A curious crowd was gathering at the scene of the fire. A man in pajamas came hurrying out of the house where Bolan stood. He glared at Bolan and snapped, "What the hell is this? What is this?" But Bolan was already moving and gone himself, racing off between the houses and to the next street. He found his car and screamed off in a hopeless search for a bloodstained vehicle with shattered glass. Though the entire fire fight had consumed barely one minute, he knew that he was too late. But the soldada was in that shattered vehicle, and it was an even bet that she was alive and unwell and that her fate was consigned to the untender mercies of the Talifero brothers. Bolan had to try. In the name of all that Mack Bolan held holy, he had to try!
Chapter Fifteen
Requiem for a soldada
Captain Harmon beat the ambulance to the scene by a matter of seconds. Wilson was conscious and grimacing with pain, and his first words to the captain were, "Well, I met Bolan."
Hannon said, "Okay, okay," shushing him and moving quickly aside to make room for the ambulance attendants.
An intern moved in and took over, quickly assessing the damage.
Wilson chuckled through his pain. "I'm not dying, cap'n," he said. "Don't look so worried. If you think I look bad, you oughta see the other guys."
A uniformed officer hurried the Kirkpatrick girl away. "The kid's all right," Wilson said, following the girl's departure with his eyes. "Take care of her cap'n. Somebody wants her bad."
"Yeah," Hannon mused. "The same guy who wouldn't think of shooting a cop."
"No nine millimeters in me, sir," the Lieutenant protested in a weakening voice. "Bolan had a Luger. Hell, he saved my butt — hers too."
The wounded officer was being carefully lifted onto a gurney. Pain rippled across his face. He set his jaws and spoke between tightly clenched teeth. "It was an ambush. The house . . . and cars, each end of the block. We were almost into it . . . then Bolan came sailing off the roof. Just like Batman. He had a Robin with him, too . . . little guy, down the block."
"He had what?"
"Little guy . . . in army clothes . . . got hit . . . down the block."
Hannon would have liked to have heard more, but the lieutenant was being hurried to the ambulance. The attendants scampered in behind the gurney, the door closed, and the vehicle threaded between police cars and fire trucks — and Hannon's first casualty of the Bolan Wars was sped away from the scene of combat.
The captain wearily squeezed the back of his neck and began trying to reconstruct the sequence of possible events in the incredible carnage of Palmetto Lane. It was almost impossible to accept . . . and yet, there it was. Hannon went methodically about his business, with a growing respect for "the confused kid," and with the strengthening conviction that "a death trap" would never be the answer to the Bolan problem.
Then someone yelled from inside the house, "Captain, we've got a live one in here!"
Bolan was seething inside, tortured by jumbled emotions, damning himself for an entire series of miscalculations and imagined weaknesses. How could he have failed to spot the tail on him, by a jeep of all things! How could he have ignored the repeated indications of stealthy movements all about him, in the yard, in the alley, all around the damn place! She had reconned his recon— then lain back to protect his flank — and for what? She was a soldada— that was for what. A female soldier who could handle the weapons of warfare but not her female heart. Damn damn damn — and Bolan had failed her — he'd gone for the cop at the expense of the soldada— he'd turned away and consigned her to the Taliferi, and god knew what they would do to her — she couldn't even speak English!
He was speeding along the back streets, recklessly daring each intersection to halt his progress, flashing through with head snapping from side to side in a quick scan in the forlorn hope of spotting a likely movement somewhere, anywhere. He was cutting a zig-zag intersection of the back-city, feeling in his bones that the Taliferi would not risk an open run on a major street in that shattered vehicle — and he felt that he was at least angling in the logical direction of travel, toward the upper beach where stood two luxury hotels of conventioneering Mafiosi.
Something in the street attracted his attention as he flashed across his dozenth intersection. He hit the brakes in a squealing slide, powered into reverse, and went back for a closer look. Several pieces of broken glass in sizeable pieces were lying dead center just up the intersecting street. He wheeled about and lunged to the location, got out of the car and walked the area looking for skid marks, other broken glass, any evidence of a collision, and found none. Then he picked up the cobwebbed pieces of glass and inspected more closely. Safety laminated! Windshield glass!
