Grave Mercy

The last victim, a little girl whose age he couldn’t even guess, had been so violently assaulted that blood has sprayed along the sand for twenty-five feet. From the churned, bloody sand, he could tell that it had been four of the maniacs, not the one who had cut through the trees to the beach, who had grabbed her up. Her screams had disappeared into the mix of those of other children.

Bolan saw a small, rag-stuffed doll splattered with blood and he stooped to pick it up. All the while, he reproached himself for being to gentle with his attacker as the doll’s owner was being attacked.

He cast the reproach aside after a moment. He had been on alert, but his senses had only so much acuity. He couldn’t see through walls or hear the sound of the vehicle that had dropped off five armed people in the grip of chemical fury. It was a basic law of physics—the intervening strip of trees was too thick, too much of a barrier to keep him from noticing that, and even if he did know, Bolan had only his knife.

There were wounded besides Antoine, the young man who’d surrendered a hand in defense of others. Bolan and Rudd had tended to cuts and bruises after ensuring that the boy wouldn’t bleed to death, but now Rudd stumbled around, shell-shocked by the horrors he’d experienced. A call through to the police and for an ambulance received an answer that the small surf camp would have to wait as a beach resort two miles up the road had been the victim of similar violence.

Bolan knew that the carnage on the scene at a more crowded pleasure spot would have been horrendous.

“Rudd,” Bolan called, “help me check on the attackers.”

“The girl is dead,” Rudd said, his words coming out of his mouth in a slurred mush.

“The one who attacked you?” Bolan asked. He winced as he realized that he’d applied far too much force to her, but in the wake of Spaulding’s brutal murder, he’d let slip his kid gloves. Still, she’d been a victim of chemical reprogramming, a drug-fueled rage that had been inflicted upon her and the other four, turning them into marauders who barely felt pain and had required skeletal fractures to stop them.

Bolan stopped at another body, a killer who had gone down with a twisted arm and a kick to the head. He was a local, a young man who was all lean muscle and long limbs. The soldier checked for broken bones in the neck, but the only signs of what had killed him were dried crystals flaking at the corners of his mouth, leftovers from the froth and foam that had burbled up when his body succumbed to a hormonal overload.

The big American wasn’t a coroner, but he’d seen people killed by overdoses of drugs and it would be a good guess that the machete-armed invaders of this beach haven had all succumbed to massive heart attacks brought on by the chemicals pumped into their veins.

Five corpses, each of them brought down by the Executioner’s hands in such a way that they would live, snuffed out by the same strange fuel that had driven them to attack.

“Are they all dead?” Rudd asked, cringing at the sight of them as Bolan stacked their limp forms together.

Bolan nodded. As an afterthought, he picked up a pair of empty water bottles from a nearby recycling bin and cut open the veins on two of the bodies. He’d have to collect blood samples and hope that Stony Man Farm could supply him with someone who’d run toxicology screens. He wanted to know what kind of chemical cocktail had been utilized to turn humans into weapons, and with that bit of knowledge, he’d be able to narrow the focus of his search for the perpetrators.

“That’s grisly,” Rudd said, looking at Bolan draining blood into a bottle.

“No more than what they did,” Bolan said.

“Who were they?” Rudd asked.

“Pawns of someone. Most likely they were kidnapped tourists,” Bolan answered.

Rudd’s brow wrinkled. “Tourists?”

“Harmless people sparked to insanity by a biochemist of some sort,” Bolan added. “I tried not to cause them too much pain, but they were too violent. Even so, the measures I took against them should have left them with long-term injuries, not dead. Their hearts gave out after I rendered them unconscious.”

“Who’d do such a thing?” Rudd asked. “And who’d let them loose here, where it’s just kids?”

“That’s what the bottles are for,” Bolan told him solemnly. “If there’s a clue in the blood, then I’ll use it.”

“You’re going after them yourself?” Rudd inquired.

Bolan nodded. “Alone. With an army. It won’t matter. I’m going to find the people behind this.”

Rudd nodded.

Bolan took a deep breath. “It’s not a job I want. But I have a feeling that this was a test run. More people are going to be released on wild rampages. More innocents are going to die. I intend to end it as fast as possible.”

