Blood Testament te-100

by Don Pendleton

  She flushed the toilet and tugged up her slacks — immediately conscious of another weapon close at hand. Before the tank refilled itself, she found the shutoff valve and closed it tight. She raised the heavy lid, aware that it could do some damage if the slab of porcelain was smashed against a human skull, and laid it carefully across the sink. She studied the assembly of tubes and floats and wires that had released mankind from midnight rambles to a reeking privy in the yard, and knew that it could serve her now in other ways.

  She broke three fingernails and cut her fingers twice before she finished disassembling the mechanism, salvaging the slender float arm and an eight-inch metal slat that had been previously connected to the flush handle. Either one was stiff and sharp enough to savage unprotected eyes and throats at need, assuming she got close enough to try. Without a wrench to loosen pipes beneath the sink and give herself a bludgeon worthy of the name, it was the best she could do.

  But she could not do everything alone.

  They had four weapons now, albeit primitive and flimsy in the face of submachine guns. She would need the full cooperation of her children if they were to have a chance at all.

  The risks were staggering, but there was finally no alternative. Inaction was a form of suicide, she realized, and once their deaths were finally decreed, the end would come in seconds for herself, for Jeff. But not, perhaps, for young Eileen. The leader might not have the interest or the energy to finally restrain Gino and Carmine once the killing started. When it came right down to it, the leader might enjoy a little stolen sex himself.

  If there had been a chance, however slight, of their survival, Helen might have counseled Eileen to submit, to save herself by any means and confront the ordeal another day, when she was safe and sound and out of there. But they were doomed; she knew that much with numbing certainty. And knowing that, she saw no need to make it easy for their would-be murderers.

  It went against the grain to simply watch her life, the lives of both her children slip away. A fighter as long as she could remember, the lady knew that she would go down fighting. Before she let the gunners take Eileen and foul her with their touch, she was prepared to die, prepared to kill.

  Soon now. At midnight or a little after. When the gunners got their orders on the telephone.

  She called the children and showed them what she had already done, and set about dismantling the shower rod. The closet would be next, and they would take it one thing at a time, while time remained.

  A maximum of sixty minutes now, and Helen felt a tightness in her chest as she began to count her life, her children's lives, in measured heartbeats. They had one chance in a hundred thousand of surviving, but she could not let that single opportunity slip by without attempting to secure it. By midnight she would know if she was capable of killing physically; the mental qualms had long since disappeared.

  And she would need the grim resolve that had already settled on her shoulders, worming deep into her heart and mind with tentacles of ice. She was relying on the threat against her children to provide her with the killer instinct she would need to do the job.

  By midnight.

  By the witching hour.

  Sixty minutes minimum, and counting down.

  A lifetime.

  * * *

  "Time to go."

  Brognola checked his watch and nodded, startled by the hour. Saturday was damn near gone, and Sunday morning promised little in the way of respite from the empty ache he felt inside.

  "Okay."

  He finished wiping down the Smith & Wesson .38 and stowed it in a holster riding on his hip. The Bulldog .44 from Charter Arms was snug beneath his arm in horizontal rigging that would shave a heartbeat off his draw, and both were loaded with the lethal Glaser "safety slugs" designed for heavy stopping power. Copper-jacketed projectiles filled with Number 12 shot suspended in liquid Teflon, the bullets were designed to exit from the muzzle at terrific speeds, exploding savagely on impact with a human target. And if impact from the Glasers failed to drop your man, there was the grim fringe benefit of creeping poison, Teflon working through the veins until it reached the heart, occluding vital passages and valves, arresting life.

  More Glasers went into his pockets, rattling softly as he hoisted off the bar stool, following the others. Leo was already waiting for them by the door, one arm pressed tight against his side, securing the Uzi that he carried beneath his trench coat. He was tight-lipped, somber, but his hands were steady, and Brognola had no fear that he would fade when it was in the fan.

  Mack Bolan wore his nightsuit underneath a bulky topcoat, weapons visible as bulges to Brognola's eye. A casual observer wouldn't notice, and in any case they would not be encountering a crowd at Arlington this time of night. The Unknown Soldier would be keeping any secrets to himself, and as for their intended contacts... well, they would be seeing Bolan's hardware right up close and personal. With any luck at all, it just might be the last thing that the bastards ever saw.

  Provided that they kept the date, of course.

  In spite of their precautions, there was a possibility that the contact team might smell a rat, take off without completing the connection. Hal would never know until it was too late, and he would have to live with his decision. But in the meantime he was banking on their plan, betting everything that they would keep the rendezvous.

