The warwagon was parked on the reverse slope of a shaded knoll overlooking the "ranch." The range was about 1,000 yards, elevation perhaps fifty feet, situation beautiful. Bolan sat on the forward slope in the shade of a gnarled tree, a wireless extension to the warwagon's mobile phone at his knee, the Weatherby .460 with sniper-scope across his lap, powerful binoculars resolving the vision field an almost eerie arm's length away. He put down the binoculars to give naked eyes another panoramic sweep. The ranch stretched away from his position almost like a miniature set, Mummy Mountain in the distant backdrop.
Satisfied, finally, that the time was right, Bolan sighed and picked up the telephone.
He got a breathless pickup on the first ring.
"Ranch."
"Put 'im on," Bolan growled.
"Who's calling?"
"Avon, dummy. Put me through."
A silence denoting some hesitance, then; "Okay. Hold it."
Bolan held it, raising the binoculars again to zero in on a movement at the patio door. A guy in shirtsleeves, calling over to the congregation at poolside.
Bolan panned across with the binoculars to pick up Kaufman in a moment of irritation. Heavy lips poured forth staccato response to the summons from the house even as a chubby hand moved toward the portable phone. Bolan smiled as he watched the emperor of Arizona delicately handle that instrument as though it were a bomb set to go at some undetermined moment, jowly face wobbling with thinly disguised tension. But it was the same houseman's voice that broke the silence across that connection. "Who's calling?" The guy again inquired.
Smiling grimly, Bolan spoke for the benefit of those ears at poolside. "I have news of Sharon. If he doesn't want to hear it, fuck 'im."
He indeed wanted to hear it. Breathlessly; "Okay, I'm on, let's hear it."
"The kid's okay," Bolan growled.
"How do I know that?"
"Because I say."
"Okay. I'll accept that for now. Get this, though, and be sure you understand it. If I find that girl with a hair out of place, I'll scorch this goddamned state from border to border, and I'll have balls and all of every sonovabitch involved in it. Understand that. I'll deal to get her back. But, man, she better get back smiling and happy."
"Relax, she's already back," Bolan growled.
"What?"
"You heard it."
"She's home safe? Who is this?"
"Nothing of yours is safe, Kaufman. For the moment, though, yeah, she's okay. I left her in her own hands and walking free. Do you know a kid lives over by the hospital?"
"St. Joseph's?" the worried father replied quickly, then cautioned: "Say no more. I got it. Hey — I owe you. If this is level. What can I do?"
"You can listen for about thirty seconds and believe what you hear."
He watched perplexed eyes as they shifted rapidly in the magnification of the powerful binoculars, then the guy replied: "I don't-uh, who the hell is this?"
"The name is Bolan."
A sharp intake of breath was the only immediate response for the ears. For the eyes, a mixture of fear and disbelief filling the field of vision. Then, cautiously: "Convince me."
"Bonelli let paper on you. I sniffed it out and got there as they were leaving. They had your kid. I burned them down and sprung the kid. She's very pretty. Must have got it from her mother. Tried to convince me that her father is a poor misunderstood humanitarian with unfortunate business connections. But we know better, don't we? So does Bonelli. He wants what you've got, Humanitarian. You spoke of scorched earth, but it's all moving toward you, Can you believe that?"
"Maybe." The guy's eyes were working furiously, belying the calm of that voice. "Saying it's all true ... what's your interest?"
Bolan gave him a chilled chuckle. "Come on, now. You know my interests."
"Are you looking for a connection?"
It was almost funny. Bolan told him, "I've found the connection. I'm going to sever it. Call this fair warning. Pull it in, Kaufman. I can't allow Bonelli to pull this off. If you don't make the cut, I'll have to."
Angrily: "I don't know what the hell you're talking about!"
Coldly: "Sure you do. You can have your little games on the home turf. If the people of Arizona don't care, why should I? But your Washington connections are a bit much — even for a provincial like you. For a cannibal like Bonelli, it's unthinkable. I can't allow it."
