Mack Bolan: American Hero by George Koukeas

George Koukeas' insightful article covering Mack Bolan was sent to us by a Gold Eagle fan recently. Check it out below:

Years ago, I read and enjoyed Ayn Rand’s novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s characters were unconventional and talented. I never thought I’d find another book, let alone a series of them, that featured another unconventional hero.

Then I discovered Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels. The hero this time around was Mack Bolan.

Like Howard Roark and John Galt, Mack Bolan also possesses a gift. He is an ex-Vietnam veteran whose talent is for warfare, strategizing, and resourcefulness. By attributing this gift to his character, Pendleton presents Bolan as a “beat-the-odds” American soldier who has philosophical musings in-between battles.

Bolan’s personal courage, integrity, and commitment to his mission surpass his contemporaries. Most of all, his unconventional sense of morality leads him to fight a literal one-man war against the Mafia.

In his first adventure, War Against the Mafia (1969), a 30-year old Bolan returns home from Vietnam for the funeral of his family — victims of a Pennsylvania Mob outfit. When Bolan discovers the true extent of mafia corruption in America, his soldier’s sense of responsibility motivates him to fight the mafia as a means of protecting our country.

The mafia eventually responds by playing rough. Because Bolan cannot back down without betraying his moral and patriotic values, he wages a highly offensive, proactive war.

Hence, Bolan’s moral sense places him on a path that defies society’s legal conventions. Because the mafia’s power and influence have immunized its members from legal prosecution, Bolan takes the law into his own hands in order to destroy the mob.

Doing what Rand did for Atlas Shrugged’s “pirate,” Ragnar Danneskjold, Pendleton provides a good man with a moral justification for fighting criminal violence violently. Despite this justification for his actions, the cops try apprehending Bolan for “vigilante” activity.

Bolan, then, not only executes offensives against ruthless mafia thugs but also has to elude police that pose a threat to his life and mission. Nevertheless, Bolan never fires upon cops (or civilians) and is motivated primarily by compassion for victims and not by hatred of the enemy.

Though Bolan goes “solo” on his missions, he is sometimes assisted by helicopter pilot Jack Grimaldi, Federal cop Harold Brognola, and other interesting secondary characters.

Like Rand’s fiction, Pendleton’s 38 Executioner books are sprinkled with philosophy. Pendleton explores the deeper meanings of life and, what he called, the “metaphysics of violence” (i.e. why violence exists in the world and what its role is).

On one level, Bolan’s conscientious battle against crime represents one of the series’ morals about life: that life is most meaningful when a person meets, struggles through, and defeats life’s challenges.

Though he experiences in microcosm the tragedies of war, Bolan’s psychological strength and conviction enable him to persist in his war and maintain his humanity. This is one of the series’ elements that I as well as many readers relate to: The Executioner stories are an analogy for overcoming life’s challenges with a commitment to values, without becoming callous or bitter towards life.

Pendleton, through Bolan, seems to argue that because life is sacred, it is worth the struggle. The fact that Bolan finds meaning in his experiences and prevails through perseverance and commitment serves as an inspiring lesson. Unlike the philosophical comprehensiveness of Atlas Shrugged, Pendleton’s philosophy is expressed in “pieces” spread across 38 books and revealed through the same character.

The Executioner stories reveal Bolan’s effectiveness in restoring Justice. In the long-term, Bolan succeeds — as an individual — where most legal bureaucracies have failed. Likewise, Galt and Roark also demonstrate the power of the individual.

Other similarities exist between Pendleton’s and Rand’s characters that further illuminate Bolan’s character. For example, Dagny Taggert, in Atlas Shrugged, mistakenly views Francisco D’ Anconia as “unprincipled” before discovering they are on the same side.

Similarly, federal cop, Hal Brognola, tries shooting Bolan on sight as a dangerous “criminal” before being won over by Bolan’s nobility. The two men become allies in fighting crime and develop a deep friendship.

Furthermore, just as Howard Roark inspires Dominique and Gail Wynand to change their views on life, Mack Bolan has a similar effect on the other characters in the series.

After completing his 38-book series, Pendleton trained other writers to continue Mack’s adventures. Eventually, Mack Bolan moved from fighting mafia criminals to fighting Communist Russia in the 1980s. Today, Bolan fights America’s war on terror.

Some of the writers Pendleton trained have a good grasp of the character while others make semi-erroneous characterizations. Some of the better writers have stand-out books, such as Line of Control (2003) and its sequel Breached (2003), that present Bolan as accurately and as grandly as Pendleton did.

Newcomers to the series who want a good understanding of who Mack Bolan is would enjoy these books. Or, even better, look for Don Pendleton’s original series in used bookstores.

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George Koukeas is a freelance writer based in Colorado who has written for magazines, websites and the occasional newspaper. He is currently working on a series of articles focusing on Frontier history and related tourist spots in the West.

