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"Wrong," Lyons murmured.
"What's that?"
"I owe the guy my life. I'm not that anxious to nail him."
Tatum stared at the young cop for a moment before he quietly inquired, "What did they send me? One for my side or one for his?"
"I'll do my job, Cap'n," Lyons assured him. "But I won't lie to you. My heart won't be in it. I told the same thing to Captain Braddock. So if you want me to turn around and go home then I — "
"Do you smell Bolan around here?" Tatum asked brusquely, shutting out firmly that other line of conversation.
"Faintly, but yessir, I do. I'd like to see some more of the evidence and — "
Another detective had come bustling up and the L.A. advisor gave ground to the obviously urgent nature of the intrusion. The newcomer gave Lyons a curious glance then reported to Captain Tatum, "That house is bugged from top to bottom. Real cute stuff. Radio relays, God's sake, planted outside the windows."
Tatum whistled softly under his breath.
Lyons' facial expression did not alter, but his voice had a crackle of interest as he inquired, "Has your department had this place under electronic surveillance?"
Tatum shook his head. "Never could get it cleared. The local feds have been complaining about the same problem. So unless they just went ahead anyway...."
The L.A. cop said, "Could you check that out? I mean, unofficial but damn quick?"
Tatum gave an eye signal to the other detective. The man nodded and hurried back toward the house, then Tatum asked Lyons, "Are you saying that Bolan ... ?"
Lyons answered the uncompleted question with, "You better believe it."
"I didn't know the guy was that sophisticated," the homicide chief growled.
"He can be as sophisticated as he wants to get. You asked me about Bolan's smell. I can tell you now, it's getting stronger by the minute. I couldn't...."
"You couldn't what," Tatum asked, glancing at Gonzales with a worried frown.
"Well I just couldn't read this hit into Bolan's M.O. First off, he's worked alone ever since the L.A. hit. Secondly, I couldn't see the guy setting up a hit like this. Too risky, too many possible innocent bystanders on the sidelines. But an intelligence probe, now ... yeah, it reads Bolan all the way. He sends someone in close to work the eavesdropping gear — and I'll bet I know the guy he sent, incidentally — while covering him with precision fire capability from way the hell up there in a non-residential area. It would be — "
Tatum interrupted irritably with: "You're saying the guy didn't come out here looking for blood?"
"That's what I'm saying," Lyons replied, coolly meeting the hot gaze being directed at him. "He's just probing now, looking for targets. Once he gets set and locked onto the people he really wants, then your war will suddenly get very hot."
"What the hell do you call this?" Tatum flared, spreading his arms in a dramatic compass of the battle zone.
"It's a probe, Cap'n," Lyons replied evenly. "Just a light probe."
"Jesus Christ!" the Captain yelled, and stomped off toward the house.
Gonzales turned a grin to the young cop from L.A. "I think you said the wrong thing," he told him. "I don't know what it is in your town but, in San Diego, seven dead and six wounded is Friday Night Gangbusters. The Captain gets uptight over just one homicide."
"He'd better get loose," Lyons muttered. "He hasn't seen anything yet."
12
13
14
15
"What's that?"
"I owe the guy my life. I'm not that anxious to nail him."
Tatum stared at the young cop for a moment before he quietly inquired, "What did they send me? One for my side or one for his?"
"I'll do my job, Cap'n," Lyons assured him. "But I won't lie to you. My heart won't be in it. I told the same thing to Captain Braddock. So if you want me to turn around and go home then I — "
"Do you smell Bolan around here?" Tatum asked brusquely, shutting out firmly that other line of conversation.
"Faintly, but yessir, I do. I'd like to see some more of the evidence and — "
Another detective had come bustling up and the L.A. advisor gave ground to the obviously urgent nature of the intrusion. The newcomer gave Lyons a curious glance then reported to Captain Tatum, "That house is bugged from top to bottom. Real cute stuff. Radio relays, God's sake, planted outside the windows."
Tatum whistled softly under his breath.
Lyons' facial expression did not alter, but his voice had a crackle of interest as he inquired, "Has your department had this place under electronic surveillance?"
Tatum shook his head. "Never could get it cleared. The local feds have been complaining about the same problem. So unless they just went ahead anyway...."
The L.A. cop said, "Could you check that out? I mean, unofficial but damn quick?"
Tatum gave an eye signal to the other detective. The man nodded and hurried back toward the house, then Tatum asked Lyons, "Are you saying that Bolan ... ?"
Lyons answered the uncompleted question with, "You better believe it."
"I didn't know the guy was that sophisticated," the homicide chief growled.
"He can be as sophisticated as he wants to get. You asked me about Bolan's smell. I can tell you now, it's getting stronger by the minute. I couldn't...."
"You couldn't what," Tatum asked, glancing at Gonzales with a worried frown.
"Well I just couldn't read this hit into Bolan's M.O. First off, he's worked alone ever since the L.A. hit. Secondly, I couldn't see the guy setting up a hit like this. Too risky, too many possible innocent bystanders on the sidelines. But an intelligence probe, now ... yeah, it reads Bolan all the way. He sends someone in close to work the eavesdropping gear — and I'll bet I know the guy he sent, incidentally — while covering him with precision fire capability from way the hell up there in a non-residential area. It would be — "
Tatum interrupted irritably with: "You're saying the guy didn't come out here looking for blood?"
"That's what I'm saying," Lyons replied, coolly meeting the hot gaze being directed at him. "He's just probing now, looking for targets. Once he gets set and locked onto the people he really wants, then your war will suddenly get very hot."
"What the hell do you call this?" Tatum flared, spreading his arms in a dramatic compass of the battle zone.
"It's a probe, Cap'n," Lyons replied evenly. "Just a light probe."
"Jesus Christ!" the Captain yelled, and stomped off toward the house.
Gonzales turned a grin to the young cop from L.A. "I think you said the wrong thing," he told him. "I don't know what it is in your town but, in San Diego, seven dead and six wounded is Friday Night Gangbusters. The Captain gets uptight over just one homicide."
"He'd better get loose," Lyons muttered. "He hasn't seen anything yet."
12
Tracks around the tar pit
Bolan had learned early in his wars that there was no such thing as a casual connection between the mob and the so-called "straight" community. Whether that connection be social, business, political, or simply a chance pairing of golf or tennis partners — Bolan knew enough of Mafia methods to look penetratingly at any contact between the two levels of American society.
There were no off-duty hours for the mob. Its members were always in there pitching, in business and in pleasure, and they lost no opportunity to extend their area of influence in whatever direction opened to them.
The Mafia was a cancer. It grew and acquired dominance in the same manner as any cancerous growth — by extension — by moving into weakened adjacent matter and absorbing the resources there into its own spreading designs.
A wise man did not provide hospitable accommodations for a cancerous growth within his own body.
But many supposedly wise businessmen had played around with accommodations for the Mafia cancer. Almost without exception, these men were eaten quickly and easily and were either passed on through as excrement or absorbed into the growing body of the cannibal.
The same thing happened to bored socialites who seemed to think that a hoodlum in the drawing room or even in the bedroom, was "chic" — or at least an interesting conversation-piece.
There were also those straight citizens who unwittingly found themselves in a social or business contact with one of "the boys" and then found it too painful or too dangerous to withdraw from that association. Violent intimidation and blackmail were favorite tools of the cannibals; they never hesitated to apply them unsparingly. The end result for these victims was about the same as for all the others — they were used and abused until every resource had been plundered, then absorbed or eliminated.
Much has been said and written to romanticize the American mobster. Bolan had heard the stories concerning their high moral values, their gallantry to women, their concern for the underdog, their patriotism and love of country, their support of charities, their exalted sense of brotherhood and personal ethics within their own organizations, their high ideals regarding family and community.
And it was all sheer hogwash.
Bolan knew them for what they were. They were rapists, thieves, sadists, terrorists, murderers. The American mobster was a bloated and self-seeking cannibal who answered to no morality which did not serve to feed his savage lusts and voracious appetites.
None of this had anything to do with being Italian. Often it was their Italian relatives and neighbors who suffered the most at the hands of these unconscionable despots.
Bolan was no psychologist or sociologist. He was not even interested in determining the environmental factors which produced priests, artists and mobsters from the same neighborhood or even from the same family.
He would leave those complicated considerations to those who were trained to study such phenomena.
Mack Bolan's mission was to identify the gangsters, to isolate them and to eliminate them. He was not hampered by intellectual moralizing or agonizing over the questions of force and violence, right and wrong, the constitutional rights of wrongdoers or the legal trickery of the American justice system — all of which had been manipulated by the mob into a protective bubble which insulated them from any effective counterattack by the law-enforcement community.
They owned policemen, in high positions and low. They had their own judges, prosecutors, councilmen, assemblymen, congressmen, bureaucrats — the mob had their own "second invisible government" which saw to their protection at every level of American life. Except for one.
They had no immunity from the Executioner.
Mack Bolan was no zealot — nor was he a romantic idealist. He was a military realist. He had pledged to defend his country against all enemies, external and internal.
The mob was an internal enemy.
He could draw no realistic line of distinction between this enemy and that one.
