Caribbean Kill te-10

by Don Pendleton

  "The human animal is a product of the planet," Bolan explained as he continued the scouting. "We've developed certain rhythms, both physically and mentally. Dawn is a sort of neutral area. For the guy that's been up all night, it means an inner letdown, a torpor."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. In the jungle sense, it means a relaxation from the perils of the night — that is, for us daylight creatures. That hint of light in the sky means that we've made it through another night, and we can relax now."

  "So you relax and attack," Grimaldi commented. "Sounds brilliant."

  "No," Bolan said. "You attack the guy who's fallen into a false sense of security."

  "You won't find any false security down there, buddy."

  "We'll see," Bolan said. "Put her down."

  "You really going to trust me to come back and get you?"

  "Yep."

  The pilot grinned. "Think you're a pretty good judge of flesh, don't you?"

  "Have to be," Bolan clipped back. "Put me down."

  Grimaldi put him down, hovering just off the coastal rocks less than a hundred yards outside the high walls of the estate.

  Bolan opened the hatch, said, "Good luck," and slid to the ground, a drop of about five feet.

  Grimaldi leaned over to secure the hatch, murmured, "Yeah, good luck, what's that?" — and sent the little bird into a heeling climb toward the sea.

  Bolan watched him disappear into the dusky overhead, then he took a sighting on his goal, checked his weapons, and moved silently toward the wall.

  He was in blacksuit, face and hands also darkened, a gliding shadow in a landscape of darkness.

  The moon was gone, and the first faint streaks of morning grayness were edging into the eastern horizon.

  The timing had been perfect. So far. It had to be. Ten minutes… that was all the time he had.

  He scaled the wall and dropped lightly inside the grounds and moved swiftly on without pause, relying now entirely upon Jack Grimaldi's memories of things that had been — three months earlier.

  Halfway across the compound Bolan was suddenly hit with the realization that things were almost preciselyas they had been on that earlier occasion of Grimaldi's visit.

  The damn joint was overflowing with people.

  Visiting type people.

  A large-scale meeting of the mob was evidently in progress, and had apparently been going on all night.

  Bolan did not know it yet, but the Caribbean Conclave was in session. He would soon recognize a familiar face or two, and he would wonder if he had dropped into an executioner's heaven… or into hell itself.

  And he had less than ten minutes to discover which it was to be.

  The dawn was on the march.

  And so was Death.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The biggee

  The layout almost perfectly coincided with Grimaldi's diagram. Bolan quickly located the telephone cable and took away their communications with the outside world. He then went directly to the security station at the east side of the courtyard.

  It was an elaborate little structure made of choice Haitian wood and polished to a dark lustre, about the size of a large American outhouse but with standing room only inside.

  A row of closed circuit television monitors were banked along one wall, providing various exterior views of the grounds — including the wall Bolan had just come over.

  An athletically built black man wearing a tight-fitting white suit was standing in front of the monitors, his back to Bolan, yawning and stretching and scratching the back of his head.

  The Beretta phutted a quiet Parabellum in to help relieve the itch. It scrunched in between the clawing fingers and the guy pitched forward against the monitors and slid into a squat beneath them.

  Another sentry came strolling in from a flower bed a few yards away, fiddling with the fly of his trousers. Yeah, even overloaded bladders wanted to let go at dawn. Bolan let go another zap from the Beretta. The guy's head snapped back and he returned to where he'd been, lying in it now and not even knowing it.

  Bolan grabbed the first guy by an ankle and dragged him into the flower bed and left him beside the other one.

  He'd been a minute and a half inside the grounds. And not a peep from anywhere. No false security, eh?

  Next on the agenda was the guard shack at the other side. Bolan crossed over on a soft run, avoiding the lighted areas near the house, and found the shack attended by a single guard who was in the act of pouring coffee from a thermos into a plastic cup.

  He waited until the guy set the thermos down, then he reached inside with both hands and lifted the sentry out, one big hand over the mouth and a forearm clamped into his throat.

