The Exterminator

by Peter McCurtin

  KILL FOR PEACE!

  John Eastland was a Vietnam vet who wanted no more than to live and let live, but the gangsters, pimps and weirdos wouldn’t let him. When they wasted his buddy it was the last straw. John went to war and he brought it all back home. With exploding bullets, flame throwers, and an M-16 set to rock and roll he was a one man search and destroy mission against the enemy in our streets.

  John Eastland uses a Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum with an eight-inch barrel. He drills out the tips of his slugs and loads them with mercury. When they hit a scumbag’s belly they blow up like a hand grenade. John calls that his rat load.

  This is the story of criminals who kill and go free. This is the story of degenerate scum who are protected by the law. This is the story of dying cities and the hopeless people who live and work in them and know that they have been deserted by a callous government and a sleepwalking establishment.

  This is the story of a man who wouldn’t take it any more. This is what he did about it.

  A MANOR BOOK

  Manor Books, Inc.

  45 East 30th Street

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 1980 by Manor Books, Inc.

  This book is a novelization of the movie entitled:

  THE EXTERMINATOR. © 1980 Avco Embassy Pictures Corp. MARK BUNTZMAN presents a film written and directed by JAMES GLICKENHAUS starring CHRISTOPHER GEORGE, SAMANTHA EGGAR and ROBERT GINTY as THE EXTERMINATOR. Edited by CORKY OHARA. Original music composed and conducted by JOE RENZETTI. Guest performance by STAN GETZ. Songs by THE TRAMMPS® and ROGER BOWLING, and CHIP TAYLOR. Director of photography ROBERT M. BALDWIN.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  ISBN: 0-532-23320-4

  PROLOGUE

  The shock wave of the exploding mortar shell blew Eastland off the side of the hill like the hand of God and he went down, down into blackness. When he hit and rolled he came up on shaky, bleeding legs in a pile of mangled bodies. A carpet of broken bodies had broken his fall.

  None of the bodies was a whole body. Other mortar shells came screaming in, blowing the hill to bits. The VC were walking the shells in. Compared to regular artillery the mortars were slow and you could hear them coming. Other stuff was coming in too, mostly rockets, and they exploded along the sides of the deep, narrow jungle valley. The rockets had a different sound than the mortars, and a lot more range.

  Most of the guys in the company were dead. A guy came running and screaming in panic and stepped on a land mine. There was an orange flash and after it, came the shower of rocks and dirt. Eastland knew they were coming in from all sides. They were moving up the heavy machine guns. They were coming in right behind the mortars and the rockets.

  The walls of the valley were on fire and fresh fires started every time a rocket hit. Eastland saw his friend Michael Jefferson walking backward, firing an M-16 as he came. Then he saw Michael go down and he thought: after all we’ve been through, Michael’s dead. He felt the blood running down his legs. He hadn’t felt any pain until now. Now it was very bad. There was numbness as well as pain. The legs were holding him up. For how long he didn’t know.

  Eastland got over to Michael and shook him. His friend was wounded in the side, but it didn’t look too bad. The shelling went on, but now it seemed to be moving past them. He could feel the heat from the fires high on the valley walls. A lone soldier came from nowhere. He had lost his weapon and his eyes were wild. A burst from a hidden AK-47 cut him down before he got far.

  Michael Jefferson struggled to his feet, patting himself all over. He looked at the blood on his fingers, then at Eastland’s shredded legs.

  “You’re worse off than I am,” Jefferson said.

  “Where the fuck is the Air Cav?” Eastland cursed. “Those fucking cowboys, where are they?”

  Four American soldiers came running from the brush. One was carrying a radio and he knelt and pulled up the antenna. He talked into the mouthpiece:

  “You got to get us out of here. We’re finished—we’re fucked! The whole company is wiped out. Repeat: the whole company is wiped out …”

  As he spoke a helicopter came clattering into the valley below the level of the walls. Eastland pulled a flare gun from his belt and aimed it skyward. The flare went up into the night sky, exploded, and hung there before it began to drop in lazy streaks. The chopper came in fast, skimming over the tops of the trees. Now the VC were pouring all their fire at the chopper, but it came ahead, rocked and buffeted by explosions. Then it touched down for a moment and the four soldiers began to run toward it, yelling. Supported by Jefferson, Eastland moved as fast as he could.

