Bolan slid over, took the wheel and sent the vehicle into whining traction along the same track, then he pulled another weapon from beneath the seat and lay it on his lap. It was a big, impressive, silver pistol—fully a foot long—of the type which feeds bullets from a clip in the handle.
“Listen to me,” he was telling her. “When I say go, that means you. You bail out, hit the ground crawling like hell and don’t look back. You get clear and you stay clear until you hear me calling you back. Understand?”
Claudia understood. She also knew instinctively that this cool warrior was making this particular fight on her behalf, serving up his own life in the defense of hers. She felt unworthy, tarnished, certainly undeserving of such a champion.
One did not, however, question the hand of providence. Claudia Vitale had unquestioningly accepted the protection of Mack Bolan, until very recently her gravest enemy.
“Good luck,” she whispered from the floor of the speeding vehicle. And she meant it, with all her heart.
The Porsche was speeding into the vehicular loop of Capitol Hill, handling much better in those sweeping curves than the big crew-wagon, and wheelman Vasquez was having a tough time jockeying in for the kill. To make matters worse, the Porsche was hugging the inside curb, leaving the centrifugal handicap to the chase car.
Even for the Capitol grounds it was that time of night when they had the place all to themselves; not another vehicle was in sight and the track was almost as good as the Indy 500.
As the two cars roared toward the straightaway fronting the big domed building, Matti yelled, “Goddammit, get me alongside!”
“Hang on,” the wheelman warned, giving the big car a reckless surge forward.
At that precise moment, the Porsche drifted out across their path in a plunge toward the outside.
Matti screamed, “Look-out!”
Vasquez was already reacting, instinctively following the drift with his own wheel.
The bastard in the Porsche, he realized, was a hell of a wheelman himself. It had been a planned maneuver and the sports car held all the advantage in this sort of road game. The Porsche whipped back toward the center but Vasquez was too far gone to recover.
They hit the outside curbing with the left-front wheel and bounded over in a wild plunge. The wheelman thought he had lost it for sure, and he was bracing for a roll. But the heavy vehicle held its wheels and plowed on into the trees lining the drive.
To his dying day Vasquez would never be able to explain how he managed to avoid a head-on into one of those trees. They sideswiped several as he fought the vehicle to a metal-grinding halt—Matti cussing a blue streak all the while and trying to shove his feet through the floorboards, the gunners in the rear grunting and damning the wild bronco ride and flopping about like a couple of buoys in troubled water.
And when the wild plunge was ended, matters immediately became much worse.
The Porsche had arced about into a U-turn and was already parked.
Vasquez could see the big guy in black charging out of there with a gun in each hand and running straight for them.
Matti had the door on his side open and the chopper already spitting flame as he struggled to the outside.
Vasquez kicked his door open and tumbled to the ground, dragging the sawed-off shotgun with him.
Okay, he was thinking, you wanted him, Buck. So goddammit take him, what’re you waiting for?
He heard the boom of a big handgun as Matti’s Thompson began drawing return fire, then another and another—and Vasquez actually heard the bullet that connected with the crewchief. The Thompson crashed across the hood of the car and tumbled to the ground. Matti toppled over the other way, holding his belly and shrieking something in a voice which was fast losing steam.
The big handgun was raising hell in rapid fire now, and bullets like cannonballs were thudding into the vehicle.
Wild Bill Stewart came staggering out of the rear door on the wheelman’s side, fighting to get his Thompson into the battle while taking cover behind the vehicle.
Buckholzer stepped out of the other side with blood spurting from his neck, not even a gun showing.
Vasquez raised to a knee, and across the few feet of hell-ground the two “elite” hitmen locked gazes for a frozen moment, then another sizzling projectile crunched into Buck’s skull and it went to pieces in a spraying shower, some of it splattering across the car and onto the wheelman.
Vasquez suddenly felt very sick, and he crawled away from there as the stuttering reports of Wild Bill’s automatic were interspersed with the continuing big booms of the silver handgun. Then the stuttering stopped.
He threw one last look across his shoulder as he got to his feet and ran out of hell, and the scene back there was one which would remain with him forever.
The big guy in black—Bolan, for damned sure—just standing there with those two guns filling his hands. The shattered crew wagon. Buck and Wild Bill and Gung-ho Matti reduced to unmoving lumps of elite nothingness. The lighted dome of the Capitol backdropping and adding to the macabre quality of the thing. Capitol cops erupting and spilling down the steps.
And Bandalero Vasquez felt no guilt whatever at quitting that place on the run.
The guy, Bolan, was as big as his reputation, that was for sure. And now he was in Washington.
The important thing now was to get the word to Lupo. And that might not be the easiest task in the world to accomplish. The guy was harder to find than Whistler’s father, what with all the security razzmatazz.
He for damn sure had to be told, one way or another. Bolan had a way of turning everything upside down, of spitting in the face of odds and coming through smelling like a rose.
So, sure … the important thing now was to get to Lupo and tell him. The game had changed. The Wolf had to be told that the Tiger had come to town.
Despite himself, Vasquez had to smile in grudging admiration of the bastard. What a hit—what a hell of a hit that had been.
