Devil's Mark

Devil's Mark
Don Pendleton

Trouble on the U.S. border with Mexico puts Mack Bolan in the middle of a DEA counter-narcotics operation that's been compromised in the worst way.The mission takes a bizarre and unexpected twist when headless corpses from both sides of the cartel wars indicate a new player has entered the game. The mysterious figure is spoken of in terrified whispers as "The Beast." All knowing, all seeing, his ruthless henchmen appear out of nowhere, spreading slaughter and commanding deathly silence. Bolan has seen enough evil in the world to know monsters exist - but in his experience they are all too human, preying on the innocent and the weak. And he is determined that whoever or whatever is behind the biggest coup of Mexico's drug trade will face his retribution.

The chopper’s engine clanked and screamed

Grimaldi bellowed as he fought the stick. “We’re going down!”

MacLeod burst apart like a water balloon, turning the cabin interior into a charnel house. Bolan could feel Smiley bleeding out in his arms. Chet was screaming hysterically. “You bastards! You bastards!”

The Devil had come for his due.

The helicopter soared over a sandy beach and spun nauseatingly. She skipped like a stone as one of her skids hit an outcropping. Grimaldi’s voice was uncommonly desperate. “Brace for impact!”

The helicopter hit.

Devil’s Mark

Mack Bolan

Don Pendleton

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

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

—Edmund Burke

1729–1797

Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

Some forms of evil are more obvious than others. My task—and that of my associates—is to take on all comers until the puppetmaster is exposed. Then I’ll mete out my brand of justice—hell on Earth.

—Mack Bolan

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

Tijuana, Mexico

The three-car prisoner caravan wended its way through the potholed backstreets. Bolan rode shotgun in an unmarked, armored Bronco. It was 4:00 a.m., and the Tijuana back alleys still bustled in a sloggy way with drunken, bleary-eyed tourists either looking for a last, ugliest bit of action or staggering away from it. The dens of sin didn’t bother to promote themselves with neon lights or pamphlet-waving hawkers pimping strip shows as on the main strip. Displaying the wares was frivolous excess at this time of night and in this part of town. It was old school Tijuana—graffitied brown adobe walls, an occasional bare bulb and small, dark doorways. If you were here and had money, you had already picked your perversion. You just walked through a door and the wares found you.

Bolan glanced back at “the package.”

Prisoner Cuauhtemoc “Cuah” Nigris wasn’t a happy man. Nigris was the last of the “Baja Barbacoas,” a quartet of Mexican cartel contract killers who specialized in kidnapping their victims and slow-roasting them alive in a traditional Mexican open pit barbeque covered with maguey agave leaves. The fact that a man who had terrorized the Baja Peninsula from Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas, and was rumored to have eaten parts of his victims, had been reduced to the shivering cold sweats was cause for concern. Then again, all three of Cuah’s fellow accomplices had been caught, and despite the best efforts of the Mexican authorities, the three had been shot, poisoned and garroted while in custody, and adding insult to injury, they had all had their heads removed at some point before they went into the ground. Nigris was the last of his culinary killing quartet and, in desperation, had broken the cartel code of silence. He agreed to spill everything he knew about anything and everybody if they would only extradite him to the perceived safety of the United States.