CHAPTER 14
ALIVE AND LIVING
“Let me tell you,” Leo muttered, “you had my flesh crawling awhile ago with that stuff about the Baldaserras. But I see, then, why you did it. Two stiffs to account for. But tell me … who really cut Tommy, do you think?”
Bolan had paused in the lobby to light a cigarette. He replied, very quietly over the flame, “Carmen Reddi did it.”
Leo was scandalized by that. “Aw, no! The house boss?”
“The same,” Bolan said. “It’s a damned sick family, isn’t it?”
“God, I guess it is!”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Bolan suggested, smiling faintly.
“I’m with you, pal. You got some wheels?”
“No. But I guess we’ll find some.”
Right on cue, then, Jimmy Jenner came loping up from the rear hall to breathlessly announce, “Your chopper’s here, Frankie.”
Bolan looked past his cigarette to check his watch, and took it like a trooper. “Great. Right on time.”
This Jimmy Jenner was one of those guys who never grow old. He’d been around for years and years. Leo remembered him from the old days. Not exactly retarded or anything like that, but just forever laid back and taking it one day at a time. And the guy never grew old. He’d been a “kid” for as long as Leo could remember seeing him around.
And God was he impressed with this Frankie the Ace.
“Is it okay with you, Frankie, if I come off watch now? I just been standing around out there talking to my relief.”
Bolan grinned and told that guy. “If we had forty like you, Jimmy, we could take the world.”
The “kid” swelled noticeably under that praise. “I do my best. You say stay, I stay till you say different. And, Frankie, I just want to say if you’ll pardon me, it’s a pleasure to know you. I hope we see you again soon.”
Bolan was giving with the solemn gaze. He laid it straight on the guy and asked him. “Will you take a word of quiet advice?”
“Yes, sir, whatever you say.”
“Beat it.”
“Huh?”
“Those men in there are going crazy. Take whoever you think you can trust to be quiet about it, and get the hell out of here. I don’t mean tomorrow and I don’t mean tonight, I mean right now. Go south. Go far south. And don’t look back, don’t ever look back.”
“God, Frankie, what—”
“Do you get any meaning?”
“Yes, sir, I guess I get your meaning. And thanks. Thanks all to hell. I’ll do like you say.”
“Quietly.”
The guy rolled his eyes and replied, “Bet your ass, quietly.”
Bolan and Turrin went on outside, leaving Jimmy Jenner to ponder the troubling vicissitudes of a crumbling lifestyle.
As soon as they had cleared the door, Turrin growled, “What chopper?”
“Beats me,” Bolan replied nonchalantly. “Let’s go see.”
“You beat all I ever … right on time, eh? And that boy Jenner—why’d you do that?”
The iron man shrugged and replied, “Why not? He’s just a cipher in the games these people play. I get no pleassure from their blood. And the world doesn’t need it. I’m going to level this joint, Leo. Let all that want to leave, leave. Those that stay will stay forever.”
The undercover fed shivered as he digested that grim pronouncement. “I thought maybe you were getting soft spots,” he muttered. “But the thought should perish.”
Bolan squeezed the arm affectionately and told his old pal, “Maybe there is a soft spot here and there. Some of these kids … well …”
“Well, what?”
“I don’t know, maybe I could buy the Cosa Nostra routine if it was pointed in the right direction. There’s something very admirable about—it’s like the military, when you take the military seriously. I never could believe in every man for himself. That’s the larger danger of democracy. If people lose the spirit, then democracy deteriorates damn quick into anarchy. Anarchy is disorder, and disorder is anti-life. So …”
Turrin could not believe that they were having this conversation. The helipad was out near the docks, still fifty or so yards away. They had just left a pack of wild beasts to the rear, also an overgrown stray cub, who right now could be dashing about telling everybody within earshot that “Frankie says” everyone should bail out—strolling nonchalantly toward a helicopter which, for all anyone knew, could be carrying a genuine Ace of Spades or whatever—and the guy was talking casually about democracy, and disorder, and anti-life.
