Lethal Vengeance. Don Pendleton

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       Chapter One

      El Paso International Airport

      Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, stood a few yards off from Runway 12, watching as the Learjet 40 approached from the east. The aircraft descended to a textbook-perfect landing, its pilot throttling back on the twin Honeywell engines. It taxied toward him, gradually slowing to a halt. The engines switched off before its exit door opened behind the cockpit, on the port side, and a built-in set of steps unfolded to the tarmac.

      Barbara Price came out to meet him. Wearing a tailored pantsuit and “sensible” shoes, she barely showed the stress of flying 1,900 miles—nearly the Learjet’s top range—from Stony Man Farm in Virginia to “The City with a Legend,” as El Paso called itself.

      Bolan and Price were more than friends and colleagues, but they kept the greeting to a handshake. He followed her back to the plane, mounting the steps behind her to its cabin.

      “You made good time,” he said as they sat facing each other with a folding table in between.

      “No time to waste,” she said, not asking how he’d beat her there when he was coming from Los Angeles. He’d covered less than half the distance she had, and Price would know that automatically.

      “So how bad is it?” Bolan asked.

      “It doesn’t get much worse.”

      “Tell me.”

      He knew some of it from their brief phone conversation hours earlier. Hal Brognola, director of the clandestine organization known as Stony Man Farm and a head honcho in the Department Justice, had vanished from his hotel in El Paso the previous night, the next-to-last day of a law enforcement conference on terrorism and drug trafficking across the Tex-Mex border.

      He knew El Paso was the Lone Star State’s sixth largest city, covering 256 square miles, with some 680,000 year-round residents. Across the Rio Grande, it faced Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s eighth largest city, smaller in size than El Paso but with 2.5 million full-time inhabitants. Together they formed the second largest binational metropolitan area on America’s southern border, after San Diego-Tijuana.

      “Okay,” Price said. “I told you he was taken out of his hotel, and that’s confirmed from evidence recovered from the scene. We have his fingerprints on a hotel ice bucket and soda can he dropped when the kidnappers grabbed him. Local cops found his room key, same place, no evidence that anybody got inside the room after they lifted him.”

      “Security cameras?” Bolan inquired.

      “One long view of the hallway, from the other end. Two men, likely Latino, but no hits from facial recognition software yet. One of them jabbed him with a hypo. We’re assuming it was just a sedative.”

      “Because why poison him and carry him away?”

      “Exactly. When they took him out, another CCTV feed picked up a shot of the abductors hooding him and securing his arms and legs before putting him in a car trunk. No luck with an ID on the car, although it turned up on a traffic cam two blocks away, heading south. Stolen license plates. We assume the car was hot, as well.”

      “Headed for Mexico.”

      Bolan already knew four bridges spanned the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez: the Bridge of the Americas, Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge, Paso del Norte Bridge and Stanton Street Bridge. Combined, they permitted some twenty-three million vehicular passages yearly. Once across the border, southbound traffic could go anywhere in Mexico.

      Brognola had been gone for thirteen hours. He could’ve traveled 780 miles within that time, at sixty miles per hour, but smart money said he’d probably been taken to a hideout tucked away in Ciudad Juárez itself.

      “Who knew he’d be at the conference?” Bolan asked.

      “Starting from the top,” Price said, “the AG who assigned him to it—over Hal’s objection, I might add. Kelly, his secretary, would’ve made the travel bookings. Then we’ve got the folks who organized the conference and the various official delegates from Justice, ICE, the DEA, likely a couple from the CIA pretending to be someone else. That’s ninety-five registered delegates, not counting Hal. Add on hotel staff, from managers to housekeepers. The Bureau will be grilling all of them, but...”

      “By the time they finish up, it will be too damned late.”

      “Bingo.”

      Bolan went for the long shot. “Cell phone?”

      “In his room. We can’t track him by GPS.”

      “So it comes down to who might want to kidnap him, and why.”

      “Cartels to start,” Price said. “Since 1997, the Juárez Cartel’s been under fire from both the Gulf and Sinaloa outfits, trying to control the city. That СКАЧАТЬ