Wednesday’s Wrath
The Executioner, Book Thirty-five
Don Pendleton
Dedicated, with sincere respect, to the men and women of White Sands, birthplace of America’s missile and space activity.
Well done. Keep on.
The wrath of the lion
is the wisdom of God.
—William Blake (Proverbs of Hell)
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go.
—Nursery Rhyme
The wrath of the lion
may see me through Wednesday
But where the hell do I go
after that?
—Mack Bolan, the Executioner
PROLOGUE
He could not remember a time when he had not been tired. And “tired” was far too mild a word to describe the way Mack Bolan felt at the moment. It was not mere weariness of the physical systems; Bolan’s very soul was at the point of total exhaustion.
Eternal warfare could do that to a guy, of course. But it was more than that, too.
Futility? Was that the word? Was he simply allowing himself to become overwhelmed by the seeming ability of the shit machines to quickly reassemble themselves, no matter what he hit them with? Maybe. A sense of futility could be a terribly grinding thing to the soul of a man who cares.
Army psychologists had characterized him as a man “who commands himself.” Exactly what the hell did that mean? What it meant, maybe, depended upon the quality of command.
The quality of command?
A good commander would take into consideration the capability of his forces—their natural limit of effectiveness. You wouldn’t send a rifle squad against an armored column. Unless you were demented. Or terribly desperate. Or, simply, stupid.
The quality of command, yeah. Command of one’s self. Maybe somewhere in there lay the whole secret of what made men tick. Maybe it had something to do with an inner vision of one’s own worth. Would a good commander—in command of one’s self—assign the self to an impossible, hazardous, and futile task … if the inner vision was one of high worth?
Maybe so, yeah—if the situation was desperate enough.
Mack Bolan felt comfortable with himself. That was not the problem. He entertained no suicidal or self-sacrificial tendencies.
The problem, dammit, was that the situation was desperate—terribly desperate! And Bolan, obviously, was simply not up to the task. He had tried. God knew he had tried. He had hit them everywhere he could find them, with everything he could find to hit them with. And even though he had won every battle, every encounter, he was losing the damned war!
Grinding, yeah. A knowledge like that could grind a man down right into the dust.
Futility.
Don Quixote, fighting the magnificent war of the windmills.
To what damned useful effect?
Brognola had told him: “You’ve won. Try to understand it—you’ve won! The rest is mere mop-up. Let us take care of that.”
Sure. It was all over … except for a routine mop-up. Bolan had bought that. He’d bought it. Not because it was true, but because he’d wanted to buy it. He was tired and he was weary of war and he was sick of commanding the self through an endless succession of meaningless victories and he was lonely and he was damned and he was full to the throat with other men’s blood and numb in the heart with too many sacrificial victims to this all-consuming miserable goddamn senseless war!
And, yeah, he was feeling goddamn sorry for the self, too, wasn’t he?
So he’d bought Brognola’s offer of total amnesty for the sorry self and an end to the unending war. With a tiny reservation. Sop for the soul, Bolan? What else. A six-day blitz, or so he’d thought, to put a final seal on the insidious shit machines. Then the feds could have what was left.
What was left? Really?
Sop, yeah. It had sounded so good, so right. The perfect way out, maybe, for a weary soul? You can’t win this war, guy. So do the next best thing. Let someone convince you that you’ve won so you can turn your back on the reassembly and walk away with head high and feeling good.
He’d almost managed to do that.
Brognola called it a second-mile effort—more sop—and the head fed arranged military air transport for Bolan’s battle cruiser and even provided a pretty assistant to keep it cool. The first day of that “second mile” had been a perfect sop bowl … a few minor leaguers from the Midwest ineptly trying a reassembly … and Bolan had walked away from that one feeling right and holy.
Day Two had begun with all the promise of Day One—a few broken-down old mobsters grubbing in the ruins of the western syndicate, an easy tap for an Executioner with sop on the mind … until he ran head-on into the most monstrous damned reassembly operation the technological mind could conceive. That had shaken the sop bowl just a bit … but only just a bit.
Now it was Wednesday … Day Three of the Sop Express. Except that now the bowl was gone. It had shattered in the hands and disappeared like the wisp it had been all along. The schedule had called for a quick visit to Dallas and a freeze-dried look at the remnants of the Texas mob. The warwagon had been airlifted ahead under the care of April Rose, the “pretty assistant” and new custodian of Bolan’s Sop. And then, moments before Bolan’s own scheduled departure with a fresh supply of armaments, the hot flash had come down from Leo Turrin, Bolan’s inside man at La Commissione, the mob’s New York headquarters.
So here sat Mack Bolan—not in Mile Two Dallas but in the windswept wastes of New Mexico, grimly contemplating the saddle of the devil-horse, which would carry him with a single leap back to the gates of hell, back to war eternal, back to the infinite vista of Mile One: War Unending Against the Mafia.
And he was so tired.
God knew, he was weary to the soul.
CHAPTER ONE
INTO HELL
The familiar odor met him at the doorway—and it almost stopped him from going in. The one thing Mack Bolan did not need at this moment was another living nightmare. And there was no mistaking that smell, once it had been experienced. But then the nightmare groaned, and there was also no way to turn away from that.
