When it was all spent, Bolan hoisted himself upright and made a wary approach, AutoMag at the ready. A figure on the roof of the burning building rose into smoky silhouette and began spraying the fire zone with an automatic weapon. Even at this range and situation, Bolan instantly recognized the stolidly familiar figure of Pol Blancanales—and it was a welcome sight, indeed.
Another blast jarred the area slightly, a relatively distant blast, and The Executioner knew that Gadgets Schwarz also was at work. He gave a high-sign to his compadre on the roof and received a returning signal of recognition.
Men were staggering from the inferno with hands held high—stupefied men with no resistance left in them—choking, coughing, gasping for the breath of life.
Bolan called up, “Pol! Backboard me!”
An “aye aye” floated down from the back side of the roof.
Bolan grabbed a wheezing fat man of about fifty, shook him viciously, and demanded, “Where’s Jules?”
The guy’s eyes were dazed, uncomprehending. Bolan let him go and turned to another. At that moment, old Jules himself reeled through the smoking doorway and collapsed at Bolan’s feet.
There were perhaps a dozen survivors out here, all of them obviously from Pattriccia’s force. A younger guy was on one knee, too close to the blazing building, fighting for mere air and giving Bolan a curious gaze.
Bolan grabbed the guy and pulled him clear. “Is this all?” he asked the guy.
The hurting man nodded and wheezed his reply. “Thanks to you, there’s this many. I’m Tony Dalton. I owe you, Mister.”
Bolan growled, “You owe me nothing, guy. Get these people out of here.”
“Did Artie send you?”
“No time for jawing,” Bolan growled. “Cops are screaming here from every direction. I’m taking Jules with me. The word is, the rest of you get lost. Go south, and don’t hurry back.”
“I get you. Thanks.”
“Moving out, Pol!” Bolan yelled. He hoisted the old man to his shoulder and headed for the breached fence with all possible haste.
Tony Dalton froze him several paces out with a single, bawling word: “Bolan!”
He whirled to that sound with the AutoMag extended.
The guy was just standing there. “You are Bolan!”
“I am.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Don’t spend the rest of your life worrying about it. Just go!”
“Don’t hurt the old man, eh. He’s dying anyway.”
Bolan spun away from that human moment and went on. Hurting old men was not the name of his Saint Louie game.
He’d come here to slay an idea.
And these old men were going to help him do just that. If, that is, he could make it past these damn St. Louis cops.
Mack Bolan, at that moment, was not at all certain of success in that.
9: ACTION, REACTION
“Tac 1 from Tac 2. Can you hear that?”
“Hear it, hell, I can see it!”
“Tac 1 from Control. What’ve you got there?”
“We’re at Four Boston Seven, Control. What we have here is a bombed vehicle and seven victims, all DOA. What we have a couple miles up the road is anybody’s guess. Can you hear that through my carrier?”
“Affirmative, Tac 1. Sounds like Normandy Beach on D-Day. Can you pinpoint?”
“Negative. Source appears to be in the general vicinity of the old barge works. Column of smoke is now several hundred feet elevation, and explosions are still occurring. We are now rolling to investigate with Tac 2 in company.”
“All units, this is Sector Control. Converge on Boston Three, repeating, Boston Three. Exert due caution, this is a possible Maximum Contact. Do not acknowledge, do not acknowledge. Tac 1, you are cleared for Extreme Reaction. Tac 2, you are cleared for Maximum Support. All other units, Sector Four, you are cleared for Maximum Containment and Standby Support. Tac 1 and 2 acknowledge.”
“Tac 1 aye.”
“Tac 2 aye.”
The Sector Leader swiveled away from the console and squeezed the back of his neck as he shot an oblique gaze at the skipper. “Fits Postum’s briefing like a picture in a frame,” he observed. “The ‘bandit’ was a tailing vehicle. The guy dropped back and I believe the expression was ‘cleared the backtrack.’ Now they’re having the slug-out up near the old barge docks. I can’t fit that into ‘wine vat,’ though. Can you?”
The skipper shook his head. “Tom?”