But the guy had gone too far, now. He had endorsed his own death certificate. That much was certain.
Nobody had ever taken on Lupo and lived to brag about it.
Neither would Mack Bolan.
The son of a bitch was as good as dead.
4: THE PROBLEM
Bolan had not come to Washington to rescue maidens in distress nor to engage enemy gun crews in pointless firefights. Sometimes, though, a guy found himself in a pure-reaction situation—and such was the case with Claudia Vitale.
He’d stumbled across Claudia’s tracks while gathering intelligence against a wheeler-dealer known by the code name of “Al 88” during the Boston battle. And he’d understood immediately that some ominous intrigues were afoot in the nation’s capital.
A full-blown mob conspiracy against the nation’s governmental machinery was practically verified by a U.S. Justice Department official, Harold Brognola, an old “friend” who fed Bolan’s intelligence into the central crime computer at Washington.
Brognola, a grudging and often unwilling “accomplice” to the Bolan campaigns, was thoroughly shaken by the implications that organized crime had strongly infiltrated the congress, the federal judiciary, and various executive departments of official Washington. There were even indications that high levels of the justice department were involved in the take-over, and the shaken official was distrustful of his own superiors. It was Brognola’s suggestion that “a touch of Bolan” might be needed to clear the Washington atmosphere. It was not an official invitation, of course—nor even a personal one. Mack Bolan was on the FBI’s “most wanted” list. He was sought by the police of a dozen states and of several sovereign nations.
The long relationship with Harold Brognola had run an erratic course. At one time the justice department official had quietly maneuvered for secret governmental sanctions of the Executioner crusades, seeing in Bolan the most formidable weapon ever to arise in the war on organized crime.
Bolan had refused the “secret portfo
lio” of official backing.
“I don’t want a license to kill,” he explained.
He would conduct his own war his own way and he would meet “the final judgment of the universe” standing on his own two feet.
Later developments had borne out the wisdom of that decision.
As his war escalated and expanded, official pressures became intense and Brognola was eventually given personal responsibility for the government’s “stop Bolan” counter-war. He had very nearly fulfilled that responsibility during the battle for Las Vegas.
In the aftermath of that experience, Brognola had confided to Leo Turrin, another Bolan “ally”: “Hell, I couldn’t do it, Leo. I just couldn’t gun the guy down in cold blood. From a distance, maybe I could … even in the back. But I couldn’t look that man in the eye and shoot him. Not that guy.”
A curious fact of the Bolan wars was that despite the man’s desperate situation and his many close scrapes with entrapment, he had never once been known to fire upon a police officer.
Entries in his personal journal repeatedly reflected his feelings in this regard. At Pittsfield, for example:
“The cops are just doing their job. I can’t fight them, I simply have to avoid them.”
And a short while later, in Los Angeles:
“I’m not above the law. In the final analysis, justice under law is the only hope for mankind. But sometimes a man just can’t go by the book. I can’t turn away from this fight simply because it conflicts with certain ideals. There is a higher ideal at work here. At the same time, I have to keep my respect for the law. We are working toward the same end.”
During a run through Arizona, he recorded this cancellation of a planned strike:
“Just in time, Leo says an undercover man is inside this operation. No way to tip him. Mission scrubbed.”
A San Francisco note about cops had this to say:
“They are soldiers of the same side.”
Perhaps the most revealing of all is this message to himself during the Manhattan wars:
“I have a rage to survive, I know that. The animal in a man dies hard. I have to keep conditioning myself to accept death from a cop, when it finally comes down to that.”
It was a tightrope which Bolan was walking, a precarious balance between the law and the lawless, and he was forever in danger of being ripped apart by either side.
Although many lawmen respected the Executioner in the same sense that he respected them, others did not find it so easy to manipulate their sense of duty. Still others saw the blitzing warrior as a genuine menace to society and some regarded him as only a feather to be added to their cap of personal ambition.
In the final picture, the entire world was a jungle of survival for this very able jungle fighter, and his decision to “go it alone” was probably dictated by a highly sensitized survival instinct.
Even his contacts with Leo Turrin, the undercover cop at Pittsfield and Bolan’s closest friend, were conducted with the utmost caution. Anyone, at any time, for a variety of reasons, could suddenly become “the enemy.” Like a jungle cat, Mack Bolan trusted no man implicitly and looked warily at every proffered hand of friendship.
So the Executioner certainly had not come to Washington in response to an official invitation, as rumored, nor had he been “nudged there” by Harold Brognola, as the latter perhaps had reason to believe.
Actually Bolan had already committed himself to a probe of the Washington atmosphere before listening to Brognola’s misgivings concerning “high level treachery.”
He had come because of his own deep feelings that something was terribly rotten in the nation’s capital, and because all the signs pointed toward a “big happening” in the very near future.
And he told Claudia Vitale, shortly after the Capitol Hill firefight: “Stop apologizing. I saved you for selfish reasons. I’m here to sabotage the master timetable in any way I can. If you want to square yourself with your conscience, now’s your chance. Otherwise goodbye and go to hell. I don’t want any cute games, lady, and I haven’t time for romantic intrigues. So declare yourself here and now. I’ve got to get this show on the road.”
