“Come watch something else, then,” Leo suggested, “if you got a quick second.”
Charlie Atlantic told his boys, “Don’t budge,” and went with Turrin to the east window. From there, at a point where the terrace began, was an excellent view of the area surrounding Rockefeller Plaza, just up the street. But that street was curiously free of traffic, except for two large buses which were pulled up at the plaza. Tiny figures in khaki clothing were moving around, down there, and it looked as though the street was being barricaded.
Charlie Atlantic grunted and produced collapsible opera glasses from his coat pocket, opened them, and raised the glasses to his eyes.
“Is it what I’m afraid it is?” Turrin inquired softly.
“If you’re afraid of feds, then you’re right,” the bodycock assured him. He passed the glasses over. “I thought those guys had left. We just missed ’em, coming in. What the hell does it mean?”
Turrin was peering through the glasses, working hard to suppress a smile of admiration for his boss, the Whiz from Wonderland. It could not have been a better “show of force.” Marshals in flak jackets and carrying riot guns were moving into position all along the plaza area, forming into squads, apparently preparing to move out. “I guess,” Leo told his “pal” from Brooklyn, “it means they’re coming back. I wonder if they are barricading all around us?”
“I just wonder what it means,” Charlie Atlantic commented nervously.
“Well, I have to wonder if Marco could tell us what it means,” Leo said, handing back the opera glasses and arching his eyebrows for added meaning.
“What the hell would he stand to gain by …?”
Turrin shrugged his shoulders. “All I know, Charlie, is that they came up before and took one guy away. One guy who Marco could not get into the pocket. And I guess they’re coming back. There’s nobody here, now, Charlie, who was not here before. ’Cept, of course, Johnny Grazzi and the best of Brooklyn.”
“That doesn’t sound …”
“It never does,” Turrin replied archly. “Who knows where the clout goes, these days, eh?”
The big bodycock growled something unintelligible and hurried back toward the bar.
Some of Minotti’s boys had naturally noted the action at the window with the opera glasses. Four of them drifted casually onto the terrace and went straight to the parapet. Two of those came quickly back inside and began to circulate among the cadre.
These quiet tensions were quickly communicated to the men at the bosses’ table. Both were beginning to quiver with tightening nerves when a guy hurried over and whispered something in Minotti’s ear.
He immediately pulled his revolver and rose halfway out of his chair.
In the immediate wake of that reaction, before anyone could actually read the intention there, at that table, the four men at the bar opened fire on the four Minotti bodyguards, who had reacted quickly to the sight of their boss’s firearm and were scrambling to their feet.
Those four had not all hit the floor yet when Minotti himself began emptying his leaping revolver into the stupefied person of Johnny Grazzi.
Then, of course, it all went crazy.
Leo made a dive for cover behind an overstuffed lounge, near the wall.
Bolan had already begun his move and he was several paces removed from Omega’s office when the shooting started. That whole penthouse was a hellground when he reappeared in the office doorway with the M-79 raised and ready. He sent a round of HE toward the glass wall at the terrace, then quickly reloaded and sent another.
That whole side of the room was immediately obscured behind clouds of flame and smoke. Elsewhere, guys were diving around and staggering around, firing weapons in every direction, flinging blood in gushing torrents everywhere.
It was enough. It was, hell, too much.
Bolan introduced some chemical smoke into the situation, then a round of teargas as he moved swiftly toward the foyer door.
Someone ran past him when he was about halfway across, someone grunting and wheezing with fear and the stretch for survival—and a combat shiver suggested to him that this “someone” was Crazy Marco. But he was diverted from that prey by a familiar voice at his right flank. It was Leo, pleading for a cease-fire.
Bolan worked his way through the acrid smoke toward the sound of that voice, grabbed his friend by the arm, and pulled him toward the exit.
