Grave Mercy. Don Pendleton

drugged berserker in the small of the back, the force of his impact hurling the brainwashing victim ten feet past Rudd, landing him in the surf. The splash of water over his body didn’t do anything to clarify the killer’s mind as he leaped back to his feet with unnatural speed and strength. Bolan knew that a tackle like he’d given this man would have left anyone else writhing in pain. Even Bolan’s shoulder ached from that contact.

      “Well, come on!” Bolan shouted at the blank-eyed man. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, but he appeared to have been on a football team. The youth in front of him was as big as the Executioner, and had a thicker musculature, making the soldier think of a linebacker. Tanned and blond, he was undoubtedly an American, and this one would be strong enough to twist Bolan’s head off his shoulders thanks to the chemical cocktail that had reduced him to a feral, froth-mouthed berserker.

      Bolan had tried muscle, and ended up slamming into a brick wall, jarred himself by the very impact that had saved Rudd. Pure strength wasn’t going to be enough to end this conflict because if he struck any harder, he’d kill the young man. It was time to outfight, using his intellect. He summoned up his best “drill sergeant” voice and taunted the berserker again. “Kill me!”

      That order spurred the linebacker-size attacker to charge, blind rage spurring him on. Bolan threw himself at the charging drug-crazed assassin, but he aimed low, striking the man across the thighs and flipping him head over heels. The berserker tumbled into the sand, throwing up a cloud, and the thud that resounded from his fall was a powerful drumbeat. The big killer’s eyes were now unfocused, dazed from the crash, and Bolan didn’t waste a single moment, scissoring his legs around his neck.

      With all the leverage and strength of his calves and ankles pressing on either side of the marauder’s neck, Bolan had him locked in a true sleeper hold, not pinching the windpipe shut but pressing the knots of bone around his ankles against blood vessels that fed the brain. Deprived of fresh oxygen, the killer’s fevered brain faltered, losing consciousness even as the berserker clawed at Bolan’s shins.

      The soldier grimaced, but with a proper sleeper hold applied, the would-be murderer was slumped, out cold in the sand.

      “What the hell is going on?” Rudd asked, his voice shaky.

      “Check on Antoine. One of these crazies chopped off his hand,” Bolan ordered.

      Rudd paused, blinking at the bloodied and battered Executioner in front of him.

      “Move it!”

      Rudd’s senses returned to him and he rushed to the badly wounded teen’s side. Bolan knew that he’d have to find some form of cord to apply a tourniquet to the stump; direct pressure wasn’t going to work.

      Luckily, the maniacal assassin had a belt on. Bolan whipped it out of the unconscious brute’s belt loops and started to stagger to Antoine’s side.

      The only warning that the Executioner had of an attack were the grunts and pants of the attacking woman. For Bolan and his finely tuned reflexes, that was more than enough. The young woman had murdered Spaulding, so a gentle response wasn’t in the cards. She was within a few feet when her throat released the shrill beginning notes of an animalistic howl, but Bolan cut it off with a raised elbow that exploded her nose and tore her cheek open.

      She hit the ground, and Bolan sighed. He’d let his emotions get the better of him, and now a brainwashed young woman was disfigured, bleeding and unconscious in the sand. He tore himself away from his self-reproach.

      A boy needed medical attention, and Bolan’s battlefield first aid was going to keep him from bleeding to death.

      BEFORE BOLAN returned his attention to the flattened, defeated machete-wielding marauders, he’d already encountered a terrible death toll in this attack. Spaulding was one of course, but there was a mother and two children slain in the violent rampage. The woman, named Anna, and her eight-year-old son were hacked apart, Anna’s life given as she provided a living shield against the rising and falling edge of the murderer’s blade. Her courage and sacrifice were in vain, sadly, as the machete’s merciless steel severed her left arm as it shielded her son’s head, taking off the limb and crushing a cruel crease in the boy’s face.

      Bolan looked at the horrific carnage, his gut filled with bitter defeat. He didn’t look too hard, but he realized that he couldn’t tell where mother ended and son began, their dark, crimson-stained skin torn apart, muscle and bone so pulped and splintered that it was as if a demonic elephant had stomped a puddle into their bodies. Dread and loss were crippling emotions, but the Executioner was far too human, too humane, to be able to bottle up and dispose of those feelings. Instead, he buried them, making them the spurs that stuck into his soul that would be there to prod him along should his strength begin to fail.

      Dread and loss were abstract, unfocused ideas that he couldn’t use. Pain and righteous anger, however, were the flint and steel that would ignite Bolan to go one more step, endure one more injury, throw one more punch. The horrors of this morning turned from peace to panic were the kindling, the firewood that would fuel his hunt for justice.

      The last victim, a little girl whose age he couldn’t even guess, had been so violently assaulted that blood has sprayed along the sand for twenty-five feet. From the churned, bloody sand, he could tell that it had been four of the maniacs, not the one who had cut through the trees to the beach, who had grabbed her up. Her screams had disappeared into the mix of those of other children.

      Bolan saw a small, rag-stuffed doll splattered with blood and he stooped to pick it up. All the while, he reproached himself for being to gentle with his attacker as the doll’s owner was being attacked.

      He cast the reproach aside after a moment. He had been on alert, but his senses had only so much acuity. He couldn’t see through walls or hear the sound of the vehicle that had dropped off five armed people in the grip of chemical fury. It was a basic law of physics—the intervening strip of trees was too thick, too much of a barrier to keep him from noticing that, and even if he did know, Bolan had only his knife.

      There were wounded besides Antoine, the young man who’d surrendered a hand in defense of others. Bolan and Rudd had tended to cuts and bruises after ensuring that the boy wouldn’t bleed to death, but now Rudd stumbled around, shell-shocked by the horrors he’d experienced. A call through to the police and for an ambulance received an answer that the small surf camp would have to wait as a beach resort two miles up the road had been the victim of similar violence.

      Bolan knew that the carnage on the scene at a more crowded pleasure spot would have been horrendous.

      “Rudd,” Bolan called, “help me check on the attackers.”

      “The girl is dead,” Rudd said, his words coming out of his mouth in a slurred mush.

      “The one who attacked you?” Bolan asked. He winced as he realized that he’d applied far too much force to her, but in the wake of Spaulding’s brutal murder, he’d let slip his kid gloves. Still, she’d been a victim of chemical reprogramming, a drug-fueled rage that had been inflicted upon her and the other four, turning them into marauders who barely felt pain and had required skeletal fractures to stop them.

      Bolan stopped at another body, a killer who had gone down with a twisted arm and a kick to the head. He was a local, a young man who was all lean muscle and long limbs. The soldier checked for broken bones in the neck, but the only signs of what had killed him were dried crystals flaking at the corners of his mouth, leftovers from the froth and foam that had burbled up when his body succumbed to a hormonal overload.

      The big American wasn’t a coroner, but he’d seen people killed by overdoses of drugs and it would be a good guess that the machete-armed invaders of this beach haven had all succumbed to massive heart attacks brought on by the chemicals pumped into their veins.

      Five corpses, each of them brought down by the Executioner’s hands in such a way that they would live, snuffed out by the same strange fuel that had driven them to attack.

      “Are they all dead?” Rudd asked, cringing at the sight of them as Bolan stacked their limp forms