Against a badge, Abe? The man came in with a badge in his hand and you gunned him down?
Cop killer!
You fucking lunatic! You killed two cops and your best friend — you killed your comfort!
He went back to the desk and sat down. The sun would be setting soon.
Yeah. Yeah. The sun would be setting very soon, now, for Honest Abe Weiss.
Chapter 19
Score
Bolan was hoping to engineer a climactic shootout at the OK corral. And why not? It was the Wild West, wasn't it? The combined force would number perhaps a hundred guns. Those were odds that were best avoided whenever possible. Bolan very much desired to avoid them. If he could persuade them to decimate themselves, though ... He swung past the Hinshaw encampment at a cautious distance and triggered a final data collection. Even if Hinshaw had bought the tip-off on the wires, it was still possible that there had not been time yet for him to locate and disable the little black box.
The intelligence console was sucking something in. Bolan gave it time to assimilate the intel while he continued the wary circling of the enemy camp. He struck off cross-country, the big cruiser running easily on the desert surface, running up their back side at about a thousand yards out.
Then the computer flashed him a signal. He sent the necessary response and activated the audio monitor. And it was a real score.
The senior Bonelli, all triumphant and gloating, was on the horn with Jim Hinshaw. "Did Paul get there yet?"
"Sir, I need to tell you right off to be careful. We think there may be other ears on this line."
"Whose are they?"
"We think maybe Bolan."
The Capo Arizona scoffed at that. "Let 'im listen. It's all over, Jimmy. It's bagged. Put Paul on."
"We don't expect him till sundown, sir."
That didn't sit well. "I guess he's betwixt and between, then. I couldn't raise him at the other joint. Listen. I'm coming up there. They're rolling the plane out right now. You know where we'll land."
"Yes, sir."
"Pass this to Paul soon as he gets there. Pass this. It's bagged. The golden opportunity is meeting me at the airfield. I want Paul there, too. We're going south for awhile. Not Guatemala but the other — he'll understand."
"Pardon me, sir, but-"
"I'm not finished. You're still passing, now. Paul is to hot it over to the golden opportunity's joint and go right in. Don't be surprised at what he finds there. He'll understand it all, then. And he's to clean up that garbage. That's the important part, Jimmy. Clean up the garbage. I want it spotless. You get all that?" "Yes, sir, I got it all," Hinshaw replied feebly. "Where does this leave me?"
"Sitting pretty," Bonelli said jovially. "There'll be bonuses all around. Take it on back down to the home digs and wait till you hear from me."
"I don't, uh, think I understand, sir. What about Bolan?"
"What about 'im?"
"Well, uh ... the guy is still blasting around. Does he know it's all bagged?"
Bonelli laughed nastily. "Let's tell 'im. Hey, Bolan. You there? Been laid lately? No? Here's my advice to you, then. Go get fucked."
"Mr.-sir, I don't think-I mean, shit, pardon me but nothing is bagged. This whole damn town is crackling with that guy."
The capo was not to be deflated. "Let 'im crackle. We got what we wanted. Get it down, now, Jimmy, and dare the guy to come in. The feds are pouring Into the state from every direction. They're even sending Border Patrol after the guy. Just get it down and wait 'im out. He'll be moving on at dark. I'll bet my life on that."
"Can I speak plain, sir?"
"You might as well."
"What about Scorecard?"
"What the hell you think I been telling you? It's bagged."
"You mean ... ?"
"That's what I mean. That's the garbage. How plain can I say it?"
Bonelli cackled over the spluttering Hinshaw's discomfort. "Golden opportunity did it for us," he howled.
"Well I'll be damned," Hinshaw marveled.
"Yeah. Rich, huh? He came over on his own. So ... you were doing more up there than you thought you were."
"He fragged 'im!" Hinshaw roared.
"Yeah, goddammit, ain't that rich?"
"I'll pass it to Paul, sir. I can hardly wait."
"The cleanup is important. Be sure and pass that We don't want golden opportunity facing no rap like that."
"Oh, hey, right. I see what you mean."
