Vendetta in Venice

by Don Pendleton

  As he packed up the components of the transmitter, Bolan continued his survey of the junkyard. An occasional intact vehicle stood out like a beacon among the tangle of exhaust pipes, sheared-off valances, overriders, side panels, rubbing strips.

  There, for instance, was an American roadster that had been totaled in a head-on collision. The wheels and engine were in the driving compartment, and the long hood had been crumpled into nothing. On the other side was an Italian minicar that had been squashed almost flat in some unimaginable road drama. In contrast there were several trucks that looked as if they had died peacefully of old age. A Unic flatbed with grass growing out of the remains of its driver's seat must have been there since long before World War II. Beside it was a panel truck with scarcely an inch of its bodywork undented or unscratched, but that couldn't have been more than two years old. And nearer the Executioner was a dump truck with its back and sides literally falling to pieces.

  It was crazy, just the same, how different parts of a wreck deteriorated at different rates. The engine of that dump truck was a case in point. From what Bolan could see through a gap between the cab and an engine panel, it looked in pretty good shape.

  Idly he sauntered toward it, but halfway there, he stiffened. He stepped up to the derelict in half a dozen determined strides. The white dust that covered the leaves in the hedge lay thickly over everything else in the yard. Except, it seemed, in the case of this one truck.

  He peered into the cab. The seat was threadbare, the rubber floor mat worn almost through, the controls shabby in the extreme. Yet there was hardly a trace of the all-pervading dust... and the cabs of the others were smothered in it.

  Rapidly, silently, he circled the truck and lifted off the entire hood. The engine shone in the lamplight reflected from the street. The cylinder block glistened with oil. The spark plugs looked new, and the wiring must have been replaced within the past few weeks. Bolan unscrewed one of the caps on top of the battery. The electrolyte was topped up, and there was water in the radiator.

  He checked out the other trucks he had seen.

  As he had expected their engines were caked with dried grease, the insulation on the cables cracked and the top surface of everything was covered thickly with the all-pervading dust.

  The dumper might only just have been acquired by the owner of the yard, but to Bolan it looked much more as if it had been there some time... and had only recently been restored to running order. It had been left looking deliberately decrepit, although in fact it could probably work perfectly well.

  Why?

  What use could anyone have for what was in effect a "Q-truck" hidden in a junkyard? Unbidden, Tufik's parting comment leaped into the Executioner's mind: "It's not always the new ones that travel the best..."

  He dropped to his hands and knees. The street lighting didn't help much at ground level, but he could just make out the shadowed indentations of tire tracks that led from the front wheels toward the gap in the hedge through which he had entered.

  The truck had been used recently.

  And suddenly, in a flash of inspiration, he knew the reason why. He saw why someone could want a serviceable truck disguised and kept hidden in a junkyard. He saw why it could be important that the vehicle, however well it went, should appear to an outsider to be derelict.

  "It's not always the new ones..."

  Several facts, until now unrelated, jelled in his mind. The taxi Brognola had ridden in had been a Minerva — an ancient model made by a manufacturer that had ceased production before World War II. It had taken him to a car junkyard.

  The garbage disposal truck in which the Parisian mafioso Secondini had escaped was a model the city sanitation department had stopped using years earlier. The panel truck in which the guy made it to the private airfield was said to be "beat-up." The two-tonner from which Bolan himself had escaped was old. The car that had tried to run him down in Paris was old. The terrorist who had bamboozled the Dutch police had been smuggled past the cordon inside a barrel organ that was a museum piece.

  For the first time since the operation began, Bolan felt excitement rising within him. He set up the transmitter and its aerial again. Ten minutes later he raised the cipher clerk in the U.S. embassy in Paris on a frequency normally used only by field agents of the CIA who wanted to contact either the Paris resident or the ambassador's military attaché.

  "I want you to put through a priority message to Hal Brognola in Washington," he said. "The duty officer will give you the routing. The message is short, and it's simple. It should be signed Striker, and it reads: I think I've found out how they operate the network."

