War Against the Mafia
Page 20
Bolan grinned. “It was good for his soul, I’m sure,” he commented.
“Yeah.” Washington tugged at the tip of his nose. “I’d like to tell you something, Sarge.”
“Okay.”
“You run a sweet hit. It looked good, mighty good, from where I was. I didn’t see nothin’ wrong with the timing. It went just like you said—even to the cops.”
Bolan sobered. “It has to stay that way. And especially where the police are concerned. We have to avoid them at any cost.”
“Any cost?” Fontenelli growled.
“That’s what I said.”
“I don’t get this love affair with the fuzz,” Fontenelli grumbled.
“You want to get yourself a bluesuiter, Chopper?” Bolan asked quietly.
“Not ’specially. But if it comes down to, like between me’n them—well …” Fontenelli cast a quick survey of the assembled faces. “Well … I’m not sure I’ll want to break and run.”
“You’d better break and run,” Bolan said ominously. “You understand this. You deliberately shoot a cop, and you’re out on your ass. Now understand it. You’re out. I don’t even like the contingency plan we had with Deadeye on today’s strike. Shooting at a cop isn’t much different than shooting into a cop, from the cop’s point of view. All of you, now, understand this thoroughly. As long as we are just cleaning out the sewers, people will be rooting for us. Secretly, maybe, but still cheering. But you kill one cop, or one kid, or any other innocent bystander, and the cheering ends, soldier—it ends right there. The cops stop looking the other way and the news people stop romanticizing, and suddenly you’re just another piece of sewer filth yourself. And then, Robin Hood, you’re to hell out of business.”
“Sure, sure,” Fontenelli agreed quietly.
“All right.” Bolan was studying the tips of his fingers. “I don’t want to belabor the thing, but what I said in the beginning is just as certain as the sunrise. I’ll shoot dead in his tracks any man who tries to turn this squad into a ratpack. There’s still time to get out if anybody has decided he doesn’t like the setup.”
A strained, almost embarrassed silence ensued. Bolan gave it full play before he smiled, cleared his throat, and began speaking again. “Fine. We all know the score. Now let’s talk about operations. Today’s soft probe was a success from every angle. Giordano was my only sure link with the western branch of the family. Now he knows we’re in town. He knows we’re onto him. We killed two of his boys, we wrecked his house, we took a chunk of money away from him, we humiliated him, and we showed him that he is living strictly at our pleasure.” The smile broadened. “That’s a helluva bitter mouthful for a Mafia honcho to chew on. He will be laying quiet for a few hours, at least until the cops stop poking around the neighborhood. Then he’ll start braying like the tin god he is. He will start threshing around and flexing his muscles and demanding our heads on a Mafia platter. This is precisely what we want him to do.”
Bolan turned an amused gaze onto his friend Zitka. “Remember that operation at Vanh Duc, Zitter?” he asked.
Zitka responded with a broad grin. “Yeah,” he said, his gaze sweeping the circle of faces. “The Ninth was conducting a sweep into long-time VC territory. No contact, no contact, everywhere they probed. Knew damn well the northmen were around there, but they just kept fading away. All the Ninth flushed during a ten-day sweep was a bunch of terrorized villagers. So they sent us in.”
His gaze flicked to Bolan and lingered there for a moment; then he chuckled and resumed the account. “It was Mack and me, two flankmen, two scouts. We walked for three days, and we knew where we was headed. We played the VC game, see. Hit and fade, hit and fade. By the time we’d penetrated to Vanh Duc, the VCs were screaming bloody murder. We’d already executed one of their generals, a half a dozen high-ranking field officers, and about that many of their village politicians. They were fit to be tied. Finally the northmen had to come outta their holes. Losing face, see, to a lousy six-man team. They sprung their trap on us at Vanh Duc—and of course, that’s what we’d been aiming at all the time. We got a full battalion chasing our butts out across the rice paddies, and that’s where they met our air force.”
“I remember that operation,” Harrington put in. “That was the time the airborne infantry was living in helicopters for three days.”
“That was Vanh Duc,” Zitka confirmed, nodding his head soberly. “We smoked ’em out, and what the air force didn’t get, the Ninth did.”
“We’re playing a Vanh Duc game here,” Bolan explained. He glanced at his watch. “Only there will be no air-force or infantry reinforcements to finish the job once we’ve smoked the enemy into the open. We have to do the entire job ourselves. We’re going to hit ’em, and hit ’em, and keep on hitting ’em until they’re trying to hide up each other’s asses. Then, when we know who they are and where they are, all of them—then we squash them. That’s the entire plan. We play the details by ear. Gadgets has bugs all over Giordano’s house, and he put a recorder on the telephone. In just about two hours, Zitter and Bloodbrother will take up their stakeout positions. Flower, you’re on Zitter. Gunsmoke, on Bloodbrother. You know the routine—play it like life and death, ’cause that’s what it’s going to be. Boom, you alternate the electronics watch with some Gadgets. Politician and Deadeye, on me but not too close, give me room to operate. Chopper, you’ve got base camp security. Oh—and Boom, how long would it take you to make about a dozen of those little impact grenades?”
“You don’t want fragmentation?” the explosives man asked solemnly.
“No. Just plenty of flash and concussion.”
“Hell—twenty minutes,” Hoffower replied.
