Bolan knew the general better than that.
"What was the reason, sir?"
"I told Kelly what I found out," said Crawford. "Jones was a GI stationed in Germany until eighteen months ago when he was busted as the head of a full-scale drug operation he operated on the base where he was stationed. The murders of a German national and a Turk were involved, but it was never proved that Jones pulled the trigger. None of it was ever proved, as a matter of fact. But there was enough circumstantial evidence to get Jones bounced out of the service with a dishonorable."
"How did he meet Kelly?"
"Jones fought the proceeding right to the end. He was stationed in D.C. while his appeals went through. Kelly was working as a cashier at a PX snackbar."
"Jones may have changed his name, but he hasn't changed his style," said Bolan. "The men I took out were hired hands to do the dirty work while Damu Abdul stayed out of the rough stuff with Kelly."
"What rough stuff?" asked Crawford. "What did Kelly get mixed up in?"
"Have you been briefed on the Stony Man situation, sir?"
"I, uh, know of the difficulties you're having with Lee Farnsworth."
"That's not what I mean."
Bolan told the general about the sabotage of the Farm's communications system and the blood hunt that had taken John Phoenix to the Mafia, the Armenians, the CIA and Grover Jones and his pals.
He explained to the retired officer that he still did not have any answers as to who was behind the sabotage that so endangered Able Team and put a good man in a coma.
"The only way it plays is that Jones subcontracted a hit on me," finished Bolan. "Whoever wanted me hit knew about the CIA surveillance on those Armenians. They knew enough to figure that I would try for the Armenians on my own because their arrival in the city coincided with the sabotage."
"The someone you want seems to know a lot," said the general. "Do you think Kelly would know who hired Jones?"
"If Jones is big enough to subcontract a hit, he's smart enough to keep that kind of information to himself," said Bolan. "If he did have a name, it'd be just another middleman like himself."
"You must have some ideas."
"Some," acknowledged Bolan. "That's another reason I brought Kelly home to you, sir, instead of dropping her off somewhere. I could use your help."
"In what way, Colonel? I had a hand in designing the Stony Man and Central Foreign Bureau operations, but security requires that I keep my distance from both units."
"That's why you're the man, sir. I want a full rundown on Lee Farnsworth. Everything that didn't make his 201 file. There should be a lot. He's been in covert operations a long time."
"Farnsworth? You don't think he's behind the sabotage?"
"There's as good a case against the CFB as there was against those Armenians," growled Bolan. "The timing is right."
"Colonel, believe me, Farnsworth is as much a patriot as you are."
"Then you won't turn up anything. You had access to that information when you considered Farnsworth for the job, didn't you?"
"Let me get this straight," said Crawford. "You're suggesting that the head of the Central Foreign Bureau is a mole out to destroy the Stony Man operation?"
"I'm suggesting nothing," said Bolan. "I'm still looking. And I can't afford to slow down." He got to his feet. "You'll have to excuse me now, sir. I'll keep in touch."
The general stood and they left the kitchen.
"I'll do as you ask, certainly," said Crawford. "I've known you a long time, soldier. Long enough to trust your judgment. I just hope you're wrong this time. About Farnsworth and the CFB, I mean. I feel the same way about that outfit as I do about you and the bunch at Stony Man.''
The two men faced each other at the front door.
"I'll try to pick up Jones's trail," said Bolan. "Any idea where the guy hangs out?"
A voice answered from the top of the stairs.
"He hangs out at a club called the Tattle Tail," Kelly Crawford told Bolan. "That's T-A-I-L." She gave him the address. He committed it to memory. "A joint," she added, not moving from the head of those stairs. "A rough place."
Kelly had cleaned up her act. A shower had buffed her blond beauty to a fine glow. Even her wet hair did not detract from her fresh good looks. She was clad in a floor-length robe that clung to her figure.
"I'll take my chances," growled Bolan. "Thanks, Kelly."
