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      Special thanks and acknowledgment to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

      War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

      —General William T. Sherman,

       1820–1891

      No honest soldier has anything good to say about war—but we fight where we can, where we must.

      —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

      Prologue

      Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

      The first explosion stunned Lance Corporal Kenneth Pyle. Patrol duty at Gitmo was strictly routine, no surprises encouraged, since Camp X-Ray had been established to contain leading terrorists, insurgents, or whatever the hell they were labeled this week.

      The enemy, Pyle thought, and let it go at that.

      So, no surprises in the guise of training measures for Marines who drew guard duty at the camp, in case somebody had an itchy trigger finger and he greased a drill instructor.

      But what in hell was this about?

      The first blast sounded like a half-pound charge of C-4 or the equivalent. It echoed from the east side of the camp, meaning that Pyle could not investigate despite his shock and sudden, urgent curiosity. The first rule of guard duty in the Corps was to stay alert and man the post assigned, no matter what distractions surfaced in the course of any given shift. Pyle couldn’t leave his beat along the camp’s northern perimeter unless directly ordered by the Sergeant of the Guard or someone who outranked him.

      Pyle was thinking accident when two more high-explosive detonations rocked the base, one on the southern side, and one—unless Pyle missed his guess—not far from the command post.

      And it wasn’t any goddamned accident.

      He knew that, now.

      Pyle jacked a round into the chamber of his M-16 and watched the wire, remembering the orders that had been drilled into him from day one of his posting to Guantanamo. The base and all that it contained was U.S. property, an island in a hostile sea of red, surrounded by the enemy.

      That rule had been in place since 1959, around the time Pyle’s father was born, and there had never been an assault on the base.

      Until now.

      Three blasts, plastic explosives, and if Pyle had any lasting doubts, the sounds of automatic weapons fire confirmed what he already knew: this wasn’t any exercise designed to test the camp’s security procedures.

      This was happening. The shit was coming down, and—

      Pyle saw movement, fifty yards or so beyond the razor-wire perimeter he’d been assigned to guard. Raising his M-16, he sighted on the spot and saw a man rise from the undergrowth out there, with something balanced on his shoulder.

      By the time Pyle recognized the object as a rocket launcher, triggering a short reflexive burst of 5.56 mm rounds in vain, the nose-heavy projectile was already hurtling toward him. All that he could do was hit the deck.

      And pray.

      1

      Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia

      Mack Bolan listened as the all-news station playing on the Ford Explorer’s radio kept coming back to it. Grim bulletins from Cuba, where a band of gunmen loosely dubbed insurgents had apparently stormed Camp X-Ray—the controversial, semisecret facility where U.S. Marines and CIA agents had penned alleged terrorist suspects since America’s invasion of Afghanistan, in the wake of the 9/11 skyjacking raids. Civil libertarians called the military prison an illegal concentration camp and torture center, whose inmates were held without charges or counsel, some still publicly unnamed after all those years.

      Administrators airily dismissed the charges, citing precedent from both world wars to justify their actions, and the controversy showed no signs of winding down while Camp X-Ray survived.

      But now, it seemed, someone had tried another angle of attack to bring it down.

      The early news was spotty, as expected. Getting any word out of Guantanamo was difficult enough, much less when the Marines and comrades from the Company were agitated by embarrassment. Bolan