Bolan made the dash to the Jordan apartment in less than three minutes.
But the end had already begun.
The picture window had been smashed, the door was standing ajar, and Mary Valdez was nowhere.
She was nowhere … right.
CHAPTER NINE
A QUICKENING
The Mafia wagon was parked in front of the northside house where the crew had stopped briefly earlier that morning. Bolan pulled in behind it, and affixed the silencer to the Beretta as he walked to the house. It was a ramshackle frame structure with peeling paint and advanced decay. The neighborhood was semiindustrial with several other homes in similar disrepair sharing the block with a junkyard and a trucking terminal.
Not a living thing was in sight or sound except a raggedy dog, which came groveling toward Bolan from an adjacent vacant lot. The dog changed his mind about Bolan when it came within a few feet, whimpering and turning tail in quick retreat.
The ancient porch had a rolling surface and uncertain foundation. Bolan took it in a single stride and paused for a quick sniff at the door. He could hear conversation in there, someone laughing.
The knob turned easily to his touch; he pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Mary Valdez was seated on a filthy, ragged couch. Her blouse was slightly torn and the hair a bit mussed, but she seemed okay—if you could discount primal terror.
There was no other furniture in the room except for a card table littered with beer can empties and overflowing ash trays.
Bean was leaning against a far wall, talking to someone on the phone, his back to Bolan.
Another guy whom Bolan did not recognize stood in the open doorway to another room, talking and laughing it up with someone in that other room, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He saw Bolan coming in and immediately raised the beer can in greeting. “Hi, CIA,” he said nastily. Then he saw the Beretta and just froze there with the beer in salute.
Bean tossed a quick look over his shoulder, alerted by the greeting, then said into the phone, “He’s here,” and hung it up.
He, too, noted the ominously tipped Beretta in the second look. “Relax,” he said with a glazed smile. “The chick’s okay. We just wanted to get your attention.”
“Congratulations,” said Bolan, “you got it.” And he blew Bean away with a chug and a sigh.
The guy in the other doorway hastily emptied both hands, trying to stand erect and spring hardware at the one instant. The Beretta beat him on both counts, the quietly whispering round punching him in a sprawl into the other room.
Bolan reached that doorway just a step behind the bullet to find Nick in flight toward the back door. The room was a kitchen—or had been, once—now strewn with litter from an overturned card table, which had served as support for a hot plate and other small appliances. Also a Styrofoam cooler was overturned and disgorging ice and beer cans, which were rolling about the rough floor and creating a little problem for the fleeing hood.
The guy had a pistol in hand and a beer can underfoot as he crashed into the back door. He came around muttering foul words and trying to line into a shot at Bolan, but again the Beretta snorted first. The sighing round splattered into the soft underside of his chin and blasted on through the crown of the skull, carrying jellies and squirting fluids through the exit. The remains toppled back toward the center of the small room and came to final rest amidst the other trash.
Mary had come unstuck from the couch and was moving nervously about the middle of the living room as though confined within an invisible cage. Bolan asked her, “Just three of them?”
She jerked her head in mute affirmation, luminous eyes devouring him.
“You okay?”
Another jerk of the head and a fluttering of the eyes was the response to that.
“Okay enough to drive a car?”
She tried her voice, then, and found it—weak but serviceable. “I—I guess so. My God! You play rough!”
“I try to,” he told her. “Do you have money?”
“I … my purse … at Phil’s. Should I go back for it? Or I could go to the bank.”
Bolan pulled five hundreds from his war chest and handed them to her. “Take Phil’s car. Stop nowhere. Just hit the road and keep going until you’re running out of gas.”
“I can’t take this!” she protested, trying to give back the money.
“Sure you can. It belongs to nobody.” He showed her a sober smile. “Enemy money, liberated. It spends fine against them, though. Use it with my blessings. Now beat it.”
She threw her arms about him and whispered, “Who are you?”
He gave her a quick squeeze as he said, “I’m the guy telling you to go … go … go.”
She disengaged rather reluctantly from the embrace, paused at the door to flash him a confused smile, then ran to the car.
Bolan watched her away, then turned back to the business at hand. He stripped the bodies of personal items and searched the house, but found very little to add to his understanding.
The guys carried New York ID, which was no surprise, and the house was very obviously a temporary camp with a recent beginning. And all the signs were for a short stay. Which maybe said enough, in a negative sense.
He backed the station wagon to the porch and loaded the bodies, carefully covering them with blankets.
Then he went back into the house and used the phone to locate Jack Grimaldi.
“I need some wings,” he told his pal, the pilot.
“When and where?” was the ready response.
“I guess what I really need is a chopper,” Bolan said. “Think you could pick one up locally?”
“Way ahead of you,” said Grimaldi, rather smugly. “The only local chopper available for hire today is down for maintenance.”
Bolan chuckled soberly and fed him the punch line. “But?”
“But I found one in El Paso. They ferried it up an hour-ago. She’s now serviced and ready.”
“And people wonder why I love you so,” Bolan replied drily.
“What people?” Grimaldi asked defensively.
Bolan chuckled and said, “I’ll meet you at your motel in ten minutes.”
