Black Death Reprise

Black Death Reprise
Don Pendleton

The search for a missing virologist leads Mack Bolan to a cult with a horrific agenda. An order of monks has emerged as a new force of unprecedented terror.Legend has it that the centuries-old brotherhood was the mastermind of the Black Death. Reborn as a fully modern paramilitary organization with cells across the globe, the order is ready to unleash a new plague upon the world.With ritualistic precision, forty couriers of death will be deployed to major cities. Bolan's race to stop the unthinkable takes him from the U.S. to Australia. The Executioner must find the source before a designer disease with its roots in history's darkest nightmare causes untold human suffering.

Bolan shifted his aim to the three gunmen who were directing fire his way

Holding the submachine gun at waist level, he sprang from behind the cover of the tree and dashed forward, angling his way toward an outcropping of rocks. While he ran, he fired the Spectre in short bursts, engaging targets of opportunity as they appeared.

Bullets were flying through the air as Bolan launched himself into a dive that would take him to his intended spot behind the rocks. He felt the sudden sting of a round scratch the top of his scalp. He twisted in midair to direct his reply at the shooter, sending a burst of a dozen slugs into him and the man who knelt nearby.

“How’re you doing?” he asked into the mike as he grabbed one of his two remaining box magazines to replace the spent one.

“The M-60 is out,” LaFontaine shouted back.

“Throw the smoke and give me cover. I have plastique for the four corners. Let’s blow this building!” the Executioner shouted.

Black Death Reprise

The Executioner

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Peter Spring for his contribution to this work.

To lead an untrained people to war is to throw them away.

—Confucius, 551–479 BC

Evil men lead blind followers into battle unprepared for what they will face. What they will face is me—their Executioner.

—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

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

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

1

A gentle breeze passing through the vineyard from the Pyrenees turned the leaves on their stems, making them appear to be waving to the man who glided silently through their tethered rows. The soothing rustle as they stirred on warm air currents, exposing undersides that shimmered a silvery-gray in the moonlight, was the only sound reaching Mack Bolan’s ears as he trod silently across the fertile fields that for more than eight hundred years had been producing wine for the St. Rafael Monastery north of Bayonne.

Dressed entirely in black, with green and brown camouflage paint smeared on the high points of his face to flatten his features, Bolan’s large frame was all but invisible against the inky French countryside.

On his hip, the ex-soldier wore a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, while a holster on his left shoulder held a Beretta 93-R loaded with a 20-round clip of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition. A foot-long Fairbairn-Sykes combat knife, honed to a razor’s edge, rested in a weathered black leather sheath strapped to the outside of his right calf.