“Route Three is maintaining,” Zitka advised. Then: “Uh-oh. Trouble at the crossroads.”
“What is it, Zit?”
“Roadblock! Damn—lookit that! They’re running it!”
“Break!”
A brief silence; then: “It’s Route Three, Junction Two. I am avoiding, resuming track beyond.”
Bolan swore under his breath. Washington chuckled and sent the sports car into another squealing turn. “You said tonight’s the night, and that’s the last thing anyone believed,” he told Bolan.
The voice of Gadgets Schwarz came through the radio, speaking in a rapid monotone. “Okay, here’s the lay. Containment around periphery. Looks like a hole on Route Four, though. All exits at Routes Two and Three are sealed. Avoid. Run wide on Four. Out.”
“Okay, that’s great!” Bolan snapped into the radio. “Now, dammit, bail!”
“Negit,” Schwarz replied. “D and D is bearing fruit. Will exercise options.”
“Roll call!” Bolan commanded.
“Eagle is out and splitting wide on Four,” from Bloodbrother Loudelk.
“Track’s back on and streaking for skinnytail,” said Zitka.
“Comin’ ’round the mountain and closing,” reported Boom-Boom Hoffower.
“Angling and running for Four,” Gunsmoke Harrington sighed.
“I’ve got Horse in sight,” said Flower Child Andremede. “Will cover all possible.”
A brief silence followed. Bolan glanced at Washington, punched the transmitter, and barked, “Chopper! Where away?”
“He’s away in a lay on the Beverly clay,” Andromede reported in a flat voice. “He says spend his pension on the kids in Jersey.”
“Confirm!” Bolan snarled.
“He’s free, brother, and that’s as confirmed as he’s going to get.”
“Run careful, dammit,” Bolan muttered into the radio. “The price has already got too high.”
Captain Braddock smacked a fist into an open palm and cried, “Get that hole plugged on the Golden State. That’s the Route Four they’re yakking about!”
The dispatcher waved an excited hand at Braddock and said, “Another gunfight. Pacific Coast and Beverly! The roadblock. Two more cars damaged. I got no nearby units to replace ’em.”
Braddock lunged toward the console and quickly surveyed the map set into the glassed top of the desk. “Send these over,” he instructed, his index finger circling a flagged area. He moved over to stand in front of an intercom. “Andy, what’s the word up there?”
Lieutenant Andy Foster, on the roof with the special intelligence team from the U.S. Navy, responded immediately. “They’re scattering like the pieces from an explosion. They’ve located the new Hardcase net, too, you know.”
“Yeah, dammit, I know. I’ve been listening. What’s that stuff about a horse?”
“A rolling control center, we gather. Probably the van.”
“Stay on them. Let me know when a definite route of travel can be established.” Braddock sighed and turned back to the dispatcher. “Let’s swirl south,” he said. “Start ’em moving.”
“They don’t even know what they’re looking for, Captain,” the dispatcher replied in a low voice.
“Dammit, I know that. But get ’em moving anyway.”
The dispatcher nodded and turned back to his console. “Zone Four,” he announced, “Zone Five, Zone Six—all units, commence …”
Braddock turned away with a heavy frown and walked toward the coffee service. It was happening, the thing he’d feared most. The drag that had been activated for Bolan was engaging the fleeing Mafia vehicles first—and blood was flowing in L.A. streets. The captain sighed and half-filled his cup with coffee. He knew, somehow, that tonight was to be the climax to the Bolan affair. One way or another, blood-washed or otherwise, the L.A. streets would be a lot cleaner on the morrow.
The petty officer in charge of the navy team grinned at Andy Foster and said, “Is this the guy they call The Executioner?”
“That’s the guy,” Foster replied sourly. “Can’t you get a better fix?”
“This if RDF, you know, not radar,” the sailor said. “We get an automatic triangulation every time we get a signal, but our receivers don’t scramble out and identify each different voice that comes across. The only thing we can do is block track. You know—we can say, five minutes ago, they were all in the Beverly Hills area. At this moment they seem to be slightly south of Beverly Hills—but there’s a fox out there, Lieutenant. I think it’s the one they call Horse, and there is more than one voice involved, possibly two or three. He’s running a diversion pattern and transmitting frequently, and we’re getting no meaningful grouping on our fixes because of that. It will take at least another five minutes before we can identify a definite pullaway of the main group. Whoever this horse is, he damn well knows what he’s about.”
