Hawaiian Hellground

by Don Pendleton

  “Who’s sending them?”

  “Well—you know.”

  “Tell me so I’ll know for sure.”

  “The old men.”

  “Which old men?”

  “You know.” The fat man was fidgeting uncomfortably, eyes downcast, studying his hands. “The council-men.”

  La Commissione. Sure, Bolan knew that. But these people had the fear of omerta born into them. Such innate defenses had to be approached properly.

  “You’re telling me nothing, guy!” Bolan declared in an icy voice. “My time is up. So is yours.”

  “Wait! This is level! I’m nothing to those people—nothing! And they tell me nothing!”

  “So what should I wait for, Oliveras?”

  Those troubled eyes rolled upwards and the big man shuddered under the onslaught of conflicting emotions. “Chung,” he sobbed, the voice barely audible.

  “What about Chung?”

  Another shudder, then: “He’s the center man.”

  “What’s he centering?”

  “I swear I don’t know.”

  The Beretta sighed without warning. The huge bulk of the boss of Oahu corkscrewed off the chair to land in a seated position on the floor. Joey Puli’s eyes flared wide, then closed above gritting teeth. Blood was pumping in bright spurts from a rip in Oliveras’ shoulder.

  The guy’s face was a total blank, head swiveled in stunned contemplation of the gushing wound. A huge hand flopped heavily to that area and fat fingers tried to stanch the flow.

  Bolan’s stiletto whipped through the sashcord that held Puli in his chair. “Your turn, Joey,” Bolan said as he freed the little guy’s hands. “You want to carve him or shoot him?”

  “Wait!” shrieked the bleeding man from the floor. “Chung has a place over on Hawaii, the big island. Something big, something really hot! I don’t know where it is, exactly. In some valley, away from things. Big place!”

  Bolan made no comment to that. He was staring at Puli. “Well?”

  “The knife,” Puli replied weakly, on to the game now and bravely trying to carry his end of it. “I’ll take him a piece at a time.”

  That was the end of Oliveras’ omerta—the sacred oath of silence. He struggled to his knees, babbling in the release. There was not much to be made from it in the form of hard intelligence, but Bolan went away from there convinced that he now knew at least as much as Oliveras himself knew about the “big thing” in Hawaii. He also went away with pretty good directions to the next front.

  They left the boss of Oahu kneeling drunkenly in his own blood on his bedroom floor, and Bolan and Puli withdrew through the carnage of an Executioner hard hit, then descended to the main lobby via the elevator.

  They paused at the guard desk while Bolan tersely reported to a confused security cop. “It wasn’t birds, guy. You’d better call Honolulu Central and tell them to bring a meat bus with them.”

  Then they moved unchallenged through the lobby and out the door on the beach side.

  Puli, speaking stiffly through mangled lips, marveled, “You are something else, mister. Please don’t ever get mad at me. Or are you, anyway?”

  Bolan chuckled and told his new admirer, “You’re not the enemy, Joey.”

  “Thank God,” the little guy replied. And he said a silent prayer for all who were.

  4: The Big One

  Greg Patterson, the lieutenant from homicide, stepped out of the elevator at the fourteenth floor and into a slaughterhouse. Detectives Tinkamura and Kale, who had arrived at the scene some minutes earlier, quickly came forward to greet him, picking their way carefully through the blood-spattered disaster zone.

  “What is this—bonus night?” Patterson grunted. He was a large man, early middle age, tough, one-hundred-percent cop.

  “There’s more inside,” Tinkamura reported soberly.

  “All told, ten,” said Detective Kale.

  “Oliveras?” Patterson asked, almost hopefully.

  “Naw,” Kale replied. “The medics took him away about five minutes ago. Shoulder wound, an easy one. He lost some blood. That’s about all, except for fifty or sixty pounds of dignity.”

  The lieutenant had moved over to stand astride a grotesquely twisted corpse and was peering into the mutilated face. “Is that Wheels Morgan?” he asked nobody in particular.

  Tinkamura replied. “Could be. I could even hope so. Couldn’t you?”

