Bolan was going into a stripdown, seemingly all business again. “I’ll need the blacksuit,” he told her.
She went blindly to the wardrobe and found the combat outfit. But when she turned about, her man was nowhere in view. The clothing he had been wearing was folded neatly across a console.
Then she heard the water start, in the shower.
Grimaldi was halfway to the chopper.
She closed the door and threw the interlocks, then left a trail of her own clothing from console to shower stall.
“Knock knock,” she said breathlessly.
A strong arm reached past the curtain and hauled her in.
“Lord, but you’re beautiful!” she sighed.
Indeed, indeed. To hell with hell!
If this was heaven, April had certainly found her niche. And, yes, she felt very special.
CHAPTER 16
INCIDENT AT SEA
They overtook the vessel at one of the wider points at this end of the nearly 200-mile long bay—roughly twenty miles across from shore to shore, if you discounted a couple of small islands and a jagged peninsula extending from the eastern side.
She was a tired old freighter of WW2 vintage, drafting perhaps five thousand tons under full load, though now riding high and apparently running under very light load.
Grimaldi went in close for target verification, crabbing about at mast level to run along the keel line in a fore-to-aft pass at about fifty yards out.
A guy in the wheelhouse stepped to a side window to peer at them through binoculars as they slid by.
“That’s her,” Grimaldi shouted.
“You figure about ten knots?”
“More or less, yeah. What’s the plan of attack?”
“Give me a hover as close as you can get to that wheelhouse.”
“Are we shooting or spitting?”
“Let’s try first for spit,” Bolan yelled back, grinning. He snared the portable electronic bullhorn and added, “Any time you’re ready.”
The amazing flyman was always ready. No sooner said than done, Bolan found himself in an eye to eye confrontation with a scowling mariner in a gold-braided hat. He told that guy, via the bullhorn, “I’ll give you two minutes to abandon ship. Shut down the engines, drop the hook, and bail out. Two minutes. Then I blow this tub out of the water.”
The guy just gawked at him, but Bolan knew that the message had been received and understood. Two wild-eyed guys in civilian dress ran out onto the bridge deck to assist in the gawking. Another man stepped through a hatch on the main deck, waving a revolver and shouting something to others still inside and out of sight.
“I want no innocent blood,” Bolan informed one and all. He tossed a marksman’s medal through the open window of the wheelhouse. A guy in there reacted as though it were a grenade, diving for cover behind the bulkhead. “I just want your cargo. But you guys have to call the play. Those that stay will have to pay. Two minutes from now. Two minutes.”
He did not have to say a word to Grimaldi. The hot combat pilot immediately cocked the rotor, and sent the little chopper swinging into a quick withdrawal to a safe holding range.
“Think they’ll take it?” Grimaldi shouted above the rotor noise.
Bolan shrugged his shoulders and began readying the weaponry. “One way or another,” he growled.
His only concern was for the seamen. Those guys had no stake in any of this—though, certainly, the skipper and, maybe, all the ship’s officers must have been wise. Bona fide “passengers” do not cavort about the decks of their vessel brandishing weapons.
He would sincerely prefer that the non-combatants get the hell out of the way. But their continued presence there, after fair warning, would not prolong the life of that ill-fated freighter.
Grimaldi crowed, “There they go! A raft just hit the water!”
Someone, yes, was taking the warning seriously.
Not one raft, but two were now in the water beside the ship, trailing along at the end of towlines. And several men were over the side already.
So okay.
The option was there and some were taking it.
There could be no overriding concern for the others.
“A minute thirty!” the pilot reported.
Bolan loaded the bazooka and positioned it in the open doorway. From a satchel at his feet he removed a molded ball of plastic explosive, and carefully inserted an impact detonator.
Grimaldi rolled the eyes and yelled, “You were serious!”
“Always,” Bolan replied. “And we’d better stay serious about this stuff. It’s heavy goods. We don’t want to be too close to the hit.”
