They call themselves the devil force. A crew of modern-day pirates who report to the Mafia, they scour the coasts of Florida ripping off pleasure cruisers and small-time dealers. They are savage, they are scum—they are the perfect target for Mack Bolan. After countless battles against the Mafia, the Executioner has planned one final week of missions across a variety of states, intending to hit six mob outposts in as many days. But what he finds in Florida may take longer than twenty-four hours to destroy.
The devil force leads Bolan to an underground fortress where a cadre of mobsters have teamed up with a crazed scientist in a desperate attempt to upend the world of crime. To stop a scheme that could mean the end of the United States as we know it, Bolan will turn up the Florida heat higher than it’s ever gone before.
Thermal Thursday is the 36th book in the Executioner series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
They call themselves the devil force. A crew of modern-day pirates who report to the Mafia, they scour the coasts of Florida ripping off pleasure cruisers and small-time dealers. They are savage, they are scum—they are the perfect target for Mack Bolan. After countless battles against the Mafia, the Executioner has planned one final week of missions across a variety of states, intending to hit six mob outposts in as many days. But what he finds in Florida may take longer than twenty-four hours to destroy.
The devil force leads Bolan to an underground fortress where a cadre of mobsters have teamed up with a crazed scientist in a desperate attempt to upend the world of crime. To stop a scheme that could mean the end of the United States as we know it, Bolan will turn up the Florida heat higher than it’s ever gone before.
Thermal Thursday is the 36th book in the Executioner series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
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Overview
They call themselves the devil force. A crew of modern-day pirates who report to the Mafia, they scour the coasts of Florida ripping off pleasure cruisers and small-time dealers. They are savage, they are scum—they are the perfect target for Mack Bolan. After countless battles against the Mafia, the Executioner has planned one final week of missions across a variety of states, intending to hit six mob outposts in as many days. But what he finds in Florida may take longer than twenty-four hours to destroy.
The devil force leads Bolan to an underground fortress where a cadre of mobsters have teamed up with a crazed scientist in a desperate attempt to upend the world of crime. To stop a scheme that could mean the end of the United States as we know it, Bolan will turn up the Florida heat higher than it’s ever gone before.
Thermal Thursday is the 36th book in the Executioner series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497685888 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 12/16/2014 |
| Series: | Executioner (Mack Bolan) Series , #36 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 179 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Thermal Thursday
The Executioner, Book Thirty-six
By Don Pendleton
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1979 Don PendletonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8588-8
CHAPTER 1
H-HOUR
It was a dawn landing, with nothing but a makeshift windsock emplaced beside the dirt strip to guide the way in. Grimaldi made a sign with his thumb and went around one time at low altitude for a quick recon. Bolan checked the action on his Beretta then returned the piece to concealment beneath a Levi's jacket as he scanned the layout below.
The hammock was several hundred yards long by maybe a hundred wide, barely distinguishable from the sea of sawgrass marshland surrounding it. There were no trees and hardly any vegetation—an indication that someone had farmed the tiny island in recent times. Now it was little more than a primitive airstrip buried deep within the Florida Everglades, one of those countless oases-in-reverse that dot the shallow waters. There were no manmade structures on this one except for a rickety pier near the north end of the airstrip. A couple of small boats were alongside and a swamp buggy had been run ashore close by.
Bolan counted five human figures standing in a clump at the north end of the strip. Off to the west about a mile, two large swamp buggies were approaching the hammock via a narrow channel of open water imbedded in tall grass; that presence would be undetectable from the surface of the hammock.
"I guess it's going down," Bolan muttered to his pilot.
"They said dawn," Grimaldi grunted. "Is it a go?"
"Yeah, go," Bolan replied without emotion.
They went, a wing of the twin Cessna dipping into a ninety-degree turn as Grimaldi lined up with the runway.
The thing was going down, and Bolan was not thinking of the descent of the airplane. "It" was going down—no question about it. Death was overhanging that tranquil scene below—a heavy, smothering presence which a man such as Mack Bolan had long ago learned to recognize as an entity—to be felt on the skin like hot wind, tasted on the lips like brine—entering the body like smoke through the lungs to energize the bloodstream with quiet whisperings.
