California Hit

by Don Pendleton

  And back there, somewhere in the darkness, one hell of a unique human being was striding off into the unknown to take on the whole damned world.

  Yeah…

  There were times when Leo Turrin resented being anything other than a human being.

  And he had to wonder… what was Mack Bolan’s pet resentment? At a time of soul-wrenching decision, what did the Executioner hate the most about his situation?

  The answer to that question, Turrin was certain, would be forthcoming shortly.

  3: Escalation

  One of the earliest recorded uses of psychological warfare occurred during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, three centuries before the Christian era. The brilliant military strategist had pushed his armies in a sweep to the borders of India when he decided to postpone further hostilities. Before withdrawing from the Indian border campsites, however, Alexander instructed his craftsmen to make a number of helmets, breastplates, horse bridles, and other items of personal armor which were many sizes too large for any ordinary man or beast. These outsized items were left behind at the abandoned campsites, and it is reported that the Indian defenders were severely demoralized upon finding this evidence of an enemy force of “giant warriors.”

  Mack Bolan perhaps had never heard of the psychological tactics of Alexander the Great—but it should be noted that Bolan himself habitually made full use of enemy-demoralization techniques in his own private war.

  The three daylight strikes of that first probe of Boston were conducted with this specific goal in mind—to frighten and awe the enemy, to give local reinforcement to the growing legend of the Executioner’s deadliness and invincibility. This, he felt, was the only practical tool in his personal campaign to free Johnny Bolan and Valentina Querente.

  Bolan was a realist—but he was a soldier, not a detective. He knew that he could not hope to match the quality of actual police work being conducted on the pair’s behalf. He also knew that all the odds were against the chance that routine police methods would be effective enough or quick enough to have any meaning to the end result. If not dead already, Johnny and Val were in extreme jeopardy—and their danger increased with each passing moment.

  Bolan the realist knew also that the two innocents were very likely being subjected to some hellish experiences, if indeed they were still alive. He had to get to them, and he had to do it very quickly.

  It was a staggering objective. Boston was New England’s largest city. The city proper could probably count no more than 600 to 700 thousand citizens, but the metro area comprising Greater Boston numbered about 17 cities and towns with nearly three million people and roughly 900 square miles of real estate.

  How could a man alone realistically hope to locate two carefully concealed individuals in that sprawling tangle of places and people?

  The answer, of course, was that he could not possibly do so—not without an amazing bit of luck or miracle—and Bolan the realist dealt in neither such uncertain commodities.

  His only chance was to try to convince the enemy that they had grabbed a tiger by the tail and to induce them to let it go, very quickly and very carefully—or else to hasten to the bargaining table without further delay.

  If Leo Turrin’s assessment of the Boston situation was accurate, then this could be a problem of no easy dimensions. If competitive branches of the syndicate were vying for dominance—if Johnny and Val were mere pawns in this larger struggle—then quite possibly Bolan had been lured into Boston by “somebody” who hoped to exploit the Bolan wars to personal advantage.

  If this were the case, though, it seemed to Bolan that his “somebody” was playing his side of the game entirely too quietly, too cautiously, and leaving entirely too much to chance.

  Bolan’s foes, he knew, were realists also. If indeed the idea had been to lure the Executioner into Boston for a rampage there, then red flags should be waving all over the place. But then, too, it was entirely possible that something had gone amiss, that something had disrupted the original plan, that some last-minute foul-up had messed the play up.

  There were infinite possibilities and an unlimited supply of “ifs”—and Bolan simply could not afford to wait for the logic to fall into place.

  He had to make a move, and he had to do so quickly. He had to hit and keep hitting until the hurt started being felt in the right quarters.

  He had begun the campaign in the most logical place—“at the border,” so to speak. LaRocca, Gaglione, and Lavallino represented a triune of “Little Italy” neighborhood mobsters, unimportant in the overall weave of Mafia influence in Greater Boston, unimpressive in terms of family rank. But their executions would hardly go unnoticed, and this seemed to be the ripest spot to inaugurate the psychological war.

