version of an M16A1; a Benelli M4 Super 90 semi-auto twelve-gauge shotgun with extended magazine and collapsible buttstock; a matched pair of Glock 22 pistols, chambered in .40 S&W; and a Buckmaster 184 survival knife. He added a fast-draw shoulder rig, a clip-on holster for his belt, two dozen extra magazines and all the ammo he could carry. Bolan paid cash—lifted from an L.A. crack dealer some months before—and made the salesman’s day.

“Y’all come back now, hear?”

A little tinkering would turn the AR-15 into a full-auto weapon if Bolan had the time. Meanwhile it was a good killing machine straight off the rack. He would have liked at least one sound suppressor for the Glocks, but that meant filling out a lot of Class III paperwork and waiting while it cycled through the ATF labyrinth in Washington. In a pinch, the Buckmaster was quieter than any firearm and never had to be reloaded. He’d simply have to be up close and personal when he went in for the kill.

This was supposed to be a peaceful meeting, though. No fuss, no muss, no bodies on the ground.

Supposed to be.

So here at the Alamo, he wore the Glocks and knife concealed, leaving the rifle and the shotgun in his rented SUV. He had parked it down on Crockett Street and had walked back to the Alamo, dodging the streetlights where he could. If all went well, it was a relatively short walk back to catch his ride. If not, two blocks could be a lethal gauntlet.

Fifteen rounds in each Glock’s magazine, plus two spares in the pouches on his shoulder rig and two more in his pockets. Enough to stop a midsized company of soldiers, but it only took one lucky shot by an opponent and the game was over. Bolan could die and never know what hit him, sure. The way a combat soldier always hoped to go, if old age wasn’t on the table.

But until that happened, he was working every angle for security. Taking nothing for granted beyond his next step, his next breath.

* * *

“WHERE IS SHE?” Jesse Folsom muttered.

“Runnin’ late,” Bryar Haskin said. “How the hell should I know?”

“We just sit and wait for her?” asked Jimmy Don Bodine.

“Naw,” Haskin answered back. “We gonna go ’n’ get a lap dance, then tell Kent we didn’t wanna stick around. How’s that sound to ya? Think he’ll like it?”

“I just meant—”

“Check this out,” Cletus Jackson said, from the backseat.

A car was turning north from Crockett onto Alamo Plaza. It slowed for the parking lot’s entrance, then swung in it. Creeping along, the vehicle slid into a space about two hundred feet from the old Mexican mission.

“That her?” Folsom prodded.

“Can’t tell,” Jackson said. “Wait and see, with the dome light.”

The car was a black Dodge Avenger, four door, not an obvious cop car. Haskin puzzled over that, since they were waiting for a cop—a lady cop, at that—but he supposed that she could be off duty, driving her own vehicle. It didn’t matter what she came in, after all, as long as she went home with them.

The cop...and whoever she was meeting at the Alamo.

“I still can’t see the driver,” Jackson said, to no one in particular.

“It’s one of ’em,” said Haskin. “Has to be. Who else would be here when the place is closed?”

“Damn tourists,” Bodine suggested. “Wanna snap a picture standin’ in the lights.”

“Parkin’ as far as they can get from anything?” Haskin snorted dismissively. “We got one. Now just keep your eyes peeled for the other.”

“You figure they’ll be packin’?” Jackson asked him.

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Hell, I am.”

That was a fact. Between them, they were carrying two pump-action shotguns, one Heckler & Koch HK416 carbine chambered in 5.56 NATO, one AK-101 feeding the same NATO rounds and at least four handguns. Bodine sometimes wore a second pistol in an ankle holster for backup, normally a Colt .380 Mustang Pocketlite, but Haskin hadn’t looked to see if he was packing it tonight.

They had firepower, anyhow, and horsepower under the hood of their GMC Yukon, with its 5.7-liter turbocharged Chevrolet small-block V8 engine. Haskin wished they’d had a bit more brainpower, but these were good boys, dedicated, all straight shooters. He would work with what he had.

And how hard could it be?

Pick up two people from the ever-loving Shrine of Texas Liberty and take them back to headquarters for questioning. It wasn’t like they had to fight John Wayne and Richard Widmark, or even Billy Bob Thornton. Sure, one of them was a Texas Ranger, but she was a woman, for God’s sake.

One woman then and she’d be packing, but he didn’t know about the other one. Haskin had no idea who else they were looking for—a man or woman; white, black or whatever—but it stood to reason that there’d be at least one other gun against their eight or nine.

Safe odds, if only they had been allowed to kill their quarry, but that wasn’t in the cards. His orders were to bring at least one of them back alive and preferably both. Headquarters couldn’t question corpses, and if Haskin dropped the ball on this one, it would be his own ass on the charcoal grill. And that was not one of them whatchamacallits. Simile or metaphor, maybe an oxymoron.

Screw it.

“Here goes,” said Jackson, as the Dodge Avenger’s driver opened up her door and stepped out. She’d turned the dome light off—smart thinking—but the parking lot was lit for security’s sake, and Haskin recognized her from a photo he’d been shown that afternoon.

“It’s her,” he said. The lady Ranger.

“One down, one to go,” said Bodine, like he had just invented math.