Bolan leapt into his vehicle and laid rubber in a screeching takeoff. He knew now where he was headed, and to hell with the back streets. He angled east at the next intersection and made a power run for the beach drive. Possibly, he could beat them there. He had to beat them. Once the Taliferi reached the guarded palace walls of the Beach Hacienda, it would be adios, soldada.
Perhaps, he thought, this was what they wanted. Something to drag him in, to lure him on — maybe it was already too late for the girl, and they were carting a dead body along just to insure Bolan's continued interest in their whereabouts. Well, they could be sure of that, all right. Bolan was intensely interested. He was deadly interested.
Harold Brognola had come a long way in an attempt to satisfactorily engineer a highly delicate and top secret operation closely involving Mack Bolan. In the very top drawer of the department's strategy against organized crime lay a smouldering and politically dangerous piece of intrigue on which Brognola held the principal mortgage; it was his project, conceived and underwritten by him, delicately maneuvered through the top echelons of government by him, and now entirely dependent upon his ability to bring the ends together into a firm package. He had tried twice earlier to complete that package,1 and both times failed by a hair's shadow to tie the knot. The problem lay in Bolan's elusiveness and understandable reluctance to tarry in the shadow of the law.
The "inside man" who was conventioning with the family in Miami held a possible entrance to Bolan's presence. Brognola had not come to Miami to "rescue an undercover agent, though it was convenient for others, even those in the local field office, to think so. Brognola did feel it imperative that he contact the inside man. This man had known Bolan, had worked beside him with each of them unaware of the other's duplicity until a showdown came,2 and was perhaps the one man in the world who could approach Bolan safely without a gun in his hand.
And so it was, in the late evening hours of November 5th, that Harold Brognola was quietly meeting with a Mafia caporegime in an alleyway several hundred feet removed from the Beach Hacienda, a luxury hotel at the edge of Miami Beach's glamor strip. The two men solemnly shook hands and Brognola asked, "How are things in Bolan's battleground?"
The Mafioso smiled and replied, "That guy is something else, isn't he. He's got them jumping at their own shadows. And that includes me."
Brognola raised his eyebrows and said, "He wouldn't throw down on you, would he?"
The other man rocked nervously on the balls of his feet. "You never know, with Bolan." Then he chuckled and added, "I've had that guy's steel against my neck — but that was before. If he takes time to look, I'm O.K."
Brognola nodded. "I want a meet with that guy. I don't know how you could assist, but he runs more in your circles than in mine. I was scouring Southern California for him when he turned up down here. Guess I should have known. So what do you think? Any ideas?"
"Well . . . it's just a million to one shot, Hal. I won't ask why you want the meet, and I don't want you to tell me why."
"Don't worry, I hadn't intended to."
"I guess we could come face to face before it's all over down here. I can't promise anything, Hal. What's the drop?"
Brognola handed over a scrap of paper with a telephone number written on it. "Memorize that and give it back," he said.
Brognola said, "This is really hot stuff, and I can't-" He stepped against the other man suddenly and shoved him into a darkened doorway as an automobile wheeled suddenly into the alley, lights out and cruising slowly. They stood there, hardly breathing, as the car eased past them, an alert and grimfaced man behind the wheel.
Brognola gasped, "God's sake! Wasn't that Bolan?"
The other man shook his head, frowning. "Can't say for sure, Hal. I've never seen him in his new face."
The automobile was powering in a sudden acceleration into the next street, heading west, away from the beachfront. Brognola said, "Dammit, that was him! Come on!"
The two men ran to the corner, paused, then hastened up the street after the disappearing vehicle.
His heart was thudding against his ribs in the certain knowledge that he was probably too late, although a quick reconnoiter of the hotel area had produced no sign of the prey. Possibly, he was thinking, he had misread the signs entirely . . . maybe they weren't even headed for the hotels . . . maybe they were hotting it for the boat, and Bolan had not the faintest idea where that boat lay or even the approach to it.
