California Hit

by Don Pendleton

  His eyes had not yet met Bolan’s gaze, and he seemed to be avoiding such a confrontation.

  Bolan told the old man, “Save it, DeMarco, he won’t be needing that.”

  Rivoli’s lips moved again and he whispered, “No mercy, I said. Shoot to kill. You hear me? Shoot to kill.”

  Bolan said, “Okay.”

  He snuggled the Auto Mag beneath the old man’s arm and squeezed off once. The big piece roared and bucked against the Capo’s chest.

  DeMarco lurched forward, eyes wide and stricken with a mortal awareness, and his mouth formed the words, “Missed… you missed.”

  Bolan told him, “I never miss,” and he walked to the window while he tucked away the Auto Mag and re-fitted the gas-mask to his face.

  It was not until then that DeMarco became aware of the mess behind him. The Tiger of the Hill had lost his face plus a goodly portion of skull to the rear… and the big mean bastard in the black suit had been right about the uselessness of that tourniquet.

  Ten thousand tourniquets wouldn’t put Little Tony back together again. Pieces of him were splattered all over the bed, even on the walls.

  DeMarco yelled, “You bastard you, you bastard! What’re you doing this to me for?”

  But the window was up, and the bastard was gone, and actually he’d done nothing whatever to Don DeMarco. Except shoot up his house, and fill it with smoke, and splatter Little Tony all over his bedroom, and kill off God only knew how many of the house boys.

  The Don went over to the window and closed it. He got the hell away from it quick and staggered back to the bed to stare with fascination at what was left of his old friend Tony’s kid… little Tony.

  His lip curled, and he said quietly, “Some tiger. The only tiger on this hill, kid, just climbed out that window.”

  And then the Capo went to the liquor cabinet, poured himself a drink, then he sank wearily into a chair and waited for someone to come up and take care of him.

  9: WANG DANG DOO

  He was two minutes into the hit and the numbers were rapidly running away from him when Bolan dropped to the ground beneath DeMarco’s bedroom window.

  The smoke at ground level was beginning to dissipate and it was straggling about the neighborhood in puffy clumps.

  People were still running about in confusion at the front of the property. Bolan could hear men cursing and shouting inside the house.

  Someone in there was yelling, “The fans, get the goddam fans going, blow that shit outta here!”

  Another guy leaned out of an upstairs window, coughing and gasping for breathable air. He saw Bolan and took a shot at him, and Bolan quickly responded with a quiet phu-uut from the silenced Beretta. The guy gurgled and disappeared back inside. Bolan went on, making tracks across the rear yard and wishing he’d had another thirty seconds of good heavy smoke to cover his withdrawal.

  He made it to the garage and was girding himself for the leap to the roof when another man materialized from the thinning smokescreen.

  This one was wearing a gas mask with a neat SFPD emblem on the cannister. He had black hands, and one of these was filled with a snubnosed .38 Positive—and Bolan knew damned well then that he had overrun his numbers.

  The guy barked, “Freeze! One move and I’ll fire!”

  Bolan hesitated for a sluggishly bloated second of solar time, and it was like an eternity in the universe of pure mind. This was the realization of all the Executioner’s harshest nightmares—a gun-to-gun and eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the law. Cops were special things. Some were rotten, sure, some as rotten as any of the enemy—but they were soldiers on the same side, in Bolan’s mind, and that made them special. Mack Bolan did not live to gun down cops.

  At the same time and in that same framework of mind, this was no goddam game of touch-tag he was playing. He could not simply roll over and play dead at the first appearance of a dutybound cop. There was a hell of an important war to be fought!

  Yeah, it was agonizing. It was a hell of an agonizing real life nightmare.

  Sgt. Phillips was realizing with a harsh jolt that neither had the drop on either. He had reacted in pure instinct, with all the training of his adult lifetime focusing into this undiluted moment, this hellishly painful and entirely non-academic moment in the life of a law officer.