  Bolan had not left behind in Little Italy any oversized pieces of armor, but he had left there a shadow which would grow in size with each retelling of the story—the shadow of an ice-cold hit man who strode with audacity through broad daylight and into the enemy outposts, who called out the names of his victims before coldly gunning them down, who drew and fired his weapons with such blinding speed that witnesses could not agree on details of the strikes, and who left chilling little messages to be repeated over and over again until the shock waves of those “easy hits” had spread throughout the city.

  Perhaps Bolan had studied the campaigns of Alexander. Perhaps not. But the effects of his “border psychology” were just as great as that earlier warrior’s.

  By nightfall the entire city was quivering with the news of the Boston blitz. The newspapers had quickly seized the dramatic implications of the Bolan visit, as had radio and television newscasters—and each of the network outlets at Boston were given large spots on nationwide editions of the evening news to cover the new war in their city.

  Local politicians were interviewed and quoted as “confident” that the police establishment could handle the situation. Several political hopefuls, however, recalled the two years of gangland unrest in Greater Boston and the “ineffectiveness” of the police to deal with that problem. How, they asked, could the same police hope to cope with a full-scale Bolan war?

  An independent television outlet screened a hastily edited rehash of the Bolan wars from Pittsfield to San Francisco in a program which ended with a five-minute “projection” of “Bolan’s Boston Blitz.” The projection seemed, to many oldtimers, like an echo of the famous Orson Wells broadcast of the ’30’s, in which an imaginary invasion from outer space was reported.

  But Mack Bolan was no Martian. He was as American as apple pie and his crusade evoked widespread feelings of sympathy and respect in this cradle-city of Americana. A local disc jockey even suggested that a “phantom ticker tape parade” be conducted along the Freedom Trail, but none took up his idea of scattering torn football pool cards and lottery tickets along the streets.

  If Bolan had captured the sympathetic imagination of man-in-the-street Bostonians, though, he had also succeeded in his prime purpose; he had commanded the respectful attention of underworld Boston, and this was the name of the Bolan game.

  At a “gun and hunt” club, near Stoneham in the northern suburbs, the members of that privately chartered organization got together in a hurried meeting late that Monday evening to discuss the Bolan presence in their unhappy midst.

  Present at that meeting were the ruling heads of “the Middlesex Combination”—territorial bosses of northwest suburban Boston. Chief among these were Manfredo “Manny the Clock” Greco of Waltham and Terencio “Books” Figarone of Cambridge, both of whom were regarded as political and financial power-houses in the Massachusetts crime structure.

  Figarone was a legal eagle who had been disbarred from the practice of law during the Bobby Kennedy anti-crime crusade. He had also, until that time, been a visiting lecturer and honorary professor in one of the area’s most prestigious schools of law.

  Greco’s rise to underworld eminence had come through labor circles. As a young man he had been an apprentice
watchmaker in one of the nation’s oldest time factories, and Manny the Clock had never lost his respect for the importance of time in human affairs. Manny was fond of pointing out that none less than Albert Einstein knew a guy couldn’t amount to much unless he took time into his calculations.

  Manny Greco always knew precisely what time it was—and he had called this meeting to commence at exactly ten o’clock.

  At exactly ten o’clock the meeting commenced. Five territorial bosses were in attendance and they met behind closed doors in the “game room” while their cadres pondered the imponderables of sudden death over beer and peanuts in the main lounge.

  The “Shot ’n Feathers” was a hardsite. Its defenses—when they “went hard”—were considered the best in the East. The location had once been a soggy marshland, bypassed and abandoned by the march of progress and even by an adjoining country club golf course, until Books Figarone stumbled onto the site and picked it up for a song some ten years earlier. Close enough to the city proper and yet isolated enough to provide the maximum privacy in a highly developed region, the site had lent itself admirably to the requirements of the Middlesex Combination and had especially proved a restful spot for jangled nerves during the past two years of gangland unrest.