  12

  A sudden dazzle of light blinded the Executioner. "What the hell do you think you're doin'?" a voice snarled roughly. A large hand swept the miniature dish aerial to the ground and yanked free the cable linking it to the transmitter. Booted feet stamped the lightweight metal saucer into the mud.

  Bolan whirled away from the mike. He must have spoken too loudly while briefing the clerk at the embassy; his voice had alerted the watchman in his shack by the yard entrance.

  In the light reflected from the beam of the man's powerful electric lamp, the warrior saw that he was tall and husky, with mean, glittering eyes.

  He could see, too, that the man held a gun on him.

  It was an old gun, a six-chamber revolver with a rusted barrel. But it was a large-bore iron, probably a .45-caliber Colt. It would blow the Executioner to hell before he could get a hand anywhere near the Beretta holstered on his hip.

  "Get to your feet," the watchman growled.

  Warily, keeping his hands well away from his sides, the Executioner complied.

  The man jerked his head toward the shack, and Bolan began to walk. He heard a screech of metal behind him, the snap of breaking plastic, a faint tinkle of glass. His captor had grabbed the portable transmitter and smashed it against the fender of a wreck as they walked by.

  The shack, which was lit by a single oil lamp, smelled of cheap cigarettes and overboiled coffee. The guard motioned Bolan to sit at a table covered with newspapers. The warrior lowered himself into a canvas chair and placed his hands palm downward on top of the papers. The gunner looked trigger-happy, and the way he had smashed the radio suggested a low threshold of tolerance. Bolan decided to hold himself in check... for the time being.

  There was an ancient electric heater near the door. Keeping Bolan covered, the guard tipped it over on its back and placed a chipped enamel jug of coffee on the grillwork. "Okay, now it's time for some answers," he snarled. "Who are you? Where did you come from? What the hell are you doing sending radio messages from here?"

  "I wanted a quiet place to transmit," Bolan replied.

  "Transmit what? Who to? Why here?"

  "Find out." Bolan was relieved to see that, apparently, the watchman hadn't gotten close enough to hear the message.

  "Don't think I won't," the man threatened. "We got truck generators here that run a current strong enough to make a statue sing."

  "You'll need help," Bolan said affably. "Do you think I'm just going to lie down quietly while you strip me, tie me up and fix the electrodes? With one hand? You do plan to keep me covered, don't you?"

  The watchman hesitated, scowling; the mechanics of his threat hadn't occurred to him. Finally, his eyes and the gun still trained on the Executioner, he backed off to a tall wooden chest, placed his free hand behind him and pulled open the door. From an untidy mass of papers, ledgers and overflowing folders, he produced a telephone, which he placed on the table. He dialed a number.

  Bolan couldn't place all the figures, but from the regional and area codes at the beginning he reckoned the call was long-distance, almost certainly international.

  The watchman waited a long time for an answer.

  "Bart?" he said at last. "Stefan, from the yard at Montigny... I figured I might get you at home today — Yeah, yeah, I know you don't like me to call you, but this is important. I flushed out a guy sen
din' radio messages, right here in the yard! Yeah, that's right. Tall guy with black hair. Blue eyes. Looks in shape. You want me to find — Oh, you know who he is! Well, okay, what you want me to do with him?.."

  His mean eyes flicked over Bolan and then back to the phone again. "No questions. Just terminate. Whatever you say, Bart. Well, sure, there's the canal back there. Runs a reasonable flow of water about this time, on account of the sluices up at the reservoir being opened. Check. Call you back."

  Stefan kicked open the door and motioned with the barrel of the gun. "Walk."

  Bolan shivered as he stepped onto the muddy ground and breathed the damp night air outside the hut. He was under no illusions. Whoever "Bart" was, he had recognized Bolan from that brief description. Which meant that Bart — and the junkyard itself — were part of the escape network. It was probable too that it was the same character — the stocky guy with the aggressive chin — who had taken the Executioner for a ride two days earlier. Only this time Bart had clearly thought he could do without answers, and had cold-bloodedly ordered Bolan's execution.