Bolan stalked off to get his satellite phone to contact Stony Man Farm.

Rest and recuperation was over. The chase was on.

CHAPTER FIVE

Morrot leaned on the desk, peering down at the tablet monitor that relayed footage from a digital camera video strapped to the frame of a remote-control airplane. The tiny little diesel-motored plane had long, wide wings that were shaped like those of an albatross, complete with the exact dimensions, enabling the craft to hang in the air with a minimum of fuel supply.

He looked at the group that he had released early, the one with his favorite subject, Rojas. He’d dropped the group near the Spaulding Youth Surf Camp to add to the horror—it was a place where children were in abundance. The news would find itself drawn to the slaughter of innocents. The remoteness of the little camp also ensured that Rojas and his friends would escape into the woods, free and wild murderers who would stalk and hunt for days, maybe even weeks, giving Morrot a continuing menace in the background while he strove to create more of his magnificent monsters.

Morrot had kept the camera in the air over the first surf camp to make certain that things were going according to his plan. From a height of hundreds of feet, but with a high-definition, long-range zoom camera, he was able to see Rojas taking a direct approach to the beach where the sounds of children playing had drawn him.

And that’s when the tall man on the surfboard did something Morrot had never expected—he charged a machete-wielding berserker without even pausing to pull the knife from its calf sheath. In moments, the black-haired surfer had flattened Rojas and turned his attention to one of the women.

All told, the savage squad he’d released onto the Spaulding Youth Surf Camp had been eliminated in the space of two minutes by a single combatant. There were wounded, there were dead, but one lone human had stood against five people whose nerves had been numbed to pain and whose strength had been boosted by chemical-induced ferocity.

“Should we turn the other group back?” Pierre Fortescue asked, watching the same video feed on a monitor of his own.

Morrot shook his head. His mismatched eyes were locked on the screen, looking at the man who had stood for only a brief moment over the unconscious form of the woman. “There won’t be anyone like him in the resort.”

“Who is he?” Fortescue asked.

Morrot could only see the man from the top down, but his shoulders were broad, and his arms were long and wrapped in corded cables of muscle. He was of European descent, despite the darkened tan of his skin. “That man is a professional soldier.”

Fortescue glared at the shaman, but subdued his spite before Morrot took notice. Fortescue himself was the son of one of the strongmen in the old Haitian guard, the Tonton Macoute. The Macoute wasn’t only a cadre of highly trained gunmen, it was backed by ties to superstition and the skills of houngans like Morrot himself. Though Fortescue hadn’t been one of those elite, murderous soldiers, he’d been taught by his father and had sharpened those skills in exile, being a hired gun for various Jamaican gang members.

The implication of Morrot’s words made him bristle, but Fortescue was nothing if not smart. If he’d said or done anything in response to the accusation, Morrot would find a reason and a way to eliminate him. Morrot was ruthless and too damned smart, and Fortescue wasn’t the kind of man to take unnecessary risks. Showing his temper under the one-eyed voodoo priest’s verbal abuse wasn’t just a risk, it was an invitation to slow, painful death after a horrific road of pain and insanity.

“He took down all five. There were a few casualties, but nothing truly usable to increase the panic,” Fortescue said, keeping his voice clinical and cool. “The delivery to the resort will have to bring in some major carnage to instill the proper panic in Kingston.”

“There will be blood and terror,” Morrot told him. “Do not worry, my friend.”

Fortescue looked at the half-mutilated face of the scrawny shaman in front of him. If anyone could manipulate the nations of the Caribbean Sea, it was this dark-hearted wizard of mayhem and madness.

The promise Morrot made would be backed by his programmed-for-madness minions.

WHATEVER GUILT Mack Bolan might have felt at his inability to save lives at the Spaulding Youth Surf Camp was dispelled when he saw that the Pleasant Shore Resort, two miles up the coastal road, had been turned into an abattoir. Dozens were dead, and hundreds injured, many in critical condition. The local news was inundated and trumped by international press circling the Jamaican getaway like sharks now that they had smelled blood in the water, literally.