“Okay. I’ll call the airport and make it ready for a quick git.”
Which was why Mack Bolan loved the guy so. They’d had a terrible beginning, yeah. But Grimaldi had made a tremendously significant contribution to Bolan’s war effort. The guy could fly anything that moved through the air. And he had excellent combat credentials.
Bolan left the phone off the hook, got into the station wagon, and took his cargo of corpses away from there.
He did not wish for those bodies to be discovered right away. The pace of the day was quickening and he wanted to be riding the crest of that wave. With a little help, it could become a tidal wave—a cleansing wave.
Both the warwagon and Brognola’s hotshot federal force should now be converging on the trouble spot.
Within about an hour, yes, all the actors would be upon the stage.
But the tide was quickening and Bolan could feel the waters rising all about him. He had to keep on top, a little out front, and in full command of the situation.
And Grimaldi’s wings were little more than a forlorn reach for that position. At the moment, though, Bolan had only the faintest hope that those wings could keep pace.
If they couldn’t keep the pace … then the only alternative would be to try to cool it down a bit.
And that could be a hell of a perilous alternative.
CHAPTER TEN
QUESTION OF THRUST
Roughly 4,000 square miles of New Mexico’s land mass is given over to the White Sands Missile Range. The restricted zone is an irregular rectangle one hundred miles long by forty miles wide in its extremes. You could put the states of Delaware and Rhode Island in there and still have room to accommodate New York City and Philadelphia.
The terrain is a geologist’s delight, including within i
ts boundaries several mountain ranges, alkali flats, lava beds, sandy deserts, and soaring peaks.
Adjoining its southern perimeter is the Fort Bliss Military Reservation, another huge government area that extends south into Texas to El Paso and also juts east and north of the missile range to within a few miles of Alamogordo.
The two areas considered together, as one, present an irregular perimeter of more than 400 miles encompassing some of the most jumbled landscape to grace this planet. In places it looks more like moonscape than landscape.
U.S. Highway 54 from El Paso splits the Bliss reservation up the middle, leaving it finally behind when less than fifteen miles south of Alamogordo, then runs north from Alamogordo along the eastern periphery of the White Sands range.
U.S. 70/82 traverses the southern region of the missile range, cutting a diagonal line between Las Cruces and Alamogordo and providing access, also, to the White Sands National Monument, a dazzling preserve of more than 200 square miles of white gypsum sand dunes, which is actually enclosed within the larger reservation of the missile range.
Holloman AFB is also situated just off this highway a few miles west of Alamogordo. The Missile Test Center, the actual “facility” at White Sands, sits in the southwest corner of the range just east of Las Cruces, some sixty miles from Alamogordo.
Immediately north and east of Alamogordo are the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation and numerous winter sports areas with peaks in the 9,000– to 10,000-foot range; Sierra Blanca, just inside the Mescalero north boundary, soars to 12,000 feet.
This, taken together, was the war zone as presented to the tactical mind of Mack Bolan.
It was a humbling presentation.
A full army division could not be deployed in any effective hunt and kill operation in such a zone.
As for the Los Alamos question, the nuclear research laboratories were in the far northern part of the state, fully 200 air miles from Alamogordo. Bolan had to draw an operational line somewhere. Clearly, Los Alamos lay far beyond that line. He would have to hope and trust—at least for the moment—that a total victory within the established war zone would negate whatever treachery might lay beyond.
The problem at hand, here and now, was to delineate as clearly as possible both the size and the thrust of the enemy force.
And that was going to be a hell of a problem.
“That’s restricted air space, you know,” Grimaldi informed him. “There’s no flight deck whatever. You can’t fly over at any altitude.”
Bolan was studying the aeronautical chart of the area. He said, “Harrelson is operating in there, Jack. Maybe he’s kluging the system, passing as a bona-fide operational force. But I know damn well he’s in there. His camp is up near Tularosa Peak, and that’s inside the range.”
“Just inside,” Grimaldi grunted, craning his head for a better view. “The way you’ve lined it out, there, that camp could be just outside.”
“Whatever,” Bolan said, “the guy has combat capability and I doubt very much that he’s contemplating a strike at the Apaches.” He drew a small circle on the chart, then added spokelike radiation lines extending beyond the circle. “His instrumentation is approximately here. Please note, that’s almost precisely at mid-range. He can monitor anything moving through that restricted zone.”
“Or control it, maybe,” the pilot observed.
“That’s the scariest part, yeah,” Bolan agreed.
“You think he’s planning on capturing some birds in flight?”
Bolan shook his head and said, “I don’t know, Jack. Sounds too wild, doesn’t it? How do you harness a bird in flight? And bring it down intact? What about the warhead?”
“I guess you’d have to know if you were talking about free flight or controlled flight,” Grimaldi said. “A free flight bird is no different than an artillery shell … or a bullet. You couldn’t handle anything like that. But a controlled …”
Bolan said, “Suppose the bird is carrying a dummy warhead. You’re testing controls only. Do you have to crash-land the damn thing or can you bring it down where you want it, softly?”
Grimaldi smiled as he replied, “You know the answer to that, Sarge.”
