Bolan gave a show of cracking his knuckles for the crowd, and waited on Sawyer “Mad Dog” Love.
The soldier’s spirits sank and the crowd erupted as Tavo Salcido burst through the door throwing Puerto Rican gang signs, pounding his fist over his heart in solidarity and roaring boasts and invectives in Spanish to the rafters. Bolan examined his unexpected opponent. The powers that be had groomed Tavo for the Hunger Games, and he had been given extra food and time to train. He wore no shirt and his chiseled physique radiated strength, speed and health. He was an athlete who, despite his circumstances, was at the peak of condition. He held up taped fists to the adulation of the crowd.
Bolan had made a plan for dealing with the Mad Dog. His plan had gone right out the window.
Zavala gloated. “Win or lose, hard-ass? You lose.”
The guard was right. Warden Linder had thrown Bolan a curve ball. Salcido was one of Duivelstad’s few genuine celebrities, and despite being a cocky bastard he was also friendly, handsome, always joking and popular. Crippling or killing him wouldn’t win Bolan any friends. Letting Salcido pound his skull in wouldn’t help Bolan with his mission. Things had just gone FUBAR.
Black Widow jumped up and down, shrieking like a banshee and clapping for Salcido. Most of the crowd joined her. Despite Bolan’s showing against the Todd and Schoenaur, Tavo Salcido was clearly the crowd favorite.
He entered the ring strutting like a rooster, and Zavala closed the cage behind him. The Puerto Rican shook his head happily. “You heard my girl, ese! Tonight, your pink ass goes down!”
The crowd cheered.
“This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me,” Bolan replied.
The crowd jeered and whistled.
Salcido looked at Bolan and sighed. “I like you, Cooper. I really do, but you’re going down tonight, and for the thousands of fans watching at home, I gotta take you down hard.”
The soldier gave the boxer credit for seeming to be genuinely sympathetic to his plight. And Bolan knew Salcido was right. The fans who were paying to watch this wanted a hard fight, or failing that, something so drastic they would leap out of their seats at the horror and rewind it a hundred times to catch every nuance of the human destruction.
Bolan smiled and spoke low just for Salcido. “Out of respect for Billy the C and the kindness he showed me, I’m going to take it easy on you, hermano.”
Salcido’s eyes flared.
The crowd went quiet as Schoenaur raised his revolver. The skylights rang as he pulled the trigger. Bolan recognized the sound of a blank. Salcido had been here before. According to Rudy, the man had won three fights to win the right to face Love.
Bolan had been tossed into the caldron and thrown in Salcido’s way.
The Puerto Rican came straight in with his left hand jab working like a piston and his right hand ready. He was a welterweight, but he had hands the size of a superheavy and had earned his way up as a knockout artist. Bolan wanted none of it and backpedaled. The crowd booed. Salcido cut off the ring like the expert he was, and Bolan felt storm fencing yielding against his back and razor wire cutting into his shoulders all too soon.
Salcido went to work.
Bolan wasn’t a boxer. He knew how to cover up, but Salcido had dissected pros. His taped fist slammed into Bolan’s biceps to crush the power out of his arms. A left hand slipped past the soldier’s guard and the crowd screamed as Bolan’s head jerked with the impact. The soldier couldn’t help but raise his hands. Salcido’s fists instantly flew beneath Bolan’s elbows and dug into his ribs as if he were digging a grave. More than one ally and adversary had remarked that if you blinked when you fought Bolan, you died in the dark. But Salcido was younger and faster. He had what they called in the blood sports “heavy hands.” He was blindingly fast and his blows fell like it was raining hammers. Salcido’s right hand skidded off Bolan’s forearm and nonetheless skewed the soldier’s vision as it connected. The crowd roared. Razor wire sliced into Bolan’s skin as he leaned back and jinked right to stay out of range of the Puerto Rican’s fist.
Bolan had exactly two heartbeats to admire the artistry as Salcido did the Ali shuffle and switched to southpaw. It turned out that the man was left-handed. The soldier’s vision narrowed down to a dark tunnel lit by purple sparks as his adversary’s left-hand lead shot through his guard like a cannonball and crashed into his jaw. The crowd screamed when Bolan buckled and fell to hands and knees.
Salcido threw his fists up in victory. “They said he took out the Todd! They said Kal respects his shit! They said he was the shit!” Salcido grinned triumphantly at the Black Widow. “You and me and Marilyn makes three, baby!”
Black Widow pantomimed a sexual act, to the delight of the fight fans. Salcido turned back to Bolan. “Now, get up, motherfucker! Get up and—”
The soldier rose, spit blood and raised his hands.
Salcido took in Bolan, the look in his eyes and his current condition. The boxer lowered his chin and raised his fists. “Well, all right then. Let’s finish this.”
Bolan’s bell had been rung more times than he liked to think about. It was a credit card that was going to have to be paid off sooner rather than later. That didn’t matter. This night there was a battle that had to be won. Bolan stepped forward, put up his hands and whipped his right shin into Salcido’s thigh just above the knee. He took a hard jab to the chin for his effort, gritted his teeth and slammed his shinbone into the back of his adversary’s knee.
Salcido staggered backward.
Bolan bore in.
He faked a right-hand lead and the Puerto Rican couldn’t help his instinct to raise his hands.
Bolan put every ounce of strength into his round kick into Salcido’s quadriceps. The man groaned as he took the mother of all Charlie horses and fell back into the fencing and wire, hopping on one leg. Bolan stepped in and threw a right-hand lead that crashed into Salcido’s mouth like a train wreck.