The guy was all but frothing at the mouth. "You can't allow it!? Who the hell-you wise shit!-where the hell do you get off-how the hell do I even know who's talking!?"
"Sever the connection, Kaufman. That's the only way you can save it, anyway. I'll take care of Bonelli. You take care of that Washington connection. I'll call it a successful mission and take my games elsewhere."
There was silence on the line for a long moment as the focal field of the glasses registered a full parade of conflicting emotions. Presently the guy sighed and calmly replied, "I still don't know you're who you say. And if you are, it makes no sense to me. Exactly what are you saying?"
"I'm saying I'll enforce the status quo ... almost. Bonelli keeps Tucson. Kaufman keeps Phoenix but severs the national link."
Suspiciously: "And what does Bolan keep?"
Lightly: "Bolan keeps the peace ... elsewhere. But you'll have to cut your national link."
"That's the game, eh?"
"That's about it. And it has to be quick. Before the sun sets again."
"What's the alternative?"
"You already said it. Scorched earth."
"How do I know this isn't-why should I believe a damn thing you say?"
"You need a convincer, eh?"
"Damn right. Another thing, why should ..."
Bolan set the phone aside and hoisted the big sniper to his shoulder. Eight thousand foot-pounds of bone-shattering energy would propel a heavy 500-grain messenger across that thousand-yard course in about one second flat. But the object, this time, was not to shatter flesh and bone. The object was to convince.
The pudgy racketeer sprang into sharp relief in the highly localized vision field of the big scope, fat lips still working in time with the crackling sounds emanating from the telephone receiver.
Bolan centered the cross-hairs momentarily on that agitated mouth before tracking on. One caress of the finger at that moment would have stilled that forked tongue forever. But the pained face of a pretty girl streaked across the memory field, influencing an already reluctant trigger finger, pushing the scan onward. To take Kaufman at this point would be to play directly into Bonelli's designs on Arizona. Kaufman would keep.
The hairs were already calibrated to the range. A quick mental adjustment for windage moved them two clicks left of the portable telephone at Kaufman's side. No flesh stood in the path.
He squeezed into the pull and rode the recoil for instant target evaluation, smiling with grim satisfaction as that phone took sail in a flurry of flying fragments. The bullet got there faster than sound, and Bolan was already squeezing into the next pull before that startled flesh down there understood what was happening. The hollow thunderclaps rolled away from his knoll across the flats to reverberate from the sounding board of the ranch house as puffs of cement dust and exploding glass marked the progress of the rapid-fire barrage, each round targeting harmlessly from the human point of view but wreaking considerable destruction upon inanimate objects.
No human flesh was in view down there, now. A couple of heads bobbed cautiously just above the surface of the pool. The sunning board was overturned; folding chairs scattered in hasty patterns of retreat. A jeep was tearing along a dusty road from the north forty, but there was no other obvious movement anywhere down there. Bolan gathered his gear and withdrew. Paradise Ranch had recognized a truth.
Chapter 8
The wedge
The true scope of the Phoenix game was beginning to gel, imposing itself on Bolan's consciousness as a sinister silhouette, still devoid of detail, but already looming above anything he had been pr
epared to find in the Grand Canyon State. The Executioner had come to Arizona seeking heroin and dealers in the poison, but he had found instead that "something else," fragmentary, veiled, still incomplete, but something, something big, overshadowing the routine importation of Mexican drugs just as the Mafia itself overshadowed ordinary street crime. As that silhouette grew, expanding into a looming shadow of doom, Bolan realized the full urgency of his situation, his need to identify the game plan and the highly lethal players.
For once, the problem was compounded not by the usual shortage of leads, but by too many. Too many game trails to follow and too many players to identify without a comprehensive score card. There were simply too damn many fingers in the Arizona pie.