  The big guy was just standing there, poised in that special way on the balls of his feet, the very mean-looking black Beretta peering up from the gun hand. One side of his consciousness was trying to appreciate the confrontation from a strictly ethereal standpoint, and he actually imagined for one flashing instant that part of him was hovering overhead in a spectator’s view of the scene.

  Two men, one dressed in black, the other born in black, with a hell of a lot more than the color of skin separating them. One a cop, the other the most wanted “criminal” in the country. Both wearing gasmasks, and each with a trained gun laying down on the other.

  And yet there was so goddammed much that these two gladiators shared in common.

  The moment came unfrozen, the big guy moved almost imperceptibly, and the Beretta dropped ever so slightly.

  “Okay, fire away,” Bolan told the law.

  “I mean it, Mack. I won’t enjoy it, but I’ll drop you in your tracks like a Wang Dang Doo.”

  Gasmasks or not, eight thousand ocean miles and too damn many years between notwithstanding, the message had been sent and received and the Executioner knew his challenger.

  The Beretta dropped another inch and the familiar voice said, “Well, damn. Is that you, Bill?”

  “That’s me.” The mask came off but the revolver did not waver. “Don’t make me drop you.”

  Bolan removed his mask and it dropped to the ground. “You might as well,” he replied. “I’m a dead man the minute those cuffs go on me anyway.”

  Phillips felt the flicker of a smile, and he wondered if it had managed to reach the outside of his face. He said, “You hit the old man, eh.”

  “No. He wasn’t the target. It was a tiger hunt.”

  “I’m going to cuff you, Mack. Throw the gun away and hold that wall up.”

  The next few seconds occupied a confused kaleidoscope in the mind and the memory of the Brushfire cop.

  He certainly was no rookie—and even granted a bit of clumsiness and momentary inattention as he reached for the handcuffs, there was simply no intellectual explanation for the way the big junglefighter turned things upside down on him.

  All Phillips knew was that suddenly the Beretta phutted, from the hip, then again and again. All the while Bolan was all over him, manhandling him into a sprawl to the ground, and the Beretta was coughing on in an uninterrupted song of whispering slugs and sighing death.

  His own gun was lying at his fingertips and numbly Phillips realized that the zinging little missiles were not tearing into his own flesh, but were seeking more distant game.

  Bodies were toppling out there somewhere, in the misty smoke, and the grunts and muffled shrieks of the dying and the grievously wounded served only as a postscript to the booming of opposing weapons as the return fire chewed the turf and whistled screaming tracks in the air above their heads.

  The kaleidoscope cleared abruptly. Bill Phillips was back in Vietnam again and his team leader was once again dragging him out of a life and death situation. As he disentangled himself and reclaimed his own weapon, he knew that enemy pursuit had caught them in an open firefight, with a wall at their backs and a regrouped army pressing in from all other sides. Sergeant Bolan was giving ’em hell, throwing everything at them but his own fingers and toes, and giving the rest of the squad a chance to break for cover.

  Phillips mumbled, “I’m on you, Sarge.”

  Bolan grunted, “About time. Watch that left!”

  The big silver gun was in Bolan’s hand now and the thing was tearing up Phillips’ eardrums and totally eclipsing the reports of his own weapon. It served to return him to present time and place, however… and, really, the situation was
little different than it had been so many times before.

  Bolan yelled, “Garage roof! Go! You, then me!”

  The Brushfire cop reacted instinctively to the command, as he had done to that same voice so many times in the past and with such memorable results. That voice had brought him through Vietnam in one whole piece. He threw a round into a shadowy running figure off to the left, then he flung himself in a wild roll toward the corner of the garage.

  Bolan was on one knee and firing the silver hawgleg like an automatic repeater, the big sounds booming, rolling and echoing around the confined area, and guys were still screaming and flopping about out there.

  Hot little things zipped through the air about him but Phillips gained the roof in one mad fling, and he found reason to be thankful for all those morning workouts in the police gym. Before his mind even fully appreciated what it was he was trying to accomplish, he was up there at the edge of that roof and throwing a rapid fire into the receding smokescreen, and suddenly Bolan was there beside him and panting, “And a Wang Dang Doo to you too. Let’s blow!”