  A rock wall ten feet high surrounded the entire six-acre site, with the only access via a narrow wooden bridge which spanned a shallow drainage ditch across the front of the property. The clubhouse occupied a rise of ground just inside the gate. The slopes at sides and rear provided plenty of open space for skeet-shooting and rifle ranges, also a small “game yard” enclosed with chicken wire for live target shooting at trapped birds.

  The clubhouse itself was not overly pretentious, consisting of a small central lounge and two elongated wings housing various recreational and business facilities. A basement room beneath one of the wings served as a pistol range with automated targets in human form which “screamed” when hit in vital spots. Beneath the opposite wing were emergency “hard rooms”—minimally outfitted sleeping facilities in tense times for overnight guests.

  Behind the central lounge area was a small appendage which served as a kitchen and storehouse. The entire building was constructed of prefabricated concrete sections, and it was regarded as fireproof, bulletproof and utterly impregnable.

  Even so, the ten o’clock meeting of that Monday evening got underway in an atmosphere of jittery apprehension. More than a dozen armed sentries patrolled the approaches to the hardsite and another half-dozen or so roamed the grounds inside the walls. The windows of the building, although equipped with bulletproof glass, were heavily shuttered, and armed men walked the roof.

  The Middlesex Combination was taking no chances on a surprise visit from Mack the Bastard.

  And, as Books Figarone angrily proclaimed at ten minutes past the hour of ten, “Look, we didn’t come here to praise the guy—we came to bury him, so let’s not have any more free propaganda on his behalf, eh.”

  “Call it propaganda if you want to,” Manny the Clock shot back, “but I tell you the guy has a precision works inside his head. He’s like a Swiss movement. I say he knows exactly what he’s doing. If he says somebody knows why he’s knocking over our downtown boys, then somebody sure knows why.”

  “I had a call from Al not two hours ago,” Figarone argued patiently. “He assures me that they know nothing whatever about the Bolan kid. In fact, Al is more disturbed about all of this than we are.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Andy Nova, the boss of Medford. “I didn’t even know the guy had a brother. I sure don’t like the idea of bum-rapping a snatch, not with this Bolan nut picking up all the marbles. I have to go along with Manny. I think somebody in this town is pulling a fast one.”

  The lawyer from Cambridge obviously felt the situation slipping away from him. He lit a cigar and toyed with the lighter for a thoughtful moment, then he cautioned, “Look, let’s not go off half-cocked. We all know what this war has cost us already. Now Al has been working miracles. We know that. Would he bring in a madman like this Bolan, at a time like this, just to tear everything apart again?”

  “Maybe they already decided to write us off,” Manny Greco said sourly. “Maybe they figure Boston is the least costly place to cold deck the guy. Maybe they’re even doing it behind Al’s back. Maybe they’d rather have Bolan than Boston. Eh?”

  The Medford boss soberly nodded his head in agreement. “I been thinking pretty close to that,” he declared solemnly. “I mean, just look at it. The guy has got the whole organization running scared. Everywhere. He don’t care who he hits, or where. So just look at it. We ain’t even in good national standing since BoBo took the powder. Why not, right? Why not maneuver this Bolan into a dead territory, get him all pissed off and hope he does something dumb, I could buy that.”

  Figarone was scowling with displeasure at the suggestion. He said, “We could be overlooking the most obvious answer.”

  “Like what?” Greco asked, leaning forward with interest.

  “Well… what if the whole thing in a plant? I mean, what if the Bolan kid wasn’t really snatched? You know?”

  Manny Greco’s eyes narrowed. “You mean,” he replied, “what if Bolan is just inventing the snatch. Why would he do that?”

  “The guy’s a slicker,” the lawyer said, sighing. He delicately shrugged his shoulders and added, “He’s a divide and conquer guy. He works that way.”

  Silence descended and reigned as the troubled Mafiosi labored to pull together in their own heads the full ramifications of the problem confronting them.

