“Hell, I don’t care. I got cheated out of a husband. Somebody who treated me fine in spite of the bitchy things I did to him. That man was a saint.”
Bolan moved closer, speaking softly. He knew she was distraught and any sudden moves on his part could mean the end for both of them.
“Angela, I know things look a little gloomy now,” Bolan coaxed, “but they’ll be better. Think of your children!”
He caught her hand gently and eased the grenade away while holding the arming handle firmly in place.
Bolan leaned away from her, took a roll of black tape from the suitcase on the seat behind them and taped the grenade’s arming handle solidly in position. Then he put it back in the case.
She sighed and broke into tears. “Oh, damn! I have to go back. I’ll tell Carlo that you tricked me and forced me to help you, and that I almost killed you with a grenade. He’ll have to believe me.”
Bolan reached over, touched her chin and turned her face to him.
“Angela, you are a beautiful, sexy woman. Just relax and see how things look in a month or so. You’ll be married again within a year, or I miss my guess.”
She blinked. “You really think so?”
“Yes, besides, killing me won’t accomplish anything. Your children must be important to you.”
“Yes, of course. But I’m important, too.”
He dropped her downtown and watched her get a cab. The women were the real losers within the whole Mafia framework, he thought. The mobsters’ women always lost.
He consulted his watch — not quite noon. There was a little more than twenty-four hours before the mayor’s speech. He had a lot of important work to do before then.
* * *
Behind the rented Buick, a man in a rented Thunderbird watched Mack Bolan. The man was large — six foot four and 260 pounds of hardened muscle. He had black flashing eyes, dark hair that crowded his collar and was clean shaven. His name was Vince Carboni and he worked for La Commissione, the high commission of the Mafia bosses of bosses. His only job — to hunt down and kill Mack Bolan.
11
Vince Carboni snorted as he watched the man he had been hunting for two months. Now he would watch Mack Bolan, get in position and blow him away before Bolan even knew that Vince Carboni was in town.
He had been going to see Carlo Nazarione to warn him not to notify the Bolan Search Center in New York that the bastard was in Baltimore. Turning in at Nazarione’s gate, he saw two people walking down the street. One was a knockout blonde, the other one was Bolan.
Carboni had slowly passed to make certain, then circled the block and followed the pair to a car. They drove around and then stopped and talked. Later they drove downtown, where the woman got out and hailed a taxi.
Pure chance that he had spotted Mack Bolan, but he’d take it.
When Bolan’s Buick pulled away from the curb, Carboni’s Thunderbird followed two cars behind. He had practiced following cars around New York; if you can tail a car in Manhattan, you can stay with one anywhere. Carboni was an expert. As long as the victim did not know he was being followed, Carboni usually stayed three or four cars behind. If the other guy knew, it became a race, not a tail.
Carboni knew at once that Bolan had no idea he was being tailed. The Buick sedan wound through several streets, then stopped near a phone booth. Carboni parked across the one-way street and watched.
He had been waiting a long time for this chance. The commission first came to him a year ago. He had been happy working in New York as an enforcer and “eliminator,” as they called it now. But the commission offered him ten times the money he was making, and his own don urged him to take the job, so there was no problem either way.
He spent two months on weapons, learning everything he could about handguns, all the auto and semiauto submachine guns, and then taking a postgraduate course from an old sapper about gunk, juice, powder and plastic explosives.
For two weeks he spent sixteen hours a day reading everything the commission had collected on the Executioner. They had copies of every story printed in the United States.
Slowly Carboni filtered out fiction from fact, the hype and local paranoia from the reality. He knew more about Mack Bolan, his family, his involvement with the government at Stony Man Farm and his subsequent “disengagement” from Uncle Sam than anyone in the Mafia.
Now he planned to kill Bolan!
Carboni had missed the bastard in Portland, but just barely. This time he would not miss. It was a matter of pride now.
