“Ghost, Dinosaur,” Bob heard in his earpiece. “What the hell’s going on down there? I see three KIA now, including the one I buzzed. You okay?”
“AOK, Dinosaur, and thanks. He almost got me.”
“You’re getting old, son, a like me,” Stansky replied.
“Who are you talking to?” Benson demanded. “I thought this was just you and me?”
“Just another bird in my ear,” Bob told Benson and then keyed the mic again. “Dinosaur, can you swing over to the Tuscany roof one and a half klicks southeast of my pos and pick up Ace and Koz?”
“Ghost, Ace. You sure you want to do that right now?”
“Ace, I’m sure,” Bob answered. “After that, Dinosaur, you can swing by here and pick us up.”
“Ace, Dinosaur. He is one confident son of a bitch, isn’t he?”
“Roger that, sir, roger that,” Ace answered. “Packing up, and ready for extraction in One.”
“Who was that?” Benson demanded. “A goddamned flock of birds this time?”
“No, only one. Sometimes I just hear voices, that’s all.”
“Voices, huh? Then you don’t need that earpiece or the chin mic, do you?” Benson stated. “You were the one who said this would be mano a mano, remember? Just you and me, and that means no outside help.”
Bob looked at him and smiled before he looked around at the others again. Ernie Travers, Linda, Chester, The Batman, Bulldog, and even Jimmy Barker had all come out on the deck to watch. “Listen up, this is between me and him. Nobody interferes,” he reminded them. “If Benson wins, he can walk out of here. Everybody got that?” Bob said as he pulled off the headset and tossed it aside.
Benson smiled too, knowing that without the earpiece, none of the other Deltas would be able to tell him how good he had gotten with the knife, either.
And so they began, exactly as Benson expected. The two men focused entirely on each other, tuning everything else out as they began to circle. Benson had watched Burke in hand-to-hand combat before, always against larger men, and this would be no different. Burke always danced around his opponent on the balls of his feet, upright, making a rapid series of hand and head fakes, as Burke measured him and tried to tire him out. As time passed, he knew Burke would get bolder and bolder, so Benson held back and didn’t take any of the feints. He stayed solid and frosty, bent at the knees and waist, getting a feel for his rhythm, waiting patiently for him to make that first big mistake, because it would be his last.
Unfortunately for Gramps, the slow circling, bobbing, and weaving lasted less than five seconds. That was when Bob suddenly ran straight at him in an all-out, win-or-lose, fast, Krav Maga attack, which was the last thing Gramps Benson expected. With his arms and legs churning, Bob was inside Benson’s reach before the bigger man could react. He made a sweeping block of Benson’s knife hand with his left forearm, pushing the knife outward, as he continued on in. As he did, he drove his right elbow into the center of Benson’s face, flattening his nose, and stunning him. At the same time, Burke drove his left knee into Benson’s groin. As the bigger man stumbled backwards, Burke brought that same elbow down onto the bundle of nerves in the right side of Benson’s neck, temporarily paralyzing the arm. For all intents and purposes, the fight was already over. While Bob was unaware of Benson’s new proficiency with a knife, Benson was equally unaware that Bob had turned away from all the conventional defensive martial arts he once was an expert in, such as Karate, Judo, Aikido, Tae Kwon Do, and had spent the past three years concentrating exclusively on Krav Maga, the extremely violent system of attacks and counter-attacks developed by the Israelis.
“Look at his upper arm,” Patsy screamed at Benson as she pointed at his shoulder where blood was now coming through his shirt. "I bet that's where I shot him that night in the house in Fayetteville."
"You really are a piece of work, aren't you, Gramps?" Bob said as he began to circle him again. For all the damage he had inflicted on Benson, amazingly, the bigger man was still on his feet. The knife had fallen on the deck, his right shoulder was bleeding and his arm hung numb at his side. He stood there wide-eyed, wobbling back and forth, and bleeding badly from his nose. Somehow, however, he was still standing. Finally, his eyes cleared and they focused on Burke. A loud, desperate, unearthly moan came out of him as he bent over, picked up the knife with his left hand, looked at it for a second, and suddenly charged.