  No matter that it was a trap. That much was obvious from the beginning. Anyone possessed of the ability to follow him for months on end and photograph his meetings with a number of important undercover operatives had no need to negotiate for secret witness lists. The snapshots and phone logs were persuasive evidence that Justice had been penetrated weeks before the move against his family. If further evidence was needed, it would be found in the fact that Justice staffers hadn't yet identified the undercover agents. Someone on the other side was miles ahead of federal investigators when it came to cracking Hal Brognola's private org-crime network.

  From day one his work on SOG was strictly need-to-know. No more than half a dozen people in the government had access to his files, the true identities of agents in the field. Brognola had designed the system to be foolproof... or as nearly so as he could make it, short of absolute — and unattainable — infallibility. The files that had been confiscated from his office would contribute little to the enemy, but from the photographic evidence, they needed little more in any case.

  That left him with the question of a motive, and the man from Justice finally admitted to himself that he was getting nowhere in his effort to deduce the "why" behind his family's abduction. If the goal had been to simply put him on the spot, the shooters could have found a simpler way without resorting to assaults upon his wife and children. Privately convinced that he was meant to die this night, Hal still believed that there was more behind the plot than cut-and-dried assassination.

  They had brainstormed through the evening, getting nowhere as they wrestled with the scattered pieces of the puzzle. Someone had been working through DeVries, and from the evidence of his elimination, Hal was betting that the someone had been Nicky Gianelli. Whether Gianelli had been in the set alone was something else entirely, and Brognola had no way of finding out the answer, not until his family was safe and sound, his full authority at Justice reconfirmed.

  If he survived the meet at Arlington, there would be enough time to think about the job, about pursuing Gianelli to the corners of the earth. It might require a lifetime, but Brognola would not rest until the D.C. capo had been killed or locked away forever.

  If he survived...

  It was the top priority now. He would be useless to his family if it went sour at the meet, if he did not live long enough to pluck them from captivity with Bolan's help. Hal cherished no illusions that he might be able to complete the job alone. If not for Bolan's help, if not for Leo's selfless offer of assistance, he would have been walking into Arlington alone, condemned to die.

  With two guns beneath his coat and two friends at his back, he had a
chance to pull it off, salvage something from the rubble. They were looking at a doublecross in Arlington; he knew that much before they ever left the house, but his opponents would not field an army in such close proximity to Washington. They would be waiting for a single man, convinced that he would follow orders and come alone. Three gunners, maybe four would be enough to do the job. He would be very much surprised if they were faced with greater numbers, and the hardware they were packing should be adequate to do the job.

  Bolan had agreed that there was more than mere assassination in the wind, but he had kept his speculations to himself. Whatever happened, he would be on hand to stand with Hal against his enemies. As always.

  Brognola sometimes wondered where he would have been, what course he would have taken, if the Executioner had never crossed his path. If Bolan's father had been wise enough to bypass dealings with the loan sharks up in Pittsfield, or if Striker's plane had gone down while en route from Vietnam to the United States and graveside ceremonies for his murdered family. What might have been, if there had been no holy war to suck Hal in and change his life forever, leading him to heights and depths that had been unimaginable in his other life?

  It didn't matter now. Bolan's everlasting war was grim reality, and Hal had signed on voluntarily, his eyes wide open to the risks involved. From grudging admiration of the soldier's talents he had passed to something more like hero worship tempered with a veteran's knowledge that no single man is impervious to death. He sided with the Executioner because the guy was doing something, fighting in a world where action had been voted out of style, where wait-and-see was everything. He had enlisted in the soldier's fight because he finally had no choice, and Bolan's exit from the Phoenix Program had not dimmed Brognola's admiration for the man, nor his commitment to the everlasting war.

  The war was coming home for Hal Brognola now, in ways that he had never seriously contemplated, but it did not change his mind. The move against his family might finally destroy him, but as long as he survived, he would continue striking back against the enemy with everything he had.

  He understood Mack Bolan now as he had never understood the man before. He felt the pain that finally transcended human suffering, becoming simultaneously more and less than simple pain. If he should fail to rescue Helen and the kids, Brognola knew that wound would never heal while he survived. And at the same time, he was conscious of the fact that it would not impair his own ability to single out his enemies for retribution. Private suffering did wonders for a soldier's visual acuity. Brognola could see clearly now: his duty, the potential consequences — everything except the outcome of his rendezvous with death at Arlington.

  For that he would be forced to wait, and if his luck ran out there would be Bolan, running on against the savages, a doomsday engine programmed for destruction of the enemy. It gave Brognola peace of mind to know that one man's death could not abort the holy war.

  He needed peace of mind tonight and strength to see him through the early morning darkness. Whatever daylight might reveal — success or grim disaster — he would face it and move on. While life and strength remained he would continue fighting, from his post at Justice or outside the fold. If necessary he would wage his battle from a prison cell.

  And when they finally brought him down, he would be braced to take as many of the bastards with him as he could. It was the only way Brognola knew to play the game, and he had learned it from a master.