  Presently Andy Nova, the man from Medford, declared, “Well, whatever, we got to figure out something to stop the guy. I already sent my family to the island—Helen and the kids, I mean. They’re staying there ’til this thing is settled.”

  Another boss growled an unintelligible comment which sounded like an agreement.

  Silence again descended.

  At fifteen minutes past the hour, Manny the Clock was glaring at his pocket watch, an impressive “railroad special” in a gold case. Someone knocked on the door to the game room. Manny returned the watch to his pocket and yelled. “Awright, it’s open!”

  An Andy Nova hardman pushed head and shoulders into the room and, in a tone of controlled excitement, announced, “We found something downstairs. Tramitelli thinks you should come see.”

  “Who come see?” Nova growled.

  “All of you, boss. He says you’d all wanta see this.”

  The conclave of bosses exchanged a nervous round of puzzled glances, then they silently got to their feet and straggled from the room, Nova leading the procession.

  The underlings in the lounge were all on their feet, hovering about in tense groups. Obviously they had already been alerted that something was up. Individual sets of eyes located respective bosses in the procession from the game room and followed their silent progress through the lounge and onto the stairway to the basement level—but neither word nor signal was passed to alleviate the tension.

  The bodyguard who had summoned them pushed open the heavy door to the soundproof pistol range and stood back to allow the bosses to file past, then he entered behind them.

  Hoops Tramitelli was standing woodenly in the center of the firing area, hands on his hips, staring thoughtfully at the floor. Tramitelli was Manny Greco’s chief triggerman and—at any meeting of the Middlesex Combination—security chief for the entire group. A large man, heavy through chest and shoulders, veteran of many wars, the 50-year-old triggerman was also respected throughout the Boston area as an intelligent and crafty operator.

  Greco called out, “What the hell, Hoops? What you been doing down here?”

  “Nothing,” Tramitelli replied quietly. “That’s just the trouble. Nobody’s been doing nothing down here.”

  The condition of the place seemed to be calling Hoops a liar. Private pistol cases in the weaponsstorage racks had been broken open and the handguns scattered along the firing line. Ammunit
ion boxes were smashed, their contents carelessly dumped in piles all about the place. The three automated targets were in operation and moving smoothly along their programmed paths in the target pits.

  Andy Nova angrily cried, “Who the hell did this? What nut…?”

  The other bosses were strolling woodenly about, tentatively kicking at ammo piles on the floor and avoiding the more heavily littered areas.

  Tramitelli was explaining, “I just come down here a few minutes ago, just a security check. I found it like this. Nobody else had been down here. The lock was still on the door. But this is just the way I found it.”

  Books Figarone quietly asked, “Who’s the head cock out here this month, Hoops?”

  “Charlie Sandini. I already sent for him.”

  A skinny youth with nervous eyes entered the pistol range and came to a frozen halt just inside the doorway, his eyes flaring.

  In a choking voice he exclaimed, “Well Jesus! What’s been going on here?”

  “That’s what we wanted you to tell us, Charlie,” Tramitelli advised the duty steward.

  “God I—this is the first I—God I don’t know nothing about this, Mr. Tramitelli!” the man insisted.

  “You’re the head cock, you damn sure better know,” Manny Greco declared coldly.

  “I didn’t even open up down here,” Sandini protested. “You said just a business conference, just booze and snacks, and that’s all I got ready for. I didn’t even come down here all day. I didn’t even…” The worried eyes swiveled toward Books Figarone. “That guy!” he cried.

  “What guy?” the lawyer growled.

  “That guy you sent out here this afternoon!”

  “I sent nobody out here, Charlie,” Figarone said.

  “Yessir you did—remember the guy from the gun factory?”

  Figarone said, “You been smoking marijuana again, Charlie. I told you to—”

  “Wait a minute,” Manny Greco put in angrily, “When was this, Charlie, this guy from the gun factory?”

  “About five-thirty, six o’clock I think,” Sandini replied quickly, gratefully riveting his attention to the other boss.