There was only one restraint. Vince Carboni was not going to sacrifice his own life just to get the Executioner. He could not spend that five-million reward if he were laid out in a coffin. Which was why he did not unlimber his .44 AutoMag right then and blast Bolan as he stood in the phone booth. Not with a hundred witnesses to identify both him and the car. He was too smart for that.
Bolan left the phone booth and drove north. He hit the Jones Falls Expressway and continued north across the Beltway. The small town of Brooklandville was ahead. It was almost rural here, a few small farms and acreages. Traffic fell to nothing. Carboni pulled up behind the Buick and leaned out the window. There was no chance now to disguise a tail, but at least there would be damn few witnesses out here.
His first shot blew the left rear tire. The Buick moved sideways, then back, as it stopped on the right shoulder.
Carboni braked the T-Bird to a halt fifty yards behind and ducked. He went out the side door and saw that the Buick’s door was open, too.
Beyond a small ditch was a field of corn, head high. Bolan was out there somewhere.
Carboni jumped back in the car as a small-caliber shot thunked into the door where he had crouched. He went out the door on the other side and stared into the cornfield. Before he could determine a strategy, the boom of an AutoMag broke the silence and the rented Thunderbird rocked as the heavy round crashed into the engine. He heard steam escaping and swore.
His wheels were probably dead! Carboni charged around the back of the car, raced across the ditch and into the cornfield. He paused in the corn, breathing heavily, then held his breath and listened.
All he heard was leaves rustling in the breeze. Where the hell was Bolan? He looked down the row, but the lush growth of the stalks and leaves obscured the view beyond about a dozen feet in any direction. He looked over the top of the six-foot tassels, but saw no one.
Carboni moved deeper into the field toward the spot where he supposed Bolan had to be. All he wanted was one good shot. Just one and he would collect five million dollars!
The hit man eased forward again, then stopped. He heard an engine grind, catch and wheels spin. Carboni screamed and reversed, running wildly through the corn, holding the AutoMag ready.
The damn Executioner had slipped back to the Buick and was moving.
Carboni saw the Buick drive along the shoulder, its back tire flopping. His .44 AutoMag ejected three rounds into the side windows. Then a round hit the gas tank. Gas gushed out but did not explode.
Carboni was running as fast as the car was flopping along. He charged along the ditch, figuring the rig could not move more than three or four hundred yards with only the fuel in the carburetor and fuel pump.
After a hundred yards the Buick wavered, and the engine sputtered and died. Carboni went flat on the ground in the ditch and waited for Bolan to step out and die.
A minute later, the hit man frowned. Bolan had not yet emerged from the car.
Fifty yards behind Carboni, Mack Bolan knelt among the cornstalks, clipping grenades onto his hastily donned combat harness and web belt. He adjusted his AutoMag and put the Uzi on its shoulder strap. Then he moved toward the road, the Uzi up and waiting.
Carboni had crawled along the ditch to the Buick. He walked around the Buick, his big gun ready.
Bolan grinned, wishing he could see the expression on the big headhunter’s face. His contacts told him that Vince Carboni, a former hit man from New York, was smart, mean an
d resourceful, and had spent three months training before starting the manhunt for Mack Bolan.
Vince Carboni was not a man to take lightly.
He would be furious when he found the Buick’s steering wheel tied down and a big rock on the gas pedal.
When the New York gunner came behind the Buick, Bolan slammed a 5-round burst at him from the Uzi. The mafioso ducked, and the rounds pounded into the Buick.
Bolan’s combat-trained mind had evaluated his options and selected one computer-fast — search and destroy. He needed to eliminate this continuing threat.
Bolan darted up to Carboni’s Thunderbird and looked inside. A Weatherby Mark V rifle lay on the back seat. The Executioner removed the weapon and retreated to the rear of the car. Sheltered behind the car, he decided he could not carry the ten-and-one-half-pound weapon. He quickly took the bolt from the big rifle, making it inoperative, threw the rifle into the cornfield and the bolt in the opposite direction.
