The house occupied a sparsely populated stretch of highrise coastline just north of Torrey Pines State Park. It was not a spectacular place — not exactly in the millionaire class — but it seemed to offer the sort of comfort and seclusion which might be sought by a retired combat officer turned industrialist ... with something or someone to fear.
An English tudor style, it probably combined all the charm of an earlier age with the most lavish conveniences of the late twentieth century — and it was not a bad way for an old soldier to fade away.
As for the super-security — this seemed to fit the new image of General Harlan Winters — the image which had lately become so disquieting to the world's foremost Mafia-fighter.
A row of stubby, wind-stunted trees marked the circular periphery of the cliffside property. Set just inside this natural barrier was a double row of hurricane-fencing spaced about ten feet apart, neither row being of forbidding height but high enough to discourage the casual trespasser.
As a further note, bright red signs were placed along the outer fence with the warnings:
DANGER GUARD DOG RUN
In this regard, Rosario "Politician" Blancanales had earlier made his scouting report to Bolan: "He keeps a couple of ornery Dobermans penned up in a little demilitarized zone surrounding the house. You don't go through there without permission, unless you want to get eaten alive."
So Bolan had come prepared for the Dobermans.
"Crossman air pistol, hypo darts," he had decided. And he'd instructed Blancanales, "Check the dosage carefully. We just want to put them down for a half-hour or so, not forever."
So now here he was at Howlin' Harlan's Del Mar beach house and it was time for the first probe into the trouble at San Diego. The weather was one of those fantastic Chamber of Commerce specials — a night almost as bright as day with the moon and stars seeming to hover at fingertip distance, the entire area wearing the heavens like a close-fitting bonnet — the breeze coming in off the Pacific like a lover's moist kiss.
Yeah, a night for romance, Bolan thought wryly — not warfare.
But warfare it had to be.
The saliva-dripping snarls from the Dobermans were not exactly moist kisses, and their rebounds against the heavy fencing were becoming frantic under the kill-instinct.
The tall man in combat black cooly checked the load in the Crossman, then he thrust the muzzle through the steel mesh of the fence and sent a syringe through. It caught the nearest dog in the tender zone just inside the shoulder. He sat down quickly, as though someone had thrown a de-activate-switch inside his head, whimpering and licking at the offended zone.
The other one went down just as quickly and peacefully.
Blancanales moved out of the tree cover and bent his back beside the fence. Bolan took the boost and went over quickly. As he touched down inside, the Politician showed him a droll smile and murmured, "I think there were just two."
Bolan whispered, "Funny, that's funny," and knelt to examine the tranquilized animals. He withdrew the darts and ruffled the fur in the areas of entry, then passed the Crossman and the darts through to his companion. "Okay, I'll take it from here," he growled. "Get on station and stay hard."
Blancanales tossed an exaggerated salute and abruptly disappeared into the trees. Bolan crossed the dog run and scaled the interior fence, then made a cautious advance across the grounds, blending with the landscape and the shadows wherever possible.
He was in blacksuit. Hands and face were also blackened. At his right hip was the formidable .44 AutoMag — beneath the left arm, the black and silent Beretta. Slit pockets on the lower legs held a variety of small tools. Several miniaturized electronic gadgets were carried in a belly-pouch.
Halfway across the grounds, Bolan paused in the shadow of a flowering shrub to establish contact with the warwagon, left several hundred yards behind under the command of Herman "Gadgets" Schwarz.
"I'm inside," Bolan reported in a husky whisper. "How's it sound?"
A tiny voice purred up from his shoulder in reply: "Great, coming in five-square on all channels. It's a go."
Bolan went.
This was to be a soft probe, an intelligence mission — not a hard hit.
Howlin' Harlan had once been a friend.
The problem now was one of re-identification. Harlan Winters, Brigadier General, U.S. Army retired. Friend or foe?
