Don Pendleton - Tower of Terror

Our democracy won its independence through the heroism and sacrifice of countless citizen warriorssome recognized by history, others anonymous. Now we are threatened by terror. At any time, without warning, despite the efforts of our police and armed forces, the defense of family or friends could fall on the individual. To these citizens, who may suddenly find themselves warriors, we dedicate this book.

Carl Lyons: blond blue-eyed ex-LAPD sergeant, this recent veteran of the Justice Department's war against organized crime has seen enough blow-torched, pliers-mangled corpses to know what to do about today's psycho punksshoot first.

Rosario Blancanales: from a Chicano background, he's known as Pol for Politician. Able Team's broad-shouldered senior member now fights the war against international terrorism with a special kind of sophistication and fury.

Herman Schwarz: code-named Gadgets for his wizardry with electronic devices, this Vietnam vet with metaphysical leanings has a genius-level iq and a penchant for the unusual and unexpected in strategy and action.

It had been a dream of Mack Bolan's for many years. It was a dream of hope and a dream of despair.

Sometimes it was a real dream, a vision in the deepest sleep, that the Executioner's Death Squada hellish unit of ruthless, disillusioned veterans of Vietnamwas reborn in glory from the flames and ashes. More often it was a daydream that the guys were back again, the warriors of Death Squad on the attack in the world once more.

Death Squad. They were certainly not an hallucination. They were once a maelstrom of nine very real and extremely dangerous men. They were heroes of the Vietnam War. They were recruited by Mack Bolan when the Black Hand let out a $100,000 contract on the big guy's life.

What a unit! Chopper Fontanelli and Deadeye Washington Flower Child Andromede and Gunsmoke Harrington Boom-Boom Hoffower Bloodbrother Loudelk Whispering Zitkaand Politician Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz.

All but the last two were killed, mercilessly felled by Mafia guns in the Executioner's final wipeout strike against the mob's hardsite on the cliffs of Balboa, Southern California.

The Executioner himself was wounded in that engagement. And the bloodied survivors, Pol and Gadgets, were captured by police in a retreat from the Beverly Hills estate of LA czar Julian DiGeorge. The best thing about that bitter time was Carl Lyons, a sergeant with the LAPD, who became a Bolan ally, later joined him in his campaigns in San Diego, Las Vegas, Hawaii.

After the carnage in California, Bolan vowed never to involve allies in what he saw as an exclusively personal crusade.

But it is hard to keep good men down, especially those hardasses who had no fear of death and remained undaunted by any Mafia.

Blancanales and Schwarz and Lyons had in fact found new strength in Bolan's cauldron of justice and retribution, and they would remain allies of the man in black to the fullest extent of his final miles. For them, there was no other choice.

Carl Lyons was the only one of the three who had been baptized in fires other than the Asian war. His experience was with the Los Angeles police, a career which reached its brutal limits with the get-Bolan detail codenamed "Hardcase," a war waged against the Executioner by law-enforcement officers because of Bolan's severe infractions of the law in his own war against the Syndicate. It was a fierce assignment, and it involved Lyons' growing awareness that Bolan was right at whatever cost. A new road was opening up for him. It was the road of righteous war, paved by that giant American who lived large. For Lyons, a trim blue-eyed man of iron who knew the ways of unconventional combat as well as any veteran, there would be no turning back.

Rosario 'Pol' Blancanales was a Black Beret in 'Nam, and served on the infamous Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols. It was as a guide on penetration missions in that conflict that Pol first met Mack Bolan. Blancanales earned his "politician" nickname from his skills in dealing with all types of people, his ability to win acceptance easily and blend chameleon-like into any environment. During the Vietnam pacification programs he learned the obscure dialects of the country fluently; it was an unusual accomplishment, indicative of high intelligence as well as his outstanding degree of ordinary common sense.

Herman "Gadgets" Schwarz was the wizard, a counter-intelligence advisor in Vietnam who had turned his genius-level skills at electronics to good effect in the Death Squad. Seeing Gadgets blaze away with a primed Ingram, it was hard to visualize him as the person he really wasthe favorite son of a reclusive, slightly screwball lady in Pasadena who filled her house with cats and Herman's leftover gadgetry. But nothing was predictable about Schwarz.

Nothing was predictable about any of these individuals: seasoned in guerilla war of the utmost extremes, they operated now in a nation stalked by multinational terrorists, fighting an undeclared war much more momentous than anything that had gone before.

Two of themPol and Gadgetshad started a detective agency called the Able Group, which with Blancanales' sister Toni soon became a multi-operative team that took on cases too involved to be cracked by ordinary law enforcement. Meanwhile Lyons had become a Federal Agent, an undercover specialist for the Justice Department.

These roles would soon lead to the realization of Bolan's dream of rebirth. His John Phoenix program, a war for the Executioner that would take him to new shores and new enemies, had left the home flank dangerously exposed. And so the Stony Man team was forged, a grouping of powerful individuals headquartered in the secrecy of Stony Man Farm, which was their heavily equipped hardsite in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Historically the scene of a four-year "valley of humiliation" for the Union forces against Stonewall Jackson, it became a fitting locale for the ultimate rebellion: Death Squad is back!

It has always been Mack Bolan's feeling that the universe is a violent thing, created by a series of explosions. Bolan and his allies are those continuing explosive forces that sustain and advance life itself. None of them will ever really be on stand-bythey are always in action.

Now named Able Team, Mack's three-man anti-terrorist operation will move into action whenever conventional forces are unable to act. It is Able Team's job to take over from law enforcement when the odds are too stacked. That bright, crisp morning in New York City, for example, when something gross and bloody happened in Wall Street a day and night that were to be slashed and torn with terror. Who would have thought that the whole thing began in Florida, in Miami's not-very-crisp, far from morning-bright "Little Havana"? Able Team would soon find out

Backed by a brilliant Stony Man unit that includes Hal Brognola and April Rose, the Executioner's Able Team is a dream come true. Born in flames, they are ready to die at any time, but they will never be extinguished.

Come in, Able.

They followed Rosario Blancanales through the crowded, neon-bright streets of Miami's "Little Havana," never getting too close, but never letting Blancanales out of sight. The Latin nightlife of the district moved around them, young women in tight skirts, macho young men in disco finery, the groups of big-bellied older men standing in front of cafes, laughing.

Carl Lyons leaned across the front seat of the van and adjusted the passenger-side rearview mirror. The nightlife didn't fool him. Many of those macho young men trained in the Florida Everglades, grunting through swampwater as their instructors fired machine-gun bursts to keep their heads down. Those older fellows, who looked like grandfathers, were cold killers. Betrayed at the Bay of Pigs, some of them financed their dreams of recapturing Cuba through the smuggling and sale of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. If any of them was to learn the identity of Rosario Blancanales, or see into the interior of the closed van carrying Carl Lyons and Herman "Gadgets" Schwarz, there would be death. The FBI had lost several agents in the streets and alleys of Little Havana. The agents simply disappeared.