Страница:
Don Pendleton
San Diego Siege
The whole art of war consists
in getting at what is on the
other side of the hill.
Duke of Wellington
I can't get at the enemy here.
He is too well dug in. So I'm
laying siege to San Diego.
When the pressures get too
intense, then we will see what
comes up over the hill.
Mack Bolan, THE EXECUTIONER
Prologue
The tall man in midnight combat garb stood in stark silhouette on the high ground atop Point Loma, gazing broodingly upon the sprawl and sweep of California's oldest city. Coronado and the impressive Naval Air Station lay directly ahead, Lindbergh Field and the Marine Base slightly to the north, the complex of seagoing navy activities spilling off toward the south bay. Backdrop to it all was the old city herself with her hills and freeways and suburban clusters — "Dago" to generations of servicemen, San Diego to those who proudly loved her and made their homes in the sunny, smog-free environment ... "hell-ground" to the tall man in black who quietly contemplated his next area of operations.
He was Mack Bolan, Mafia-fighter extraordinaire, the one man army who had already become legend in the world's annals of crime.
This time, however, he was not alone.
Another man moved into silhouette against the city's lights — a shorter man, heavier, powerfully built.
The meeting had been pre-arranged. The greetings, though restrained almost to the point of stiff formality, were nonetheless warmly emotional in undertone.
"You got my message," the short man said, for openers.
"I wish I hadn't," the other murmured.
"Sure, I know. But... well, you said it yourself once or twice. A life without challenge is no life at all. I couldn't stay up there boy-scouting while all this — "
"Okay," Bolan interrupted. He was not a man to spend much time on small talk, but the voice was tired, concerned, and admiring all at once as he added, "You're looking good, Pol. Dropped a few pounds, eh?"
"Yeh." The man patted his belly. "Few inches, too. You look as mean as ever. Even with the pretty new face. Brantzen did a good job."
"They got Brantzen," Bolan declared coldly.
"Yeah, I heard."
"They'll get us all, eventually. You have to know that, Pol."
"Sure, I know that," the other agreed. "In the meantime...."
Bolan sighed. "Okay. What's the big smell?"
"That town down there. They call it 'the city around a park,' or words to that effect."
"So?"
"They should call it 'the town that Uncle built,' meaning Uncle Sam. Between the military bases and the defense contractors, it's the highest federal-impact area in the nation, dollar for dollar."
"Go on," Bolan prompted.
"Well you know what federal dollars mean."
"The city built around a picnic," Bolan replied quietly.
"Yeah. And also the city with a Mexican border. Plus one of the world's ten greatest natural harbors."
The man in black again sighed. "I don't have this town on my hit parade, Pol. They're too well covered here. There's no battleground down there, no combat stretch. San Diego doesn't have skin lesions — it's got cancer of the gut. I can't carve it out without removing a lot of good tissue along with the rot."
"That's exactly the problem," the other man muttered. "An old friend of ours is caught up in that rot down there."
"Who's that?"
"Howlin' Harlan Winters."
Sure. Colonel Harlan P. Winters — Howlin' Harlan or Howlie to his troops, a soldier's soldier, once top-dog of the elite Penetration Teams in Vietnam.
Bolan said, "I heard that he'd retired."
"Yeah. Kicked him up to Brigadier and right out the goddam door."
"That happens to good soldiers sometimes," Bolan mused. "Especially when they get too good."
"Well, he's in a hell of a mess now."
"A mob mess?"
"That's the smell I get. I stumbled onto the thing up in Frisco, sheer accident. He's in deep shit, Sarge — and he needs a guy with a big shovel."
"Meaning the Executioner."
"Yeah."
Bolan's shoulders drooped forward in an almost imperceptible movement and the eyes turned to ice as they returned to a sweep of the crescent coastline of San Diego Bay. He told his companion, "I just came from a messy one, Pol."
"Yeah, I know, I heard. They were even trying to tie you into an assassination attempt on the President. I knew that was pure bullshit the minute I heard it."
"This one could get even messier," the Executioner declared. "I brought quite a bit of Intel away from that Washington sweep. Enough to know that ... well, I can't just blitz into San Diego. And especially not for Howlin' Harlan."
"You know something about him I don't," the other man decided.
"Maybe. Did he ask for me, Pol?"
"Hell no. He doesn't even know I'm into it, yet."
"Then how .. . ?"
"I bumped into him up in Frisco. Looked terrible, scared outta his skull when he recognized me. Said he was on a business trip. Had a chick with him, introduced her as his niece. We had a drink together, the three of us. Small talked, that's all, then they split. Next day the chick looked me up, with SOS written all over her. Now is the time for all old troopers to come to the aid of the C.O. That was her message. You see, he — "
"Save it for a full briefing," Bolan suggested. "You split for now. Meet me again tomorrow — same time, same place."
The other man displayed a tense smile. "It's a go, then."
"A tentative go. I want to scout the terrain a bit before I commit myself."
"Okay, but look out for these San Diego cops. I hear they're pretty savvy."
Bolan knew about the San Diego cops. Many of them, especially higher echelon types, were ex-feds who'd decided they could do a better job under local colors. Which usually meant that something was rotten in fedville. He told his friend, "Yeah, I'll watch it. Now split. Too long already."
"Gadgets wants into this one, too," the other man said, smiling soberly.
Bolan gave a resigned sigh and replied, "Okay. Tell him I said welcome aboard. I'll need every talent he's got."
The smile grew. "The death squad is reborn."
"Not quite," Bolan said.
"Yeah, you're right, not quite."
Rosario "the Politician" Blancanales, along with Herman "Gadgets" Schwarz had fought beside Bolan in Vietnam ... and also in Los Angeles with seven others ... the Executioner's "Death Squad." Of the nine, only Pol and Gadgets survived.
The two men locked eyes for a moment, and there was no disguising the pain which passed between them. Then Blancanales punched his old friend lightly on the shoulder and faded quickly into the darkness.
The entire meeting had consumed less than two minutes.
But the man in black remained on Point Loma for another half-hour, pushing an infinity of ideas through his combat-conditioned mind, re-examining his priorities, re-assessing the implications and directions of this eternal damned war of his. He was realist enough to realize that it could not, in fact, be an eternal war ... it simply seemed that way. He could survive just so many firefights, elude just so many cops, live just so long.
And he had to make every breath of life count for something positive.
As for a resurrection of the Death Squad, even a partial resurrection ... he had vowed never again to take on allies, never again to deliberately place friendly lives on his firing line. There had been much too many live sacrifices upon the altars of the Executioner's crusades. And yet... Pol and Gadgets were living in some sort of purgatory, at best. If they wished to come out and meet their fates head-on...
It was no private damned war.
It had started that way, of course ... private ... but not a war, not in the real sense. It had begun as a simple quest for personal justice. Sergeant Mack Bolan, much decorated hero of a seeming endless war in Southeast Asia, had come home from that combat theatre solely to bury his parents and teenage sister — victims of another sort of ferocity — and to arrange for the care of his kid brother, the lone survivor of that tragedy at home.
But then Sgt. Bolan learned that there was more to the story than was mentioned in the official police report. Ailing steelworker Sam Bolan, Mack's father, had been in a financial squeeze. He had borrowed money at appallingly usurious rates from a local loan company, one which turned out to be operating on the borderline of legality. With continued illness and a partial disability, the elder Bolan fell behind in his payments ... and the terror began for the Bolan family. Sam was physically attacked; repeatedly. Young Johnny Bolan was approached by a theft ring, his seventeen-year-old sister by a prostitution ring — with suggestions as to how they could "bail your old man outta trouble."
Johnny Bolan demurred.
Cindy Bolan did not. Her father was suffering a serious heart condition. Continued pressures and violent intimidation would kill him, she felt. Cindy became a "sponsored" prostitute, turning over her earnings toward the discharge of Sam Bolan's indebtedness.
Upon learning of this, the elder Bolan "went berserk." In a frenzy of soul-torment, Sam Bolan shot his daughter, his son, his wife, then turned the gun on himself. Only young Johnny survived to tell the tale, and it was a story to clamp the jaw and ice the eyes of big brother Mack, a combat specialist who had earned the tag "The Executioner" in the jungles and hamlets of Southeast Asia.
"Cindy did only what she thought had to be done. In his own mixed-up way, I guess Pop did the same. Can I do any less?" By this simple declaration was Mack Bolan's "war against the Mafia" enjoined. In the beginning, however, he did not think of it as a war, nor did he even know that the culprits were Mafiosi. He knew only that he was performing an act of justice in an area in which the police had already professed helplessness. He "executed" all five officials of the "loan company" — and, hours later, he knew that he had started another "war without end."
"The Mafia, for God's sake. So what? They can't be any more dangerous or any smarter than the Cong. Scratch five, and how many are left? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? So — I've got another unwinnable war on my hands."