The Mafia stood as the most visible and dangerous enemy in his area of perception. He would, until he drowned in his own blood or theirs, fight that enemy with every resource at his command.
The threat at San Diego was shaping into one of those confrontations which Bolan had hoped to avoid.
The problem was similar to the routine dilemma of the war in Vietnam: in order to get at the enemy, you often had to destroy an entire friendly town.
Bolan had managed to keep the major thrust of his homefront wars directed into the hardcore operations of the enemy — into their clout routes, the overtly criminal activities, into pitched battles with their armed forces and execution missions against their leaders.
At San Diego, it was beginning to look like the civilian community might be unavoidably involved in the resolution of the problem.
The intelligence probes had paid off handsomely, but the yield was also very troubling to this dedicated warrior.
Tendrils of the Mafia cancer were woven throughout the fabric of this great little city's business and social communities. The in-growth was still tenuous, however, and the encroachment had not yet reached the cannibalistic stage. But Mack Bolan knew his enemy. And he had learned quite a bit, in a relatively short time, about the city of San Diego.
And, yeah, this was one city he could not avoid. Some of the area's most solid citizens had been trekking to the tar pits of licensed greed — in many cases, perhaps, unaware that a band of cannibals were lurking there in the shadows, patiently awaiting the opportunity to ensnare them there and devour them — that some were already being eaten.
A sober and troubled electronics expert stored his surveillance tapes in a fireproof box and turned a thoughtful frown to his friend, the Executioner.
"So now what?" he asked, sighing. "So now the siege is ended," Bolan replied quietly.
"You mean we pack up and walk away," Blancanales said.
"No. We storm the city."
"Oh, well...." The Politician scratched his nose, glanced at Schwarz, and said, "What's the first target?"
"The tar pits," Bolan told them.
"The tar pits?"
"Yeah." Bolan was buckling into his AutoMag.
"You mean like the LaBrea tar pits, up in L.A.?"
"Something like that," Bolan said. "Only these are invisible.''
Schwarz and Blancanales exchanged puzzled glances. They were accustomed to Bolan's sometimes cryptic utterances, but this one left them blank.
"They've dug bones of woolly mammoths and I think dinosaurs out of LaBrea," Schwarz commented.
"We're after bigger game than that," the Executioner assured his crew.
"It's still a rescue mission?" Blancanales wanted to know.
"That," Bolan replied, "is exactly what it is."
There were no off-duty hours for the mob. Its members were always in there pitching, in business and in pleasure, and they lost no opportunity to extend their area of influence in whatever direction opened to them.
The Mafia was a cancer. It grew and acquired dominance in the same manner as any cancerous growth — by extension — by moving into weakened adjacent matter and absorbing the resources there into its own spreading designs.
A wise man did not provide hospitable accommodations for a cancerous growth within his own body.
But many supposedly wise businessmen had played around with accommodations for the Mafia cancer. Almost without exception, these men were eaten quickly and easily and were either passed on through as excrement or absorbed into the growing body of the cannibal.
The same thing happened to bored socialites who seemed to think that a hoodlum in the drawing room or even in the bedroom, was "chic" — or at least an interesting conversation-piece.
There were also those straight citizens who unwittingly found themselves in a social or business contact with one of "the boys" and then found it too painful or too dangerous to withdraw from that association. Violent intimidation and blackmail were favorite tools of the cannibals; they never hesitated to apply them unsparingly. The end result for these victims was about the same as for all the others — they were used and abused until every resource had been plundered, then absorbed or eliminated.
Much has been said and written to romanticize the American mobster. Bolan had heard the stories concerning their high moral values, their gallantry to women, their concern for the underdog, their patriotism and love of country, their support of charities, their exalted sense of brotherhood and personal ethics within their own organizations, their high ideals regarding family and community.
And it was all sheer hogwash.
Bolan knew them for what they were. They were rapists, thieves, sadists, terrorists, murderers. The American mobster was a bloated and self-seeking cannibal who answered to no morality which did not serve to feed his savage lusts and voracious appetites.
None of this had anything to do with being Italian. Often it was their Italian relatives and neighbors who suffered the most at the hands of these unconscionable despots.
Bolan was no psychologist or sociologist. He was not even interested in determining the environmental factors which produced priests, artists and mobsters from the same neighborhood or even from the same family.
He would leave those complicated considerations to those who were trained to study such phenomena.
Mack Bolan's mission was to identify the gangsters, to isolate them and to eliminate them. He was not hampered by intellectual moralizing or agonizing over the questions of force and violence, right and wrong, the constitutional rights of wrongdoers or the legal trickery of the American justice system — all of which had been manipulated by the mob into a protective bubble which insulated them from any effective counterattack by the law-enforcement community.
They owned policemen, in high positions and low. They had their own judges, prosecutors, councilmen, assemblymen, congressmen, bureaucrats — the mob had their own "second invisible government" which saw to their protection at every level of American life. Except for one.
They had no immunity from the Executioner.
Mack Bolan was no zealot — nor was he a romantic idealist. He was a military realist. He had pledged to defend his country against all enemies, external and internal.
The mob was an internal enemy.
He could draw no realistic line of distinction between this enemy and that one.
The Mafia stood as the most visible and dangerous enemy in his area of perception. He would, until he drowned in his own blood or theirs, fight that enemy with every resource at his command.
The threat at San Diego was shaping into one of those confrontations which Bolan had hoped to avoid.
The problem was similar to the routine dilemma of the war in Vietnam: in order to get at the enemy, you often had to destroy an entire friendly town.
Bolan had managed to keep the major thrust of his homefront wars directed into the hardcore operations of the enemy — into their clout routes, the overtly criminal activities, into pitched battles with their armed forces and execution missions against their leaders.
At San Diego, it was beginning to look like the civilian community might be unavoidably involved in the resolution of the problem.
The intelligence probes had paid off handsomely, but the yield was also very troubling to this dedicated warrior.
Tendrils of the Mafia cancer were woven throughout the fabric of this great little city's business and social communities. The in-growth was still tenuous, however, and the encroachment had not yet reached the cannibalistic stage. But Mack Bolan knew his enemy. And he had learned quite a bit, in a relatively short time, about the city of San Diego.
And, yeah, this was one city he could not avoid. Some of the area's most solid citizens had been trekking to the tar pits of licensed greed — in many cases, perhaps, unaware that a band of cannibals were lurking there in the shadows, patiently awaiting the opportunity to ensnare them there and devour them — that some were already being eaten.
A sober and troubled electronics expert stored his surveillance tapes in a fireproof box and turned a thoughtful frown to his friend, the Executioner.
"So now what?" he asked, sighing. "So now the siege is ended," Bolan replied quietly.
"You mean we pack up and walk away," Blancanales said.
"No. We storm the city."
"Oh, well...." The Politician scratched his nose, glanced at Schwarz, and said, "What's the first target?"
"The tar pits," Bolan told them.
"The tar pits?"
"Yeah." Bolan was buckling into his AutoMag.
"You mean like the LaBrea tar pits, up in L.A.?"
"Something like that," Bolan said. "Only these are invisible.''
Schwarz and Blancanales exchanged puzzled glances. They were accustomed to Bolan's sometimes cryptic utterances, but this one left them blank.
"They've dug bones of woolly mammoths and I think dinosaurs out of LaBrea," Schwarz commented.
"We're after bigger game than that," the Executioner assured his crew.
"It's still a rescue mission?" Blancanales wanted to know.
"That," Bolan replied, "is exactly what it is."
13
The link
She was young, beautiful, married to one of San Diego's most illustrious citizens, and — according to her own immodest claim in a telephone conversation with Lisa Winters — she had "balled every hood in this town ... and a few over in Mexico."
Her hair was shades of red and hung in a full drop to a point just below her shoulders. The eyes were emerald-hued, but lacked sparkle. The body was long and shapely with soft curves that flowed one into the other beneath velvet-textured skin. A true redhead, the sun apparently was not kind to her; she was glistening and greasy with protective oils and lotions. She wore a micro-bikini which did not quite conceal the fringes of the silky growth of hair at the base of her soft little tummy.
She was topless — one of those who could get away with it admirably.
With all that, if Bolan had ever seen a truly turned-off young woman, then this was the one.
She was sprawled upon her back on a large beach towel, head and shoulders supported by a plastic pillow, staring at him with something less than curiosity. A large Doberman, identical to the dogs at the Winters place, sat faithfully at her feet and regarded Bolan with that same detachment.
Needlessly, it seemed, she commanded the dog, "Thunder, stay." Then she told the intruder, "This is a private beach."
Bolan replied, "I know."
Except for the hat, he was dressed in the seagoing togs he'd acquired for the hit on Danger's Folly. The AutoMag was snugged into a shoulder holster beneath his left arm. The big piece made anoticeable bulge in his jacket, but this was the desired effect.
She was looking him over with a shade of interest now.
"You can be prosecuted for trespassing," Maxwell Thornton's wife informed the Executioner.
He said, "I'll risk it."
She sat up, sending the undraped chest a'jiggling, and leaned forward to grab a handful of the dog's coat. "Thunder is my bodyguard," she declared in that same listless tone. "A word from me and he'll be at your throat."
