Dixie Convoy

by Don Pendleton

  He pulled into the drive and killed the lights, then stepped outside and moved quickly to the rear entrance. It had to look natural, of course—unsuspecting. He found the key where he knew it would be and let himself in, turning on a single light downstairs and moving immediately to the second floor where he also illuminated the master bedroom and bath. He wasted not a single motion or moment, moving quickly downstairs and through the rear to the outside, blending into the wet night for a quick quit of that place.

  The hounds would already have performed their function.

  Very soon, the headhunters would be on the scene.

  And, sure, it was a game for which Mack Bolan had written the rulebook.

  The Executioner, also, would be there. He circled on foot to the south intersection and approached the stakeout vehicle from the rear. He opened the back door and slid onto the seat, the silent Beretta leading the way. Two startled faces turned to the quiet intrusion and each immediately received a Parabellum boneshredder from the sighing Belle, dead center between flaring eyes.

  Bolan reached over the seat and started the engine, turned on the parking lights, then left them there and completed the circle on foot. He scratched the other pair of hounds with the same quiet dispatch, retreating immediately to the darkness opposite the Turrin residence and settling into a patient vigil.

  The wait was not long. Less than ten minutes after the lights had first appeared at Leo Tuirin’s windows, a big crew wagon eased in from the north—a Cadillac limousine with jumpseats, and crammed with personnel. It paused momentarily beside the stakeout car, then went on without lights to halt just short of the Turrin drive.

  The vision was terrible in the constant downpour from the black skies, and even sounds were muffled and uncertain in the background of steady raindrops, but Bolan was aware of an energetic exodus from that big crew wagon as the head party descended upon its target. He caught a glimpse of two figures moving swiftly through the dim glow of light at the side of the house—then two more, close behind. The driver remained with the car—and that put four guns at the rear of the house, four at the front.

  It came, then—two guys charging the front door with sawed-off shotguns at chest level, a quick kick at the door—and they were inside, briefly visible and identifiable in the sudden light before disappearing into the interior.

  Real professionals, yeah—these guys knew what they were doing.

  The other two remained at the front lawn—shadows, mostly, raised shotguns silhouetted against the light from the upstairs windows—waiting coolly for something to show at one of those windows.

  Bolan waited, also, respectful of that professionalism, and thankful that Leo Turrin was nowhere near.

  Again, the wait was not long. He moved closer as four gunners moved through that doorway and down the stairs to the lawn. Others drifted into that little knot at the front of the house. Bolan was close enough now to overhear the angered words of that conference.

  “Nothing’s in there, Mario.”

  “Nothing came out the back way,” reported another.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Run ask Shorty Joe what the hell this is, Eddy.”

  One of the glistening shadows detached itself from the group at the steps and ran up the street to the stakeout car.

  Bolan saw the interior light flash on as the guy jerked the door open—then the door was hurriedly slammed shut and the guy came loping back.

  From ten yards out, he gaspingly reported, “They got their damn heads blowed off, Mario!”

  A thick voice from the knot immediately snapped, “Move ’em!”

  The knot abruptly dissolved and flowed toward the street. Two figures moved quickly on to the death car while the others hastily piled into the crew wagon. Engines revved, lights flashed, and both vehicles sped away.

  Bolan went to his car in the Turrin driveway and moved out behind them, his own headlamps extinguished. The procession paused briefly at the first intersection as the head party made its second grim discovery. That vehicle quickly joined the lineup. Bolan fell back, giving them plenty of running room. For now, all he wanted was tracks—a game trail of his own. And, yes, the numbers suddenly had meaning again—in a tactical sense—and the Executioner was taking their count.

  “Twenty headhunters,” was the word in town. “Ten from Boston, ten from Albany. The meanest around.”

  Lucky, yes, for Leo Turrin that his ears were perceptive and his instincts active. Otherwise he and his entire family would be so much slaughtered meat at this moment, scattered in bloody little chunks about that house back there.