Another petty officer sitting close by removed a headset and joined the conversation. “I think I’m getting the same guy on Hardcase, too,” he declared. “He’s really screwing things up. Listen to this.” He flipped a switch, throwing his monitor onto a loudspeaker.
“Zone Five Units, disregard last and stand by further,” an officious voice commanded, on the Hardcase radio network.
“That’s not your dispatcher,” the navy man pointed out.
An exasperated voice blared in immediately to deny the validity of the previous announcement. A loud squeal immediately overrode that transmission, effectively blocking it. The navy men were grinning at each other.
“He’s even jamming you,” the leader told Foster.
“What can we do about it?” Foster demanded angrily.
The sailor shrugged. “You should have a contingency plan.”
“Zone Six, Zone Six, disregard swirl and close on Alpha Three, that is Alpha Three, and stand by further.”
“That was not—” Foster recognized it as Braddock’s voice just before another ear-splitting squeal knocked him off the air.
The navy men were now laughing openly. Foster whirled to the intercom and shouted, “You’ve gotta get that damn horse!”
“Will you drop dead?” Braddock’s tired voice came back.
Julian DiGeorge’s massive Cadillac was eating up the Golden State Freeway. He was hunched over the wheel, heart pounding, mind whirling, and every snick of his tires seemed to be repeating, idiot, idiot, idiot … Deej had goofed—oh had he goofed! He had been so reluctant to return to the “old ways.” Sure, sure, why not? Deep down in his brain he must have known that there was no returning to old ways. Old ways are dead and gone; there’s no way to get back to them. Deej had tried to step backward twenty years in one small step, and he’d just about landed in the grave of those dead old ways.
Times change, they change, and a guy has to change with the times. Sure, he knew that now. Try fighting a war nowadays using the same old weapons of the World War. Yeah, that’s what Deej had done. Times had changed, war had changed, and Deej had tried to step back into the old ways. He’d thought he could scare Bolan off with a show of strength, and bastard Bolan had shoved that show right back through his teeth. Just a plain guy, huh? Plain hell!
Well, it was all lost now. The legitimacy, the respect, the comfortable floating with the cream of society—yeah, it was all gone now. The cops, the newspapers, the feds—everybody would start digging into the DiGeorge empire now. And the truth would out. Julian DiGeorge, nee Julio DiGeorgio, would be another name on the racket busters’ lists. They’d investigate his banks, his ships, his politics—everything would get the big eye, and Deej would have to labor again. He would have to labor to his dying day.
Well—okay. Deej had always known, deep down, that he didn’t really belong in that puking mass of social respectability. Deej was, by God, a laborer—and he wasn’t ashamed of it. To hell with Beverly Hills. To hell with the bright boys with the phony smiles, and to hell with the hot tramps with the itching asses. To hell with it all. Deej was a laborer, and h
e was now headed for that laboring man’s castle down in Balboa, the family home, a place where a man could stretch out and thumb his nose at the miserable cops and the puking social climbers and lunatics like soldier boy Bolan. Deej hoped Bolan would find Balboa. God, he hoped the miserable bastard would find it. He wouldn’t find a bunch of foolish old idiots, trying to step into the past. No. Bolan would find the twentieth-century brotherhood at Balboa. He would find the Black Hand of God, by God, and in all its fury and potency.
“This is Horse, signing off, final transmission. Good luck, Sarge. Hope you win the war.”
“Gadgets!” Bolan snapped. “Gadgets?”
Flower Andromede’s calm tones came through. “Guess he can’t hear you, Maestro. They’re buzzed by the fuzz. No chance, no chance. I’m breaking. Scratch one politician and one ohms lawyer.”
“Is it P.O.W., Flower?” Bolan inquired anxiously.
“Affirm. A quiet surrender. Where do you run? I’m rejoining.”
Bolan’s voice was heavy with a mixture of sadness and relief. “We run true. Your option, Flower. Head for the hutch if you’d rather.”
