Terrible Tuesday

by Don Pendleton

  Another guy with gun in hand came charging through and was met there smack in the doorway by a sizzling round from the Beretta. It punched him back into the kitchen and the door swung closed behind the falling body.

  Bolan gave it a beat to see what else might try it via the swinging door, then he whirled to the window and kicked his way outside, getting there in time to spot another guy sprinting across the grounds in fast retreat. He quickly released the sound suppressor and hoisted the Belle into target stance, squeezing off a single round that caught the guy in mid-stride at about sixty yards out. The guy did a flinging cartwheel and stayed there. Instantly a car, somewhere down the street, roared into motion with tires squealing in frantic getaway.

  The guy on the lawn was dead and carried no identification. Likewise, the one on the kitchen floor. An elderly woman, obviously the cook, had died with a bullet in the belly. The little man in the white coat had taken two hits in the chest, which had killed him instantly.

  McCullough was huddled with his ladies in the library.

  “I’ve called the police,” he told Bolan.

  “Then I’ll be leaving,” Bolan told him. “I wasn’t sent here to start a war, anyway.”

  “You didn’t start it,” the guy told him. “But you saved our lives, and we’re grateful.”

  No doubt about that, no. This one bore all the signs of a classic hit. A dawn raid. If those guys had gotten their way, they would have left nothing but dead bodies strewn from kitchen to bedrooms. And this could have had nothing to do with the hit on Terry Fortune; there had been no time for such retaliation.

  “You’re in big trouble, McCullough,” Bolan needlessly pointed out.

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Can you handle it?”

  “I can handle the police question. I don’t know about the rest.”

  The cold Bolan gaze flicked to the women. It met hostility in the young one, apology from the other.

  “Get your women out of here as quick as you can,” he suggested. “Send them some place cool and keep them there until I say different.”

  The McCullough face showed instant relief. “Does that mean you’ll be staying in town for awhile?”

  Bolan gave him a sober smile as he replied, “That’s what it means. Play it careful. I’ll be in touch.”

  He gave the women a final, cool inspection then went out of there. The cops would be responding very quickly, in this exclusive neighborhood. He wished to be well clear before their arrival.

  The sun was just beginning to show over the hills.

  Tuesday, Terrible Tuesday. Already it had claimed the lives of five people in Mack Bolan’s shadow.

  And yeah, Leo—it was a hell of an inspired starting place.

  CHAPTER 2

  CLOSURE

  During his New Orleans campaign, Bolan had acquired a twenty-six-foot GMC motor home, or RV (recreational vehicle), which—with the assistance of aerospace engineers who rallied to the cause—became the Warwagon, a rolling dreadnought with advanced electronics systems that had added significant new dimensions to his war effort.

  Besides massive and sophisticated firepower, the big cruiser also provided the highest reach in electronic surveillance and intelligence gathering capabilities. The rolling laboratory and gunship had also been “home” to the warrior ever since New Orleans, providing the perfect cover beneath her innocuous RV exterior and allowing the man to move freely about the continent within his own little world, thus avoiding many dangers of detection and entrapment.

  But the big vehicle had posed a special problem for this second mile effort. A six-day nationwide blitz could be mounted only with air transportation. Bolan had felt that his effort would be severely diminished if he were to leave the gunship behind. Therefore his single request of Brognola was for air support—an airlift operation to keep man and machine together along that second mile.

  Brognola gladly complied, placing a C-135 aircraft with military crew at Bolan’s disposal and further providing a “trusted technician” to pilot and safeguard the gunship for the airlift operations.

  The “trusted technician” turned out to be a female operative out of Brognola’s own Washington headshed with the unlikely name of April Rose and the dazzling beauty of a Hollywood starlet. The lady was an engineer and physicist with a specially developed background in computer technology and communications. She was a whiz kid—and a gutsy one, at that.

  “The lady has it all together,” Brognola had assured his friend, the warrior. “She can be a lot of comfort and you’re a damned fool if you don’t utilize her talents to the fullest.”

  “Just what are her talents?” Bolan had wished to know.

  “She can run that bloodmobile for you, I’ll guarantee that. The lady could write the book on that Buck Rogers gear you have in there. That’s mainly why she was selected. I was afraid to turn just anybody loose with that stuff. But she’s a lot more than a babysitter for computers. Believe it.”

  Bolan had learned to believe it; the lady had proven her guts and had come through quite well under fire during their initial operation in Indiana. But there had been frictions early on, fueled perhaps by the inevitable male-female chemical reactions flowing between these two exceptional poles of human excellence. Bolan naturally resisted the idea of placing that lovely life in the jeopardy of his savage world. April herself had trouble reconciling Bolan’s modus operandi with her own deeply ingrained concepts of justice under the law. The frictions were still there, just below the surface of the association—and that was natural, also. Even though time expands and relationships mature rapidly in the heat of high adventure, the fact remained that these two had known each other for barely more than twenty-four hours.

  Still, frictions and all, the two had reached a certain level of understanding and accommodation in a remarkably short time. They had made war together and they had made a sort of love together. More than anything else, they had made peace together. April Rose was now fully “on board,” and she was providing essential services to the six day war—so much so, in fact, that Bolan would soon be forced to acknowledge that he could not swing it without her.

