At that moment, not even Bolan himself could have known.
Tell them I’m here!
Tell them somebody knows why!
It was the message from a desperate war machine, in frenzy mode. It was a message of doom. It was, in every sense, the message from a tortured soul, acting out the only course of action available.
And somebody in Greater Boston know why.
2: Decisions
She’d been a 26-year-old maiden schoolteacher—never married “or anything”—but a damned pretty and a savvy one and Bolan was a doomed man on the run with his life’s blood leaking out of him when he first placed eyes on Valentina Querente.
She had given him first-aid, shelter, then understanding and ultimately she’d given him her love. Reluctantly he had accepted it, knowing that he was doomed, knowing that he could add nothing to her life but anxiety, misery and eventually tragedy.
But Mack Bolan was no superman. He bled like other men, he fell in love like other men and he sometimes made wrong decisions like other men.
He had made a bad decision regarding Valentina Querente. She had convinced him that, from her point of view, it would be far better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all—that pain and anxiety were every woman’s price for love and fulfillment.
All this had happened during the first campaign—at Pittsfield. Bolan had not expected to live beyond that initial engagement. And, yes, there had been a strong element of selfishness in that decision to include Val in his final bloody mile on earth. A woman’s love could be a wonderful and reassuring thing to a dying man. Bolan had selfishly accepted Val’s love and recklessly returned it tenfold.
And then, miraculously, he had survived the hell at Pittsfield. He saw that victory as a brief reprieve, a mere stay of sentence, and he had sallied out to meet the enemy again on new ground, far away from his beloved Valentina, and he had told her at that time, “I am dead. Bury me, Val. Mourn me if you have to, but make it brief. Then pull your life together and give that bright love of yours to a guy who can give you something valuable in return, something better than a handful of ashes.”
Val had not buried Mack Bolan. She had, as it were, ressurected him—via the kid brother, Johnny. Very quietly and with the connivance of sympathetic local officials she’d had herself declared Johnny Bolan’s legal guardian, and she had gone with him into hiding.
“Protective concealment” for Mack Bolan’s brother had been, of couse, an entirely necessary thing. Simple vengeance alone would have been motivation enough for a rub-out of the kid brother. More than vengeance, though, mob possession of Johnny’s fate would give them an influence over their hated enemy which could probably never be gained via any other method.
Valentina had voluntarily cast her fate beside Johnny’s. There was nothing linking her to the Bolan wars nor to Bolan himself, not until she allied herself with his only surviving relative.
So, yes, Valentina Querente was a very special item in Mack Bolan’s heart.
As for Johnny Bolan—the kid had been a mere toddler when big brother Mack had first gone off to war … that time, in an infinity called Korea. Johnny had grown up with that soldierly image forever in front of him. Mack had written him personal letters, at least once each month, throughout those long years between toddler and teen-ager. He had sent him souvenirs and gifts from exotic lands, and he’d taken the kid camping and vacationing during those infrequent visits home.
Actually, despite the years and miles of separation between the two, these brothers probably had closer bonds of family and friendship than is usually found in a normal home environment.
Mack had forever been the hero in young Johnny’s life, always larger than life, perfection personified, the “dream” big brother of every kid who’d ever grown up without one.
Upon leaving Pittsfield that final time, big brother Mack had given Johnny this parting word of advice: “Make something of yourself. Forget the past, forget me. Mom and Pop and Cindy are buried out there in Hillside Gardens. And so am I, Johnny, so am I. So you’re the last Bolan. Make it count. For all our sakes, Johnny, make it count.”
Johnny Bolan did not, could not, forget. His world had been snatched away from him by forces that he did not control and which he could not fully comprehend. Brother Mack had remained the shining symbol of strength, courage and security in a world suddenly turned hostile and unbelievable.
The kid had kept a scrapbook of the Executioner’s adventures against an enemy which was also considerably larger than life, and it must have been a terrible temptation for him to confide his secret to close friends at the private academy which was sheltering him and Valentina—he as a student, she as a faculty member.