Death was here, yes—palpable, imminent, unavoidable.
Bolan and his partner could avoid it, though—this time, this place. Those down below could not; and, of course, it was Bolan's task to challenge, not to evade.
"See the devil force?" the pilot inquired quietly as he continued the landing procedure.
"About a mile west," Bolan replied.
"Yeah—I thought I caught a glimpse. Okay. Here we go. This could be a rough one. Grab your teeth."
But it was not so rough a landing. The heavily mineraled soil of the hammock was nicely compacted and relatively smooth for a dirt strip. The Cessna used only about a third of the available runway for the landing roll then turned about for a quick return to the offload area at the north end, where the reception party waited.
Some party. They were mere kids, those five. And two of them were female.
Grimaldi ground his teeth as he commented, "Would you look at that! Babes in joyland! What the hell do they think they're ...?"
"Kids younger than that died in Nam," Bolan growled.
"Sure, but ... two of these are baby dolls!"
"Equal rights," Bolan muttered and stepped outside.
Baby dolls, right. Pert, smiling, overly energized by the thrill of the adventure—dancing eyes, butts wiggling in too-tight jeans as they strode forward in greeting.
Baby guys, too. Not your stereotype smuggler, for sure. These guys would look more natural at a pantyraid or pep rally. Bright ... aware ... alive. Nothing really terminal could ever happen to them, could it? Life was just a game, wasn't it, after all? The worst that could happen was that you would not collect your two hundred dollars as you passed "Go." Right?
Wrong.
Bolan showed those bright smiling faces his Beretta as he coldly commanded, "Get in the plane. No arguments. Just do it."
Bright smiles turned to worried frowns and questioning glances furtively exchanged, but all five entered the Cessna, doing it with no arguments and no vocal comments whatever.
They probably thought it was a bust. Big deal. So they would not collect their two hundred bucks: Go to jail; go straight to jail; do not collect your two hundred dollars.
Grimaldi kicked a couple of bundles to the ground as he said something quick and quiet to his new passengers, then he quickly spun the plane around and returned aloft.
The two bundles appeared to be identical. One, however, contained hi-grade cocaine worth well beyond two hundred bucks, for sure, in the underground trade. The other contained a wicked little Uzi submachine gun, some extra ammo clips, and two fragmentation grenades.
Bolan carried the bundles to the pier and was opening the one containing the weapons when a miniature breast-pocket radio beeped an incoming signal. He extended the antenna and responded, "Striker."
Grimaldi's voice came back immediately with a terse report from high overhead. "Two hundred yards off the pier in high grass and moving in. It's a double. I count four per each."
Two buggies, eight guns ... the "devil force." It was a new phrase being whispered about the 'glades and along the Florida coasts, a new version of a very old game ... modern pirates preying upon the smuggling lanes with a savagery never approached by Blackbeard. But this bunch was not going to find unarmed college kids awaiting their mercy. Instead, this time, they were going to find ...
Bolan replied, "Okay. Keep it cool. Eyes open."
"Betcher ass," was the response.
Bolan smiled solemnly as he tucked the radio away. Grimaldi had been a good friend and able ally throughout much of the war. The guy was a mob pilot. Once, down in Puerto Rico, he'd done his best to do Bolan in. And vice versa. But one of those strange twists of fate made friends of natural enemies and added an important new dimension to Bolan's war effort. The guy could fly anything with wings. And, as it turned out, he had no particular love for his employers. Besides becoming a valuable intelligence source, Grimaldi also had combat experience and was a capable and reliable soldier in the hotspots. It was Grimaldi's contacts that had led Bolan into the new game in Florida—and that game involved quite a bit more than simple pirating. This was a mere starting point.
And it started like so many others.
Out of the grass suddenly appeared the snakes. One man in each boat carried an automatic weapon. The other guys packed pistols in side leather. They'd done this before ... many times. It was sheer routine now. They even looked bored. The buggies were twenty yards out and proceeding abreast when a guy picked up a bullhorn and called ahead, "Just cool it, mister. Don't move, don't even breathe hard, and you'll be okay."
Bolan was cool, he wasn't breathing hard, and he felt quite okay. Both hands were inside the weapons cache, wherein a grenade with a ten second fuse was receiving its prime. At ten yards out, he produced the little bomb and tossed it with an underhand flip toward the approaching raiding party.