  And, as Mack Bolan tracked that head party toward the rest of its numbers, his mind sought a logic to the lunacy.

  Why, for God’s sake, Pittsfield? Why here?

  Leo Turrin’s little Pittsfield arm could not field twenty hard men even if all had remained to fight. It was a nickel-and-dime mob, Turrin’s was—pimps and bookies, policy men and juice merchants, grease and graft crews—hardly a dozen hard men among them. Pittsfield’s only claim to fame—in mob circles—was Turrin himself. Bolan had broken the rest of it beyond repair, in the battle that had opened this eternal war—oh hell, how many eternities ago!—the battle that had smashed the Sergio Frenchi empire and left western Massachusetts an open territory.

  Turrin had been the sole ranking survivor of that initial battle of Mack Bolan’s war against the Mafia. The savage old men in new York had then looked at the territory, dismissed it, written it off as a viable property, and suffered Leo Turrin’s self-elevation to underboss status in the town nobody wanted.

  An underboss was not a boss. Only La Commissione could make a boss, and that regal council had not yet seen fit to recognize the territorial claims of Leo Turrin. Pittsfield had thus functioned as a colonial arm of the national empire, without representation at the council tables, answerable to the whims and politics of the bunch in New York.

  Turrin himself, however, had grown steadily in terms of national prominence and prestige—thanks mostly to his status as a “Bolan expert.” Good things had lately been brewing for the guy. Augie Marinello himself, de facto boss of all the bosses, had taken a shine to the brash “kid” from Pittsfield and had apparently been grooming him for some exalted position in the international structure.

  So what had gone sour? Why had the tables suddenly been turned? Why the big purge? And why was Leo Turrin coming down on the wrong side of the cut? It was not a personal vendetta—Bolan was sure of that. This “purge” was of a more or less national scope. The movements were being felt everywhere, not just here in Pittsfield. What the hell was happening?

  It did not have to make sense. Bolan realized that. Not in this savage world of Mafia. Here, “sense” was usually only what the bosses wanted.

  Right now, it seemed, what they wanted was Leo Turrin’s head—and they had dispatched twenty hard men to collect it. That act in itself seemed to be saying something about the total question. The numbers did not compute. This was not the usual way. It was too many guns for what should have been a routine hit. Someone evidently felt a strong need to get to Leo Turrin hard and quick. Who? Why?

  Those were secondary questions, of course. At the moment, it was purely a game of numbers. Four were down. Nine more were in the gunsights. Another seven needed to be accounted for.

  Then, the universe willing, Pittsfield would send back twenty soft men.

  Maybe, then, the old savages would send her forty more—and Pittsfield would need to soften and return those numbers also.

  Would eighty then follow?

  Bolan shook the question away. It needed to go to the end of the line—behind who and why.

  At the moment, right now, Mack Bolan was playing the only game he had. It was one which he knew and understood, perhaps better than any other man alive.

  It was, yeah, the death game.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Body Count

  They were quartered at a rundown old motel just off
the Berkshire Trail, east of the city—a dozen or so small cabins scattered at the edge of a wood.

  The head party seemed to be occupying the entire place. A “No Vacancy” sign along the roadway was illuminated. When Bolan made the scene, only the office cabin was darkened. All others were alight and alive. People were standing around in the rain, exchanging guarded greetings with those in the returning vehicles. A partially clad woman stood framed in the light of an open cabin; another, wearing nothing but panties, was wandering about in the downpour, giggling and singing her greeting. There were perhaps a dozen others in evidence, as well.

  A second crew wagon and several other head vehicles were scattered about, parked at the various cabins.

  If there was any base security, none was evident. These guys had obviously expected no “trouble” with this assignment. They’d been partying, not warring.

  One guy stood out from all the others—a big, mean-looking guy with a Mr. America physique and granite jaw—and, yeah, Bolan knew the guy. His mental file clicked to an immediate make. Joe Romani was the name, headwhacking was the game—a contract hitman from Boston. He stood now beside the Cadillac, barefoot and clad only in undershirt and trousers, arms folded at the massive chest, conversing loudly with the other crew chief.