He sent 200 pounds of enraged kick into the flimsy door and stepped quickly inside with the same motion. The thing on the table at room center was far beyond any awareness of that entry. And the ghoul who was bending over it was too engrossed in his art to take note of anything else. But a guy at the far window looked around with a sick grin and immediately elevated both hands in quick surrender to the imposing figure at the door. Some things simply cannot be surrendered. The big silver pistol thundered from the doorway to send 240 grains of howling death splattering through that sick grin.
Another guy ran in from a back room just in time to catch the next round in the jugular. Most of his throat sprayed away with the hit, but the guy just stood there on the back porch of hell for a frozen moment while the brain tried to understand the message. Another quick round plowed in between unbelieving eyes to correct the sloppy hit and verify the unhappy message.
And Bolan now had the full attention of the maniac in the blood-spattered vinyl smock. The guy was about fifty, tall and spare of frame, handsome with a touch of distinguishing gray at the temples, and very nicely dressed beneath the protective Vinyl. “I can explain,” declared the turkeymaster. It was not the voice one would expect from a maniac, but calm, cultured—almost detached from the horror at hand.
Bolan replied, “Good for you,” and blew away the devil’s elbow.
The guy screamed and grabbed for a tourniquet that lay on the table beside his victim. The next round from the AutoMag blew his wrist away and another quickly followed to the knee.
The turkeyma
ster hit the floor, squawling and writhing for a comfort that was not going to be found. He lay there jerking around in his own blood, for a change, screaming for a mercy he had never accorded others.
A turkeymaster Mack Bolan was not. He’d never hit for pain or punishment—and the shock of those massive hits would not, he knew, produce anything near the mind-cracking agony and helpless horror that this guy had been systematically dealing out to others. Just the same, the guy was hurting like hell and the sounds of that suffering were getting to Bolan’s belly. But maybe the guy needed to take to hell with him some small appreciation of what he’d been handing out so freely to others—and someone else was first in line for Sergeant Mercy.
The thing on the table was only marginally alive and blessedly unconscious. Doc Turkey had apparently been trying to bring that shredded mind back into conscious focus. There was no way to know at a glance whether it had been male or female—or, for that matter, black or white, human or otherwise. It was simply a thing—torched, carved, scraped and hacked into a mutilated and shapeless lump—that had been kept alive and, no doubt, aware throughout most of its ordeal.
There was no way to reverse that nightmare or to even salvage anything from it. Bolan muttered, “Go find peace,” and put a bullet where an ear had been. Then he turned to the squawling monster on the floor and sent him the same mercy.
Bolan found another gruesome turkey when he checked the back room. This one had been dead for some time—hours, perhaps.
Bolan was shaking the joint down for intelligence when Jack Grimaldi moved inside, a short shotgun cradled at the chest.
“Jesus Christ!” the pilot muttered and quickly went back outside.
“Is it cool?” Bolan called to him through the open doorway.
“It’s cool, yeah,” was the strained reply. “What is that in there?”
Bolan went on with his search as he called back, “It’s a turkey shack.”
“Aw, shit,” Grimaldi groaned. “Really? Aw, no. I thought that was just a myth. Hey, I didn’t know I was bringing those poor bastards to—I really didn’t know!”
“It’s no myth,” Bolan growled. “And you couldn’t have changed a thing, Jack. Did you check out the vehicle?”
“Yeah. Clean. Keys in the ignition. It’s from Alamogordo.”
Bolan went to the doorway and leaned tiredly against the jamb. “Okay. Thanks again, buddy. I’m releasing you. I’ll take the car into town.”
“It’s your game,” the pilot quietly replied. “But, you know, you can fly me anywhere. I can think of lots of places better for you right now than Alamogordo. Almost anywhere, in fact.”
They’d been good friends since the Caribbean adventure, and more than that. As a mob pilot, Grimaldi had been a steady source of reliable intelligence and he’d risked a lot—he’d risked everything—as a Bolan convert and ally.
The Executioner smiled at his friend the Mafia pilot as he told him, “Thanks for the thought. Save the worry for yourself.” He inclined his head toward the nightmare behind him. “That’s what they do to their friends, guy.”
Grimaldi shivered and turned his gaze elsewhere. “Sunrise soon,” he said.
Bolan said, “Soon, yeah. You’d best move it out. Now.”
“You’re mad as hell, aren’t you?”
The tall man in the doorway smiled tightly as he replied, “I can handle it.”
“Listen … I’ll fly on over to Alamogordo and tie down there for the day. I’ll leave my hotel address with the base operator. If you should need some quick wings …”
Bolan said, “Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.”
Grimaldi hesitated for a moment then asked, sotto voce, “Who were the turkeys?”
“You don’t really want to know.”
“I guess not, no. Okay. Well, I’ll be around.” The pilot turned away and strode off across the wastelands.
Sunrise soon, yeah. Already the black of night had deteriorated to a dirty gray. Bolan watched his friend disappear into that grayness, then he went back inside the shack and resumed the search. He loaded a tape recorder and several used tapes into the vehicle parked just outside, then threw in a collection of wallets and other personal items gathered during the shakedown.