Beneath that turned-off exterior, the girl was frightened. Bolan knew this by the way the dog was beginning to tense and strain. A good dog could sense its owner's concealed emotions.
He told her, "Thunder must be a real comfort. Too bad."
The dog was off his fanny now, legs beneath him in a low crouch, lips curling upward to show this intruder how impressive his fangs were.
After a brief silence, the girl asked, "What's too bad?"
"Too bad that Howlie couldn't get the same sense of security from Thunder's brothers."
That one penetrated, immediately.
She let go of the Doberman and cried, "Thunder, hit!"
The big fellow's trained reaction was instantaneous and dramatic. The soft sand gave him a little trouble, but just a little, and he left the ground with all four feet airborne, snarling into the conditioned-response attack, the great mouth fully open and grinding into that contact with human flesh.
It is impossible to depict a true guard-dog attack in one of those staged presentations for movies or television. The Hollywood dogs are trained to simulate an attack and there is no way to fake the actual fury and viciousness of a true guard-dog response to a kill command.
These impressive fellows do not passively wrestle about with their jaws clamped lightly around a guy's forearm. They explode into a writhing juggernaut of fury unleashed, slashing and ripping with fang and claw, and it is a rare man who can bare-handedly stand up to such an assault.
Mack Bolan was a rare man. He had read the attack, and he'd been waiting for it. His jump-off was synchronized with that of the dog as he pivoted inside and under the scrambling leap. He popped him in the throat with everything he could put behind a balled fist and rammed a knee into the belly as the Doberman fell back onto his hind legs.
It was a matter of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, with the immovable object getting the best shots in.
The Doberman's legs buckled. The big head drooped toward the sand as he alternately coughed and retched, struggling to draw air with his temporarily paralyzed respiratory system.
He was all out of fight, for the moment.
Bolan sprung the AutoMag and aimed it at the Doberman's head. "Call him off," he warned the woman.
It had all occurred so quickly that the woman's hand was still poised in the air where she had released the dog. Those emerald eyes did not so much as flicker as she issued the soft command. "Thunder, break."
The monster-dog seemed grateful to be relieved of his responsibilities. He crawled toward the woman, whining and still fighting for breath,
Bolan sheathed the AutoMag and knelt beside the dog to rub his throat and massage the quivering ribcage.
Something was coming alive in Marsha Thornton's dead eyes as she watched the tall man with the impassive face stroke the suffering animal. She murmured, "I wouldn't believe that if I hadn't seen it. I was assured that Thunder would protect me from a grizzly bear."
Bolan said, "He would."
His jacket was ripped and he was bleeding slightly from a fang-graze on his hand.
The woman rolled onto her knees and stood up. "Come on up to the house," she suggested. "I'll put something on that cut."
The Doberman was licking the fingers which had defeated him, and Bolan was thinking what a shame it was to misuse a dog this way. Man's oldest friend in the animal world, converted to a living robot, programmed to kill upon command.
The dog and Mack Bolan had a great deal in common — Bolan realized that. He'd pondered the question after a run-in with a couple of German Shepherds during the New York battle. And he'd decided then that there was a difference — subtle but important — between himself and the killer dog.
The dogs killed because they were conditioned to accept a command to do so. In a dog's world it was a sort of a morality to be obedient to his master's desires. Actually, Bolan knew, guard-dogs killed because they had to kill. There was no mental or moral alternative.
Bolan did not have to kill.
He killed because he could— and because, like the dogs, there was no mental or moral alternative.
So, yeah, he had a lot in common with the Doberman — but with a difference. A very important difference.
He pushed the thing from his mind and followed Marsha Thornton to her beach house, the Doberman huffing along at his side.
It seemed that he had made a conquest.
If all went well, he would very soon make another.
While Bolan cultivated the distaff side of the House of Thornton, Schwarz and Blancanales invaded an impressively modern skyscraper in downtown San Diego for a call upon the master himself.
The solid oak door was marked GOLDEN WEST DIVERSITIES, INC. and the suite of offices on the other side of it were strictly gilt-edged, redolent with the sweet smell of success.
Among the diversified interests of Maxwell Thornton was petroleum, real estate, electronics, agriculture, and transportation. He had also been very active in politics, as a behind-the-scenes power in local, state, and national campaigns.
Blancanales had donned a pale blue nylon suit with coordinated accessories — the collar of the shirt with exaggerated dimensions, the tie immaculately knotted, powder-blue hat low over the eyes — altogether a splendiferous image, and altogether the perfect picture of a Mafioso in full dress.
Schwarz wore old-fashioned pleated slacks, sport shirt with loose tie, checkered sports coat, no hat. He looked like a cross between a Tijuana pimp and an Agua Caliente racetrack tout.
Both images had been meticulously contrived.
The receptionist stared at them for a moment, then announced, "I'm sorry, Mr. Thornton is in conference."
"You'd better get him outta there, honey," Blancanales growled in his best Brooklynese.
Schwarz had spun the woman's appointments book around and was studying it.
Blancanales nudged the flustered receptionist again with, "Hop, now!— go tell the man we're here."
"I-I'll see if he's back in his office," the girl replied, thoroughly intimidated now. She depressed a button on her desk intercom and said, "Mr. Thornton — two gentlemen to see you. It appears urgent. They — I think you should."
A tired voice sighed back, "Do the gentlemen have names, Janie?"
Schwarz brushed the receptionist's hand aside and held the intercom button himself as he replied, "Yeh, but you wouldn't want 'em shouted around this joint, Thornton."
"Come on in," was the quick response. The girl showed them the way. Blancanales patted her shoulder as he brushed past her and into the private office of Maxwell Thornton.
The entire outside wall was glass, and there was a fair-sized balcony beyond that with potted trees and other growing things. The city was spread out there for inspection in a most impressive view.
The man sat at a kidney-shaped desk with probably fifty to sixty square feet of surface on top which supported nothing except a telephone, an intercom box, and an open fifth of Haig & Haig. The guy was drinking the Scotch from a water glass, undiluted.
He didn't look the part of millionaire, civic light, city father. He looked like a guy who'd just stepped down from a hot bulldozer to hurry into a hand-tailored suit which still somehow didn't quite fit. A tall man, lanky, sort of gangly and rawboned, well past fifty.
The voice fit the rest of him as he waved his visitors to chairs and told them, "Well, I guess the shit has hit the fan, hasn't it?"
Schwarz picked up the bottle of Scotch and sat down. Blancanales remained standing. He said, "Bolan's in town."
Thornton sighed, sipped at his drink, then said, "I know it."
"Gettin' loaded ain't gonna help."
"Get fucked," Thornton growled. "Bennie send you? What's he want me to do, lead a vigilante army?"
"Bennie don't send us," Schwarz informed him.
The gray steel eyes came up in a quick flash. "New York? You're from New York?"
Blancanales jerked his head in a nod and ambled to the window.
"Who are you?"
Schwarz replied. "The boss is Harry DiCavoli. I'm Jack Santo. You're in trouble, Thornton."
The millionaire grunted and said, "I was born in trouble. I suppose you heard about Howlie Winters."
"We heard," Blancanales spoke up, from the window. "We wanta talk to you about that, Thornton."
"You people squeezed him too damn hard!" the man declared angrily. "I told you he wouldn't hold still for that."
"You told me nothing," Blancanales/DiCavoli replied.
"I told Bennie, and I urged him to relay the advice to New York. Look ... Winters was a square. A guy like that will dabble in the shit pile, but he won't take a bath in it. I told you this whole thing was too much for him to swill."
"I guess you better speak for yourself, man," Blancanales said.
"What do you mean? Look...." The guy was getting hotter by the minute. He pushed back his chair and lifted himself to his full height, and it was an impressive one. He was waving his arms as he spoke. "I had to swim in shit to get where I am. I'll never deny that, except in a court of law. I've had the course, buddy. I've been there and back, several times. You goddam ghetto street-corner lawyers didn't invent the game, and you don't play it very well. The only edge you've got is that you play it rougher than most. Well, get fucked, will you please? I've had it up to the throat with you, all of you."
Blancanales muttered, "You want me to go back East and tell 'em that?"
The guy had moved away from the desk. He was standing spread-legged, coat gaping open, hands thrust into hip pockets, glowering at the man at the window. His eyes dropped, slowly, and his voice was dying away as he replied, "No ... I guess I don't want you to do that."
"That's just what we come to find out."
"I can take the heat, if that's what's worrying you."
Schwarz had risen from his chair and edged his backside onto the desk. With Thornton engrossed in the confrontation with eastern authority, he was quietly and swiftly taking the telephone apart.
"That ain't all," Blancanales was saying. "We been waiting long enough for this deal. Now with Winters out of the picture, we have to wonder...."
"Don't worry, you'll get your stuff. With or without Winters. But listen — what's the name — DiCavoli? — listen, DiCavoli, this is no dime-store radio, you know. We're into defense security violation when we start messing around with this kind of gear."
Schwarz's ears perked up at that. His work at the telephone was finished. He moved toward the other men and joined the conversation. "That's right, Harry. It's not dime-store stuff."