“Roger, understood. Just tell me when.”
Bolan looked at his watch and made a hand signal. “Once across the bow for starters. Strafing run.”
Sure … no sooner said than done.
The little bird kicked itself into a side-slipping plunge and executed a wide turn to starboard, shooting an angle which cut an intercepting path directly across the bow and a hundred feet above the deck of the Tangier Victory.
Grimaldi had jury-rigged a tripod mount on his side, on which was positioned a light submachine gun. Bolan wedged a foot into a deck cleat, and knelt in the doorway with a handheld chatterpiece.
They side-slipped across the path of the moving vessel, and raked the decks with a withering fire, going not for blood but for pure psychological effect. And they got plenty of that. Grimaldi ended the side-swing with an abrupt vertical rise and a hover at two hundred feet, the vessel passing almost directly beneath them. Someone had cut the towlines to the two rafts, and people were slipping overboard from both sides of the ship.
But they got a bit more than psychological effect, as well. They got return fire, from more than a dozen points below. A couple of guys on the bridge were using rifles, and one on the fantail cut loose with a burst from an auto, which sliced across the after section of the ’copter.
Grimaldi kicked her again and went into a windmilling climb across the port quarter, swinging far out and going into a wide circular path, once again angling for an intercept.
Guys were scrambling all over those decks down there, now, guys with weapons looking for cover and awaiting a kill.
Bolan had offered the crew all the consideration he could afford. He could see numerous bodies in the water, bobbing about in a long and irregular path in the vessel’s wake. As for the others …
“Stay and pay, boys,” he muttered to himself; then, to Grimaldi, “Bomb run!”
“Bomb run, aye,” the pilot yelled back, and kicked the little ship into a head-on confrontation at full throttle.
They zoomed in at about two hundred feet, Bolan kneeling in the open doorway with his homemade aerial bomb. He flipped it out as they broke the bow, yelling, “Away!”
Grimaldi’s quick evasive maneuver very nearly flung Bolan through the doorway; it was as though some giant hand had reached down from the heavens to snatch up the little craft and hurl it away. Good thing, too. It was damned heavy goods. Impact was just forward the superstructure, main deck. The blow was primarily aft, the blast throwing its major effect toward the superstructure and bathing the entire forward bulkhead in a huge mushroom of fire.
The chopper was five hundred feet off the deck, and maybe a hundred yards to starboard before the full effect could be evaluated.
The window glass of the wheelhouse was shattered and gone, paint blistered and blackened. The seaman at the wheel had obviously given it up; the ship was off her course, now, still steaming but beginning to wander to starboard in a diagonal line across the shipping channel.
Secondary fires were erupting around the cargo hatch forward, and there was much human excitement down there.
They went in again, Bolan hoping for a hundred-to-one knockout punch down the stack with the second and last bomb, but it was not to be. Those gunners down there were throwing up a hell of an effective fire now. The chopper was taking hits everywhere, slugs punching
through the thin skin like hail through tissue paper. Grimaldi had to opt for caution as a better alternative; the homemade bomb missed the superstructure entirely, dropping onto the after cargo deck and raising another firestorm back there.
“It’s getting rough!” the pilot yelled, as once again they swung up to a safe hover. “What d’ya think?”
“I need to be sure!” Bolan yelled back. “I want the wheelhouse!”
“Okay, swell. How do you figure to get it?”
“Bazooka range!”
“Yeah, I was afraid you’d say that! You’ll need a stable platform! And you can’t fire that thing off inside here! The backburn could play hell with this bird!”
“Get me a platform, then! I need a trajectory straight into the wheelhouse!”
“That could be tougher than you think! It looks like nobody’s steering that vessel, now! She’s yawing the channel!”
Bolan yelled, “Get out in front and hang there! Hold her at fifty feet off the deck! As stable as possible! I want her to slide right under us!”
“At fifty feet she’ll slide right through us! The bridge is higher than that!”