“Neg. We’re already three too few. I’ll find you.”
“I’m in clover,” Zitka came in. “Are you on?”
“I’m on,” Bolan assured him. “Guns? Where away?”
“Parallel to track and running true,” Harrington reported.
“Roger. Guess we’re clear. Keep running true.”
“I couldn’t hear Horse and Flower,” Zitka complained. “What’s happening?”
“The blues corralled the horse,” Bolan replied. “Flower is rejoining, and just in time—it sounds like we’re running beyond the radios.”
“Maybe we broke outta the radio trap, then,” Zitka observed soberly.
“Maybe so. But keep it minimum, just in case.”
“Roj.”
“Where dp you run, Boom?”
“Closing on Gunsmoke right now,” replied Hoffower’s quiet voice.
“Okay. Let’s try to tighten it up. Give me a fix, Zit, so I can verify track.”
“I’m coming up on Victor Four,” Zitka said.
“Mark your passage.”
“Roj … stand by … mark.”
“Okay. I am … two minutes light and closing. Let’s all fall in now.”
“I have you in my rear view, Maestro,” Loudelk reported.
“Roger, I see you. Let’s try to flock now. All birds, pull it in.”
“Man I am flying in,” Andromede’s faint voice advised.
“There’s still a straggling pip or two, but they seem to be heading down the Golden State,” Foster reported excitedly. “And we’re losing them fast.”
“You’d think, with half the mobile units in town on the job, we could have plugged that damn …” Braddock fumed. He was reaching for his hat and stuffing things into his pockets. “Get my car ready! Extend the alert all the way to Oceanside and try to pull in Riverside, Redlands, Banning, San Jacinto, and anybody else you can get into that fan. Ask the CHP to seal Oceanside solid, and I mean solid.”
“How far you figuring to chase these guys, Cap’n?” asked a uniformed officer.
“I’ll chase ’em clear to Tijuana if I have to,” Braddock roared.
The track ended a few miles above Balboa, on one of the irregular outjuttings of California coastline. They had left the interstate route some minutes back to proceed along a twisting and torturous blacktop road that swept down to the sea, skirted a small inlet, then climbed several hundred feet to the rocky promontory.
Bolan rolled to a halt behind Loudelk’s vehicle. Zitka’s chase car, a little MG, was not in sight, but Zitka himself was jogging quietly down the road toward the clustering cars of the Death Squad. Bolan stepped out onto the ground just as another vehicle pulled up on his rear bumper. Loudelk had slithered out to join Zitka; the two of them walked on to Bolan’s Porsche, where they were joined by a grinning Gunsmoke Harrington. Washington opened his door and stepped out, then leaned across the roof of the Porsche with a sober smile. A few scudding clouds were passing low overhead, intermittently blocking out the faint nightlight.
Zitka had been busy lighting a cigarette. A stiff coastal wind was making the job difficult. He dragged hard on the cigarette and said, “End of the line.”
Bolan nodded. He was gazing out onto the long promontory, mentally calculating the length, breadth, and height. A large house at the far end loomed grimly foreboding against the horizon. Lights were showing faintly on all three floors of the structure. “Is it sealed at this end?” he asked Zitka.
“You better believe it. Stone wall, about ten feet high, runs across the entire front. About a hundred yards wide. Big iron gate right in the center. Brick gatehouse just inside. Maybe four guards in there. I figure a thousand yards from the gate down to the house. There’s a guy walking the wall with a shotgun.”
“Conclusions?” Bolan asked tersely.
“It’s a fortress.”
Bolan nodded. “It figures. This is their hard site.”
“Eighteenth-century mentality,” Harrington put in.
“Maybe so,” Bolan said, “but we have to figure a twentieth-century way to get in there.”
Loudelk had walked to the far side of the road to gaze along the sheer drop to the ocean. “Almost straight up and down as far as I can see,” he observed quietly. “And I’d hate to fall. Looks like nothing but rocks down below.”
Bolan swung his gaze onto Harrington. “Wasn’t Boom just behind you?”
“He’s spotted back at the turnoff,” Harrington yelled, “to make sure Flower doesn’t get lost.”
“I’m glad we have the benefit of Politician’s last bright idea,” Bolan said musingly. “Looks like we might need it.”