Blancanales quickly picked up the play. "A radio's a radio," he sniffed. "What's such a big deal?"
Thornton coldly returned Schwarz's gaze as he replied to the other "Mafioso." "An L-band feeder horn is a hell of a big deal when you start stealing them from the military."
"Well we gotta know," Blancanales pushed on. "Are you going to deliver or aren't you?"
"Of course I'm going to deliver! But, my God, you don't just muscle your way into — "
"It's heavy stuff, Harry," Schwarz helpfully butted in. He was probing, now — feeling his way. At the same time, he was establishing a sympathetic relationship with the harried millionaire who'd lingered too long near the tar pit. "You can't pick up a feeder horn at the supermarket, y'know. This stuff is heavy, I mean heavy. What is it, Max — about six hundred megs?"
Thornton inclined his head in a deliberate nod. He was giving Schwarz a respectful examination now, wondering, pondering the enigma of a Tijuana pimp who spoke with an understanding of sophisticated communications gear.
Schwarz was "explaining" to Blancanales/DiCavoli. "Y'see, these data links, you pencil-beam into a dish antenna up in the L-band, around six hundred megacycles. It's like a beam of light, only you don't see it. You don't get no side lobes off the pulse envelopes, so there ain't much danger of the FCC or somebody latching onto you. Right, Max?"
Thornton again nodded his head. "It's foolproof," he murmured.
"And the stuff is hard to come by," Schwarz went on explaining. "You don't just walk up and ask a government contractor to make you one. You'd have the FCC all over your ass the second you tried to put it on the air — and in no time you'd have feds swarming all over your operation. What Max is saying is simply this: we gotta be patient while he carves one out of a contract. Right, Max?"
Thornton quietly replied, "Yes. Just like the last one."
"I guess I wasn't in on that one," Blancanales declared innocently.
"Just who are you people?" Thornton asked, his voice barely audible.
"We came with the man," Blancanales replied, dropping the street accent.
"What man?" Thornton asked wearily.
"Bolan," Schwarz said, soberly studying their victim.
The guy walked jerkily back to his desk and sat down. He poured several fingers of Haig & Haig into his glass and belted it, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
"I've been there and back," he declared quietly.
"But I sure talked myself into this one, didn't I?"
"Keep trying," Blancanales suggested. "Maybe you'll talk your way out of something."
"You're in deep shit, Max," Schwarz said gently.
The guy was trapped, and he knew it. He studied his empty glass for a moment, then raised resigned eyes to Gadgets Schwarz. "I was born in shit," he murmured.
"So now you got a chance to wipe yourself," Schwarz told him. "How about it?"
"Full redemption, huh?"
"We can't promise that."
"All right," the self-made millionaire muttered. "Pass the toilet paper."
Her hair was shades of red and hung in a full drop to a point just below her shoulders. The eyes were emerald-hued, but lacked sparkle. The body was long and shapely with soft curves that flowed one into the other beneath velvet-textured skin. A true redhead, the sun apparently was not kind to her; she was glistening and greasy with protective oils and lotions. She wore a micro-bikini which did not quite conceal the fringes of the silky growth of hair at the base of her soft little tummy.
She was topless — one of those who could get away with it admirably.
With all that, if Bolan had ever seen a truly turned-off young woman, then this was the one.
She was sprawled upon her back on a large beach towel, head and shoulders supported by a plastic pillow, staring at him with something less than curiosity. A large Doberman, identical to the dogs at the Winters place, sat faithfully at her feet and regarded Bolan with that same detachment.
Needlessly, it seemed, she commanded the dog, "Thunder, stay." Then she told the intruder, "This is a private beach."
Bolan replied, "I know."
Except for the hat, he was dressed in the seagoing togs he'd acquired for the hit on Danger's Folly. The AutoMag was snugged into a shoulder holster beneath his left arm. The big piece made anoticeable bulge in his jacket, but this was the desired effect.
She was looking him over with a shade of interest now.
"You can be prosecuted for trespassing," Maxwell Thornton's wife informed the Executioner.
He said, "I'll risk it."
She sat up, sending the undraped chest a'jiggling, and leaned forward to grab a handful of the dog's coat. "Thunder is my bodyguard," she declared in that same listless tone. "A word from me and he'll be at your throat."
Beneath that turned-off exterior, the girl was frightened. Bolan knew this by the way the dog was beginning to tense and strain. A good dog could sense its owner's concealed emotions.
He told her, "Thunder must be a real comfort. Too bad."
The dog was off his fanny now, legs beneath him in a low crouch, lips curling upward to show this intruder how impressive his fangs were.
After a brief silence, the girl asked, "What's too bad?"
"Too bad that Howlie couldn't get the same sense of security from Thunder's brothers."
That one penetrated, immediately.
She let go of the Doberman and cried, "Thunder, hit!"
The big fellow's trained reaction was instantaneous and dramatic. The soft sand gave him a little trouble, but just a little, and he left the ground with all four feet airborne, snarling into the conditioned-response attack, the great mouth fully open and grinding into that contact with human flesh.
It is impossible to depict a true guard-dog attack in one of those staged presentations for movies or television. The Hollywood dogs are trained to simulate an attack and there is no way to fake the actual fury and viciousness of a true guard-dog response to a kill command.
These impressive fellows do not passively wrestle about with their jaws clamped lightly around a guy's forearm. They explode into a writhing juggernaut of fury unleashed, slashing and ripping with fang and claw, and it is a rare man who can bare-handedly stand up to such an assault.
Mack Bolan was a rare man. He had read the attack, and he'd been waiting for it. His jump-off was synchronized with that of the dog as he pivoted inside and under the scrambling leap. He popped him in the throat with everything he could put behind a balled fist and rammed a knee into the belly as the Doberman fell back onto his hind legs.
It was a matter of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, with the immovable object getting the best shots in.
The Doberman's legs buckled. The big head drooped toward the sand as he alternately coughed and retched, struggling to draw air with his temporarily paralyzed respiratory system.
He was all out of fight, for the moment.
Bolan sprung the AutoMag and aimed it at the Doberman's head. "Call him off," he warned the woman.
It had all occurred so quickly that the woman's hand was still poised in the air where she had released the dog. Those emerald eyes did not so much as flicker as she issued the soft command. "Thunder, break."
The monster-dog seemed grateful to be relieved of his responsibilities. He crawled toward the woman, whining and still fighting for breath,
Bolan sheathed the AutoMag and knelt beside the dog to rub his throat and massage the quivering ribcage.
Something was coming alive in Marsha Thornton's dead eyes as she watched the tall man with the impassive face stroke the suffering animal. She murmured, "I wouldn't believe that if I hadn't seen it. I was assured that Thunder would protect me from a grizzly bear."
Bolan said, "He would."
His jacket was ripped and he was bleeding slightly from a fang-graze on his hand.
The woman rolled onto her knees and stood up. "Come on up to the house," she suggested. "I'll put something on that cut."
The Doberman was licking the fingers which had defeated him, and Bolan was thinking what a shame it was to misuse a dog this way. Man's oldest friend in the animal world, converted to a living robot, programmed to kill upon command.
The dog and Mack Bolan had a great deal in common — Bolan realized that. He'd pondered the question after a run-in with a couple of German Shepherds during the New York battle. And he'd decided then that there was a difference — subtle but important — between himself and the killer dog.
The dogs killed because they were conditioned to accept a command to do so. In a dog's world it was a sort of a morality to be obedient to his master's desires. Actually, Bolan knew, guard-dogs killed because they had to kill. There was no mental or moral alternative.
Bolan did not have to kill.
He killed because he could— and because, like the dogs, there was no mental or moral alternative.
So, yeah, he had a lot in common with the Doberman — but with a difference. A very important difference.
He pushed the thing from his mind and followed Marsha Thornton to her beach house, the Doberman huffing along at his side.
It seemed that he had made a conquest.
If all went well, he would very soon make another.
While Bolan cultivated the distaff side of the House of Thornton, Schwarz and Blancanales invaded an impressively modern skyscraper in downtown San Diego for a call upon the master himself.
The solid oak door was marked GOLDEN WEST DIVERSITIES, INC. and the suite of offices on the other side of it were strictly gilt-edged, redolent with the sweet smell of success.
Among the diversified interests of Maxwell Thornton was petroleum, real estate, electronics, agriculture, and transportation. He had also been very active in politics, as a behind-the-scenes power in local, state, and national campaigns.
Blancanales had donned a pale blue nylon suit with coordinated accessories — the collar of the shirt with exaggerated dimensions, the tie immaculately knotted, powder-blue hat low over the eyes — altogether a splendiferous image, and altogether the perfect picture of a Mafioso in full dress.
Schwarz wore old-fashioned pleated slacks, sport shirt with loose tie, checkered sports coat, no hat. He looked like a cross between a Tijuana pimp and an Agua Caliente racetrack tout.
Both images had been meticulously contrived.
The receptionist stared at them for a moment, then announced, "I'm sorry, Mr. Thornton is in conference."
"You'd better get him outta there, honey," Blancanales growled in his best Brooklynese.
Schwarz had spun the woman's appointments book around and was studying it.