It had begun with Nick Bonelli, the Tucson Mafia, and heroin. Then came the startling realization of a secret paramilitary force drilling in the Tucson desert and striking northward toward the Phoenix preserves of Moe Kaufman and company. Complications aplenty, yeah. More than enough even before the addition of a kinky senator who was maybe being groomed as White House material.
Too many leads, sure. Bolan always sought the overall view, the big picture, but the picture in Arizona was just too big. The stage was so crowded with actors that the plot was all but lost in their entrances and exits. And the most recent addition to the cast was a face from the Executioner's own memory, an identity which eluded him with frustrating adeptness. Bolan had wracked his brain seeking a name to match that face, an identity to pair with that vague remembrance and the evil tremors it inspired. He had managed to eliminate known mafiosi and their hangers-on by scanning his mental mug file, which left him where? Vietnam? Before?
He brushed the phantom aside to concentrate once more upon the game itself, a mystery whose significance overshadowed the importance of any one man. Arizona offered so many opportunities for an industrious tribe of cannibals that Bolan scarcely knew where to begin looking. Heroin, sure, and all the associated border rackets which could rake in millions every year for the mob coffers. But Nick Bonelli had all that already, and he needed to prove nothing by declaring unnecessary war upon Kaufman and the Phoenix mob. The same argument negated consideration of the other routine rackets, which had been shared more or less peacefully by the competing mobs for over three decades. None of those rackets nor even all of them together could justify the expense and risk incurred by Bonelli in outfitting, training, and unleashing his private army.
And that left, yeah, something else.
Always the trail led back to Abraham Weiss, and politics, and ... what?
Real estate was booming in Arizona, and Bolan knew very well how deeply Kaufman and Weiss had mined the illicit goldfields of fraud and foreclosure. A land grab? Bolan put it down as a "possible" and continued his mental search.
Mining was important In Arizona, with the state supplying 54 percent of all American copper and one-eighth of the world supply. Silver and gold were big, too, and with them came the whole range of associated industries and manufacturing — electronics, aircraft, steel, aluminum, transportation equipment — the list went on forever. And much of that industrial wealth was centered around Phoenix. Of late, there had been rumbles UP to the federal level about finding a suitable climate and industrial atmosphere for serious development of solar energy plants as an alternate fuel source for the entire nation. The Arizona desert had been suggested by Senator Abraham Weiss among others.
And yeah, it might play. The Executioner's mind began to pick significant details from among the mass of useless ones, slowly shaping order out of chaos. Phoenix was already big in the Arizona economy, and by all indications it was slated to be bigger still, and very soon. And Phoenix belonged to Moe Kaufman in all the ways that mattered.
But for how long?
Bolan added up the possible ramifications of the deal, lopped off half for possible exaggeration, and still found himself looking straight at an impending coup d'etat. The thought chilled him.
His hands clenched the warwagon's steering wheel, his jaw set in grim determination. A shattering offense was clearly indicated, but first he had to find the opposing team.
And where the hell were they?
"Is there any room for mistake?" Jim Hinshaw's voice was not hopeful, indicating that he knew what the answer must be.
"No chance, Jim," Angel Morales told him earnestly, to the accompaniment of Floyd Worthy's head-shake. "I'm sure it was Bolan."
The black man softly added, "What did I tell ya?"
"Okay, okay." Hinshaw waved away the I-told-you-so's with an irritated gesture. "No sweat. This is nothing we can't handle."
Worthy frowned. "We'd better get started then. We ain't done all that well handlin' it so far."
Hinshaw parried that verbal thrust with a question. "Why didn't you nail him when you had the chance?"
"You never saw a cat move that fast, man. Least I never did. He damn near outran those slugs from my M-16."
"Don't build him up to be more than he is," Hinshaw cautioned.
"I'm not buyin' any ghost stories," the black man assured him. But that mother is some kind of man!"