Valentina herself had been “agitating” for another meeting with the man she loved. “One hour,” the contact had relayed to Bolan just very recently, “she wants one hour.”
“I don’t have one,” was Bolan’s curt reply.
What he had meant, of course, was that he would not risk their lives with the contamination of his presence. Wherever he walked, death strode along with him—and he simply would not cross their paths with his blood again, not ever.
But now, it seemed, fate or destiny or whatever moved the universe had decided to entertwine those precious lives with his once again, and Bolan had found that he had considerably more than “one hour” to offer to Valentina Querente and Johnny Bolan.
He had a lifetime to spend on them, and he would gladly spend it.
Life, after all, had boiled down to a matter of minutes or hours at best, anyway, for this doomed warrior of the damned.
“I want them alive,” Bolan wrote in his journal during that tense flight from West Coast to East. “But more than I want them alive, I want them delivered from terror. I have seen too many turkeys on the Mafia’s doorsteps. If I find Johnny and Val that way, I’m afraid. I’ll very probably lose my mind. I have to determine, first, that they are alive and well. Then I will do anything to spring them. I’ll make any deal, take any action that includes rockbound guarantees of their safety. But first … first those bastards had better be able to show me two alive and unharmed people who never in their whole lives did anything mean or shameful. If I find two turkeys, instead … then God help us all.”
A “turkey” is the term given to what is left of a human being after a particularly gruesome method of of torture-interrogation or sometimes mere revenge favored by certain underworld mentalities. A “turkey” is a being who is biologically alive but physically shredded and mentally reduced to a shrieking bundle of mindless nerve-endings pleading for that final mercy which is delayed to the last possible tortured, screaming moment.
And, yes, Mack Bolan had encountered one turkey too many in his wars already. He fully expected to be one himself, sooner or later.
He was, in fact, prepared to trade himself for two other likely candidates.
First, however, he had to be certain that there was something left to trade for. Two pathetic turkeys-in-hand were of absolutely no value to the Executioner … nor to the world at large.
So he had to do a job which several hundred cops were already finding impossible. And he was going about that task in the only way he knew. “Somebody” was playing it cozy as hell, cute as hell—or maybe just plain scared to hell. Whatever the motives, the kidnappers had left no word, no threats, no ultimatums—no clues whatever as to their intentions with regard to the kidnapped pair.
Bolan had to break that silence.
He had to learn the name of the game, and he had to learn it damned quick, before all his options were removed by the pace of events.
As a prelude to that triple-punch Monday-afternoon hit on Boston’s lower-Mafia echelons, another bit of background unfolded into the Executioner’s Boston Blitz.
In the early pre-dawn hours of that fateful Monday, a heavy black sedan nosed into the loading area of a public warehouse near Constitution Wharf and came to a halt near a public telephone booth.
The lone occupant disembarked and leaned casually against the side of the vehicle while lighting a cigar. He was a youngish man with dark features and a sort of devil-may-care tilt to his head. Well dressed and handsome with a quick and intelligent face, the man was Leopold Turrin and he had balanced for several years on the sharp edge of a very dangerous blade.
Turrin was a Caporegime of a western Massachusetts Mafia family.
He was also an undercover police officer who had infiltrated the mob through a blood relationship with a former Capo, and he had moved slowly but surely through the ranks to a position of trust and importance in the far-flung underworld organization.
Once, Bolan had been sworn to kill Leo Turrin. That was before he learned the deeper truth of the man. Now Turrin was Bolan’s closest friend and staunchest ally. The relationship was, of course, a furtive one. It would be viewed with harsh disfavor by Mafia and police authorities alike.
After a precise five-minute wait, Turrin returned to his vehicle and sent the car into a slow crawl along the wharf. At a point about twenty yards down-range a tall figure detached itself from the shadows of the warehouse and slid into the front seat beside the driver.