"I'm sorry," she said quietly, not making eye contact with Bolan or her father. "I've been an immature, stupid fool. I'm sorry."
"You're home now," said the general. "That's the important thing. Rest up. We'll talk about it in the morning."
"I'm home because of this man," said Kelly. She looked at Bolan for the first time. "Who are you, mister?"
"The name is Phoenix," Bolan told her. "Kelly, do you have any other ideas where Grover will hole up if the club doesn't pan out?"
"If Grover isn't at the Tattle Tail, someone there will know where to find him," she assured Bolan. "It's his turf. He used to take me there so all his pimp friends could see his fine white bitch."
"Please, Kelly — " began her father.
"I was a fool, and I've got to admit it aloud to both of you or it won't mean anything at all," said Kelly. "I was slumming with some real slime, wasn't I, Mr. Phoenix?"
"The slimiest," Bolan acknowledged. "And one of them is still out there. Grover will need a doctor, but he won't go to a hospital. He's holed up someplace right now where he thinks he's safe. That's the edge I need. He won't be moving. I will. And I've got to start moving right now. Good night, both of you. And thanks."
"Thank you," said Kelly to the Executioner. "I thought I loved a man who cared about me. But all he did was use me. I guess he was using me all along. Thank you for saving my life and making me see that." Then she looked at her father and her voice quavered. "I'm sorry, daddy. I really am."
Then she turned and padded off down the upstairs hallway.
Bolan and General Crawford stepped out onto the front porch.
"My thanks too, Mack. It's good to see you again.'' Crawford saw only the Lancia in the driveway. "Take the Lancia, you'll be needing some wheels. Good luck. God bless you."
The two warriors shook hands, then embraced warmly like the brothers they were.
Bolan climbed into the Lancia and roared away from there, angling back toward the Roosevelt Bridge and D.C.
He would get rid of the Lancia at the first car-rental agency he came to. Then he would phone the general to pick it up.
He was driving a car registered to General Crawford.
That would make it easy for someone to identify.
Someone in the know, the general had said.
Who?
Farnsworth?
Could General Crawford be involved?
Bolan felt a flash of angry guilt at that last thought.
He pulled up at a pay phone by a closed service station. He dialed a number that was routed from a scrambler station in B.C. through a computerized reroute via Miami, Flagstaff and Missoula, Montana, before buzzing the switchboard at Stony Man Farm's central control.
April answered.
"Stony Man."
"It's me, mother hen."
Bolan could feel the woman of his heart smiling at him over the line.
"Striker, it's good to hear from you. How's it going?"
"Swinging. I could fill a book. What's the situation there?"
"Some very bad news, some not so bad. Konzaki is dead. He never came out of the coma."
Bolan felt something cold run down his spine.
"Now it's personal," was all he said.
"Maybe you should be back here," said April. "It's past midnight. If there is going to be an assault on the Farm tonight, shouldn't you be here?"
"I'm twenty minutes away," said Bolan. "You're just lonesome."
April chuckled, and the intimate sound of it made the warrior wish for one instant that he and this woman were together and none of this
was happening.
"I'm lonesome for you, Captain Hellfire. Men, we've got plenty of. Phoenix Force arrived an hour ago."
"What about the communications repair?"
"That's the not so very bad news," said April. "The Bear is out there now. The parts just arrived."
"Still no word from Able Team?"
"Still no word. I take it you have no intention of returning here until and if you're needed?"
"There's a hot time in the old town tonight," Bolan told her. "I've got some more cage-rattling to do. Konzaki's soul won't rest until it's done. Neither will mine."
"Hal has been calling. He wants you to contact him."
"I'll bet he does. Tell him the trail's too hot right now for talk."
"Is there anything I can do?"
"Run a tracer on Grover Jones, a.k.a. Damu Abdul Ali. Recent dishonorable discharge from the Army."
"Will do. Anything else?"
