Terrible Tuesday

by Don Pendleton

  … That one may become eminent in learning, it costs him time, watchings, hunger, nakedness, headaches, rawness of stomach, and other such inconveniences as I have partly mentioned already; but that one may arrive by true terms to be a good soldier, it costs him all that it costs the student, in so exceeding a degree as admits no comparison, for he is at every step in jeopardy to lose his life. And what fear of necessity or poverty may befall or molest a student so fiercely as it doth a soldier, who, seeing himself at the siege of some impregnable place, and standing sentinel in some ravelin or half-moon, feels the enemies undermining near to the place where he is, and yet dares not to depart or abandon his stand, upon any occasion whatsoever, or shun the danger which so nearly threatens him? But that which he only may do, is to advise his captain of that which passeth, to the end he may remedy it by some countermine, whilst he must stand still, fearing and expecting when he shall suddenly fly up to the clouds without wings, and after descend to the depths against his will. And if this appear to be but a small danger, let us weigh whether the grappling of two galleys, the one with the other in the midst of the spacious main, may be compared, or do surpass it, the which nailed and grappled fast the one to the other, the soldier hath no more room in them than two foot broad of a plank in the battlings, and notwithstanding, although he clearly see laid before him so many ministers of death, for all the pieces of artillery that from his body the length of a lance, and seeing that if he slipped ever so little aside, he should fall into the deeps, doth yet nevertheless, with undaunted heart, borne away on the wings of honor, which spurreth him onward, oppose himself as a mark to all their shot, and strives to pass by that so narrow a way into the enemy’s vessel. And what is most to be admired is to behold how scarce is one fallen into that place, from whence he shall never after arise until the world’s end, when another takes possession of the same place; and if he do likewise tumble into the sea, which gapes like an enemy for him also, another and another will succeed unto him, without giving any respite to the times of their death, valour, and boldness, which is the greatest that may be found among all the trances of warfare …

  April shivered and put the book back on the shelf. The Knight of the Woeful Countenance, yes. Her man. Why fault him for that heavy countenance? He wore it honestly.

  She drifted into the armory, still searching for some nameless comfort. Everything in its place …

  But everything here was not in its place. A great lot of it was missing. He was not merely scouting, then. He’d gone out rigged for heavy combat. Her heart lurched. How could he hope to …?

  The rocket pod had been rearmed—four wicked little firebirds nested there in a fresh bracket. A grenade launcher was missing … a submachine gun … the EVA ordnance pack—heavy combat, yes.

  She smiled faintly, noting the absence also of one of a pair of miniature transceivers. She went quickly to the con and switched on the UHF monitors then turned her thoughts back to the timeworn Don Quixote purely as an occupation for her idling mind.

  Yes, the world had gone so wacky. That novel was a product of the Middle Ages—somewhere around the 16th century. It had been around a long time. And yet the world had gone wacky. It had been very fashionable for April’s college generation to speak of one world, one people—peace and love and the brotherhood of man—while at the same time very de rigueur to accept the “fact” that all cops are pigs and all voluntary soldiers are blockheads. What had become of “undaunted hearts, borne away on the wings of honor.”

  Someone had ripped off April’s generation. Or maybe they’d ripped off themselves. Such confusion, such hypocrisy. “Marching to a different drummer”—all of them, each of them—yet all, it seemed, marched to the same drummer and none thought to inquire where he found his cadence.

  Harold Brognola was not a pig.

  Mack Bolan was anything but a blockhead.

  Cervantes declared that peace was the end of war—the reason for it. Mack had told her that the meek shall never inherit a savage earth. Who was Mack Bolan’s drummer?

  She thought she knew, now. And she knew, now, that she would never find that “nameless comfort” for which she had been searching. There was none, for those who love warriors. And it was not all for nothing. It counted, it mattered. It was not a “waste”—even if she never saw his heavy countenance again.