The startled reaction could have been produced by something as harmless as an apple or an orange; it was like one of those surprise encounters along the Ho Chi Minh Trail where the instinctive reaction precedes rational thought and everyone involved follows his own spontaneous sparking of the survival pattern.
A couple of guys hit the water; others flung themselves to the decks in a scramble for protection; one of the burpers cut loose with a wild burst into the air—and all this before the fuse found its ten-count.
Bolan was in the shallow water beside the pier, Uzi in hand and bracketing the target zone, when the grenade exploded. It had found its mark in the air about ten feet above the buggies. One of them lurched away in a quick turn with no one aboard then came about and ran aground a few yards downrange. The other was ablaze and foundering almost instantly, a dead man at the controls. A scared-looking guy with a submachine gun stood in waist-deep water and gawked at the carnage about him. Bolan cut that guy diagonally across the chest with a burst from the Uzi, then sent another chasing a couple of swimmers who were threshing toward the tall grass.
That left a single survivor, a guy with a bleeding pattern spreading across his backside, who was painfully pulling himself aboard the beached swamp buggy.
Bolan deliberately failed to see that guy, instead sending concentrated fire into the burning craft until it exploded and sent its parts hurtling across the disturbed waters. When next he looked, the other buggy was creeping into the sawgrass and disappearing from view some fifty yards downstream.
Good enough.
He activated his radio and sent the report aloft: "Okay down here. The rest is yours."
"Have him in sight," came the response. "Just call me flypaper."
Bolan smiled grimly and pocketed the radio. He gathered his stuff and fired up the buggy that had been brought there by the kids, took a last look around, then put that place behind him.
It seemed a strange place for a beginning ... but perfectly fitting as an end to a particular devil force. How many hammocks had they left this way—With how many unarmed amateurs left as a picnic spread for the 'gators?
Too many, if only one.
But this was Thursday morning—and a modest beginning for a day which would have to see a vicious crime empire dismantled and flung into the muck.
Thursday, yeah ... hot Thursday ... thermal Thursday. And so the day began.
CHAPTER 2TRULY ALIVE
Harold Brognola had been in charge of the official U.S. government response to organized crime since shortly after Mack Bolan began his own unofficial war on the mob. The two men had been covert allies through much of the Bolan experience, exchanging intelligence and sometimes joining forces in joint operations against a common threat—but the chief fed had never been completely comfortable with his secret liaisons with a man who was also, at the same moment, prominent on the FBI's most-wanted list. It was a question of not only official ethics but of personal principles, as well. Brognola was a man of strong moral fiber. The association with Bolan was therefore a troubling one, creating inner conflicts which sometimes approached crisis proportions.
Once, in fact, Brognola had actually pulled the trigger on this man whom he admired and respected—whom, indeed, he loved like a brother. That the trigger pull did not result in Mack Bolan's death was nothing to the credit or debit (however you chose to look at it) of Hal Brognola. Fate, or whatever, had intervened—and the remarkable outcome of all that was the incredible fact that Bolan understood and forgave, as though it had never happened. Not so incredible, though, when you really knew the man.
For all of Brognola's moral and ethical strength, he knew that Mack Bolan was far more the ideal man than Brognola himself would ever be. The guy was one of those flaming anachronisms, born far beyond his time, capable of a degree of personal commitment and dedication unmatched in modern men.
Nor was the guy all blood and ice, either.
In the words of a former Vietnam buddy, "The Sarge is a man who can carry both heart and guts in the same body at the same time." Indeed—though Bolan had first earned his Executioner tag in the hellgrounds of Vietnam, he had also become quietly known among the medics there as Sergeant Mercy.
Said one surgeon at a forward medical facility: "This man Bolan has singlehandedly done more for the American cause in the unpacified areas than any official program I know of."
It seemed that the Executioner—whose missions as a penetration specialist routinely took him into hostile territories—routinely carried with him unofficial gifts of much-needed medical supplies for the civilian victims of that savage time.