Benson may have only been moving at half his normal speed, but he still packed considerable power once he got that weight and muscle moving, too much weight, momentum, and power for Bob to match head-on. As a result, Bob did not use Krav Maga; he reverted to one of the oldest Judo moves in the books, and went with the flow. He dodged the knife, pushed it aside, and took several small steps backward until he matched Gramps’ speed, and grabbed the big man’s shirt-front with both hands. Bending his right leg at the knee, he jammed his left foot into Benson’s gut, continuing backward even faster as he sat down, bringing all of the big man’s size and momentum with him. Continuing to roll backward, he kicked upward with all his strength. It is called a Tomoe Nage or Circle Throw, one of the “backward sacrifice throws” as they are called in Judo. Complicated and used with considerable risk, it is a thing of beauty when properly timed and executed, as this was.
Bob ended up on his back on the deck, while Benson found himself sailing high in the air, cartwheeling toward the edge of the roof. While that was not Bob’s intention, Benson came down hard, head first, on the top of the parapet wall. He seemed to stand there for an impossible moment, upside down, looking back at Burke and the others. Already stunned, it took Benson a second or two to realize what was happening, before he toppled backward over the edge and fell off the roof. Consequently, it was only when he passed the third floor that he began to scream in earnest. That, in turn, only lasted a few seconds more until he hit the concrete sidewalk below and the screaming suddenly stopped.
There was silence on the roof until Ernie Travers said, “I bet that hurt.”
“Good!” Patsy Evans snapped angrily as she folded her arms across her chest. “Now he knows how Vinnie felt!”
Jimmy Barker hurried over to the side of the roof and looked down. “No, he’s not feeling much of anything, now, but I wouldn’t want to be the one who had to clean that up.”
That was when the all-black Iroquois helicopter came in and touched down on the far side of the roof. Bob quickly got to his feet and put his headset back on.
“Ghost, Dinosaur,” he heard. “There’s a whole bunch of police cars and emergency vehicles converging on your position. Time to di di mau,” or run like hell, in Vietnamese, Stansky said.
“Roger that. Sure took them long enough,” Bob answered Stansky as he turned to the others. “All right, everybody get in,” he said. “It may be a tight squeeze, but the bus is leaving. Jimmy, you and the girls hop on somebody’s lap. We need to get out of here, and back to the boat.”
Giving the roof one last look, he saw Carbonari’s briefcase lying near the bar, ran over, and picked it up. After a quick head count to make sure everyone was there, he jumped through the Iroquois’ rear door and had barely landed on the helicopter’s deck when Stansky kicked the bird in the butt, and it took off low and fast, heading northeast toward Absecon Bay and the vast open marshes beyond.
Bob crawled to the edge of the helicopter’s deck and looked down. Stansky was right; it looked as if every police car, ambulance, and fire truck in Eastern New Jersey had descended on the Bimini Bay complex. Odd, he thought, as he looked at the rear side of the building. He swore he saw smoke billowing out of the mechanical building next to the loading dock. Well, that was where they suspected Martijn Van Gries’s data center was hidden, so perhaps it wasn’t so odd after all.
As Stansky took the big black bird down to the deck, Bob had a beautiful view of Clam Creek as the moonlight and neon lights of the city reflected off the water of Absecon Channel. A large sailboat was motoring out and already halfway d
own Absecon Inlet, heading toward the Atlantic Ocean. It made a lovely sight in the moonlight, he thought, and in a few minutes, he planned to be doing exactly the same thing.
Bob rolled over onto his back and looked up. Jimmy was sitting sideways in Patsy’s lap. Her arms were wrapped around his neck, and she had him in such a fierce lip-lock that he figured it would take a pry-bar to get them apart. Oh, well, they had earned it. Linda sat next to them in the front row of seats on Ace’s lap, with her arms around him and Batman who had somehow squeezed in next to her. On the rear side sat Koz, Bulldog, Chester and Ernie. With General Stansky and Command Sergeant Major Pat O’Connor next to him in the co-pilot seat, that was a lot of weight for one small helicopter. No wonder the Iroquois felt sluggish.
Linda looked down at him and smiled. “This could be you, you know.”
“Last man in gets the floor.” Bob shrugged. “It’s an old air assault rule.”
“Nice moves back there, by the way,” Ace said grudgingly. “Good to see you didn’t let yourself go completely to hell.”
“I’ll be the judge of that!” Linda smiled down at him.