“Suppose the other one don’t show?” asked Folsom.

“Then we bag this one,” Haskin replied. “Call it a night.”

“We have to take her straight back?” Jackson queried. “She’s a looker.”

“Remember what we’re here for, damn it. And remember what you stand to lose, if you screw it up.”

* * *

WATCHING FROM THE SHADOWS, Bolan saw his contact step out of a vehicle he took to be her personal ride. Nothing the Texas Rangers would select for chasing outlaws on the open road, and Bolan wasn’t sure if they did any undercover work. He knew the force was small—about 150 officers to police America’s second-largest state and its twenty-six million inhabitants. Not to mention the countless tourists, drifters and undocumented aliens. Only a handful of Rangers were women, and Bolan was looking at one of them now.

He knew her face from photos he’d received in preparation for the meeting. She, on the other hand, wouldn’t know him from Adam until Bolan introduced himself. Photos of Bolan—with the new face he had worn since “dying” some time back in New York City’s Central Park—were scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth. He hadn’t bothered changing fingerprints at the same time, since he was dead to the world, and Uncle Sam’s elves had purged every file they could find that contained Bolan’s prints—from the Pentagon and FBI headquarters, to LAPD, NYPD and so on down the food chain.

In that sense, at least, it was good to be dead.

The Ranger he had come to meet, by contrast, was very much alive. And Bolan hoped to help her stay that way.

Adlene Granger was thirty-one years old, five-seven without standard Ranger cowboy boots and Stetson hat, her frame packed with 137 fairly trim, athletic pounds. Green eyes and auburn hair, no known tattoos, although she had a scar inside her left forearm from taking down a crackhead who had pulled a razor in the scuffle. All of that was in her file, together with the fact that she had shot two would-be bank robbers in Brownsville, on a stakeout, killing one of them.

But now she needed help and couldn’t ask her fellow Rangers. Couldn’t put her faith in local law enforcement, Texas-style. She wasn’t all that keen on trusting Feds—from what Bolan understood—but everybody had to lean on someone, sometime.

Nature’s law.

Enter the Executioner.

His contact—Ranger Granger?—had a tale to tell, and Bolan had agreed to listen. He already knew the basics from his briefing, but he needed more details. Needed to know if it was serious enough to rate his kind of handling and yield a positive result.

Bolan had known too many dedicated and courageous women of the law to swallow any crap about their runaway emotions, inability to cope with crises or the rest of it. Short of a power-lifting contest in the heavyweight division, Bolan couldn’t think of any field where women did not rival or surpass their male competitors—and he had seen some Russian ladies who could hoist the big iron, too.

He wasn’t looking for a partner, though. Had no intention of enlisting anybody for his mission, if it turned out that there was a mission here, deep in the heart of Texas. He wanted information he could act on—if it seemed his kind of action was appropriate—while Ranger Granger went back to her normal daily life and put their meeting out of mind as best she could.

Simple—unless it wasn’t.

Bolan knew she had a personal connection to the problem, but he didn’t know how far she planned to chase it. He would have to make it crystal clear that he was not recruiting, not inviting her to join in a crusade. She would be briefing him and nothing more.

He hoped.

Emerging from the shadows, Bolan showed himself, waited and watched her start the long walk from her Dodge Avenger toward the south end of the Alamo’s facade. She took long, determined strides, an easy swing to her arms. She wore hand-tooled boots with sharply pointed toes, blue jeans, a denim shirt under a thigh-length suede jacket. The jacket was unbuttoned, granting easy access to a good-sized pistol on her right hip, worn in a high-rise holster.

Here we go, he thought, standing his ground.

* * *

“YOU SEE ’IM?” Jackson blurted out.

“We ain’t blind,” Haskin told him.

“Let’s get after ’em,” said Bodine.

“Not yet.”

“Why the hell not?” Folsom challenged.

“Look, we know it’s her and likely him, but I ain’t making no mistakes ’cause we got hasty.”

“What, you think he’s just some random guy walkin’ around the Alamo?” asked Jackson.

“Making sure don’t cost us nothin’ but a little time. And they ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Oh, yeah? Suppose his wheels is back there and they just take off?”

“We ain’t afoot,” Haskin reminded him. “And Kent didn’t put you in charge.”

“Hey, I’m just sayin’—”

“Shut your piehole, will ya? Lemme see what’s goin’ on.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

At times like this, Bryar Haskin wished he didn’t have to deal with idiots. They were useful, in their way, but Christ, their whining grated on his nerves.

He watched the woman walk toward the man who had appeared as if from nowhere—meaning that he’d walked up somewhere from the south, maybe approached by way of Crockett Street. Whatever. He was here now, if it was him, and while Haskin had no serious concerns on that score, he was still determined to be sure before he made a move.

It was interesting that the guy, whoever he was, made no attempt to meet the woman halfway. He hung close to the Alamo, ready to duck back out of sight and under cover at the first suggestion of a trap. A cagey bastard and corralling him could take some doing. Granted, Haskin had three men to back him, odds of two-to-one, but if the man and woman separated, and it turned into a foot chase, they were screwed. He didn’t plan to run around the Alamo all night, like some dumb cluck in one of The Three Stooges comedies.