One of the hotel’s swimming pools had been turned to the color of red wine, the badly mutilated corpses of two people staining what would have been crystal-clear water. The filtration systems were plugged by chunks of flesh, preventing the thinning of the murky pool. The work of five insane people in the resort, armed with machetes that could carve through flesh and bone, was brutally efficient. At the surf camp, their victims had been spread out, giving the Executioner time to intercept the berserkers. The crowds at poolside and on the beach had been caught unaware, and the violent fury released found dozens of targets.

There had been security guards on the scene, but Bolan knew that nothing short of a contact-range shotgun blast or a bullet right in the medulla oblongata would slow the attackers. Handguns were a poor substitute for true fight-stopping firepower, though the Executioner’s skill with his preferred pistols had made him deadly enough to survive combat against opponents with bigger, more powerful guns.

As it was, the security at the resort wasn’t equipped to deal with armed maniacs. It was there to prevent drunks from hurting themselves or harassing the other patrons. The hotels spent big money keeping the drug gangs from bringing their business squabbles into their backyard, and what handguns were available were just that—pistols. The United States military learned a long time ago, during the Moro uprising in the Philippines, the uselessness of a mere sidearm against someone who was on painkillers and in the grip of fanatical rage. The machete-wielding killers would have died from their wounds, but for the fifteen minutes of fury that they were still operating, they were rampaging machines, lashing out at everything.

It had been the Executioner’s training that had carried the day at the surf camp, and even then, there had been casualties. Too many for Bolan’s taste, enough to feel that he’d failed at the standards he’d set for himself. Bystanders were to be protected at all costs, even to the point of catching a bullet in the chest. He’d never staged a battle where civilian noncombatants were on hand, and in instances where others had been endangered, Bolan had done his best to attract attention to himself.

The blood samples that Bolan had collected in water bottles sat in the little humming refrigerator, a box with a door and its sides and front covered in plastic sheeting colored to look like wooden paneling. He’d transfer it to a cooler to take it to a laboratory for examination, but even refrigerated, the blood and the chemicals within weren’t going to last forever. Within twenty-four hours, natural enzyme breakdowns could erase traces of some toxins and drugs. Freezing the blood was an option, but then again, there was the problem of crystallization of water affecting the chemical makeup.

Bolan’s laptop screen flickered to life, an incoming call from Stony Man Farm jarring it from sleep mode. Barbara Price, her face illuminated by her monitor’s bleak, harsh light, appeared in the web camera chat box. She was mission controller at Stony Man Farm, the installation that was home to the nation’s elite antiterrorist teams. Bolan sat in front of his own camera, dressed in a black T-shirt and khaki-colored cargo pants. Price’s eyes flicked left, then right, noting the straps of his shoulder holster in place.

“You’re aware of the attack in the resort,” Price said.

“I caught a preview. It looked like someone wanted to release my marauders into the wild after they tore up a camp full of unarmed surfers and other kids,” Bolan answered.

Price pursed her lips in a frown before speaking again. “You said you’d suffered casualties.”

Bolan didn’t answer.

“Hal and the President have been going over this. They know that you’re in the region, but they aren’t certain that the situation warrants your involvement,” Price said.

Bolan still remained quiet, his slitted eyes providing the only sign of a response, a show of annoyance that the Sensitive Operations Group and the White House were able to dictate where and why the Executioner would take action. He finally spoke. “They don’t have to be. I’m certain.”

Price nodded. “Hal knows better than to deny you your choice of operations.”

“I’ve got refrigerated blood samples from the berserkers I encountered. Is there a lab handy where I can get this looked at?” Bolan asked.

“We’ve been checking local laboratories and most in the country don’t have the kind of toxicology skills you’d need,” Price replied. “But we have help in the area.”

“Hospital ships off Haiti,” Bolan surmised. “U.S. Navy? I don’t want to pull personnel off of the relief effort.”

“No problem in that regard. We have someone on hand who is a trained medic,” Price said.

“Is Cal coming to pick me up himself, or do I meet him on the ship?” Bolan asked.

“A navy helicopter’s coming to get you and the samples to meet him,” Price replied. “Since there’s no need for forensic toxicology, the facilities on board the aircraft carrier devoted to that won’t take away from things.”

“Good,” Bolan returned. “What’s my cover?”

