Knockdown

by Don Pendleton

  Malatesta understood what he had heard. "It's in the fan," he said quietly.

  "Bolan," Salina said ominously. "Did you hear those bursts? No ordinary guns."

  "There's a little boat in the garage," Uccello announced. The tall, bald, almost scholarly-looking man was checking his Beretta as he spoke. "I mean it's a maybe."

  "We've still got the advantage here," Rossi said. "Chained up in the bedroom. Say we sit three in the front seat of the Chevy, her between us."

  "No," Salina told him. "We walk out. I walk out, with her right ahead of me on a chain. Pistol to the back of her neck. Joe, you and Malatesta come along in the car behind me. If they do drop me, you'll drop her — that's what we yell at them." She looked at Rossi and Malatesta. "You use Uzis to chop up whatever they've got — cars, maybe that helicopter that was flying around a while ago."

  "What about me?" Uccello asked.

  "You get that boat running. Don't burn any gas trying to torch the house. We're going to need it. There's only one road off this end of the Cape, and they'll have it blocked sooner or later. We'll drive the Chevy south a mile or so, then cut into the first lane to the beach. You'll see us on the beach, and you come in and pick us up."

  "Salina…" Rossi tried to interrupt.

  "Shut up," she snapped. "What we need is an end run around their roadblock."

  "Awful small boat," Uccello said doubtfully.

  "Big enough for three," she said. "You and Malatesta walk from the beach. You aren't known. You look like tourists. You take my advice and bury your guns in the sand. Even if you have to show identification, nobody knows who Malatesta and Uccello are. Just a couple guys on a vacation."

  "And where do we go in the boat?" Rossi asked.

  "To where you can rent a car," Salina replied. "We'll be out on that water with a thousand boats, and who'll know which is us? About fifteen miles will get us away from the north hook. In an hour we can be down where there are three or four highways and ten thousand tourists. We can figure it out from there."

  "The Cape's a trap," Rossi warned.

  "This house is the trap," she said angrily. "Cape Cod's a big place. But every minute we stand here jawing is a minute lost. Everybody move. Give me the keys to Gina's padlocks."

  * * *

  Bolan lay on his belly on the last dune before the open sand where the Chevrolet station wagon waited. Coppolo lay on another dune twenty yards away and slightly farther from the house.

  "Kruger," Bolan said quietly into his handie-talkie. "What would you guess is the weight of the chopper?"

  "Don't have to guess," Kruger replied, his voice a little distorted. "It weighs 2150 pounds empty. We're carrying about two hundred seventy-five pounds of fuel at this point, five pounds of oil, say forty pounds of baggage."

  "Plus one hundred sixty pounds of pilot," Bolan said. "Figure twenty-six hundred pounds. Okay. Let's try something to distract them."

  * * *

  Uccello trotted from the house to the garage, carrying the five-gallon can of gasoline. He had no confidence in the woman's judgment or her plan, and was surprised to see Rossi and Malatesta taking orders from her. But he had no choice as far as he could see. Walk out of here with the Indian girl ahead of them as protection? How did they know the cops out there cared anything about the Indian girl? Launch this boat and run south to a rendezvous on some beach without even knowing where? Then he and Malatesta were to walk off Cape Cod? And Rossi and the two women were going to cover fifteen or twenty miles in this little boat? The whole thing was crazy.

  But she had two tough arguments — first, Malatesta had told him she'd just as soon kill a man as look at him. Second, nobody had any better ideas.

  Just as he opened the garage and again saw the little open boat on its cart, he was startled by a roaring, rustling sound overhead and looked up to see the helicopter. It swept over the top of a dune, barely twenty feet above the low crest, its rotor wash blowing up a blinding storm of sand and dust.

  Emilio Uccello knew what came from a chopper — machine-gun fire. He'd seen plenty of that in Vietnam. Plenty. He threw himself inside the garage — maybe out of sight. He hoped he was out of sight.

  Malatesta ran out with an Uzi and swung the muzzle up to fire a good long burst at whatever arrogant bastard had brought that chopper in so close. A burst from a different direction cut his legs out from under him. He fell, writhing, watching the blood gush rhythmically. His light began to dim, and he knew he had no more than a minute before it went out.

  With his last sight he stared dully at the helicopter. God, it seemed big now! It hovered directly above the roof of the house and it was settling, its skids touching the ridge of the roof.

  Uccello had knocked a hole in the back wall of the garage, and he crawled out and began to inch his way on his belly in the sand, toward the beach. The noise of the rotor swinging persistently above him was terrifying.