"Uh, yeah. See what you can come up with on General James Crawford."
"The general? But, Mack — "
"Someone close to us is striking at us tonight," Bolan explained. "My only course is not to trust anyone."
"You can trust my love, guy," April said softly. "I'll get what you need."
"Stay hard, lady," said Bolan.
He broke the connection.
The low cloud cover draped a humid blanket across Washington, as if trying to suffocate it.
Bolan returned to his vehicle and headed into the nighttime city, into the belly of the monster.
13
The Tattle Tail was in the heart of D.C.'s black section.
It had been a long time since the open racial hostilities of the late sixties and early seventies, but faces along the sidewalks and tenement steps turned hostile, cautious, at the sight of a white.
Bolan had shed Big Thunder, packing the mini-howitzer away for the time being in its leather beneath the front seat of the rental car when he parked the vehicle half a block away.
He wore the Beretta 93-R shoulder-bolstered beneath his jacket.
The inner-city pavement was crowded because of the warm spell, even though it was well past 1:00 a.m.
The street was alive.
Bright colors and the latest fashions paraded by to the throaty roar of powerful exhausts and the calls of young men to foxy ladies.
The tall man with peculiarly icy eyes ignored the stares and entered the bar that was advertised by a lone Pabst sign in the window.
The joint was busy with an after-hours crowd. The walls, hidden somewhere beyond a swirling haze of cigarette smoke, throbbed to pulsating funk music from a jukebox and the constant din of raised voices.
The conversation dropped when Bolan appeared.
Suddenly there was no sound except for the music.
Dozens of eyes watched the stranger from a sea of black faces.
Then the conversation and din of a barful of people resumed, a notch lower, but more guarded than before.
Bolan walked to the bar and took the end stool where the bar met the wall. There were no patrons back here except for the gaudy hooker two empty stools down.
The whore wobbled onto her high heels and started toward Bolan, but when she got close enough to read his eyes, she changed her mind and went back to her stool and her beer.
The bartender was a squat, round-faced man who came over and regarded the stranger with a careful appraisal that gave away nothing.
"What can I get you?"
The tall man issued a single icy command.
"Grover Jones."
"Uh, what's that, sir?"
The tall man with the icy eyes repeated, "Grover Jones. Calls himself Damu Abdul Ali."
The bartender's expression tightened into a strange mixture of apprehension and hope.
"You a cop?"
"I'm not his friend."
"Yeah, the punk hangs out here," the barman confided in a lowered voice. "I own this place. Name's Ike. This joint used to be called Mr. Ike's, used to be a nice family place.''
Bolan looked around at the noisy hookers and pimps and ghetto nightlife.
"What happened?"
"Eight months ago this Ali bastard came around and said he likes my place and wants it as sort of his headquarters. Wants his own private rooms and his people to get cut-rate bar prices. I told him no, so he hired neighborhood gang kids to hassle my customers. They roughed me up. Said they'd do things to my wife and kid. My little girl, she's only fourteen. They changed the name of the place, everything."
"I can do something about that," said Bolan.
The black proprietor regarded him for a moment.
"I'll damn well bet you can."
"Where do I find Jones?"
"The rooms in back. There's a door to the alley, so I don't know if he's there or not, but some of his boys'll be. Be careful man. Them mothers kill people."
"So do I," growled Bolan. "Thanks, Ike."
The Executioner left the bar. He skirted the bar scene and passed through the archway Ike had indicated. Off to his left were the restrooms. Another short corridor on his right led to a corner. He moved to the corner and around it. At the end of the hallway was an exit sign above a metal door with a push bar handle. There was another door to Bolan's left between him and the alley exit. The sounds from out front were a dull rumble back here. Bolan heard the soft, distinctive click of billiard balls from behind the door to his left.
He walked over and kicked open the door.