  “They’re all head hits,” Kale volunteered. “Very messy.”

  “All of them?” Patterson growled.

  “Yeah. Somebody ran wild in here, that’s for sure. Somebody who got inside easy past all this security without being challenged. Not until he’d penetrated the—”

  “Hold it!” Patterson snapped. “Aren’t you assuming a lot? Why do you say he? Why not they?”

  Detective Kale grimaced. “The medical examiner came in with us. His quick guess is one weapon, one man. Except for the two at the southwest corner, and that didn’t come at the same time. It came earlier. A high-powered rifle, for sure. Also, they’re stuffed into weighted bags. Awaiting burial at sea, I’d guess. So—”

  “So shit you’ve lost me,” Patterson said quietly.

  Tinkamura smiled sourly as he updated the lieutenant. “Kale and I responded to a gunfire report at 902, down at Ala Wai Tower. Several occupants of the upper floors complained that someone was firing a rifle up there. We didn’t find anything—not there, not then. But at about that same time there was a disturbance report from this building—a big commotion on the fourteenth floor, this one. It was never dispatched for investigation because the building security people called in an okay. We get this later, see. Said a bunch of birds flew right through a glass wall. Well, you know, that’s not too far out. It does happen. So—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Patterson interrupted impatiently. “So anyway …”

  “So at about ten, one hour later, an alarm comes in from the security people here—a bell ringer. Patrol unit responded, took one look from the elevator there, then called us in. We took one look at this mess and I guess the same thought clanged our minds at the same time. We made a beeline to the south side of the building and sure as hell, there it was. Our nine o’clock gunfire report.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Some hot cock was shooting from over half a mile away, and he tore hell out of everything at this southwest window, including the unlucky heads of Oscar Meyer Weeni and Charley Boy Tellevecci. Head hits, I mean, from the Ala Wai Tower. I never—”

  “Now hold it!” the lieutenant protested. “I’m not riding with you boys, for some reason. Don’t tell me, dammit. Show me.”

  Several minutes later, the one-hundred-percent cop had been shown all he cared to see for one duty day. He was in the Oliveras bedroom, staring down at the very messy remains of one Trigger John Minelli, who had carried the reputation of being the fastest gun in the islands.

  The medical examiner, a tired-looking man with nervous eyes, had just declared, “It’s going to be one of those nights at the morgue.”

  “Yeah,” Patterson quietly agreed.

  “Ten all at once. We M. E.’s ought to have a union. We’d protest—”

  “Twelve,” Patterson corrected.

  “Yeah, we’d—twelve?”

  The lieutenant handed over a sheet of note paper. “Two more at this address. And I’ll bet I can tell you before you get there. Head hits—same weapon, same man.”

  The M. E. muttered something unintelligible and ambled away.

  “What was that?” Kale asked the lieutenant.

  “That was Paul Angliano and his shadowman. Or so the report says. A vice detective called it in. I got it on my way here.”

  “Hey, hey,” Tinkamura commented thoughtfully. “We got a drug war.”

  “I’m betting we got more than that,” Patterson growled. He was slowly pacing off the room, head bent, eyes alert. “What is Oliveras saying?”

  “Nothing at all,” Kale replied, glancing at his pa
rtner. “We’ve put a hold on him at the hospital. We’ll try to get a statement before we check in.”

  “Do that,” Patterson said absently. He had dropped to one knee to examine something on the carpet near the closet door. An empty brandy snifter lay nearby.

  Kale said, “We’ll get the lab men to dust that glass, Lieutenant.”

  “Do that,” Patterson again replied, his mind obviously focused elsewhere. He had produced a handkerchief, which he wrapped about his hand to carefully lift a small object from the floor.

  “What do you have there?” Tinkamura inquired.

  “The answer, I think,” Patterson replied in a strained voice.

  “How much of an answer?”

  “Too damned much, maybe.” The lieutenant extended the linen-wrapped hand so that his junior officers could see what was lying there, a metallic object in the shape of an iron cross with a bull’s eye at its center.

  “Hell, I should have known,” Tinkamura declared in hushed tones.

