And, yes, he had been making points. He had moved caution, respect, and perhaps belly-bunching fear into the hearts of the enemy. It could prove to be an edge that he would sorely need before this night was done.
Sure, he could have taken Lileo and Quaso both, as easy as pie. But to what good effect on the overall objective of this mission?
The game, at this point, was to rattle some teeth —to demoralize the enemy, get them to jumping at every shadow, wincing with every sound of the night.
A confused and overly cautious enemy was likely to make mistakes—crucial ones.
Bolan had not come all this way just for a shoot-out with the head-hunters.
He had come to restore depth to the heart of Texas.
But first he had to put in fear.
And, yes, things were working.
Ten minutes after the fusillade through jaunty Joe Quaso's penthouse windows, a number of heavily loaded vehicles erupted from the underground garage to form a caravan which sped away toward the inner city.
And, several blocks back, an interested observer in Porsche hot wheels tagged along to scout the next fire line.
14: RUNNING
To give the devil his due, it was a mighty tough job of defence presenting itself to Lileo, Quaso, and company.
It was bad enough that the mob interests were so far-flung and multilayered in Texas; the guy could pop up just about anywhere, and it would take a very fine spread of defences to cover every eventuality. Add to this the fact that the damned guy had such fantastic mobility and the job became a nightmare.
If you then considered the guy himself and what he could do when he wanted to, then the nightmare became a very real fact of life. The stories about the guy were probably not all that exaggerated, after all. He was a stunning son of a bitch. Just look at what he had accomplished in less than twelve hours.
He'd made a raid on the oil field, blitzed the place, made off with a star hostage.
Next he'd popped up in Dallas, coolly invaded the head shed itself and made an idiot of Joe Quaso knocking off half the palace guard and robbing the safe.
A short while later he turns up at the edge of the state to execute a friend of the friends in El Paso, another in Houston, a third in Austin.
And while the heads were together and trying to figure a way to cover that type of assault, the cocky bastard makes another audacious hit on the head shed—while talking to Lileo on the damned telephone!
It was demoralizing, yeah. It was worse than that. All the boys were walking around on tippy toes, taking every breath like it might be their last and peering into every dark corner like the fiends of hell might come rushing out of there at them.
And that wasn't even the worst part. The guy was shaking hell out of the Texas Plan—that was the worst part. Lileo's force had swarmed into Texas on an offensive mission—the Job: get Bolan And the bastard had turned the tables before they could even get launched. Now the primary mission was an unnerving job of defence: save Texas from the Bolan crunch.
Yes, the Texas Plan was wobbly already—after only twelve hours of this guy. And the old men in the East were damned unhappy about that. The instructions to Lileo and the Bolan Bunch were quite direct and quite clear: stop that son of a bitch from running wild through Texas!
Stunning, yeah. A stunning son of a bitch.
The problem was to figure some way to turn the tables around again. A show of counterforce, first, to reassure those running-scared friends who were central to the Texas Plan, to get them to stand firm and give Lileo time to set up an offensive of his own. Then to outsmart the smart guy, to set him up and let him walk in and hand over his head.
There had to be a leak somewhere in the organization, that was certain. And the guy was using it to make monkeys of them all.
So . . . why not put the leak to work for the right side?
Lileo told Joe Quaso, as their vehicle wheeled into the new headquarters: "I have a plan, Joe. We're going to get that bastard to running."
"Running where, though?" Quaso muttered worriedly.
"Running wild," Lileo replied. He grinned, looked at his hands, and added, "Yeah. Running hog wild."
Bolan followed the Mafia caravan to an old district close-in to the city, where once undoubtedly the cream of Dallas society lived but which was now a decaying neighbourhood in which the fine old mansions of a bygone era had been converted to rooming houses and apartment buildings. Others had been torn out to make room for drive-in restaurants, service stations, and other commercial establishments. Here and there, however, remained a valiant holdout against decay and progress, its splendour slightly tarnished but not entirely eclipsed by the tides of time.
It was one of these latter which proved to be the destination of the Lileo’s force—a three-story Southern colonial with plantation porches and white columns set on several acres of surrounding grounds, fenced with spiked iron.
The place looked like a hard site.
Bolan marked the spot for future reference and passed on by.
Those people would keep.
There were more pressing matters to occupy his attention for now.
He stopped at a public phone several blocks along and called a local television station.
"Let me speak to the managing editor of your news department," he requested.
"Ringing," the switchboard operator assured him. A moment later he told another young lady, "This is Mack Bolan. Tell the man, huh."
Following a flustered response and a brief wait, a man's voice came on. "This is Les Moore, newsroom manager. Who is this calling?"