  “Hang in there, buddy,” Jefferson said.

  The chopper took off before they reached it and even as it sailed up backward into the sky a rocket exploded where it had been a moment before. Heavy machine gun fire chased the helicopter as it gained altitude. It made a turn and went back the way it had come. A rocket killed two of the soldiers who were shaking their fists at the departing chopper.

  Jefferson helped Eastland to get out of the hellfire light that glowed all over the valley. There was a chance—a lousy chance—that the VC attack would run over them, leave them behind. How much good that would do them they didn’t know. If they had to hide out too long, Eastland’s legs would begin to rot in the steamy, stinking jungle heat.

  The shelling stopped and they were alone in the half darkness of the jungle. It was quiet except for the cries of a wounded American somewhere close by. A scream rent the darkness and they knew the man was dead.

  In this jungle no animal life existed. It hadn’t been sprayed by defoliants, yet it was dead. Suddenly, they knew the VC were on all sides of them. One by one, the muzzles of AK-47’s pointed at them from the brush. Slowly, they raised their hands.

  Now, thirty minutes later, they were standing with their wrists tied to poles on either side of them. Huts were behind them, a shallow, muddy river in front. A short distance away another American soldier was tied in the same way. Eastland knew his last name was Holtzer. He didn’t know his first. Monkeys in a bamboo cage chattered. The VC ate monkey as well as pig. The VC ate anything. A VC guard with a light machine, its tripod folded up along the barrel, watched them as the VC officer walked around.

  The officer was young, yellow skinned. His thin face twitched in the firelight. A pig was roasting over the fire. The officer carried a Russian automatic pistol, a Tokarev, and a machete. As he walked around, he slapped the flat of the razor-edged blade against his palm. He stopped in front of Eastland and yelled, “When you attack Lom Pot?”

  The offensive against Lom Pot was to start in a week. It was a big secret that everyone knew. Eastland didn’t answer.

  Smiling, the VC officer strolled over to Holtzer, who was so badly wounded that only the ropes were holding him up. Eastland and Jefferson had been placed so they could see Holtzer. Without warning, the VC officer swung the machete and severed Holtzer’s head with a single blow. There was a fountain of arterial blood and the head fell and bounced. The chained pigs were excited by the smell of blood.

  The officer came back to Eastland. “When you attack Lom Pot?”

  From the corner of his eye Eastland saw Jefferson snaking a wire garotte from his bushy hair. At the same time he was freeing his hands from the ropes. The guard with the light machine gun stood in front of him.

  Eastland said, “We attack July 31st.”

  The officer smiled and raised the machete. His face grew startled as he heard the strangled cry of the guard. Jefferson grabbed the guard’s gun as he died and cut down the officer with a short burst. The officer screamed and toppled into the river. Other VC came running and Jefferson blew them away. Smoke curled from the muzzle of the light gun a
nd it was quiet except for the gurgling sounds the VC officer made in the muddy water. The officer was dying as he crawled. Eastland grabbed a .45 Colt automatic from the belt of a dead VC, snapped the slide and shot the officer in the back of the head. In the silence that followed they heard the chopper coming back.

  The rockets started again, but the chopper kept coming. It touched down, holding its ground this time, and they ran for it.

  The chopper went out of the valley through a wall of flame.

  CHAPTER 1

  The night sky turned from black to a sickly gray over the Bronx Terminal Market. Long distance trucks were still pulling in, trailing diesel smoke behind them. Men were unloading the trucks already there. As the sun came up the smells of the huge market grew stronger: sides of beef still dripping with blood; fruit and vegetables and cheese and sweat. A fork lift went up the ramp and dissappeared into one of the warehouses. Inside the warehouse other fork lifts were moving crates of produce around, stacking them higher and higher. As the crates were raised, men man-handled them into position.

