“Too late for what?”
“I once wanted to be a priest. Figured it was the only sure thing going. But I was very young, and I quickly got other ideas. Now, suddenly, I’m feeling very old. And I’m wondering if it is too late.”
“It is,” Turrin said, very soberly, “entirely too late. You wouldn’t live long enough, cop, to hear out your own confession. Pick something surer. A locked room, say, and a good supply of booze.”
Brognola looked at his watch as he sourly replied, “I’ll drink to that, and to secret heroes, fallen comrades, and the fall of a civilization. Take it home, Parker.”
And that, Turrin decided, was a fitting farewell toast to the damnedest guy either of them had ever known.
Let the world watch itself for a while.
The survivors were going to tie one on.
18: ENGAGEMENT
The “damnedest guy” was, at that very moment, tying on something of his own—but it was not a celebration of his own greatly exaggerated death.
One half of the Snow Trails force was maintaining the alert watch—split into two groups. The Alpha section patroled the inner compound area—the plateau itself. These were all ground grunts and ski-troops. Bravo section represented the motorized troops. They patrolled the approaches and overlooks—perhaps all the way to U.S. 40.
The other half of the force was crowded into the guest cabins, under orders to sleep and rest. And from the looks of those guys, the orders were totally unnecessary. They’d spent a tough day in harsh weather.
Bolan estimated the total force at about three hundred men, not counting the officers. And he readily acknowledged the fact that they would have to be regarded as elite troops—real soldiers with toughness of spirit, above-average intelligence, and a willingness to absorb personal hardships without complaint.
The discipline was amazing, considering the fact that it was a cosmetic force with no organizational authority other than that imparted by the men comprising it.
The organizational line, itself, was conventional enough, modeled along the team concepts of the modern army. Each team was small and self-contained, though strongly interlocked, in the operational sense. It was an army of line combatants which transported itself, supplied itself, supported itself; there were no logistics elements, per se, which Bolan could discern.
It was certainly no ragtag collection of street punks but a thoroughly capable and efficient combat force. They were taking nothing for granted and therefore offering no angle of exploitation which Bolan could see.
In a sense, though, this worked out as a plus for Bolan. He could place himself inside the skins of these men—think like them, feel like them, become indistinguishable in their midst.
And that was the only game he had.
Scovic was in the command van, taking his second tour of “warm relief” and going over the guard rosters. Bolan, a la Pulaski, was out cruising the compound on skis and looking for an angle. This was his second “inspection” of the guard posts and at least he was becoming a familiar figure—and an authoritarian figure—if nothing else. This alone would buy him nothing, of course. He could not stray far from the normal routine of the watch and he dared not risk too much in casual contacts with this highly professional enemy. He did still have a relative freedom, of course, and a mobility which could develop into some sort of effective game plan. Under the circumstances, things were going great. They just were not going there fast enough.
Prior to joining the enemy’s ranks, Bolan had again rotated his personal armaments to concealment beneath the parka. He had six grenades, a few incendiaries, the AutoMag and six spare clips, the Beretta and four clips, the razor-edged stiletto, a couple of garrotes. All in all, against a force of some three hundred elite troops, not a hell of a lot.
But he was beginning, now, to reevaluate his position in the Colorado game. His entire thrust of the past several hours had been toward disengagement, withdrawal—a tactical retreat and a hotline to Washington. He’d been thinking like a scout who’d stumbled onto a secret enemy offensive—a forward scout, deep in enemy territory, struggling desperately only to extricate himself from enemy encirclement so that he could get the word back to command, to the main force.
Maybe the “angle” he’d been looking for had been in his own mind all the while. Maybe it was a matter of viewpoint, of personal vision, of role identification.
Why disengage?
Hell, he was here in the enemy camp, part of the enemy camp. He was not a scout, dammit. He was a guerilla force, in successful penetration of the enemy. That was the game, the only sensible one. Engagement, dammit, not disengagement. He could not get out to neutralize the plot. So okay. The only game left was to neutralize it from within.
With that decision, his thoughts returned immediately to the question of the armored vehicles. One was on patrol station at the exit road. The other two were parked beside the house, under guard by a sentry from the Bravo section. This guy was not in Scovic’s detail and therefore not subject to the “warm rotation” enjoyed by the Alpha people. He was a sort of forgotten man, alienated by distance as well as territory from his own command. The guy had been given no relief since the setting of the midnight guard.
It was a likely place to start.
Bolan cruised past there and gave the guy a quick lookover. He was standing between the vehicles, arms crossed at the chest and huddling over them to conserve body warmth. Bolan returned immediately and skidded to a halt from a snowplow turn at the rear of the vehicles. The Bravo man was not wearing skis. He had tramped the snowbed between the vehicles into hard, icy compaction. The boots were caked with ice all the way up and the face mask was brittle with frozen moisture from his breath.
“You okay?” Bolan asked him.
The guys lips were so stiff that his reply was almost unintelligible. “I’ll make it.”
“I don’t think so,” Bolan told him. “Bravo forget you’re down here?”
“I go off at two hundred hours. I’ll make it.”