  “That guy wouldn’t be here,” Kale observed, scoffing at the idea.

  “It looks like he is,” Patterson said quietly. “You said head hits at a half a mile? That’s no trick for a guy like Bolan. Who else can you think of who might pull a stunt like that, then waltz right in to mop it up?”

  Tinkamura muttered, “Tell the doc he better join that union quick.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” Kale said, obviously not wanting to. His gaze shifted to a chrome chair near the bed. “Who was tied to that chair? I believe we have separate incidents here. Put together, sure, it looks like one thing. Take it all apart, it’s something else entirely.”

  The lieutenant glanced at a uniformed officer at the door. “Bring that lobby guard in,” he instructed.

  The security cop was ushered in carrying a registry book under his arm, gazing uneasily about the large room and stepping carefully around the corpse at the doorway.

  “Who came up here tonight?” Patterson asked him.

  The guard handed over the register as he reported, “Only two, as you can see. The eight-fifty entry was a kid in his early twenties. Looked like a beach boy. He was cleared by phone and I sent him on up. That’s all, except for Sergeant Nalob there—the next entry—see? He was up here for just a few minutes. Came back down with the Puli kid in tow. The kid was all beat up. I’d just received a call from the thirteenth floor. Lady said she heard a couple of gunshots. Well, I knew Nalob was up here. I didn’t know what to think—but then I got to worrying maybe he was in trouble. Finally decided to call it in when here comes Nalob and the beach boy. He instructed me to call and I did.”

  “You said a couple of gunshots?” Patterson pressed. “That’s all? A couple?”

  “Yes, sir. Mrs. Rogers in 13-A, that’s exactly how she said it, a couple of gunshots.”

  “Silencer,” Tinkamura muttered.

  Patterson was staring quizzically at the security cop. “This guy Nalob. What’s he look like?”

  The cop looked suddenly flustered. “Don’t you know him? He showed identification. Big fella, well over six feet. About two hundred pounds. I’d say, late twenties, early thirties. Dark hair, medium skin. Blue eyes, I believe—yeah, blue and very piercing. He looks holes through you.”

  Kale said, “I don’t know any Nalob.”

  “Wait outside,” Patterson instructed the guard, returning his register. “Hang on to that book.”

  The guy went out gladly.

  “Well, there you are,” Patterson declared, eyes on the marksman’s medal.

  “The description fits, all right,” Tinkamura agreed.

  “Take that guard down to Central,” the lieutenant instructed his officers. “Let’s see what the artist can do.”

  “Right. And just for the hell of it, I’ll check out this Nalob. But I never heard of any—”

  Patterson stopped him with a clucking chuckle and said, “You still hung up on that? You won’t find a Nalob in the department, Tink. Nalob is Bolan spelled backward.”

  A brief silence fell upon the gathering, then Tinkamura laughed loudly. “How ’bout that guy!” he said admiringly.

  Kale’s action was quite the reverse. “Crazy,” he declared, voice muffled. “It is, it’s crazy. He must know we can seal him on this island. He’ll never get off alive!”

  “You bet he won’t,” Patterson said grimly, closing his fist on the medal. “You boys stay here until the lab crew arrives. Then get that guard down to Central and let’s get some composites.” He’d already spun on his toe and was marching from the room at a quick pace.

  “You want us to report this?” Tinkamura called after the departing figure. “Set up an all-points?”

  “I do not!” the lieutenant yelled back. “I’ll handle it!”

  Damn right he’d handle it. Greg Patterson was personally taking this little bombshell to market.

  He meant to get the assignment, the prime spot.

  And he intended to see to it, personally, that the most wanted man in the free world did not leave these islands a free man.

  The one-hundred-percent cop was going to, by God or by otherwise, bag the big one. He was going to get Mack Bolan!

  At about the same moment that Lieutenant Patterson was quitting the scene of carnage, the man called Chung was receiving a furtive visitor at his Oriental-style home in the Kalihi Valley, a few miles north of Honolulu.