Blancanales nudged the flustered receptionist again with, "Hop, now!— go tell the man we're here."
"I-I'll see if he's back in his office," the girl replied, thoroughly intimidated now. She depressed a button on her desk intercom and said, "Mr. Thornton — two gentlemen to see you. It appears urgent. They — I think you should."
A tired voice sighed back, "Do the gentlemen have names, Janie?"
Schwarz brushed the receptionist's hand aside and held the intercom button himself as he replied, "Yeh, but you wouldn't want 'em shouted around this joint, Thornton."
"Come on in," was the quick response. The girl showed them the way. Blancanales patted her shoulder as he brushed past her and into the private office of Maxwell Thornton.
The entire outside wall was glass, and there was a fair-sized balcony beyond that with potted trees and other growing things. The city was spread out there for inspection in a most impressive view.
The man sat at a kidney-shaped desk with probably fifty to sixty square feet of surface on top which supported nothing except a telephone, an intercom box, and an open fifth of Haig & Haig. The guy was drinking the Scotch from a water glass, undiluted.
He didn't look the part of millionaire, civic light, city father. He looked like a guy who'd just stepped down from a hot bulldozer to hurry into a hand-tailored suit which still somehow didn't quite fit. A tall man, lanky, sort of gangly and rawboned, well past fifty.
The voice fit the rest of him as he waved his visitors to chairs and told them, "Well, I guess the shit has hit the fan, hasn't it?"
Schwarz picked up the bottle of Scotch and sat down. Blancanales remained standing. He said, "Bolan's in town."
Thornton sighed, sipped at his drink, then said, "I know it."
"Gettin' loaded ain't gonna help."
"Get fucked," Thornton growled. "Bennie send you? What's he want me to do, lead a vigilante army?"
"Bennie don't send us," Schwarz informed him.
The gray steel eyes came up in a quick flash. "New York? You're from New York?"
Blancanales jerked his head in a nod and ambled to the window.
"Who are you?"
Schwarz replied. "The boss is Harry DiCavoli. I'm Jack Santo. You're in trouble, Thornton."
The millionaire grunted and said, "I was born in trouble. I suppose you heard about Howlie Winters."
"We heard," Blancanales spoke up, from the window. "We wanta talk to you about that, Thornton."
"You people squeezed him too damn hard!" the man declared angrily. "I told you he wouldn't hold still for that."
"You told me nothing," Blancanales/DiCavoli replied.
"I told Bennie, and I urged him to relay the advice to New York. Look ... Winters was a square. A guy like that will dabble in the shit pile, but he won't take a bath in it. I told you this whole thing was too much for him to swill."
"I guess you better speak for yourself, man," Blancanales said.
"What do you mean? Look...." The guy was getting hotter by the minute. He pushed back his chair and lifted himself to his full height, and it was an impressive one. He was waving his arms as he spoke. "I had to swim in shit to get where I am. I'll never deny that, except in a court of law. I've had the course, buddy. I've been there and back, several times. You goddam ghetto street-corner lawyers didn't invent the game, and you don't play it very well. The only edge you've got is that you play it rougher than most. Well, get fucked, will you please? I've had it up to the throat with you, all of you."
Blancanales muttered, "You want me to go back East and tell 'em that?"
The guy had moved away from the desk. He was standing spread-legged, coat gaping open, hands thrust into hip pockets, glowering at the man at the window. His eyes dropped, slowly, and his voice was dying away as he replied, "No ... I guess I don't want you to do that."
"That's just what we come to find out."
"I can take the heat, if that's what's worrying you."
Schwarz had risen from his chair and edged his backside onto the desk. With Thornton engrossed in the confrontation with eastern authority, he was quietly and swiftly taking the telephone apart.
"That ain't all," Blancanales was saying. "We been waiting long enough for this deal. Now with Winters out of the picture, we have to wonder...."
"Don't worry, you'll get your stuff. With or without Winters. But listen — what's the name — DiCavoli? — listen, DiCavoli, this is no dime-store radio, you know. We're into defense security violation when we start messing around with this kind of gear."
Schwarz's ears perked up at that. His work at the telephone was finished. He moved toward the other men and joined the conversation. "That's right, Harry. It's not dime-store stuff."
Blancanales quickly picked up the play. "A radio's a radio," he sniffed. "What's such a big deal?"
Thornton coldly returned Schwarz's gaze as he replied to the other "Mafioso." "An L-band feeder horn is a hell of a big deal when you start stealing them from the military."
"Well we gotta know," Blancanales pushed on. "Are you going to deliver or aren't you?"
"Of course I'm going to deliver! But, my God, you don't just muscle your way into — "
"It's heavy stuff, Harry," Schwarz helpfully butted in. He was probing, now — feeling his way. At the same time, he was establishing a sympathetic relationship with the harried millionaire who'd lingered too long near the tar pit. "You can't pick up a feeder horn at the supermarket, y'know. This stuff is heavy, I mean heavy. What is it, Max — about six hundred megs?"
Thornton inclined his head in a deliberate nod. He was giving Schwarz a respectful examination now, wondering, pondering the enigma of a Tijuana pimp who spoke with an understanding of sophisticated communications gear.
Schwarz was "explaining" to Blancanales/DiCavoli. "Y'see, these data links, you pencil-beam into a dish antenna up in the L-band, around six hundred megacycles. It's like a beam of light, only you don't see it. You don't get no side lobes off the pulse envelopes, so there ain't much danger of the FCC or somebody latching onto you. Right, Max?"
Thornton again nodded his head. "It's foolproof," he murmured.
"And the stuff is hard to come by," Schwarz went on explaining. "You don't just walk up and ask a government contractor to make you one. You'd have the FCC all over your ass the second you tried to put it on the air — and in no time you'd have feds swarming all over your operation. What Max is saying is simply this: we gotta be patient while he carves one out of a contract. Right, Max?"
Thornton quietly replied, "Yes. Just like the last one."
"I guess I wasn't in on that one," Blancanales declared innocently.
"Just who are you people?" Thornton asked, his voice barely audible.
"We came with the man," Blancanales replied, dropping the street accent.
"What man?" Thornton asked wearily.
"Bolan," Schwarz said, soberly studying their victim.
The guy walked jerkily back to his desk and sat down. He poured several fingers of Haig & Haig into his glass and belted it, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
"I've been there and back," he declared quietly.
"But I sure talked myself into this one, didn't I?"
"Keep trying," Blancanales suggested. "Maybe you'll talk your way out of something."
"You're in deep shit, Max," Schwarz said gently.
The guy was trapped, and he knew it. He studied his empty glass for a moment, then raised resigned eyes to Gadgets Schwarz. "I was born in shit," he murmured.
"So now you got a chance to wipe yourself," Schwarz told him. "How about it?"
"Full redemption, huh?"
"We can't promise that."
"All right," the self-made millionaire muttered. "Pass the toilet paper."
14
Tar
Bolan's interrogation of Marsha Thornton was revealing very little in the nature of direct intelligence, but she was filling in quite a bit of background insight into the San Diego situation.
"Max is quite a bit older than I am, you know," she told Bolan in that curious turned-off voice. "I wouldn't mind that. I mean, I guess I love him. He's a perfect husband ... in every way but one. Gives me everything I want. Except himself. He… can't. So I have to go find that somewhere else."
"And Max just turns his head, eh."
"Yes. He understands. He just asks that I be … discreet. I guess I've caused him a lot of embarrassment, just the same."
"It figures," Bolan told her.
"Yes. Well, you'd have to know my husband to understand how gross all this could be for him. I mean, a man like him. Well... I have no apologies to make to anyone, except to Max I guess, and he won't let me. He simply understands. I've had a hunger ever since my boobs started budding, Mr. Bolan. I can't turn it off. Don't get the wrong idea. I'm no nympho. But when I'm hungry, I'm hungry."
Bolan murmured, "I can understand that." He was getting a bit of an itch, himself.
"You probably think I'm a nympho," she said, deadpanning a sidewise gaze in his direction. He got very few direct looks from this one. "It's okay, you may as well think it. Everybody else does. I've been in analysis. My analyst says I am definitely not a nympho."
Bolan said, "Okay."
"I hated those hoods. They just kept hanging around Max. Oh, they never came through the front door ... don't worry. But they were always around, always popping up, always underfoot. We'd go out to dinner, and there they'd be. We'd go to a club, and there they'd be." She sighed, a long painful effort. "I guess I figured they may as well be in the bedroom, too. Instant manpower."
Bolan told her, "You don't have to get into this if you'd rather not. I had the Winters telephone tapped. I heard your conversation with Lisa this morning."
That revelation drew not so much as a blink of the eyes. "Lisa's a good kid. We're about the same age, you know. Body age, not soul age. God, my soul must be a million years old."
Bolan could almost believe it.
"I guess, really, I was trying to punish Max by balling his underworld pals. I guess I was getting back at him."
"Humiliating him," Bolan suggested.