In a modern army heavy on specialties, Sergeant Bolan had practiced the oldest specialty of all. He was a death specialist. He was an expert marksman in virtually every personal-weapon category. He was a trained sniper, a skilled armorer and an experienced and wily jungle fighter. He was a man who could operate alone and in enemy territory, for long periods, living entirely off the land and by his own wits.
Few men could have been better equipped for the new job which Mack Bolan had taken upon himself. Still, the outcome of his impossible home-front war could have been foretold from the first shot fired. There was no way that a lone man, any lone man, could successfully challenge the might and the reach of the most formidable criminal organization ever to arise upon this planet. U.S. government officials called it "the invisible second-government of the nation." Crusading journalists, racket-busting prosecutors and congressional prob-ers alike had repeatedly warned of the enormous tentacles of "this underground monster" which were spreading like cancerous growths throughout the fibre of American life — and yet all had agreed that little could be done within the existing framework of the American system of jurisprudence to effectively combat the power of highly organized crime.
So yes, Bolan soon learned what he was going against. He came to know, also, that his enemies could never forgive or forget the challenge to their omnipotence. They quickly felt a necessity to squash him — as an object lesson, if nothing else. An empire built upon terror and violence must sustain itself by those same methods. And even if the Mafia did not get him, the police eventually would. Bolan came to be as guilty of murder and other high crimes as were his opponents, in the eyes of the law. From the moment when that first shot of his home front war was fired, Bolan was a living dead-man and he knew it.
He declared, nevertheless, "I will not roll over and die for them."
What did a condemned man have to lose?
The combat specialist from Vietnam resolved to give meaning to his death. He had lived as a professional soldier; he would die like one. His "last mile" would be a bloody one, and not all of the blood would be his own. He would hit their house with thunder and lightning, he would shake and rattle them while he died, and they would know that there was a price to be paid for their way of life.
So Mack Bolan transplanted his jungle warfare techniques to the city streets of America, where he took the offensive against "this greater enemy."
Much to his own surprise, that initial campaign in his home town, Pittsfield, was a resounding success … and surprisingly Bolan lived on while the local house of Mafia virtually disintegrated.
It was a hollow victory, of course. Bolan was now "deader" than ever… with a $100,000 bounty on his head, swarms of Mafiosi and ambitious freelancers on his trail, and law enforcement agencies around the nation gearing for his apprehension.
Operating as much on instinct as by the intellect, the young warrior's survival mechanisms directed him into a guerrilla lifestyle. The entire world became his personal jungle of survival, and every chance encounter with another human being became a possible do-or-die situation. To the threatened and the condemned, "aloneness" becomes the heaviest cross to bear. Bolan was not that much different from other men — he sought the comfort and protection of loyal friends — and, shortly after the opening battle in Pittsfield, he turned up on the far side of the country, in Los Angeles, where he hastily recruited his Death Squad of combat buddies from Vietnam.
This maneuver was swiftly revealed as an error in judgment, from Bolan's point of view. The squad was dramatically successful, in that they shattered the powerful DiGeorge family of Southern California — but it was another hollow victory for the Executioner, with seven dead friends on his conscience and the others in police custody. He went on to single-handedly finish off the DiGeorge family, thereafter shunning even the most casual contact with those who might feel inclined to aid him.
A man with Bolan's dedication commanded respect and loyalty, though, whether or not he sought it, and he found many helping hands as his wipe-out trail lengthened and broadened into a seemingly infinite theatre of operations: fron the American Southwest to Miami, international forays into France and England, and back through New York, Chicago, Las Vegas as the ocean of blood around him grew, then a quick dip into the Caribbean area, westward again to San Francisco followed by a searingly urgent call on Boston and a spine-tingling probe of the subgovernment scene in Washington.
None knew better than Bolan himself that his survival thus far was due in large part to the efforts of many unsolicited friends in the police establishment, in the general community, and even — here and there — in the Mafia families themselves. He did not discount the value of this assistance; he did wish to keep his personal involvements to an absolute minimum, however, for various reasons.
Howlin' Harlan presented a personal involvement.
San Diego itself would mean a personal involvement, via the personages of Pol Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz.
The Executioner could not storm that town. The whole community was too tightly interlaced with the rot, knowingly and unknowingly ... a "cure" could very easily kill the patient, if not undertaken with delicacy.
Bolan had no wish to subject that lovely old town to an indiscriminate washing with hellfire.
So ... yes ... any incursion into that complex paradise would have to be done softly and cautiously — in the beginning, anyway.
And he would need the brainy remnants of his old death squad.
Blancanales was an expert at acquiring and organizing military intelligence, at blending like a chameleon into any environment.
Schwarz was an electronics genius who could design and build the most sophisticated surveillance devices from scratch.
Both men also knew how to account for themselves in a firefight.
Howlin' Harlan Winters, though … now there was something else. A totally unknown quality in this new war. Friend or enemy? Bolan could not say. The shadows he'd dredged up in Washington were sending up faint little cries from the depths of his mind … careful, careful. But … the Colonel had pinned a couple of decorations on Mack Bolan's chest during that other war ... and they had faced death together on more than one occasion. What would they be facing in San Diego? Dishonor?
Possibly. Maybe even national dishonor.
The man in black shook his head with a perplexed narrowing of his eyes as he gazed out across the lights of the city.
Well, dammit. ...
Some things a guy simply had to play by ear and heart.
San Diego, then.
Death, dishonor, hell itself ... come what may ... San Diego had joined the Executioner's hit parade.
He was Mack Bolan, Mafia-fighter extraordinaire, the one man army who had already become legend in the world's annals of crime.
This time, however, he was not alone.
Another man moved into silhouette against the city's lights — a shorter man, heavier, powerfully built.
The meeting had been pre-arranged. The greetings, though restrained almost to the point of stiff formality, were nonetheless warmly emotional in undertone.
"You got my message," the short man said, for openers.
"I wish I hadn't," the other murmured.
"Sure, I know. But... well, you said it yourself once or twice. A life without challenge is no life at all. I couldn't stay up there boy-scouting while all this — "
"Okay," Bolan interrupted. He was not a man to spend much time on small talk, but the voice was tired, concerned, and admiring all at once as he added, "You're looking good, Pol. Dropped a few pounds, eh?"
"Yeh." The man patted his belly. "Few inches, too. You look as mean as ever. Even with the pretty new face. Brantzen did a good job."
"They got Brantzen," Bolan declared coldly.
"Yeah, I heard."
"They'll get us all, eventually. You have to know that, Pol."
"Sure, I know that," the other agreed. "In the meantime...."
Bolan sighed. "Okay. What's the big smell?"
"That town down there. They call it 'the city around a park,' or words to that effect."
"So?"
"They should call it 'the town that Uncle built,' meaning Uncle Sam. Between the military bases and the defense contractors, it's the highest federal-impact area in the nation, dollar for dollar."
"Go on," Bolan prompted.
"Well you know what federal dollars mean."
"The city built around a picnic," Bolan replied quietly.
"Yeah. And also the city with a Mexican border. Plus one of the world's ten greatest natural harbors."
The man in black again sighed. "I don't have this town on my hit parade, Pol. They're too well covered here. There's no battleground down there, no combat stretch. San Diego doesn't have skin lesions — it's got cancer of the gut. I can't carve it out without removing a lot of good tissue along with the rot."
"That's exactly the problem," the other man muttered. "An old friend of ours is caught up in that rot down there."
"Who's that?"
"Howlin' Harlan Winters."
Sure. Colonel Harlan P. Winters — Howlin' Harlan or Howlie to his troops, a soldier's soldier, once top-dog of the elite Penetration Teams in Vietnam.
Bolan said, "I heard that he'd retired."
"Yeah. Kicked him up to Brigadier and right out the goddam door."
"That happens to good soldiers sometimes," Bolan mused. "Especially when they get too good."
"Well, he's in a hell of a mess now."
"A mob mess?"
"That's the smell I get. I stumbled onto the thing up in Frisco, sheer accident. He's in deep shit, Sarge — and he needs a guy with a big shovel."
"Meaning the Executioner."
"Yeah."
Bolan's shoulders drooped forward in an almost imperceptible movement and the eyes turned to ice as they returned to a sweep of the crescent coastline of San Diego Bay. He told his companion, "I just came from a messy one, Pol."
"Yeah, I know, I heard. They were even trying to tie you into an assassination attempt on the President. I knew that was pure bullshit the minute I heard it."
"This one could get even messier," the Executioner declared. "I brought quite a bit of Intel away from that Washington sweep. Enough to know that ... well, I can't just blitz into San Diego. And especially not for Howlin' Harlan."
"You know something about him I don't," the other man decided.
"Maybe. Did he ask for me, Pol?"
"Hell no. He doesn't even know I'm into it, yet."
"Then how .. . ?"