  Her own countenance was growing heavier by the moment. It weighted the eyes and pulled at the little muscles of the lips.

  Each woman since time immemorial had sat stolidly and awaited news of her warrior.

  Not April, damnit. Not April.

  She had waited long enough.

  CHAPTER 19

  THEM

  His hunch had been right. A battery of television cameras were emplaced in a circle around the bald knob of the mountain, set into low-profile concrete housings at ground level—most inconspicuous. Apparently they were meshed into a sequenced scan with a slight overlap to provide constant 360-degree surveillance of the approaches. Normal range would provide coverage of the entire nude zone; today, the cameras were having the same visibility problems as any other eyes.

  Bolan could not be certain that he had not been spotted already. There could be a ring of steel awaiting his arrival at the top of the hill. But he had to play the hand he held. The best approach would be through the center of a particular scan—avoiding overlaps. That way, he could play to a single eye and double the chances for a successful penetration.

  If he could not clearly see the eye, then it should also hold that the eye could not clearly see Bolan. He had to time the charge to coincide with a blind moment—and more, he had to pick a moment that would hopefully extend to the back side of the camera pit.

  The moment came—borne by the puffy, ragged edge of a cloud scudding along the slope—and Bolan ran with it, lunging to his feet in a full upright, all-out sprint.

  Twenty yards, hell! Make it thirty, with also about a thirty degree upward slope—and momentary vertigo, with the feet pounding the uneven and muddy terrain in an absolutely blind charge.

  He overran the pit and tumbled past it, sprawling flat in an exhausted heap. But he’d made it. The trailing edge of the friendly cloud was just then clearing the camera eye. Beyond and just above lay pay dirt, less than fifty yards away … and no ring of steel awaiting. He could see the installation clearly now, moment to moment as the weather would allow.

  It looked like a moon base.

  Domed buildings were scattered all about with huge antennae of diverse configurations protruding from the domes—also two large towers lifting hundreds of feet higher with twinkling warning lights for aircraft and bearing other antennae—a long, low building that looked like a warehouse—many large house trailers parked all in a row at the far side.

  Those latter would be personnel quarters, no doubt—for the guard force, and perhaps even for the technical crews. The two vans that Bolan had followed here were parked in that area. Other vehicles were scattered about. But there was no sign of human activity. Apparently his presence had gone unnoted and none felt a need to venture into the inhospitable weather. Bolan could hardly blame them. They had plenty of reason for confidence in their robot defenses—and it was a chilling, penetrating downpour. Bolan himself was soaked to the bones.

  He pulled himself to his feet and walked on to the top of the slope—feeling almost nonchalant, now, inside the security circle. None came forth to challenge him as he ambled past the domed buildings and went on to the tower area. There, he removed the chest pack and began molding explosive strips and applying them to critical stress points at the bases of the towers. Seven minutes later he was walking casually among the house trailers, peering into windows and taking their numbers, dropping here and there beneath the wheeled structures small canisters of chemical smoke and timed explosive devices.

  Toward the end of that stroll, he rounded the end of a trailer and came up eyeball to eyeball with a guy in a rainslicker carrying a six-pack of beer. The guy was we
aring civvies under that slicker and the face was definitely Mafia, though Bolan’s mental file registered no definite make. Those startled eyes had a definite make on Bolan, though—instantaneously—and the beer went flying as panicked hands sought a fast way inside the slicker.

  There was no way that fast. A lightning chop to the throat and a piston-quick knee to the gut, delivered simultaneously, brought a swift end to panic and dropped the guy without a sound or hardly a pause in Bolan’s forward motion. He pushed the falling body on beneath the trailer and kept moving.

  Five minutes and counting.