"The plane's ready, Jimmy. Listen. Here's what I want you to do. Bring your boys out to the field. Just in case."
"We'll cover it, sir, Don't worry. You'll have a clean field."
"Yeah. See to that."
End of recording. Bolan punched the timer code and frowned at the response. The CONVERSATION had been recorded about ten minutes earlier. And he understood the significance of that guarded conversation. Obviously Weiss and Kaufman had dissolved their partnership. Now Kaufman lay dead in the senator's home and Weiss had gone to Bonelli for help.
Scorecard, eh?
If Bolan were to code-name his own operation, now, he would have to call it Backfire. He'd leaned on the Kosher Nostra for specific effect, sure — but not for this one.
Backfire, yeah. But maybe it was not too late to pull it out. The Hinshaw compound now lay just over the ridge. The sun had not yet set. Bonelli's "plane" could hardly be more than barely off the ground at Tucson.
So. It was not bagged yet. Are you listening, Nick? Have you been laid lately? Yes? Take this advice from me, then. Too much wore can make the brain go soft. Stay hard, Nick. Stay as hard as you can because it's not bagged yet.
The cute was ended. Only the hellfire remained.
Chapter 20
Fragged
Hinshaw stepped from the doorway of the command hut and raised a finger to summon his executive officer. Morales drifted over, a cigarette dangling from parched lips.
"Make sure the grunts are set and ready," Hinshaw told him. "Something's out of whack here. Way out."
"Maybe our old buddy was leveling with us."
Hinshaw worriedly shook his head. "Nothing figures. That's what makes it so damn scary. I'll say one thing for Bolan. He knows these guys like a fisherman knows worms. I don't trust them as far as I can fart."
"It's the devil or the deep blue," Morales agreed. "I'll say this. If I gotta face Bolan or them, I'd settle for them."
"We may be facing both," Hinshaw groused. "I just had a crazy talk with the old man. He says it's over. He says we achieved all the objectives. Can you buy that?"
Morales spat. "Shit," he said.
"He says Weiss fragged Kaufman and came over. How does that sound?"
Morales rethought it. "Maybe. That's what I'd do. If I had Mack fucking Bolan and the whole bloody Mafia on my ass. Yeah. Frag the Jew."
"So maybe it does figure," Hinshaw mused. "But you're still worried."
"I'm worried, Angel, yeah."
"Okay. I'll make a round and set the men. Can I make a suggestion?"
"If it's not too long."
"Don't tip our hand to Paul Bonelli. Keep him outside. Let's keep the card in the hole."
"I was thinking the same thing. But it may be easier said than done. I had it all figured till the old man slipped me a klinker. I don't know how to figure it now. But you're right. We keep Junior outside. If the old man is setting us up— But why would he do that now? Either he's leveling — which sounds sort of crazy — or he's setting us up before the job is even done — and that's even crazier. Set the men. I'm going down to the gate. I got a message for Junior. We'll play it their way and see what happens. But carefully, Angel — very carefully."
Morales winked and walked away. Hinshaw lit a cigarette and gazed at the horizon. He hoped that blood-red sky was not portentous. James Ray Hinshaw fervently desired to spend every cent of that 200 plus per day ... especially the plus. The plus, especially.
Paul Bonelli halted his motorcade at the rendezvous point an
d leaned out the window to greet his forward scout. "What'd you find?" he asked the guy.
"They've set up a couple of big tents and moved most of their goods inside them. Looks like they cleaned up and made a bonfire out of those damaged buildings. There's only a couple of shacks still standing."
"How many people?"
"Not many I could see. Here and there, a guy standing or sitting. The Morales kid keeps walking around very restless."
Bonelli grunted as he tried to digest that. "How many cars?" he asked.
"Just what they had before. But a lot of brush has been piled in the canyon out back. They could have a Hertz fleet back in there somewhere."
"Give me your bone feel, Ernie."
The scout shrugged. "It looks okay. But I got creepy just lookin' at it."
"Did you scout the hills?"
"Best I could with the time I had. A camper rolled through a few minutes ago, heading north. That's all."
"What kind of camper?"
"One of those big RVS. GMC, I think. Looked clean."