Either way, Bolan knew, Winters could well be the most dangerous problem so far encountered in this eternal damned war of his.
He could very well become the final problem.
By all the indicators, Howlie was a high-priced front man for the syndicate. Bolan had known of those indicators even before his arrival in San Diego.
Indicators, of course, were not always accurate.
If the general was really in a mess, Bolan could not turn his back on the man.
On the other hand ... if Howlie was as dirty as Bolan suspected ... then he could not turn his back on that, either.
Yeah, it could become a twenty-karat mess.
Therefore, friend or foe, the seal on General Winters had to be complete, positive and one hundred percent authentic. And it had to be done without the general's knowledge.
So this was more than a simple soft probe. It was a target-verification mission.
Howlin' Harlan Winters, once one of the most respected strategists in Vietnam, had to be outflanked and sealed.
And, yeah, San Diego was going to be one hell of an interesting war zone.
It had not been a spur of the moment decision to penetrate the Winters place, but a carefully planned operation, entailing several days of patient scouting and fastidious intelligence-gathering.
The job inside the house would require only a few minutes to perform. But only because so much attention had gone into advance preparations.
Bolan had scouted the terrain by boat, by car and on foot — covering specific periods of both day and night — noting comings and goings, visitors, trying to get some feel for the household routine, the people who lived there, worked there, slept there.
Blancanales, meanwhile, had nosed around the area in a home-delivery bakery truck, seeking and cultivating talkative neighbors, tradesmen, and local characters.
Gadgets Schwarz had engineered a telephone tap from the primary cable junction and had 48 hours of electronic surveillance recorded on the gear inside the warwagon.
So, sure, the thing should have gone pretty smooth. Bolan had known exactly where to go and which areas to avoid. He had a diagram of the interior layout of the house — he knew the ins and outs of the place — and he knew how to accomplish the most good in the least time.
The idea had been to rig the joint for sound, all the places that mattered, anyway — the entrance hall, the study, the dining room and a private little secondary study which adjoined the general's bedroom.
And, yeah, it should have gone off like clockwork.
It did not.
Bolan's first stop was at the large combination library-study at the downstairs rear.
Dying embers glowed feebly in a huge rock fireplace.
The only other light was at the far corner of the room, where a hi-intensity beam lamp was brightly illuminating a small area of a gleaming mahogany desk and offering the stark profile of a lovely young woman who stood woodenly behind the desk.
She was a tall girl, mid-twenties or thereabouts, soft blonde hair lying on golden shoulders, wide spaced eyes with lots of depth which right now seemed to be reflecting hell itself. She was wearing a see-through sleep outfit, and there were many interesting revelations there.
Bolan knew at first glance that she was Lisa Winters, the general's niece. He'd watched her through binoculars earlier that day as she swam and sunned nude on the private beach below the house.
She looked even better in the close-up, despite the fact that she appeared ready to come totally unglued at any moment.
Howlin' Harlan was present, also — in a sense. His body was slumpe
d in a large wingback chair near the fireplace. Both arms dangled stiffly toward the floor. Part of his skull was missing. A lot of blood had streamed down the face and dried there. Dark stains and splotches across the front of the fireplace showed where more of it had gone.
He'd been dead awhile.
An army Colt .45 lay on the floor beneath his right hand.
The girl was staring at Bolan as though she'd been standing there waiting for him to come in and take charge.
He went straight to the general and dropped to one knee in front of the chair, inspecting without touching the grisly remains of the fightin'est chicken colonel he'd ever served under.
Bolan growled, "Gadgets."
A cautious "Yo," responded via his shoulder-phone.
"Howlin' Harlan is dead."
After a brief pause, Schwarz's choked voice replied, "Roger."
"Mission scrubbed. Tell Pol. I'm rejoining."
"Roger."
Bolan sighed to his feet and swiveled about to regard the girl. She had not moved a muscle.
He said, simply, "Too late."
"Long ago," she said. Her throat was dry and the words came out withered and gasping for life.