  The first domed building to receive his scrutiny contained no personnel. It was only about twenty-five feet in diameter with no interior partitions—crammed with electronics, all busily humming and clicking with robot chores under the orchestration of a central computer. The function was beyond Bolan’s limited understanding; even an engineer may have found it too much for quick comprehension. He left an incendiary with a four-minute fuse and went back outside. All of the domes but one were that same size; all were remote-robot installations, probably feeding a central data control in the remaining dome, a huge structure of, perhaps, a hundred-foot diameter. Bolan was headed toward the large one when alarms began shrieking all over the place. He immediately went down on one knee and brought the combo around in the firing ready, squinting through the swirling mists in an effort to determine from which quarter the attack would come.

  It came from the big central dome—but not toward Bolan. A platoon of uniformed guards charged out of there and ran off toward the far perimeter—the side from which Bolan had made his penetration.

  The horns were making a hell of a racket, squawking lustily from various points around the compound. Trailer doors were beginning to open and carbon-arc searchlights mounted high on the towers sprang into mist-muted brilliance.

  Bolan was wondering what the hell was going down, but he did not have long to wonder. The little transceiver, which he carried in a shoulder pocket, beeped at him. The first thought to touch his mind was that the feds had begun a premature movement. But that thought quickly fled as he inserted the ear plug and growled a quiet “Go!” toward his shoulder.

  It was April.

  “Striker, thank God! Where are you?”

  His heart was frozen. “Me, hell!” he hissed at the offending shoulder. “Where are you!”

  “I’m under the south tower!” she replied in a breathless rush. “Guess I tripped an alarm!”

  He guessed she hadn’t been as patient with the cameras as she should have been—or maybe she just hadn’t been as lucky.

  He calmly instructed the shoulder: “Hit the dirt. A war party is searching for you. If they spot you, throw up the hands and surrender immediately. Roger that.”

  “I roger that,” was the faint response.

  Then it hit him. He glanced at his chronometer and delayed that instruction. “Forget it! That tower falls in two minutes! Get clear. Walk due west. Roger it!”

  “Roger, I am walking due west.”

  Bolan raised the combo and let fly a hot one toward the east perimeter to divert the search, then quickly repeated fifteen degrees left. The tandem explosions briefly lit the heavy atmosphere over there and brought raised voices in immediate reaction.

  “East rim! Cover it!”

  “Spread out, spread out!”

  He then sent a couple into the trailers to discourage any hasty movements from that quarter—then went looking for his lady. He found her with the help of leaping flames from a burning trailer and calmly took her hand and led her to safer ground. She was terribly embarrassed and more than a little frightened—but her only words were in anticipation of a harsh rebuke for blundering in where only seasoned professionals belong.

  “I’m an idiot,” she said softly.

  But there was no rebuke in him.

  “We all are, one time or another,” he told her.

  It was a moment separated from time and space. The Klaxon horns were still squawking. Flustered footfalls were pounding this way and that across the cloudbound mountaintop while excited voices screamed out instructions and warnings from every quarter.

  But this moment belonged to Mack Bolan and his lady. He understood her anguish—and he had never felt closer to another human being.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Me, too,” he said. “We should have gone to Rio.”

  She quietly giggled and replied, “I’ll settle for Disneyland.”

  “I’d settle for a dry bunk,” he said, chuckling.

  A moment carved free from time and space, yeah. But only a moment. He kissed her softly on the lips, then patted her bottom as he told her, “You picked a hell of a time to come calling, lady. I’m busy as hell.”

  “So I see,” she murmured. “Is this what they call ‘the Bolan effect’?”

  The moment was gone.

  He asked, “Why, April?”

  “Had to. I got that package you ordered. Thought you’d like to know what’s in it. This is the mother lode, partner. For you, it’s a powder keg. I-I thought … I mean, I was afraid you didn’t know what you were walking into.”

  He dropped to one knee and pulled her down beside him. One minute and counting. “I didn’t,” he admitted.

  “Your Mister Big is William McCullough. He owns all this—or controls it, anyway.”

  Bolan sighed. “It figures. The ants found a new picnic. Why not take it over?”

  “Do you know what this place is?” she asked him.

