Thermal Thursday

by Don Pendleton

  “God, I wouldn’t do that to you, Frankie. Anyway, I know I can straighten this out.”

  Ten minutes later the guy was off the island and “Frankie” was in command.

  Every man there knew precisely what had happened. And there was nothing but admiring glances and respectful attention for the new project boss.

  “Now I want to see this golden goose of ours,” he told Papriello.

  “I can hardly wait to show you, sir. Do you know that Guido has never seen it? He never saw it, sir.”

  But Mack Bolan would.

  Yes, indeed.

  Mack Bolan was going to get the ten-billion-dollar tour.

  9

  THE RIDE

  The “house boss” was one Johnny Paoli, a more or less trustworthy middle-aged thug who had a reputation for doing precisely what he was told to do, nothing more and nothing less. The guy was obviously a bit deficient upstairs but he could understand an order and he possessed the brawn if not the brains to make an order stick.

  Bolan took him aside and patiently explained the new pecking order at Santelli Island. Then he told him, “You watch after the lady, Johnny. Nobody touches her. Nobody comes in the damn house, period, while I’m out of it.”

  “I got that,” Paoli grunted.

  “You keep it.”

  “I got it and I’ll keep it, right.”

  “No phone calls.”

  “No phone calls, right.”

  “Any calls coming in for Guido, you just say he’s not here. He’s not here. That’s all.”

  “Guido’s not here right now.”

  “That’s it exactly. You never heard of Frankie Cavaretta.”

  “Right, I never heard of that guy. Who the hell is Frankie Cavaretta, boss?”

  “That’s me, Johnny. But you never heard of me.”

  “Oh, right, I never heard of you. I get that. I’ll keep that, too.”

  “I’m going to be depending on you, Johnny, to keep my house clean.”

  “Depend on me, right.” The guy was counting it off with the fingers. “Take care of the lady. Nobody comes in. No phone calls. Guido’s not here right now. I never heard of that Cavaretta guy.”

  Bolan patted that disturbed head then he took the lady aside and told her, “You cool it. I mean, take a bath, anything but—”

  “I didn’t come out here to cool anything,” she protested.

  “We play my game, first,” he insisted. “Once that one is tight enough, we’ll take a look at yours. You have my word on that. For now, cool it.”

  She batted those huge eyes as she replied, “Okay. Your word is good enough for me. But don’t be long, huh? Maybe I have a tight schedule, too.”

  “You want to talk about it right now?” he asked quietly.

  “Not right now.” She kissed him hard on the mouth then ran up the stairs.

  Bolan watched her into the house then he signaled Papriello with the eyes and went off for a tour of the territory. The head gunner led him to a small outbuilding at the center of the compound, explaining, “This is what we call the portal. Guido never came any farther than this. I think he has a head problem. You know, one of them, whattayacallit, phobia.”

  A big, mean-looking guy responded to a rap at the door. “This is your new boss,” Papriello told the guy. “Say hello to Frankie Cavaretta.”

  The keeper of the portal flashed a huge grin at the new boss-in-residence and showed how quick the word can travel in a closed system. “Hi, boss. Bring on them crazy ladies. I’m ready any time.”

  Bolan showed how a photographic memory operates by quickly scrolling through the mental mugfile and withdrawing a handle for the guy. “Hi, Rocky,” he replied breezily. “Tonight’s the night, so save your energy.”

  The guy was one Lucian “the Rock” Vesperanza, another alumnus of the old Castiglione family—never anything more than a street soldier, a button man, but among the most dependably mean of the lot. And Bolan was beginning to understand what had become of the old Castiglione power nucleus. It seemed that they were alive and well in Florida. For the moment, anyway.

  Vesperanza was showing a wall-to-wall smile, ignoring Papriello’s obvious discomfort over his unpardonable familiarity with the new boss.

  The Pip threw an apologetic glance at Bolan as he explained, “The boys are just glad you’re here, Frankie.”

  “Sure, I know,” Bolan replied easily.