“We have our people on fifteen-minute rotation. Look, man, this just isn’t the way it’s done. You go down to our snack wagon and put some hot coffee inside. I’ll cover for you here. There’s a foot warmer down there, too.”
“Thanks, but I’d better stick.”
“I’m ordering you, man. It may be your equipment, but it’s my turf.”
“You the sergeant of the guard?”
“One of them, yeah.”
“Yeah, I’ve been watching you zooming around here. I thought you ski troopers had the hard duty. Now I’m wondering.”
“I’m relieving you, Bravo. Take fifteen.”
The guy came unstuck and shuffled forward. “Okay. It’s your turf. If they fine me, though, you pay it. What’s your name?”
“Scovic.”
“Thanks, Scovic.”
The Bravo man struggled off across the flats and Bolan immediately went to work. He raised the engine hoods and taped a grenade to each vehicle, then primed them and wired the release pins to the accelerator rods. It was a simple but effective booby trap. One pump of the gas pedal would detonate it. The resulting blast would easily disable the armored vehicles, but Bolan was going for a bit more than that. He also loosened each fuel line to a drip-leak then carefully concealed all traces of the tampering.
The guy was back in ten minutes, which was twice the time Bolan had required, and he was looking a lot better. Bolan told him so, adding: “Didn’t hurt a bit, did it.”
“Keep it between us, just the same,” the guy said. “The man over there tells me you’re not Scovic, though.”
Bolan chuckled softly at that. “Scovic wouldn’t mind paying your fine. Don’t worry. It’s between us.”
“A sergeant can afford it. I can’t. I have mine planned to the last dollar.”
“Yeah? What are you going to do with yours, Bravo?”
“I’m going to lay in the sun for a whole year. I just figured it out. The Caribbean sun, rum and coke from a spigot
, lots of crazy women.”
“Have to watch those crazy women, Bravo. They’ll suck up everything you have and leave you wondering where it went.”
“No, I have that figured, too,” the guy replied, very sober about it all. “I have a system. A budget. One thousand a week. That’s all I break at a time.”
“I guess that would run you a year,” Bolan said lightly.
“Figure it again, Alpha. That will run me twice around the track.”
Bolan did figure it, and he went away from there with a new sense of the magnitude of this operation. Twice around the track at a thousand a week was roughly one hundred thousand dollars! Was that the take, per man? For the common grunt, a payoff like that? He ran a fast mental calculation, figuring only three hundred men in the force and at the minimum pay, and his mind reeled under the result of that calculation.
Thirty million dollars? For nothing but personnel? And was it, then, a one shot deal?—hit and run?—collect and play for the rest of a lifetime with no further commitment to the force?
If that were true, then the stakes of this game had to be incredibly high. But who could—or even would—supply such a fat purse for a one-shot operation?
His mind returned again to a consideration of the fantastic overkill in this mind-boggling game. And, again also, to Frank Harrelson’s solo pitch via the PA system. How much was fact and how much oversell? General’s stars and filthy riches, military forces and the politics of assassination versus thirty million dollars in one-strike hit money.
What the hell could it all mean?
He went straight to the command van, removed his mask, opened the parka, and sat down across the desk from Sergeant Scovic.
He was a man of about Bolan’s age, hard around the eyes, a no-nonsense set to the mouth. Those eyes flattened as he glanced up from the paperwork and then came back to hold the fix. “Who are you?” he asked his assistant.
“I’m Pulaski,” Bolan replied flatly.
“No you’re not.” That cold gaze was raking Bolan up and down. He started to push himself away from the desk.
“Don’t do that,” Bolan quietly commanded. The Beretta was there, watching the guy through the ominously bulbed silencer.
Scovic’s hands stiffened flatly against the top of the desk. “Well, would you believe this,” he said coldly.
Bolan said, “You’d better, Scovic.”
“What do you want?”
“You.”
Those hands twitched but remained where they were. “Okay. You’ve got me. Do it.”
“I’m going to. Don’t get any false hopes. I’m going to burn you, Scovic. End of game, for you. It will be quick and easy, you have my word on that. Anything you want to say?”
“Yeah. Die screaming, Sergeant.”
“Is that all? With all the profit gone, you still want to burn your country?”
“My country!” Scovic jeered. “You’re a nut, you know that? Cappie sure has you pegged. He’ll nail you, too, dude.”
“Let’s stick with you. You don’t owe anything to anybody, eh? You want to see it all burn.”
“You have it turned around, Bolan. I don’t owe. They owe. They owe all of us. Even you, sucker. You could have cut yourself in. Know that?”
“I never heard the size of the pie, Scovic.”
Those lips twisted, sneering silently.
“Big deal,” Bolan said coldly. “A few thousand in the hat—and for what? I run through that much in ammo every day.”
The guy just sat there, staring glassily, the sneer hovering at those distorted lips—and that was the way it was when the Beretta chirped and opened a third eye between the glassy ones. This one bubbled red froth, and Scovic went over backwards, chair and all, dead before the fall.
Bolan sighed, wagged his head, and reached for the paperwork which marked Sergeant Scovic’s final organized activity among the living.