Claudia “declared” herself, and the intelligence which she ripped off in thirty breathless minutes was enough to convince the Executioner that he had stumbled into ripe grounds indeed.
She also told him, “It’s the old game done up in bright new costumes. Ward politics in all their viciousness, elevated to a national scale. Threats, violence, blackmail, intimidation of every stripe and directed at every seat in congress, every staff, every bureaucratic office. They’re rewriting the laws of the nation and doing it so cleverly that no single victim on Capitol Hill is even aware of what’s really happening. New bills are being watered down in committee or else totally mutilated in order to favor criminal interests—and their interests range into almost everything now. Some bills are even being drafted by syndicate lawyers and slipped into the mill by their connections. Anyone they can’t buy or intimidate is disposed of—one way or another. They can kill their character reputation, their political careers, or they can smash their bodies—and they’re doing it all. That’s what finally turned me away. Those envelopes you saw me delivering … they weren’t payoffs. Those were threats, evidence for blackmail, that sort of thing. I haven’t made a cash payoff since Lupo made the scene. He doesn’t believe in buying what he already owns.”
So … yes … the battle lines were firmly drawn. Bolan did not know, the entire enemy, but he knew what they were doing, how and why.
The next move was his.
He had to disrupt a zero-hour countdown for domination of a nation’s governmental functions. It seemed almost silly even to contemplate such a take-over—in a country as powerful and progressive as the United States—but if it wasn’t a silly idea to the mob, then neither was it silly to Mack Bolan.
He had to ferret out the dry-rot in the national capital’s institutions, expose those who were unfit to serve, protect all he could those who had simply been sucked into an operation too powerful to fight.
He had to stop the mob at every turn, at every reach, at every attempted movement toward control in Washington … and he had to run their rotten asses out of there.
Could one man do all that?
Yes. One man could do a hell of a lot. If he was totally committed to his goals. If he could harden his guts—his very soul—to wade through rivers of blood and never look back. If he had the tools, the energies, the talents and if he would apply them all unsparingly.
Mack Bolan was such a man.
Yes. He could do all that.
But only if the gods were willing.
5: THE RECORD
From an entry in Mack Bolan’s personal journal…
Washington, 18 April
At a time like this I regret my lack of formal education. There are things I want to record here—feelings, mostly—and that can be a tough job for a guy who has spent his lifetime soldiering.
This may be my last chance to get it into the record, to try to explain why I sent my life along the course it is now on.
I try to tell myself that I don’t mind being called a murdering lunatic … but I do, I mind. No man who is sane enjoys being pointed out as an enemy of his society. I guess what I mind the most, though, is that so damned much official attention is going to my side of the war and not to the other.
It’s a lot like the Vietnam problem. All the noise and agonizing over the morality of the thing, with no really close look at the reasons for it. You can’t make a problem like that go away by simply debating the right or wrong of it. Both sides to any debate are usually sincere. What bothers me is when one side seizes the “morality” stick—as though there is always but one morality and everything else must kneel to it.
That makes it pretty easy for some people. It isn’t too hard to cop out when you have “morality” on your side.
I didn’t really want this war with the Mafia. I sort of edged
into it, the way our government did in Vietnam. Once in, though, there’s nothing left but to see the thing through, for better or worse. I couldn’t run from the mob now. That would give them a strength they’d never had before. It would wipe out every advance I’ve made, and it would actually make things worse than when this war started.
I did not want to come to Washington. Everything inside of me kept telling me to bypass this town, to take an R & R or to try a softer spot.
What the hell, my army is worn thin. Barefoot, tattered, reserves just about exhausted. I’m in no shape to be storming the national bastion.
But, hell, I had to check into this one. I didn’t bring it here, it was already here. And it looks like it’s for all the marbles. How could I bypass it?
I have this feeling that the entire focus of my life has become fixed on this spot; that I will very likely die here. If that’s the way it has to be, then okay. I’ve known all along that there was only one way out of this mess for me. What I mind is failing, and failing at such a hell of a critical time. Also, I don’t feel that the mob will put me down. I believe it will be the law, and I’m afraid that the focus will go the wrong way. Big deal, they got Mack Bolan. Never mind the marauding cannibals who were left around to pick up the pieces. That’s what bothers me.
I’m no politician and I am not talking politics when I say that my present war is no more than an extension (or maybe it’s a contraction) of that other war in Vietnam. I never did have the feeling that I was fighting to save the world from Communism or for any political ideals. I fought, the best way I knew how, simply because I felt the call to battle. It was a personal war for me, the same as this one is.
It’s a war of principle.
I can’t really do anything about Vietnam. But this country, and the real problems we face here is something I can tackle.
And I’m worried about the outcome of this Washington battle.
Ten years ago I wouldn’t have been so worried. We were a different nation then. I guess what scares me is the sinking feeling that the country has lost its guts. Everyone seems to be hung up on ideas of doing their own thing, living in peace and sweetness and love. Hell I can’t blame anyone for wanting that. I want it too, not this hell I’m stuck with now. All those nice things, though, come with a price tag. Some one has to be willing to settle the bill, or there will be no seller and no buyer.
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