  She was “on board” that Tuesday morning, also.

  Bolan established radio communications with his “rolling base” immediately upon departure from the McCullough home.

  “Blackjack to base, hello.”

  Instantly, cool and calm: “Go ahead, Blackjack.”

  “What’s your situation?”

  “A lot quicker than you led me to believe. I hardly had time to get set.”

  “You’re on it, then.”

  “You bet I’m on it, General. We’re heading west on Mulholland—about, uh, two miles east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.”

  “Great. Play it loose. Don’t try to close. Is it wired good?”

  “Affirm, the wires are good and I am playing it loose.”

  “Maintain track. I am closing.”

  “Roger.”

  She was sharp, yeah. There had been no thought that the game would erupt so soon. She’d arrived in the McCullough neighborhood just behind Bolan to begin the stake-out. Then, according to her report, she’d hardly settled in when the shooting began. Now she was on that getaway car, trailing loose with an electronic lock to minimize the chance of discovery.

  It could be a useless exercise, of course. There was no certainty that the hired killers would provide any sort of useful link to the new conspiracy in California. But Bolan was forced to grab for straws. His own understanding of the situation was entirely nebulous—and although he knew the identity of many of the players, he did not know precisely where all of the diverse connections came together, where each of the particular players fit, nor even if he had the leaders identified. Most discouraging, he did not understand the new logic. What was this proudly whispered California Concept? How did it differ from the standard logic of the Mafia world? Which areas of the straight society were being manipulated and shaped to fit the criminal
need?

  Each of these were highly important considerations if the blitz was to be effectively targeted.

  A large element in Bolan’s success at crime-busting was his understanding of the enemy. It was a game of tactics and strategy, movement and countermovement, a complicated and sensitive game of wits. He did not merely charge in with weapons blazing—although this may appear to be the case to casual observers. The man was much more than a killer, though. He was a soldier—a one-man army in every sense of the term—and he played the game that soldiers had invented: warfare. It was a science and it was an art. Mack Bolan was perhaps the supreme artist in this area of human accomplishment. The big turnabout in the Washington attitude toward this man was a recognition of that expertise. The U.S. government had not extended an official embrace to a psychopathic killer, but to a dedicated and highly accomplished military strategist and tactician.

  The Bolan game was not a simple game, no—but, at the moment, it had been reduced to an elemental level of action-reaction. He had hoped to apply pressure that would topple dominoes all along the action-reaction sequence, straight to the heart of the California question, and he had set up William McCullough as the trigger domino. But there was the time factor which Bolan considered inflexible for his six day war, coupled with the principle of uncertainty inherent in any such approach. He had to make a start then run with the developments, relying upon his own fine instincts to seize the proper moment and run the true course.

  The hit on McCullough seemed to provide one such moment—and one that held much more dramatic possibilities than the original plan. So Bolan was “playing the ear”—which, simply translated, meant that he was following finely developed instincts and hoping for the best.

  Instinct can take the warrior only so far, though. The rest must come from that combination of science, art, and heart that produces the superior warrior—and Bolan was aware of that fact, also.

  So it was not a psychopath filled with blood-lust who tracked that hit car into the Topanga Canyon wilds on Terrible Tuesday. It was a scientist and artist with a warrior’s heart, sallying forth to bait the dragon in its lair.

  The hell of it was that he did not even know what the dragon looked like.

  CHAPTER 3

  MISTY

  The track had swung south at the upper western edge of Los Angeles, following Topanga Canyon Boulevard, a rugged arterial connecting the San Fernando Valley to the coast above Santa Monica. A pea-soup fog was laying in from the sea to drape the mountains and seep along the canyon toward the valley, clinging in turgid pockets of ground-based clouds to the hollows and depressions of that tangled landscape.

  For miles, now, the visibility had been fluctuating rapidly from fifty feet to zero in an unpredictable pattern, at times producing a vertigo-like sensation as the big vehicle crept through the twists and turns of the tortuous route. At one early point, April had to remind herself that she was still within the city of Los Angeles—a curious fact, considering the wild isolation through which she was moving.

  The tracking would have been impossible without the aid of the Warwagon’s sophisticated systems—and perhaps it was this very circumstance that was producing the occasional vertigo. She was navigating as much by instruments as by direct reference to the road, dividing her attention between the roadway and the terrain-reference monitor of the navigation console, upon which was displayed a road-sector map overlying the grid of the computer-fed electronic vectoring system. It was a fabulous device, embodying the most advanced state-of-the-art concepts of modern technology, a delight that was not lost on the engineering mind of April Rose. She had told Bolan, at their first meeting: “I’d like to meet the person who designed these systems.” More than that, though, April would savor the opportunity to dig into the computer heart that integrated all those diverse electronic subsystems, combining radar-following, microwave radio, lasers, infrareds, and magnetic field detectors into a single display function to provide, at once, target tracking, track orientation, and terrain-route orientation. The result, as translated to the monitor-viewscreen, provided a visual display similar to a roadmap upon which three tiny, pulsing lights revealed the positions of the target vehicle, the Warwagon, and the chase car bearing Mack Bolan. The three were creeping south along the canyon, spaced about two hundred yards apart—and they had been running in this attitude for more than twenty minutes when the monitor signaled a change of track.

