The Executioner 79: Council of Kings

The Executioner 79: Council of Kings
by Chet Cunningham and Les Danforth
1985 Worldwide Library

Through the decades and hundreds of books, Mack Bolan has gone through several phases.  After Don Pendleton's original run of his war against the mafia, Bolan got recruited by the government to fight terrorism.  At some point he avenged the death of a love interest, burning his bridges with the government as he went, so he's back to fighting the mob, supported by his brother Johnny.  I may prefer this era of the Bolans, with Mack as a stone cold sociopath moving from target to target.

Council of Kings is set very much in Oregon, with shootouts at Multnomah Falls and Mount Tabor Park.  Bolan's target is a mafia lone sharking operation, which spins off into prostitution and arms running.  There's a little bit of him working with the sister of a women killed in the operation, but Bolan is so uniquely horrible at keeping women alive that she's soon dispatched and forgotten about.

There's a bizarre sequence of Bolan going through a series of deathtrap rooms in a warehouse before he can confront a pimp.  There's a room full of cobras, another room covered in sand full of landmines, etc.  I can't see the pimp having to run the gauntlet every time he wants to leave his office, and I wonder who feeds the snakes.

The book ends with Bolan telling Johnny a story from his 'Nam days as an excuse to include a short story to fill out the page length.  I don't know how common this practice was, but this particular story was one of the darkest in Men's Adventure.

Bolan has a buddy who, after getting a Dear John letter, shaves his head into a mohawk, signifying that he didn't intend to come back from his mission.  He doesn't, but Bolan's convinced that he managed to swallow a canvas map before being killed.  He becomes obsessed with the idea, and breaks into a mortuary to cut open his buddy's corpse to find it.  Instead, he finds a stash of heroin.

Here Bolan learns that the US military is controlled by a cabal of organized crime, the titular Council of Kings, who use war to push drugs.  And we learn that female VC spies would kill GIs while screwing them, via toilet paper tubes lined with razor blades secreted in their hoo-hahs.