Sparked by Paranoia, Fueled by Fear...

As revealed at San Diego's Comic-Con, ROOM 59 is Gold Eagle's brand-new thriller/adventure series launching in January 2008.

The Players: ROOM 59 is a multinational policing agency sanctioned to terminate global threats that governments can’t touch. Its high-level operatives are seasoned in the dangerous game of espionage and counterterrorism. A Room 59 mission puts everything on the line; emotions run high, and so does the body count.

Written by Cliff Ryder, each ROOM 59 novel is a stand-alone story featuring intricate plots, thrilling action, nail-biting suspense and the timeless battle of good and evil.


The first book of the series is THE POWERS THAT BE: When a double agent in Cuba suddenly disappears, there’s concern that he might have gone rogue, working against ROOM 59 and the world at large. But one of the agency’s top spymasters has a blood tie to the operative in question, which leaves him with an agonizing choice: allow the mission to be scrubbed, and leave thousands to die in the resulting bloodbath—or risk everything he knows, including his career, to keep his secret deeply buried.

ROOM 59: The Powers That Be will be in stores January 2008.

An excerpt from Rogue Angel: Secret of the Slaves

Pain jabbed the muscle of Annja Creed's right forearm as she slammed it into the hardwood limb jutting from the trunk-like pole before her.

Good, she thought savagely. She slammed a palm into the slick-polished wood of the trunk itself even as her left forearm blocked into another protrusion.

Faster and faster her hands moved, in and out, over and under the blunt wooden posts stuck in sockets on the central pole. She practiced blocks, traps, strikes with stiffened fingers and fists and palms. A drumbeat rose as muscle and bone met wood with jarring impact.

Annja was a tall, fit woman in her midtwenties. She wore a green sports bra and gray shorts. The humming air conditioner kept her Brooklyn loft cool.

She paused to brush away a vagrant strand of chestnut hair that had worked loose from the bun she had pinned it in. Her scowl deepened.

The stout wooden apparatus rocked to a palm-heel thrust, despite the fact its wide base was weighed down by heavy sandbags. Annja's sparring partner was a training dummy used as an adjunct to wing chun style gongfu. She had taken up the study because it was supposed to be highly effective and easy to learn, while giving her another option for nonlethal use of force.

She had plenty of lethal options available. The deadliest was currently invisible to the naked eye. But it was not intangible, not like her rapier-quick intellect or boundless resourcefulness, which she knew could be as deadly as any physical weapons.

She whipped the back of her right hand against a wooden arm. She let the hand flop over it in a trapping move, fired a punch that made the post rock. As she worked into a blinding-fast pattern of blocks and strikes, all oriented toward the centerline of the post, as they would be to the centerline of an opponent's torso, she found herself worrying about the turn her life had taken.

She thought about the sword—her sword. She had learned that it had once belonged to Joan of Arc. And that she was the inheritor of the long-ago martyr's mantle. On a research trip to France she had, seemingly by chance, found the final piece of St. Joan's sword, broken to pieces by the English captors who burned her. At more or less the same time she had met the man named Roux. He was spry for his gray beard—and even sprier for the fact he claimed Joan had been protégée. He and his apprentice Garin Braden had failed to rescue her from execution. As a result they had been cursed—or blessed—with agelessness.

Roux had spent the half millennium since Joan's death trying to reassemble the saint's shattered sword. At first he'd regarded Annja as an interloper and tried to steal the final fragment from her. Yet when she came into the presence of the other pieces, in Roux's chateau in France, the sword had spontaneously reforged itself at her touch.

It was a bitter pill for a lifelong rationalist to swallow. Especially one who made most of her income as the resident skeptic on the notably credulous cable series Chasing History's Monsters, on the Knowledge Channel.

Her arms and hands now moved too fast for the eye to follow. The tough, seasoned hardwood creaked and strained to the mounting fury of her blows. Human bone would give way long before that old wood did.

The sword. It had come to dominate her life.

It rested now in its accustomed location—what she thought of as the otherwhere. It was not present in this world, except at her command. To summon it, she had learned, all she needed was to form a hand as if to grasp its hilt, and exert her will. And her hand was filled.

But her life, it seemed, had correspondingly emptied since the sword came into it.

Sweat soaked her hair and flew from her face. Her wrists and knuckles and elbows sounded like machinegun fire as they struck the muk-jong.

Orphaned at an early age, raised at an orphanage in New Orleans, Annja had always been alone. She was always apart, somehow, different, although she never tried to be. And it didn't often bother her.

She had never felt as if she couldn't enjoy companionship. But she didn't actively seek it. She'd had close friends at college, on digs, among the crew of Chasing History's Monsters. She had had lovers. But, she had to admit, no truly lasting loves.

And now she figured she never would. At least so long as she bore her illustrious predecessor's sacred sword.