  The two men greeted each other in restrained tones and paced the edge of a lotus pond in the walled garden. Stiffly formal and making small talk, the visitor obviously uncomfortable, awaiting the signal that the official conversation might begin.

  The host was a stocky, powerful-looking man of perhaps forty years. He wore only a terrycloth karate wraparound and sandals. The face was impassive, eyes hardly visible behind folds of hard flesh, black hair bristling in a severe crew cut.

  The visitor was a Caucasian, fairly young, neatly attired in a conservative business suit, good looking. At the moment he was nervous, on edge—and with good reason. George Riggs was a cop.

  Chung paused beside a small statue of the Buddha, struck a match on it, and lit a cigar. Then he told his visitor, “All right, George—you may report.”

  It was some sort of ritual. Riggs suspected that it had something to do with Chung’s security. They always met in the garden. They always strolled the lotus pond, making small talk. Chung always struck the match and lit the cigar before any business got underway. And George Riggs always had the uncomfortable feeling that concealed eyes were following his every movement.

  “Mack Bolan is on the island,” he reported flatly, watching the other closely for reaction.

  There was none. Chung took several pulls at the cigar before replying, “Is that fact or guess?”

  “Fact, I’m afraid. I got a call at about nine o’clock from Oscar Weeni. He was telling me that some punk had brought over a marksman’s medal from Paul Angliano’s office. Said that Paul and his tagman were supposed to be dead, wanted me to check it out. I did, and they are. A slug in each head. While I was talking to Oscar, though, all hell broke loose over there. Right in the middle of a sentence, Oscar went unghh and that was the end of the conversation. I could tell that the phone hit the floor. And there was a hell of a commotion going on. No gunfire, none of that, but the sound of incoming. Know what I mean? Heavy slugs punching in from somewhere way out and just tearing hell out of everything. That lasted for just a few seconds, then the phone went dead. I tried to call back, kept getting a busy signal.”

  “Is Frank dead?”

  “No. And I need to tell this the way it happened. Otherwise it gets very confusing. I walked around on eggshells for about five minutes, I guess, after the telephone incident, then I hopped in my car and went over there. I didn’t go in, though—just cruised past a couple of times. Saw no evidence of a police response. Figured the situation was in hand, and I didn’t want to go barging in at a time like that. I was off duty. I went down to headquarters and nosed around.
Nothing was on. So I called Frank’s apartment again, and this time I got through. I talked to Trigger John. He said Frank was taking a bath to calm his nerves, that he was okay. He said Oscar and Charley Boy were dead, but it was being quieted. Said some guy with a fantastic eye, Bolan maybe, had parked away off somewhere and raked Frank’s office with rifle fire—something, too, about some punk kid who worked for Angliano maybe helping to set it up for the rifleman. They still wanted me to verify the Angliano hit. So I went on over there. Some people saw me enter, so I had to straight it. I delayed as long as I could, then I called in the report and waited for the homicide detail to relieve me. When I went back past Frank’s building there were official cars everywhere and cops running all around the place. I parked and went in for a closer look. Just as I got to the lobby, they were bringing Frank out on a stretcher. He’s a lucky man, Chung. He caught only a flesh wound in the shoulder. I had a chance for only a couple of quiet words with him. He said I should tell you quick to look out—that it was Bolan, all right—that the guy hadn’t been satisfied with the sharpshooter bit, that he’d come right on up there an hour later, past all that security, that he’d wiped out Frank’s entire force.”

  “One man,” Chung commented thoughtfully.

  “Yeah.”

  “Single-handedly. A real American hero.”

  The cop lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in a strong gust toward the lotus pond. “That’s what they say about the guy, yeah. How much is truth and how much is myth is for someone else to say. But I’ve read all the official bulletins on the guy from the mainland. And let me tell you—even at seventy-five-percent myth, he’s a dangerous son of a bitch.”

  “So I’ve heard. We get our bulletins too, you know.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s all I have. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “It seems quite enough,” Chung mused. “Except …”

  “Except what?”

  “Why is Frank not as dead as the others?”

  “I told you, he got lucky. A flesh wound in—”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Chung exploded.