“Good. Do it now. Put them in a hip pouch for me.” Bolan smiled and got to his feet. “This is going to be a lot better than Pittsfield. I’m glad you people are with me.” He started to walk away, then checked his stride and turned back with an afterthought. “Oh—Politician has the money divvied up into eleven shares. It figured to forty-seven-fifty per man. The eleventh share is for the kitty. Pick up your money and then get some rest. There won’t be much sleeping tonight.” He turned abruptly and strode off the patio, heading for the beach.
“What’s this bittty about the kitty?” Andromede asked, addressing no one in particular.
“The war fund,” Blancanales explained. “Told me to put his share in there too.”
“Somebody loan me three hundred,” Fontenelli said. He was the first at the table and was fingering a packet of bills with reverence. “I wanta know what five grand feels like, all in one hunk.”
“Where’s he going?” Hoffower asked, gazing after the departing leader.
Zitka picked up his share of the spoils and said quietly, “He always goes off by himself for a while after a strike. Leave ’im alone.”
“If he don’t want the money, what does he want?” Hoffower persisted.
“Aw hell, Boom, they rubbed out his whole family,” Harrington said.
“It’s a holy war,” Andromede murmured. “The Karmic pattern. The law of retribution. Liberation from hell to heaven—and maybe back to hell again.”
Hoffower was carefully counting his stack of bills. He thrust a wad at Blancanales. “Here’s the thousand he advanced me,” he said quietly. “Put it in the kitty.”
“It wasn’t an advance,” Blancanales protested. “It’s a bonus.”
“Put it in the kitty anyway,” Hoffower insisted.
Blancanales accepted the money and added it to the stack on the table. Andromede stared at the “war fund” for a strained moment, then quickly counted a thousand dollars from his packet and dropped it onto the table. Fontenelli wavered painfully, then followed suit.
Washington was staring after the quickly receding figure of Mack Bolan as he trudged up the beach. “There go de judge,” he said with a soft sigh. Then he stepped to the table and deposited a stack of bills.
Loudelk was smiling faintly. “Soft probe, eh?” He to
ssed an uncounted stack into the growing kitty. “Here’s my vote for the winning side.”
The vote of confidence quickly became unanimous, the war fund swelled, and—most important—the ten had become one.
Flower Child Andromede walked to the edge of the patio, then turned back to his comrades, his face in a saintly expression, and said, “Vanh Duc, Vanh Duc, through blood and muck, if it’s not a gangbang, it’s a piece of bad luck.”
“What he talking about?” Washington muttered.
“Liberation, I guess,” Loudelk quietly replied. “We know about that bag, don’t we, black man?”
Washington grinned without humor. “Yeah, man, we know that bag.” He raised his voice and directed it toward Andromede. “Hey, Chaplain—come on over here and confess my sins.”
“You handle your sins, brother, and I’ll handle mine,” Andromede replied, grinning. “Right now, I go to build up my contempt of death. Join me. We’ll meditate together beside the still waters.”
“I’ll join you at Vanh Duc, man,” Washington replied softly.
“There’s a reality.” Andromede sighed and walked away. Death, he had long ago decided, was the only true reality.
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EPILOGUE
The battle of Pittsfield had ended. Victory, for Mack Bolan, had been not an era but a miniscule point in time which had already receded into the fuzzy past, one that was absorbed and neutralized by the perilous present and which stood under the constant threat of being reversed by the uncertain future. Bolan had not killed an idea, nor a system; he had barely rippled the surface of the most powerful underworld organization in existence. Already, he knew, the full resources of that organization would be gearing up to flick away the gnat which was gnawing on its shinbone. There were no self-deceptions for Bolan; he knew that he was perhaps the most marked man in underworld history. He had, overnight, become an American legend; a plum to be picked by every ambitious law enforcer in the nation; sudden riches to be cashed in by every two-bit punk with a gun in the country; a debt to be settled by each member of the far-flung family of Mafia around the world.
Mack Bolan was marked for death; he realized that he was as condemned as any man who had ever sat on death row. His chief determination was to stretch that last mile to its highest yield, to fight the war to its last gasp, to “eat their bowels even as they are trying to digest me.”
Bolan had taken steps to minimize his personal danger. He had changed the color of his hair, grown a moustache, and adopted horn-rimmed, clear-lens glasses. This cover, he hoped, would at least see him safely to the West Coast. A better cover awaited him there, in the talents of a former Army surgeon who owed his life to Mack Bolan—a surgeon whose battlefield experiences had given rise to his present specialty: cosmetic surgery. Bolan would find a new face on the West Coast. He left behind, in Pittsfield, an orphaned brother, a chunk of money, and a pretty girl to administer both. He left behind, also, an identity; one which perhaps he would never again be able to claim.
Bolan swung his newly acquired vehicle onto the west expressway of Pittsfield on the evening of September 12th, blending in with the rush-hour traffic, Val’s tearful goodbye still influencing his emotions. Behind lay everything he had ever held dear. Ahead lay everything he had ever learned to fear. He cleared his mind of self-pity, letting go even of the image of tender Val, and scowled into the bright glow of the setting sun. There was nothing ahead but hell. He was prepared for hell. Somebody else, he avowed, had better get prepared for it, too. Mack Bolan’s last mile would be a bloody one. The Executioner was going to live life to the very end.
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 are 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 © 1969 by Pinnacle Books
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8554-3
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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