Bolan said, "Let's keep this short and quick. What I have to say should verify my identity. The name is Bolan and I am not in Texas for my health but for yours. Swamp rot is festering here in Lone Star country and there's going to be the devil to pay if people here don't come alive and face the problem."
"Uh—Bolan, I've got this on the recorder."
"Be my guest. I want it known that I'm the one who hung the death medals on Spellman, Whitson, and Kilcannon this afternoon. I want it known also that a lot more awards will be handed out during the night."
"Everyone is wondering," the newsman said quickly, "why those particular men—why them?"
"Shouldn't be so hard to figure out," Bolan clipped back. "I don't make war on civilians."
"Yeah but—you mentioned others. Are you speaking of people with the stature of the other three? You're going to kill—?"
"My time is limited and I hadn't planned on going into details with you. The only ones who need to worry about the night already know who they are. And I know who they are, that's the important point."
"You want me to put this on the air. Right?" Bolan said, "Right."
"Okay, but I want something in return."
"Name it."
"A quick interview."
"If it's very quick, okay."
The newsman's voice was crackling with interest. "Why Texas? You're a Mafia buster. Do we have that much, uh, infiltration here?"
Bolan's voice crackled back, "It's no infiltration, Moore. You're being eaten alive."
"That's hard to believe. There's a border Mafia, sure. But—"
"But hell," Bolan said. "It's like cancer. You don't feel the pain until the terminal stages. The mob is about to eat your whole state. They're into everything, and I mean every vital organ."
"But these men you killed today, Bolan—they were among our most respected citizens. Surely—"
"That's one of your larger problems," Bolan said, quietly interrupting the argument. "Look, it's all the time I have."
"Just one more. Uh, human interest angle. Personal question. Okay?"
"Go," Bolan growled.
"How do you know? I mean, when you execute a man like Jerry Whitson, how do you know?
Don't you ever have doubts? Don't you ever wake up in a cold sweat and wondering if you really know what you're doing?"
"The doubts come before, Moore, not after. If the do
ubt can't be settled then I don't move. I have to go now."
"Wait, just one—I didn't phrase that right. What I meant to ask is how it feels to be judge and jury over these people. How can you be so sure of your own judgment? To just go out and kill a man without benefit of fair trial. Our whole country is based on the idea of justice and—"
"You said an interview, Moore, not a debate. I have to go—but I'll tell you this much. If a kid goes out and knocks over a gas station, he knows that he's handing his fate up to our justice system. He could get caught, he could get tried and convicted, he could serve time. That's the system, and it usually works. But we're not talking about that kind of system when we reach the subject of organized crime, big-time crime. These people have nothing but contempt for our quote system unquote. They buy the damned system, they own it, and they use it to their own advantage. They are above the system. Okay. I'm outside the system, too. That's where they operate—okay, it's where I operate. When our paths cross, there's a reaction. Don't talk to me about judges and juries in the same breath with Mafia."
"They get caught. Our federal prisons are full of big-time crooks who are paying the debt to society."
"Are they? A guy loots the economy of a nation, murders and tortures and terrorizes according to his own whims, corrupts governments and cannibalizes industries, makes junkies out of your kids, whores out of your women, and pimps out of your elected officials. So he's sitting in Leavenworth on an income tax rap.. He's paying a debt?"
"Well ... at least he's out of circulation."
"No way. These people go out of circulation with a bullet in the head. That's the only way."
The newsman had an idea he could not let go. "But when you simply walk up to a man, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger—isn't that?—I mean, every man deserves his day in court, an opportunity to face his accusers."
"They face me every time," Bolan assured his interviewer. "And they know. Believe me, they know."
"Gerald Whitson, too? Did he know? Why he was being killed?"
"He knew. These people are their own judge and jury, Moore. I'm just the executioner."
"Yeah," the newsman replied in a choked voice. "Trial by ordeal, eh? If they manage to live, then they're innocent. If you pull the trigger, then they're automatically guilty."
Bolan said, "No, they're automatically dead. I'm going now. If you feel all this strongly about the injustice of my operation, then I'm sure you'll want to get the warning out. Judgment has come to Texas. There is only one way the guilty can evade it. They have to get back into the system."
"What does that mean?"
"It means total surrender. Full disclosure of all illegal acts, confession."
"Oh," the newsman replied, startled by a new understanding. "There is an out, then. They can purge themselves."
"The outriders, yeah, the people who are riding along on the Mafia's coattails. Like Whitson, Spellman, Kilcannon. They can rejoin the system and take their chances with legal justice. Or they can take their chances with me. Tonight."
Bolan hung up, returned to the hot wheels, and blended back into the night.
While, in a downtown office building, an excited television news crew was gathering around a tape recorder for a replay of the hottest scoop of the year.