“Colonel Brandon Stone,” Price returned. “We’ve already set it so that you can be armed on the carrier, but you do have to carry concealed.”

Bolan shrugged. “Even military brass can’t be armed on a Navy ship.”

“Not everyone believes in the inherent goodness of the U.S. Armed Forces,” Price replied. “Unfortunately that includes many commanders in the Navy, the Army…”

“I’ll deal with it,” Bolan said, tugging on a BDU overshirt, concealing the Beretta 93-R in its holster. As a soldier in the field, and years of interacting with servicemen abroad, the soldier had learned that the Pentagon policies about disarming troops when not in direct contact with the enemy had lead to countless being left vulnerable to ambushes. The death toll, thanks to those policies, was high, a level of loss that caused suffering among families at home and crippling deficiencies among active-duty personnel.

“The helicopter is coming to the camp, correct?”

“The less you have to travel with the blood before it can be brought to the lab, the better,” Price told him.

Bolan nodded. “ETA?”

“Ten minutes.”

The soldier looked up from buttoning the jacketlike uniform blouse. “I’ll be ready. Any news on who is claiming responsibility for the attack?”

“No word per se,” Price said. “Though the zombie-like rage exhibited by the attackers have people talking about voodoo. Someone leaked videos through the internet and they have hit cable news stations.”

“That may be the point,” Bolan replied.

Price tilted her head. “How so?”

“Phoenix, Able and I have had plenty of encounters with real-life voodoo zombies over the years,” Bolan said, referring to Phoenix Force and Able Team, Stony Man’s two action units. “Some were just makeup and bulletproof vests while others were people whose minds were destroyed by traditional houngan treatments, either as cheap slave labor or purpose constructed.”

Price frowned. “No one is taking responsibility because the targets of this attack will know who was behind it.”

“It could be part of the local Jamaican drug war, trying to fill in the void I recently knocked in the status quo,” Bolan added. “Or it could be something political, because I can’t see the cocaine cowboys on this island making a mess of their target demographic.”

“Tourists looking for nose candy and herb,” Price said.

Bolan nodded. “If they scare off tourism, a lot of their local dealers lose customers. With no income, they can’t bribe the hotels to let them hang around and deal, and the addition of violence in the hotels makes them really out of luck.”

“That doesn’t mean that the local gangs aren’t helping in some manner,” Price said. “Someone would have to provide ingredients to the chemical cocktails that set off the berserkers.”

“Calvin and I will look into that if we get a chance,” Bolan told her. “I’d prefer to have him working with me here in the islands because he fits in better than I do.”

“That’s part of the reason why Calvin is riding a Tomcat to the carrier out of Langley AFB,” Price said.

“He’s not on hand yet?” Bolan asked.

“By the time your helicopter drops you off, he’ll be on deck,” Price replied. “They caught a tailwind off the coast of Georgia. Do you want any other help?”

Bolan shook his head. “If the President doesn’t think this situation warrants my attention, I’m not going to pull in any more official Stony Man personnel than Cal. And how did he get free?”

“He took some time to meet with an old SEAL buddy,” Price replied. “Building more unofficial relations, so to speak.”

“What does the buddy do now?” Bolan asked.

“Security firm,” Price said. “So now, Phoenix Force has more friends in the New York area…just in case.”

Bolan nodded with approval. “Shame to interrupt that.”

“Cal made the call to me that he was going down to meet you,” Price replied. “One helicopter transfer to Langley…”

“I’ll be sure to tell him I appreciate this,” Bolan said. “I hear the chopper coming.”

“Striker.” Price spoke up, her voice grown soft, losing its hard business edge for a moment.

Bolan looked into the web cam, knowing that it was the closest that he could get to looking into her eyes over their cybernetic link. “Barbara?”

“I’m sorry that your…time off…had to end this way,” she said.

“No need to feel sorry for me,” Bolan returned. “You may want to spare some concern for the men who caused the deaths of children.”

Price looked down. She’d heard the icy grating in his voice, like a whetstone over a combat knife.

Mack Bolan was on the hunt.

CALVIN JAMES pulled off the oxygen mask and flight helmet before he crawled out of the rear seat of the F-14 Tomcat. The Mach 2 fighter had torn through the skies like a guided missile, delivering the former SEAL to the aircraft carrier in time to meet up with the Executioner. The pilot of the plane had pointed out Bolan’s chopper, looking as if it were hovering still in the air compared to the breakneck pace of the long-range jet.

