Looking back, he saw traffic slowing to a halt all along the road. Drivers were running toward the stalled Mercedes.
There was a dead man in there, and blood covered the fragmented windshield. The motorists would think they'd witnessed a daring prisoner escape. But already Bolan could hear the hee-haw donkey bray of a genuine police siren farther back along the expressway. The mafiosi would have some explaining to do when the patrol car arrived.
There were lessons to be learned from the encounter, Bolan thought to himself as he trekked across two cornfields and emerged in a country lane.
It was clear now that the Mob would go to any lengths to prevent Brognola and his analysts from deciphering the hologram that enshrined the famous Mafia report — even to the length of hiring the cheap goons that Bolan had just bested. The risks of discovery in such a daring and foolhardy operation were enough to underline the urgency of the Mafia planning.
If the evil organization commanded in Europe its usual army of spies and informers among cabdrivers, hotel porters, shopkeepers and clerks of various kinds, it wasn't surprising that they'd been able to easily locate a six-foot-three-inch American with cold blue eyes and a hawk face in a city the size of Liege. Bolan guessed the inexperienced locals had been drafted after he'd wasted the original hit team, because there hadn't been time to call up top-notch replacements.
Okay, so the mission now resolved itself into a simple equation.
Bolan's job was to backtrack Zulowski's flight from Cologne to Luxembourg and find the medium he'd used to make the holograms.
The Mob's job was to stop him.
In view of the intensity of the efforts they'd already employed, it seemed to him there was only one way he could make it.
He'd return to his hotel to get his weapons. Then he'd go underground.
13
Going underground for Mack Bolan meant disappearing from the daily routine of life; it also meant anonymity and invisibility. It meant traveling at night in nondescript vehicles or in those where the driver was unaware that he carried a passenger. It meant riding the rails, stowing away and cross-country jaunts. At a personal level it meant that the Executioner had to stick to the shadows, togged in his formfitting combat blacksuit, complete with a customized harness that incorporated the quick-draw shoulder rig for the Beretta, a hip holster for a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, two clips for plastic stun grenades and a watertight neoprene pouch for certain other tricks of his lethal trade.
He dropped from sight as quickly and effectively as a diver with lead-soled boots vanished beneath the surface of the sea.
In Liège the initial disappearance was the difficult part. The local Mob bosses might have been forced to call up an inexperienced snatch team after he had wasted their hit men in the Ardennes, but Bolan was certain there'd be backup units in place. The hotel would have been under surveillance, probably still was — there must have been a network of informers in place to have traced him there — there'd be spies at railroad stations, bus terminals, the airport. Maybe they'd even tailed the fake police car.
By now they would have been told that raid had been screwed up; the network would have been alerted. But he had to make it back to the hotel to collect his combat equipment, which meant that when he left the building, he'd first have to identify the shadows, and then shake them.
He could be in a tough situation if they pulled out all the stops. A professionally operated hit team working two-hour shifts was practically impossible to detect. You'd have a guy behind in radio contact with a woman ahead on the far side of the street, alerting a car cruising in a parallel street, which would be in touch with a cab driving in the opposite direction to drop a fare behind you, who would replace the first man. As well, a couple of standbys on foot could be called up to track the mark through stores, public buildings and apartment blocks, and at least one extra car would be on call.
Such high-powered tailing demanded at least twenty operatives ready to act, with two or three more as coordinators, working the radio terminals at some nearby base. It worked, in fact, on much the same principle as a radio-cab network...
Bolan donned the blacksuit, strapped on the harness and its accessories, hid the ensemble beneath a loose, lightweight sweater and a pair of baggy jeans and quit the hotel. His bag and the rest of his clothes he left in the room, with enough money to settle the account weighted down by an ashtray on the night table.
He broke a personally imposed rule and flagged down the first cab he saw crawling his way. "Residence Kennedy," he told the driver, naming the apartment block near the river bridge.
The cabbie nodded and spoke quietly into his radio. At the next intersection, before they turned into the parkway, a second cab — this one with no passenger — appeared from an alley and fell in behind them.
In the cathedral square, Bolan leaned forward. "I changed my mind. You can let me out here." He thrust a bill into the man's hand and walked hurriedly past the steel-and-glass bank building to a department store on the far side of the square. The cabbie and the driver of the car behind were both speaking agitatedly into their microphones.
Bolan raced through the crowded store, out into a shopping promenade lined with ritzy dress shops and then along a flagstoned walkway that led to a one-way street.
His aim was simple: he wanted to tip off the surveillance team that he knew he was being tailed, and that he was doing his best to shake them. He hoped they'd call out all their reserves, so there'd be no extra backup available when he made his play.
A line of taxis occupied the curb outside the opera house. The warrior waited until the first two had been taken and then hired the third, which had no radio, to take him to the other side of the river.
He paid the cabbie off near the warehouse area where he'd been before, and made his way to the street market. He had no idea whether the team was still with him, but he kept making the surreptitious checks that a professional would make to see if he was under observation-sudden halts, changes in pace, a glance into an angled shop window or the side mirror of a parked car.