"What?" Bolan asked, not sure he'd understood.
"It's been too late for a long time," she repeated listlessly. Her eyes raked him from head to toe with half-hearted interest. "What are you, a Del Mar commando or something?"
He replied, "Or something," and turned his back on her to examine the smouldering ashes of the fireplace.
"I burned it all," she told him, the voice rising and bristling with taut defiance. "So you can go back and tell that to whomever sent you."
Bolan muttered, "The hell you did." He was gingerly salvaging a sheaf of scorched and blackened papers.
"That's all you care about, isn't it!" the girl screeched. "The damned papers! They're all any of you care about!"
She was at the edge of hysteria. Bolan went on about his business, extinguishing the dying sparks and carefully stuffing the salvage into his belly pouch. Then he went to the bar, poured a slug of scotch into a water glass, carried it to the girl, and held it to her lips. She sipped without argument, then strangled and pushed the glass away.
"I don't need that," she gasped.
"When did it happen?" he asked gruffly.
"I don't know. I just — who are you? How'd you get in here?"
"Have you called anyone yet?" Bolan asked, ignoring her queries.
She shook her head.
'It's time to." He picked up the telephone. "Who do you want to call?"
"Carl, I guess."
"Who is Carl?"
"Carl Thompson, our attorney."
Bolan found the number on a phone list attached to the base of the telephone. He set up the call, waited for the first ring, then pressed the instrument into the girl's hand and steered it to her head.
He went away, then, pausing at the doorway long enough to make sure that she had made a connection.
As he faded through the doorway he heard her saving, "Carl, this is Lisa. The general shot himself. He's dead. Help me. God please help…."
Howlin' Harlan Winters had been "sealed" for good.
And, yeah. It was going to be a hell of an interesting war zone.
2
One for the man
He had been an OD soldier — acigar chewing, cussing, emotional and one hell of an inspiring C.O. — a true leader whom men followed because he led, not because he'd been created by Act of Congress.
He hadn't always been the most popular officer in camp. Some men found it hard to measure up to Howlin' Harlan's image of the fighting man. They muttered and bitched and frequently promised themselves that they'd shoot him in the back some dark night, and a few openly entertained ideas of shooting themselves as a means of being rotated out of Howlie's command — but one and all respected the man; some openly and warmly loved Harlan Winters; others would have gladly given their lives for his.
He'd been a latter-day Patton, a real soldier's soldier.
Yet, less than a year into civilian clothes, he had died in utter defeat.
This was the part which Mack Bolan could not accept.
Sure, good men sometimes went wrong.
But not that wrong.
Bolan could not buy it. He could not read Harlan Winters as a suicide.
"So what's your reading, then?" Blancanales asked him.
"I don't know," Bolan muttered in reply. "I'm no cop. Even if I were, though, I'd have the same signs to read. The signs all say, sure, Howlie knew the world was closing in on him and he took the easy way out. My gut can't read signs though, Pol. And in my gut I know that all the signs are wrong."
Schwarz put in, "Mine agrees. Howlie didn't kill himself."
The three men had been working for hours over the charred papers which Bolan had salvaged from the Winters' fireplace.
Twelve sheets of typewritten correspondence had been fairly well-reconstructed; these seemed to be an exchange between Winters and a Pentagon official involving "Quality Acceptance Waivers" on several large shipments of war materiel which the Winters firm was producing under government contract.
Various other charred remnants provided intelligence which seemed to confirm the suspicion about Harlan Winters which Bolan had brought from Washington.
A few months after his retirement from active duty, the general had popped up as president of a newly-formed California corporation which was geared entirely to the needs of the military. "Winco" was actually a mini-conglomerate, a merger of a half-dozen or so previously obscure companies which had never been directly engaged in government-contract work. Winco, however, came to life with several sizeable contracts already in its corporate pocket.