Ten minutes after Grimaldi had set off on his solo return trek to the plane, the nightmare shack was in flames and Mack Bolan was beginning his journey into another nightmare in the appropriated Mafia wheels.
Grimaldi flew over the burning shack and dipped his wings in a silent farewell. Bolan responded with a flash of headlights and quickly put that scene behind him.
The physical scene, that is.
The images would remain with him to the grave. Worse yet, he’d have to listen to those abominable tapes—the record of two souls descending into hell itself. The turkey techniques made brainwashing a genteel social affair by comparison. It was not brainwashing, but soul bursting. Interspersed with all the shrieks and desperate pleas would be the babblings of a life record in quick and selective playback—containing every sin imagined or otherwise, along with everything else a desperate soul could devise to please its tormentor, so as to shut off that which was already recognized as irreversible.
Yeah, Bolan would have to listen to all that.
And yes, Jack, he was already mad as hell. Not so much because of who they were, but simply because they were.
Bolan had no particular sense of compassion for the likes of Charlie Rickert and Jack Lamamafria, the latter also known lately as Jack Lambert.
But nobody deserved to die that way. Not even with the fate of the entire civilized world hanging in the balance. Did that sound melodramatic? Too bad, then. Because that was precisely the point of this latest game in the troubled life of Mack Bolan: the fate of the entire civilized world.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SWIRL
Bolan heard enough from the tapes during the hour’s drive into Alamogordo to confirm his guess that the movements in New Mexico were directly related to the recent developments he had just left behind in California. Rickert and Lamamafria had been charged with the security of that West Coast operation, which had been ripped asunder by Bolan’s Day Two mop-up of the area. There were overtones of punishment for a responsibility poorly met during the interrogations, but the main thrust had obviously been total recall in an outrageously inhuman “debriefing” of the two Mafia lieutenants. Which merely underscored the importance with which the higher bosses regarded the events of yesterday in California—and especially as they were related to the New Mexico thing.
It was not exactly standard form to so punish an honest failure; in fact, Bolan had never heard of such an occurrence in the past. Such treatment was traditionally reserved for traitors or enemies with important secrets. It was beyond doubt, though, that these tapes constituted a debriefing of friendly personnel carried to unusual extremes.
Something very big was developing, for sure.
Muted rumblings of that something had been emanating from the area for some time. In fact, Bolan had followed the tremors from his recent blast into Arizona and had been tentatively scouting the New Mexico question when the urgent summons from the East sent him airlifting into Tennessee. All he’d found during that brief probe had been whispers and echoes of some quiet underworld activity in the wastelands. Now here he was again, same scene, probably the same situation, except that now the whispers had become shrieks of agony.
But a pattern was developing, for sure.
The flash from Leo Turrin had warned of a “large event” going down in New Mexico—related somehow to the California disaster—with various “important men” hastily dispatched to that area.
As another item in the weave, Charlie Rickert and Lamamafria were the only ranking local members of the California conspiracy to survive Bolan’s rampage in Los Angeles. Bolan had last seen Lamamafria, a.k.a. Jack Lambert, lying unconscious on the floor of his Sunset District office. Rickert, the renegade cop, had been turned over to local authorities
after assuring Bolan that he would cooperate.
According to Leo Turrin, who had not been in a position to get it all, Someone had “moved heaven and earth to spring a certain VIP prisoner from the L.A. county jail”—and this was somehow related to the thing in New Mexico.
Big Tim Braddock, a recent convert to the Bolan cause and now deputy chief of the L.A. cops, was all but frothing at the mouth as he confirmed Bolan’s suspicion that Charlie Rickert’s release had, indeed, been quietly engineered, mere hours following his arrest.
Then Jack Grimaldi had provided the cinching element with his report of “ferrying a burial party” from Santa Monica to a lonely spot in the New Mexico wastelands.
“Two pigeons,” Grimaldi reported to his old friend, “with two keepers. They had ’em doped and hooded all the way so I don’t know who the poor bastards are. There was a car waiting for them, in the middle of nowhere. I had to land on a dirt road in the dark, without lights if you can imagine that.”
Bolan had imagined that, yeah. And he’d asked his friend, the Mafia pilot, to repeat the performance. Now it seemed that Leo’s fears had been right on target. Something big was going down, for sure. It was directly related to the California thing. Maybe it was an action-reaction sequence. That would explain all the urgent parleys in New York while the Los Angeles thing was falling apart.
Yeah, maybe so.
It was now very obvious that the council of bosses—weak though their coalition might be at the moment—had not been all that concerned about outsider Bill McCullough and his ambitious stretch toward a West Coast takeover. The vaunted “California Concept” had probably been at their fingertips the whole while, awaiting nothing more than the proper moment for the cannibals to step in and make it their own. Until Bolan happened onto it. But they’d not been concerned about McCullough. They’d had Rickert and Lamamafria inside that operation right at the top.
And it was guys like McCullough who kept the mob fat, happy, and immortal—even at a moment when you’d think they were going down for the final count.
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