  Michael Jefferson caught a box thrown from a truck by another market worker. The muscles of his powerful black arms rippled as he put the box on a pushcart with rubber wheels. Another box came at him and he caught it and that completed the load. Pausing to sleeve the sweat from his face, Jefferson started to push the cart away from the truck.

  “There’s got to be an easier way to make a living,” Jefferson muttered, but there was no real complaint in his voice. It was back breaking work, but it was better than no work at all. Jobs were scarce in the depression that Jimmy Carter said didn’t exist, and Michael Jefferson was glad, if not delighted, to have the job he had. Eight years before, in Vietnam, he had hoped to come back to something better, but when he got home he knew he’d just been playing with himself. The medals he had won in Nam weren’t worth shit. Still, he wasn’t complaining. There were plenty of guys a lot worse off; a lot of guys didn’t get back at all.

  “Tote that barge,” Michael Jefferson said as he pushed the heavy load of boxes.

  Gus Myers sat in his dusty office filling pay envelopes with bills and coins. After he figured out the deductions he put the money in the envelopes spread out on his desk. The coins went in last and they rattled when he licked the envelopes and sealed them. Gus Myers was no longer young; this was something he had been doing for longer than he cared to remember. For the last few years he had formed the habit of talking to himself. He knew he did it, but it didn’t bother him. It was a way of sorting out his thoughts, a dialogue with himself. At home, in his untidy apartment on Walton Avenue, sometimes he talked to his wife, Sadie, now dead for five years. However, he never talked to Sadie in his office; after all, business was business.

  Now he ticked off a worker’s name on the payroll sheet and said, “Mike Ramirez, a hundred and twenty-four dollars and eighteen cents. That dumb bastard, Ramirez. I got to have a talk with him about his drinking. Where is it written that a man has to drink on the job?”

  Gus Myers sighed. Every week when he filled the pay envelopes he made the same remark about Mike the Rummy, Mike the Juicehead. Every week it was his firm intention to call Mike in and lay down the law. But even as he vowed to be stern he knew that he would never do it; he had been putting off the temperance lecture for the last part of five years. Before his wife died, Mike had been one of his best men, and was still pretty good drunk or sober, but not as good as he ought to be. Even so, Gus Myers could understand how loneliness might send a man sliding to the bottom of the bottle, though the ways of drunks were beyond his understanding.

  He licked the last pay envelope and put it on top of the others. Then he closed his tired eyes and massaged them, knowing full well that it wasn’t going to do a thing for the headache that never seemed to go away. His doctor said the headaches were caused by hypertension, and was forever warning him to take his pills, the ones that depressed him, and to keep on trying to lose weight.

  “Hypertension my ass!” Gus Myers grumbled, knowing what the real problem was. The real problem lay right in front of him, and it took an effort to look at it—$1000 in cash, a neat stack of fifties held together with a rubber band.

  “Wops. Goddamn wops,” Gus Myers said.

  For that thousand, and all the thousands that had gone before, he broke his balls, winter and summer. He got up when his bones ached and he would rather stay in bed. To come up with that extra thousand every week, he had to hold down wages and whine to the men that business wasn’t as good as it could be. He had a good business and a good crew of men—most of them anyway—and here he was wondering what would happen to him when he really got old.

  Gus Myers didn’t dare touch the money again because he knew it might set him off. Like so many mild men he had a terrible temper when he got started. If he let himself lose his temper, really lose it, it might give him the courage to talk back; and that would be the worst thing he could do. It would be, he thought, what they called a fatal mistake; for though he had broken his back to earn that money it belonged to the Mob, the guinea goombahs with the $500 suits, the Miami suntans, the solid gold ID bracelets. The Mob guys walked around like they owned the world; and if they didn’t own all the world, they sure as shit owned the only world he knew.

