She slowed to a walk, clutching tortured sides in crossed arms and struggling for breath, and when she reached the vehicle she crumbled to the ground and wailed, "Well, damn it, just damn it!"
A gruff voice from the darkness commanded, "Off your tail, and on your feet, partner."
Yeah, sure, it was her guy — in one piece but slightly frayed here and there — a tail burnt off his coat and blood on his hands, but, God, what a big, beautiful bastard he was.
"What kept you, Captain Tortoise?" she panted. "That was a hell of a long two minutes!"
He picked her up and carried her into the van, placed her on the bunk, and tenderly inspected her parts.
"Damn it, Toby," he said solemnly. "Just damn it."
"I'm all present and accounted for, sir. Aren't I?"
"You sure are," he said.
Yes, she sure was. But the warrior wasn't.
"Captain Tearful!" she cried in genuine surprise and flowing concern, viewing his face clearly for the first time since the reunion — and she pulled the man's head onto her breast and held him there.
"Go ahead," she crooned. "Let it out, let it go."
"Can't," he muttered in a choked voice. "Guess I'm just not man enough yet."
Even so, it was cosmic magic — of a different sort. And Toby the Lady Fed had never felt more a woman.
23
Promised
Toby drove while Bolan changed into combat rig. They talked through the opening between cab and van.
"How were things in 1492?" she inquired with forced lightness.
"Enlightening," he replied. "And ominous."
"Well, how about giving a girl some ominous enlightenment."
"If I tell you at all, Toby, I have to tell it all. I don't know how to color it."
She cast a dark glance over her shoulder. "I've never asked you for colors."
He cinched up the black suit and gave it to her straight. "Crazy Sal sentenced Georgette to fifty days in the chamber."
"The chamber? What's that?"
"The guy back there claims he doesn't know any more than that. And maybe he doesn't. If it's what I think."
"Okay, what do you think it is?"
"Let me tell you the other first. The guy at 1492 is a big international money front for the Detroit mob. He handles literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year — some of it mere trading paper, but quite a bit in cool black cash. The entire movement is half legit, half business as usual for the boys. And that last half covers all the sins. If you have the cannibal instinct, you know, you can eat a lot of people in the legitimate business world."
"And God knows," Toby sniffed, "even the straight ones are cannibal enough."
"What a difference, though," Bolan said. "Sure big money carries all sorts of filth with it regardless of who's handling it, but these mob people have their own distinctive flair for hot rape. And their own cute games. Like 1492, case in point. This guy isn't satisifed to simply influence the bouncing bucks with free sex. He likes to capture them with a club. The club, of course, being that same free sex, only it turns out to be expensive as hell. You were right about the party girl jet set, A street-corner hooker is Saint Joan by comparison with these kids. The 1492 girls are cannibals of a different stripe, and the power they carry between their thighs is awesome to contemplate — when you know the international figures they're playing hotsy with. Of course, the mob can't afford to let that kind of power become independent or competitive. They need to own these girls, own their very souls."
"You're talking about industrial blackmail."
"With a variation or two, yeah. Political blackmail, also. Which is why 1492 handles soul recruiting the way it does. They take the girls with a club, too. Corrupt them with terror and shame and everything else they can lay on them, then send them into the jungle to bring home some hard-to-get stocks, or a new company, or whatever else is hot in the marketplaces at the moment — maybe even a small, but developing, nation here and there."
"I know the routine," Toby reported, tight-lipped. "What's that chamber?"
Bolan replied, "Only my gut knows for sure. I believe I can tell you this much. Georgette has been held up as some sort of object lesson to new recruits. They parade the new souls through this 'chamber' to show what could happen to them if they ever develop cute ideas about not playing ball with their new masters."
Toby shuddered. She whispered, "Oh, my God."
Bolan said, "Yeah. A chamber of horrors. Have you ever seen a turkey, Toby?"
