could live longer as the gun in the murderer’s hand rose slowly toward her. Sofia’s hand was through the window. She was in midfall to the ground outside.
A flash of light emitted from the barrel, though there was no loud crack of a gunshot.
Time suddenly snapped back to normal as her head was driven back, crashing into the half-opened window. Glass shattered and cleaved through her scalp, turning her blond locks to a ruddy crimson.
The next shot that Steiner pumped into Sofia DeLarroque’s face didn’t bounce obliquely along the curved bone of her skull. This .22 slug hit dead on, penetrating the fragile shell of her temple, tearing deep into the UN worker’s brain.
She was alive, technically, even as her brain cells were spun into a frothy soup by the bouncing bullet. Her heart still beat, and she still had reflexes that crashed her completely through the opened window. The frame snagged her, holding her as muscles flinched, making Sofia’s corpse twitch and twist.
Steiner walked up to the dying woman, looking her up and down. Blue eyes, the color of a tropical sea, glimmered, staring into a cloudless sky, lips moving wordlessly.
“Go to sleep, girl,” Steiner said, pulling the trigger on the Beretta twice more.
The Israeli unscrewed the sound suppressor from his pistol and stowed both pieces in his gear.
This wasn’t over, the assassin knew.
Where it would stop was anyone’s guess.
2
Hal Brognola chewed into his unlit cigar so hard he felt his teeth ache, as the voice on the other end of the phone line spoke.
“I’m going on a hunting trip, Hal.”
“Dammit, Striker,” Brognola spoke up. The handset was plugged into a hardline at Stony Man Farm, a top secret facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Even with the latest encryption hardware and software protecting the call, years of experience had taught him that nothing was one hundred percent secure, and even after all this time, he was not in the habit of talking openly on the phone with the man whose voice he knew intimately.
Experience had also taught Brognola something about the man he called Striker. Once he made up his mind to accomplish a goal, nothing would stop him.
“Dammit, Striker,” Brognola repeated, “I think I know what you’re looking at.”
“You think,” came the reply. There was no mockery or challenge in his tone. Brognola and Striker were friends who respected each other too much to play word games. “There’s a big wide world out there, Hal. A world that needs me to act between the jobs you have for me.”
Brognola grunted. He tasted the buds of tobacco squeezed from the crushed cigar between his teeth and set it down on an ash tray. Spitting residue from the tip of his tongue, he looked at the desktop full of news clippings and intelligence reports that made up the hell that was tearing through the world at that very moment.
It was the same crap, just different names. Terrorists. Mobsters. Drug dealers. Murderers. Conspiracies. Threats ranging from the schoolyard to the ivory towers of governments and corporations. This was the world that Brognola looked at every day, a wall of mourning and misery that he had to pick and choose from, and apply the powerful resources of America’s most elite covert action organization against.
To have Striker, one of Stony Man’s most important allies…
That was the truth about their arrangement, Brognola reminded himself.
Mack Samuel Bolan, the Executioner, wasn’t an employee. He wasn’t a recruit. He wasn’t a member of Stony Man Farm. The Executioner was the cat who walked by himself. He chose whether to go along with the soldiers of Able Team or Phoenix Force when they needed an extra hand. And he chose when to discharge his duties elsewhere.
The career of the big soldier wasn’t one defined by pay, or orders. It was entirely personal. It had started with destroying major chunks of the criminal organization that drove his family to its death. It moved up to battling terrorists, and then to the Executioner’s realization that there was more that needed to be done than what was sanctioned by any pencil-pushing politician or even Brognola himself.
“I’m sorry. Thanks for letting us know that you’ve got other pots cooking,” the big Fed said. His cheeks burned, even though he knew Bolan would forgive him.
“If it’s any consolation, you could be right about who I might be doing,” Bolan said.
“I’m betting it’s Chaman,” Brognola said, pulling the report of an attack on a relief hospital setup near a refugee camp in Afghanistan.
“Remind me to keep you away from LasVegas,” Bolan said.
A chuckle relieved the pressure in Brognola’s gut. “I dunno. I don’t remember having much time to place bets any time we’ve been to Vegas. Besides, I’d be much more interested in catching one of the shows.”
“Well, that’s one thing Vegas and Chaman will have in common,” the Executioner said.
Brognola chuckled. “You’ve always been known for your tiger impersonation.”
“Yeah. But when I put my teeth into someone’s neck, I intend to take their head off,” Bolan said.
MACK BOLAN WENT to Afghanistan in answer to the murders of UN relief workers, but he went not to bury them, but to insure that no one else would fall. The soldier’s duty he undertook didn’t have room for feelings of hatred and revenge.
He needed assistance, and while the cyberteam he usually relied upon at Stony Man Farm might have proved helpful anywhere else, in the technological wasteland of Afghanistan, Internet evidence of the suspected Taliban perpetrators was scarce.
That meant that the Executioner was going to have to go hunting the old-fashioned way. Electronics only went so far, but human eyes and ears, and trusted old friends, could reach further and deeper than anything. When the world was still in a cold, cold war, Bolan had been to Afghanistan often and had built up a network of allies, warriors among the mujahideen, the first and finest of whom was Tarik Khan, an old ally from the very last days that Bolan had been known as Colonel John Phoenix.
Aleser Khan looked every bit the younger version of his Uncle Tarik, and though he didn’t know Bolan personally, the two men knew each other by reputation. The young leader accepted the soldier into his camp as if he were a long lost cousin, and listened to the Executioner’s reasons for being there. Aleser’s dark brown eyes flashed with outrage, not at his presence, but at the need for the Executioner’s presence. His long black hair flowed like the mane of the lion he was named after.
“My uncle and my cousin owe you their lives, Al-Askari. It matters not which name you travel under. You will always have the best Aleser Khan can provide you, in men or arms,” the young mujahideen leader told him. “Especially when it comes to righting the wrongs done by those who claim to be our countrymen.”
“Thank you.” Bolan accepted, glad at Aleser’s facility with English. While the soldier knew enough Arabic to help him get around most of the Middle East, the Dahri dialect wasn’t one he was as skilled with. “I know that the men of the Taliban are no sons of this
