Boston Blitz

by Don Pendleton

  Silhouetted in the glow of the headlamps, a running figure emerged from the darkness downrange, hands over the head and pumping wildly in a crossing motion, trying vainly to stop something that would not be stopped.

  A rattle of gunfire split the night, and the running figure of Books Figarone hit the ground flopping, then disappeared beneath the lights.

  My debt is paid. You lived past my gun, Books.

  Guarini groaned. He took a step toward the darkness and Bolan warned him, “Huh-uh. Stay put!”

  “You saw that!”

  “You bet I did.”

  “They’ll shoot anything that moves! Those are the orders!”

  “Then don’t move,” Bolan suggested.

  The guy hadn’t expected to be taken literally, but what he’d meant to imply Bolan already knew.

  That was a head party coming across the Boston Common, and they were on safari aboard a sanitation truck. This was fair-game country; anything that was living within these protected grounds, at this dangerous moment, was a candidate for swift death.

  The idea was overkill; mop up; and if any of the first-wave troops were unlucky enough to still be around at overkill time, then that was one of the misfortunes of war.

  The idea was to get Bolan, whatever the cost, and to leave him absolutely no way to survive the meet at the Common.

  Of course, a fifteen-year-old kid and an entirely harmless young woman would have to bear the misfortune right along with everybody else.

  Al 88 must have had a lot of confidence in his timing.

  Well, time it now, Al.

  “Take off!” Bolan commanded.

  The guy did not need much prodding. He hurled himself out of that lamplight like he’d been catapulted, and he actually made about ten flying flings across the Common before his head party caught up to him, and filled his carcass with forty pounds of lead—at least a sword’s-full—and ground him into the Boston Common from which he would never, ever, rise again.

  Al 88 was a part of the history of the place when Bolan moved out to engage the enemy.

  He calculated a point about ten feet to the rear of those moving headlamps and he lobbed a fragmentation grenade into there. The sight and sound of Bolan-at-war split the night with local thunder and lightning, and in the flash bodies could be seen being ejected from the bed of that open truck and floating rather ungracefully to ground. He hit them with the other grenade then, so the hunters already knew that they had become the hunted. The sounds of that discovery came across those historic grounds as a babble of alarm and pain and fear.

  Bolan descended upon them then with the mini-cannon, putting an end to pain and fear.

  He poked among the ruins in a final evaluation, recognized there what was recognizable of Skip Sicilia, Hoops Tramitelli and other outstanding birds of that same feather.

  Then he loped off toward the west boundary of the hell-grounds, aware that he would have to evade cops and robbers alike along that freedom path, but confident that the night would carry him through.

  Yet the Executioner felt good about the entire experience.

  He knew that, in some subtle way, mankind had vindicated itself here tonight, in this cradle of liberty.

  The predators did not always have to win.

  That answer had arrived, yes—but not, after all, from Johnny and Val.

  It had come from a fragile little echo of the bloodlines which had originated this better idea in human relations, about two hundred years ago.

  I love my husband, Mr. Bolan. And yet she had …

  Yeah, the answer had come from a goldfish who had learned to outswim the sharks.

  Sure … as long as one human being cared that much, then there had to be a valid meaning to the riddle of life. It all fit together, somewhere.

  And, yes … the Executioner was glad that he’d come to Boston.

  EPILOGUE

  The kid was just standing there, giving him that awed look—a sort of an embarrassed, shy, don’t-know-what-to-say kind of look.

  Bolan swept it all away with a joyous whoop, and he lifted the kid brother completely off the floor and swung him around in a bear hug.

  When he put him down, tears were flowing unashamedly from every eye in the place, and Johnny had found his voice.

  He told the big brother, “That face is hard to take right away, Mack. On a wanted poster, or in a newspaper—that’s something else. But to see my brother actually wearing it, well, that’s weird.”

  Bolan asked him, “What’s in a face, Johnny?”