"I bumped into him up in Frisco. Looked terrible, scared outta his skull when he recognized me. Said he was on a business trip. Had a chick with him, introduced her as his niece. We had a drink together, the three of us. Small talked, that's all, then they split. Next day the chick looked me up, with SOS written all over her. Now is the time for all old troopers to come to the aid of the C.O. That was her message. You see, he — "
"Save it for a full briefing," Bolan suggested. "You split for now. Meet me again tomorrow — same time, same place."
The other man displayed a tense smile. "It's a go, then."
"A tentative go. I want to scout the terrain a bit before I commit myself."
"Okay, but look out for these San Diego cops. I hear they're pretty savvy."
Bolan knew about the San Diego cops. Many of them, especially higher echelon types, were ex-feds who'd decided they could do a better job under local colors. Which usually meant that something was rotten in fedville. He told his friend, "Yeah, I'll watch it. Now split. Too long already."
"Gadgets wants into this one, too," the other man said, smiling soberly.
Bolan gave a resigned sigh and replied, "Okay. Tell him I said welcome aboard. I'll need every talent he's got."
The smile grew. "The death squad is reborn."
"Not quite," Bolan said.
"Yeah, you're right, not quite."
Rosario "the Politician" Blancanales, along with Herman "Gadgets" Schwarz had fought beside Bolan in Vietnam ... and also in Los Angeles with seven others ... the Executioner's "Death Squad." Of the nine, only Pol and Gadgets survived.
The two men locked eyes for a moment, and there was no disguising the pain which passed between them. Then Blancanales punched his old friend lightly on the shoulder and faded quickly into the darkness.
The entire meeting had consumed less than two minutes.
But the man in black remained on Point Loma for another half-hour, pushing an infinity of ideas through his combat-conditioned mind, re-examining his priorities, re-assessing the implications and directions of this eternal damned war of his. He was realist enough to realize that it could not, in fact, be an eternal war ... it simply seemed that way. He could survive just so many firefights, elude just so many cops, live just so long.
And he had to make every breath of life count for something positive.
As for a resurrection of the Death Squad, even a partial resurrection ... he had vowed never again to take on allies, never again to deliberately place friendly lives on his firing line. There had been much too many live sacrifices upon the altars of the Executioner's crusades. And yet... Pol and Gadgets were living in some sort of purgatory, at best. If they wished to come out and meet their fates head-on...
It was no private damned war.
It had started that way, of course ... private ... but not a war, not in the real sense. It had begun as a simple quest for personal justice. Sergeant Mack Bolan, much decorated hero of a seeming endless war in Southeast Asia, had come home from that combat theatre solely to bury his parents and teenage sister — victims of another sort of ferocity — and to arrange for the care of his kid brother, the lone survivor of that tragedy at home.
But then Sgt. Bolan learned that there was more to the story than was mentioned in the official police report. Ailing steelworker Sam Bolan, Mack's father, had been in a financial squeeze. He had borrowed money at appallingly usurious rates from a local loan company, one which turned out to be operating on the borderline of legality. With continued illness and a partial disability, the elder Bolan fell behind in his payments ... and the terror began for the Bolan family. Sam was physically attacked; repeatedly. Young Johnny Bolan was approached by a theft ring, his seventeen-year-old sister by a prostitution ring — with suggestions as to how they could "bail your old man outta trouble."
Johnny Bolan demurred.
Cindy Bolan did not. Her father was suffering a serious heart condition. Continued pressures and violent intimidation would kill him, she felt. Cindy became a "sponsored" prostitute, turning over her earnings toward the discharge of Sam Bolan's indebtedness.
Upon learning of this, the elder Bolan "went berserk." In a frenzy of soul-torment, Sam Bolan shot his daughter, his son, his wife, then turned the gun on himself. Only young Johnny survived to tell the tale, and it was a story to clamp the jaw and ice the eyes of big brother Mack, a combat specialist who had earned the tag "The Executioner" in the jungles and hamlets of Southeast Asia.
"Cindy did only what she thought had to be done. In his own mixed-up way, I guess Pop did the same. Can I do any less?" By this simple declaration was Mack Bolan's "war against the Mafia" enjoined. In the beginning, however, he did not think of it as a war, nor did he even know that the culprits were Mafiosi. He knew only that he was performing an act of justice in an area in which the police had already professed helplessness. He "executed" all five officials of the "loan company" — and, hours later, he knew that he had started another "war without end."
"The Mafia, for God's sake. So what? They can't be any more dangerous or any smarter than the Cong. Scratch five, and how many are left? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? So — I've got another unwinnable war on my hands."
In a modern army heavy on specialties, Sergeant Bolan had practiced the oldest specialty of all. He was a death specialist. He was an expert marksman in virtually every personal-weapon category. He was a trained sniper, a skilled armorer and an experienced and wily jungle fighter. He was a man who could operate alone and in enemy territory, for long periods, living entirely off the land and by his own wits.
Few men could have been better equipped for the new job which Mack Bolan had taken upon himself. Still, the outcome of his impossible home-front war could have been foretold from the first shot fired. There was no way that a lone man, any lone man, could successfully challenge the might and the reach of the most formidable criminal organization ever to arise upon this planet. U.S. government officials called it "the invisible second-government of the nation." Crusading journalists, racket-busting prosecutors and congressional prob-ers alike had repeatedly warned of the enormous tentacles of "this underground monster" which were spreading like cancerous growths throughout the fibre of American life — and yet all had agreed that little could be done within the existing framework of the American system of jurisprudence to effectively combat the power of highly organized crime.
So yes, Bolan soon learned what he was going against. He came to know, also, that his enemies could never forgive or forget the challenge to their omnipotence. They quickly felt a necessity to squash him — as an object lesson, if nothing else. An empire built upon terror and violence must sustain itself by those same methods. And even if the Mafia did not get him, the police eventually would. Bolan came to be as guilty of murder and other high crimes as were his opponents, in the eyes of the law. From the moment when that first shot of his home front war was fired, Bolan was a living dead-man and he knew it.
He declared, nevertheless, "I will not roll over and die for them."
What did a condemned man have to lose?
The combat specialist from Vietnam resolved to give meaning to his death. He had lived as a professional soldier; he would die like one. His "last mile" would be a bloody one, and not all of the blood would be his own. He would hit their house with thunder and lightning, he would shake and rattle them while he died, and they would know that there was a price to be paid for their way of life.
So Mack Bolan transplanted his jungle warfare techniques to the city streets of America, where he took the offensive against "this greater enemy."
Much to his own surprise, that initial campaign in his home town, Pittsfield, was a resounding success … and surprisingly Bolan lived on while the local house of Mafia virtually disintegrated.
It was a hollow victory, of course. Bolan was now "deader" than ever… with a $100,000 bounty on his head, swarms of Mafiosi and ambitious freelancers on his trail, and law enforcement agencies around the nation gearing for his apprehension.
Operating as much on instinct as by the intellect, the young warrior's survival mechanisms directed him into a guerrilla lifestyle. The entire world became his personal jungle of survival, and every chance encounter with another human being became a possible do-or-die situation. To the threatened and the condemned, "aloneness" becomes the heaviest cross to bear. Bolan was not that much different from other men — he sought the comfort and protection of loyal friends — and, shortly after the opening battle in Pittsfield, he turned up on the far side of the country, in Los Angeles, where he hastily recruited his Death Squad of combat buddies from Vietnam.
This maneuver was swiftly revealed as an error in judgment, from Bolan's point of view. The squad was dramatically successful, in that they shattered the powerful DiGeorge family of Southern California — but it was another hollow victory for the Executioner, with seven dead friends on his conscience and the others in police custody. He went on to single-handedly finish off the DiGeorge family, thereafter shunning even the most casual contact with those who might feel inclined to aid him.
A man with Bolan's dedication commanded respect and loyalty, though, whether or not he sought it, and he found many helping hands as his wipe-out trail lengthened and broadened into a seemingly infinite theatre of operations: fron the American Southwest to Miami, international forays into France and England, and back through New York, Chicago, Las Vegas as the ocean of blood around him grew, then a quick dip into the Caribbean area, westward again to San Francisco followed by a searingly urgent call on Boston and a spine-tingling probe of the subgovernment scene in Washington.
None knew better than Bolan himself that his survival thus far was due in large part to the efforts of many unsolicited friends in the police establishment, in the general community, and even — here and there — in the Mafia families themselves. He did not discount the value of this assistance; he did wish to keep his personal involvements to an absolute minimum, however, for various reasons.
Howlin' Harlan presented a personal involvement.
San Diego itself would mean a personal involvement, via the personages of Pol Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz.
The Executioner could not storm that town. The whole community was too tightly interlaced with the rot, knowingly and unknowingly ... a "cure" could very easily kill the patient, if not undertaken with delicacy.
Bolan had no wish to subject that lovely old town to an indiscriminate washing with hellfire.
So ... yes ... any incursion into that complex paradise would have to be done softly and cautiously — in the beginning, anyway.