  The two ex-partners from another time and another war scrambled to the rear and leaped over the fence into the adjoining grounds.

  A moment later they were in good cover and with no visible pursuit from the other side. They lay there for a moment, breathing on each other and chuckling as they’d done so many times before, and presently the cop let out a deep breath and declared, “Well, I damn near got your ass shot up again.”

  Bolan said, “Do tell.”

  “If you’d just asked, I could’ve told you. Rivoli had a stacked deck on you. I mean he had troops all over this damned hill.”

  “I believe you,” Bolan panted. “But I was just about home clean when you jumped in.”

  “I’m sorry, Mack. They brainwash you in those police academies. A guy gets all hung up on—”

  “Forget it. You’re right and I’m wrong. Hell, I’m as wrong as a guy ever got.”

  “Not quite,” the cop reminded him. “You didn’t throw down on me, brother.” He laughed nervously. “Although, for a minute there, Sergeant, I sure thought you had.”

  Bolan was breathing raggedly through his mouth and forcing some big ornery-looking bullets into the clip of the silver hawgleg. “You’ll have to take me in dead, Bill,” he declared quietly.

  “Shit I’m not taking you anywhere,” Phillips replied. “My gun’s empty and I guess I’m at your mercy.”

  Bolan chuckled.

  The Sergeant said, “Did you know that Gadgets Schwartz and the Politician are living here now?”

  Bolan’s head snapped to attention and he asked, “In San Francisco?”

  “Yeah. You haven’t been in touch, eh?”

  “Hell no. Last thing in the world those guys need now is my touch of death. They holed up?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yeah. They’ve got new names. Gadgets is doing electronics work for a guy down on the marina. Politician is doing something at the Boy’s Club. He was always good with kids, you know.”

  Bolan said, “Yeah.” He sighed. “They okay?”

  “Yeah, they’re great. Worry about you a lot. Keep track of your banzai war, you know.”

  “They have any money problems?”

  “Not that I know about.”

  Bolan gave his old friend the cold stare and asked him, “You keeping track of my war, Bill?”

  The cop said, “Sure.”

  “It was no accident that you showed up at DeMarco’s.”

  “Course not. I’ve been sitting there waiting for you to show since three o’clock this morning.”

  Bolan grinned suddenly and said, “You’re the spade cop out at the gate awhile ago.”

  Phillips showed him a baffled smile. “Where were you?”

  “I was around. So… you came gunning for me.”

  The Sergeant dropped his eyes in embarrassment. He changed the subject. “Hell, I can’t get used to looking at that face, Mack. What was wrong with the old one?”

  Bolan shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess it doesn’t matter which face I’m buried with.”

  The dark face of the law clouded with an unhappy thought as Phillips said, “This is just a temporary truce, Mack. We’ll probably meet again, if you ever come back to San Francisco. And I can’t… I mean, you know. So don’t come back.”

  Bolan reminded him, “I haven’t left yet. I’ll be around awhile.”

  “God, don’t. Get out. Blow this town, man. It’s hot. Captain Matchison wants your ass with a burning passion.”

  “Brushfire,” Bolan commented thoughtfully.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I hear. Are you with Brushfire, Bill?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bolan said, “Well, good luck. Everything okay with your life?”

  “Until today, yeah.”

  “These tough Frisco cops didn’t give you a hard time?”

  The black man snorted, “Hell, I’m a tough Frisco cop myself.”

  Bolan agreed, “That you are.” He got to his feet, squeezed the other man’s shoulder affectionately, and told him, “Blow, cop, before we get into another Wang Dang Doo.”

  They shook hands and Phillips said, “That was a hell of a place, wasn’t it.”

  “It was,” Bolan agreed.

  “So is this place, Mack. It’s Wang Dang Doo times ten. Believe that.”

  A muscle rippled in the Executioner’s jaw and he replied, “I believe it”

  “Get out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “The mission that important?”

  Bolan sighed. “I think so.”