  The kid had some substance. He didn’t even have to think about it … or maybe he already had. He just said, “Guess you’re right. They’re all masks, aren’t they?”

  And then Johnny very discreetly excused himself to see how Mrs. Greene was doing. “She’s pretty well tore up,” he explained to a couple who had suddenly found each other with their eyes, and hadn’t eyes or mind for anything else at the moment.

  Bolan told her, “You look great, Val.”

  She walked into his arms, and there was not much to be said for the next several minutes.

  Then Bolan firmly took her in hand, led her to a chair, gently pushed her into it, and they talked very seriously and at times very emotionally, for the most part of an hour.

  When Bolan left the Greene library, Valentina was in tears and he was wearing as grim a face as he had worn all day.

  Leopold Turrin, in dark glasses and with a silk muffler draped casually across his chin, met him in the hallway and told him, “Your hour is about up, Sarge—and Trantham is bending the ground rules even for that. I wouldn’t waste time shaking this town if I were you.”

  Bolan grunted, “Yeah.” Then he asked his friend, “What does a dead man say to the woman he loves, Leo?”

  “God, I don’t know,” Turrin replied dismally. “But if I ever find out, I’ll tell it to Angelina first.”

  Bolan clasped his shoulder and they walked to the door together. “Put them away again for me, Leo. And tell Johnny … well tell him I’m so proud of him I could bust open.”

  “Okay, sure. Uh, somebody is waiting for you outside.”

  “Who?”

  “Brognola. He wants to talk, but strictly off the record. I don’t believe he’s had a regular heartbeat since we got that poop on Al 88. He’s reading all sorts of things into that bit of intelligence, and I get the feeling that he’s scared to even discuss it with his superiors. You know what I mean. These days a guy never knows who he’s really talking to.”

  “Yeah,” Bolan said. “I know.”

  “Well, talk turkey to the guy—oh hell, pardon that expression. Talk to him level, and listen to him level, understanding that you’re talking to a man, not to a government agency. He’s acting purely as an individual right now.”

  Bolan said, “I understand.” He thought he knew what was coming, via Harold Brognola.

  As a matter of fact, it didn’t much matter what the Washington VIP had to say to him. Bolan had already decided that Washington would be the next stop on his hellfire trail.

  He didn’t like the idea of dragons disappearing into his country’s hallowed halls … not even in dreams.

  He opened the door, then gazed back into a mansion which reflected the history of a nation, and he told Leo Turrin, “Tell them I love them, Leo.”

  The undercover cop nodded understandingly. “I’ll tell them,” he assured the livingest dead man he’d ever known.

  And as Turrin watched the man walk away, he remembered another moment, just a few impossible mornings ago, when he’d watched the tall warrior stride off into the darkness.

  In one of those rare openly philosophical moments, Leo had thought about his own resentments—he had resented being anything other than a human being.

  And he had wondered … at times such as these, which meant all the time for a guy like Bolan … what did the Executioner resent the most about his situation?

  Turrin was feeling philosophical again now, and perhaps
for the same reasons as before. He thought about that long bloody trail reaching out from Pittsfield to zig-zag across the country and the world, and he thought about the fantastic kind of man it had to be who had stepped off every mile of that travel. The constant warfare, the unending peril, the eternal vigilance—and there the guy went again, without hardly getting his breath, the Executioner was off on another one.

  Yeah, a guy in that situation could logically carry a hell of a large bag of resentment.

  But Turrin would never again wonder the question.

  He’d seen the answer in those cool blue eyes as the guy wheeled about and went out that door … yes, it had come to Leo Turrin in a flash what Mack Bolan resented about his situation.

  Nothing.

  Yeah, that was the answer or at least it was part of it. The big guy resented none of it. He accepted it, all of it, all of the hell, the anguish, the infinite damned blood … and without a whimper. He’d quietly accepted his fate, joined it, made an ally of it. Someday he just might stride away and conquer the whole damn world with it.

  Yeah.