It was a series of rough mathematical calculations, all based on a central figure of two hundred and fifty thousand. Bolan folded the paper and added it to his pouch.
“They owed you, eh?” he muttered.
So the going price for a sergeant’s soul was a quarter million bucks.
It was some hell of a game, that much was sure. And these people were playing it with a vengeance. According to Scovic’s calculations, he had drawn three “disciplinarian fines” of five thousand dollars each. No wonder the Bravo trooper was skittish about leaving his post. And it explained much about the tight discipline within the outfit. Their reward was apparently tied directly to their competence and dedication. Not a bad idea, at that.
Bolan dragged the body into a corner of the van and covered it with a blanket.
He really did not need to know the name of the game. He knew the rules, and that was enough.
And the game was definitely on, once more.
19: THE DANCE
Most of the lights had been extinguished in the house. Undy’s home had obviously been transformed into a forward command post. The officers were billeted there, and it had been the center of operations throughout the long evening.
Bolan relieved the sentry at the front, sending the guy off on warm rotation. “Who’s inside?” he asked, before the sentry left.
“Alpha leader, Bravo leader. Another troop I don’t know.”
“Looks like they’re buttoned up for the night.”
“Privileges of rank,” the sentry replied philosophically.
Bolan removed his skis the moment the guy pushed away, then he went up the steps, opened the door, and went inside.
Only the living room area was lighted. Maps and combat charts lined the sloping walls. A folding blackboard on a tripod was set up beside the fireplace, bearing cryptic diagrams in several colors of chalk. The couch had been pushed aside and a powerful field radio console installed in its place.
And, yeah, this explained the limited access question. The house had been totally off limits to enlisted personnel since Bolan joined their ranks. He was standing in their war room.
He removed his parka and left it on a hook near the door—and he was standing at the blackboard, interestedly studying the colored diagrams, when a guy stepped in from the kitchen. A .45 was strapped to his hip on military web, his shoes were off, and he carried a glass of milk and a sandwich.
Lieutenant Thomas, Bolan presumed, of the snortzenzoomer corps—Alpha leader—a quick identification, via that gratingly unpleasant voice.
“What the hell are you doing in here, soldier?”
“Nice and warm in here,” Bolan said, sizing the guy. Young, tough looking, all hardness and all business. These people, officers and men alike, seemed to be from a common mold.
“A thousand dollars worth of warm?” Thomas responded harshly.
Bolan got the meaning of that. Discipline by the dollar’s worth, yeah.
“Heard you lost some men today,” Bolan explained. He turned to face the guy, full on. “If you’re looking for replacements, I’m volunteering.”
Thomas was a bit uneasy with what he was seeing. He placed his food on a small table near the fireplace and came on with a scowl. Bolan noticed that the flaptop on the holster was open, the hand hovering there. Thomas’s voice was a bit unsteady as he demanded, “What’s your name, trooper?”
“Bolan, Mack Samuel. Master Sergeant.”
Cool, yeah. The expression on that face changed not a quiver but the guy was coming on him like Genghis Kahn, and Bolan responded in kind.
He met him with a kick to the belly that whoofed the guy over and sat the guy down. He was upon him with a nylon garrote before that stunned diaphragm could begin a recovery.
Thomas died there, with one hand at his belly and the other clutching the throat—and he died quietly if not so quickly.
Bolan placed the body behind the couch and went immediately up the stairs to the sleeping level. He found a guy sleeping in the first bedroom and left him there with a slashed jugular. The one in the next room raised hims
elf on his elbow in his bed as Bolan strode through the door. That one got to see what had come for him, but very briefly.
The Executioner wiped his blade clean on the bedsheet and went on without pause, but there were no others present on that upper level.
He left a marksman’s medal on the landing and returned below for a thorough search of the ground floor but found none there, either.
The mysterious Captain Harrelson apparently did not sleep with his troops. Which was dammed good luck for the captain, but a disappointment to the wearied warrior from Pittsfield.
He took a pad and pencil from the field radio desk and made a sketch of the blackboard diagram then jotted several notes concerning the stuff on the walls.
He went back to the radio, sat at the desk, and undertook an examination of the communications rig. It had HF, VHF, and UHF capability—as well as what appeared to be a couple of landline terminals. He pursued that latter finding, discovering to his elation a junction with the house telephone line.
Which explained why they had smashed Undy’s instruments instead of merely ripping out the line.
Bolan went to the front door and noted that the sentry had returned from his warmup. The guy was looking around in some confusion, obviously very much agitated. Bolan opened the door and called down, “Trooper!”
“Yessir?”
“It’s okay. I’m briefing the duty officer on the patrols. You take over my rotation for the balance of the watch.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s okay, I’m relieving you. Give each man five minutes. Start where you are and work it clockwise around the perimeter. Got that?”
“Got it. Do I have …?”
“You have the duty officer’s direct orders. Carry them out.”
The guy took off, a bit uncertainly. Bolan stood at the door until he saw the next sentry in line moving across the flats toward the snack wagon, then he went back inside and directly to the mobile radio station.
He found the secrets of the telephone system and patched in a line. Now, if only the storm had not taken the whole Rocky Mountain Bell system with it …
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