“I want a horizontal sightline into that bridge! You can haul away the moment I release my bird!”
“The return fire will be murderous at that range! Are you sure you want this?”
“I want it, yeah. But I can’t tell you to do it!”
“Hell, I want it if you want it! I’ll do it! Okay, here’s the only way I can do it! Can you hear me?”
“Go ahead, I hear!”
“I’ll have to take her bow-on, tail-high just a bit! That will make the angle for my gun so I can give you some cover! But that means you’ve got to fire across our own bow! You get my meaning! You’ve got to be outside! So the blowback doesn’t rupture our nest And you’re going to be a hanging duck! Do you get my meaning?”
Bolan got his meaning, sure. He’d have to brace himself against the landing skid, get that big bazooka onto the shoulder, and wait for a line-up. Meanwhile those people below were going to have a stationary target to plunk at.
“Let’s go do it!” he shouted.
So they went and did it. The vessel was still yawing hard to starboard, and lining into a dead run toward the distant west shore. Grimaldi circled out to an intercepting point, while Bolan positioned himself in the doorway and studied the man-angle between doorway and skid.
As it so often turns out, the contemplation of the act was the hardest part. Grimaldi successfully anticipated the intercept course of the rapidly yawing vessel and took station at fifty feet above that path. Bolan slipped outside and settled himself onto the skid, straddling it and steadying himself against the fuselage. Then he dragged the bazooka outside and hoisted it to the right shoulder.
Several men with rifles ran into the open on the ship’s bow and took up firing positions. The vessel was approaching at a speed of roughly ten knots. The riflemen below opened fire. Grimaldi responded with his sub, lacing it into them with telling effect from about a hundred yards out, scattering them and disrupting the defensive set.
The worst part, for Bolan, was the waiting.
The men on deck were scattering to cover and continuing the duel with Grimaldi, but only half-heartedly.
Bolan sat on his skid and waited, eye at the scope, ticking off the slowly dwindling range, waiting it in, loathe to waste a round and have to scramble around for a reload from this precarious perch.
He could see the men on deck clearly now, could read their faces … knew that they were not American Mafia … wondered about the connection with foreign interests … thought back over the developments of this fantastically telescoped morning on the day of the vulture … wondered about the man with the gold braid, who was now staggering across the wheelhouse toward that unmanned ship’s wheel … wondered if the guy …
And then he knew he could not do it.
He could not send a killing firestorm into that housing. That poor guy, very probably, was not the enemy, but just a seaman doing his job, following company orders … master of a vessel in deep trouble and getting deeper with each passing moment. This was not cops and robbers … and it was not even war … not in Mack Bolan’s sense of the word.
It was, hell, an incident at sea … and it was just too damned impossible to separate the innocent from the guilty.
Bolan lowered the sights and squeezed into the fire. The rocket whooshed out of there and made a trail of flame to the impact point on the bow of the vessel, expanding then into a shattering fireball, which enwrapped men, rifles, and all into its consuming grasp.
Then he reloaded and did it again, sending this one into another defiant pocket at the forward mast.
He could see the face of the man at the wheel, now, very clearly. The guy was ringing something up on the engine telegraph … and Bolan could tell by the position of the levers that it was ALL ENGINES STOP.
He heaved the bazooka inside, and pulled himself back aboard. The ’copter immediately swung away from the collision course with the ship’s bridge, the pilot yelling, “Jesus! What happened?”
“Enough already,” Bolan yelled back. He donned the headset and asked Brognola, “Where the hell is the Coast Guard?”
“They’re on the way, Striker,” was the quick reply. “Get the hell out of there!”
“Get the hell out of here, Jack,” Bolan said tiredly to his pilot. “Forty million American bucks are at all engines stop … and ready for salvage.”