  The guy probably could do just that.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Executioner series

  1: THE GAME

  The woman jumped out of her vehicle before it was fully parked and ran smack into the waiting arms of Horse Lucchese and Tommy the Sandman Roberts, two of the meanest hitmen in Washington. Without even a hello or by-your-leave the enforcers grabbed the flustered beauty and roughly hustled her into the shadows at the side of the apartment building.

  Bolan left his car at the curb out front and flitted along in quiet pursuit, making full use of the natural cover of darkness and closing just enough to maintain visual contact.

  Obviously something had gone sour and the Executioner wanted to know precisely what that something was.

  He’d been on Claudia Vitale’s tail for nearly a week, dogging her around Washington on an eighteen-hour a day surveillance—and she had been a very busy little bagwoman for the Capital mob.

  Bolan did not ordinarily devote so much time and attention to a payoff courier—he either hit them or forgot them. But this one was something else. Dropping bags around venal Washington was just a moonlighting sideline for Mrs. Vitale. At the stroke of eight every morning she turned back into the sedate and capable Chief Administrative Aide to the venerable old patriarch of Capitol Hill, Congressman Harmon Keel.

  And, yeah, this made Claudia Vitale a very special item in Mack Bolan’s book of warfare.

  She didn’t actually tote payroll bags around Cloutville, of course. What she carried were tidy little envelopes which could be inconspicuously passed at bureaucratic gatherings and social-set happenings.

  Bolan’s chief interest had lain in the recipients of those envelopes.

  Not that the courier herself was unworthy of a man’s interest. She was the kind who was never inconspicuous, whatever the crowd. Belled hips, alluringly sloped in the upper approaches and firmly rounded at the bases. Long legs, exquisitely tapered from full thighs—all of it together. A nipped little waist exploding upwards toward softly voluptuous womanhood and delicately molded shoulders. Swan neck, smooth as velvet and gracefully supporting a head of classic Roman beauty.

  On those evening rounds, she looked more like a Washington VIP-league call girl; Bolan had to wonder if she’d once doubled in that capacity, also.

  She’d been an easy mark to watch. Bolan could spot her walk from a block away. He knew all the little gestures as she conversed or dined or sipped at a cocktail. She was highly animated, a very much alive and interesting woman. He had been close enough often enough to know the flash and sparkle of those dark eyes, and he could tell by the tilt of her head if she was bored, interested, sad or mad.

  Right now, at the tired end of this evening, Bolan’s reading on Claudia Vitale was that she was “scared out of her skull.”

  And with damned good reason. The Horse and the Sandman were not particularly known for polite conversation and social graces.

  They had maneuvered the woman to the rear entrance of the building.… Bolan knew where they were headed. He doubled back, went in through the front door—delayed only momentarily by the efficient security locks—and proceeded directly to the top floor. He emerged from the elevator just in time to see the others disappearing inside the Vitale apartment.

  Something about the look on the woman’s face as the Sandman shoved her through that doorway struck a sympathetic chord in Bolan’s mind. He decided to go in for a direct reading … but not without a quick recon of the battle zone.

  The Executioner quietly backtracked his own route to the ground level, then went to the rear exit and let himself outside. He stood on the small porch for a moment, casually lit a cigarette while his eyes probed the dimly-lit parking area.

  He scored immediately, finding the thing he’d expected to find.

  The outside man.

  He was seated tensely at the wheel of a Pontiac LeMans, a beefy man with a nervous cigar. The parking lights were on and the engine was running, the vehicle parked rear-end to the building and ready for a fast departure.

  Hell, it was a setup for a hit.

  Bolan went on down the steps and walked directly to the Pontiac. The guy’s eyes were following his progress with a curious and indecisive stare.

  Bolan stepped right up and tapped on the window. It rolled down immediately and the stereo sounds of a tape deck drifted through the opening.

  The Executioner’s ominously-tipped Beretta Belle drifted in, attaching herself to a point directly between a pair of suddenly-flaring eyes. She coughed once, quietly and almost apologetically, and death whispered in between those eyes and shuttered them forever.

