Don Pendleton
Day of Mourning
The world dies 'twixt every heartbeat, and is born again in each new perception of the mind.
For each of us, the order of life is to perceive and perish and perceive again, and who can say which is which — for every human experience builds a new world in its own image — and death itself is but an unusual perception.
Live large that you may experience large and thus, hopefully, die large.
A soldada's final words.
Translated from the Spanish for Bolan in Miami Massacre
1
In the beginning, it was like any of the other missions in this government-sanctioned new war against world terrorism: Mack Bolan, the Executioner, now known as Colonel John Macklin Phoenix, the stony man of Stony Man, racing toward another confrontation with dark forces....
The AV-8B Advanced Harrier skimmed the endless expanse of the choppy Atlantic at a snappy 600 mph. Jack Grimaldi was behind the controls of the Vertical Short Takeoff and Landing combat jet, heading on a southeasterly course three hundred miles off the northern coast of Brazil. The Marine Corps' state of the art VSTOL aircraft was equipped with full cannon and missile capability.
Grimaldi's passenger was a big, icy-eyed man outfitted in scuba gear.
Mack Bolan, in the seat behind Grimaldi, felt wrapped in the steady low-pitched whine of the jet's engines.
A gray cloud ceiling melded with the turbulent ocean on the near horizon beyond the Harrier's Plexiglas.
Bolan jarred forward against his shoulder harness as Grimaldi, a longtime ally in the Executioner's old and new wars, slacked off sharply on the mighty aircraft's forward thrust.
Grimaldi then brought the Harrier to a stationary hover at fifty feet above the roiling sea.
The pilot's voice crackled through Bolan's headset.
"Radar beep, forty-seven miles due south. Right on the money, Striker. Do we hit 'em?"