  “We’re going across,” Pip told Vesperanza.

  The grinning thug stepped back into the interior of the building and the other two moved inside. Nothing was in there but an overstuffed chair, a folding cot, an orange crate doing service as a table, and a transistor radio. There were no windows. Walls and ceiling were unfinished, rough. The flooring was unpainted plywood. A filthy throw rug concealed one 4 × 6 square of that flooring which in turn concealed a steep subterranean stairway, narrow and dimly lit.

  Papriello flashed a quick smile at Bolan and led the way down.

  The angle of descent seemed to be just about due south from the hole in the floor. Bolan counted twenty-nine iron steps, calculating the penetration southward at maybe fifteen feet before he came onto a broad landing, a ninety-degree turn to due west, and another twenty-nine-step descent.

  And though he had suspected some such arrangement, Bolan was mentally unprepared for that which lay at the bottom of that descent.

  It was a large, dome-shaped cavern—roughly circular and measuring perhaps thirty feet across—sloping walls converging to form the domed roof which stood some fifty feet above a subterranean pool occupying the bottom, wall to wall. The stairway from the surface ended at a steel catwalk anchored into the stone walls at about ten feet above the water level and leading to another tunnel-like cavern at the south wall, from which was trickling a thin waterfall into the pool.

  Papriello spoke his first words since entering the stairwell. “Ain’t it enough to blow your mind?” he asked almost reverently.

  Bolan quietly agreed with that comment, then asked: “How deep is the water?”

  “I never went down to find out,” the Pip replied, chuckling. “But they tell me there might not be no bottom.”

  “Everything has a bottom,” Bolan growled.

  “They tell me,” Papriello replied in a confidential tone, “that the water gets warmer the farther down you go. Maybe it bottoms in hell.”

  Bolan said, very soberly, “Maybe it does.”

  “To tell the truth, it gives me the spooks, sometimes. I’m not superstitious, you know. But a place like this makes you wonder, sometimes.”

  Bolan understood the feeling. From such natural wonders, perhaps, were born all the primitive religions. He said, gruffly, “Let’s go, Pip.”

  The guy grinned sheepishly and led the way around the catwalk to the horizontal cavern. He fumbled along the wall until he found a light-switch and warned, “Watch your head here, Boss,” and stepped through the entrance.

  Water was running ankle deep along the stone floor. Bolan had to bend almost double to move through the shallow tunnel before emerging into another rock-walled vault, some six to ten feet farther along. But this vault was obviously man-made, and very recently so—or, more properly, man-enlarged. Walls and ceiling had been pushed back and reinforced with steel bars supporting steelmesh sheeting. A low platform led to another horizontal cavern—or probably it was a continuation of the original—in which had been constructed a small monorail system.

  “From this point,” Papriello said, grinning, “we travel in style.”

  The open, bullet-shaped car would seat six in a single-file configuration. The Pip took the driver’s seat and Bolan dropped in behind him.

  “We call this the tunnel of love,” Papriello said lightly. He chuckled, adding, “But I ain’t had no lovin’ down here, yet.”

  The whole feeling was that of a “ride” in an amusement park. But Bolan was not feeling particularly amused by the experience.

  “Just keep your arms inside,” Pap
riello warned as he set the car in motion. “Especially on the curves. There’s a couple of narrow squeaks along here.”

  The car was obviously electrically powered. The ride was smooth and quiet, if a bit slow. The air was good and the temperature comfortable. A guy could close the eyes and have no sensation of moving along a tunnel at some thirty feet or more below the surface of the earth.

  But Bolan was not closing the eyes and he was feeling anything but comfort. He was moving, he knew, into something fantastic and satanically threatening—with no superstitious nonsense involved. Not that Mack Bolan did not believe in the powers of good and evil. Satan, he knew, was alive and well—embodied in certain mortals. The true Lucifer’s Ladder would be found in that mental passageway linking flesh and blood human beings to the pits of hell—and it drew all its power, he also knew, from the good intentions of the meek.