If he did still have operatives shadowing him, it would keep them hopping.
Keeping tabs on someone in a crowded city was no problem, provided enough people were available. Without the mark knowing he was under surveillance, that is.
It was something else when an operative had to do the same thing across a barren moor, in a deserted village or on a long straight country road.
A stretch of water fell into the same category.
At the far end of a narrow space between two warehouses, Bolan saw a tug towing a string of barges on the river. They were heading upstream empty, toward Huy and Namur, perhaps to load a cargo from the Charleroi-Méziers coalfields.
Bolan glanced behind him, then sprinted down the alley. He tore off his sweater as he ran, stripped the jeans from his legs on the wharf beyond, then dived into the river and struck out for the barges with a powerful crawl.
There were six barges behind the tug. The warrior was treading water by the time the last drew level. He seized one of the old car tires strung along the side of the barge, and hanging on to this, he was dragged out of sight upstream toward the Kennedy Bridge.
To fool any pursuers who'd managed to stay with him that far, he didn't use the barge to ferry him way out of town. Instead, beyond the bridge, when the wharf he'd left was hidden behind a couple of moored sailboats, he let go of the tire and swam back underwater to the side of the river he'd just left.
He laid low until nightfall between two stacks of crated pineapples from the Ivory Coast, then stole a bicycle and rode eastward toward Germany. The warrior was underwater again when he crossed the border, swimming beneath the surface of a small river near Raeren, seven miles south of Aachen.
His target, thirty miles away, was a castle on the top of a hillside overlooking the Rhine. Schloss Königsberg, halfway between Cologne and Bonn, belonged to the new European Mafia boss, Vito Maccione.
Bolan scanned it
from the upper branches of a tree on the far side of the river. The lightweight combat gear he'd packed didn't run to field glasses, but there was a DEP-350 scope mount on the alloy frame of his Desert Eagle... and one of the accessories carried in the neoprene pouch was a sight, modified for IR night vision.
Through this he could make out the general layout of the place. The castle was like a dozen others built on the high ground overlooking the Rhine — a complex of steep slate roofs, turrets and square towers topped with spired onion domes, wedged at several different levels into a cleft splitting the forested cliff.
The main entrance, Bolan guessed, would be on level ground, beyond the crest of the hill. On the river side, the property sloped all the way down to the road at the water's edge. The estate was surrounded by a high wall, and the warrior had no doubt there would be closed circuit monitors scanning every inch of the ground, supplemented by trip wires, sensors and possibly an electrified fence on the perimeter.
Even from inside, an intruder would find it hard to penetrate the castle. Some of the walls fell seventy or eighty feet sheer down into the faults cutting into the cliff.
There were also, the Executioner saw, teams of dogs patrolling the entire property with professional handlers.
If the Schloss Königsberg wasn't intruder-proof, at least from the riverside, it was as near as modern technology, unlimited funds and experienced personnel could make it.
Bolan was determined, nevertheless, to penetrate the defenses.
If he was to trace Zulowski's steps without a single lead, it seemed as good a plan as any to begin where the murdered agent had started: at the place where the stolen report was kept.
A building so heavily protected on the outside, the Executioner reckoned, might conceivably be less saturated with alarms within. The fact that Zulowski had gotten to the safe and had made his way out again unchallenged tended to support this.
Yeah, but how the hell had he gotten inside, in the first place?
Bolan was wondering whether he should cross the river, climb the hill and make a recon around the main entrance on the far side, when the castle — until then lit only by a few windows on one of the upper floors — was suddenly printed against the night with glaring brilliance.
Floods had been illuminated all around the baroque facades, and an even brighter light radiated skyward somewhere behind the towers and turrets, a white light punctuated at irregular intervals with pulses of red.
Bolan was staring in surprise at the unexpected display when he heard the noise, a droning clatter that overlaid a continuous whine approaching from the south.
A helipad had to be situated among those steeply inclined roofs, and a chopper was coming in to land.
He saw the navigation lights among the stars, then the dark blur of the bird's cabin before a searchlight lanced downward from beneath the nose.
The pilot hovered only briefly before he set the ship down, and it sank from sight onto the floodlit pad. In those few seconds Bolan saw that it was a medium-sized craft, no blister-and-formers skeleton but an executive-type helicopter capable of ferrying eight or ten passengers, with a full-length cabin and covered fuselage. It was a European model he'd never seen before.
The rotor whine and the clatter of the blades died away. Soon afterward the floods were killed and an extra row of windows lit up on one of the castle's lower stories. Maccione evidently had guests. As far as the warrior was concerned that meshed with his plans. Maybe a night of eavesdropping would provide him with a clue.
Because there was going to be one extra guest — uninvited — who Vito Maccione didn't know about.
The arrival of the chopper had given Bolan an idea. Off the highway, a short distance from the tree he was perched in, he remembered passing a brightly lit road-house with a campsite and trailer park. And among the trailers were pickups with specialized equipment that decided Bolan. The hell with any attempt to penetrate the castle defenses at ground level.
He'd go in like the other guests... at the top.