Leo growled, “What do you mean by anti-life?”
The big man shrugged and replied, “Even the merest speck of life depends on tight organization to survive. If it starts getting disorganized, then the plunge is quick and straight into entropy, the reversal of life. That, pal, I call anti-life.”
Leo smiled weakly and said, “Okay.” He always felt like such an idiot around this guy. One day, maybe, if they both should live so long, he might actually figure out what made the guy tick. For now, Leo just felt fortunate as hell that the guy was ticking along right beside him.
The chopper was a commercial type of moderate size, capable of hauling three or four passengers probably. The engine coughed to life when they were about twenty paces out, sending the two boys on the dock watch retreating from the windstorm.
Bolan stepped aboard first, then gave Leo a hand and hauled him in without so much as a glance into the interior of that craft.
The guy at the controls looked vaguely familiar—a mob pilot, no doubt about that. Thank God for charmed lives, or whatever it was that kept the incredible Bolan alive and well, no one else was aboard.
But then it became immediately obvious that this was Bolan’s chopper. The pilot leaned over to slap the big guy on the shoulder and muss his hair, then they were lifting away and sliding along the shoreline in a quick git.
The noise level in there made conversation damn near impossible, so Leo didn’t even try for an understanding. He settled back into his seat, and took the first easy breath of that harrowing morning.
Bolan had his head right beside the pilot’s. Apparently those two were having no problems with interpersonal communications. Bolan was grinning, and the pilot was waving a hand around and shouting something, which got lost two inches from his mouth.
Some kind of guy, yeah, that Bolan. Hell, he could charm a charging rhino and turn its charge into a waltz with a flash of the eyes. It was no wonder, not in Leo Turrin’s mind, that the mob was buckling and falling apart everywhere this guy happened to cast his attention. The goddam guy could just walk in and take over whatever he decided to take over. He could kill them with a smile, and win their rotten little hearts with a word and a swagger.
And yet there was no swagger to the real Mack Bolan. Leo had never met a finer man, a nicer guy, a more perfect human being. He was what every man, in his own secret heart, imagined that he himself could really be. Bolan was the man.
And sometimes Leo felt a little queer when he realized how he himself felt about that guy. So far as he knew, Leo had never loved another man. Not love, not even his own father. But, by God, he loved Mack Bolan. Let the world think of that what they would. Not that he wanted to lie down between the sheets with the guy, nothing like that for Christ’s sake. But the love was there, and Leo was not all that sure that he would not lie down with the guy … if Mack Bolan turned out to be a little bit queer.
But that was crazy. There was nothing like that. Thank God. Leo had enough troubles already. And he knew that he was just feeling giddy, silly with the relief of being able to just walk out of that joint with his head still on his shoulders.
He wondered if anyone would ever really know … he meant, really know, just how close they’d both been to death and dismemberment all the time they were in that joint. Leo knew … and he figured that Bolan knew, too.
But no one else could know.
Bolan made it look so damned easy. Leo kn
ew that it was not that easy. Those guys back there were nobody’s damn fools. They were the most vicious, the most cunning, and the most by God dangerous sons-of-bitches between Atlantic City and Miami.
But that goddamn Bolan had done it to them again, hadn’t he?
Right now, back there in that joint, they were all probably starting to tear each other apart. And here sat Bolan, relaxed and grinning and having a nice visit with another old pal.
Leo recognized that pilot, now. The name was Grimaldi. He’d been a genuine member of the clan, once. But the redoubtable Sarge had wooed and won the guy somewhere between Vegas and San Juan—and, like so many others, the world had never again been the same for Jack Grimaldi.
Okay, dammit, call it love.
Nothing wrong with that.
Hell. Bolan had his finger right on it. It was reversed entropy. It was life. And living it large. It was two human beings knowing that the world was a better place simply because they were together.
Not a damned thing in the world wrong with that, just because it happens between a couple of guys.