"I've heard of them," she replied shakily. "Are you saying that Georgette... ?"
"You said no colors," Bolan muttered. "And that's what my gut is telling me about Georgette."
"Oh, my God."
"Yeah." He buckled on the automag and tested the action.
"Did you say for fifty days?"
"That's the story."
"But how could they ... ?" Toby shuddered again. "How could anyone take it that long?"
"Let's hope she couldn't, Toby. Pray that she's long dead."
"My God, my God."
He slithered into the Beretta rig, sprung her twice, checked the clip, secured Whispering Death.
"Where are we going?"
"You know the place."
"I do?"
He raised the lid of a munitions chest and began selecting weapons for the hunt.
"Do I?" she repeated.
"You said it held some secrets. I believe it does."
"You can't hit that place again so soon!" Toby cried. "It would be crazy suicide!"
"Maybe so. But there's more than one route to suicide, Toby. I can't walk away from this one."
"But not if she's dead already! It would be senseless, wasteful!"
Bolan closed the chest and drummed his fingers on the lid.
Toby pulled the war wagon to the curb and turned to him with a tortured gaze.
He asked her quietly, "Are you ready to write her off, Toby?"
She just stared at him.
He said, "There are ways of keeping people alive … through almost anything. These people have turkey doctors who — "
"Oh, shut up!" Toby screamed.
"Did you ever read the Nuremberg reports on the surgical techniques used by the Nazi lunatics? Do you know what a skilled surgeon without a soul can do to a living body — and keep it living? Have you ever — ?"
"Shut up! Just shut up!"
"Let's roll, partner."
She mauled her lower lip between grinding teeth, realizing the pain only when she tasted blood, then told the man, "Not for my sake, Captain Gallant. This one is not for me. She's dead and I know it. You know it, too. So this one is not for Toby."
"Call it for me, then," Bolan muttered. "And roll this goddamned hearse. Now!"
She rolled it, reluctantly, and Bolan resumed his preparations for war.
A moment later she told him, "Okay. But I'm going in with you."
"The hell you are."
Tears were streaming down her face, diluting the blood at her lips. She said, "And just when I was getting to really like you."
"Stop thinking, Toby. Just drive."
"I've felt more alive today than I ever have. I don't want it to end, Captain Honey. I just can't stand to lose it now. Not now"
He told her, "You can't lose something you've never owned, Toby."
"Thanks; that hurt like hell. I don't want to own you."
"I didn't mean me."
"Oh hell, Mack! What are we doing? What's the sense of all this? God, tell me God, what are we doing?"
"Living, Toby. We're just living. Largely."
"I'll settle for small"
"No, you wouldn't. Tell you what, though. I'll share an R&R with you. After this. We'll take a few days off from living, and we'll just graze in green pastures until we've both had a bellyful. Okay?"
She smiled through tears and told him, "That's a cheap promise. From a dead man."
He said, "I'm not dead yet."
"Green
pastures, eh? Okay. Okay."
But the green, green hills of home seemed terribly remote, at that moment, to the somber man in black.
It was a cheap promise, sure.
Toby called back to him, "We're getting close. What's the plan? Quiet entry?"
He glanced outside to orient himself, then replied, "No. Not for this one, Toby. Pull into the next street west, and stop."
For this one, no. No quiet entry.
Charley Fever would be expecting it, and all the quiet ways would be under heavy patrol.
This one would be a hit — a hard swing to the solar plexus — thunder and lightning and hell on the hoof.
And let Death pick up her pieces where she would.
24
Dead
A smoke cannister whizzed over the wall directly between the twin gatehouses at SCYC and fell to the lawn, spewing a dense black cloud, followed immediately by another and then another — each spaced about a hundred feet apart.
The gate captain bellowed an anguished alarm and hit the double-lock, while another guard fumbled with a walky-talky radio.
Then a gray van with a canvas satchel draped across the grill leapt out of the shadows of the access road and charged along the fifty-foot approach to the chute, steadily gaining speed.