“If you’re lucky,” Bob shot back, well aware that the teasing and banter were a natural and inevitable reaction to the life-and-death tension that preceded them.
Minutes later, the stealthy black bird touched down in the parking lot near Barney’s Dock and everyone piled out.
“Thanks a lot, sir.” Bob reached through the pilot’s window and shook Stansky’s hand. “Nice ride.”
“Glad to help, Major,” the general quickly answered. “Over the years, you’ve given me more than my share of gray hair, so it was fun to watch you operate ‘up close and personal,’ as they say. By the way, what’s that?” He motioned toward the big briefcase in Bob’s hand.
Bob smiled. “It’s Carbonari’s. He had it clutched to his chest like a life preserver, and maybe it was. So, we'll see. Maybe it can help cover a few operating expenses.” That said, Bob snapped to his parade ground-best position of attention, and rendered the general a crisp salute. “Hope to see you down at Bragg in a few days, sir.”
“You do that, Bobby!” Stansky saluted him back. “I’ve got a bottle of Jim Beam Single Barrel in my desk that O’Connor’s been bugging me to open for weeks now, and I can’t wait,” Stansky winked. “And bring the wife. There’s a lot of things I need to tell that girl. Stand clear!” he shouted as he added power and worked the Iroquois’ cyclic and collective controls. Without all the weight, the black bird heaved a sigh of relief. Its nose quickly rotated until he threw its tail in the air and the black bird shot off to the northeast.
Bob didn’t have to tell anyone to get on board The Enchantress. The others had already run below deck, and Ace and Chester were casting off the lines as he jumped onto the stern and climbed up to the flying bridge.
“Let’s get out of here,” he told them as he looked across the small harbor at the flashing red lights from the fleet of emergency vehicles surrounding the Bimini Bay. He moved the engines to quarter speed ahead and powered away from the pier into the boat channel, glad to be the hell out of Atlantic City.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The old Marine Basin marina was tucked away on the water side of the Belt Parkway in southeastern Brooklyn, hidden behind rundown warehouses, storage sheds, and parked trucks. It wasn’t the kind of place where it paid to stick your nose in other people’s business, see things you shouldn’t see, or ask too many questions. Worn out, ground down, and beat up, the marina offered no amenities. What it offer was the quickest boat access in New York City to the ocean, the Hudson River, the East River, and Long Island Sound. The kind of boats that one saw there were not luxury yachts or sail boats. They were small to medium sized work boats, dredges, commercial fishing boats and trawlers. One example was an old forty-nine-foot O’Brien fishing boat that sat at the far end of the pier. Used and abused for over thirty years, it was functional, but in serious need of repairs, repainting, and refitting.
Three weeks after the escapades in Atlantic City, Angelo Roselli still had no idea where his money was, except that it wasn’t in his accounts, where it was supposed to be. He brought in some of the best accounting and computer brains money could buy in the city, and all they could tell him was that he had been cleaned out. Where did it go? Don’t know. Who took it? Don’t know. Can I get it back? Don’t know that either.
“Like I didn’t freaking already know that?” he raged every time he thought about it. After all, twenty-seven million dollars and counting was a very big deal, but he also lost an entire crew of his best Brooklyn men — six “made” men on top of that — plus a crew chief, and all those morons could tell him was they didn’t know. That didn’t sit well with Angelo, it didn’t sit well with the Lucchese family bosses he reported to, and worst of all, it didn’t sit well at all with their partners, the Genoveses over in Manhattan, either. The relationship between the Luccheses and the Genoveses had always been touchy at best, and a “thing” like this could push other “things” right over the edge. So to avoid a war, there must be answers, restitution, and blood — someone else’s blood, Angelo hoped — and everyone knew it.
At 2:00 a.m., the marina was quiet and deserted. After he closed the restaurant, Angelo had enjoyed a leisurely late dinner of his own scaloppini, manicotti, cannoli, and a nice glass of sangiovese, swapping stories about the old days with a few of the boys. Finally, he donned his heavy overcoat, his wide-brimmed fedora, and got in his dark gray Lincoln. With his favorite Dean Martin CD in the player, he wound his way southeast on the dark city streets for the short drive south to Shore Parkway, and then east to the marina on 41st. He still felt full, too full, knowing it was never a good idea to eat a heavy meal like that before taking a boat ride.
