Continental Contract

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan was weary, and his belly was just about full of open warfare. For a split second he debated ending it here and now. It would be simple and relatively painless—a quiet matter of stopping the MG at the barricade ahead, the final shootout, then blissful oblivion. Already, however, he was there, the trap cars were seesawed across the narrow roadway, and Bolan’s intellectual centers stood aside for survivalist instincts. He was powering into the barricade at full throttle. Men with startled faces were flinging themselves clear of the certain collision, and Bolan’s hands and feet were quivering with the tension born of a necessity for hairbreadth control and precision timing. He hit brakes and steering and powershift simultaneously, arcing into a half-spin and ricocheting off the barricade into a shallow ditch at the side of the road, jouncing against the chainlink fencing enclosing the runway area—the wheels spinning, finding traction, then propelling him into a surging advance along the sloping walls of the ditch. An alarmed face was giving him the death look from just beyond the MG’s hood as human reactions fell one pace behind charging machinery; he heard the whump and saw the body spinning away; a flailing hand thwacked against his door post; then he was climbing for asphalt and making it and the high-traction drive was finding hard surface once more and the scene was falling behind. Only then did the impotent and receding rattle of gunfire officially mark the roadblock a failure; it seemed that Bolan was home clean—the trap had developed lockjaw. His heart had just begun beating again when he saw the police beacons flashing along the perimeter highway. Of course—it was time for the cops to crash the party, and they were coming in force. Bolan counted six cruisers in a tailgate parade, and he knew that there would be no exit from Dulles International this night.

  It was a time for decision. The Executioner had never challenged police authority; he had, in fact, studiously avoided any confrontation that would force him into a gunfight with cops. It seemed now, however, that the unavoidable moment had arrived. First they would seal all exits, then they would pour the place full of bluesuits, the inexorable magic of police methodology would have its way, and that final inevitable staredown with authority would occur; Bolan would not submit to arrest, he knew that. Better to die swiftly and with the dignity of a still-free man than to suffer that slow suffocation of jail cells and courtrooms. How strong, though, were his instincts for survival? In that final moment when he was staging his apeshit charge and inviting them to cut him down, would those combat reflexes assert themselves as they had so many times before, would his fire be going in for effect, and would he end up taking one or two good men with him? This was one of Bolan’s most persistent nightmares; he had met a cop or two during the course of his Mafia war, had recognized them as soldiers doing a soldier’s job and respected them for it. He did not wish to kill or maim any cops.

  So now the mob was at his rear and the bluesuits were pushing in from the front. Bolan made a swift decision and pulled into the parking area of the passenger terminal. He took a briefcase and a small suitcase from the rear of the MG and left the battered vehicle snuggled into the sea of cars in a longterm parking space. As he reached the terminal, two police cruisers were flashing along the inner drive; from the other direction, a small caravan of private autos were hurrying up from the freight area.

  Bolan sighed and went on in. He was caught in the pincers. Possibly, one escape route remained open. Straight up. It was fly or die—and, for Mack Bolan, the war-weary one man army, that initial decision was merely to fly now, die later, for he knew that death awaited him between every heartbeat.

  This was to be a fateful decision for certain overseas arms of that cancerous crime syndicate known as the Mafia. Though he did not know it at that moment, Mack Bolan’s private war was about to become an international one. The Executioner was moving toward a new front.

  2: Movements at the Front

  The tall man, lean and rangy in a dark suit and coordinated pastel shirt and tie, strode into the deserted flightline waiting room and dropped a small overnight bag and a briefcase carelessly to the floor. A shock of black hair spilled across the forehead, large tinted lenses in gold wire frames concealed the eyes, a heavy moustache trailed out to almost meet sideburns at the jawline. Just outside, the ramp dispatcher was standing in front of a big jet and passing hand signals to the cockpit crew; the engines of the huge airliner were whining into the warmup run.

  The uniformed man at the ticket desk widened his eyes noticeably when the hundred dollar bill came into view. The tall man with the eyeshades told him, “I’ll bet a hundred you can’t get me on that Paris flight.”