A panicky guard on the catwalk connecting the two gates opened fire on the vehicle with a chatter gun. The windshield shattered, but the truck bore on.
Someone screamed, "Look out!"
Then it hit, dead center on the outer gate, blowing through with a fanastic explosion that shook the night all over those grounds.
A wall of the main gatehouse promptly disintegrated. The catwalk tilted, cracked, then collapsed into the chute.
And that was not all.
The demolished van skittered on, wedging itself into the narrow chute halfway between the two gates. A second explosion triggered itself seconds after the catwalk fell in, and this one outdid the first by several points on the Richter scale. Debris from both gatehouses flew in an almost horizontal movement in a farflung pattern across those bedeviled grounds as desperate voices screamed into the night.
While the displaced pieces were settling, a solitary figure in combat black stalked across the no-man's-land and calmly walked into hell.
As he moved through the shattered area, he pulled a gas mask into place and heaved another smoke cannister far ahead.
He bore a military pack on both chest and back. The massive head weapon, a .44 magnum autoloader, occupied prime position in the right hand. The left held a hand grenade — dead-man-armed with five seconds of fuse.
A pistol yapped at him from the left flank. Without breaking stride he squeezed off two thunderous retorts from the automag — and the yapping abruptly ceased.
He stepped into the smoke and guided his progress with one foot moving along turf, the other scraping paved drive. He was a pack mule, and it was necessary that he move like one. The weight upon those feet was nearly double the usual.
The night was dead, breezeless, unreal, as viewed through the visor of the mask and choked with the heavy atmosphere of chemically produced smoke.
Shadowy figures were running blindly and wheezing in all directions around him.
The guy had found his bullhorn again and was exhorting the troops from some place safely removed.
Bolan the Mule plodded on, pausing only to grip the mag between firm teeth now and then while he heaved another ration of smoke — and he continued thusly, unmolested, all the way to the parking area beside the house.
A fire team with wet towels at their faces occupied the small porch at the side entrance, five of them jammed onto that small oasis of relatively unpolluted atomosphere.
The sighting was instantaneous on both sides.
A volley of reactively hasty fire crackled into the charged environment of doom as Bolan merged back with the smoke. His left arm executed a half-circle in a softball pitch.
The grenade dropped into the pile-up and the HE pummeled the clear zone and scattered smoking bodies in every direction. One of the victims was afire with flames leaping up his back; he rose to hands and knees then pitched forward without a sound.
Bolan sent him a .44 mercy round just to make sure, then resumed the assault plan.
He hit the windows at both levels with a combination of smoke and HE, methodically working his way around the big house while people in there stampeded and screamed for assistance from hired guns who had apparently lost all taste for the wages of war. Guys were running all over the grounds and yelling, yet the direct challenges to the tall man in executioner black were scattered and brief. The big, rolling booms of the automag seldom competed with the more devastating thunder of high explosives that continually puffed and rocked and swayed that hellhouse.
The artificial smoke had become an unnecessary factor by the time Bolan's chestpack gaped empty and limp.
The shattered building was shooting flames and billowing honest smoke from every opening — and there were numerous new ones. Guys were leaping from second-story windows and lying about, groaning, everywhere.
Bolan shed the useless pack and invaded the pandemonium, moving swiftly and surely to the only area that could possibly produce the results he sought from this strike.
He found it where he thought he would — in the sub-basement — he was chilled by the knowledge that he had stood less than two paces from truth on his last trip into here.
Yeah, Toby, the joint held secrets.
The hidden door creaked open to his expert touch, and he found himself in a small lounge area — not much larger than an ordinary bathroom. A tattered chair shared the space with a small table upon which rested a double hotplate and a stained coffee pot, an open box of Baby Ruth candy bars, and a six-pack of Dr. Pepper.
Bolan had actually looked into there the night before, found it empty, and went on.