Two sets of teeth flashed in brief smiles of greeting as the vehicle quickly swung into a wide circle and picked up speed along the reverse course.
Not until they were well clear of the pickup point and cruising casually along Atlantic Avenue did either man speak.
Bolan said, “You’re looking great.”
“Then I’m a liar,” the other replied. “I feel terrible.”
Bolan said, “Yeah. I know. Okay, what do you have?”
“Not nearly enough.” Turrin was studying his friend’s face, seen only briefly during the few personal contacts since Bolan’s departure from Pittsfield so many lifetimes earlier. “Can’t get used to that battle mask of yours, Sarge.”
The reference was to Bolan’s “new face”—received early in the wars through the surgical skills of another friend, now deceased. The plastic surgery had proved a futile tactic, except for the exigencies of the moment. Bolan’s new face had quickly become as well known as the old one, and this was chiefly due to his decision to use his new look as combat camouflage rather than as retirement insurance.
Bolan said, “Don’t call it a battle mask, Leo. It’s a fear pack. My guts are crawling. What have you found?”
“First of all,” the Mafioso cop replied, “the roll call on the mob side of the street keeps drawing total blanks. I can tell you this much—the snatch wasn’t engineered by any of the nationals. The Talifero brothers are still in a Vegas hospital and both are still on the critical list. So the national gestapo is in disarray and probably will be for awhile.” He showed his passenger a wry smile. “To show you how bad things really are, the Commissione has tapped yours truly as their man on the scene at Pittsfield. To get to the bottom of the thing, I mean. They’d never heard of Val until I started flapping my tail about the snatch. And I’m convinced that they’d had no leads on Johnny’s whereabouts. So … from an organization standpoint, this whole thing has come as a bit of heady excitement.”
Bolan’s face was a study in chiseled marble—and as cold. It did not change expression as he said, “Then I guess I’m just pounding sand. I smell Boston Mob all over this thing, Leo.”
“There is no Boston Mob per se, not anymore. But I think you’re right. I don’t know where you get your instincts, but …” Turrin smiled grimly. “I’ve got something from the other side of the street.”
Bolan was listening.
“Your old nemesis, Lieutenant Weatherbee, thinks he’s found two of the guys who figured in the snatch.”
“Who are they?” Bolan growled.
“Wait, don’t get up that high. These guys are beyond your reach anyway. They’re in the Pittsfield morgue and—”
“Which family?”
“There’s the rub. They’re not connected.”
Bolan groaned. “What the hell then? Freelancers?”
“That’s one theory. But let me lay it out for you, and you read it for yourself.”
“Okay,” Bolan agreed. “Lay.”
“Rudy Springer and Pete Grebchek, smalltime hoods, long records, nickel and dime stuff. Springer was released from the state prison three months ago. Grebchek escaped from Suffolk County jail, here in Boston, just two weeks ago, under rather suspicious circumstances.”
Bolan said, “So?”
“So the state police found them shot to death this morning, in a car parked just off Highway 9 about five miles east of Pittsfield. Each had a bullet in the head. They’d been dead for more than 24 hours. Both of these guys have Boston addresses, Sarge.”
“Keep laying,” Bolan said.
“You’ll like this part. A marksman’s medal was lying on the seat between the two men. They’d been shot with a nine millimeter weapon, hi-shock Parabellums, same type you use. Verdict: a Beretta Brigadier.”
Bolan grunted, “Cute.”
Turrin said, “Yeah, isn’t it? It threw Weatherbee for a minute. Just proves one thing to my mind, though. The engineer didn’t know that you were starting a war on the other side of the continent at about that same time. So he must have pulled the job before the West Coast news came in.”
Bolan agreed. “Okay, that figures. What else?”
“Well … Weatherbee has definitely placed these guys—Springer and Grebchek—or, at least, their car—in the vicinity of the academy during the period when Johnny and Val were last seen. The car is registered to Springer and several witnesses have positively identified the vehicle. It was an old beat-up Dodge with an easily recognizable backyard paint job and some very characteristic dents and crumples.”