"Bastard, you mean," Hinshaw countered. "I'm not the only one here with a score to settle with Sergeant Mack Bolan." He stressed the rank designation, turning it almost into an obscenity.
"We dig where you're coming from, man," Morales broke in. "But we can't play games with this dude. He's been tearing up the families from ..."
"Save the history lesson, Angel. I did six months hard time thanks to that-" He left the sentence unfinished, the oath unspoken, but the grim set of his features told the story eloquently to his companions. Silence reigned in the office for a long moment before Hinshaw spoke again. When he did, all traces of tension and fury had been suppressed in his voice, and the facade of unshakable calm was restored.
"The mission comes first, as always. Bolan has Involved himself now, and we have to deal with him as a definite threat. Angel, what did he want from Kaufman?"
The smaller man squared his shoulders before speaking. "Him and Kaufman were talking a deal, Jim. I swear to God."
Hinshaw was clearly skeptical. "It doesn't ring true. What's the scam?"
"Cease fire, so he says. If Kaufman cools it and takes out the Senator on his own, Bolan will take care of us for him."
Hinshaw shook his head as Worthy swore softly and said, "He just might do it."
"Not a chance," Hinshaw snapped. "We know the enemy now, and we can use that knowledge to advantage." He turned back to Morales. "Was Kaufman buying the truce?"
"He was thinking it over, Jim. He didn't say yes or no but ... well ... I think it's a go."
"So we play it that way. We can pull the rug while he's sitting on his hands."
"What about Bolan?" Worthy asked. "He won't be sitting on his hands."
"If we work it right, we can play them off against each other. While they chase each other around the block, we bag ourselves a territory,. With luck they'll kill each other off. If not, we'll be waiting for the winner before he can catch his breath."
"How do you plan to run it down?" Worthy asked.
"We need a wedge, Floyd. Bolan offered the deal, so we have to play him up as the back-stabber." Hinshaw thought for a long moment in silence. When he spoke again, his voice was firm with self-assurance. "Stay close to the wires on Kaufman and Weiss. I want to know every move they make before it's made. Everybody's on edge, and mistakes are inevitable. When they make one, we'll have our handle."
The other men grinned and rose to leave. Floyd Worthy paused in the doorway, turning for one final comment. "You know, man, if Kaufman doesn't put Bolan away, it's us against the sarge."
"I wouldn't have it any other way," Hinshaw told him solemnly.
Alone again, the soldier let his mind dwell on the possibility of a confrontation with Mack the Bastard Bolan. A second confrontation, and the last one, too, one way or another.
Hinshaw's first meeting with Bolan had been long ago and thousands of mil
es away in another world and time. That meeting had brought the curtain down on the single sweetest experience of Hinshaw's life, cutting it off short. Not to mention the six months' stockade time and a less than honorable discharge, the only blots on an otherwise impeccable military record. Somebody had to pay for that disgrace. Somebody named Bolan. And Hinshaw had been waiting a long time to collect that tab. Waiting and hoping for another chance at Mack the Bastard. But lately, as he almost compulsively followed Bolan's campaigns in the newspapers and on television, his lust for the confrontation had begun to fade.
Wiping moist palms against his trousers, Jim Hinshaw wondered if Moe Kaufman would be able to take Bolan out. It would make everything so much ... simpler, yeah ... simpler and safer. He bitterly rejected the thought and its unsettling Implications. He was not afraid of Bolan, dammit, he was just ... cautious. Yeah, cautious. Everything that Hinshaw was or ever hoped to be was riding on this operation, not to mention Mr. Bonelli's money, time, and trust. Hinshaw had a duty, to repay that trust with success.
Duty, yeah, you could never get away from it. Hinshaw fervently hoped that Kaufman would be up to handling the Bolan challenge, but a nagging apprehension grew in the back of his mind, setting his teeth on edge. Us against the sarge. Sure, and that would mean Hinshaw against Bolan.
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