  Bolan opened the door and eased the messy remains onto the floorboards, then he turned off the ignition and the lights, rolled up the window, locked and closed the door, and went back to where the action was.

  The apartment door yielded to the first delicate probe. Bolan swept on inside.

  All the lights were on. The woman’s handbag was lying on the floor just inside the door. It was nice, simply decorated but reeking of affluence—sliding glass doors at the end of the living room, small balcony outside, Washington Monument visible in the background.

  A large TV-stereo combo served also as a bar, but there was no action there.

  An open doorway led to the bedroom, also brightly lighted. The shimmering cocktail gown the woman had been wearing was now lying in a wad just inside the door; other, more intimate articles, were strung along in an erratic path to the bathroom. That door was partially closed. The unmistakable sounds of a bathtub being filled with water were the only sounds in the place.

  They had not, Bolan knew, rushed up here for a quick community bath.

  He hit the door with a commanding foot, sending it banging into the party, the Belle close behind and at the ready.

  Horse Lucchese caught the full force of that moving door and he went over head first into the tub with a startled cry.

  The Beretta’s whispering death overtook him there, two of her grim little messengers plowing into the rear of the gunner’s skull at cerebellum level to liberate bubbling blood and jellied matter into the swiftly discoloring water.

  The other guy had his hands full of Claudia Vitale. She was very nude and putting up one hell of a grim fight for her life. The Sandman was scratched and bleeding about the face; both of them were so preoccupied with their own troubles that they were not immediately aware of the new presence in the Vitale bathroom.

  Roberts was the first to know, via the unsettling thing in the bathtub. He froze for a split-second, then gave the woman a panicky shove toward the far wall and came around in a fast pivot, clawing gunleather.

  The silent Beretta tracked right along with him, and Tommy the Sandman kept right on going round, collecting Parabellum hi-shockers in the head and throat as he spun onto the john, then slid into a deflated heap, wedged between the porcelain fixtur
e and the wall, dead eyes open and reflecting the bewilderment of that final instant of life.

  Bolan stepped inside and turned off the bath water.

  The woman was slumped against the far wall, one arm raised and steadying herself against the corner, the other pressed flat to the wall beside her as though she were trying to hold it upright. Horrified eyes rebounded from the mess in her bathroom and she moaned, “Oh God.…”

  Bolan growled, “Get out of here.”

  “They fed me p-pills,” she gasped, “…sleeping pills. Going to drown me. Make it look … accident. Already taking effect I guess.”

  One knee buckled and she almost went down.

  Bolan snatched a large bath towel from a wall rack and draped it over her shoulders as he grabbed her and pulled her out of there. “How many pills did you take?” he asked her.

  “Too many,” she replied weakly.

  She had her eyes on the bed but Bolan pulled her on into the kitchen and bent her over the sink. “Stick a finger down your throat,” he gruffly commanded. “There hasn’t been time for that stuff to get into your system.”

  “You’re wrong,” she protested. “I can feel it.”

  “What you’re feeling is Tommy the Sandman and Horse Lucchese,” Bolan told her. “Now whose finger is it going to be, yours or mine?”

  She swiveled her head about and those dark eyes probed his briefly before she asked, “Do I know you?”

  The towel fell to the floor.

  Bolan stared at her for a moment, taking in all there was to take. There was quite a bit, then he retrieved the towel and knotted it about her waist as he told her, “You’re going to. I’m Mack Bolan.”

  The eyes receded somewhat and a curtain seemed to fall into place there. In a very tired voice she said, “That’s all it takes to make my night.” Then she turned back to the sink and muttered, “For what it’s worth, thanks for my life. Now go away; leave my misery private.”

  He instructed her anyhow, “If the finger doesn’t work, try some salt water. But get it up, empty the stomach completely. Then make some strong coffee and fill your belly with it. Wet the towel and slap yourself in the face with it if you’re feeling drowsy. And stay on your feet.”