The occasional boom of a heavy handgun could still be heard reverberating through the insanity when they reached the foyer and groped their way toward the stairway door. The elevator car, of course, was gone—and Bolan knew that it would not be coming back up, not for a while.
There were other feet on that stairwell, too, maybe a floor below. A pistol down there boomed and sent a slug gouging into the plaster above Bolan’s head, then a door down there banged shut. Whoever—Marco, maybe—was scrambling for the other elevators.
Bolan and Turrin went on down, cautiously, past the 27th and to the 26th. An elevator was on the way down, the floor indicators showing the progress. Bolan called another car, grimly avoiding his friend’s dazed eyes, then stepped aboard and punched off.
“The garage?” Leo asked, unbelieving.
“Why not?” Bolan replied gruffly. “That’s where the future is at. I think it’s Marco, ahead of us. I think he knows too much. About tomorrow, maybe. I can’t give him that.”
“God, no,” agreed the Sticker. “We’ve worked too hard for it.”
But Mack Bolan was dining on a bit of crow, himself. Brognola had been right, too. The Phoenix Project was too vitally important to be allowed to fall apart in America’s own jungle-lands. He had to catch that guy. And he had to pin the mark of the beast across that insane mouth. Otherwise, the Wonderland politicians would have a field day with a besieged president, another morbid government crisis would probably ensue, and there would be no Phoenix Project now or ever, with Mack Bolan or anyone else at the helm.
The savages of the world would just go on eating the gentle folk, and the civilized world would …
Okay, yeah, say it—melodrama or not.
The civilized world would begin to eat itself.
CHAPTER 17
ON BOLAN
The underground garage was a small hellground, too, when they reached it.
Handguns were sounding off with much larger voices than their powder commanded, amplified and echoing in the cavernous environment, sending their hot little messengers pounding into or ricocheting from the hapless metallic beasts entrapped there.
A couple of those cars were screeching about on straining rubber, fighting for traction and an avenue conducive to a safe retreat. As one of those reached the ramp, the other lost control and banged into a steel stanchion, then hurtled away only to slam broadside into a parked vehicle. Both cars involved in that pileup erupted into a flashing explosion which hurled chunks of shredded metal far and wide, impacting the flesh, also, with the shock wave from that contained blast.
Bolan and Turrin took advantage of that diversion to break down the line to the red Ferrari, parked about ten spaces beyond the office by one of Brognola’s people. Bolan fished the keys from behind the license plate and they were aboard and making some screeches of their own by the time the gunfight resumed.
There was no way to know, in all the confusion, who was fighting whom—but the general identity of the participants seemed rather obvious: it was still Minotti versus Grazzi, in a family sense.
They were jockeying past the burning vehicles when a nearby pistol spat two slugs screaming past their windshield. Then someone in the background yelled, “That’s Omega in the Ferrari! Let ’im pass!”
“Who was that?” Bolan grunted as they raced up the ramp toward daylight.
“Beats me,” Leo grunted back. “Billy Gino, maybe.”
“Say a prayer for Billy, then,” Bolan suggested.
They hit the street and screamed about in a tire-testing skid toward the opposite curb. The impact there straight
ened the plunge and sent them hurtling off in hot pursuit of a heavy sedan which had just quit the hellgrounds and was now plowing through the sawhorse barricades at the intersection north.
“I’m dropping you at the barricades!” Bolan announced.
“Like hell you are!” Turrin yelled back.
There was no sense in both of them taking the chase. Besides, Leo had never been a combat type. Mob politics was his specialty, not death on the run.
Bolan explained, “I want you to brief Hal! Tell him to track my progress and close with all possible speed! If we lose this guy, now …”
“How do you know it’s him?” Leo protested. “It could be anybody in that car!”
“I have to play the worst! He should also contain the action back there and make sure none slip through!”
They had penetrated the intersection, swerving around the remains of the sawhorse barricade, and Bolan was already applying the brakes when a heightened drama ahead began to unfold. Two of Brognola’s big buses suddenly pulled broadside across the street just opposite Rockefeller Plaza, creating an entirely effective barricade to contain the fleeing sedan at that point.