  The ticket man grinned at Bolan and replied, “I’ll take that bet, sir.” He nudged the man beside him and commanded, “Run out there and tell Andy to hold the gangway, we have a late boarding VIP.”

  Moments later Bolan was ticketed and moving along the boarding ramp. A man in airline uniform stood impatiently at the aircraft door. He waved the tardy boarder inside and closed the door behind him. Bolan found his seat and was buckling himself in when the door again opened and another last-minute fare stepped inside and took the final remaining open seat, just across the aisle from Bolan. Immediately thereafter the aircraft began moving away from the loading zone.

  Bolan was discreetly studying the man across the aisle; what he saw gave him neither comfort nor qualms. He was just a guy, about Bolan’s age and size, modishly dressed, still breathing hard from his dash to the plane. A stewardess detached herself from the group at the crew station and came down to add their names to the passenger list. Bolan gave the name on his passport, Stefan Ruggi, and heard the other man identify himself as Gil Martin. This produced a sharp reaction from the stewardess, prompting the man to hastily add, “Look, don’t make a fuss, eh? I’ll keep the secret if you will.”

  The girl nodded mute acquiesence and moved forward toward the flight deck. Bolan wondered who the hell was Gil Martin, but his attention was immediately diverted to the window. The plane was moving slowly along a taxiway, running parallel to the terminal building. Considerable activity beyond the fence had commanded Bolan’s attention as he noted cars with flashing beacons on their roofs and uniformed men moving energetically about the terminal area. He sighed inwardly and tried to relax into the seat, but the rather plain young woman seated next to him softly exclaimed, “Oh God!”

  “Is something wrong?” Bolan inquired, turning to inspect her for the first time.

  “Did you see all that out there?”

  Bolan smiled. “The police? Are you on the lam?”

  The question both amused and embarassed her. “No,” she replied, “but doesn’t it give you a little tingle to wonder what they’re doing? Maybe there’s a bomb aboard this plane … or a hijacker.”

  Bolan tried to reassure her. “More than likely it’s only super security for a visiting dignitary.”

  The woman said, “Oh,” but was obviously not wholly satisfied with such an un-tingling explanation.

  Bolan dismissed her from his mind and tried to force the tensions out also. They would not go. He would not be breathing easy, he knew, until he was off and clear of that aircraft. If the police were as thorough as he knew they could be, a surprise party might be awaiting his arrival in Paris—or, as bad, a Mafia reception—those guys could be thorough, too.

  A domestic flight would have been greatly preferable. But this had been the only flight immediately leaving Dulles and it had seemed his best move. Now he was having doubts. He would have to clear through the French customs and perhaps go through other formalities. The only problem with that, in Bolan’s view, was his passport. How good was it? He had barely glanced at it, as part of the portfolio urged upon him by Harold Brognola in Miami; he had never seriously entertained any ideas of leaving the country. Could that passport be gimmicked as some weird sort of trap to identify the Executioner the moment he stepped onto foreign soil? No—that would not make sense. Bolan did not wish to go off the deep end of groundless fears—he had enough of the flesh-and-blood v
ariety to occupy his attention.

  He glanced at the woman seated next to him and tried to draw a mental equivalent of her fears and his. Wasn’t he being just as silly? Was this Mafia war finally getting to his inner chambers, rattling them, raising phantasms of fear much more terrible than the physical reality? Was Bolan the Bold going to cop out to combat fatigue?

  He was thusly talking himself out of an impulse to drag the briefcase into his lap and inspect that passport. They were standing just off the runway now, and the engines were revving up. The door to the flight cabin opened and the stewardess for Bolan’s section reappeared. A man in uniform showed himself momentarily in the open doorway, glanced at the passenger identified as Gil Martin and smiled, then closed the door. The stewardess was buckling herself into a seat. She, too, turned and sent a smile toward Martin. If the subject of the curious interest took notice, he did not respond.

  Bolan again fell to wondering about the man, then he subconsciously resolved the passport conflict by suddenly opening his briefcase and transferring the passport to the breast pocket of his coat, where it belonged anyway.