  Time to go, and death was waiting for him in a graveyard full of heroes. If the shadow overtook him there, he would be satisfied to rest among them for a while, secure in the knowledge that an Executioner remained to carry on the fight. It was the best that he could do in terms of hope, and it would have to do for now. For Arlington and his fate.

  18

  Darkness and the ranks of gravestones seemed to stretch away forever, lost in murky shadow. Hal Brognola felt almost as if the dead were watching him, awaiting his reaction to their presence, looking for a signal that he understood them. At once he shrugged the morbid thought away as he realized that they were not deliberately spying on his grief. The dead knew nothing of his problems and if they had known, they probably would not have cared.

  Before he reached the cemetery gates, Brognola pulled his four-door to the curb beneath some overhanging trees and doused the lights. He did not kill the engine, for he wasn't stopping long. If anyone was watching, he was banking on the fact that he was early to assuage their fears. They would believe that he was killing time, or having second thoughts about his mission, dawdling before he was committed irretrievably. With any luck at all, they would not understand that he was dropping off a passenger.

  Behind him on the curb side, Bolan was already EVA before the car had come to a stop. Brognola scarcely heard him opening the off-side door and closing it again. They had removed the dome light prior to setting out, eliminating any chance that Bolan's move would be betrayed to watchers in the shadows.

  Finished sooner than he had anticipated, Hal remained in place and counted down the fifteen seconds that had been allowed for his delivery of Bolan to the jump-off point. It was excessive, granted, but a rolling stop would probably arouse suspicions if his enemies were staking out the rendezvous, and he was not about to gamble with the calculated odds. Not when the lives of his wife and children were at stake.

  The Executioner had chosen fifteen seconds as the optimum delay. It gave him ample time to clear the vehicle and find shelter in the shadows ringing Arlington. It also granted Hal the extra time he needed to apparently examine his dilemma, making up his mind. Another moment, and he would have drawn attention to himself; a moment less, and there would have been no apparent purpose for his pulling to the curb.

  One down.

  The other — Leo Turrin — would be riding with him to the drop. He was sequestered in the trunk, as comfortable as Hal could make him with a blanket folded up beneath him to provide some insulation from the road. The trunk lid was open far enough to let him breathe, secured in place by taut rubber fasteners that could be easily released. There was a possibility Brognola's contacts might wish to look inside the car, to make sure he had come alone as ordered, but the chance of anyone checking the trunk was remote. If their precautions took them that far, they would find themselves confronted by an Uzi primed and ready to dismantle anyone within effective range, and they would have a second, maybe less, to flip the mental coin and cast their vote for life and death.

  Whichever way it went tonight, Brognola hoped that some of them would opt for life. He had no interest in the welfare of his enemies beyond a wish to see them all eternally consumed by hellfire, but he would require at least one prisoner to provide him with the information he required. The whereabouts of Helen and the kids, for openers. And after that...

  So many questions, dammit, and he wondered whether there was enough time to answer all of them before he bought the farm. He needed names and motives, evidence to make it stand in court if it should go that far — but most of all he needed those infernal names. If he could finally identify the men responsible for the abduction of his family, then justice could proceed at once. Tonight. This instant.

  Gianelli was involved, of course. If Hal had nurtured any doubts about the mafioso, they had been erased by the annihilation of DeVries. And yet there was the possibility — the probability — of other hands behind the move against his family, the frame so clumsily designed that it could only be a cover for some larger plan. It was the owner of those other hands whom Hal was anxious to meet in person. Only one of them could walk away from that encounter, and if neither walked away... well, then it might be worth it anyway. The flanking move was Bolan's brainchild, and Brognola had immediately seen its wisdom. Granted that the meet at Arlington would be an ambush rather than a swap of hostages, and assuming that the enemy would want the job done right, they would have snipers among the headstones, hidden in the trees, to catch him in a cross fire once he left the car. It would be Bolan's task to pick out th
e snipers and pick them off before they had a chance to do their job. In the alternative, he would be left to mop the place with their remains, exacting any vengeance that he could upon the stragglers in Brognola's name.

  The gates were open — they were always open — and Brognola rolled on through, the ranks of silent dead surrounding him. He sought one special monument, the meeting place, and paid no mind to all the other fallen soldiers lying head-to-heel in midnight darkness. There was enough time to greet them later if he lost it, if his adversaries carried out their strike on schedule.

  The Unknown Soldier had been waiting for him, patiently, secure within his stony anonymity. Brognola felt a kinship with the nameless dead, and wondered if his mind was slipping as he killed the headlights once again, allowed the car to coast the final twenty yards.

  But no. The kinship did exist. He felt it in his gut, and wondered if the Executioner could feel it as he moved through the darkness, rigged out for doomsday and prepared for death. Lord knew that Bolan had much more in common with the unknown dead than Hal could ever have.