  They walked down a lane between towering piles of car wrecks, Fords, Citroens, Renaults, Volkswagens and Audis, stacked in a rigor of buckled steel and rusted panels. If this was to be his last view on earth, the warrior reflected as they came in sight of the canal, it looked as if he was at the River Styx already. For no scenarist creating a twentieth-century inferno could have dreamed up a scene more hellish than the one he was looking at.

  Through the heavy, sulfurous atmosphere, he saw the serrated roofs of factories above a string of coal barges moored on the far side of the polluted water. Flame seared the violet sky to the east over the belching mouths of blast furnaces. The few stars visible through gaps between the clouds were too far off to be of any help.

  Bolan had reached the water's edge. He looked down at dark, scummed ripples sucking at rotted piers. A cold breeze carried the stench of decomposing skins from a tannery on the other side bank of the canal. Was this, then, the way it was all to end — no last-man-last-round defiance but a short plunge into foul and depthless water after a hammer blow that smashed the spine?

  Not this time.

  Light swept across the water from beyond the barges and a small motor launch angled out into the canal, putting upstream against the current. A blue light gleamed on top of the half cabin.

  Stefan smothered an exclamation. "Don't move, asshole," he hissed as the searchlight raked the oily swell of the canal. But the warning came too late. Bolan had already moved.

  Knowing the killer wouldn't fire while the lawmen on the police launch were within earshot, he hurled himself backward, cannoning into the guy's legs. The watchman went down, his arm swinging wildly as he clubbed with the butt of the revolver. But Bolan took the blows on his arm and shoulder, springing up and haring for the nearest stack of wrecks while Stefan was still thrashing in the mud.

  By the time the searchlight had faded and the launch had chugged away upstream, Bolan had dragged himself, panting, among the smashed vehicles in the stack. He was seven feet off the ground, crouched on the floor of a gutted sedan whose ragged upholstery stank of mildew and decay.

  He strained his eyes to pierce the semidarkness: the flickering radiance from the blast furnace across the water didn't provide enough light to show anything in detail. But he could see the watchman. He stood in the alley between the stacks, the barrel of his revolver questing right and left.

  Bolan felt something hard by his knee. His fingers located the object. It was heavy — a rusty spring shackle from some outsized vehicle. He hefted it experimentally in his hand.

  Many of the skeletons in the mechanical graveyard were precariously balanced on the stack: the slightest move could provoke an avalanche of steel. Bolan lobbed the shackle through the glassless window. He heard a sudden clatter, a shifting of metal lower down the stack on the side nearest the canal. The revolver in Stefan's hand roared twice and spit flame. More ironwork fell someplace within the stack.

  The guy walked forward slowly, peering into the tangle of wrecks. In the silence Bolan heard a shunting locomotive puffing in a nearby marshaling yard, clattering a line of boxcars into a siding. He looked around for something else to throw.

  His searching hand found shreds of upholstery, cotton waste, a twist of corroded wire too light to carry. He eased the Beretta from its holster and sprung the magazine. Carefully he pried away the top three shells from the 20-round charger and threw them as far as he could. Tinkling, jangling, they dropped down through the complex of metal.

  The watchman spun around and fired two shots, almost as a reflex action. A ricochet whined past the sedan. Something heavy — a wheel? a seat? a detached fender? — displaced itself in the center of the stack. The sound could have been made by a man losing his balance, sliding, falling.

  For the fifth time the flat detonation of a heavy-caliber revolver shot was batted from side to side between the wreckage.

  One round left in the cylinder.

  "Come out, you bastard, before I spill gasoline over the stack and fry you," the watchman rasped.

  It was time for the Executioner to make his play. The gasoline threat didn't bother him, but if he didn't step up to bat now, the gunner might take time out to reload.