As he drove into the marina, he slowly skirted the numerous potholes and wound his way to the end of the old concrete pier. He parked next to the boat and got out, not even bothering to lock his car. Most people would be afraid to leave a nice car like his down here on the Brooklyn waterfront at this hour, but he wasn’t. The kids down here knew who the car belonged to, and they knew that taking it or even touching it would be a “life-altering” decision. He paused and looked up. There was a thin quarter moon hanging in the sky over Staten Island, and a cold, damp breeze coming up off the water. Even with his suit, the gray fedora, and a heavy overcoat, it made him shiver. Cold? Yeah, maybe it was time for him to retire to Florida or Palm Springs after all. He was getting too old for this crap.
Angelo walked with a measured, purposeful gait to the boat, stepped over the gunnel, and came aboard. He waved to the man up on the bridge and gave a quick nod to the deckhand standing near the bow as he cast off the lines. The boat was pointed out to sea and its large engines were already warmed up and idling as he stepped around an empty 55-gallon oil drum, some scrap metal, a plastic drop cloth, and a chainsaw that were lying on the aft deck. He ducked his head and stepped down the narrow flight of stairs to the main cabin below. He looked around, remembering that it used to be nice down here, but that was a long time ago. They used to keep a refrigerator in the corner, some cushions on the side benches, and even a few Naugahyde lounge chairs, so the boys could relax and have a few beers after they went out to fish, or whatever; but nobody did that no more. Now, the boat was only used to haul stuff.
The soft purr of the twin diesels soon become a throaty rumble, as the boat pulled away from the pier and headed out into Gravesend Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. He removed his fedora, placed it carefully on the side bench, and looked down at the prostrate figure of Donatello Carbonari lying on the deck in the center of the cabin, hog tied, gagged, and looking up at him with terrified eyes. Sitting on the hard benches across from Carbonari were two other large men in slacks, Italian leather shoes, and gaudy sports coats. They were smoking, and there were a half-dozen ground-out cigarette butts on the deck between them. Each man had a large revolver hanging indifferently in a shoulder holster, and they
looked down at Carbonari with cold, pitiless eyes. They had done this before. Carbonari hadn’t.
“He cause you any trouble?” Angelo looked over at them and asked.
“Him? Nah, it was almost as if he was expecting us.”
Angelo shrugged. “Dat’s ’cause he was; wuzn’t you Donatello?” He paused, and then answered his own question. “See, Donatello’s been a bad boy. He forgot that doze pleasure palaces he used to run down da coast belong to us, not to him, and dat he was responsible for what happened… for everything dat happened.”
Slowly, Angelo walked around Carbonari, circling, and staring down at him as if he were a bug under a microscope. “Don’t get me wrong. Nobody up here minds a little skimmin’ off the top. Hell, Donnie, we’re all freakin’ crooks to begin wit’, ain’t we, boys?” He laughed. “But da penthouse, da helicopter, dat million-dollar yacht, and den da Manhattan condo — even dat’s okay, so long as you’re makin’ your ‘nut.’ But when you come up short, real short, dere’s limits, and you forgot dat, Donnie, didn’t you? Now, da money’s gone, the penthouse and helicopter got all shot to hell, bodies all over da freakin’ place, and nobody can find dat sailboat. It’s a real mess you left down dere, kid.”
Carbonari began shaking his head, trying to talk, but the gag was too tight, not that it mattered. None of the other men on that boat had the slightest interest in anything he had to say anyway.
As they came around the headland and entered the broad, open bay, the water got rougher, the boat began to rock, and Angelo finally took a seat on one of the benches. “Remember when we used to go down to Atlantic City and go fishin’, Donnie? Let’s see, it was me, you, your old man, Freddie from Brownsville, Tony from up in Queens, Lenny, sometimes Petey from Jamaica Avenue, and even Father Pat, from St. Michael’s. You wuz what? Maybe seven or eight den? I remember your old man had a fishing boat he used to take us out on.” Angelo stopped and looked around. “It was about like dis one, wasn’t it? I don’t think you liked dat boat very much back den, did you? I remember havin’ to hold you over the side by your feet while you upchucked your breakfast. Remember dat? Yeah, good times back den. I wonder what happened to dat old boat?”
Burke's Gamble Page 38