She was an archaeologist. Her period of concentration was the later Middle Ages and Renaissance Europe. She spoke all the major modern Romance languages, and Latin, and studied any number of archaic forms—and weapons.

She wasn't sure why she was feeling a sudden gap in her life left by the lack of a lasting relationship. She had her mentor, Roux, and her sometime enemy, Garin. But she didn't really think those relationships counted. She didn't want them to.

Great, she thought as she slammed her forearms against the projecting limbs. She recognized the rare feeling she was experiencing.

"I'm lonely!" she said to her empty loft. She slammed an elbow smash into the upright on the last word. It broke free from its base and toppled backward. "Nice," she said in disgust. She rubbed her elbow, the pain corresponding to her mood. "Those things cost money."

She stomped off to the shower.

ANNJA EMERGED from the bathroom wearing a long bathrobe swirled in patterns of green, yellow and blue. Her long hair was wrapped in a towel. She heated a cup of cocoa in the microwave and looked around her loft. While jobs were scarce for a freelance archaeologist, she had lucked into enough supplementary income from her television gig and some publishing deals to afford the space.

With Roux's assistance she sometimes accepted commissions to do special archaeological assignments around the globe—always consistent with her strict sense of scientific ethics—for employers who wanted them kept discreet. They tended to be a lot more perilous than the usual university dig, and accordingly well compensated. Sometimes only just slightly over the considerable expense such missions tended to incur.

Flopping on her couch in the space left by several piles of manuscripts various contacts had sent her, mostly dealing with her side interest in fringe archaeology, she made the key mistake of clicking on the television.

She was hoping for a distraction. What she got was Kristie Chatham, on location with some kind of cockamamy Knowledge Channel crossover production in England. Annja was all too aware of not having been invited to take part.

"…standing here in front of Stonehenge," Kristie was saying brightly, "which as we all know was built by the Druids…"

Annja emitted a strangled scream and threw a cushion at the screen. "No, you bimbo," she shouted. "No, no, no. Stonehenge was built thousands of years before the Druids. Don't you bother to research anything?" A better question might've been, didn't the Knowledge Channel fact-check anything? But she knew the answer to that one, too.

"I'm here with Reggie Whitcomb of the South England Pagan Federation," Kristie bubbled on, "who's going to explain how the Druids levitated the huge cross-pieces, called sarsen stones, into place using their advanced psychic powers."

Annja grabbed the remote and clicked off the set just as Kristie turned her microphone toward a chinless guy wearing a white robe with a peaked hood that made him look as if he belonged to a middle-school auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan. The skies were black over Salisbury Plain, and the wind cracked like wet sheets whipping on a clothesline. Annja hoped Kristie would get struck by lightning. Or at least soaked to the skin.

Of course that would make Kristie's sheer white blouse transparent.And Kristie would score another topviewed video on YouTube. Unlike a lot of its media rivals, the Knowledge Channel never set its legal hounds to pull such videos down—the producers had noticed how ratings spiked for their repeats after one went online.

Annja slammed her remote on top of a stack of printouts on the couch beside her.

"It's not like I'm Ms. Establishment Science or anything," she muttered, with her chin down to her clavicle. "It's just that I don't open my mind so wide my brain rolls out my mouth."

Her cell phone rang and she frowned at it in suspicion. If that's Doug Morrell, his head's coming right off, she thought.

She picked it up, flipped it open. "Hello." "Annja Creed?"

Whomever the voice belonged to, it was not her producer from Chasing History's Monsters. The voice was like liquid amber poured over gravel—deep, rugged, yet somehow flowing.

Her eyes narrowed. I know that voice, she thought. It sounds so familiar.

"Ms. Creed?" She was certain of the Irish accent.

"Oh. Yeah. Sorry. This is Annja."

"Ms. Creed, my name is Iain Moran. I'm a musician. You may have heard of me."

"Sir Iain Moran?" Annja asked. It couldn't be.

"The same." Her mind's eye could see that famous smile, at once roguish and world-weary.

"Publico? Lead singer for T-34?"

"The very one."

"Right," Annja was in no mood for pranks.

"Don't hang up! Please. I really am Sir Iain Moran." "Sure. Multibillionaire rock stars call me every day. If Doug Morrell put you up to this, you're both way overdue for a good swift kick to the—"

"Please. I'd very much like to consult you on a professional matter, concerning your expertise. Would it help to assuage your doubts if my helicopter collected you on the roof of your flat in fifteen minutes?"

It was original, as pranks go. She had to give her caller that. "You're on," Annja said, daring her caller to push this as far as it would go.

Fifteen minutes later she stared openmouthed into the brownish haze of a hot Brooklyn day. Her face and hair were whipped by the downblast as a Bell 429 helicopter descended to the roof.


~ Secret of the Slaves will be available in bookstores September 11th, 2007.