The Mafia vehicle tried to leap the curb and go around but instead found deep trouble on the plaza itself. It grazed a light standard, then ran up onto a low wall, suspended there with all four wheels still turning but something that looked like the driveshaft lying on the ground alongside.
Three guys leapt away from there, ignoring a distant challenge from Brognola’s marshals, and ran into the plaza.
One of those guys, yeah, was definitely Crazy Marco. The Ferrari skidded to a halt, Bolan yelled to Turrin, “Tell Hal!” and erupted from there as though shot from his own gun.
Turrin sat there for a moment and inspected his shaking hands, then he picked up the cut-down M-79 which Bolan had left on the seat and stood up to test his legs.
They were doing exactly what the hands were doing; Leo had to admit, if only to himself, that he was not cut out for this kind of work.
Brognola was running up from the shredded barricades, all wild-eyed and breathing like a novice marathon runner at race’s end. He stopped running when he saw Turrin, coming on at a more sedate pace and calling ahead, breathlessly, “Thank God you’re okay. Where the hell is Striker?”
A suggested answer to that question came from the plaza, in the form of volleying pistol fire. “He’s chasing Marco,” Turrin reported. “He says the guy knows about tomorrow, maybe. He wants all possible support. But you’d better call the uniforms off, Hal. They—”
But Brognola was already moving on, running full-out again toward a squad of heavily armed marshals who were beginning to cautiously advance upon the plaza.
“They might gun him down,” Turrin continued, voicing his worry aloud, anyway, to an empty street.
But then a familiar vehicle turned through that deserted intersection back there, and a familiar, pretty lady stepped down from it a moment later.
“He turned his beeper on!” she called to Leo. “Get that damned bus out of my way!”
But the bus was already moving clear, propelled by a marshal in uniform.
Leo ran to the Warwagon and leapt inside just before the door closed on him.
They were moving in a quick acceleration as he struggled to his feet, putting Rockefeller Plaza swiftly to the rear.
“Where away?” Leo panted.
“Tracking north,” the pretty lady called back to him. “On foot, I’m sure. Are you armed?”
“Sort of,” Leo replied feebly.
“Armory is in the rear, soldier! Use it!”
The “soldier,” by God, went back there and used it. He took a Uzi, strapped on a readybelt and took on extra clips of ammo. He could hear the lady, up forward, trying to raise Hal on the radio.
It was time for all good men to rally ’round. And Leo, by God—cut from the right cloth or not—was ready to do or die.
If Bolan should lose it now—if, God forbid, he should die on this last lousy day in hell, then …
Leo shoved in the clip, armed the little weapon and went forward to stand ready at the door.
“Do you have his signal?” he asked the lady.
“Now and then,” she replied. “It seems that they are moving through null areas, here and there. Through buildings, maybe, I don’t know.”
That pretty voice was strained with an agony similar, Leo was sure, to his own.
Similar, sure, but not the same.
She loved the guy.
Of course, Leo loved him, too. Not in the same way, course not, but love just the same.
Then he heard that good voice, clear as a bell as it lifted away from a speaker above the con, a bit breathless but clear nonetheless.
“Moving north toward Central Park, Eighth Avenue,” it reported. “Are you on me?”
Leo could see her lips trembling against the mike and wondered how the words came so clear as she responded to that. “We’re on you, Striker. Be careful, dammit.”
But Leo the Sticker knew that the Striker would not, could not, be “careful.” A daylight chase along the busy Manhattan streets could not ever be that, not for a guy in Bolan’s shoes. Somewhere along the way, a cop and then a whole parade of cops would join that chase, and then …
“Get closer!” Leo urged the lady. “And keep on trying to raise Hal. Drop me as soon as we hit the fire zone. Maybe I can at least backdoor the guy and protect the rear, if nothing else.”