  “End of truce,” the cop said. “Goodbye, soldier. Next time we meet, it’s Wang Dang Doo.” He glanced at his watch. “You might still have about thirty seconds to beat the grid. That’s what we call the containment network. Thirty seconds, if you’re lucky.”

  He turned his back and walked away.

  Bolan faded quietly into the opposite direction.

  Every second counted now. And he wasn’t about to scrub this mission even if it was Wang Dang Doo times a thousand.

  It was, yeah, a damned important mission.

  10: ABLE TEAM

  Wang Dang Doo, and Hanoi too.

  It had been one of those private jokes of a handful of scared-out-of-their-skull warriors known as Penetration Team Able. Bolan was the ranking non-com, the team leader. The entire team actually existed as a tactical support unit for the special skills of their leader—Executioner Bolan.

  Maybe there really was a Wang Dang Doo somewhere, Bolan never knew. Some of the places they hit over there didn’t have a name. Some didn’t even have a permanent geographical existence. The enemy in Vietnam had been a highly mobile force. Sometimes Able Team had been required to track a Charlie command post halfway across the deltas before they could set up a strike.

  Under Bolan, Able Team had ranged up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. They’d made a few quiet excursions through the DMZ and into the strongholds of the Northmen. Several times they’d found themselves tracking deep into Laos or Cambodia.

  There had been no sanctuaries from Able Team. And none, incidentally, for them when they were on a mission.

  There had been dozens of Wang Dang Doos. The term, reduced to its utter simplicity, simply meant a rub-out. A wipe-out. A slaughter.

  That had been Bolan’s specialty.

  Sniper, yes. Stiletto man, yes. Garroter, bone-crusher, spine-cracker—yes, all of these were in Bolan’s bag of tricks. And he had not been the only specialist in Vietnam. But for the specialty of specialties, Able Team was always the pick of the list. They always got the gory ones. And they got the tough ones because they did the job better.

  Able Team had the Executioner.

  This was not an item of pride for Mack Bolan. He accepted the medals, the decorations, the special scrolls from grateful villages—but he put them quietly away in a box and forgot them.

  Killing peop
le had never meant anything more to Bolan than a distasteful chore which had to be done. He recognized the fact that he had developed a high proficiency in the art of killing, and he recognized also that this proficiency obligated him to a special responsibility. A war needed winning—or, at least, it needed to be contained and controlled. Bolan had the tools, the abilities, and the toughness of soul required for the proper discharge of particularly grisly responsibilities.

  He recognized this, but he had taken no special pride in that recognition.

  Wang Dang Doo, and Hanoi too.

  Yeah, there had been a lot of Bills and Bobs and Toms and Dicks. Kids, most of them, scared out of their skulls—forever wondering why they’d volunteered for this hellfire team. At least Bolan had Korea behind him. He hadn’t come into the war with storybook ideas of what it was all about.

  Bill Phillips was not the first of the PenTeam graduates Bolan had run into during this new war. He’d even thought once that he could pull together an American civilian version of the old death squads, and he’d actually pulled one together… briefly. The results were tragic; enough so to convince Bolan that it could never work over here.

  Herman “Gadgets” Schwartz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales were the sole survivors of that experiment. They’d squared their account with the law, but they’d have the mob on their asses forever—that much was certain. They were marked men… marked for death.

  No more. Not ever again. Bolan would never involve another human being in his private war, not as an ally.

  This was a specialty war. A Wang Dang Doo in the real sense, and a job for a loner, without support, a guy who knew every way and every wile, a guy who could stride through rivers of blood to kill again and again… and be willing to take his lumps in that final judgement of the universe.

  Yeah. And there it was, of course. Mack Bolan was not a religious man. Not in the ordinary sense of praying and going to church and that sort of thing. But he knew that the universe did not run itself. It wasn’t a damn machine which just suddenly sprang into being and then began running down. There was a purpose to the whole thing… somewhere beyond the fragmented understanding of ordinary mortals there was a good reason for the existence of the universe.