  “What’re you saying, Mario?” Romani rumbled.

  “I’m saying your boys pulled me into a suck off, that’s what I’m saying,” came the taut reply from inside the vehicle.

  “How bad are we hurt?”

  “Not we, Joe. You. I brought you two hearses.”

  Romani stepped back with an angered exclamation and splashed toward an investigation of those “hearses.”

  The mild excitement of the greeting took a sudden turn toward heated outrage as the base camp revelers began to realize that the hit had gone sour. The dead had friends, yeah, and the friends were mad as hell.

  They had been done wrong, sure. Bolan would never cease to marvel at the curious one-way direction in which thought traveled through the Mafia world. That “Turrin bastard” was supposed to meekly hand over his own head to the collectors; maybe he should even thank them for the honor of being executed by his own amici. Where the hell did that guy get off, pulling this kind of treacherous shit? The contract was written the other way, dammit. And, yeah—what they would do to Leo the Pussy Turrin for this infamy! He would die by the organ, one of them at a time. He would first drink his own urine and eat his own genitals. Then he would scream and plead for the privilege of dying while his gleeful amici taunted and degraded him to the final shuddering breath.

  Yeah. Bolan had heard it all before, so many times. It was the logic of savages—and it worked equally well among them all. Today they would together avenge the treachery to their “friends,” even though one treachery had begat the other. Tomorrow they could well be the official avengees rather than the avengers—but that all went together with the logic.

  That logic was at the heart of the bundle which made Mack Bolan’s task so clear-cut. One did not sit down with cannibals and reason with them—not beside their pots, at any rate. He had known from the beginning the truth of that rationale. He had known always that there would be a single resolution to the Mafia problem. He had known forever that his would be a terminal war of attrition—a war of absolute obliteration. Death was the only answer these people would ever accept—because it was the only answer they understood.

  Mack Bolan was not a cold-blooded man. Nor even an essentially violent one. He could be gentle, if he lived in a gentle world. It was not, however, such a world. Bolan’s world was a savage one—and the meek could never hope to inherit such an earth. Not unless the inheritance could be claimed from within a cannibal’s bowels.

  No. The man was a realist. He knew that the world was doomed to suffer forever in brutality unless the savages could be controlled. He was idealist enough, though, to respect the moral dreams of his society—even though he could not pursue them himself and remain true to his own moral sense. He was thinker enough, also, to wonder if his “own moral sense” was uncomfortably close to the savage logic which he so abhorred.

  It was, of course. Close, sure, but not the same. There was a difference—even if the man himself was, in fact, the only difference. Bolan had probably never heard of Elbert Hubbard, an American writer and lecturer who had died before he was born, but who could have been illustrating the “moral sense” of this twentieth-century American warrior when he proclaimed: “God will not look you over for medals, diplomas, and degrees—but for scars.”

  If “scars” were what God looked for, then He should have tremendous respect for a man like Mack Bolan.

  Bolan himself did not pursue the thought quite that far. In his own mind he knew only that he did what he must do. He knew that he was uniquely equipped to respond to the Mafia challenge to the nobler world—and he knew that he must respond, with his strongest suit. If he picked up scars on the soul along the way—then okay, that was the way it had to be. All of which is not to say that the man never wearied of his burden, never questioned his cause, never wondered whether his response was “wrong,” or futile, or both. Bolan was not, in any sense, a superman. He was simply a superb man, with all the dimensions of character that implied.

  Right now, yes, he was a wearied and troubled man. The campaign in Georgia—barely twenty-four hours into the past—had been demanding and exhausting. It had been at the height of that campaign that he had discovered the rumbles of “purge” emanating from New York and learned of Leo Turrin’s personal jeopardy. He had quickly moved Georgia to an acceptable conclusion and sped forthwith to Pittsfield to find Turrin throwing in the towel and heading for certain destruction—with the directions from Washington so obviously miscalculated to insure that destruction. It was unlike Hal Brognola, the nation’s Number One official crimefighter, to be guilty of such erroneous thinking. Bolan had to suspect that the guy was being pressured from somewhere above. If that was true, then the entire Pittsfield stand could already be a futile exercise in the impossible.