It was not empty now.
A fat ghoul was standing stiffly against the far wall, staring at the visiting apparition with a resigned snarl.
Yeah, Bolan thought, small damned underworld!
It was the turkey doctor whom Bolan had encountered so briefly, yet so traumatically, on that back door of hell in central Jersey. He knew the guy only as "Sal," and even that was too much knowledge for Mack Bolan to stomach.
He removed the gas mask and told the fat man, "Two Crazy Sals under one roof is too much for my belly."
"There was but one crazy Sal," the guy said haughtily. "I am not programmed by ridiculous emotions."
The smell of Auschwitz and Buchenwald hung heavy in the air between them. Bolan had to fight his trigger finger to keep it cool.
"Spring the door," he commanded icily. "And stand aside."
"Forgive me for not understanding that instruction," said the spirit of scientific savagery.
Bolan helped along the understanding. He shot Fat Sal at the arch of heavy thighs with a 240-grain chunk of nonsurgical steel. The guy screamed and grabbed and fell forward onto his knees, clutching hands instantly dyed red, eyes wild with understanding now.
"How's the perspective from down there, Sal?" Bolan asked soberly. "That's just tab one, spelled Bruno." He kicked the guy out of his path, and the turkey doctor fell onto his side, legs still doubled, and lay there grunting.
Bolan found the springset on his own and opened the trick door, steeled himself, then stepped into the Dark Ages.
A chamber of horrors, yeah. Complete with candelabra and sacrificial altar. Low ceiling, dank cement walls, the smell of mold and mildew surpassed only by that other odor — that turkey smell that chased Bolan's dreams down blood river and haunted his wakeful strolls across hell's back acres.
It was a long, narrow room — dominated by the raised surgical table at the center. A series of eight-by-ten glossy photos lined the wall on one side, telling the graphic story of the shredding of a sentient being in grisly, step-by-step detail, each one carefully dated to preserve he continuity of the crime, each one a pict
ure of the same pitiful wreck who now lay upon that dreadful table with the candelabraum at her head.
Crazy Sal sentenced her to fifty days in the chamber.
Fifty enternities was more like it.
A medical device for intravenous feeding stood at the side, connected to the "patient" by a length of clear tubing. It could be used for blood transfusions, as well.
A small table at the other side held hypodermic syringes and vials of liquid.
Oh, how Fat Sal had struggled to keep this one alive and aware. And, God in heaven, what an awareness.
She had no feet and no hands.
One eye socket was empty and ghastly in the candleglow.
The other eye was intact but had no lid with which to shutter reality — a reality helped along by an arrangement of mirrors placed for unavoidable viewing.
She also had no breasts.
Where genital labia had been was now a smooth skin graft with a miniature artificial penis to facilitate urination.
A crude "badge" had been carved into her abdomen, glowing redly with raised scar tissue that had been encouraged rather than inhibited.
Yeah! Step by step and day by grisly day the dismemberment of a once beautiful woman had gone relentlessly forward.
Bolan's guts creaked with this firsthand realization, shaking his faith in the worth of the whole human experience.
And — yes, Toby — she was alive ... breathing with shallow little grunts, defenseless cyclops of an eye roving the face in a mute plea from the bowels of hell itself.
He stood beside her in frozen immobility and groaned, "Canuck, baby — okay, okay."
She tried to speak, but then he saw that she had no tongue and also no teeth — but no speech was really necessary to convey the message from that pleading eye.
He whispered, "Okay. God rest you, Georgette."
The automag roared and the reverberations of that blast sent him reeling out of there.
The lunatic from Hades was still curled into a knot on the floor. He'd managed to get his pants down and was attempting to stanch the flow of blood with his bare hands.
Bolan stepped over him without a second glance and went on to the larger chamber and through to the main basement. He shrugged off the backpack and carefully removed the contents, shaped the plastics and emplaced the timers, then methodically set the explosives for maximum demolition.
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