  Then they were on the takeoff run. Dulles was becoming a blur beyond the window, the nose lifted, and Bolan was being gently pressed into the seat cushions.

  For a few hours, okay, he could relax now. The police had allowed the plane to depart. Bolan wondered how much he owed that to the last-minute arrival of Gil Martin, an obvious celebrity who would fit rather well the general Bolan description. He could visualize the exchange between tower and pilot: the police were looking for a tall man, about thirty, dark, clean-shaven, a hard looking bastard with cold brown eyes. He might have boarded the Paris flight at the last moment. Yes, we got a guy like that but, ha ha, it’s just old Gil Martin, you know, the celebrity.

  The tensions were leaving. Bolan was grateful for the false facial hair which so altered his appearance; doubly grateful that young men’s fashions had gone to hair—there was nothing unusual or even notable about face hair these days. The muttonchop sideburns and sweeping moustache gave Bolan an almost soft anonymity. So okay, relax now and conserve the energy, replenish the brain, cool down the vital juices, take it easy. In Paris, he would very likely need everything he could get going, false hair notwithstanding.

  Out of his fog of introspection he became aware again of the girl beside him. She was talking compulsively to the passenger in the window seat, apparently fighting takeoff anxieties. “… and they say the Right Bank has become so commercial, so brassy, I’d love to find a little hotel on the Left Bank, perhaps in the Sorbonne district. Don’t you think that would be charming? And inexpensive, too. They say it’s so colorful and interesting, the artists and students and all live there, on the Left Bank I mean, but then on second thought I don’t know, I mean it might not be safe for …”

  Bolan grinned, closed his eyes, and let it all go. He would take care of Paris when Paris presented itself. But only for a little while. A war at home awaited him, commanded him. Maybe he could work in a brief R&R in gay Paree before returning to the front.

  The Executioner would soon discover, however, that the entire world was his front. There was to be no R&R for Mack Bolan in gay Paree.

  Quick Tony Lavagni sat at a desk in the rear of a shop in Washington’s ghetto, counting the day’s bag from the most lucrative numbers operation south of Harlem. Wilson Brown, an immense black man and Lavagni’s central controller, stood nonchalantly at Quick Tony’s elbow, chewing on a dead cigar and watching the count with miss-nothing eyes. Brown was in his early thirties, and the mark of many personal wars, mostly lost ones, was ground into his dusky features; only the eyes showed an aliveness, a quick awareness and responsiveness, perhaps an intelligent wariness mixed with an acceptance of a black man’s destiny. Lavagni was in his forties, not appreciably lighter in color than his controller, an emotional man of quick temper, violent tendencies, and a reputation with a knife. It was this latter consideration that had given him the label of “Quick Tony.”

  Near the front door lolled two of Brown’s runners, talking in bored whispers and shooting occasional dark looks toward the men at the desk. Another white man sat in a chair tilted against the wall, trying to read a racing form in the dim light reaching him from the desk lamp.

  Lavagni completed the count, consulted the bank sheet, and drawled, “You’re fifty short, Wils.”

  “Naw,” the black man replied, bending low over Lavagni’s shoulder to peer at the figures. “It’s there in th’ side money.”

  “Oh yeah, I see. You laid off to Georgetown. How come so much lay off, Wils?”

  “I told you, we could get flattened if—” Brown’s explanation was interrupted by a muted ringing of the telephone. He scooped it up and grunted into the mouthpiece, chewed the cigar furiously for a moment as he listened to the message, then said, “Okay, then you better try to spread another fifty across the worst numbers. You know what, okay?”

  “Another fifty?” Lavagni fumed as the black man hung up the phone.

  “You’ll be glad tomorrow,” Brown assured him. “It’s just one of those days, Tony. It’s heavy on all the possibles. We’re even having trouble placing lay-offs.”

  The Italian growled something unintelligible and began placing the money in a heavy paper bag.

  Brown raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You takin’ the whole bank, Tony?”