  Brognola was supposed to be the only man in Washington to know the true identity of “Sticker”—Leo Turrin’s code name in the undercover ranks. If that cover had been blown in the political malaise that was Washington—then, hell, Leo’s game was doomed for sure. And Mack Bolan was therefore engaged in a bloody campaign which could have no meaning whatever in the final tally of things accomplished.

  There was no bloodlust in Mack Bolan’s makeup.

  He did not kill for thrills nor did he make war through any concept of “revenge.” He killed because it was the only way to beat the savages—and he made war because, dammit, the savages were winning.

  With Leo’s life at stake there were, of course, personal considerations—strong enough in themselves to make the battle worthwhile. But there was a larger reason for the Pittsfield stand—and that larger reason bore directly on the overall war effort. Leo Turrin was a highly valuable player in this grim game between the worlds. And, yes, every move mattered. Every good man mattered. Bolan was not being melodramatically cute when he told the Sticker, “I want your life, Leo—not your death.”

  The savages themselves mattered not a damn to Mack Bolan—except in their numbers of dead. He would, sure, kill a million of them if that was what it took to keep one Leo Turrin in the game.

  The task was not quite that large, though—at the moment. The task now was to kill but sixteen of the savages.

  And they were making it easy for him.

  “Get those broads out of here!” Romani yelled, at the top of his voice. “I want a council in ten minutes, my cabin! Jake!—Bobby!—you boys get out front and keep the eyes open! Mario!—you come with me right now! I want a complete rundown on this crap!”

  “Mario” was obviously the crew boss from Albany. He stepped from his vehicle and angrily slammed the door. “Where do you get off, Joe?” he growled. “Where does it say Boston is running this contract?”

  Romani took a menaci
ng step forward and jabbed a stiff finger in the air to punctuate his words as he growled back, “Four dead boys say so, Mario! You want to discuss that?”

  Albany was not backing down to Boston. The guy thrust his chin forward and sneered, “Yeah, I want to discuss that! It was a suck off! I want to know who was sucking!”

  “My four dead boys, maybe,” Romani spat disgustedly.

  “We both know what staked meat is, Joe! And we both know who staked those boys. They called us into that suck—they called it! Maybe we were just closer and got there quicker than anybody expected. Huh?”

  Romani preened himself in the falling rain and roared back: “Are you crazy, Mario? Are you clear out of your skull screaming crazy? You saying I set you up for a suck off? To who, dammit?”

  “To the cops, maybe,” Albany raged. “To Leo the Pussy, maybe. How the hell do I know? I just know that I damn near got sucked!”

  To that, Romani coldly replied, “If I’d wanted you sucked, guy, you wouldn’t be here now complaining about it. Let’s go inside and put this thing together. Come on.” He turned his back on the Albany leader and went to his cabin.

  Mario passed hand-signal instructions to his crew and slowly followed the man from Boston.

  The women were being unceremoniously rounded up and ejected from the base camp. They straggled toward several vehicles which were parked at the front of the compound and made their departure without apparent complaint. Professional women, sure—and not locals. The boys would not be that stupid. The women had brought themselves and they were taking themselves away, in their own small caravan.

  As the cars departed, one of the guys yelled, “Keep it warm, Marie.”

  A bare arm waved panties from an open window as the reply sang back: “You’ll know where to find it.”

  The caravan hit the main road and headed east, toward Boston.

  Bolan circled immediately to the hastily established forward post and quietly ended the game for the two sentries there—“Bobby” and “Jake,” he presumed. He dragged their bodies from the vehicle and deposited them in high weeds alongside the drive, then returned to his own vehicle and prepared for open combat.