  Week after week, like Cossacks in the old country, they took his money without as much as a nod. A few years back after they raised the protection money for the third time, he decided to sell the business for what he could get and settle for a rocking chair on a porch in Florida. But that was just another of his bright ideas. Gus Myers sneered at himself: he was full of bright ideas. The Mob guys said he was doing just fine and why didn’t he stay on the job, like always. It had not been a suggestion. Then he got another bright idea and said why didn’t the Mob buy him out—no reasonable offer refused—and run the place with their own people. But the middle management wop, the one he dealt with, turned him down cold.

  “You’re the best man in the business” the mobster said. “You think we want some dumb schmuck taking over and fucking things up? I’m surprised you even say such a thing, Mr. Myers. If word got back to the Big Man he might say, ‘Let’s teach this guy Myers a lesson and up his weekly.’ So let’s just leave things alone, Mr. Myers. Me, if I was you, that’s what I’d do.”

  Gus Myers had a bad taste in his mouth and he spat into a Kleenex and threw it at a wastebasket and missed. Shit! He couldn’t even do that right. All he could do right was give the Mob $1000 a week. He belonged to the Mob as surely as his father belonged to the tax gatherers back in Russia.

  He looked at the Colt, a big gun, a forty-five, lying on the desk beside the gangster money. The heavy revolver was a present from the middle management wop, who said he didn’t want to see some nigger-spic bandit walking off with Organization money. Not to worry that he didn’t have a license for the piece, the mobster said. The cops would be only too glad to oblige.

  Staring at the gun, Gus Myers indulged himself in a familiar fantasy. He would write down everything he knew and send it to the Justice Department in Washington. He wouldn’t send it to the Bronx DA, because the Mob might have a pipeline right into his office. A few years back, a ballsy guy he knew sent a letter to the DA, only to have it returned, but not for postage due and not by a postman. What the Mob enforcers did was tie this guy to a chair, soak the letter in lighter fluid, stick it up his nose, and set it on fire.

  Gus Myers, no longer young, shuddered as he thought about the guy who had lost his nose. And he knew he never would write a letter to anyone. He would pay—and keep on paying.

  Michael Jefferson was unloading another truck when the shiny black Cadillac pulled up in front of the market. The brand new car, glittering in the morning sun, looked out of place among the battered trucks and the muck of squashed fruit and vegetables. There was something disdainful in the elegance of the sleek car. It looked like a car that was washed by hand every day before it started on its appointed rounds. Two men got out, the driver
stayed with the car.

  One man was bigger than the other; both were big. Big and heavy-shouldered, in expensive suits that were slightly too tight, as if their owners didn’t want to admit that their waistlines were as wide as they were. They wore snappy black hats that contrasted oddly with their longish hair; and they had bandit mustaches just like young cops and junior editors in publishing companies. They were men who knew what they were doing all the time; and if they had ever loved or laughed, it didn’t show in their pale, meaty faces. Their public face was one of implacable menace; it came from them with a force all its own. They were mobsters of the new breed who settled their business disagreements with a gun, but only when sweet reason failed to reach its objective.

  Now, watched by Michael Jefferson, they started for Gus Myers’ office. Michael Jefferson, watching them without appearing to, spat in the gutter after they passed him. It was a futile thing to do, and it didn’t make him feel any better, for he knew that nothing would ever change. The two mobsters, hand tailored and cologned, were just a small part of the rotten system that was sucking the life from the city. Small cogs in a big machine was all they were; and above them in the system were men with power so vast that they could order the death of a man, the destruction of a family, with nothing more than a casual wave of the hand, the briefest of nods.

  How I hate those bastards, Michael Jefferson thought. He thought of the section of the South Bronx where he lived, an area so devastated that it looked like a bombed out city in a World War II newsreel. The Big War had been over for thirty-five years, and the German cities were all spiffy clean again, while the South Bronx still burned and smoked, its inhabitants huddled in rat-ridden tenements. Jefferson knew he couldn’t blame the two goombahs for the South Bronx, yet somehow he could—they were part of the corruption that had caused it to happen.

  It was The System, always the fucking system; and it had been there before the Mob did its first killing and bombing in high collars and cloth caps.