  “Damn right,” Lavagni growled. “You send a boy over tomorrow with a voucher, I’ll give ’im the pay-off purse.”

  “Suddenly Wils Brown ain’t to be trusted?” the big man asked in a thickening voice.

  “Hey, don’t start that—you know me better than to start that, Wils. It’s this Bolan. He’s been spotted around town, I told you that. I ain’t taking no chances on him busting up my banks.”

  “I thought you were skinnin’ that cat, man.”

  “Yeah, well, certain people are taking care of that detail right now. So don’t—” Lavagni was interrupted by another ringing of the phone.

  Brown reached for it and Lavagni went on toward the door, then he heard the black man saying, “Yeah he’s here, just a minute.”

  Lavagni turned back with a questioning look. Brown was extending the instrument toward him. “It’s your chief rodman. He sounds like his eyes might be rolling.”

  Lavagni strode back to the desk and snatched the telephone. “Yeah?” he said quietly. His face fell immediately as the receiver rattled with some breathless report, then he deposited the paper bag on the desk and reached for a handkerchief. “No, hell no, keep away from those cops!” he barked, dabbing at his forehead with the handkerchief. “After they leave, you go through there with a sieve. You make damn sure he’s not hiding in a john or something. Then you get a rundown on every plane that left out of there during that time, and you get copies, of the passenger lists … shit I don’t care how you get ’em, just get ’em!” He deposited the phone with a crash and growled, “That bastard!”

  “Bolan got away again,” Brown decided in flat tones.

  “That bastard!” Lavagni repeated.

  “I can get ’im.”

  “Huh?”

  “I can get Bolan for you.”

  “Shit!” Lavagni sneered. “You and what cock-a-doodle army? We got the whole goddam country swarmin’ for that guy, and you say …”

  “I can kill him with a kiss.”

  “Hey, I ain’t in no mood for … what the hell you mean? You mean the Judas kiss?”

  “Something like that,” Brown replied quietly. “I did duty with the guy. I know him. I waded rice paddies with him and jungle-skunked ’im for about three months once. Yeah, I could—”

  “Then why didn’t you say so before?” Lavagni asked coldly, watching the black man through half-slitted eyes.

  Brown shrugged. “I’m not no Maf—I’m not one of you, man, I just work here. And I didn’t figure I’d get no popularity medals for knowing Bolan.”

  “Well that’s a hell of a goddam attitude
!” Lavagni shouted. “Now how’m I supposed to know what the hell you been up to, huh Wils? How’m I supposed to know what you’n that bastard Bolan’ve been cooking up, huh?”

  The two black men near the door were moving nervously toward the disturbance. Brown shot them a quick glance and said, “It’s okay.” To Lavagni, he said, “Just use your head, that’s all. This ain’t no confession, you know. I’m telling you I can get Bolan for you.”

  “Why?” the Italian asked suspiciously. “You’re already my best right hand, right here. I admit, you been smart staying out of this other mess. So now why you stoppin’ being smart, Wils? Huh?”

  Brown shuffled uncomfortably and hunched his shoulders forward in a thoughtful stance. “Well, I been thinking. I’m not no part of nothing, you see. I’m just me, Wils Brown, and I’m whatever I can make for myself. Right? How much can Wils Brown make for himself, Tony, if he gets Mack Bolan for you?”

  Brown had come up with the one convincing argument which Quick Tony Lavagni could understand, and with which he could identify. He was quietly studying the idea and scrutinizing his central controller, obviously seeing him in an entirely different light than ever before. “There’s a hundred thou contract on Bolan,” he explained slowly. “Arnie Farmer has added another hundred thou if he can get his hands on th’ bastard while he’s still alive.”

  Brown smiled solemnly. “Well now, see? Wils Brown would kiss Jesus himself to be a part of that purse, Tony.”

  “I got an interest in anything going in my territory, Wils,” Lavagni carefully pointed out.

  “Okay, I’d give you a split,” Brown agreeably replied.

  “And Arnie hisself, he’s got an interest too.”

  “He pays out with one hand and takes back with the other?”