  “Vaguely,” he replied. “Looks like a moon base, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what it’s supposed to look like. FACES is in the book as a center for cosmic studies. I’m betting their studies are strictly terrestrial. Did you read 1984?”

  The novel by George Orwell. Yes, he’d read it. “The Big Brother routine, eh?”

  “Yes, but with a private enterprise slant. I have a two page list of supposedly legitimate corporations who are ‘contributors’ to this foundation. They’re buying eyes and ears, Mack. And the price tag is enormous so you know the profit potential must be, too.”

  It was all together, now. Almost.

  Twenty seconds and counting.

  “How do you read these antennae, April?”

  “It’s an intercept system. With the right computers, they can tap the secrets of the world. Anything that moves by radio or long distance telephone. Even ComSat.”

  “Not for long,” he murmured.

  Five, four …

  “Mack, McCullough is—”

  … ignition!

  “Moon Base” lifted off.

  Both tall towers flung their bases aside and came crashing down. A walking line of explosions in the trailer area sent brilliant streamers of fire trumpeting skyward to overwhelm the heavy atmosphere, diverting even the clouds and sucking them briefly off the mountaintop in a hot vertical vacuum.

  The power station arced and sputtered, then lent itself wholeheartedly to the festivities, sending horizontal lightning bolts crackling across that tortured landscape before finally escalating into full self-destruct and flinging itself to the four winds.

  House trailers leapt and staggered, great rents opening along thin metal walls and disgorging contents and flames and howling men in a cacophony of doom.

  It was pandemonium time at Mafia Heights.

  April’s eyes were wide pools of awe. Bolan pushed her flat to the ground—commanded, “Stay!”—and went off to join the party.

  Most of the activity seemed to be centered around the trailer area. People were yelling and scampering around that disaster zone in total confusion. But that was not the party Bolan had in mind.

  Another wild scene was amid the wreckage of the south tower. Apparently the “war party,” which had gone baying after April Rose had recovered their offensive just in time to greet the falling tower. But Bolan’s interest was not there, either.

  People were spilling in panic from the large central dom
e—a mixed group of uniformed guards, white-coated technicians—and, leading the pack, a tight knit cluster of excited men in business suits, five of them. Charlie Rickert was one. The others rang no bells in Bolan’s memory banks—but this was the party he was seeking, for sure.

  A limousine with all four headlights blazing lurched across the tarmac and screeched to a halt across the path of the fleeing group. The civilian party melted into the vehicle and it surged forward even before all the doors were closed. Bolan had a fleeting image of Rickert standing behind, with hands on hips and watching the departure with a twisted smile; but this was not Rickert’s moment.

  The tall figure in rain-soaked executioner black stepped onto the roadway in the path of the fleeing vehicle, the combo weapon at the hip, headlamps framing him there in the swirling mists for that split-second of doom. Then the muzzle of the M-16 came aglow with stabbing darts of lightning, which reached out and seized that hurtling mass; and shredded it; and shattered it; and sent it reeling back across the tarmac under a dead-man’s throttle in a closing circle to the starting point. It plowed head-on into the central dome and punched through the steel wall, burying itself to the windshield. And then the gas tank joined the celebration, whoofing into a spectacular finish for that aborted flight.

  When Bolan got there, Charlie Rickert was lying on the sidelines in a stupor, a Chief’s Special .38 held loosely in an outflung hand. There was no sign of the whitecoats and only two SecuriComs remained in close focus. Both of those hurriedly threw up the hands and gladly accepted Bolan’s scowling invitation to lose themselves.

  He kicked the .38 out of Rickert’s hand and touched the hot muzzle of the ’16 to the guy’s pulsing throat. Those eyes rolled for a moment, then focused on the heavy countenance above the weapon. Confusion showed there, for a moment, in that searching gaze—then resignation as recognition dawned and the split identities of D’Anglia-Crusher-Bolan merged into one.