  April immediately reported the development to Bolan. “Deviation.”

  “Roger. Is it a charted road?”

  “Negative. This could be end of track. Stand by.”

  A moment later the pulse from the target vehicle changed color from amber to red. “Engine shutdown,” she reported.

  “Where away?” Bolan radioed back.

  “One hundred yards south of my position, fifty yards east.”

  “Stand down,” he instructed. “I am coming aboard.”

  She found a broad shoulder and pulled the cruiser off the road, immediately activating the audio scans and bringing them on line. The headlights of Bolan’s car swung in behind her a moment later and the big man came aboard.

  He threw her a quick smile and two clipped words—“Good work”—and went straight to the rear. He was removing his clothes—and she knew what that meant. With a guy like Bolan it meant war, not romance. Never romance, damnit. It appeared that such never quite fit into his timetable. Or maybe it was just some anachronism called chivalry that stayed the romantic beast. Whatever, her initial misgivings about their close association had borne no fruit whatever. Within minutes after their first meeting, he was ordering her to undress. For war, naturally. Chivalry or whatever, it sort of hurt a girl’s self-image to have a man stare right through her nudity and think of only war. And even when the war was over, for awhile, he had lain down with her nudity to gently touch and console the hurts and bruises thereon with no attempt whatever to capitalize upon the moment.

  “What are you?” she’d asked him whimsically, last night, as they lay closely touching, but not really, during the flight from Indiana. “Some sort of monk?”

  And she’d known he was smiling, though she could not see his face as he quietly replied, “Some sort of tired. You too, soldier.”

  She was, of course. Damaged, too—though, she thought, not visibly. A madman had played kickball with her pubes, among other indignities. There was no way she could have accommodated any sort of romantic involvement with that area of her anatomy. Maybe the general knew that, or guessed it. But at least he could have tried.

  “Catch you later, then,” she’d murmured, feeling all warm and good and secure in the strength of his presence. She’d drifted in and out of sleep while listening to his even breathing, and thinking what a comforting sound it was. During one of the “out” periods she’d gotten herself worked up with a little light sleepytime fantasy and raised to an elbow to lightly brush his lips with hers, thinking him to be safely asleep. But even as their lips touched she saw that his eyes were slitted. He lunged away from that light encounter with the big silver pistol rising up between them.

  “Sorry!” she gasped.

  “My apology,” he muttered, in a flash totally relaxed again and those remarkable eyes retreating behind the slitted lids.

  She’d known, then, how frighteningly close she’d been to death—and she’d gained another important insight into this unusual man. He slept with his eyes open and a gun at instant access. How terrible! How horribly grim for any human being to be forever cocked and ready, poised at the edge of the abyss of death, unwilling to let go even in sleep. And she understood, however imperfectly, the terrible price this man was paying to pursue his “impossible” war.

  He’d told her later, “Sure, I sleep. But it’s a trick I learned on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It’s a balancing act, sort of. I guess it’s a form of divided consciousness. The part that needs to sleep, sleeps. The part that needs to remain aware, doesn’t. It’s like the mind posting its own se
ntry. I call it combat sleep.”

  A terrible price, yes. And now the man who warred even as he slept was back there in the war room changing the costumes of unending warfare. He was getting into the “black-suit”—a form-fitting nylon affair, which resembled a surfer’s wetsuit but had been designed for far grimmer purposes. Strategically placed slit pockets on arms and legs provided quick and easy access to various small tools and lethal devices—some as old as mankind, others as new as Moonshot and Surveyor. The suit itself had to be regarded also as a weapon of war, if only for the psychological implications, but she knew that Bolan also placed great store in the outfit for the values supplied toward ease of movement, convenience, and concealment. During periods of darkness, the suit rendered him practically invisible.

  He was now drawing on the “combat rig”—a system of belts and devices for carrying guns, grenades, ammunition, and other necessities of war. Earlier that same morning April had experimentally tried to get into that rig and found it almost too heavy to lift. She could not imagine packing it around on her person. Bolan hardly seemed to notice the burden as he easily slipped it on and cinched it down.

  “Looks as though you’re going for a heavy score,” she commented, eyeing the formidable figure of the warrior as he touch-checked the weaponry.

  That granite face was poised between a scowl and a smile as he replied, “The boy scouts say you should be prepared. I try to be.”

  “What’s troubling you?”

  “Nothing,” he replied coldly. “You ready to truck?”

  She nodded her head in mute response, knowing what was troubling the big softy. He still did not like the idea of sending her into jeopardy.

  He instructed her, “Give me two minutes. Then you take a recorder pack and find the telephone feeder. Get the wires on and get back here without delay. Then haul it out of here and wait for me a thousand yards south.” He pushed past her and stepped forward to set the mission clock. “If I’m not back in thirty minutes …”