  He knew, also, that the meek would never inherit this earth—not while that linkage was there.

  Bolan had, indeed, submerged his very life into that proposition.

  And he had been busily severing links wherever he could find them.

  He had, however, never expected to find them in such a place as this. And, being mortal himself—he had to wonder if he had finally found the link which would sever Mack Bolan, instead.

  10

  ISLAND X

  This joint was staggering to the imagination. The chamber must have measured some fifty feet long by a hundred and fifty feet wide, with a depth that defied casual estimates … maybe equal to an eight- to ten-story building.

  And that was about what these crazy people were engineering down here in this hole in the ground: a framework building, fashioned of steel and anchored directly into the rock sides at each level, with steel ladders and catwalks going off at various angles to hook the levels together. Great massive doors suggesting airlocks or some type of watertight system were emplaced right into the rock facings at various levels. An overhead crane on rails, set high into the arched dome, was presently lowering a section of prefabricated steelmesh into the depths. Somewhere down there an air compressor was operating and Bolan could hear the sucking rumble of great volumes of water in motion—in fact, that was all that could be heard. The whole thing was brightly lit and apparently under good atmospheric controls but the noise level in that hole was almost unbearable.

  The monorail from Santelli Island had brought them in at the top level, about ten feet below the crane rails. Two men dressed in limp khaki and wearing yellow hardhats stood in a glass cubicle at the far side, fussing with a large roll of blueprints.

  Papriello had to tug at Bolan’s sleeve to get his attention. He mouthed the words, “Over here,” and led the way to the cubicle.

  It was a control room with exotic electronic panels and even a computer terminal … and it was soundproofed, thank God. The hardhats barely acknowledged their presence, giving a flick of grudging welcome with the eyes then returning to an agitated study of the blueprints.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Papriello demanded. “Where is everybody? What’s all the damned noise?”

  Those guys were not “boys.” They were bona-fide engineers and obviously knew what they were about. One of them announced, without looking up, “Blowout at a hundred and twenty feet. We’ve contained it. Now we’re trying to determine the extent.”

  “Can you fix it?” Papriello wanted to know.

  “Sure, we can fix it.”

  “How much damned delay are we talking about?”

  “You’ll have to talk to the chief about that,” the guy said. He raised a level stare to Bolan. “Beat it, eh. This is a serious problem. We have no time for tourists.”

  “Watch your smart mouth!” Papriello yelled, eyes blazing with outrage.

  “It’s okay,” Bolan said easily. “You heard the man. He’s busy. Let’s go.”

  They returned to the catwalk and went through one of the strange, airlock-type doors into a short passageway which shortly became a staircase almost identical to the one at the other portal. The noise was once again behind them. Papriello puffed, “Sorry ’bout that damned smart mouth, Frankie. When this job is finished, I’m tellin’ you the truth, I’m going to have my innings with those people.”

  Bolan dismissed the incident with a breezy, “So long as they give us what we want, Pip.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to give ’em what they want as soon as it’s done.”

  The guy was still panting with suppressed rage when they reached the surface. This portal was simply a small cement-block housing built around the top of the stairs. They exited into bright sunshine and a charmingly tropical scene.

  The lagoon which Grimaldi had spotted from the air lay some fifty yards to the south of the portal, a beautiful crescent-shaped inlet lined with palm trees and other luxuriant vegetation. Also lining that verdant shoreline and snuggling beneath the palms were a dozen or more small hut-like structures reminiscent of a South Seas island village. At the very center of the crescent stood a long rectangular building with a low roofline, behind which rose a high tower bristling with radio antennae and supporting a covered platform. It was a watch tower, pure and simple, the kind you would see at prison walls. Two guys were up there with shotguns. It was also equipped, Bolan noted, with searchlights.

  “Nice, really nice,” Bolan-Cavaretta murmured as he stopped to light a cigarette.

  His guide told him, “You should’ve seen it before they cut the banks away. This was a spring lake, you know. I mean, not connected to the ’glades. They had to screw it up. Water control, you know.”