Very soon, now, everybody would be running.
15: FACE OF THE DEVIL
There had been a storm of reaction to what the whole town was referring to as "the Mack Bolan newscast." Several prominent citizens had requested police protection. A US district judge announced his resignation and retirement from the bench. Two members of the Texas legislature quickly followed suit and the governor's office announced that an "in-depth investigation" of the executive branch was "underway."
Police agencies throughout the state girded for a night of fireworks and it was announced that a special federal task force of law enforcement officials had reached Texas soil.
So, yes, the night was unwinding itself in Bolan's wake as his movements sent shock waves from border to border. But the man himself was just getting started.
He made one slow pass around the neighbourhood, eyes and instincts alert to ominous signs, then powered into the parking lot beside the building in which Arthur Klingman kept town dwellings.
He was debarking from the Porsche when a guy with New York written all over him stepped from the shadows of the building, flashed an open wallet, and announced, "Building security, sir. I'll have to see your parking permit."
Bolan straightened up and gazed down at the guy. "So look," he invited in a light drawl. "Its on the windshield."
The Mafioso bent over the low-profile vehicle and never straightened up again. Bolan's knee moved into the small of his back as both arms snaked around the neck into the deadly "Vinh Ha torque." The vertebrae were wrenched loose with a gentle sucking sound and the guy quietly ceased to live.
Bolan helped the body to its natural level and nudged it on beneath the vehicle with his feet.
Even if it had been bright daylight, a casual observer would have wondered what became of the second man—it had happened that quickly and that smoothly.
Bolan went on without a pause, moving swiftly to the rear entrance and stepping into the small lobby there.
He was challenged again immediately by a fat man who came scrambling off the stairway. Bolan sat him right back down with a football kick to the belly and followed through with a stiff-finger jab to the throat. The eyes rolled up and the lids dropped—for a while if not forever. The invader kept right on going, homing to his target and moving on tight numbers.
He hit the fourth-floor landing and swept through into the hallway with the Beretta at attention. A guy lunged away from a door about halfway down, clawing for leather as he whirled into position. The Belle chugged once and the sentry whirled on toward eternity, completing the spin and sprawling face down across the entrance to the Klingman apartment.
Bolan stepped over the body and kicked his way inside.
Two hard men who had been lounging at the television with beer and sandwiches were falling all over each other as they tried to go from full rest to full survival in a heartbeat. Neither made it. Nine millimetres of zinging death for each punched them back to total rest and deposited them in a twisted litter of spilt sandwiches and overturned beer.
Bolan closed the door and advanced deeper into the apartment. He found Arthur Klingman in a back room, seated quietly at a small desk with a jug of tequila and a neat row of lemon slices.
He was a handsome old man with thick white hair and ruddy face, clear eyes, and a chin that could have led a wagon train across hostile country.
A tough old bird, yeah.
He was dressed in starched khaki, the trouser legs stuffed into Western boots that had seen a lot of use. The hands on that desk had the hard, gnarled look that comes from a lifetime of honest toil.
He stood up, slowly and carefully, alert eyes measuring the dimensions of this stranger behind the gun —big like Texas, tall and straight and ready for anything—and, yeah, Bolan thought, a living symbol of this fantastic state.
"I guess we've come a gusher," Klingman said, and the voice matched the rest of the man.
Bolan tossed a marksman's medal to the desk as he replied, "I guess we have, Klingman."
"Okay. I'm ready."
"I'm not here to pin that medal on you," Bolan said.
Surprise registered in those bright eyes, then curiosity. "Then what do you want?"
"I want to keep a promise to a gutsy lady," Bolan told the pioneer oilman. "I told her I'd do what I could to salvage her daddy."
Klingman's eyes quivered. "You've talked to my girl?"
"I have your girl. She's safe and well." Bolan flipped a matchbook to the desk and Klingman immediately snatched it up. "You'll find her there. Room one fifteen. She's waiting for you to come for her. Take some clothes, she doesn't have any. Your buddies kept her drugged and naked, under lock and key."
The angry swe
ep of a forearm sent the tequila hurtling off the desk. "Sonsabitches!" Klingman exploded. Raging eyes found their level in the cool Bolan gaze, then dropped off. "Guess I'm the biggest one of all," he added, the voice deflated.
"That's for you to sift out for yourself," Bolan sold him.
"How much do you know?"
"Most of it. Judith helped. I'm up on Flag Seven. The Texas Plan. And I'm going to bust it. With or without your help."
"You want my help?"
Bolan gave the old man a curt nod. "Judith feels that you would welcome the option."
Pendleton, Don - Executioner 018 - Texas Storm. Page 9