Dixie Convoy

by Don Pendleton

  He removed his poncho and put it in the trunk of the car, cinched on a readybelt with chest loops, pat-checked the positioning of the various items of ordnance accommodated there, then selected an Uzi submachine gun from his mobile arsenal and slung on a belt of spare clips.

  He hoped he would not be required to use the explosives—or any other weaponry except the Uzi. This was not supposed to bear the marks of an Executioner hit. If he could catch them cold—then okay, yeah, maybe the Uzi would be enough. He had not intended to give them time to settle in, to begin comparing notes and laying reaction plans. The entire camp would almost certainly go “hard” as the first step in that direction. At the moment, the advantage was all his. Within minutes, those odds would begin weighing the other way.

  He strode straight along the access road and into the camp. A graves detail was worrying with the corpses of the early dead, moving somberly about in the steady rain and tongue-clucking the unpleasant task as they stacked their dead on a cabin porch. Others stood in small, nervous groups on the porches of other cabins, Boston to the left and Albany to the right, smoking and conversing tensely about the uncertainties of the night.

  Bolan was ready to dispel the uncertainties.

  He stepped into the open ground between the cabins and found a friendly shadow as he readied the Uzi and called out: “Joe! Joe Romani!”

  It was time to count bodies, in the opening stand at Pittsfield.

  It was no good this way, this tension between the amici—and Romani was trying to make that point to the angry shark from Albany, Mario Conti. “It’s your contract, Mario,” he’d just reminded the guy. “I’m not telling you what to do, or how to do it I’m just saying that something is haywire. They sent me over here to kiss the guy for you. Okay, I kissed him. The rest is up to you. I just don’t like it that four of my boys went down with the kiss. I especially don’t like it when you start making dumb noises about a suck off. Something’s haywire, that’s all.”

  “Haywire is right,” Conti growled. “I was assured it was all set up. I was told it would be a romp. Now I don’t know, Joe. I just don’t know. I think I want to talk to Albany before anything else. I want to verify the contract.”

  “That’s dumb, Mario,” Romani was saying, just as someone outside started yelling his name.

  Conti snarled, “What’s the matter with those goddamn guys!”

  Romani replied, “Ahhh, they can’t shit without …” He did not finish the sarcasm. Something was wrong outside, definitely wrong.

  “Kill that light!” he growled as one of his boys outside replied to the loud summons.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “I have a message for Joe from Leo the Pussy!”

  Every one knew the meaning of that. Conti’s eyes blanched and skittered away from Romani’s startled gaze. The Boston chief leapt to his feet, hit the light switch in one swift motion, and whirled on to the window for a look outside. His boys were all frozen in clutch groups, staring uneasily at something in the darkness beyond the cabins.

  Someone nearby yelled, “Joe! Mario! Somebody’s here!”

  “Stay put!” Romani yelled back. He carefully opened the window and shouted, more loudly: “Who’s there? Come into the light and show yourselves!”

  Conti had just leapt to the door and cracked it open when a rattling burst from a submachine gun told the tale all had dreaded to hear—and, suddenly, Joe Romani’s world fell in on him. That first burst of automatic fire came spiraling into the cabin, punching through the flimsy walls as though no walls existed, disintegrating glass and shredding furniture in an absolutely withering hail that left no cubic volume of air untraveled—and Joe knew that it was all over, right there, in that first stark instant of awareness.

  Conti hit the floor with a groan and a bubbling sound at about the same moment that something ripped into Romani’s gun arm and spun him around and sent him staggering across the cabin. He fell onto the bed and pulled the shattered arm into his lap, feeling frantically for a pressure point to shut off the flow of blood that was gushing all over him.

  His consciousness divided, part of it leaping outside to assess the situation there. It did not sound good out there. The amici were returning fire but it sounded disorganized and frantic. Guys were yelling and cussing and running around but the chatter of that chopper went on and on as other guys screamed and called to Jesus in profane prayers.

  And suddenly it was over. Impossibly, unbelievably, it was over. He checked an impulse to cry out for help, unsure of just what that sudden silence meant. A moment later he was glad that he’d checked the impulse. The chopper again. Short bursts, widely separated, moving about the yard out there. Romani knew what that meant. It was a clean-up. The chopper was moving among the dying, hastening the process. He shuddered and waited, knowing that his time would come, too weak from shock and pain and bleeding to make a move to save himself.

  He heard a movement on the porch, then the door creaked on its hinges and the lights came back on.