Then he moved forward. The Mafia hit man was next on the Executioner’s own hit list.
As Bolan ran for the cornfield, three rounds snapped past him. There were from Carboni’s AutoMag, and now he knew how others felt when he fired his own big gun at them and missed. He charged into the corn, moved inward fifty feet, then carefully worked forward. He tried but could not entirely prevent the tops and tassels of the cornstalks from swaying as he moved from one row to another.
Something black flew through the air toward him.
Grenade! He charged twenty feet down the row, then dived into the soft dirt as the bomb exploded. The inch-thick cornstalks absorbed most of the shrapnel. He had seen the bomb just in time.
One fragger was left in the suitcase in the Buick. What else? Only a .45 and some extra ammo for his weapons. So the fragger probably had been one of his own. He would find out shortly. He moved cautiously toward the road without disturbing a single leaf.
Bolan stopped at the edge of the corn, still concealed. He checked each way and at last saw Carboni behind the dead Thunderbird; one of his legs showed under the car. A 6-round burst from Bolan’s Uzi brought a scream from the mob goon. The hit man fired over the car into the cornfield with no idea where his target was.
Bolan was running short of ammo for the Uzi, which he had taken from the guard at Carlo’s castle. He had two more magazines and that was it. He had to conserve his firepower, since the Uzi was the only long gun in the contest.
Carboni crossed the road, then limped to a fence and crawled under it. By the time Bolan saw him he was a quarter mile away, crossing a pasture toward a dry irrigation ditch.
Sprinting, the Executioner moved the Uzi to single shot and sent two rounds into the ditch where Carboni had vanished. He scanned the area. The irrigation ditch ran toward some farm buildings a mile away, set in the middle of what might once have been a mile-square farm. A small stream with lots of brush and small trees growing along it meandered through the pasture and came within two hundred yards of the barn.
Why was Carboni heading for the buildings? Again Bolan’s combat-trained mind checked off the possibilities and came up with the most reasonable. The thug was hurt and looking for shelter, a longer weapon and possibly hostages to use for bargaining.
Bolan did not like any of these motives. He ran toward the barn, hoping to intercept the hit man before he reached it.
The shot came without warning. It lanced through the air less than three feet from Bolan, and he dived and rolled into a slight depression in the pasture. The second shot missed his head by a foot. Carboni had traveled faster than Bolan had anticipated, and was firing from fifty feet ahead of him.
So much for the first tactic. On his toes and elbows, keeping his body just off the ground, Bolan crawled toward the creek and its cover of brush and trees.
He made it to the creek, taking only one more shot from Carboni, who had worked farther down the irrigation ditch. Carboni would beat him to the barn and the other buildings. That could be a real problem.
Bolan waded across the foot-deep creek and began running along the meandering stream toward the barn, still three hundred yards ahead of him.
He was still fifty yards from where the creek came closest to the barn, when he saw Carboni jump out of the ditch and race for the protection of the wooden structure.
Bolan hoped there was no one home. Maybe they were all out in the fields. As if denying his hope, a screen door slammed somewhere.
Bolan worked out a new tactical plan. He would swing around the barn to the house. He ran hard.
Panting after the four hundred yards, he approached the sixteen or twenty fruit trees behind the house, most large enough to give him some protection.
He took no enemy fire.
Again he dashed from one tree to the next, edging closer to the old two-story frame farmhouse. There was no back door. He knelt behind a bushy apple tree closest to the house. From there he walked casually, the Uzi at his side. He hoped no one would glance out the rear windows.
As he reached the house he heard the roar of an AutoMag. A scream followed. He hit the ground, edged to the corner of the house and looked around.
Thirty feet away, Carboni held a woman around the waist and pulled her close to him. In his right hand was the big cannon. The two figures walked forward and out of sight around the front of the house.