  He stood up on the running board of the ancient, doorless sedan, the Beretta in his right hand, his left arm hooked around the car's windshield pillar.

  "Up here, pal!" he called.

  The watchman swiveled on his heel, leveled the heavy gun and fired all in one precise movement. The concussion of the .45-caliber round was overlaid by the sharp whip crack of the Beretta in 3-shot mode.

  Bolan snatched his arm, smarting like hell, away from the windshield pillar: the slug, missing his wrist by a fraction of an inch, had sliced through his sleeve.

  His own three shots drilled the watchman through the chest and hammered him backward into the mud; three dwindling streams of scarlet pulsed from his lifeless body. Bolan dragged him back to the hut, locked the door and returned to the Mercedes.

  He now knew two things about the escape organization: he was wise to the junkyard connection, and knew that a member of the gang — a member important enough to order a killing — was called Bart. Plus he was on his way to see a man who had a regular lead. He started the engine and drove south toward Switzerland.

  13

  Imre Sujic scored nine out of ten in Bolan's book right from the start. The Czech colonel was no buck passer: he made his own decisions, acted upon them and was prepared to defend those actions. And he wasted no time on nonessentials. He was a professional.

  There was no hesitation in his approach to the Executioner. Clearly he had studied photographs, for he strode across the lobby of the Geneva hotel with outstretched hand, as though he were greeting an old friend.

  Maybe that wasn't all that remarkable, Bolan thought ten minutes later, studying in his turn the mug shot of the Czech killer he was to impersonate. It was uncanny.

  "Impressive, no?" Sujic said, glancing from Bolan to the photo and then back again. "The features are not identical, of course. That would be too much to ask. But they have the same cast, a similar — you will forgive me, Per Bolan? — a similar ruthlessness and determination. What is perhaps more important, the height, build and quality of voice match perfectly. Once the hair is altered and you remember to limp a little on the right foot, you could fool even the wardens in the jail he escaped from."

  "It's the voice, the language, that bothers me the most," Bolan said.

  "Under the circumstances, this is not important. Zoltan Cernic was a crude man, a thug with little education and no culture. He spoke little, and then in a kind of growl. He was excessively ill-humored. Cernic came from a peasant area in the Carpathians, the part of the country nearest the Soviet Union. Any... inadequacies...on your part will be put down by the citified characters in the Prague underworld as due to this rustic background."

  "And you have the complete
lowdown on his habits?"

  "Certainly. His hideout was in the old part of the city. Nobody knows he was killed except the SNB — the state security police — and my own department. We know where he bought his food, where he drank, what time he went out, everything. We even know where the loot from his robberies is hidden, for we had him under surveillance for some time. If we introduce you into the neighborhood secretly, at night, and you make it to the attic he rented right away, nobody will know he ever left it."

  "You figure that if I lie up there awhile, let certain people know I'd like assisted passage out of town, and that I can pay for it, then the guys who run the network will show up and make me an offer?"

  "I should rate it probable rather than possible," Sujic said.

  Bolan grinned. "Let's give it a try."

  A few hours later, his hair shaved back into a widow's peak and died a flaming red, his right shoe equipped with a protuberance that made it impossible not to limp, the warrior sat next to Sujic in a Tupolev jetliner, fastening his belt as they circled to land at a military airfield near the capital.

  They were met far out on the perimeter track by a Tatra staff car, which drove them recklessly through blinding rain to a command post trailer parked in woods between the field and the city. Here the Executioner was provided with clothes typical of the region: wool socks, a coarse gray turtleneck sweater and wide flannel pants with deep cuffs. Then they set off for Prague.

  They crossed the Vitava river by the Sverma Bridge, narrowly missed a late streetcar at the Na Prikopé intersection and swung into Wenceslas Square. The main drag glittered with light, from the intersection to the statue of Wenceslas on his iron horse, but there were very few people about. Soon the Tatra turned and threaded its way back toward the river among the narrow, cobbled streets of the old town.