  One violent twist and the guy stopped struggling and went limp. Continuing the initial motion without breaking stride, Bolan carried him on to an automobile in the parking area and tucked the body inside.

  A door opened several car-lengths away, another white suite rose into hazy view, and a soft voice called out, "Henri?"

  Bolan stood there behind the open car door and waited for the guy to come forward.

  The prey came down hesitantly, halted at the front bumper, and again said, "Henri?"

  He was a large one. Apparently he'd been goofing off in one of the cars, and now he was worried and wondering if he'd been caught.

  Bolan did not have time to wait the guy out. He brought the Beretta up and closed the distance between them with a silent but shattering Parabellum cruncher.

  Bolan fed that body in on top of the other one, closed the door, and went on to the house.

  Except for the front gate, that should have taken care of the outside men.

  Bolan did not give a damn about the front gate.

  He went in through the French doors off the courtyard and turned into the east wing, passing through a darkened hallway and into the fully-lighted dining room.

  A television eye glared at him from a wall station. He phutted a bullet through it and continued on past the butler's pantry and into another short hallway without changing pace. Over a door in the far wall was another eye. He moved swiftly beneath it and covered the lens with his hand, rapped on the door, and said, "Hey!"

  A bored voice, mechanically reproduced through a speaker beside the television camera, responded with, "Yeah, what."

  "You got some eyes out in there?"

  "Well… yeah. I was just fixin' to call about it. What the hell is it?"

  No false security, eh?

  "Open the damn door and I'll fix it," Bolan growled. "What the hell you been doing, sleeping?"

  "Hell no, I told you I was just..."

  A buzzer sounded and the door opened to Bolan's pressure.

  He stepped inside and a fat man with a face like red wine cried, "Whuuup" and made a lunge toward his shoulder holster.

  The Beretta won the race by a lifetime. Blood and pulpy flesh and splintered bone splattered across the television monitors. Bolan stepped back to the hallway and clicked the door shut.

  The next stop was the kitchen.

  Only a night light was burning and no one was present there. He found the power panel and a thoughtfully-placed flashlight in a little alcove near the door and pulled the main disconnect, removed the cartridge fuses, and dropped them into a garbage can.

  There were no lights — nor anything else electrical — operating in the big joint now.

  Bolan was standing in total, choking darkness.

  He stepped to the window and checked the progress of the sun, then he snapped on the flashlight and went quickly back through the dining room.

  People were astir when he reached the entry hall at the front of the house. The sentry dog was growling uneasily and his handler was trying to calm the big animal. Several shadowy figures had stepped in through the doorway from the west wing, swearing and groping their way through the darkness.

  Bolan was the man with the flashlight, and obviously the man with the answers.

  A snarlingly
unhappy face appeared in the spot and the guy asked, "What the hell happened?"

  Behind that beam Bolan knew that he was practically invisible. He replied, "Power failure. Just relax."

  "Relax hell," another voice protested. "You can't see your hand in front of your face in here. How long's it gonna be out?"

  The rest of your life, Bolan wanted to say. Instead, he said, "Sun's rising pretty soon. If you're scared of the dark, go outside. It'll be light out there in a minute."

  "Fuck that," somebody commented.

  "Sounds good to me," someone else argued. "Where the hell's the door? Shine that light over on the door, huh?"

  That ancient animal dwelling within man still found himself nervous and uncertain about the dark.

  Bolan obligingly spotted the door with the flashlight.

  He counted five men moving through the open doorway.

  Then he told the man with the dog, "Take that bastard outside and shut 'im up…"

  The guy did so, without a murmur, leaving the door open.

  Bolan crossed over and into the west wing. It was set up with a hallway running the full length along the center, doors opening onto offices and rooms to either side.

  One of those doors now stood open and people were loitering about in uneasy attitudes along the darkened hallway, and all eyes turned toward the beam of light from Bolan's flash.

  Bodyguards, Bolan read it.