He would try one more quick pattern through the back streets . . . maybe they had ditched the car and were footing it. He eased through an alleyway just above the Hacienda determined to give it one last desperate shake.
A barricade lay partly across the street, two intersections up from the beach. Apparently a demolition job had just been completed there. One lane of traffic had been closed down and a wooden wall, still partially standing, extended halfway to the centerline to fence off a rubble-filled vacant lot. He was about to go around when another vehicle swerved in from the street above, running with one headlamp and rumbling along on a flattened tire.
Bolan's heart leaped, and his car along with it. He powered on into the partially-blocked street and swung his vehicle broadside across the open lane, and he was out and running up the street with Luger at the ready when the other car halted, doors flew open, and bodies began ejecting themselves.
One man stood behind the cover of an open door and leaned across it, pistol in hand, firing deliberately at the advancing figure in the black suit. Bolan fired once, on the run, the big Luger thundering across the distance. A nine-millimeter missile punctured the glass of the car door and the Taliferi went down without a sound.
Three other men were racing for the demolition site. Bolan let them go, and they scurried through a break in the fencing and disappeared.
Bolan's chief interest lay inside that shattered vehicle. And he found her there, rolled into a little ball and stuffed to the floor of the back seat. She had bled profusely from a nicked vein at the side of the once-lovely neck . . . and they had allowed her life to bleed away with no apparent effort to stop it. More . . . they had done more. The fatigue jacket had been jerked away and down over the arms, imprisoning them at her side. The bra had been torn away, and they had taken a torch — probably a butane lighter, Bolan decided — to what Bolan remembered as rose-petal breasts. One nipple was charred and virtually incinerated; the entire chest area was a horribly seared and blotched abomination of once-beautiful womanhood.
In the name of god, Bolan wanted to know, what had they wanted her to tell them? What could any man need so desperately, so fearfully, that he could do a thing such as this to another human being?
Bolan stretched her out on the back seat and carefully arranged the jacket over the mutilated chest. His shoulders quivered and his head fell to his chest, and he was remembering the last words the little soldier had whispered to him. "Vaya con dios, soldada,"he whispered back, and then The Executioner walked numbly away from there and back to his own vehicle. Mechanically he removed the keys from the ignition and went to the trunk, got out the golf bag, and calmly withdrew his magnifico weapon. Ammo belts went around his neck, extra clips of 5.56 tumblers into his hip pouch, and he thumbed a high explosive round into the M-79, a 30-round clip into the M-16, and then he walked back up the street.
An arm appeared around the opening in the fence and one of the Taliferi was challenging him with the impotent yappings of a hand gun at more than a 100-foot range. Without breaking stride and without lifting the weapon, Bolan squeezed into the pistol grip and the M-79 replied.
The end of the fence exploded in flame and shredded wood and an anonymous scream from somewhere just beyond. Bolan went on, stepped around the shattered fence, and into the demolition site. A high building barricaded the west side of the lot; the high wooden fence completed the seal. He took in the scene with a single glance and knew that he had them. The only way out was past Bolan, and no one seemed inclined, at that moment, to try that perilous route. A man lay at Bolan's feet, his clothing still smoking from an almost direct hit of the HE round. He could hear the other two running along the fence.
Bolan calmly selected a flare round, thumbed it into the breech, and put a brilliant parachute in flight above the site. The running men halted in confusion, looking wildly about them, then made a break for a wooden shack near the center of the lot. Bolan watched them fight with the door, then scramble inside. He continued the deliberate advance, marching stiffly erect. A window shattered and a pistol roared. The bullet zinged harmlessly into the ground several yards ahead. Bolan's path was taking him in a slow circle of the shack as he inspected the physical dimensions. This was obviously a tool shed or something similar, no more than ten feet square, with a low flat room. Beside it and resting on a tubular steel structure about six feet above the ground was a large tank with a hose and a nozzle, obviously a gasoline storage.