Bonelli sighed. "Hell. I don't know any more than I did before. Why would the guy call me with a story like that?"
"You know how some wise guys are, boss. Anything for a quick mark or a free meal. He hopes you'll remember it as a kind thought that was just a little wrong."
"It stinks," Bonelli snapped. "How good could you see into that joint?
If he was trying to hide something in there, could you have tumbled to it?"
"That's hard to say, boss. But you can always hide what you don't want seen."
"And it creeped you."
"Right. It creeped me."
"That's good enough for me. Send the crew bosses up here. We'll parley. Then we'll move in."
"Are we moving hard?"
"Bet your ass we're moving hard," Bonelli assured the scout.
Damn right. The soldier boy was not going to frag this C.O. The brotherhood of the blood, by Jesus, had invented that little game. Paul Bonelli had been born to it. Sure as hell he was not going to die by it.
Bolan took the ridge in a grimly silent struggle, a garrote buried deeply in sentry flesh. Then he dragged the guy to the back side and returned to the battle cruiser for the strike weapons — selecting the Weatherby sniper, an M-79, and two belts of 40mm rounds in mixed configuration.
Back at the ridge again — the same one from which the earlier cutesy strike had been launched — he spurned the drop chosen by the dead sentry and moved on down to an outcropping of rock situated just above the camp.
It was optimum range for the M-79 hell-raiser and the overlook gave him a full 90-degree sweep into the flatlands.
He laid out the belts and thumbed in a round of high explosive for openers, then placed the wicked little launcher aside and raised the glasses for a quick recon of the combat zone.
A procession of heavy vehicles broke the horizon, moving swiftly, closing — one, two, hell, eight big crew wagons. Directly below, the Hinshaw camp was coming alive — guys scurrying about in desert denims, blending far too well with that landscape and getting set for a blow.
Bolan smiled grimly as he picked up the Weatherby. Yeah. It was likely to be a hell of a blow.
They came roaring in like a wild horse stampede, raising a cloud of dust that trailed out for a half a mile behind, single-filing it until the last fifty yards or so, then wheeling it over in a fancy maneuver that Put all eight cars In rank abreast, nose to the fence.
Hinshaw growled, "Lookit that. What the hell is he doing?"
Bonelli cracked a window to call over, "Send your boys out, Jimmy. We'll use our wheels. We got plenty of room."
Hinshaw flipped away his cigarette, gripped the gate with both hands and called back, "It's all changed. Word from your papa. Come on in."
The only immediate response to that was an abrupt raising of Bonelli's window. Hinshaw stood woodenly at the gate, wondering what the hell, feeling like a fool.
Long seconds elapsed. A door opened and a guy stepped out — one of the crew bosses, a Tucson hotshot. "Mr. Bonelli wants you to come talk to him!" hotshot announced.
"What the hell is this?" Hinshaw yelled. "YOU tell Mr. Bonelli I'm here, looking at him. I got a message from his papa. But I sure as hell ain't going along with this shit!"
The window came back down. Bonelli stuck his head out cautiously. "What's the message?"
"What the hell are you doing?" Hinshaw cried. "What am I suddenly, a leper? I don't talk to you this way, Paul."
"What's the message?"
Hinshaw ground his teeth together. It was true then. Bolan had it pegged for sure. He was about to fling an angry retort at the traitorous bastard when something quite remarkable got there first.
Paul Bonelli's face simply disintegrated. The mouth turned dark and gaping, the nose collapsed into it, the eyes disappeared and the whole miserable mess disintegrated into frothy pulp. The wheelman yelled something and lunged away from those spraying juices. Only then did the sound overtake the macabre scene, a hollow boom from somewhere up the canyon, and it was James Hinshaw's turn to react. He flung himself into the dust and rolled like crazy for the closest cover, a shallow depression near the gatepost, his mind racing ahead into the numbing understanding of what would immediately, inevitably, follow.
The hotshot crew boss was the next to go spinning off into eternity, caught dead in his tracks as he sprinted for the protected side of his vehicle, down and wallowing in deflated flesh even before the second big boom came down.