But those men back there … those other men …
Yeah. The Sarge had put the finger right on it. Those men back there were anti-life.
CHAPTER 15
THE SPECIALISTS
The promontory had become a bit crowded. Three big “tour buses” had joined the warwagon there, and “Brognola’s cavalry”—a highly professional force of roughly three dozen federal marshals—were deployed about in casual groups of “sightseers,” as a very effective screen to block the area off from any civilians who might happen by.
Brognola himself stepped forward to greet the men at the helicopter. Leo Turrin was the first man out. The chief fed grabbed the little guy in a crunching bear hug and told him, “Good work, Sticker, damned good work!”
Bolan was right behind. The chief went for him, too, quickly wrapping him in an emotional embrace, whereupon the three of them joined in a spontaneous, but clumsy, little dance.
An emotional bunch, this, yes. It could be that way, for those who lived at the heartbeat—as Mack would say—unless fear and suspicion and ambition overcame.
April leapt from the warwagon and made a determined bid to find her place amidst all that masculiinty. Bolan saw her coming, and reached out with a strong arm to include her in.
She caught a glimpse of some marshals off to the side of that reunion, grinning at each other and joining vicariously in the celebration. Then she was totally off her feet and swept into the all-encompassing embrace of her man.
And, yes God, it was good.
Jack Grimaldi came out of the chopper with Santelli’s books under his arm. Brognola whirled to receive that treasure, whooping happily something about “the gold-dust bust.”
April had never seen the chief with his hair so totally down.
Bolan set her down onto her feet, whispering to her, “Later,” and turning back to confer with Brognola.
“Have you been reading me, Hal?”
“All the way, you bet. And we have a make on your Tangier Victory. She got underway at dawn, now running south toward Cape Henry. We got a fax copy of the manifest from Customs. Supposedly she’s hauling nothing but machine parts to Amsterdam. But we have a passenger list, too. She’s carrying a Zurich moneyman and two brokers, who have been buying up oil storage leases in Europe for the past year. CIA already had tabs on those guys. Eighteen more passengers are all males, all foreign nationals, and all starting to look very suspicious in the initial checkout. I’d call it an armed guard. So, I think it’s pay dirt for sure.”
“Is it legal to haul gold and silver?”
“Not the way they’re doing it, no.”
“So all you have to do now is get authority to board and search,” Bolan observed casually.
“Uh, well, there’s a hitch.”
Bolan growled, “It figures.”
“Yeah. That ship is operating under Algerian registry. There is a, quote, sensitive status, unquote, seal over at State Department covering anything Algerian, which simply translates to hands off.”
“Can’t that seal be broken?”
“Sure. As soon as we resolve a couple of small diplomatic crises with Algeria regarding certain covert African activities.”
Bolan cast a dark glance at April as he commented, “You’re telling me we’re losing it again to diplomacy.”
“Don’t get your tail kinked. We’re working the problem. It may take a couple of days, but-”
“No.”
“We can make the bust anywhere. We can make it in Amsterdam.”
“No way. The farther away it gets, the more uncertain it all becomes. That shipment is not leaving American waters.”
Brognola was becoming greatly uncomfortable. “You expect us to declare war on Algeria, dammit?”
“Not you, no,” Bolan replied quietly.
“Aw, look, Striker …”
“Just turn your back, Hal.”
“Dammit, no! There’s no need. We can keep the damned ship under surveillance clear across the pond if need be. We’ll have the full cooperation of—”
“Huh-uh, not good enough.”
“You can’t attack a damned!—you’ll have the Coast Guard and everyone else all over your ass, and I can’t do a—tomorrow’s Saturday, Striker! One more day and we’re home free! Let’s not blow it now, not for a …”
“For what?” Bolan prodded coolly. “For a clear and present victory? For the knockout punch? I’m not playing diplomatic games with these people, Hal. They used an Algerian registry for no other reason than security and evasion. You know that as well as I do. If Algeria wants to run her flag into our troubled waters, then so be it. She can take her lumps with the rest of them. But it’s just a flag, and everyone at State knows that. Who owns the vessel?”