  He announced in a loud voice, "Power failure. Don't worry, it'll be okay in a minute or two."

  One of the men growled, "It's already been a minute or two."

  Another door opened then, farther down, admitting a feeble seepage of yellow light into the hall. According to Grimaldi's diagram, that should be the conference room.

  A large man moved through the open doorway, and a man close to Bolan hastened to explain to the new arrival, "Power failure, boss. It's being taken care of."

  Another close voice demanded, "Hey you, guy, give the boss the flashlight."

  The big man said, "Never mind, we got candles. Relax, it's not the end of the world. This is Haiti, not Baltimore. Things like this happen here. What's the matter? Can't you boys read your cards in the dark?"

  Someone chuckled.

  The big guy said, "It'll be daylight pretty soon. Relax." He spun gracefully around and went back through the doorway.

  And then Bolan realized who he was.

  Big Gus Riappi.

  He called out, "Gus!"

  The guy reappeared, looking edgy and disgruntled in the flickering yellow light, but the voice was smoothly controlled. "Yeah. Who is that?"

  "Frankie. Tell Sir Edward a courier is here."

  "A courier from what?"

  "Hell I don't know. Came in by helicopter. He's in a hell of a sweat. Says we should tell Sir Edward he's here."

  "Yeah, I thought I heard a chopper. Where is he?"

  "Went upstairs, to the suite. Just before the lights went out."

  "Okay, I'll tell him. We're almost through in here."

  Riappi went back into the conference room. One of the bodyguards muttered, "It's about time they were through in there."

  Another one said, "Shut up. They'll be through when they get through."

  "I just meant, shit, since midnight chrissakes. How long does it take to shuffle a few heads around?"

  "I said shut up."

  So Bolan had another reading. As he had suspected, the Caribbean Carousel was being dismantled and put back together again — same game, same rules, different players. And it was being engineered from Port au Prince.

  He kept the flashlight beam well in front of him and casually announced, "That courier must've just come from San Juan. He says they're having a party at Glass Bay."

  The guy with the hard voice came to stiff attention and said, "What's that?"

  "Glass Bay's celebrating. I guess they got reason to."

  Bolan received a totally different reaction than the one he was expecting.

  The guy spun around and walked stiffly to the door of the conference room, rapped lightly with his knuckles, and went in.

  "That fuckin' Lavagni is the luckiest shit alive," someone muttered.

  Bolan agreed, "Yeh, he's lucky."

  Big Gus reappeared, the bodyguard in tow. Bolan thoughtfully put the spot on the floor at Riappi's feet. The big guy glared at the invisible entity behind the flashlight and growled, "What's this about Glass Bay?"

  Bolan replied, "Hell, Gus, the guy just said they're having a wild celebration. That's all I know."

  "Well I'll be a son of a bitch," Riappi said disgustedly. He pushed his chief bodyguard aside and returned to the conference room.

  Bolan said, "What's he so steamed up about?"

  "You'd be steamed up too if you'd just lost what he just lost," the talky one told him.

  The other guy said, "Flukey, shut the hell up!"

  "Well I just..."

  "Get on back in the tank!"

  "Well dammit, it's..."

  "All of you! Back in the tank! Open the goddam drapes or something, shit — use your goddam heads for a change!"

  Bolan watched as three hardmen filed into their watchroom — the "tank." The head man looked toward Bolan and growled, "What the hell are you waiting around for?"

  Bolan waggled the flashlight and replied, "I'm waiting for Sir Edward."

  The guy grunted and went into the conference room.

  Bolan leaned against the wall and counted the seconds. Not many were left. Very soon now the sun would be sliding up out of the sea and the Executioner would be losing his invisibility.

  Then that door down there opened, and a tall straight man emerged to stare coldly into Bolan's light shield.

  And yes, this had to be the guy… and he was no black man. He was also no white man such as Bolan had ever encountered in the usual Mafia circles.