And he would need the brainy remnants of his old death squad.
Blancanales was an expert at acquiring and organizing military intelligence, at blending like a chameleon into any environment.
Schwarz was an electronics genius who could design and build the most sophisticated surveillance devices from scratch.
Both men also knew how to account for themselves in a firefight.
Howlin' Harlan Winters, though … now there was something else. A totally unknown quality in this new war. Friend or enemy? Bolan could not say. The shadows he'd dredged up in Washington were sending up faint little cries from the depths of his mind … careful, careful. But … the Colonel had pinned a couple of decorations on Mack Bolan's chest during that other war ... and they had faced death together on more than one occasion. What would they be facing in San Diego? Dishonor?
Possibly. Maybe even national dishonor.
The man in black shook his head with a perplexed narrowing of his eyes as he gazed out across the lights of the city.
Well, dammit. ...
Some things a guy simply had to play by ear and heart.
San Diego, then.
Death, dishonor, hell itself ... come what may ... San Diego had joined the Executioner's hit parade.
1
Penetration
They were Dobermans, a matched set, and the two of them hit the hurricane fence together, each with all four feet scrambling for a hold on the steel mesh, great slavering heads lunging over the top of the barrier, lips curled back in the attack, dripping fangs slashing toward a taste of the man on the outside.
Bolan was damned glad that fence was there.
With a shivering gut, he realized that those sentry dogs fit the rest of the place, and he found himself wondering if there wasn't a better way to begin the probe into San Diego.
The house occupied a sparsely populated stretch of highrise coastline just north of Torrey Pines State Park. It was not a spectacular place — not exactly in the millionaire class — but it seemed to offer the sort of comfort and seclusion which might be sought by a retired combat officer turned industrialist ... with something or someone to fear.
An English tudor style, it probably combined all the charm of an earlier age with the most lavish conveniences of the late twentieth century — and it was not a bad way for an old soldier to fade away.
As for the super-security — this seemed to fit the new image of General Harlan Winters — the image which had lately become so disquieting to the world's foremost Mafia-fighter.
A row of stubby, wind-stunted trees marked the circular periphery of the cliffside property. Set just inside this natural barrier was a double row of hurricane-fencing spaced about ten feet apart, neither row being of forbidding height but high enough to discourage the casual trespasser.
As a further note, bright red signs were placed along the outer fence with the warnings:
DANGER GUARD DOG RUN
In this regard, Rosario "Politician" Blancanales had earlier made his scouting report to Bolan: "He keeps a couple of ornery Dobermans penned up in a little demilitarized zone surrounding the house. You don't go through there without permission, unless you want to get eaten alive."
So Bolan had come prepared for the Dobermans.
"Crossman air pistol, hypo darts," he had decided. And he'd instructed Blancanales, "Check the dosage carefully. We just want to put them down for a half-hour or so, not forever."
So now here he was at Howlin' Harlan's Del Mar beach house and it was time for the first probe into the trouble at San Diego. The weather was one of those fantastic Chamber of Commerce specials — a night almost as bright as day with the moon and stars seeming to hover at fingertip distance, the entire area wearing the heavens like a close-fitting bonnet — the breeze coming in off the Pacific like a lover's moist kiss.
Yeah, a night for romance, Bolan thought wryly — not warfare.
But warfare it had to be.
The saliva-dripping snarls from the Dobermans were not exactly moist kisses, and their rebounds against the heavy fencing were becoming frantic under the kill-instinct.
The tall man in combat black cooly checked the load in the Crossman, then he thrust the muzzle through the steel mesh of the fence and sent a syringe through. It caught the nearest dog in the tender zone just inside the shoulder. He sat down quickly, as though someone had thrown a de-activate-switch inside his head, whimpering and licking at the offended zone.
The other one went down just as quickly and peacefully.
Blancanales moved out of the tree cover and bent his back beside the fence. Bolan took the boost and went over quickly. As he touched down inside, the Politician showed him a droll smile and murmured, "I think there were just two."
Bolan whispered, "Funny, that's funny," and knelt to examine the tranquilized animals. He withdrew the darts and ruffled the fur in the areas of entry, then passed the Crossman and the darts through to his companion. "Okay, I'll take it from here," he growled. "Get on station and stay hard."
Blancanales tossed an exaggerated salute and abruptly disappeared into the trees. Bolan crossed the dog run and scaled the interior fence, then made a cautious advance across the grounds, blending with the landscape and the shadows wherever possible.
He was in blacksuit. Hands and face were also blackened. At his right hip was the formidable .44 AutoMag — beneath the left arm, the black and silent Beretta. Slit pockets on the lower legs held a variety of small tools. Several miniaturized electronic gadgets were carried in a belly-pouch.
Halfway across the grounds, Bolan paused in the shadow of a flowering shrub to establish contact with the warwagon, left several hundred yards behind under the command of Herman "Gadgets" Schwarz.
"I'm inside," Bolan reported in a husky whisper. "How's it sound?"
A tiny voice purred up from his shoulder in reply: "Great, coming in five-square on all channels. It's a go."
Bolan went.
This was to be a soft probe, an intelligence mission — not a hard hit.
Howlin' Harlan had once been a friend.
The problem now was one of re-identification. Harlan Winters, Brigadier General, U.S. Army retired. Friend or foe?
Either way, Bolan knew, Winters could well be the most dangerous problem so far encountered in this eternal damned war of his.
He could very well become the final problem.
By all the indicators, Howlie was a high-priced front man for the syndicate. Bolan had known of those indicators even before his arrival in San Diego.
Indicators, of course, were not always accurate.
If the general was really in a mess, Bolan could not turn his back on the man.
On the other hand ... if Howlie was as dirty as Bolan suspected ... then he could not turn his back on that, either.
Yeah, it could become a twenty-karat mess.
Therefore, friend or foe, the seal on General Winters had to be complete, positive and one hundred percent authentic. And it had to be done without the general's knowledge.
So this was more than a simple soft probe. It was a target-verification mission.
Howlin' Harlan Winters, once one of the most respected strategists in Vietnam, had to be outflanked and sealed.
And, yeah, San Diego was going to be one hell of an interesting war zone.
It had not been a spur of the moment decision to penetrate the Winters place, but a carefully planned operation, entailing several days of patient scouting and fastidious intelligence-gathering.
The job inside the house would require only a few minutes to perform. But only because so much attention had gone into advance preparations.
Bolan had scouted the terrain by boat, by car and on foot — covering specific periods of both day and night — noting comings and goings, visitors, trying to get some feel for the household routine, the people who lived there, worked there, slept there.
Blancanales, meanwhile, had nosed around the area in a home-delivery bakery truck, seeking and cultivating talkative neighbors, tradesmen, and local characters.
Gadgets Schwarz had engineered a telephone tap from the primary cable junction and had 48 hours of electronic surveillance recorded on the gear inside the warwagon.
So, sure, the thing should have gone pretty smooth. Bolan had known exactly where to go and which areas to avoid. He had a diagram of the interior layout of the house — he knew the ins and outs of the place — and he knew how to accomplish the most good in the least time.
The idea had been to rig the joint for sound, all the places that mattered, anyway — the entrance hall, the study, the dining room and a private little secondary study which adjoined the general's bedroom.
And, yeah, it should have gone off like clockwork.
It did not.
Bolan's first stop was at the large combination library-study at the downstairs rear.
Dying embers glowed feebly in a huge rock fireplace.
The only other light was at the far corner of the room, where a hi-intensity beam lamp was brightly illuminating a small area of a gleaming mahogany desk and offering the stark profile of a lovely young woman who stood woodenly behind the desk.
She was a tall girl, mid-twenties or thereabouts, soft blonde hair lying on golden shoulders, wide spaced eyes with lots of depth which right now seemed to be reflecting hell itself. She was wearing a see-through sleep outfit, and there were many interesting revelations there.
Bolan knew at first glance that she was Lisa Winters, the general's niece. He'd watched her through binoculars earlier that day as she swam and sunned nude on the private beach below the house.
She looked even better in the close-up, despite the fact that she appeared ready to come totally unglued at any moment.
Howlin' Harlan was present, also — in a sense. His body was slumped in a large wingback chair near the fireplace. Both arms dangled stiffly toward the floor. Part of his skull was missing. A lot of blood had streamed down the face and dried there. Dark stains and splotches across the front of the fireplace showed where more of it had gone.
He'd been dead awhile.
An army Colt .45 lay on the floor beneath his right hand.
The girl was staring at Bolan as though she'd been standing there waiting for him to come in and take charge.
He went straight to the general and dropped to one knee in front of the chair, inspecting without touching the grisly remains of the fightin'est chicken colonel he'd ever served under.
Bolan growled, "Gadgets."
A cautious "Yo," responded via his shoulder-phone.
"Howlin' Harlan is dead."
After a brief pause, Schwarz's choked voice replied, "Roger."