"That's what my analyst says. He calls it soiling myself in my husband's own dirt pile. Oh ... it's humiliated him, all right. But as soon as I realized it, I broke it off. You know, I cut out." The deadened eyes traveled to the dog. "That's when I got Thunder. Those hoods wouldn't take no as an answer, not from me. They'd just walk in and grab me by the ass, throw me a quick one, and walk out laughing. Boy. Talk about humiliation. Well, that was six months ago. Lisa was taking lessons at this kennels out on Cabrillo Highway, learning to handle the dogs. I decided to take the training with her, and I ended up with old Thunder here."
She surprised Bolan with a girlish giggle. "Today was the first time I ever ordered him to attack and wow, did you see him getting with it!"
He growled, "Yeah, I saw it."
"I'm really glad he didn't hurt you. You're a nice man, so far I guess. But I had to have Thunder, see. I found out those hoods were passing me around between them, giggling and snickering about me, and I'm sure it all got back to Max. His nympho wife."
The girl shivered and suddenly stood up. She was still clad only in the micro-bikini, bottom only, nothing else. She crossed her arms over the bare chest and walked out onto the sun deck. Thunder trotted along after her.
Bolan drifted out there, also. He stood behind her and gazed over her head at the impossibly blue Pacific with its foaming leading edges rolling onto the beach just below them.
It all seemed, suddenly, totally unreal.
These human moments stole up on a guy, surprising him in the midst of combat, reminding him of his mortality, his humanness.
At this moment, Mack Bolan felt entirely human.
He'd come to this town to blitz it, to wade through blood if necessary, to shake the rats out of their nests. He had not come here for a human experience.
But here he was in the presence of a lovely young woman, sharing her nakedness of body and soul.
He told her, very gently, "Look, Marsha ... all the perfect people are in heaven."
She tilted the shiny red head over her shoulder and smiled at him. Life was forming somewhere back there behind those glazed eyes.
Perhaps, he thought, she was having a human experience also. She asked him, the smile turning sober, "Do you have to kill my husband?"
He replied honestly. "At this point, I don't know. What can you tell me to help my decision?"
She shrugged, delicately. "I just wish you wouldn't. Maybe it's not too late. What can I tell you about Max? I can tell you how he likes his eggs, that he hates pretension and that he loves me very very much ... even at my worst. Is that enough to get him off?"
Bolan did not reply.
She shivered again and tightened the hold on her chest. "He's not like them, Mr. Bolan. Oh ... in his own way, he may be worse than them. More crooked, I mean. He'll admit that he's a crook, it's how he made his fortune. He's a real wheeler-dealer and he's kind of proud of it. But he's not like them." She shuddered. Her voice became tiny as she added, "He just can't get loose from them."
"What's their hold?" he asked her.
"Me, for one thing. But they already had him hog-tied before I came along."
"You how?"
"Oh, this rotten business. Do you know a man called Tony Danger?"
Bolan nodded.
"I went to a party on his yacht. A cruise to Ensenada. Two other girls. Two of Tony's hoods. We ... partied. While Tony took motion pictures of it. I was so stoned on grass, I...."
Bolan said, "Never mind, I know the routine."
"Yes, well, he showed Max some stills from that film. In my presence. Can you beat that? Max didn't say a word, didn't bat an eyelash. Tony told him the negatives were in New York. That they'd stay there in a special file. Just in case Max felt like busting out his britches, as Tony put it. Well, as rotten as I am, I guess Max would do anything to keep them from circulating something like that. I guess…"
Bolan muttered, "Maybe Max is making pilgrimages to the soiling grounds, himself."
She stared at him for a moment then said, "I hadn't thought of that. You mean maybe he's punishing himself for his inadequacy?"
Bolan shrugged. "I'm no psychologist. But it's a thought."
"Yes, isn't it," she agreed.
There was a definite luster in the girl's eyes now.
Bolan didn't want to spoil it, but he had to ask her. "Was Lisa Winters in that party — the boat trip to Ensenada?"
She wet her lips and told him, "Well, you'd have to ask her about that."
He replied, "Okay. I will."
She swiveled about and wrapped her arms about Bolan's neck in one swift motion, kissed him lightly on the mouth, then released him.
"Five minutes ago," she said breathlessly, "I was starved half to death. And hating myself for it. I'm not hungry now. You'd better go while you can."
"I'll want a rain check on about an hour of your time, at my demand," he told her. "And it has nothing to do with hunger."
"You've got it," she assured him. "Now split, before my monster awakens."
Bolan believed her.
And he split.
But his monster had already awakened, and he was hungry as hell.
"Howlie had been crumbling for months," Blancanales reported. "They got into him on little stuff, nickle and dime jazz, during his GHQ stint at Saigon. I guess he was a little bitter over the deal he got, you know, and he was ripe for the approach. You know how a guy like Howlin' Harlan must have felt at a logistics desk, God's sake."
"Yeah," Bolan agreed.
"Anyway, he was in a position to set them up for dumping contraband into the PX and service club circuits. Thornton was dragged into it from this end, via his transportation outfits. He even hijacked some of his own trucks and collected insurance on the loss. Anyway, he was able to provide bonafide shipping orders and such for the loot and he even had a couple of freighters in the play. They were running everything from shaving lotion to hootch. According to Thornton, Southeast Asia, for awhile there, was the prime dumping grounds for the hijack rings."
"Cute," Bolan commented.
"Yeh. When these guys do something, they do it big, don't they. Well, according to Thornton, he wasn't getting that much out of it. He figured the risk exceeded the profits, most of which was going to the mob anyway. But they had it into him, and he had to go along."
"What were you saying about Howlie?" Bolan reminded him.
"Well, he was nickle-and-diming it during his last few months at Saigon. After his retirement, Thornton helped him set up here. Thornton swears it and I don't know why he'd want to He about it now ... Howlie didn't know what he was getting into, not at first. Oh sure, he knew he was selling his influence at the Pentagon. I guess they all do it, most of these retired officers. Why not? It's legal, right? And it's about the only way they can make a military career pay off when things have gone sour for them. Who needs a guy who has spent his whole life deploying troops around a battlefield, right?"
"Go on," Bolan prodded.
Schwarz took it from there. "You know what a feeder horn is, Sarge? It's part of a radio transmission system, sort of like microwave but still operating at radio frequencies. It puts out a controlled emission that's beamed like a spotlight, only it's tighter than any spotlight. It's line-of-sight stuff. The other end of the system uses a dish-antenna for receiving, and you have to shoot directly into the dish or there's no reception."
"Radio point-blank," Bolan commented. "We had them in 'Nam."
"Right. Data links for radar, electronic counter-measures."
"Ultra-sophisticated," Blancanales put in.
"Absolutely," Schwarz agreed. "I have no idea what a rig like that costs, but you can bet it's mighty heavy. You can set them up for mobile use, and that gets even costlier. Besides that, if you're going to own a system like that then you've got to have people who know how to operate and maintain it. Now why. ..." He paused, grinned, and swiped at his nose with a balled fist. "Why would you think an outfit like the Mafia would want a million-dollar toy like that?"
Bolan showed the electronics expert a sober smile and said, "Data link, right?"
"Right."
"With Agua Caliente just a few miles across the border."
Schwarz looked disappointed. Bolan had spoiled his punch line. "That's it," he said. "The track down there has a complete foreign book betting service for tracks all over the world. These dummies are trying to set up a foolproof link between Mexico and Vegas. At mountain peak to mountain peak line-of-sight, do you know how many feeder-horn relays they'd have to have?"
Bolan commented, "They think big, Gadgets." He shrugged his shoulders. "And if it's costing them nothing...."
"Well yeah, but God what they have to go through to get the stuff. That's what finally stuck in Howlie's craw. He helped them get two systems already, without even realizing what he was doing. Then he stumbled onto it and tried to freeze them out. It was a neat racket and I'd like to meet the guy who thought it up. Thornton's electronics subsidiary is subbing on a military contract for a whole bunch of these rigs, complete systems. Thornton supplies various components used in the final assembly. One of Howlie's companies had the final inspection and quality assurance contract for the military. Through quality rejects and a lot of juggling, they managed to piecemeal-out enough rejected components to assemble two complete systems. They've got them holed up somewhere right now, Thornton swears he doesn't know where, until they get enough to complete the link to Vegas. But God, it was a sweet idea. I guess they marked the QC rejects as salvage, cancelled out the serial numbers, and buried all the records of the final transactions.''
"Or burned them," Bolan said. He was remembering a thick stack of ashes in the Winters fireplace. "Could those be the papers Lisa Winters was yelling about?"
"It's beginning to make sense," Blancanales said thoughtfully. "Howlie was a poor sap, a dupe. He dug up the records and took them home ... maybe to study them and confirm his suspicions. Once he knew, he told them to go to hell."
"He would do that," Schwarz said musingly.
"He'd have to have an edge on them somewhere," Bolan pointed out. "And his edge was the records. He could expose the whole scheme by publicly producing those records."
"Mexican stand-off," Blancanales said. "He'd also be incriminating himself. So he couldn't just haul off and let fire. But ... as long as he had those papers...."
"Right," Bolan agreed. "So why would he burn them? He had the boys over a barrel."
"Maybe he just couldn't keep them there," Schwarz said quietly.
"It's why he sent for Able Team," Blancanales decided.