  He heard a crunch and looked up. The chopper was settling down on the roof of the house, crushing it beneath more weight than the old beams and rafters could possibly take.

  * * *

  Salina knelt in the bathroom and opened the padlock that secured the chain from Gina's ankle to the vent pipe. She heard the chopper, felt the house shudder under the beat of the rotor and ignored all of it. Rossi was acting the man at last and was running from window to window, loosing bursts from two Uzis, keeping whoever was out there at bay until they could show their hostage and demand a ceasefire.

  "Okay, sis," Salina began. "We…"

  The house shuddered and filled with the sickening sounds of snapping, splintering lumber. Plaster fell from the bedroom ceiling, some of it directly on Salina's head. She staggered.

  Gina threw her chain over Salina's head and jerked it into her throat with all her strength. She lunged against the woman, knocking her against the wall. With both hands, straining every muscle, Gina held the chain tight and pulled it tighter.

  This was the woman who had killed Joan, and she was choking and thrashing. The two of them fell. Gina jerked and jerked again, harder, and felt the cartilage tear.

  And she felt the life begin to ebb out of Salina Beaudreau. The woman gagged and choked, and the power went out of her arms and legs. Unrelenting, Gina kept the pressure on the chain.

  The woman's body relaxed; her urine flowed.

  Gina didn't let go. When Joe Rossi stepped into the doorway, Gina still sat with the chain pulled tight. Salina Beaudreau's head lolled to her right. Her body slumped loosely.

  "You bitch…" Rossi muttered.

  * * *

  Bolan had dropped the G-11. He couldn't fire into the house with Gina still in there. Kruger had lifted the helicopter off the roof a few feet.

  "Joe?"

  Coppolo's voice came back on the handie-talkie. "Yo."

  "Run around to the beach side. Chop the porch up with a couple bursts. Not into the house, though. See if we can make them think we're coming in that way. Let me know when you're ready to fire."

  Coppolo raced behind the dunes. As he came to a crest where he could see the seaside porch of the house, he saw a man on the beach, frantically digging. He ignored him. Uccello saw him, quickly covered the hole in which he had buried his pistol, and walked north along the beach as casually as he could.

  "Mack?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Ready."

  "Let 'er rip," Bolan directed, already on his feet and sprinting for the house.

  Bursts from the Justice agent's G-11 sent showers of splinters into the air. The porch roof, supports shattered, fell with a crash to the porch floor.

  Bolan covered the fifty yards of open sand in seconds, jumped on the back porch and kicked the door in.

  Gina shrieked. Bolan ran to where he heard her voice, to the door of the bedroom.

  Joe Rossi was beating her with the chain. He had already hit her across the face and now was poised to strike again.

  Bolan didn't take time to aim carefully, and the.44 Magnum slug from t
he Desert Eagle caught the godfather of the Rossi Family low in the back. Rossi screamed as he clutched at the exploded lower half of his trunk. He had time enough to know he was dying — and why — before he fell to the floor. Ten seconds later he was dead.

  Epilogue

  Mack Bolan looked back at the City of New York as the airplane lifted off. In the past three weeks he and some other brave people had cut some heads off the many-headed monster that was the Mafia. But how long would it take the monster to grow twice as many?

  Carmine Samenza, though reluctant to become a godfather, was in the process of seizing the Corone Family assets.

  Alfredo Segesta had decided to take over the businesses of the Lentini Family.

  They were dividing up what was left of the Barbosa businesses.

  As for the Rossi Family, something very strange was happening. Eva Mueller had friends on the Commission — not only that, she had a husband who appeared as soon as the word came down from Cape Cod that Joe Rossi was dead. He was a Sicilian, a young man with firm ideas about how Family businesses should be run. It looked as if Eva and her husband might take control of what was left of the Rossi Family businesses.

  They would settle generously with Roxy Rossi and her children — provided Roxy and the kids quietly accepted what was offered.

  The mayor of New York said he was satisfied that building inspectors were doing their jobs properly again, and the NLRB had announced an investigation into corruption of New York construction unions.

  And so life went on.

  "What good does it all do?" Gina Claw asked Bolan in the airport departure lounge, where she and Eric had gone to see him off. "Do we ever win one?"

  "You bet," Bolan had said. "But you can't expect to win and then the fight's over. It doesn't work that way. It never has, and I don't suppose it ever will. The animals are always out there, and you have to fight back, all the time."

  "All the time," Eric had repeated.

  The warrior turned his eyes away from the window and began to scan a briefing book that had been sent up from Washington. A new danger, a new fight.

  All the time.