Bolan halted then, loaded an HE round into the M-79, sighted onto the tank, and let fly. He was already thumbing in another flare round when the gasoline erupted in a towering explosion. Flaming liquid spilled immediately onto the shack — and then Bolan was sighting again, and the white hot flare went to join the party.
The shack was engulfed immediately in roaring flames. Bolan stood and dispassionately watched as two human torches erupted through the doorway and flopped convulsively about the rubble. When the flopping ceased, he turned his back on them and walked stiffly away, back to their vehicle.
Bolan placed his weapon on the roof and leaned into the car for a final farewell to a too-brief friendship, and when he came back out of the car he was looking into the bore of a very large and ugly .45 automatic.
He looked beyond, then smiled faintly and said, "Hi, Leo. We meet again."
Leo Turrin, lately elevated to an underboss role in the former Sergio Frenchi family, showed a strained smile and quietly said, "Watch the gun now, Bolan, and note that I'm putting it away."
"I guess it doesn't matter," Bolan replied in a strangely flat voice. "I'm sick of this war, Leo. I am sick to death of it."
Another man, also an Italian type, stepped into view then and commented, "If what I just saw is an example of your sickness, Bolan, I hope you never get well."
"Who is this guy?" Bolan asked, not really caring.
"We're telephone friends, remember?" the man replied. "I'm Harold Brognola."
Bolan said, "Great. What do we do now, shake hands?"
Brognola stuck his hand out. "Yes, I'd like to shake your hand, Bolan," he said soberly.
Bolan unsmilingly accepted the hand. "Thanks for the assist at L.A.," he murmured. The sound of distant sirens were beginning to break the night stillness. Bolan said, "I guess I'd better be getting along." He glanced at Turrin and added, "How's it been, Leo?"
"Hairy, as usual," Turrin replied, smiling.
Brognola agitatedly declared, "Dammit, Bolan, I have to talk to you!"
Bolan simply smiled, shouldered his weapon and began trudging wearily to his vehicle. The other men hastened after him. Brognola said, "Bolan, dammit, will you listen to me?"
"Will those cops listen to you?" Bolan asked, inclining his head toward the advancing sirens.
"
Talk to him," Turrin advised. "What have you got to lose? Just talk to him."
"What about?" Bolan asked. "That same portfolio?"
Brognola snapped, "Yes, that same portfolio. Look, you said you were tired of the war. I'm offering you a possible way out of it."
Bolan threw him an interested glance. "Yeah?"
"Hey, those Miami cops are getting with it," Turrin warned. "Better make this quick."
Brognola said, "Look, it's all in here." He was thrusting a rather fat, oblong wallet upon Bolan. "Look it over in your leisure and call me at the contact number I have in there. That's all I ask, Bolan — just look it over."
Bolan took the wallet and thrust it inside the neck band of his nightsuit. "Okay," he said. "I'll look it over." He carefully placed the weapon inside his car and then climbed in behind the wheel. "Good seeing you again, Leo. Give my best to the wife, eh."
Turrin smiled and said, "Will do. She worries about you a lot, if that's any comfort."
Bolan nodded and cranked the engine. "Uh, get lost for the rest of the night, eh."
Turrin replied, "That means that you're rolling."
"That's what it means. So stay clear."
"Thanks. I'll do that."
Brognola irritably said, "Look, don't go getting yourself killed now. Break it off, dammit, and go someplace safe and read that portfolio."
"I can't break it off now," Bolan replied in a flat voice. "Too much is already invested in this battle."
"Well at least-"
Bolan had stepped on the gas and left Brognola standing open-mouthed in the street. As the car disappeared around the corner, he turned to Turrin and said, "Now if that guy isn't the coldest number I've ever run into. He wasn't like that on the phone last month. Hell I-"
"He just buried a compatriot, Hal," Turrin explained. "You didn't see what was in that car up there, did you."
"No, I was just-"
"Come on." Turrin was dragging his companion back up the street, toward the bullet-riddled automobile. "I'll show you what makes The Executioner tick."
Miami Massacre te-4 Page 12
