Killing Kings. Don Pendleton

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       Chapter One

      Val Verde County, Texas

      “Man, I wish they’d show, already,” Jack Grimaldi said. “I’m sweating like a pig, here. Must’ve lost five pounds already.”

      “I’ll bet it looks good on you,” Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, answered him.

      They lay on sandy ground they’d scooped out with entrenching tools, before daybreak, under a staked-out tarp in desert camouflage, spruced up with dry mesquite pasted on top of it. The pattern of the loose fatigues they had been sweating through since dawn matched the tarpaulin, save for their tactical boots and web gear, both desert tan.

      The warriors had come armed for bear—or, rather, armed for men who didn’t care who they gunned down or caught and tortured for whatever useful information they possessed. Each man lay stretched out beside a Steyr AUG bullpup assault rifle, selective fire, translucent magazines loaded with thirty rounds apiece of 5.56 mm NATO rounds. Each Steyer came equipped with a Swarovski 1.5x telescopic sight, integrated with the receiver casting. Its black ring reticle and basic range finder had been designed so that a person who was five feet eleven inches tall filled the scope at 300 meters downrange.

      Aside from rifles, both watchers wore sidearms on their hips. Bolan’s semiauto Desert Eagle Mark VII pistol was chambered in .44 Magnum and fired nine rounds. Grimaldi had gone lighter, with a Glock 22 in .40-caliber Smith & Wesson, fifteen rounds in the magazine and one up the spout.

      Their other armaments included extra magazines in Velcro pouches, M68 fragmentation grenades fitted with impact fuses, and their combat knives were Cols Steel GI Tantos with seven-inch fixed blades in a black, rust-resistant finish.

      They were dressed to kill, and that was just precisely what they had in mind.

      Now all they had to do was wait, and that was getting old.

      * * *

      The trail that had brought Bolan and Grimaldi to their present station in the desert had begun 1,750 miles away, to the northeast, at Arlington National Cemetery. One day earlier, amid the simple markers and some larger monuments to heroes, Bolan had been following procedure when he met with Hal Brognola, chief among his oldest living friends, once a street agent for the FBI, promoted through the ranks over time to a top-level but ill-defined post in the Justice Department that allowed him the freedom to take on various roles within the department.

      The big Fed was a man known to have the President’s ear on matters of national security. Brognola, unknown to most government officials, was also the director of the Sensitive Operations Group, a clandestine organization whose covert headquarters was based at Stony Man Farm, semiconcealed within the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. From there, assignments were issued for its warriors—Mack Bolan, if the assignment aligned with his personal goals, plus the strike forces dubbed Able Team and Phoenix Force—who would take on terrorists and criminal cartels worldwide. Their missions were, in essence, to search and destroy. Targets assigned were generally not expected to stand trial.

      When Brognola needed to speak with Bolan—long presumed dead by the public that had previously followed his extended one-man war against the Mafia, now with his records thoroughly expunged—Bolan sometimes dropped by the Farm, more often meeting casually in some venue such as Arlington, where getting lost among tourists came easily.

      This time around, the big Fed had delivered some alarming news. That in itself was not unusual; he called on Bolan only when the stakes were high and time was short. The first part of Brognola’s message—that cocaine shipments to the United States from Mexico and South America had multiplied СКАЧАТЬ