"Too late," Schwarz murmured.
"Too late for the living," Bolan told them, ice creeping into his voice. "But not too late for the dead. Come on. We're moving out."
"Where to?" the Politician inquired.
"You, to see a young lady. Concerning a stack of papers and why they were burned."
"Wait'll I comb my hair," Blancanales said, grinning.
Bolan stabbed Gadgets Schwarz with his eyes. "You've got the cold job," he warned him. "Find that stolen gear."
Schwarz's eyelids fluttered rapidly, but all he had to say about the assignment was, "Okay. So I'll bundle up good."
Bolan did not share the secret with his buddies, but he had saved the really cold job for himself.
It was time to spread the tar around.
He had to roust Tony Danger.
Even if it meant rousting him from a jail cell.
He did not know it at that moment, but a jail cell was precisely where he'd have to go to nail the guy.
"Max is quite a bit older than I am, you know," she told Bolan in that curious turned-off voice. "I wouldn't mind that. I mean, I guess I love him. He's a perfect husband ... in every way but one. Gives me everything I want. Except himself. He… can't. So I have to go find that somewhere else."
"And Max just turns his head, eh."
"Yes. He understands. He just asks that I be … discreet. I guess I've caused him a lot of embarrassment, just the same."
"It figures," Bolan told her.
"Yes. Well, you'd have to know my husband to understand how gross all this could be for him. I mean, a man like him. Well... I have no apologies to make to anyone, except to Max I guess, and he won't let me. He simply understands. I've had a hunger ever since my boobs started budding, Mr. Bolan. I can't turn it off. Don't get the wrong idea. I'm no nympho. But when I'm hungry, I'm hungry."
Bolan murmured, "I can understand that." He was getting a bit of an itch, himself.
"You probably think I'm a nympho," she said, deadpanning a sidewise gaze in his direction. He got very few direct looks from this one. "It's okay, you may as well think it. Everybody else does. I've been in analysis. My analyst says I am definitely not a nympho."
Bolan said, "Okay."
"I hated those hoods. They just kept hanging around Max. Oh, they never came through the front door ... don't worry. But they were always around, always popping up, always underfoot. We'd go out to dinner, and there they'd be. We'd go to a club, and there they'd be." She sighed, a long painful effort. "I guess I figured they may as well be in the bedroom, too. Instant manpower."
Bolan told her, "You don't have to get into this if you'd rather not. I had the Winters telephone tapped. I heard your conversation with Lisa this morning."
That revelation drew not so much as a blink of the eyes. "Lisa's a good kid. We're about the same age, you know. Body age, not soul age. God, my soul must be a million years old."
Bolan could almost believe it.
"I guess, really, I was trying to punish Max by balling his underworld pals. I guess I was getting back at him."
"Humiliating him," Bolan suggested.
"That's what my analyst says. He calls it soiling myself in my husband's own dirt pile. Oh ... it's humiliated him, all right. But as soon as I realized it, I broke it off. You know, I cut out." The deadened eyes traveled to the dog. "That's when I got Thunder. Those hoods wouldn't take no as an answer, not from me. They'd just walk in and grab me by the ass, throw me a quick one, and walk out laughing. Boy. Talk about humiliation. Well, that was six months ago. Lisa was taking lessons at this kennels out on Cabrillo Highway, learning to handle the dogs. I decided to take the training with her, and I ended up with old Thunder here."
She surprised Bolan with a girlish giggle. "Today was the first time I ever ordered him to attack and wow, did you see him getting with it!"
He growled, "Yeah, I saw it."
"I'm really glad he didn't hurt you. You're a nice man, so far I guess. But I had to have Thunder, see. I found out those hoods were passing me around between them, giggling and snickering about me, and I'm sure it all got back to Max. His nympho wife."
The girl shivered and suddenly stood up. She was still clad only in the micro-bikini, bottom only, nothing else. She crossed her arms over the bare chest and walked out onto the sun deck. Thunder trotted along after her.
Bolan drifted out there, also. He stood behind her and gazed over her head at the impossibly blue Pacific with its foaming leading edges rolling onto the beach just below them.
It all seemed, suddenly, totally unreal.
These human moments stole up on a guy, surprising him in the midst of combat, reminding him of his mortality, his humanness.
At this moment, Mack Bolan felt entirely human.
He'd come to this town to blitz it, to wade through blood if necessary, to shake the rats out of their nests. He had not come here for a human experience.
But here he was in the presence of a lovely young woman, sharing her nakedness of body and soul.
He told her, very gently, "Look, Marsha ... all the perfect people are in heaven."
She tilted the shiny red head over her shoulder and smiled at him. Life was forming somewhere back there behind those glazed eyes.
Perhaps, he thought, she was having a human experience also. She asked him, the smile turning sober, "Do you have to kill my husband?"
He replied honestly. "At this point, I don't know. What can you tell me to help my decision?"
She shrugged, delicately. "I just wish you wouldn't. Maybe it's not too late. What can I tell you about Max? I can tell you how he likes his eggs, that he hates pretension and that he loves me very very much ... even at my worst. Is that enough to get him off?"
Bolan did not reply.
She shivered again and tightened the hold on her chest. "He's not like them, Mr. Bolan. Oh ... in his own way, he may be worse than them. More crooked, I mean. He'll admit that he's a crook, it's how he made his fortune. He's a real wheeler-dealer and he's kind of proud of it. But he's not like them." She shuddered. Her voice became tiny as she added, "He just can't get loose from them."
"What's their hold?" he asked her.
"Me, for one thing. But they already had him hog-tied before I came along."
"You how?"
"Oh, this rotten business. Do you know a man called Tony Danger?"
Bolan nodded.
"I went to a party on his yacht. A cruise to Ensenada. Two other girls. Two of Tony's hoods. We ... partied. While Tony took motion pictures of it. I was so stoned on grass, I...."
Bolan said, "Never mind, I know the routine."
"Yes, well, he showed Max some stills from that film. In my presence. Can you beat that? Max didn't say a word, didn't bat an eyelash. Tony told him the negatives were in New York. That they'd stay there in a special file. Just in case Max felt like busting out his britches, as Tony put it. Well, as rotten as I am, I guess Max would do anything to keep them from circulating something like that. I guess…"
Bolan muttered, "Maybe Max is making pilgrimages to the soiling grounds, himself."
She stared at him for a moment then said, "I hadn't thought of that. You mean maybe he's punishing himself for his inadequacy?"
Bolan shrugged. "I'm no psychologist. But it's a thought."
"Yes, isn't it," she agreed.
There was a definite luster in the girl's eyes now.
Bolan didn't want to spoil it, but he had to ask her. "Was Lisa Winters in that party — the boat trip to Ensenada?"
She wet her lips and told him, "Well, you'd have to ask her about that."
He replied, "Okay. I will."
She swiveled about and wrapped her arms about Bolan's neck in one swift motion, kissed him lightly on the mouth, then released him.
"Five minutes ago," she said breathlessly, "I was starved half to death. And hating myself for it. I'm not hungry now. You'd better go while you can."
"I'll want a rain check on about an hour of your time, at my demand," he told her. "And it has nothing to do with hunger."
"You've got it," she assured him. "Now split, before my monster awakens."
Bolan believed her.
And he split.
But his monster had already awakened, and he was hungry as hell.
"Howlie had been crumbling for months," Blancanales reported. "They got into him on little stuff, nickle and dime jazz, during his GHQ stint at Saigon. I guess he was a little bitter over the deal he got, you know, and he was ripe for the approach. You know how a guy like Howlin' Harlan must have felt at a logistics desk, God's sake."
"Yeah," Bolan agreed.
"Anyway, he was in a position to set them up for dumping contraband into the PX and service club circuits. Thornton was dragged into it from this end, via his transportation outfits. He even hijacked some of his own trucks and collected insurance on the loss. Anyway, he was able to provide bonafide shipping orders and such for the loot and he even had a couple of freighters in the play. They were running everything from shaving lotion to hootch. According to Thornton, Southeast Asia, for awhile there, was the prime dumping grounds for the hijack rings."
"Cute," Bolan commented.
"Yeh. When these guys do something, they do it big, don't they. Well, according to Thornton, he wasn't getting that much out of it. He figured the risk exceeded the profits, most of which was going to the mob anyway. But they had it into him, and he had to go along."
"What were you saying about Howlie?" Bolan reminded him.
"Well, he was nickle-and-diming it during his last few months at Saigon. After his retirement, Thornton helped him set up here. Thornton swears it and I don't know why he'd want to He about it now ... Howlie didn't know what he was getting into, not at first. Oh sure, he knew he was selling his influence at the Pentagon. I guess they all do it, most of these retired officers. Why not? It's legal, right? And it's about the only way they can make a military career pay off when things have gone sour for them. Who needs a guy who has spent his whole life deploying troops around a battlefield, right?"
"Go on," Bolan prodded.
Schwarz took it from there. "You know what a feeder horn is, Sarge? It's part of a radio transmission system, sort of like microwave but still operating at radio frequencies. It puts out a controlled emission that's beamed like a spotlight, only it's tighter than any spotlight. It's line-of-sight stuff. The other end of the system uses a dish-antenna for receiving, and you have to shoot directly into the dish or there's no reception."