  He had that soft antiseptic scrubbed chairman-of-the-board look, that Wall Street image of solid respectability and impeccable social background, the kind of guy you wouldn't expect to yell shitif he were drowning in it.

  Bolan had never seen this man before, but he'd seen dozens of duplicates gazing benignly from the pages of national magazines and from the financial pages of big city newspapers.

  He was Mr. Plymouth Rock, WASP of the ages, president of that corporation and director of this foundation and chairman of a dozen charity drives.

  He was Mr. Good, protector of the nation's morals and preserver of a society's cultural treasures.

  Or, at least, he must have been at one time.

  And Bolan found himself filling with rage and shaking inside over this particularly revolting new look in "the criminal type."

  In the name of what golden graven god did a guy like this put down every human trust and confidence and turn upon his society to cannibalize, loot, rape, and ruin the upward movements of his fellow man?

  Yes, this was a big one. This guy didn't steal nickels and dimes. He built and perpetuated ghettoes, created junkies and filled the jails with habitual criminals, destroyed lives and disrupted families by the wholesale… and all for the love of the lousy buck.

  Yeah, and Bolan knew now why the fates had directed the Executioner into the sunny Caribbean… he knew that he had come for just this man, this man alone, the biggee.

  He choked back his anger as he said, "Sir Edward, a guy is dying to see you."

  "Yes, so I'm told," the guy replied smoothly, and the voice fit the rest of him. "Lead the way, please."

  "You'd better go first, sir," Bolan suggested. "Ill keep the light ahead of you."

  "Very well."

  The guy moved on along the hall, following the spot, and walked past the door to the "tank."

  Bolan fell in at his side and the Beretta found soft flesh just below the ribs and the icy voice of the Executioner recommended total silence and faultless behavior.

  Sir Edward stiffened slightly but moved on without a falter to the end of the hall, across the reception room, and out
through the French doors to the courtyard.

  They headed across the grounds toward the north wall, and the eastern horizon was glowing reddishly when Mr. Clean decided to risk a confrontation with his captor.

  He came to a halt and turned a haughty gaze upon the man behind him.

  And then the eyes wobbled, and that board-chairman jaw dropped, and Sir Edward gasped, "My God! It's Mack Bolan!"

  "That's who," Bolan replied coldly. "The bells toll for you, Edward."

  "Now just one moment! You have allowed yourself a hasty and dangerous conclusion!"

  The guy was trying to dazzle him with his good-liness.

  Bolan said, "And what's that?"

  "I am not associated with the Mafia!"

  The graveyard voice told him, "Of course not The Mafia is a legend, it doesn't exist."

  "Oh it exists, Mr. Bolan. Believe me it exists. But my God, man, surely you can't believe I could be mixed up in anything like that!"

  Bolan's stomach rolled. He shoved the guy toward the wall. "Move," he commanded.

  The image was falling apart before Bolan's eyes.

  The face went mean, the gaze crafty, and the voice turned to pure oil. "All right, then, let's be realistic. You're a grown man, Bolan. What do you want? From life, what do you want? I'll get it for you. Your heart's desires, riches beyond imagination, power beyond measure. Women! The most beautiful and desirable women in the world, Bolan — a sultan's harem! Think of that! Think of..."

  "Shut up," the voice of death commanded. "I've got what I want."

  "My God, man, be reasonable!"

  "I didn't come here to judge you, Edward. I came to execute you."

  The dissolved image was pleading, "I can give you..." when the Parabellum punched through the bridge of the nose and expanded into the brain, and another evolutionary backslider seceded from the three-dimensional world.

  The Executioner stood over the sorry remains, and he dropped a marksman's medal onto the still chest, and he said, "You can't give me a damn thing, Edward."

  As he scaled the wall, Bolan could hear the sentry dog whining somewhere off to the front, and he could hear the comforting sound of a rotary wing churning up the atmosphere in the very near distance.

  He threw a final look at "the mansion in the rocks" — and it looked much more impressive in the dark.