Blood Rites. Don Pendleton

worn your vest,” he jeered, and turned back to the battle going on behind him.

      Two pigs down, two Haitians still to go. Then they’d torch the Lincoln and find a way back to the boss, to report.

      “Party time,” Maxwell muttered, and moved off to meet his enemies.

       1

       Norland, Miami Gardens, Florida

      Mack Bolan hit the ground running in Miami. He had driven down from Stony Man Farm, in Virginia, breaking up the journey with an overnight stop in Savannah, Georgia. The drive let him carry the gear he’d picked out for this mission without any hassles from airport security, and if something happened to the car—a confiscated narco-smuggler’s Mercury Marauder, whose records had been lost somewhere between its forfeiture and its delivery to Stony Man—there would be no comebacks on Bolan or the Farm.

      The warring parties were a tough Jamaican outfit called the Viper Posse, and a Haitian gang whose leaders hadn’t bothered thinking up a catchy name. Both dealt in drugs, illegal weapons, human trafficking and sundry lesser rackets. They’d been stepping on each other’s toes around Miami for the past two years, the body count increasing, but this last flamboyant battle at the crowded Dolphin Mall caused a ripple out of Washington, propelling Bolan to the Sunshine State.

      Nine dead and thirteen wounded in the latest firefight, which was probably a record, even for South Florida. The body count included three known Viper Posse members, two illegal Haitian immigrants, two Miami-Dade police officers, and two shoppers caught in the crossfire. The wounded were bystanders, more cops and a couple of mall security officers. Local law and the feds were all over it, turning Miami’s Haitian and Jamaican enclaves upside-down, but cries of racial profiling had touched off protests in the streets, and when you got down to it, no police force in the States could chase the Viper Posse’s leaders once they split for home.

      That was where Bolan came in.

      He didn’t need warrants, indictments, subpoenas, or writs of extradition. He wasn’t logging evidence for use in court, and didn’t have to read a perp his rights before he brought the hammer down. He’d been hunting human predators of one kind or another from his youth until his staged death in Manhattan some years back, with nothing changed except his face and name.

      His war was still the same. The opposition’s ranks were inexhaustible.

      Most of the residents of Kendall, southwest of Coral Gables, were law-abiding people. However, those who stood outside the law had earned a reputation for ferocious violence.

      While most posse members were nominal Rastafarians, purportedly worshiping late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as a god and smoking ganja as a sacrament, the island-spawned gang also swam in a current of Obeah, a West Indian belief system with African roots, akin to Voodoo or Santeria. The practice of Obeah involved blood sacrifice. Animals were ostensibly preferred, but some practitioners were rumored to spill human blood for important rituals, or when they sent a special message to their enemies.

      Murder was all the same to Bolan, whether carried out with automatic weapons or machetes, and he normally repaid the predators in kind. He had no fear of “magick,” black or white, but recognized that many people felt its draw and thereby left themselves open to victimization. When superstition crossed the line into mayhem and became a tool for terrorists, the Executioner was ready to step in and shut the circus down.

      Beginning now.

      * * *

      GARCELLE BROUARD KNEW she was staring in the face of death as Winston Channer stood before her, showing a ghastly smile. A fall of dusty-looking dreadlocks framed his oval face, eyebrows replaced by rows of small, deliberately inflicted scars, more of them on his cheeks in tight spiral designs. His teeth were either capped or filed to points, so that his smile displayed a double row of fangs.

      “You’re as good as dead,” he told her.

      Garcelle kept her face impassive and replied, “So, get it over with.”

      “Not so fast, child. I’ve got a message for your family.”

      “You think that will change the way they deal with you?” She laughed, enjoying the expression on his feral face. “You’ll only make things worse.”

      “Be worse for you, no doubt. Think Daddy will like it if I send ya back in pieces?” Channer narrowed his eyes and asked, “Why are you smiling?”

      She kept the mocking smile in place while answering his question. “I’m imagining the things he’ll do to you. How long he’ll keep you tied up on his table, screaming.”

      “You like the screams, eh? When I start on you, scream plenty for me, will ya? No one’s coming to help you.”

      That was true, she realized. The Viper Posse occupied this whole apartment complex. She sat in unit 227, bound to a straight-backed wooden chair with plastic zip ties. She could scream until her lungs bled, and the other yardies wouldn’t interfere with Channer’s fun. Nor would the neighbors, who’d been terrorized into submission when the Viper Posse routed tenants from the Palm Glades complex and converted it into their headquarters.

      Police? Forget about them. They patrolled Kendall’s white neighborhoods routinely, but required an urgent call to trespass on Jamaican turf around Three Lakes. The last time they’d visited Palm Glades, it sparked a confrontation that sent nine yardies to jail, and seven coppers to the hospital. The gang was not evicted, though, because it kept a battery of top-end lawyers on retainer and possessed a bill of sale for the suburban property.

      No. She was on her own, and that was bad.

      Fatally bad.

      She couldn’t bargain with the Viper Posse’s local honcho, couldn’t bribe her way out of the trap. Channer was bent on capturing her father’s territory, taking everything he had, and would not settle for a consolation prize.

      She was a pawn to him—or worse, a living sacrifice.

      “I don’t want to cut your head off first,” Channer said. “That spoils my game and tells your daddy he’s got nothing left to hope for. Mebbe I should start down on the other end, eh?”

      Garcelle tried to imagine what it would feel like, having her feet cut off. Would she bleed out? Not likely, if her captors wanted her alive and suffering. A propane torch would cauterize the wounds, but searing would not stop infection. Not that it would help. Channer would no doubt dismember her completely, long before gangrene could end her misery.

      Tell them no more than you have to, she thought grimly. Everybody breaks, but hold on as long as you can. Make the bastards work for it.

      “Ten toes it is,” Channer declared, and moved off toward the doorway. He opened it and called to someone on the Other Side, “Gimme the little saw, brother. And one of those blue tarps.”

      * * *

      BOLAN HAD GONE all out, picking his tools for the Miami mission. Riding with him on the southbound highway was a Steyr AUG assault rifle, a Benelli M4 Super 90 semiautomatic shotgun, a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum pistol, and his favorite Beretta 93R selective-fire sidearm. For long-range work, he’d picked a Barrett M98B sniper rifle. The Barrett is a bolt-action weapon, feeding .338 Lapua Magnum rounds from a ten-round detachable box magazine. Top off that ensemble with spare magazines all around, plus two dozen M68 fragmentation grenades, and the Executioner was ready to rumble.

      His first target was a so-called social club, the Kingston House, located on Southwest 80th Street near Snapper Creek Park. Intel from Stony Man identified it as a hangout for the Viper