"Radio point-blank," Bolan commented. "We had them in 'Nam."
"Right. Data links for radar, electronic counter-measures."
"Ultra-sophisticated," Blancanales put in.
"Absolutely," Schwarz agreed. "I have no idea what a rig like that costs, but you can bet it's mighty heavy. You can set them up for mobile use, and that gets even costlier. Besides that, if you're going to own a system like that then you've got to have people who know how to operate and maintain it. Now why. ..." He paused, grinned, and swiped at his nose with a balled fist. "Why would you think an outfit like the Mafia would want a million-dollar toy like that?"
Bolan showed the electronics expert a sober smile and said, "Data link, right?"
"Right."
"With Agua Caliente just a few miles across the border."
Schwarz looked disappointed. Bolan had spoiled his punch line. "That's it," he said. "The track down there has a complete foreign book betting service for tracks all over the world. These dummies are trying to set up a foolproof link between Mexico and Vegas. At mountain peak to mountain peak line-of-sight, do you know how many feeder-horn relays they'd have to have?"
Bolan commented, "They think big, Gadgets." He shrugged his shoulders. "And if it's costing them nothing...."
"Well yeah, but God what they have to go through to get the stuff. That's what finally stuck in Howlie's craw. He helped them get two systems already, without even realizing what he was doing. Then he stumbled onto it and tried to freeze them out. It was a neat racket and I'd like to meet the guy who thought it up. Thornton's electronics subsidiary is subbing on a military contract for a whole bunch of these rigs, complete systems. Thornton supplies various components used in the final assembly. One of Howlie's companies had the final inspection and quality assurance contract for the military. Through quality rejects and a lot of juggling, they managed to piecemeal-out enough rejected components to assemble two complete systems. They've got them holed up somewhere right now, Thornton swears he doesn't know where, until they get enough to complete the link to Vegas. But God, it was a sweet idea. I guess they marked the QC rejects as salvage, cancelled out the serial numbers, and buried all the records of the final transactions.''
"Or burned them," Bolan said. He was remembering a thick stack of ashes in the Winters fireplace. "Could those be the papers Lisa Winters was yelling about?"
"It's beginning to make sense," Blancanales said thoughtfully. "Howlie was a poor sap, a dupe. He dug up the records and took them home ... maybe to study them and confirm his suspicions. Once he knew, he told them to go to hell."
"He would do that," Schwarz said musingly.
"He'd have to have an edge on them somewhere," Bolan pointed out. "And his edge was the records. He could expose the whole scheme by publicly producing those records."
"Mexican stand-off," Blancanales said. "He'd also be incriminating himself. So he couldn't just haul off and let fire. But ... as long as he had those papers...."
"Right," Bolan agreed. "So why would he burn them? He had the boys over a barrel."
"Maybe he just couldn't keep them there," Schwarz said quietly.
"It's why he sent for Able Team," Blancanales decided.
"Too late," Schwarz murmured.
"Too late for the living," Bolan told them, ice creeping into his voice. "But not too late for the dead. Come on. We're moving out."
"Where to?" the Politician inquired.
"You, to see a young lady. Concerning a stack of papers and why they were burned."
"Wait'll I comb my hair," Blancanales said, grinning.
Bolan stabbed Gadgets Schwarz with his eyes. "You've got the cold job," he warned him. "Find that stolen gear."
Schwarz's eyelids fluttered rapidly, but all he had to say about the assignment was, "Okay. So I'll bundle up good."
Bolan did not share the secret with his buddies, but he had saved the really cold job for himself.
It was time to spread the tar around.
He had to roust Tony Danger.
Even if it meant rousting him from a jail cell.
He did not know it at that moment, but a jail cell was precisely where he'd have to go to nail the guy.
15
Cold play
It was getting dark out when Carl Lyons and John Tatum decamped from the Captain's office, headed toward a quick meal and a few casual moments of relaxation before facing the long night ahead.
It had been a rough day of dreary police work — interrogations, questioning of witnesses, seemingly endless conferences with city and county officials, and finally the big Mafia roundup of outraged and bitterly complaining local honchos.
That last had been the worst, in Tatum's book. The mob had plenty of clout in the area, at every court level, and it had been damn tough just getting an overnight hold on the swaggering bastards without specific charges to book them on.
A legal eagle in the D.A.'s office had finally come up with one of those old "public good" statutes which was at least firm enough to base an argument upon until morning.
Maybe that would save the night, anyway.
Tatum paused at the duty desk to sign himself out, and he told the young cop from L.A., "I don't know, maybe Braddock is right and this is the best way to cope with the problem. Maybe we can just stalemate the guy out of town. It may be an ounce of prevention, but it sure isn't good police work, not in my book."
'The important thing is to hold down the fireworks," Lyons remarked. "Bolan isn't all that big and bad. And I guess he figures there's always a next time. He'll play the odds, that's for sure. For him, the numbers say don't push it— another time is coming."
"It'd better not," Tatum replied grimly. "One more killing and this town will blow sky high. God, the pressure. Did you feel it in there?"
"I felt it," Lyons admitted.
"And the press hasn't even got ahold of it yet." The Captain glanced at the clock above the duty desk. "That is, for another five minutes. I don't know how the word gets around, but they tell me the city-hall phones have been burning all afternoon."
"Concerned citizens," Lyons suggested wryly.
"Yeah, very important concerned citizens."
"That should tell you something."
"It tells me plenty. But what the hell can I prove?"
Lyons shrugged. The Captain finished signing-out and they went on along the corridor toward the vehicle area.
A tall patrolman in an immaculate uniform, sporting a thinline mustache, swung in from a side corridor, nodded his head cordially at Lyons, and went on by.
The sergeant from L.A. grunted and asked the San Diego homicide chief, "You allowing face hair down here now?"
"Had to," Tatum said grumpily. "They got a constitutional right ... and they also got a damn good union. What the hell. So long as it's not too far out, what's the harm? You gotta sway with the times, I guess. We're not still running around in Toonerville Cop uniforms, are we."
Lyons grinned. "No, but the Toonervilles wore face hair."
"So, change is sometimes a healthy thing ... even in a town like San Diego."
"That's right," Lyons agreed. He stepped outside and took a deep breath. "You've got a sweet town here, Cap'n."
"Thanks."
They walked to the Captain's personal vehicle. Lyons slid in beside Tatum and told him, "Maybe you shouldn't feel so bad about a Bolan visit. The guy has a way of clearing the air, making things even sweeter."
It had been a rough day of dreary police work — interrogations, questioning of witnesses, seemingly endless conferences with city and county officials, and finally the big Mafia roundup of outraged and bitterly complaining local honchos.
That last had been the worst, in Tatum's book. The mob had plenty of clout in the area, at every court level, and it had been damn tough just getting an overnight hold on the swaggering bastards without specific charges to book them on.
A legal eagle in the D.A.'s office had finally come up with one of those old "public good" statutes which was at least firm enough to base an argument upon until morning.
Maybe that would save the night, anyway.
Tatum paused at the duty desk to sign himself out, and he told the young cop from L.A., "I don't know, maybe Braddock is right and this is the best way to cope with the problem. Maybe we can just stalemate the guy out of town. It may be an ounce of prevention, but it sure isn't good police work, not in my book."
'The important thing is to hold down the fireworks," Lyons remarked. "Bolan isn't all that big and bad. And I guess he figures there's always a next time. He'll play the odds, that's for sure. For him, the numbers say don't push it— another time is coming."
"It'd better not," Tatum replied grimly. "One more killing and this town will blow sky high. God, the pressure. Did you feel it in there?"
"I felt it," Lyons admitted.
"And the press hasn't even got ahold of it yet." The Captain glanced at the clock above the duty desk. "That is, for another five minutes. I don't know how the word gets around, but they tell me the city-hall phones have been burning all afternoon."
"Concerned citizens," Lyons suggested wryly.
"Yeah, very important concerned citizens."
"That should tell you something."
"It tells me plenty. But what the hell can I prove?"
Lyons shrugged. The Captain finished signing-out and they went on along the corridor toward the vehicle area.
A tall patrolman in an immaculate uniform, sporting a thinline mustache, swung in from a side corridor, nodded his head cordially at Lyons, and went on by.
The sergeant from L.A. grunted and asked the San Diego homicide chief, "You allowing face hair down here now?"
"Had to," Tatum said grumpily. "They got a constitutional right ... and they also got a damn good union. What the hell. So long as it's not too far out, what's the harm? You gotta sway with the times, I guess. We're not still running around in Toonerville Cop uniforms, are we."
Lyons grinned. "No, but the Toonervilles wore face hair."
"So, change is sometimes a healthy thing ... even in a town like San Diego."
"That's right," Lyons agreed. He stepped outside and took a deep breath. "You've got a sweet town here, Cap'n."
"Thanks."
They walked to the Captain's personal vehicle. Lyons slid in beside Tatum and told him, "Maybe you shouldn't feel so bad about a Bolan visit. The guy has a way of clearing the air, making things even sweeter."