The meteoric rise of the new organization, together with a variety of suspicious circumstances, brought it under the scrutiny of several governmental investigative bodies.
Each of the several investigations had been quickly and quietly halted, at the Washington level, mainly through the efforts of a syndicate honcho Bolan had left dead in Washington.
So, sure, Bolan had known a thing or two about his ex-C.O.'s civilian activities, even before San Diego. He had known, also, that one day he might be faced with the unavoidable task of descending as the Executioner upon the man who had created the Executioner.
Howlin' Harlan had been Bolan's mentor, several life-times ago. The then-lieutenant colonel had been in Vietnam since before the Gulf of Tonkin escalation — first as a military advisor and later as a Green Beret specialist in counter-guerilla warfare.
Bolan had come into the combat theatre as an armor specialist and volunteer advisor in the effort to equip and train the fierce Montagnard tribesmen. Eventually he found himself with a small team of American advisors under the direct command of the already legendary Howlin' Harlan.
In such an operation there was no room for the military formalities which customarily serve as a wall between an officer and his men. Bolan and Winters became a pair, each hugely respecting the professional abilities of the other. The colonel was particularly impressed with Bolan's cool marksmanship and his steely self-command under combat stress.
Under the tutelage and direction of Howlie Winters, Sgt. Bolan became the original "execution specialist" in that theatre of operations. The first Penetration Team was formed around his particular abilities, designed to penetrate and operate deep within enemy-held territory for long periods without direct support of any nature — and Howlin' Harlan himself had gone along on the first few "shakedown cruises" of this potent idea in psychological counterwar. Those early excursions, in fact, had teamed only Winters and Bolan with a five-man support group of specially selected Montagnards.
These were the "proof" runs.
Later, the penetration teams were almost wholly American and they operated wherever enemy occupation and terrorism was present; later still, they were given missions to pursue enemy terrorists into sanctuary areas, though these assignments r
arely found their way into the official record.
Howlin' Harlan had not been the sort of man to be bound by legalities. "There are no rules of warfare," he'd often told Bolan. "The only rule of warfare is to win."
Harlan Winters had grown accustomed to winning, and his "death specialist" teams became known and feared in every enemy camp in Southeast Asia.
PenTeam Able had been the first, though — and that one was Bolan's team.
He had continued to receive the rougher missions. And Howlin' Harlan, now a full chicken colonel in charge of all the teams, often accompanied Able Team on some of the briefer penetrations.
Yes, they'd been a pair.
Together they'd subsisted on jungle roots and swamp grass, insects and wild animals, lying half-submerged in rice paddies or squatting semiup-right in canals and enemy-infested junglelands. Together they'd scouted the Ho Chi Minh trail and mini-blitzed it at carefully selected points from one end to the other; together they'd invaded the terrorist sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia; together they had many times fought their way back across miles of hostile and aroused territory in hair-raising withdrawals to safe country.
Yeah. Bolan knew the inside of Howlin' Harlan Winters like he knew himself.
And no, hell no, he could not accept this man's death as a weakling's act of self-destruction.
As for the other — the mob involvement — that idea had not been so irreconcilable with the image of the man. Winters had been the type of guy who made his own rules and constructed his own vision of morality. He had continually bucked the "political system" which he blamed for prolonging the war. Often he had ignored official directives and policy decisions from Saigon and Washington. On more than one occasion Bolan had suspected that his C.O. was falsifying reports on the PenTeam strikes.
Eventually "the system" had caught up with the maverick colonel. Quietly and with notable absence of ceremonial honors he'd been relieved of his combat command and rotated to a desk job in the Saigon headshed. All his troopers had known, though, that his rotation orders had come from the highest Pentagon sources. "Howlie" had become too much of a colorful personality; war correspondents had latched onto the guy and had, in effect, written him out of the war. The Vietnam thing had become a hot issue in the American press, and Howlin' Harlan Winters represented too much of a potential embarrassment to the men in Washington.
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