"Mission scrubbed. Tell Pol. I'm rejoining."
"Roger."
Bolan sighed to his feet and swiveled about to regard the girl. She had not moved a muscle.
He said, simply, "Too late."
"Long ago," she said. Her throat was dry and the words came out withered and gasping for life.
"What?" Bolan asked, not sure he'd understood.
"It's been too late for a long time," she repeated listlessly. Her eyes raked him from head to toe with half-hearted interest. "What are you, a Del Mar commando or something?"
He replied, "Or something," and turned his back on her to examine the smouldering ashes of the fireplace.
"I burned it all," she told him, the voice rising and bristling with taut defiance. "So you can go back and tell that to whomever sent you."
Bolan muttered, "The hell you did." He was gingerly salvaging a sheaf of scorched and blackened papers.
"That's all you care about, isn't it!" the girl screeched. "The damned papers! They're all any of you care about!"
She was at the edge of hysteria. Bolan went on about his business, extinguishing the dying sparks and carefully stuffing the salvage into his belly pouch. Then he went to the bar, poured a slug of scotch into a water glass, carried it to the girl, and held it to her lips. She sipped without argument, then strangled and pushed the glass away.
"I don't need that," she gasped.
"When did it happen?" he asked gruffly.
"I don't know. I just — who are you? How'd you get in here?"
"Have you called anyone yet?" Bolan asked, ignoring her queries.
She shook her head.
'It's time to." He picked up the telephone. "Who do you want to call?"
"Carl, I guess."
"Who is Carl?"
"Carl Thompson, our attorney."
Bolan found the number on a phone list attached to the base of the telephone. He set up the call, waited for the first ring, then pressed the instrument into the girl's hand and steered it to her head.
He went away, then, pausing at the doorway long enough to make sure that she had made a connection.
As he faded through the doorway he heard her saving, "Carl, this is Lisa. The general shot himself. He's dead. Help me. God please help…."
Howlin' Harlan Winters had been "sealed" for good.
And, yeah. It was going to be a hell of an interesting war zone.
Bolan was damned glad that fence was there.
With a shivering gut, he realized that those sentry dogs fit the rest of the place, and he found himself wondering if there wasn't a better way to begin the probe into San Diego.
The house occupied a sparsely populated stretch of highrise coastline just north of Torrey Pines State Park. It was not a spectacular place — not exactly in the millionaire class — but it seemed to offer the sort of comfort and seclusion which might be sought by a retired combat officer turned industrialist ... with something or someone to fear.
An English tudor style, it probably combined all the charm of an earlier age with the most lavish conveniences of the late twentieth century — and it was not a bad way for an old soldier to fade away.
As for the super-security — this seemed to fit the new image of General Harlan Winters — the image which had lately become so disquieting to the world's foremost Mafia-fighter.
A row of stubby, wind-stunted trees marked the circular periphery of the cliffside property. Set just inside this natural barrier was a double row of hurricane-fencing spaced about ten feet apart, neither row being of forbidding height but high enough to discourage the casual trespasser.
As a further note, bright red signs were placed along the outer fence with the warnings:
DANGER GUARD DOG RUN
In this regard, Rosario "Politician" Blancanales had earlier made his scouting report to Bolan: "He keeps a couple of ornery Dobermans penned up in a little demilitarized zone surrounding the house. You don't go through there without permission, unless you want to get eaten alive."
So Bolan had come prepared for the Dobermans.
"Crossman air pistol, hypo darts," he had decided. And he'd instructed Blancanales, "Check the dosage carefully. We just want to put them down for a half-hour or so, not forever."
So now here he was at Howlin' Harlan's Del Mar beach house and it was time for the first probe into the trouble at San Diego. The weather was one of those fantastic Chamber of Commerce specials — a night almost as bright as day with the moon and stars seeming to hover at fingertip distance, the entire area wearing the heavens like a close-fitting bonnet — the breeze coming in off the Pacific like a lover's moist kiss.
Yeah, a night for romance, Bolan thought wryly — not warfare.
But warfare it had to be.
The saliva-dripping snarls from the Dobermans were not exactly moist kisses, and their rebounds against the heavy fencing were becoming frantic under the kill-instinct.
The tall man in combat black cooly checked the load in the Crossman, then he thrust the muzzle through the steel mesh of the fence and sent a syringe through. It caught the nearest dog in the tender zone just inside the shoulder. He sat down quickly, as though someone had thrown a de-activate-switch inside his head, whimpering and licking at the offended zone.
The other one went down just as quickly and peacefully.
Blancanales moved out of the tree cover and bent his back beside the fence. Bolan took the boost and went over quickly. As he touched down inside, the Politician showed him a droll smile and murmured, "I think there were just two."
Bolan whispered, "Funny, that's funny," and knelt to examine the tranquilized animals. He withdrew the darts and ruffled the fur in the areas of entry, then passed the Crossman and the darts through to his companion. "Okay, I'll take it from here," he growled. "Get on station and stay hard."
Blancanales tossed an exaggerated salute and abruptly disappeared into the trees. Bolan crossed the dog run and scaled the interior fence, then made a cautious advance across the grounds, blending with the landscape and the shadows wherever possible.
He was in blacksuit. Hands and face were also blackened. At his right hip was the formidable .44 AutoMag — beneath the left arm, the black and silent Beretta. Slit pockets on the lower legs held a variety of small tools. Several miniaturized electronic gadgets were carried in a belly-pouch.
Halfway across the grounds, Bolan paused in the shadow of a flowering shrub to establish contact with the warwagon, left several hundred yards behind under the command of Herman "Gadgets" Schwarz.
"I'm inside," Bolan reported in a husky whisper. "How's it sound?"
A tiny voice purred up from his shoulder in reply: "Great, coming in five-square on all channels. It's a go."
Bolan went.
This was to be a soft probe, an intelligence mission — not a hard hit.
Howlin' Harlan had once been a friend.
The problem now was one of re-identification. Harlan Winters, Brigadier General, U.S. Army retired. Friend or foe?
Either way, Bolan knew, Winters could well be the most dangerous problem so far encountered in this eternal damned war of his.
He could very well become the final problem.
By all the indicators, Howlie was a high-priced front man for the syndicate. Bolan had known of those indicators even before his arrival in San Diego.
Indicators, of course, were not always accurate.
If the general was really in a mess, Bolan could not turn his back on the man.
On the other hand ... if Howlie was as dirty as Bolan suspected ... then he could not turn his back on that, either.
Yeah, it could become a twenty-karat mess.
Therefore, friend or foe, the seal on General Winters had to be complete, positive and one hundred percent authentic. And it had to be done without the general's knowledge.
So this was more than a simple soft probe. It was a target-verification mission.
Howlin' Harlan Winters, once one of the most respected strategists in Vietnam, had to be outflanked and sealed.
And, yeah, San Diego was going to be one hell of an interesting war zone.
It had not been a spur of the moment decision to penetrate the Winters place, but a carefully planned operation, entailing several days of patient scouting and fastidious intelligence-gathering.
The job inside the house would require only a few minutes to perform. But only because so much attention had gone into advance preparations.
Bolan had scouted the terrain by boat, by car and on foot — covering specific periods of both day and night — noting comings and goings, visitors, trying to get some feel for the household routine, the people who lived there, worked there, slept there.
Blancanales, meanwhile, had nosed around the area in a home-delivery bakery truck, seeking and cultivating talkative neighbors, tradesmen, and local characters.
Gadgets Schwarz had engineered a telephone tap from the primary cable junction and had 48 hours of electronic surveillance recorded on the gear inside the warwagon.
So, sure, the thing should have gone pretty smooth. Bolan had known exactly where to go and which areas to avoid. He had a diagram of the interior layout of the house — he knew the ins and outs of the place — and he knew how to accomplish the most good in the least time.
The idea had been to rig the joint for sound, all the places that mattered, anyway — the entrance hall, the study, the dining room and a private little secondary study which adjoined the general's bedroom.
And, yeah, it should have gone off like clockwork.
It did not.
Bolan's first stop was at the large combination library-study at the downstairs rear.
Dying embers glowed feebly in a huge rock fireplace.
The only other light was at the far corner of the room, where a hi-intensity beam lamp was brightly illuminating a small area of a gleaming mahogany desk and offering the stark profile of a lovely young woman who stood woodenly behind the desk.
She was a tall girl, mid-twenties or thereabouts, soft blonde hair lying on golden shoulders, wide spaced eyes with lots of depth which right now seemed to be reflecting hell itself. She was wearing a see-through sleep outfit, and there were many interesting revelations there.
Bolan knew at first glance that she was Lisa Winters, the general's niece. He'd watched her through binoculars earlier that day as she swam and sunned nude on the private beach below the house.
She looked even better in the close-up, despite the fact that she appeared ready to come totally unglued at any moment.