There were five people in the room, all black, all dressed in the latest fashions. Three guys were holding pool cues, one of them lining up his next shot on the green baize of the pool table. Two women sat at a private bar across the room, wearing the unmistakable attire of hookers.
Bolan came down three steps into what was decorated like a private club room. He walked over to the pool table. The two other men with cues stood at either end of the table. Bolan faced the guy who was about to make his shot.
"Ooh my, look what just walked in," said one of the whores.
Bolan addressed the guy across from him.
"I want Grover Jones."
The punk's shoulders hunched slightly. He did not look up. A cool one.
"Looks like we got a smartass honkey cop what wants his ass carved, boys."
The two men to either side of Bolan dropped their cues to the pool table.
Bolan allowed them to reach into back pockets and pull out six-inch blades that appeared with expert wrist snaps, learned only on the streets of the ghetto.
"That's how it is?" Bolan asked quietly.
The punk in front of him looked up and flashed Bolan a gold-toothed smile that was all hate and anger.
"That's how it is, motherfucker."
"Good," said Bolan.
Bolan felt himself going into an icy rage.
These were the cannibals who fed on their own — street bums who terrorized decent people too civilized and afraid to fight back. And Konzaki was dead.
Bolan picked up the pool cue set down by the punk to his right. He moved too fast for any of them to register a reaction short of startled grunts. He held the cue with two hands and lunged sideways so hard and fast the pointed end pierced the eye and brain of the guy on his right. Bolan yanked the stick out of the man's head and whipped it backward in a continuous motion with both hands. Bolan threw his weight behind the move hard enough to impact the second punk's forehead with death-dealing force. Both men collapsed on either side of the table, dead.
One of the whores screamed.
The guy across from Bolan lost his cool and his cue. He fished for concealed hardware, coming out with a .38 Saturday Night Special, tracking on Bolan real fast, fading back from the table.
Bolan feinted the guy like a fencer and flicked the stick.
The solid end of the cue clipped the pistol from the punk's hand before the guy could fall back far enough. Then Bolan cracked the thick end of the cue hard across the man's skull, knocking him to the floor.
The two hookers fled the room.
Bolan came around the table and grabbed the punk by his shirtfront. He yanked the creep to his feet. He bent the guy backward across the elevated lip of the pool table.
The punk retained consciousness but almost lost it when Bolan rammed the man's head down onto the felt with a thump. The Stony chief leaned onto the cue that now held the black pinned across the throat.
"Where's Jones?"
Beads of sweat popped out like pearls on the punk's frightened face.
He cried out an address.
Bolan shifted his hold on the stick closer to the sides of the man's neck. He gave a mighty push on the cue, snapping the neck of the punk.
He stepped back and let the limp corpse sag to the floor to join the other two.
The Executioner's fury was abating.
They'll pay, Konzaki. Starting with these cannibals.
He tossed down the pool stick and walked out of the game room. He left the club via the alley exit.
No one tried to stop the tall man with the icy eyes as he disappeared into the night.
* * *
Bolan drove past a one-story brownstone in a lower middle-class, racially mixed residential neighborhood. Dim light suggested itself from behind heavily draped windows.
It was the address given him by the black thug whose neck he had broken.
A man came out of the house. He strode briskly to the sidewalk and climbed into a parked car.
Two more men moved up the path that led to the front door of the house. They entered without knocking.
Bolan left his parked rental auto some distance down the block. He concealed the AutoMag under the driver's seat again. He preferred that whatever happened next not escalate into a firefight like the one back at the Interstate office.
The brownstone was the only house on the block showing any signs of life at this hour.
He walked up the front sidewalk, opened the door and stepped inside without knocking.
He was in a whorehouse.
He entered an old-fashioned parlor whose walls were lined with mirrors and couches, the couches occupied by whores of all shapes, colors and descriptions in various forms of intimate attire from lace to leather. The subtle strains of Muzak emanated from somewhere. There was a portable bar, and several men were in the first stages of appraising the merchandise.
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