CHAPTER 17
TRICK OF TIME
Incredibly, it seemed, the forward progress of Friday, Day of the Feast, had reached no farther than eleven o’clock A.M. Bolan felt as though the day had already consumed a full week of 24-hour days. As for the past week, itself … well, yeah … infinite lives. And he wondered if infinity itself was no more than a trick of time, a telescoping of large moments against some vast backdrop called eternity.
The distressed freighter, Tangier Victory, was foundering in the shipping channel of Chesapeake Bay, the Coast Guard aboard and fire boats alongside. The early report from the authorities bore no mention of combat at sea, dead and wounded, or forty million dollars in gold and silver; it merely stated that an explosion and fires had disabled the vessel, and that all crew members were alive and safe.
The direct report from Brognola, though, was much more reassuring. The mob money had been quickly located and was being transferred to a cutter. There would be some legal hassles over that illicit fortune, no doubt, but for damn sure it was going nowhere quickly—and its very presence was going to be greatly embarrassing to a number of American businessmen, legitimate and otherwise.
All of which satisfied Mack Bolan’s frame of reference to the matter, the whole point being that the mob had suffered another staggering loss in its financial department. Coupled with the other losses of this week, not to mention all that had disappeared earlier, it seemed unlikely that the organization could survive this one. Maybe service was power, as Larry Haggle had so convincingly claimed, but it took a lot of dimes and dollars to manage the clout machines and political gamesmanship that corrupted power and enthroned it. And, of course, genuine service with a fair return on investment was the American way; there was no need to fear honorable men with enterprising ideas. There was also no place in the Mafia mentality for fair return or honorable enterprise.
So, yes, Friday’s battle could certainly be regarded as a death blow. Bolan could take heart if this had been the full extent of the day’s results.
But, then, there was that other matter …
The banquet table had been prepared, yet only a few had feasted. Mack Bolan had been a phantom guest at that table, and had left with hardly a taste. That was no way for a guest of honor to quit the feast.
So here he was, back once more … contemplating the fate of that old joint beside the bay, this time by the full light of day.
April Rose was manning the warwagon, holding at a position within range of the cruiser’s ro
cketry and visual surveillance systems, on a high overlook to the south.
Grimaldi was standing by in the shot-up chopper, ready to lend a hand should a hand from the sky be needed.
Bolan had radio communications with both, via a small two-way rig in the shoulder pocket of the blacksuit. He was also loaded for heavy combat. Besides the usual personal weapons, he now carried in a shoulder sling an M-16/203 combination, and wore a flak vest with pockets to hold a full assortment of 40mm rounds for the 203 (the mated designation for the M-79). Also on the bod and dangling in quick-release attachments were four hand-throw grenades and two smoke canisters. In a special backpack were carefully nestled a number of plastic strips already impregnated with timer-detonators.
If all that stuff were to go off prematurely, on the bod, the two hundred pounds or so representing the physical existence of one Mack Bolan would violently disperse itself in microscopic bits to the far recesses of the universe … and, yeah, that could be a trick of time, too.
The trick right now, of course, was to send some other bits and pieces to the universe … to destroy a symbol of most everything that had ever been wrong with America … to put a final seal on the victory at Baltimore.
He spoke into his shoulder, saying, “Do you see me?”
April’s tense tones bounced right back at him: “Affirm, have you in sight, beautiful.”
“Let’s have a one-two. Send number one to the attic window, number two into the wall at three-six-zero from my present position.”
“The fire is ready,” she replied a moment later.
“Then send it,” he growled.
It came instantly, a fire-tailed serpent sizzling directly overhead in a doomsday course to the attic window of Arnie Farmer’s old joint beside the bay, another hotting along close behind and dipping to plow itself with shattering force into the stone wall. Twin firestorms flung themselves into hot and instant destruction, one whole section of roof blowing away and scattering its parts onto the grounds, while the fire devoured all that remained within its area of influence; the other sending shattered shards of razor-sharp stone in a driving horizontal rain onto those grounds, and leaving a gaping void inhabited only by smoke and flame where once had proudly stood the symbol of domain.
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