Bolan sprinted to the next corner, and saw a man sprawled on the grass by a wooden gate. Bolan knew he was dead. The mobster must be inside the house with the woman. Kids? Probably. The woman looked to be in her thirties.
The Executioner peered in a window on the side of the house. In a large kitchen with a long wooden table, Carboni sat on a bench, his gun pointed at the woman, who was bandaging Carboni’s calf with some cloth. Behind them a baby sat in a high chair, and two children about six and eight sat rigidly on the far side of the table.
Carboni said something to the woman, who went to a refrigerator and brought out cold cuts. The man was not going to move for a while, but maybe he could be faked outside.
Bolan drew the Beretta 93-R and worked around the front of the house, moving below windows until he was four feet from the open screen door. He cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Carboni!” Bolan called. “This place is surrounded by our SWAT team. Come out with your hands up and you won’t be shot.”
The Executioner heard movement inside the house, then a woman’s light steps running up some stairs. Heavier footsteps came toward the door.
“Damn! Nobody out there. Must have been that bastard Bolan!”
The steps retreated, and the Executioner went to the kitchen window and looked in. The three kids sat where they had been. The woman was gone.
Carboni grabbed the six-year-old and held him against his chest. The big .44 AutoMag muzzle pressed on the boy’s head.
“Farm lady. You come down here in ten seconds or I’m gonna blow this kid of yours right straight to hell!”
“No!” she screamed and came running into the room, a deer rifle still in her hands. She dropped the weapon and held out her arms.
Carboni kept the child. “Sit down and shut up. There’s a guy outside gunning for me, and I’m aiming to make him dead before I leave this place. You got a shotgun?”
The woman shook her head.
“Quit lying, bitch! You like this kid or don’t you?”
“Yes, I forgot! It’s in the cupboard, right over there.”
“Bring it and a box of shells over here. Do it now, lady. I ain’t got nothing against you but I don’t like you, either. Means not a damn thing to me whether the rest of your family lives or dies. Understand?”
“Yes.” The woman put the double-barreled shotgun and a box of shells on the table beside him.
“And finish that goddamn sandwich. You put anything in there that you wouldn’t eat yourself, and I blow this kid’s brains all over you and the kitchen.”
Even through the window, Bolan could see the strain on the woman. She was short and brunette,
and now her face was frozen tight with terror. She made a sandwich of cheese and ham and lettuce, and another one of tuna and put them in front of Carboni with a can of beer.
“Two more beers,” he said. He ate with his left hand, his right holding the weapon against the boy.
Bolan had no chance for a kill shot. Even a head shot would give the hoodlum time to pull the trigger, killing the boy. There was no device on his combat harness that would help him rout the man out of the kitchen.
He checked the grenades and remembered he had brought one flash-stun grenade for a test. He had never used it. He balanced out the possible damage the concussion might do the baby. The stun effect would be far less harmful than a round from Carboni’s big .44.
Carboni would not leave witnesses. He would kill without a thought if he figured it would help him even slightly. After all, hadn’t he already murdered the man of the family?
The Executioner moved to the front door and looked inside. Could he get down the hall to the kitchen without being heard? He made sure his equipment wouldn’t rattle, then pulled the pin on the flash-stun grenade and dropped it on the grass. He held the arming spoon around the grenade tightly and eased onto the first step.
Gingerly he pushed the handle on the aluminum screen door. It moved without a sound. He pulled it open a foot, slipped through and let it touch his back and close gently as he started down the hall. He had the Beretta up and on single shot. There were too many innocents in there to be spraying bullets.
Step by step, he worked down the hall, which had been resurfaced with ceramic tile — no squeaks. He pressed against the left wall, since this was the side the killer could not see.
He was halfway down when the woman, walking to the refrigerator, turned and stared straight at him. Either she was too surprised to react or had great control. She lifted her brows slightly and walked out of sight.
She must have instantly realized he was on her side. There had been no time to whisper anything or mouth any words.
He moved forward. Now he could hear the sounds from the room. The baby whimpered.
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