  The guy was standing outside. He had only reached through the open doorway to switch on the lights. Romani could not see the guy, but he could see the ugly snout of that chopper as fire leapt from it and Mario Conti’s bubbling corpse shuddered under the new onslought.

  Romani called out, weakly, “Hey! No! Please!”

  He was looking up the bore of that chopper—and it was all he could see.

  A cold voice said to him from the porch, “Take a message back where you came from, Joe.”

  “Sure, I’ll take the message,” Romani groaned hopefully. “Who is that?”

  “Never mind who it is. The message is what it is. Leopold Turrin does not roll over and die for anybody. Tell them that. And tell them to send men, next time.”

  “Thanks. Thanks. You know what I mean, eh?”

  “You know what I mean, Romani. You tell them.”

  “I’ll tell them, Leo. Bank on it.”

  Something sailed through the air and hit the bed beside him. He recoiled, then saw that it was a small first-aid packet.

  The snout of the chopper was gone and there were no more sounds from the porch.

  Jesus. Jesus God. Had the guy gone? And left Joe Romani alive and with a bandage for his wound? How could you figure it? How the hell could you figure that?

  Indeed, “the guy” had gone. He was at that moment trudging along the trail toward his vehicle, enveloped by the inner cold that always marked the end of a successful firelight.

  Successful, sure. Nineteen bodies, a witness to tell the tale, a note of respect for Leo.

  Sure. It was success enough, for a starter. Now the battle would really begin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Challenged

  Joe Romani did not run toward Boston, which was no great surprise to Bolan. Instead, he swung back through Pittsfield and headed north on U.S. 7. The track led to Potter Mountain, then west again into the resort country. The guy was having a hard time of it, moving slowly and weaving somewhat, as, apparently, he fought off the dizzies, halting entirely now and then to collect himself and fight off unconsciousness. Once he got out of the car and walked around it in the rain, the damaged arm in a makeshift sling, slapping his face with a soggy towel to stimulate the fading mind.

  Bolan had to respect that effort, even from a savage. The guy was trying; alone and dying, he was still trying.

  But it made for a slow track. The total travel was less than twenty miles; the total timetrack was more than an hour. It ended at a secluded mountain resort in the Taconics—a ski lodge, or something similar. Bolan could not positively identify the spot. The sign at the entrance was weathered beyond legibility and the darkness of the rainy night was too complete to allow a quick visual make. It was ski country, however—and the logic seemed to favor an off-season ski lodge. A quick visual make was all he was going to get, this time around. He briefly recalled his Colorado experience and wondered if history might be repeating itself.

  Might be,
yeah.

  The joint sat a couple hundred yards off the road atop a low hill with solid fencing. Rather effectively screened by shrubs and trees, it was a large building with two floors and a high roof—darkened and seemingly deserted. Other shapes loomed nearby in the darkness, suggesting the presence of other, smaller structures.

  Romani had pulled onto the access drive—a narrow, asphalt road which snaked up the hill to the compound—where he halted and flashed a recognition signal with his headlamps. An armed patrol in rainslickers appeared immediately to check him out and pass him through.

  It was an ominous new development. This was no more “head party” headquarters; it was a hard-site, nothing less—an alien fortress, standing in the heart of Leo Turrin’s territory.

  Bolan marked the spot in his mind and carefully withdrew. Something big was brewing, that was certain. Something considerably larger, for damn sure, than a routine contract on a small town underboss in a territory nobody had wanted for quite some time.

  The game had changed, for sure. To what, though?

  Turrin had sent his small personal cadre to bed with orders to “get rested and ready.” Then he had withdrawn to his own room in the isolated hideaway and unlocked his “red phone”—the clean line that guaranteed absolute security of communications. At five minutes past each hour, he had attempted contact with Bolan’s “floater”—a secure mobile telephone arrangement utilizing a secret access code which tapped into phone company switching facilities. “Secure,” that is, as you could get with radio communications. The only security involved was an inability of third parties to track and trace the contacts—the information itself which passed through that contact was subject to intercept-monitoring, and thus required guarded words with shaded meanings.

  The system itself, however, was foolproof—as Turrin understood it. Part of the advanced technology built into that fabulous “warwagon”—Bolan’s name for the GMC motor home which served the warrior as rolling base camp and battle cruiser—the telephone was indeed a “floater”—in two senses of the word. It “floated” about the country in a highly mobile environment, and it functioned as a remote-controlled answering service for the big impressive man in executioner black—a floater like the kind on a fishing line which signaled a presence on the buried end of that line.