  No, Bolan did not know and could not risk asking the obvious question. But he could see, now, the very obvious restructuring which had converted a spring lake into an everglades lagoon. The body of water had been considerably enlarged beyond its original western bank by the simple expedient of lowering the land elevation at that end and allowing the two bodies of water to meet.

  “Water control,” he echoed quietly.

  “It’s been drivin’ ’em nuts,” Papriello elaborated. “There’s about a dozen underground streams down there. They get one plugged up and another busts loose. I guess that’s the problem right now. Guy said a blowout.”

  Bolan would have loved to ask why so much time and obvious expense was going into that hole. Surely it was not all for the sake of an underground link to Santelli Island. And he was thinking of those huge watertight doors dotting that fabulous hole in the ground. He said, “They’re pumping it out through the lagoon, eh?”

  “Well, they call it diverting. They can run it four or five different ways. The lagoon, I guess, is the failsafe. I’ve seen currents running out of there … must be twenty, thirty miles an hour. I mean, real gushers. There’s a lot of water down there.”

  “Where the hell’s it coming from?” Bolan muttered, sounding only vaguely interested.

  The guy shrugged his shoulders as he replied to that. “I never asked. I just know it’s worse during the rainy season.”

  A stout man of perhaps fifty-five emerged from one of the shoreline huts and trudged toward them. He wore a loose-fitting jumpsuit and a hardhat. Papriello had spotted the approach, too, and said, “Speak of the devil. Here’s the guy to ask about that. He’s the chief engineer. Takes his orders straight from the top, you know what I mean, so we don’t usually have much to say to each other. He’s a doctor of something, engineering I guess. Name’s Anderson, everybody calls him Doc.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Bolan lied. He wished to hell he did know something. And he was reading nothing but trouble from a parallel chain of command.

  Papriello called ahead to the guy when he was about twenty paces off, “Hey, Doc, it’s terrible, eh. Not another damn blowout, eh.”

  Anderson ignored the comment, possessing eyes only for the tall stranger. “Not another damned tourist,” he said tiredly, speaking perhaps only to himself.

  Papriello stiffened defensively and growled back, “Listen, Doc, this is—”


  But Bolan cut into that before the introduction could be made. “Guess it’s a bad time for sightseeing,” he acknowledged lightly. “Don’t let me get in your way, Anderson. I can make it another time.”

  The guy gave him a go-to-hell look then turned the cold gaze upon Papriello. “You’ve got to do something about your God-damned turnkeys, Pip. I lost two more workers this morning with busted heads. And it had nothing to do with the blowout. You put a rein on those gorillas. I mean that.”

  A turnkey, Bolan immediately noted, was the term used for a jailer or prison guard. And that damned watchtower …

  “I’ll look into it,” Papriello promised the chief engineer, with a defensive glance at Bolan. “I was going to ask … there’s nobody in the hole. Where are they?”

  “They’re in the hall. It’s looking like they’ll get another day of rest, so dammit let them rest. An exhausted workman isn’t worth his rations. And speaking of rations …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Papriello said quickly, “we’re making a lot of changes.” Another glance at Bolan. “I can promise you that.”

  The chief engineer stalked off without another glance at Bolan, obviously heading toward the portal.

  “His time is coming, too, maybe,” Papriello raged under his breath.

  “All things in their time, Pip,” Bolan said coolly.

  “I noticed you didn’t want to be introduced. I hope that means what I think it means.”

  “Like I said, all things in their time,” Bolan replied, but saying only with the eyes what the guy really wanted to hear.

  Papriello gnashed his teeth as he said, “I can hardly wait. Listen, these guys treat us like we’re shit on their shoes.”

  “Didn’t I tell you there would be some changes around here?”

  “To tell the truth, sir, you did. And I can hardly wait. I got to hand it to you, if you’ll pardon me saying it. You’re one hell of a cool customer, Frankie.”

  The one hell of a cool customer was gazing at that watchtower … and feeling a bit warm, to tell the truth.