Howlin' Harlan was present, also — in a sense. His body was slumped in a large wingback chair near the fireplace. Both arms dangled stiffly toward the floor. Part of his skull was missing. A lot of blood had streamed down the face and dried there. Dark stains and splotches across the front of the fireplace showed where more of it had gone.
He'd been dead awhile.
An army Colt .45 lay on the floor beneath his right hand.
The girl was staring at Bolan as though she'd been standing there waiting for him to come in and take charge.
He went straight to the general and dropped to one knee in front of the chair, inspecting without touching the grisly remains of the fightin'est chicken colonel he'd ever served under.
Bolan growled, "Gadgets."
A cautious "Yo," responded via his shoulder-phone.
"Howlin' Harlan is dead."
After a brief pause, Schwarz's choked voice replied, "Roger."
"Mission scrubbed. Tell Pol. I'm rejoining."
"Roger."
Bolan sighed to his feet and swiveled about to regard the girl. She had not moved a muscle.
He said, simply, "Too late."
"Long ago," she said. Her throat was dry and the words came out withered and gasping for life.
"What?" Bolan asked, not sure he'd understood.
"It's been too late for a long time," she repeated listlessly. Her eyes raked him from head to toe with half-hearted interest. "What are you, a Del Mar commando or something?"
He replied, "Or something," and turned his back on her to examine the smouldering ashes of the fireplace.
"I burned it all," she told him, the voice rising and bristling with taut defiance. "So you can go back and tell that to whomever sent you."
Bolan muttered, "The hell you did." He was gingerly salvaging a sheaf of scorched and blackened papers.
"That's all you care about, isn't it!" the girl screeched. "The damned papers! They're all any of you care about!"
She was at the edge of hysteria. Bolan went on about his business, extinguishing the dying sparks and carefully stuffing the salvage into his belly pouch. Then he went to the bar, poured a slug of scotch into a water glass, carried it to the girl, and held it to her lips. She sipped without argument, then strangled and pushed the glass away.
"I don't need that," she gasped.
"When did it happen?" he asked gruffly.
"I don't know. I just — who are you? How'd you get in here?"
"Have you called anyone yet?" Bolan asked, ignoring her queries.
She shook her head.
'It's time to." He picked up the telephone. "Who do you want to call?"
"Carl, I guess."
"Who is Carl?"
"Carl Thompson, our attorney."
Bolan found the number on a phone list attached to the base of the telephone. He set up the call, waited for the first ring, then pressed the instrument into the girl's hand and steered it to her head.
He went away, then, pausing at the doorway long enough to make sure that she had made a connection.
As he faded through the doorway he heard her saving, "Carl, this is Lisa. The general shot himself. He's dead. Help me. God please help…."
Howlin' Harlan Winters had been "sealed" for good.
And, yeah. It was going to be a hell of an interesting war zone.
2
One for the man
He had been an OD soldier — acigar chewing, cussing, emotional and one hell of an inspiring C.O. — a true leader whom men followed because he led, not because he'd been created by Act of Congress.
He hadn't always been the most popular officer in camp. Some men found it hard to measure up to Howlin' Harlan's image of the fighting man. They muttered and bitched and frequently promised themselves that they'd shoot him in the back some dark night, and a few openly entertained ideas of shooting themselves as a means of being rotated out of Howlie's command — but one and all respected the man; some openly and warmly loved Harlan Winters; others would have gladly given their lives for his.
He'd been a latter-day Patton, a real soldier's soldier.
Yet, less than a year into civilian clothes, he had died in utter defeat.
This was the part which Mack Bolan could not accept.
Sure, good men sometimes went wrong.
But not that wrong.
Bolan could not buy it. He could not read Harlan Winters as a suicide.
"So what's your reading, then?" Blancanales asked him.
"I don't know," Bolan muttered in reply. "I'm no cop. Even if I were, though, I'd have the same signs to read. The signs all say, sure, Howlie knew the world was closing in on him and he took the easy way out. My gut can't read signs though, Pol. And in my gut I know that all the signs are wrong."
Schwarz put in, "Mine agrees. Howlie didn't kill himself."
The three men had been working for hours over the charred papers which Bolan had salvaged from the Winters' fireplace.
Twelve sheets of typewritten correspondence had been fairly well-reconstructed; these seemed to be an exchange between Winters and a Pentagon official involving "Quality Acceptance Waivers" on several large shipments of war materiel which the Winters firm was producing under government contract.
Various other charred remnants provided intelligence which seemed to confirm the suspicion about Harlan Winters which Bolan had brought from Washington.
A few months after his retirement from active duty, the general had popped up as president of a newly-formed California corporation which was geared entirely to the needs of the military. "Winco" was actually a mini-conglomerate, a merger of a half-dozen or so previously obscure companies which had never been directly engaged in government-contract work. Winco, however, came to life with several sizeable contracts already in its corporate pocket.
The meteoric rise of the new organization, together with a variety of suspicious circumstances, brought it under the scrutiny of several governmental investigative bodies.
Each of the several investigations had been quickly and quietly halted, at the Washington level, mainly through the efforts of a syndicate honcho Bolan had left dead in Washington.
So, sure, Bolan had known a thing or two about his ex-C.O.'s civilian activities, even before San Diego. He had known, also, that one day he might be faced with the unavoidable task of descending as the Executioner upon the man who had created the Executioner.
Howlin' Harlan had been Bolan's mentor, several life-times ago. The then-lieutenant colonel had been in Vietnam since before the Gulf of Tonkin escalation — first as a military advisor and later as a Green Beret specialist in counter-guerilla warfare.
Bolan had come into the combat theatre as an armor specialist and volunteer advisor in the effort to equip and train the fierce Montagnard tribesmen. Eventually he found himself with a small team of American advisors under the direct command of the already legendary Howlin' Harlan.
In such an operation there was no room for the military formalities which customarily serve as a wall between an officer and his men. Bolan and Winters became a pair, each hugely respecting the professional abilities of the other. The colonel was particularly impressed with Bolan's cool marksmanship and his steely self-command under combat stress.
Under the tutelage and direction of Howlie Winters, Sgt. Bolan became the original "execution specialist" in that theatre of operations. The first Penetration Team was formed around his particular abilities, designed to penetrate and operate deep within enemy-held territory for long periods without direct support of any nature — and Howlin' Harlan himself had gone along on the first few "shakedown cruises" of this potent idea in psychological counterwar. Those early excursions, in fact, had teamed only Winters and Bolan with a five-man support group of specially selected Montagnards.
These were the "proof" runs.
Later, the penetration teams were almost wholly American and they operated wherever enemy occupation and terrorism was present; later still, they were given missions to pursue enemy terrorists into sanctuary areas, though these assignments rarely found their way into the official record.
Howlin' Harlan had not been the sort of man to be bound by legalities. "There are no rules of warfare," he'd often told Bolan. "The only rule of warfare is to win."
Harlan Winters had grown accustomed to winning, and his "death specialist" teams became known and feared in every enemy camp in Southeast Asia.
PenTeam Able had been the first, though — and that one was Bolan's team.
He had continued to receive the rougher missions. And Howlin' Harlan, now a full chicken colonel in charge of all the teams, often accompanied Able Team on some of the briefer penetrations.
Yes, they'd been a pair.
Together they'd subsisted on jungle roots and swamp grass, insects and wild animals, lying half-submerged in rice paddies or squatting semiup-right in canals and enemy-infested junglelands. Together they'd scouted the Ho Chi Minh trail and mini-blitzed it at carefully selected points from one end to the other; together they'd invaded the terrorist sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia; together they had many times fought their way back across miles of hostile and aroused territory in hair-raising withdrawals to safe country.
Yeah. Bolan knew the inside of Howlin' Harlan Winters like he knew himself.
And no, hell no, he could not accept this man's death as a weakling's act of self-destruction.
As for the other — the mob involvement — that idea had not been so irreconcilable with the image of the man. Winters had been the type of guy who made his own rules and constructed his own vision of morality. He had continually bucked the "political system" which he blamed for prolonging the war. Often he had ignored official directives and policy decisions from Saigon and Washington. On more than one occasion Bolan had suspected that his C.O. was falsifying reports on the PenTeam strikes.
Eventually "the system" had caught up with the maverick colonel. Quietly and with notable absence of ceremonial honors he'd been relieved of his combat command and rotated to a desk job in the Saigon headshed. All his troopers had known, though, that his rotation orders had come from the highest Pentagon sources. "Howlie" had become too much of a colorful personality; war correspondents had latched onto the guy and had, in effect, written him out of the war. The Vietnam thing had become a hot issue in the American press, and Howlin' Harlan Winters represented too much of a potential embarrassment to the men in Washington.
Several months later, Bolan himself had come up for routine rotation. He took a month's leave in the states, then requested reassignment to his old outfit. The request was promptly granted and Bolan returned to the war zone for another full combat tour with the PenTeams. He had never again seen Harlan Winters, however, until that confrontation with sudden and complete retirement in the general's study in Del Mar.