Postum said, “I fed winevat to the computer and it spit it back. I guess—”
“Control, this is Tac 1. We’re running into dense smoke. Does not appear to be same source as those explosions.”
The controller swung back to the console for the response. “Clarify, Tac 1.”
“We’re into a—a smoke screen, I believe. Visibility is near zero.”
The skipper cussed. Tom Postum pulled up a chair and straddled it.
“What is your situation, Tac 1?”
“Proceeding at maximum allowable speed. That’s about, uh, five miles per hour—and it’s getting worse.”
“Tac 4, Tac 4, this is Control!”
“Tac 4 aye.”
“Report!”
“Tac 4 is now approaching Alpha Three.”
“This is Control, Tac 4 is cleared for Extreme Reaction. Tac 5 is cleared for Maximum Support. Both acknowledge.”
“Tac 4 aye.”
“Tac 5 aye.”
The Sector Leader turned to the skipper with a scowl. “Smart bastards,” he growled.
“Well if our people can’t see, neither can they,” the skipper philosophized.
“Maybe,” Postum softly commented.
“What do you mean, maybe?”
“I simply mean—”
“Control, Tac 4—we’re in it now, too. Visibility about ten feet maximum.”
The controller swore, “Goddamnit!” then viciously kicked his talk bar. “Tac 3, report!”
“Tac 3 aye, converging along coordinate three, midway between Alpha and Boston. Control, I am also socked in.”
“Well kiss my ass!” the sector leader yelled.
“Seal it off!” the skipper snarled. “I’ll bring you help from the other sectors.”
“This is Sector Four Control! All units are cleared for Extreme Reaction. This is a Maximum Contact, repeating, this is a—”
Postum had leapt from his chair to interrupt the broadcast. “You’re not getting out, Larry!”
“What?”
“Look at your modulators, dammit!”
The controller stared stupidly at his transmission monitor then released the console foot bar, thus freeing the squelch control. A cacophony of squeals and squawks, rapidly alternating across the entire audio spectrum, instantly swirled in through the speakers.
“What the hell is that?” the controller yelled.
“You’re being jammed!”
“I’m being what?”
“Someone is operating a jamming device on this channel!”
The skipper called over from another sector: “We’re getting it here, too!”
Postum called out, “Switch to your secondaries!”
“No good,” Sector Four reported miserably. “How can they do this? How do they jam all frequencies at once?”
“With great difficulty,” Postum marveled.
The skipper yelled, “What the hell kind of gear do those bastards have out there!”
The intelligence chief was suddenly grinning like an idiot. “I really couldn’t say,” he told his skipper. “I really haven’t the faintest fucking idea.”
And he did not particularly give a damn, either.
The warwagon was navigating through her own smoke via a system of “Laser-augmented infrared” optics, and it was a mind-boggler for Pol Blancanales. He occupied the copilot position to Bolan’s right, staring with awe into the small viewscreen of the command console.
Schwarz was manning the Electronic Counter Measures gea
r in the waist, although Bolan himself could just as easily have handled that chore from the command deck.
Blancanales said, “This is giving me vertigo. It’s like one of those trick driving machines in the penny arcades, the road just rolling up in front of you in that little box. How fast we going?”
“Twenty,” Bolan grunted.
“Damn!”
“The trick is to keep your crosshairs centered and your brakes ready. We’ll be breaking clear soon.”
“This is the damnedest smoke. What’d you call it?”
“Heavy gas,” Bolan replied absently, concentrating on his navigation. “Has a dispersal ratio of roughly a million to one. Reaches that level very quickly then goes inert and heavy, just lays there. In heavy winds, of course, it’s not so effective.”
“Impressive, very impressive,” his companion said.
“How’s Jules?”
“Sucking oxygen and cussing. So far he’s hung Ciglia on a meat hook, drawn and quartered him, baked him, and served him to the commissione for appetizers. When I came forward, he was working on Augie Marinello for the main course.”
Bolan chuckled. “Seventy-five years old,” was his comment.
“Yeah, well, personally I—huh ho! Is that clear air I see swirling out there?”