“We going to bust on in?” Harrington inquired, smiling brightly.
“Might have to,” Bolan replied. He turned to Zitka and Loudelk. “Give the place a thorough recon,” he told the seasoned scouts. “Pay particular attention to the cliffs at the other side. Find a hold—any kind of hole.”
Zitka and Loudelk exchanged glances, then slightly withdrew. Bolan watched them out of sight, then spoke into the radio. “Boom. Situation.”
“Flower just arrived,” Hoffower immediately responded. “On our way.”
Bolan laid the radio on the hood of the Porsche and told the others, “Let’s check the weapons.”
Washington pulled the keys from the ignition and went to the rear and opened the trunk. Harrington was walking quickly to his vehicle, playing with the snapaway straps that held his six-shooters in place. Moments later, when the other vehicles joined them, an assortment of automatic weapons and ammo clips were neatly arranged on the roof of the Porsche.
Hoffower was driving to a small panel truck and towing what appeared to be a low canvas-covered trailer. He pulled the rig even with the Porsche and immediately cut the motor. Andromede halted his vehicle, a late-model Fury, just to the rear.
Bolan gave them a brief rundown of the situation.
“Guess you’re gonna need my tagalong, then,” Hoffower observed.
Bolan jerked his head in a curt nod. “Pull on ahead of me, Boom, and get it unhitched. Give ’im a hand, Flower, and get that weapon ready to go. After you get unhitched, Boom, get your explosives ready. How many satchel charges do you have in there?”
“Six,” Hoffower replied. “I can make a few more right quick if you think you need ’em.”
Bolan shook his head. “Six should be enough. And break out four grenades for every man.” He swiped at his nose and added in low tones, “Seven of us left—twenty-eight chunks, Boom.”
Hoffower nodded, started his engine, and pulled off the road ahead of the Porsche. Andromede walked along beside the trailing vehicle, slashing at the ropes of the canvas with a knife. Washington stepped over to help him strip back the canvas and uncover the jeep. Hoffower was between the vehicles with a wrench, releasing the tow bar.
Andro
mede swung up behind the fifty-caliber mount, removed the dust cover, and busied himself with an ammo box.
Zitka and Loudelk materialized from the shadows along the road, and Zitka reported, “Not a hole anywhere, Mack. It’s right up the middle or not at all.”
Bolan had obviously been prepared for such a finding. “Okay,” he said. He spread his arms at shoulder height and waved both hands. “Gather ’round and let’s go over the footwork. Time check first.” He stared at his watch. “Oneoh-seven … right … now. Boom, I want you to drape a satchel charge over the hood ornament of Zitka’s vehicle. At precisely 1:15, Boom, you send that car against the gate. Give yourself plenty of room to drop clear. Flower, you on the fifty and Deadeye driving, right behind the battering ram. Hold back at about fifty feet and open up with that big mother. Rest of you deployed along the wall, and raise as much hell as you can without actually exposing yourself. Toss some grenades or something. Boom, I want four of those satchels. Now—nobody comes in. You’re providing diversionary fire only, and I want you—”
“Just a damn minute!” Zitka protested. “You’re going in there alone?”
“One man can do it, Zit,” Bolan argued. “If you can pull everybody toward that gate, I can be over the wall and halfway to the house before anyone begins to wonder what’s happening.”
“With four damn satchel charges!” Harrington put in disgustedly.
“You’re not leaving us standing around on the outside, Mack,” Zitka said. “Look, we’re all sorry about Chopper and about Pol and Gadgets. But we made the decision back at camp. We’re going all the way.”
“It’s our war too, man,” Deadeye Washington murmured.
“Boom?” Bolan queried, his eyes grim.
“Hell yes,” Hoffower replied quietly. “This’s no time to get faint.”
“As a squad, we’ll shoot our wad,” Flower Child intoned.
Bolan’s eyes dropped. When they came up again, he was grinning. “Okay. We’re still the Terrible Ten. Maybe Chopper’s wild-ass charge was what sent all these bunnies hopping along the trail. His effect is right here with us. Pol and Gadgets provided the police diversion that got us here. So …”
Death Squad Page 15