Bolan had not always agreed with everything Harlan Winters stood for. He had not always approved of his C.O.'s official conduct. But he had loved and respected the man for the soldier that he was and now, in San Diego, resolved to give the memory of a valiant warrior a decent burial.
He was fully prepared to acknowledge the almost certain truth that his old commander had been knowingly involved with the Mafia.
There were indications, even, that this involvement extended back into the general's GHQ stint at Saigon, during the post-combative period.
But he was not ready yet to bury Harlan Winters without military honors.
"So where do we go from here?" Blancanales wanted to know.
Bolan quietly replied, "We go into enemy territory, Pol. Into the sanctuaries. We go in there and drag the colonel out. Okay?"
The other two veterans of Able Team exchanged glances, then Gadgets Schwarz cleared his throat and said, "Right. It's a rescue mission."
"For a dead man," Blancanales sighed.
"For the memory of a good soldier," Bolan corrected him. "Howlin' Harlan deserves an Able Team effort. Right?"
"Right," Schwarz echoed.
"But no false reports," Blancanales said quietly.
"We just bring him out," Bolan agreed. "The man that was there can speak for himself."
"Agreed," Blancanales replied. "We'll give it one good rattle for the man."
The tentative siege of San Diego had not been lifted.
On the contrary, it had suddenly undergone massive intensification.
Able Team was on the job.
He hadn't always been the most popular officer in camp. Some men found it hard to measure up to Howlin' Harlan's image of the fighting man. They muttered and bitched and frequently promised themselves that they'd shoot him in the back some dark night, and a few openly entertained ideas of shooting themselves as a means of being rotated out of Howlie's command — but one and all respected the man; some openly and warmly loved Harlan Winters; others would have gladly given their lives for his.
He'd been a latter-day Patton, a real soldier's soldier.
Yet, less than a year into civilian clothes, he had died in utter defeat.
This was the part which Mack Bolan could not accept.
Sure, good men sometimes went wrong.
But not that wrong.
Bolan could not buy it. He could not read Harlan Winters as a suicide.
"So what's your reading, then?" Blancanales asked him.
"I don't know," Bolan muttered in reply. "I'm no cop. Even if I were, though, I'd have the same signs to read. The signs all say, sure, Howlie knew the world was closing in on him and he took the easy way out. My gut can't read signs though, Pol. And in my gut I know that all the signs are wrong."
Schwarz put in, "Mine agrees. Howlie didn't kill himself."
The three men had been working for hours over the charred papers which Bolan had salvaged from the Winters' fireplace.
Twelve sheets of typewritten correspondence had been fairly well-reconstructed; these seemed to be an exchange between Winters and a Pentagon official involving "Quality Acceptance Waivers" on several large shipments of war materiel which the Winters firm was producing under government contract.
Various other charred remnants provided intelligence which seemed to confirm the suspicion about Harlan Winters which Bolan had brought from Washington.
A few months after his retirement from active duty, the general had popped up as president of a newly-formed California corporation which was geared entirely to the needs of the military. "Winco" was actually a mini-conglomerate, a merger of a half-dozen or so previously obscure companies which had never been directly engaged in government-contract work. Winco, however, came to life with several sizeable contracts already in its corporate pocket.
The meteoric rise of the new organization, together with a variety of suspicious circumstances, brought it under the scrutiny of several governmental investigative bodies.
Each of the several investigations had been quickly and quietly halted, at the Washington level, mainly through the efforts of a syndicate honcho Bolan had left dead in Washington.
So, sure, Bolan had known a thing or two about his ex-C.O.'s civilian activities, even before San Diego. He had known, also, that one day he might be faced with the unavoidable task of descending as the Executioner upon the man who had created the Executioner.
Howlin' Harlan had been Bolan's mentor, several life-times ago. The then-lieutenant colonel had been in Vietnam since before the Gulf of Tonkin escalation — first as a military advisor and later as a Green Beret specialist in counter-guerilla warfare.
Bolan had come into the combat theatre as an armor specialist and volunteer advisor in the effort to equip and train the fierce Montagnard tribesmen. Eventually he found himself with a small team of American advisors under the direct command of the already legendary Howlin' Harlan.
In such an operation there was no room for the military formalities which customarily serve as a wall between an officer and his men. Bolan and Winters became a pair, each hugely respecting the professional abilities of the other. The colonel was particularly impressed with Bolan's cool marksmanship and his steely self-command under combat stress.
Under the tutelage and direction of Howlie Winters, Sgt. Bolan became the original "execution specialist" in that theatre of operations. The first Penetration Team was formed around his particular abilities, designed to penetrate and operate deep within enemy-held territory for long periods without direct support of any nature — and Howlin' Harlan himself had gone along on the first few "shakedown cruises" of this potent idea in psychological counterwar. Those early excursions, in fact, had teamed only Winters and Bolan with a five-man support group of specially selected Montagnards.
These were the "proof" runs.
Later, the penetration teams were almost wholly American and they operated wherever enemy occupation and terrorism was present; later still, they were given missions to pursue enemy terrorists into sanctuary areas, though these assignments rarely found their way into the official record.
Howlin' Harlan had not been the sort of man to be bound by legalities. "There are no rules of warfare," he'd often told Bolan. "The only rule of warfare is to win."
Harlan Winters had grown accustomed to winning, and his "death specialist" teams became known and feared in every enemy camp in Southeast Asia.
PenTeam Able had been the first, though — and that one was Bolan's team.
He had continued to receive the rougher missions. And Howlin' Harlan, now a full chicken colonel in charge of all the teams, often accompanied Able Team on some of the briefer penetrations.
Yes, they'd been a pair.
Together they'd subsisted on jungle roots and swamp grass, insects and wild animals, lying half-submerged in rice paddies or squatting semiup-right in canals and enemy-infested junglelands. Together they'd scouted the Ho Chi Minh trail and mini-blitzed it at carefully selected points from one end to the other; together they'd invaded the terrorist sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia; together they had many times fought their way back across miles of hostile and aroused territory in hair-raising withdrawals to safe country.
Yeah. Bolan knew the inside of Howlin' Harlan Winters like he knew himself.
And no, hell no, he could not accept this man's death as a weakling's act of self-destruction.
As for the other — the mob involvement — that idea had not been so irreconcilable with the image of the man. Winters had been the type of guy who made his own rules and constructed his own vision of morality. He had continually bucked the "political system" which he blamed for prolonging the war. Often he had ignored official directives and policy decisions from Saigon and Washington. On more than one occasion Bolan had suspected that his C.O. was falsifying reports on the PenTeam strikes.
Eventually "the system" had caught up with the maverick colonel. Quietly and with notable absence of ceremonial honors he'd been relieved of his combat command and rotated to a desk job in the Saigon headshed. All his troopers had known, though, that his rotation orders had come from the highest Pentagon sources. "Howlie" had become too much of a colorful personality; war correspondents had latched onto the guy and had, in effect, written him out of the war. The Vietnam thing had become a hot issue in the American press, and Howlin' Harlan Winters represented too much of a potential embarrassment to the men in Washington.
Several months later, Bolan himself had come up for routine rotation. He took a month's leave in the states, then requested reassignment to his old outfit. The request was promptly granted and Bolan returned to the war zone for another full combat tour with the PenTeams. He had never again seen Harlan Winters, however, until that confrontation with sudden and complete retirement in the general's study in Del Mar.
Bolan had not always agreed with everything Harlan Winters stood for. He had not always approved of his C.O.'s official conduct. But he had loved and respected the man for the soldier that he was and now, in San Diego, resolved to give the memory of a valiant warrior a decent burial.
He was fully prepared to acknowledge the almost certain truth that his old commander had been knowingly involved with the Mafia.
There were indications, even, that this involvement extended back into the general's GHQ stint at Saigon, during the post-combative period.
But he was not ready yet to bury Harlan Winters without military honors.
"So where do we go from here?" Blancanales wanted to know.
Bolan quietly replied, "We go into enemy territory, Pol. Into the sanctuaries. We go in there and drag the colonel out. Okay?"
The other two veterans of Able Team exchanged glances, then Gadgets Schwarz cleared his throat and said, "Right. It's a rescue mission."
"For a dead man," Blancanales sighed.
"For the memory of a good soldier," Bolan corrected him. "Howlin' Harlan deserves an Able Team effort. Right?"
"Right," Schwarz echoed.
"But no false reports," Blancanales said quietly.
"We just bring him out," Bolan agreed. "The man that was there can speak for himself."
"Agreed," Blancanales replied. "We'll give it one good rattle for the man."
The tentative siege of San Diego had not been lifted.
On the contrary, it had suddenly undergone massive intensification.
Able Team was on the job.
3
On notice
The first gray fingers of dawn were pushing into the cloudless Southern California sky and darkly silhouetting the rugged rise of mountain peaks to the north and east.