Bolan replied, “It is. Get set for the worse. Smoke’s all gone. We’re on our own, now.”
“Uhhh … yeah, yeah! There’s the Interstate! What is that—I-70?”
“It’d better be,” Bolan replied grimly. He was accelerating rapidly, now, moving toward an access road which paralleled the interstate route. He called back to the waist: “Gadgets! Situation!”
“Looks clear to me, Sarge.”
“Okay, we’re home free,” Bolan announced. He swung the big rig through an underpass and around a cloverleaf to the southbound side of the freeway and onto the ramp. “Secure ECM,” he called to Schwarz.
Blancanales lit cigarettes and handed one to Bolan. The weary blitzer accepted it with a grin and admitted, “That was too close.”
“Looked mighty sweet to me,” Schwarz said, coming forward. “Where the hell did you get this gear? I never saw such—you’ve got a tandem-driven saturation-pulse FM mixer pushing a broad-band demodulating scanner back there. Did you know that?”
Bolan grinned at Blancanales and said, “Is that what it is?”
“Best I can figure, it is,” Schwarz solemnly replied. “I’d have to really go into it to really—of course, it could be—well, let’s see. You’re whipping those driven scanners across all the—you see, it’s a spectrum tuner, double-ganged to the—what’re you grinning about, Pol?”
“Just trying to relate it to something I understand,” Blancanales replied, winking at Bolan. “I guess it’s like making love, eh?”
“I don’t see how,” Schwarz replied soberly.
“Well sure. Double-ganged impulse-actuated mutual orgasm, Gadgets—detumescing down to a single-pole push-pull disconnect. Universal joint, see.”
“That sounds like double-talk,” Schwarz said, hung between a smile and a frown. “You see, in frequency-modulated jamming concepts, what you’re doing is setting up a—”
“Get outta here!” Blancanales growled.
“You’ve got no sense of harmony, Pol,” Gadgets said soberly.
“A robot! A damned computer! With frizzy control circuits and kinky transistors! And weak tubes! I never saw such a solid-state freak in all my life! You and your damned contacts!”.
Schwarz was grinning amiably. “See, this stuff is all interrelated. There’s a harmony, a unity in nature, and I understand that. You don’t, Pol, and you don’t even want to, and that’s your problem. You’re afraid of nature.”
“What’s this have to do with making love?” Blancanales snarled.
“It’s got nothing to do with it. That’s what I—”
“Well thank Jesus! He finally admitted it!”
“Admitted what? I’m talking about the …”
Bolan was grinning hugely, savoring these relaxed few moments with the closest thing he’d known to “family” through many a long campaign. But that relaxation was to be short-lived.
He cruised past the huge Gateway Arch at the foot of town and was angling into the interchange to I-44, on a deadline course for “Stohehenge,” when the beeper began signaling an incoming call on the mobile telephone.
“What’s that?” Blancanales asked, abruptly dropping the tension-relieving banter.
“Telephone,” Bolan said.
“Who the hell would be calling?”
“I’d really rather not find out,” Bolan told him, with a sober smile.
But the thing kept beeping.
“Maybe it’s Toni,” Blancanales said, worrying about that. “Does she know—”
Bolan sighed. “Yeah, she knows. Better get it. Do it cool, though.”
Blancanales picked up the instrument and identified the mobile number, then frowned and said, “Just a minute.” He showed Bolan an apologetic grimace as he reported, “Long distance. Guy wants to talk to La Mancha.”
Bolan made the exchange onto I-44 then reached for the instrument. “La Mancha here,” he said, using his street voice.
The troubled tones of Leo Turrin, another member of this “family,” told him, “I really did not want to make this call, Sarge.”
“So why did you?”
“Because there’s a guy named Bolan standing here with a gun at my head.”
“Say again?”
“You heard me right,” said the best friend Mack Bolan had ever known. “His name is Bolan, and he wants you in the very worst way.”
And that’s the way it was, sometimes, in Mack Bolan’s world.