And then it was "Nam all over again, ambush in the wilderness, a hundred frenzied weapons in reflexive fire as hell came down all around — and Jim Hinshaw flat in the middle.
Several of the crew wagons from Tucson lurched forward, punching through the flimsy, fence in angry retort, muzzles blazing from every window.
Jim Hinshaw knew that it was all a horrible mistake.
But he was obviously the only one there who knew it. The guy with the big boomer knew it. Yeah, Bolan knew it.
And Jim Hinshaw knew, in a highly personal sense, what it was like to be the fraggee. He'd been had ... by an expert. And that went double for Bonelli Junior.
Chapter 21
Bagged
Bolan had monitored through binoculars the tense confrontation at the compound gate, read it accurately, sealed it with a thundering kiss from the Weatherby — then played the reaction entirely by ear.
The Bonelli force read the attack as treachery from the Hinshaw camp. Morales, commanding at the rear and unable to precisely understand the unfolding events, held no options whatever in the face of the furious retaliatory attack by the Bonelli guns. The inevitable result was a blazing firefight between two "friendly" forces.
And Bolan assisted that development, also, with a few touches from the background. He raised the M-79, sighted down on an invading hardwagon just inside the compound, and sent them some HE. The big vehicle heeled immediately and wallowed to a halt in enveloping flames. A following round of smoke deposited at the gate further confused the landscape there — then a rapid shoestring of alternating HE and Frag laced that hellground with walking destruction and cascading pandemonium.
The staccato chatter of automatic weapons mingled with the echoing booms of busy shotguns and the angry yapping of pistols as the clash of arms quickly reached full fury.
Hinshaw's "reserves" were no panty-waist platoon. It was a disciplined and combat-worthy fire-team — equal to anything Bolan had seen in "Nam. Except for the Bolan influence, there would have been no doubt as to the outcome of that battle. Those guys knew what they were about — and they had the heavy arms to back up the expertise. A heavy machine gun was chewing ass all along the Bonelli front until Bolan spotted it and took it out. Likewise another couple of well-emplaced units with grenade launchers which were playing havoc with the street-corner cowboys from Tucson.
Within forty seconds after the fight erupted, all five penetrating Bonelli "tanks" were destroyed and burning. The entire area w
as strewn with the dead and dying from both sides. Cautious movements in both directions signaled the approaching lull and probable stalemate. Neither side had much fight left. Bolan could count a mere handful of survivors in desert denims, about the same for the other side. Smoke and dust clouded the tableau, restricting visibility and aiding the cautious withdrawal of both sides.
The three Bonelli vehicles which had remained beyond the fence line were now maneuvering carefully to pick up retreating survivors.
Bolan caught a flash glimpse of another vehicle within the compound — Angel Morales, he thought, at the wheel — also maneuvering carefully to shield a sprinting ghost from the past, the one and only James Ray Hinshaw.
Bolan was gathering his weapons and preparing to quit that place when the Bonelli vehicles sped away into the sunset. A moment later, two cars emerged from the rear area of the compound and raced off in obvious pursuit.
Bolan grinned soberly and returned to his cruiser.
He set the navigation gear for automatic track and began the final maneuver, he hoped, of the battle for Arizona.
Weiss stood in the shadow of a dilapidated hangar and watched a sleek twin-engine Cessna jet as it taxied out of the sunset and braked to a halt.
Two burly gorillas immediately descended to the ground, nostrils flaring warily as they separated and energetically strode to flanking defensive positions beside the plane. Weiss knew that he would have to become accustomed to such unsavory presences in his life; he would be seeing a lot of it from this point forward.
A moment later, the Capo Arizona himself appeared in the doorway and made a quick exit.
The senator experienced an involuntary tremor as he stepped forward to grasp that entrapping hand. They were not exactly strangers, of course. But overt contacts with the likes of Nick Bonelli were not apt to produce the most desirable public image for an elected official. There had been no social relationship whatever.
One would think that nothing whatever had happened.
The mafiaoso gave him a sober smile and greeted him with, "Hi, Senator. Long time no see."
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