"More often than not," the surgeon said, "he came back with a dying old man or woman strapped to his back and a kid under each arm. The man has incredible strength and perseverance. I know personally of one occasion when he carried a maimed child through more than twenty miles of enemy country while under hot pursuit by the enemy. Not only that, he doctored the kid along the way and kept her alive. At his own great peril, of course. And that was only one of many such occasions. It wasn't the medics who first began calling Bolan Sergeant Mercy. That's the literal translation of the name given him by the villagers. But that wasn't his job, you know. He's not a medic."
No, Sergeant Mercy was not a medic. The enemy soldiers and officials knew him by another name, which translates as the Executioner. And he is perhaps the only soldier in modern times to have a price placed on his head by an enemy command.
So ... how to separate the pieces? Was Mack Bolan a cold and methodical killer or was he a courageous and compassionate champion of the human cause?
Brognola had found the threads of separation and—in so doing—had discovered that there was no separation of the pieces of Mack Bolan's character. The pieces all fit together into a coherent pattern to produce the total personality of a man who simply could not and would not turn away from his own vision of "right."
It was "right" that he kill certain individuals, only because he had become convinced that a higher and vital good was thereby being served. And, of course, that higher good was tied directly to his sense of compassion together with a willingness toward personal sacrifice.
Ipso facto, Mack Bolan was at war with the mob.
Also ipso facto, it was a total war utterly devoid of artificial restraints or personal reservations toward comfort and/or convenience.
Most importantly, though, Bolan's war was strongly discriminating and selective. It served no "good" whatever to sacrifice innocent victims in the pursuit of right. Unlike the terrorist mentality which killed and maimed indiscriminately in pursuit of a cause, Bolan's war took excruciating pains to separate the guilty from the innocent, to define the enemy and isolate him within the parameters of a secure war zone before the shooting began.
The guy had seen too much innocent suffering in Southeast Asia. He did not intend to inflict that same pain on his own people, at home. This was, indeed, the very thing that he was fighting against.
So, no—Mack Bolan did not cruise Central Park tossing bombs at joggers as his response to crime in the streets. Nor was he a zealot who could justify any price paid for the success of his undertaking. Many times the guy had canceled a scheduled showdown or broke off in the midst of hostilities, at his own immense peril, because of innocent intruders into the scene.
Paradoxical or not, the guy was practically a saint: a saint with a gun in one hand and a grenade in the other—either of which he would drop instantly to extend that hand to an innocent in need.
A saint with bloody hands ...
Perhaps that was overstating the case but for Hal Brognola it was not a severe overstatement. Still, there were those troubling moments when the chief fed felt like a man who was balancing precariously upon the edge of a sharp knife. Even now, with the White House itself committed to and covertly supporting the operation, Brognola was uneasy in his role as prime backstop for Mack Bolan's illegal war.
And Bolan understood all that, of course. Hell, the guy would be the first to send Brognola packing. He had, in fact, tried to do that very thing many times. And since the furious progression of events during this "second mile" effort, Bolan's most persistently spoken words were "Get off my shadow, Hal."
But, hell, there was no way to get off the guy's shadow, now. Too much was at stake. It was not just Bolan's life—it wasn't just the elimination of a few pockets of organized crime. What was at stake, now, was a powderkeg international situation and very possibly the fate of a free America in a very restless and troubled world. A guy like Mack Bolan could spell a large difference in that equation. The man's entire lifetime had been shaping and preparing him for this moment in history, a moment when man and situation coincided for a destined role in the further development of the nation. You could take all the generals and all the cops and roll them together and still not come up with as good a solution as that one man, Mack Bolan, had to offer to the growing problem of terrorist intrigue.
So, yes, a lot was at stake.
Brognola's sole concern, now, was to deliver Mack Bolan whole and healthy to the man in the oval office at the conclusion of this second-mile stroll through hell. That could be a formidable task, especially when the guy in question kept growling, "Get off my shadow."
Complicating that situation was another individual who kept urging closer and closer involvement. That individual was presently pacing back and forth while glowering at a large wall chart of the Everglades region. And it helped not a whit that this individual was a subordinate in Brognola's own department.
Some individuals simply refuse to be subordinated.
Especially some female individuals.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thermal Thursday by Don Pendleton. Copyright © 1979 Don Pendleton. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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