Bolan said, “Sure. Chute recovery. Standard procedure. But if you wanted to steal one, that way, then you’d have to confuse mission control and work out a way to snatch it from under their noses. And you’d sure want to get more than one.”
“Why?”
“Input output, Jack. Too much expenditure for too little gained. You couldn’t even show that force from the proceeds of a single bird.”
“Unless someone just wanted one to learn its secrets,” Grimaldi suggested. “And they were willing to pay anything for those secrets.”
Bolan sighed and said, “Maybe. But I believe there’s more involved here than snatching a bird or two. What do you remember about White Sands, Jack?”
The pilot scratched his head and thought about it for a moment. Then he replied, “Just gossip, here and there. I heard something once about some tests on nuke systems. Los Alamos used to do some testing here. But I think that’s all been outlawed now. I mean, you know, battlefield nukes. Artillery and light rocketry. I attended a class once in, uh—oh, toward the end—a class in developing weaponry. They were talking about nuclear warheads weighing less than a hundred pounds. For battlefield use, you know. They got, uh, some of that stuff deployed in NATO. They got, uh, artillery as light as One-Oh-Fives that are classified as nukes.”
“I’ve seen them, yeah,” Bolan said. “But I wonder if they test that stuff here at White Sands.”
“I guess you could find out,” the pilot said.
“I guess I’d better, yeah,” Bolan muttered. “Something like that could be a dandy prize in the Mideast, couldn’t it. Or in Africa. Or wherever blood flows between minor powers.”
Grimaldi whistled softly and commented, “Wouldn’t that be something, now? Can’t you picture a freak like Big Daddy Idi Amin with nukes?”
Bolan growled, “I’d rather not.”
“Well, you don’t think these guys would really try for something like that. Do you? Nukes? Proliferating all over the damned world with all these third and fourth rate powers? Couldn’t you see something like that injected into the Mideast situation? Boom goes the damned oil reserves, pal. Some of the nutties are already shooting down airliners with ground-to-air missiles. Give nukes to the radicals and you’re going to see the whole world in flames. And that’s exactly what they want, isn’t it? They want the world in chaos so they can rebuild it the way they want it.”
“It’d never get rebuilt by those guys,” Bolan said quietly. “They’re not the building kind.”
“Look at Lebanon,” Grimaldi said angrily. “Those crazy people destroyed their own country. And it was the most advanced country in the area.”
Bolan said, “Yeah.”
“Look at the fruitcakes in Italy … and Germany, France—hell, even in Ireland. God, those people have got no feeling for civilization at all. Their only God is politics. It scares hell out of me, Sarge.”
Bolan said, “Yeah.”
“You think this guy Harrelson would really go along with people like that? You saying the mob don’t care? You saying they’ll do anything for a price? Even if it means … even if …”
After a moment, Bolan said, “Yeah.”
Grimaldi pulled the car into the airport and parked it with a heavy sigh. He said, “I don’t think I like the look on your face, Sarge. You’re thinking of doing something really wild, aren’t you? You’ve got some kind of a damn crazy stunt in mind, haven’t you?”
Bolan cleared his throat, lit a cigarette, gave his friend a sad look, and said, “Yeah.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FROM THE BLUE
They followed Route 54 north, maintaining a few thousand feet above the terrain, then circled back at Tularosa for a due south approach along the edge of the restricted zone.
Tularosa Peak now lay due west,
just inside the zone.
Bolan growled into the headset, “Look at the wires on that peak.”
The pilot took a look and replied, “Seems like standard telemetry gear, Sarge.”
Bolan said, “It would have to. But I guess it could be authentic. Some things around here have to be.”
“Sure. The whole area is bristling with that stuff. Where’s that camp?”
That “camp” was damned hard to spot from the air. The collection of adobe huts in the lower valley pointed the way, though, and a flash of sunlight reflecting from some polished surface provided the fix.
“See that?” Bolan asked.
“Yeah. Is that the spot?”
“Has to be,” Bolan grunted. “We circled a bit to the south before dropping into—there!—that’s it at twelve o’clock!”
“Perfect,” Grimaldi commented admiringly. “Whoever picked that spot—one degree either way and you’d never see it. Shee-it, I see the pad. You got no horizontal approach into that joint, buddy.”
Bolan said, “It’s hard to see from this angle but there’s a—circle east, Jack.”
The little ’copter heeled over and slid gently toward Route 54. The pilot was peering over his shoulder when he commented, “You can see the fenceline from this angle. They’re just outside … practically on it. See it?”
“I see it, yeah,” Bolan replied. “I’m still betting the instrumentation atop the peak is theirs, though.” He was remembering a similar installation in the mountains above Los Angeles. And various things were coming together in his mind. He sighed, scratched at his chin, and said, “It’s a go from my seat, Jack. But it’s up to you. If you don’t like the looks …”
“Your seat won’t get there without mine, guy,” Grimaldi replied with a worried smile. “How do you read the chances?”
Bolan locked eyes with his friend for a moment before saying, “The only chance we’re going to have, buddy, is the chance we make for ourselves.”
“I counted two gunships on that pad,” Grimaldi said quietly.
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