  Turrin had been patiently hitting that floater every hour since ten o’clock. His persistence was rewarded at five minutes past the hour of one, when a connection opened and a brusque voice demanded, “Yeah, what’s that?”

  Turrin grinned as he replied, “It’s the Sticker. What’s happening, iron man?”

  “Plenty,” Bolan replied in a noncommittal tone, somewhat relaxing into the contact. “You need to send a message to Augie. Do you have any messengers?”

  “Four or five, yeah,” Turrin told his friend. “They said they wanted to stay and play. Got something for them to play with?”

  “Like I said,” the good voice replied, “—a message. Tell me something, first. Have you talked with Augie about the rules of this game?”

  “This one? No. I tried. Couldn’t get through. What’s that message?”

  “It has nineteen words,” Bolan replied. “You’ll find them at the Trails Court on Route 9.”

  “I know the place. Did you say nineteen words?”

  “That’s the count. I suggest you put them on ice and send them to your friend.”

  “Okay,” Turrin said thoughtfully. “I think I get the logic but I guess I better get your version of it. Why the refrigerated message?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know.”

  Turrin raised his eyebrows in consideration of that. “You may be right. But I can’t bank on it. All the flow seems the other way.”

  “Either way, he needs the message.” That voice had a tired quality. “Flow One says send more and I’ll send them back the same way. Flow Two says, what the hell is going on here, Augie? Either way, he needs the message.”

  “Sure,” Turrin replied immediately. “But what if it’s Flow One? That would be a red flag in the face, wouldn’t it?”

  “More like spit,” the big guy said, chuckling. “He just may respect that. But I’m leaning toward Flow Two. I let the twentieth word out, just to see where it would lead. And now I have a gut message of my own, Sticker. It does not have Augie’s stamp on it.”

  “Like, what is that?”

  “It’s like a spanking new hardsite on your doorstep, buddy. Maybe another hundred words just waiting for expression.”

  Turrin whistled beneath his breath and said, “Which doorstep?”

  “Toward Albany,” was the quiet reply.

  “That does not compute,” Turrin quickly decided.

  “Nothing does, and that’s the problem. Send your message, bugler. Let’s see what falls from it.”

  Turrin sighed and said, “Right. We’ll try that.”

  “Play it cozy, though. You know.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll safe it.”

  “Do that. Meanwhile, ease off a bit on the other front. You can forget that dawn deadline. The opposition is jumpy and now not quite so cocksure. They’ll safe it along for awhile, also, trying to read the play.”

  “Should I bet my life on that?”

  “I would,” Bolan soberly told him.

  “That’s good enough for me,” Turrin replied in the same sober tone.

  “Okay,” the guy said tiredly. “I’m tucking it away for the night. Haven’t slept an hour in the past thirty-six. Try to get that message delivered before daylight. Hit me again at eight o’clock—or before that, if you get some hard flow.”

  “Will do,” Turrin assured him. “I won’t even try to say thanks, but—”

  “Don’t,” Bolan growled as the connection went dead.

  Turrin stared glumly at the telephone for a thoughtful moment, then put it down and locked it away.

  “Some kind of guy,” he said aloud.

  Then he went to rouse his cadre. They could have a refrigerator truck loaded and ready to roll by two o’clock. A quick jog across the state line and a straight shot down the Taconic State Parkway would place them in New York City by five o’clock.

  Augie would have his “message” with his morning newspaper—waiting for him at his front door when the new day dawned.

  And then, right, oh boy, there would be plenty of “hard flow” for the embattled men at Pittsfield.

  That goddamn Mack Bolan was an audacious warrior. Leo Turrin would love to see Augie Marinello’s face when he received that shipment of cold meat from western Mass.

  Or maybe he wouldn’t. No. No. Hell no, he wouldn’t.

  Buy Savage Fire Now!

  About the Author

  Don Pendleton (1927–1995) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He served in the US Navy during World War II and the Korean War. His first short story was published in 1957, but it was not until 1967, at the age of forty, that he left his career as an aerospace engineer and turned to writing full time. After producing a number of science fiction and mystery novels, in 1969 Pendleton launched his first book in the Executioner saga: War Against the Mafia. The series, starring Vietnam veteran Mack Bolan, was so successful that it inspired a new American literary genre, and Pendleton became known as the father of action-adventure.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either asre the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1976 by Pinnacle Books, Inc.

  Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-8579-6

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Me
dia, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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