14
It was the gear on the pickups that gave the Executioner the idea that he might be able to penetrate Schloss Königsberg via the helipad that had to be located somewhere between the roofs and towers: lightweight metal spars with fulled, brightly colored material wrapped around them. Hang gliders.
And if there was a hang gliding club in the area, there had to be a decent height not too far away from which the aviators took off...
Music and laughter spewed from the roadhouse, and most of the trailers were dark. It looked as if there were some kind of party going on. Bolan stole around to the parking lot and found, nailed to the trunk of a pine tree at the entrance, an illuminated board that carried a schematic map of the region. On each side of the Rhine, dotted lines, symbols and arrows indicated scenic routes, historic monuments, forest footpaths for nature lovers, and other tourist attractions.
Including takeoff and landing areas for hang gliders.
The area was marked as Königstein Schärfe — King's Stone Edge — and it was less than five miles away, on the same side of the river.
Bolan unzippered the neoprene pouch, took out a Swiss army knife, long-nose pliers and a tiny coil of wire. The smallest pickup in the lot was a miniature Honda. It took him less than four minutes to break into the vehicle, open the door, hot wire the engine and drive out of the trailer park and onto the highway. The music from the roadhouse was still loud and clear; nobody raised an alarm.
The takeoff site was a forest clearing that sloped down to the edge of a cliff. Below it, layers of trees dropped in the darkness toward the pale ribbon of the Rhine and the moving pinpoints of light that indicated traffic on the riverside highway.
A southerly breeze, which started at dusk, had freshened to a steady wind that would carry him effortlessly in the direction of the castle. Away to his right an approaching cloud bank reflected a yellow glare that must be the lights of Bonn.
The Honda was parked beneath the trees. He'd return it later to the trailer park, along with the sail... if he got the chance. If not, it would be discovered soon enough by other members of the club.
He unstrapped the glider and readied it for flight. Then securing his harness, he ran lightly down the grassy slope and allowed the thermal climbing the face of the escarpment to fill the sail and lift him up and over the edge.
The warrior turned away from the castle, wheeling into the wind with the cliff edge fifty feet away, checking out harness and lines as he gained height. The Desert Eagle, freed like the Beretta from its shrink-wrap waterproofing, hung heavy at his right hip. The wind numbed his face, drying the tears blown back across his cheekbones from the corners of his eyes.
When the street plan of Bonn glittered like the outline of a videogame on a TV screen, he banked the kite and turned back north, sailing toward his target two thousand feet above the river.
He was alone in a world of silence, with the lights of Cologne visible now beneath the stars in the clear northern sky.
For some time the location of Schloss Königsberg was hidden by the forest, but he finally got a fix on it from the illuminations around the roadhouse. Very faintly he could see starlight gleaming on the slates, a pale highlight on an onion dome. Then he lost it as the sail hit some turbulence.
Wheeling again, he broke the turn halfway to glide crosswind across the cliff edge and make time on the lee side. When he saw the castle again, lower down on his right, on the far side of the river, he sawed at the bar, pulling it back to gain speed and then dropping the nose as he veered once more into the wind and drifted downstream parallel with the Rhine.
He had to keep enough height to locate the helipad when he was nearer the castle, but stay low enough not to be forced to descend in spirals once he got there, which could alert guards in the grounds and make him a sitting duck once he was spotted.
Over unfamiliar terrain, it called for some tricky maneuvering.
For the third time, lower now than the lip of the
escarpment, the hang glider swung east. Schloss Königsberg's turrets and spires were only a few degrees below Bolan's line of vision. Suddenly he saw the pad, a checkerboard square between slopes of roof above a grandiose pillared portico.
He put the nose down hard, swooping across the river in a long, shallow dive, and then swung back into the wind, the trailing edge fluttering as the plane neared stalling speed. When he was three hundred yards south of the schloss he turned through one hundred and eighty degrees, working the control bar beneath the A-frame to bring up the nose once more as he hit the thermal updraft streaming skyward past the terraced vineyards that lay beyond Maccione's property.
He was now approaching that property from the south, where the shape of the sail would be lost against the cloud bank blowing up from Bonn, instead of being silhouetted against the stars.
The forest treetops boiled up at him like the waves of some angry dark sea as he neared the Mafia stronghold. There was more turbulence here: the glider felt as if it really was a boat adrift on an ocean swell, lifted weightlessly and then dropped into troughs by the gusting wind.
Bolan planed down over the turrets and terminated the flight by turning one last time into the wind. As the jib of a sailboat putting about will flap, the glider's rear edge flapped when Bolan shoved the nose down and ran in over the checkered surface of the pad, spilling the rest of the air from the wing.
He halted two yards from the roof of the portico, rubber-soled combat boots noiseless on the surface. But had the fluttering of the wing given him away?
Before dismantling the craft he remained as static as one of the tall chimney stacks surrounding him, listening. He heard distant voices, a dog barking, the tick of cooling metal from the chopper parked on the far side of the pad. If the turbine was still hot, the pilot must have made a second trip since Bolan first saw the bird.
He laid the spars down on the concrete surface of the pad with infinite care.
Dead Man's Tale Page 10