James was glad to be out of the cockpit. He was two inches too tall for the Tomcat at six foot two, and his legs and head had been squashed in on the supersonic flight. The aircraft had traveled for an hour at full speed, but an hour in the claustrophobic backseat was just too much for him. The only consolation was that James had ridden in planes too small for him before and had learned how to bend and twist so he wouldn’t end the flight with muscle cramps.

That’s what he’d told himself as he rubbed his neck, wincing as sleepy shoulder muscles protested at the excessive stretching.

A crewman withdrew James’s duffel from its small storage locker just behind the seat. There wasn’t much inside it other than for a case containing his personal Beretta 92-F, two of his favorite knives and a Glock 26 backup pistol, with holsters and accessories for everything. Price had informed James that clothing would be provided at the other end of the flight, so his combat gear would be all he needed.

The captain, Timothy Bannon, was waiting across the deck, observing as his crew tended to the newly arrived Tomcat. With a simple turn, Bannon would be only moments from the bridge in case of an emergency. This carrier was his responsibility, and he hovered over it as if he were guarding his own toddler. Bannon was six feet even, with broad shoulders, and his baseball-style cap couldn’t conceal the clean-shaved sides and back of his head. Blue eyes, looking out from blond, nearly invisible eyebrows, scanned the tall black man who approached him.

“Calvin Farrow,” James introduced himself, using one of his cover names. “Permission to come aboard.”

Bannon extended his hand. “Permission granted. The Justice Department needs my ship?”

“Just a small part, sir,” James returned. “We have a man coming in by helicopter, and I need to take a look at the blood samples he collected.”

“So you’ll use our sick bay, rather than take up room on a hospital ship,” Bannon surmised. “We’re not doing anything on board, but we do have a good phlebotomy laboratory. Sadly, it’s something that’s needed in the modern Navy.”

“Mandatory drug testing, among other things,” James said. “I know the kind of stuff that people get into on duty on a carrier. Amphetamines to stay on extra duty when coffee stops working…especially for pilots.”

James could tell that he’d struck a sore point with Bannon, but the former Navy SEAL had also struck a chord that resonated with the Captain. Both were Navy, and James’s understanding of the unfortunate zeal of their fellow personnel was a salve to that soreness. “Here comes the chopper.”

“The communiqué said that Stone is, well, was U.S. Army,” Bannon noted. “Is he a good man?”

“There’s not a lick of interservice rivalry in his entire body,” James replied. “You won’t find a more staunch supporter of the military in the world.”

“A real supporter? Or a war hawk?” Bannon asked.

James looked at Bannon. “Real. He didn’t earn his colonel rank because of an accident of birth or a lot of money.”

Bannon’s broad shoulders relaxed. “Good. You see these ex-military contractors, and you start to wonder where their real sympathies lie.”

“He’s his own boss. This way, he gets to work without a lot of red tape sticking to him,” James said.

The helicopter settled down, and Bolan stepped off. His black BDU top didn’t match the digital camouflage BDU pants he wore, but the effect was a sharp blend, and the darker fabric was better at concealing the handles and bulges of his sidearms. If James hadn’t known that the Executioner rarely went unarmed, he wouldn’t have known that the man had at least two handguns and an assortment of other tools tucked away in pockets on his person. Bolan gave Bannon a sharp salute, then shook James’s hand.

“I’ve got your presents,” the soldier said.

James took the small cooler, giving its plastic side a soft slap. “Permission to head to your lab, sir.”

Bannon nodded. “Granted, Farrow. Ensign, escort him, and get him there double time.”

The ensign that Bannon addressed snapped to, and James turned, leaving Bolan and the carrier’s captain to talk.

BANNON HADN’T exaggerated about the extensive technology in the lab. James not only had an assortment of regular and electronic microscopes, but there were centrifuges and spectrometers for looking at the chemicals within the bloodstream. The final item that James had brought on the flight, aside from his personal weapons, was his personal laptop, which had the spec-profiles of hundreds of drug and toxin combinations.