Bolan muttered, “How convenient.”
“Yeah.”
“And they were definitely Boston boys?”
“Yeah. Strictly small-timers. Heist men—gas stations, small markets, taxicabs, that sort of thing. No self-respecting Mafioso would get caught even talking to them.”
“How do you read it, Leo?” Bolan asked quietly.
“They were patsies. Somebody in the mob stumbled onto Johnny and Val. I’m still trying to understand how … and Weatherbee is pushing his investigation along that line. Anyway, somebody stumbled onto the hide-out. For some reason, this somebody wanted a very quiet snatch. He hired the two patsies to pull the actual snatch, then he paid them on delivery with a bullet in the head. Tried to make it look like you had caught up with the guys, maybe, and rescued the kidnap victims.”
“Why?”
“Hell, I don’t know why.”
“Okay. With that small reservation, I’ll have to agree with you,” Bolan said tiredly. “What else do you have?”
That’s about it,” Turrin admitted regretfully. “I don’t know, frankly, why our somebody is being so coy. He should be dancing a jig and thumping his chest and sending out announcements. I mean, if he’s trying to smoke you into the open, he’s sure going about it in a weird way.”
“Maybe he wants me to sweat awhile,” Bolan suggested.
Turrin grunted and said, “Could be. But this thing has all sorts of funny complications. You’re not the only one sweating, Sarge.”
“No?”
“Damn no. You understand the shape the Boston territory has been in since BoBo Binaca took the fade. Well now, look. The mob wants your head, buddy, I mean they’ve got a hard-on for your hide that will never go away. They want you, yeah, and they’ll go to almost any fantastic lengths to get you. But notice I said almost. They do not want your enraged hide in Boston. In the middle of the Arizona desert, maybe. Better yet, atop the highest peak of the Rockies. But not, God no, not in Boston.”
“Who’s the big man here, Leo? There has to be a top dog somewhere in the woodwork.”
Turrin sighed. “There’s another rub. Since Binaca, there hasn’t been a clear line. It’s been mob war, political scandals, irate citizenry, police promises, blood in the streets a
nd just general chaos for two damn years. It stretches all around the area, even to Fall River and Providence and all points between. I guess about a hundred guys have been knocked off so far in the territorial battles. But that’s been quieting down. And this is why the boys don’t want a Bolan bull in their shaky little China closet. Al 88 is the Commissione’s man here and he’s been quietly putting humpty-dumpty Boston together again.”
“Al who?”
Turrin shrugged his shoulders and replied, “All I’ve been privileged to hear is Al 88—and that’s a code name, buddy, so don’t sit up nights trying to match it with anything. Anyway, these people don’t want your blitzing body in Boston. They feel that you’ll mess up everything they’ve worked so hard at these past two years.”
“You know what you’re telling me?” Bolan commented. “You’re saying the mob isn’t behind the snatch.”
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that there is no mob in Boston. There are fragments, yeah, here and there all over the place, but they’re not solidly mobbed up. The Commissione’s guiding hand is on the scene now, though, and working diligently to get them neatly mobbed once again and part of the national picture. So—”
“So,” Bolan put in, “the nationals are primarily the ones concerned about a new round of fireworks in Boston.”
“Exactly. Not that the locals themselves are actively looking forward to more warfare. I mean …”
Bolan said, “You mean that most of them are ready to settle down and devote their energies to business as usual.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. I can’t say that for all factions, of course.”
Bolan said, “Okay, I’m reading.”
Turrin sighed deeply. “That’s about all I know for sure, Sarge. Except … well … listen, there’s a Unified Crime alert out on you. The Boston cops have had enough underworld warfare, too. The citizens are edgy and the political picture is downright explosive. So … watch it. The first little blitz you pull, cops are going to be converging on this town from all around the country.”
Bolan said, “Great. So what do you suggest I do, Leo?”
Boston Blitz Page 2