Brognola dropped his eyes and replied, “A consortium operating out of Rotterdam.”
“A consortium of what?”
“Uh, financial wheeler-dealers, I guess.”
“Free market wheeler-dealers.”
“I guess.”
“Okay. If it makes you more comfortable, turn your back. But I’m taking them.” He clasped April’s hand and threw an eye on Grimaldi. “You game, pal?”
The pilot grinned, and raised his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Why not?”
Brognola ground his teeth together and growled, “Okay, I’ll backboard it all I can. Once you hit, then I guess the vessel is in distress and—okay, I’ll see if I can jerk some tails at Coast Guard. But, dammit, don’t do anything nutty!”
The chief fed grabbed Leo Turrin and dragged him toward the official mobile command post.
Bolan smiled faintly and muttered, “Poor Hal.” Then he led the way to his own combat center, pulling Grimaldi and April along in a close clutch to either side.
“You take care of the armaments,” he instructed the pilot as they boarded the warwagon. “Take a couple of light subs and plenty of ammo. And, uh, the bazooka … and some AP rounds.”
“I’d settle for a couple of aerial bombs,” Grimaldi said jokingly.
Bolan smiled. “Okay. I’ll build a couple right quick.”
“You serious?”
“Sure, I’m serious. Would, uh, you load the other stuff, Jack? I want a minute with April.”
The pilot winked and went on back to the weapons lab.
Bolan took off his coat, reached inside the shoulder, and carefully removed a tiny micro-pickup. It was about the size of a quarter, and had a six-inch, filament-like wire extending from it. “How’d it work?” he asked the girl.
April suddenly felt strangely ill at ease, almost embarrassed. “Beautifully,” she reported, in a barely audible voice. “Never lost touch for a moment. Where’d you put the micro-relay?”
He smiled and said, “I ran it up their flagpole.”
That hit her as very funny, dispelling the edgy feeling. “Seriously?” she squealed, clapping her hands together del
ightedly.
“Sure.” He flashed her a wide grin. “Just clipped it to the halyard and ran it up the pole. Long may it wave.”
“You really are something else, you know,” she said, lapsing again into the jitters—adding, as a whisper, “Captain Thunder.”
He caught that whisper. “I could have turned it off, you know. Or you could have.”
She replied, “No, I … not that you were … look, I want to get this out front with us. I’ve thought about it and … well, dammit, Striker, I wouldn’t have you any other way. I mean, it’s … it’s warm and it’s … right.”
“Toby is very special,” he softly explained.
“I know. And you are very special. All of you crazy people are very special. I just … I guess I feel sort of … left out. Know what I mean?”
Bolan replied, those great eyes brooding down on her, “April, you are what makes it special. Don’t ever start feeling that way. I don’t want you down there in hell, not ever again. You’ve seen the doorway and that’s enough. April, love, there has to be something waiting in heaven, or hell simply isn’t worth it.”
She began crying, hating herself for it, despising the damned feminine tears and trying to choke them back. Worst of all, he was letting her have the moment—holding her in very tight and gently massaging her back.
She quickly pushed clear of that, reasserting control. “Do you have to be so damned beautiful?” she asked, laughing quietly and striving for lightness. “All this heaven and hell stuff … it was very beautiful what you said to Toby. And I guess I just felt like a damned eavesdropper. You should have turned it off, you know. I wouldn’t want anyone listening in on us.”
“How do you know they’re not?” he whispered, raising his eyebrows in mock alarm and glancing furtively about.
“Mack, I love you!” she cried, and the damned waterworks came back full force.
“If you’re going to wet me down,” he said gruffly, “you could at least take me to the shower.”
“Is that an invitation?” she whispered through the tears.
Grimaldi went noisily past at that moment with a load of weaponry. “I’ll, uh, be about five minutes,” he informed them, very pointedly.
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