Montgomery Field, a suburban airport favored by private and charter pilots, lay quietly brooding upon the approaching daylight.
Several men in white coveralls, employees of the flying service which operated the airport facilities, moved slowly among the small craft in the tie-down area in a routine inspection.
Runway lights and the field beacon were still in operation, and brightness spilled from several open hangars.
From the base operator's private terminal could be heard the clacking of a flight-advisory teletype.
Manuel "Chicano" Ramirez and Jack "Schoolteacher" Fizzi occupied a late-model LTD, parked near a service ramp in the shadows of the terminal building. The windows were down and Fizzi was lightly drumming his fingers on the roof of the vehicle, keeping time with a country-music tune from the car radio.
Ramirez, the wheelman, a heavy man with a lumpy face and shaggy hair — expensively attired but rumpled and obviously disrespectful of $200 suits. He was about forty and well known in the police files of several nations. At the moment, the Chicano was slumped behind the wheel of the car, eyes closed, seemingly dozing.
Fizzi was in his late twenties. He had attended a small eastern college for two years, then traveled west to seek his fortune. One year to the day after his arrival in California, Fizzi began a one-to-five tenure at Folsom Prison for Grand Theft — Auto. For the next twenty months he had worked in the prison's rehabilitation program as a teacher of illiterate cons. Apparently he had learned more than he taught at Folsom. His "connection" with Ben Lucasi, overlord of Southern California organized crime, was arranged within a few weeks of his release from confinement.
The Schoolteacher was always sharply dressed, almost tensely alert, his hair longish but carefully groomed in the new mod look. The image projected was the new look in junior executive. It was a false image.
The big man behind the wheel lifted his head sluggishly from the back rest and growled, "Wha' time is it?"
"Time enough," Fizzi replied. "He's ten minutes late."
"Hate these fuckin' milk runs," the other complained.
"Me too." The handsome one sighed, adding, "This will be the last for awhile." He turned off the radio. "Maybe they hit some bad weather." "Go ask the guy inside," Ramirez suggested. "Aw no. He'll be here."
Two men wearing the white coveralls of the flying service rounded the corner of the terminal building and approached the vehicle. "Ask these grease monkeys." "What the tell do they know?" Fizzi growled. "He's been late before. Just cool it."
The men in white were making a casual approach, laughing softly between themselves until reaching the LTD, then they split and came down opposite sides of the car.
The one moving along the driver's side was about medium height, somewhat thickset, dark hair and skin, smile-wrinkles setting the expression of the face.
The man at the other side was tall, broad-shouldered, athletically built — a bit younger than his companion — with chiseled features and eyes that dominated the entire appearance. "Ask 'em," the wheelman insisted. Fizzi growled a profanity and thrust his head outside just as the tall man drew abreast. "Hey, jock, what's the weather report for the mountains?" he asked in a snarly monotone.
"Stormy," the big guy replied in a voice of sheerest ice. A silencer-tipped black auto appeared in his hand from seemingly nowhere, to graft itself to Fizzi's outthrust forehead.
A gasp from the other side of the car signaled that the same unsettling event had occurred over there. The young triggerman very carefully relaxed his tightening muscles and his tone was entirely respectful as he said, "Okay, all right, okay. Let's cool it. What's the beef?"
The tall man issued another quiet single-word response: "Outside."
It was like a voice from some deepfreeze, not calculated to encourage inane argument.
The guy backed off, just a little, the ominous tip of that black pistol unwaveringly remaining on target though, his free hand opening the door and swinging it wide.
Fizzi slid carefully to the outside, keeping his hands in clear view. As though acting out a conditioned reflex, he then turned his back on the big guy, spread his feet, raised his hands, and fell forward against the roof of the car in a "frisk" stance.
Somewhat the same scene was being enacted at the opposite side of the vehicle.
Ramirez was growling, "Where's your warrant? I wanna see a warrant."
"What're you guys — feds?" Fizzi wanted to know as the tall man relieved him of his weapon.
That same icy voice replied, "Sort of."
Before he quite realized that it was happening, Fizzi then found that his wrists were securely taped together at his back and the guy was applying a wide strip of adhesive to his mouth. An instant later he and Ramirez were curled into the trunk compartment and the guy was shoving something into his fist — something small and metallic with irregular edges.
Then the trunk lid was closed and he was sharing the cramped darkness with Ramirez.
He maneuvered the little metallic object into his palm and rubbed his fingers along the outline — and suddenly Fizzi knew what that object was.
Montgomery Field, a suburban airport favored by private and charter pilots, lay quietly brooding upon the approaching daylight.
Several men in white coveralls, employees of the flying service which operated the airport facilities, moved slowly among the small craft in the tie-down area in a routine inspection.
Runway lights and the field beacon were still in operation, and brightness spilled from several open hangars.
From the base operator's private terminal could be heard the clacking of a flight-advisory teletype.
Manuel "Chicano" Ramirez and Jack "Schoolteacher" Fizzi occupied a late-model LTD, parked near a service ramp in the shadows of the terminal building. The windows were down and Fizzi was lightly drumming his fingers on the roof of the vehicle, keeping time with a country-music tune from the car radio.
Ramirez, the wheelman, a heavy man with a lumpy face and shaggy hair — expensively attired but rumpled and obviously disrespectful of $200 suits. He was about forty and well known in the police files of several nations. At the moment, the Chicano was slumped behind the wheel of the car, eyes closed, seemingly dozing.
Fizzi was in his late twenties. He had attended a small eastern college for two years, then traveled west to seek his fortune. One year to the day after his arrival in California, Fizzi began a one-to-five tenure at Folsom Prison for Grand Theft — Auto. For the next twenty months he had worked in the prison's rehabilitation program as a teacher of illiterate cons. Apparently he had learned more than he taught at Folsom. His "connection" with Ben Lucasi, overlord of Southern California organized crime, was arranged within a few weeks of his release from confinement.
The Schoolteacher was always sharply dressed, almost tensely alert, his hair longish but carefully groomed in the new mod look. The image projected was the new look in junior executive. It was a false image.
The big man behind the wheel lifted his head sluggishly from the back rest and growled, "Wha' time is it?"
"Time enough," Fizzi replied. "He's ten minutes late."
"Hate these fuckin' milk runs," the other complained.
"Me too." The handsome one sighed, adding, "This will be the last for awhile." He turned off the radio. "Maybe they hit some bad weather." "Go ask the guy inside," Ramirez suggested. "Aw no. He'll be here."
Two men wearing the white coveralls of the flying service rounded the corner of the terminal building and approached the vehicle. "Ask these grease monkeys." "What the tell do they know?" Fizzi growled. "He's been late before. Just cool it."
The men in white were making a casual approach, laughing softly between themselves until reaching the LTD, then they split and came down opposite sides of the car.
The one moving along the driver's side was about medium height, somewhat thickset, dark hair and skin, smile-wrinkles setting the expression of the face.
The man at the other side was tall, broad-shouldered, athletically built — a bit younger than his companion — with chiseled features and eyes that dominated the entire appearance. "Ask 'em," the wheelman insisted. Fizzi growled a profanity and thrust his head outside just as the tall man drew abreast. "Hey, jock, what's the weather report for the mountains?" he asked in a snarly monotone.
"Stormy," the big guy replied in a voice of sheerest ice. A silencer-tipped black auto appeared in his hand from seemingly nowhere, to graft itself to Fizzi's outthrust forehead.
A gasp from the other side of the car signaled that the same unsettling event had occurred over there. The young triggerman very carefully relaxed his tightening muscles and his tone was entirely respectful as he said, "Okay, all right, okay. Let's cool it. What's the beef?"
The tall man issued another quiet single-word response: "Outside."
It was like a voice from some deepfreeze, not calculated to encourage inane argument.
The guy backed off, just a little, the ominous tip of that black pistol unwaveringly remaining on target though, his free hand opening the door and swinging it wide.
Fizzi slid carefully to the outside, keeping his hands in clear view. As though acting out a conditioned reflex, he then turned his back on the big guy, spread his feet, raised his hands, and fell forward against the roof of the car in a "frisk" stance.
Somewhat the same scene was being enacted at the opposite side of the vehicle.
Ramirez was growling, "Where's your warrant? I wanna see a warrant."
"What're you guys — feds?" Fizzi wanted to know as the tall man relieved him of his weapon.
That same icy voice replied, "Sort of."
Before he quite realized that it was happening, Fizzi then found that his wrists were securely taped together at his back and the guy was applying a wide strip of adhesive to his mouth. An instant later he and Ramirez were curled into the trunk compartment and the guy was shoving something into his fist — something small and metallic with irregular edges.
Then the trunk lid was closed and he was sharing the cramped darkness with Ramirez.
He maneuvered the little metallic object into his palm and rubbed his fingers along the outline — and suddenly Fizzi knew what that object was.