10: STANDING ROOM
“It’s the kid brother,” Turrin explained with an unhappy sigh. “I think he’s flipped out. He’s got this shiny new Colt .45 which he assures me is loaded and ready—and frankly, Sarge, I think it must run in the family, he’s giving me the shivers. I figured, uh, I’d better just make the call.”
Bolan said, “Sorry, Leo. Put him on.”
“No, he won’t accept that. Guess he’s afraid he’ll get talked out of it.”
“Out of what?”
“He wants an eyeball meet. Yesterday, if not sooner.”
“Leo, I can’t—I’m in the middle of a thing here.”
“Sure. Johnny and the whole world knows it. He still wants that meet. And I, uh, I think we better try to work it out.”
Bolan gave a despairing sigh. “Doesn’t sound like Johnny, Leo. He must have a tough one.”
“Well, to tell the truth, there have been some, uh, surprising developments on the local scene. He says he’ll blow my damn head off if I whisper a word to you about it. Wants to do that, himself, eyeball to eyeball.”
Bolan’s heart leapt. “Something happened to Val?”
“Uh, naw, no—not like that. Look, I can get a plane in about an hour. Let me bring him out. Forget the gun and take my word for it. He needs. We can handle it, can’t we?”
Bolan’s decision was typically immediate. “Okay. Double cover your tracks. Put some dark glasses on him and keep them there. Johnny knows the game and how to play it but you’d better give him a quick refresher. There’s a motel at the airport. Check in there under your own name. Go straight to the room and stay there until I make contact. What time do you expect to arrive?”
“Let’s say mid-afternoon.”
“Right. I’ll get there at the earliest possible. Tell Johnny I say right now, he’s to give you the hardware.”
“Yeah, uh … okay. I have it. He says to tell you he has not flipped out. And uh, shit, this is a BB pistol, Sarge. Sure looked like the real article to me.”
Bolan grinned. “Tell him to hang in there. I trust him, and I understand. I’ll see you both as soon as I can carve a trail. And Leo … thanks.”
“Knock it off. Just say goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Leo.”
; Bolan handed the phone to Blancanales and told him, “Personal problem. I’m going to have to work it in, somehow.”
“Brother John.”
“Yeah.”
Schwarz was seated on the floor between the two, his back against the command console. “He wrote me once, in ’Nam. Cindy, too. I’m sorry, I never got around to answering. I’m not much on that. What’s he now—about sixteen?”
“Try sixty,” Bolan said quietly.
“Raw deal,” Blancanales said, commenting on the Bolan family tragedy.
“I didn’t do much to lighten it,” Bolan said, scowling. “I was all he had left. Then I took even that away from him.”
“The kid understands,” Blancanales said, trying for reassurance.
“Understanding is one thing—living with it, something else,” Bolan said softly. “John and I talked about it. Before I declared war. Sure, he’s a gutsy kid. He understood what would happen, and he cheered me on. Still does. But … hell, it must be a grim life for a kid like that.”
Schwarz said, “My folks died while I was in ’Nam. They were pretty old. But I still ache, sometimes.”
Blancanales gave his partner a searching gaze. “I didn’t know that, Gadgets.”
The electronics genius shrugged. “I was a change-of-life baby. Their one and only. My dad proudly gave me his name, the whole thing—and Mama gave me her life, what there was left of it. Then Uncle Sam stepped in and took it all. I was a draftee. Did you know that? Mama wanted me to go to Canada. I almost did. But my dad would have had a heart attack for sure. He was a patriot, a double-deuce vet, American Legion and all that. So, hell, I went to ’Nam. And I re-upped over there. Didn’t even get home for their funeral. Didn’t even get the word until two weeks after.” He grinned solemnly and went on in that matter-of-fact tone. “I was shagging the black gang along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
“They died together?” Bolan asked, perhaps relating the experience to his own.
“Day apart. Mama first. She died in the bed they’d shared for forty-two years. Died in her sleep. Guess my dad just couldn’t get over the shock. Had a bad heart. They had a thing, those two. Dad always said he’d never live to see them put her in the ground. And he didn’t.”
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