The “Sticker” was a sticker no longer.
The thing he’d been sticking to all these years was now a dead thing, of that he was certain. And all the hell had been worth it.
But not with Bolan dead.
It would all come up ashes, that way.
So Leo Turrin was now, by God, a “Striker.” And he would strike anything or anybody who tried to foreclose Mack Bolan’s final victory in hell.
Yes. He would strike even himself.
CHAPTER 18
MEDITATION
There was no “fire zone” out here, on these civilized streets. Leo Turrin and April Rose would know that for themselves, in a moment. As for Mack Bolan, his weapon was sheathed and he was merely concentrating on keeping the guy in sight. He had a pretty good idea where Minotti was headed. Toward Roman Nights, no doubt. Even charred in spots and watersoaked, the “favorite toy” would beckon magnetically to a guy whose bubble had burst so dramatically, so devastatingly, so quickly. Maybe the guy even had some money stashed there—or some other comfort. Whatever, Bolan was pretty sure that the trail would end there.
Minotti had been working his way toward that imagined haven, on a zigzag course which finally stabilized along 8th Avenue, for more than ten minutes since the gunfight at Rockefeller Plaza. The last of his “boys” had lent their blood to the artistic fountains there and left their boss woefully alone in a world he could no longer manipulate.
The guy was crazy, sure.
And he was obviously moving, now, through some mental world of his own creation. Not once had he tried for a cab, or looked at a bus. Crazy Marco was walking home—or, if the stories were true, to the closest thing to a home he had known throughout all his savage life.
The gossip was that, tucked away behind the stairwell on the first floor of the building housing Roman Nights, there was a “play house” where Marco sometimes took a special lady—special, that is, for the night. And, according to the stories, that Roman Nights apartment was done up like a turn of the century mansion—like, perhaps, something that a very young boy had seen once in a movie or in a magazine. It was sad, sure, and even tragic—but the sadness did not remove the monster from the man who had once been a deprived boy.
It simply underscored the social brutalizations which created monsters like Marco Minotti. All the tears and moral arguments the world could produce would not change the present fact that Marco was an incorrigible and deadly enemy of the American dream. He would take what he could seize, kill what pleased him to destro
y, brutalize as he himself had been brutalized until someone finally, mercifully, removed Marco from the human family. He had no place there, now, and none could be made for him.
Bolan did not “hate” such men. The sadness which he often felt for them could not be matched by professional moralists or social designers. He hated, of course, what these men represented. And sometimes he hated the social ills that bred them, a civilized world that would not police itself, a “gentle” society which preferred to hide its face and hope that the monsters would all go away.
They would not go away.
Anyone who had lingered awhile in the savage jungles of America’s underbelly knew that they would not go away. They would prey and prey and go on preying until the last gentle man took his hands from his eyes to see the final blow which split his skull and killed forever the promised inheritance of the meek.
How could the “meek” ever hope to inherit a savage earth? Surely not—unless, of course, a fingersnap from heaven could set it all straight.
But would that fingersnap reform the savage and fill the animal breast with love instead of lust? Hardly. If that hand from heaven ever did come down, it would surely smash all the savages everywhere, once and for all.
Bolan could not believe in fingersnaps from heaven. It was his personal conviction that God had built the world for men to tame—and women, too, of course—and to build themselves into something worthy of survival during the taming process.
Some day, sure, maybe, if all went well and the process continued, the world would be a safe place for soft men and women. At present, it was not. Whatever safety there was had been bought and paid for by hard men and women.
And yes, there were those times, too, when Mack Bolan felt a surge of resentment toward the soft ones, those who shrank with horror of the real world into their silk cocoons of golden dreams and premature platitudes in a world too soft to police itself. Those were the ones who made necessary the personal commitments and lonely hells shared by those who were willing to face the savage realities of a world not yet ready for paradise.
Satan’s Sabbath Page 9