Salcido rubbernecked with the blow and buckled back into the fencing. He lay back and made a pretense of rope-a-doping.
Bolan slammed his shin again into Salcido’s blackening thigh.
The man sagged into the links. Bolan charged and threw his shoulder into Salcido’s torso like a fullback breaking a tackle. Fence links rattled as the boxer bounced off the barrier and flew forward against his will.
Bolan used his opponent’s momentum, slamming a hand into Salcido’s throat and the other into the boxer’s crotch as he came off the fence. Bolan roared with effort as he pressed Salcido over his head. The soldier lost the momentum and toppled forward to dump his load. The Puerto Rican went through wire and fell at the feet of Marilyn and Black Widow, wreathed in bloodied, sprung coils of razor-sharp steel.
For one pregnant second the crowd was stunned into silence.
“Send me a bigger one!” Bolan roared. He spun and pointed his finger at Scott. “Send me the biggest you’ve got!”
The crowd went mad. Bolan shot his fists skyward in victory. The chant of “Coo-per! Coo-per! Coo-per!” coalesced and began to shake the gymnasium.
The Aryans began chanting “Love! Love! Love!” in response, but Bolan’s new fans were handily winning the team-spirit war.
Bolan spit more blood and held up his bloodstained hands for the cameras.
He hoped the show had earned him some library privileges.
The Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia
THE FEED ENDED.
Kurtzman was stunned. Price was outraged at the gladiatorial combat she had just witnessed. “Did you see that? It’s like an arena in ancient Rome!”
Once Delahunt had briefed Kurtzman’s team, locating the Hunger Games feed had presented no problem. The computer team leader had been recording the fight, and he clicked back to the start. This time he kept his eyes off Bolan and his opponent and watched th
e periphery to see what he could pick up of the crowd, the surroundings and any other clues. He and Akira Tokaido would parse it frame by frame until the wee hours—Hunt Wethers was at a conference—but Kurtzman wanted another viewing to let his second impressions sink in.
“Oh!” Tokaido gasped as the soldier’s first kick thudded home in the rerun. “That’s going to leave a mark!”
Price scowled at the hacker ferociously.
“That’s our Mack!” Delahunt’s eyes glittered with cupidity as Bolan pressed Salcido over his head and threw him through the razor wire.
The four of them watched with the same awe they had the first time as Bolan whirled to the camera, bared his teeth in a bloodstained leer of triumph and called for a bigger one.
“He’s like some hero out of myth,” Tokaido enthused. “Defying the gods.”
“Don’t you mean someone out of one of your first-person shooter games?” Price muttered. “Tell me we have enough now to take down Linder and close Duivelstad for good.”
“Oh yeah.” Tokaido nodded without taking his eyes off the screen. “We can easily prove the feed came from D-Town.”
“We have him on trafficking in blood sports, conspiracy, cruel and unusual.” Kurtzman restarted the clip. “I can think off the top of my head of a hundred laws he’s broken.”
“So?”
“So Mack didn’t go in there to break up the Hunger Games and close Duivelstad. There’s something bigger going on. Mack thinks it’s going down soon. If we have the Feds raid the place, and Linder lawyers up, the guards all say talk to my union rep, and the inmates all get transferred and scattered to the four corners of the United States while it turns into a giant jurisdictional fight. The fact is we don’t know what we’re looking for, and that means there is a very real possibility that we won’t recognize it when it slips through our fingers. The other thing is that Mack hasn’t asked for us to come in, or for extraction.” The feed stopped on Mack Bolan with his fists raised in brutal dominance. “And if he wanted that, he would have figured out a way to tell us right there.”
Price was far from pleased. “So we just sit and wait.”
“No,” Kurtzman replied. “We let the man work.”
Warden’s Office
“DID YOU SEE that?” Warden Linder asked.
“I was right there at ringside,” Scott replied. “What did the fight fans have to say about it?”
“Same as always, the fight was too short. A few aficionados thought it was a little too boxy and kickboxy. They went berserk when Cooper gorilla-slammed Tavo through the wire.”
“So they want to see more of Cooper.”
“They’re clamoring for it. We’ll make a killing on Cooper versus Love.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“You saw what he did to Tavo,” Linder said. “You’re not worried about it?”
“No,” Scott scoffed. “Tavo’s a boxer, good one, but a boxer, and not a bare knuckle one. To be honest, he never stood a chance. The only reason Cooper has a mark on him at all is because he tried to take our Olympic contender down easy. He ate a few fists for the camera, and so that he could take Tavo down without crippling or killing him.”
“You think Sawyer can take him?”
“You know, I’ve been wondering about that after Cooper shanked Rollin with his fingers in the yard. Normally, I’d said yes.”
“But?”
“But Cooper took out the Todd.”
Warden Linder was surprised. “You don’t think Love could’ve taken the Todd?”
“Love could’ve take the Todd apart, but it would have cost him about a pound of flesh to do it, and he’d be in the infirmary getting rabies shots. Cooper walked out of the House of Todd without a mark on him.”
“So what are you saying?”
“My lad Love is U.S., Grade A, number-one brute. But Cooper, that man is brutal. Love knows enough to protect his eyes and his nuts in the Hunger Games while he’s breaking his man down. We’ve seen him do it half a dozen times. He’s owned that pit since the first day he stepped inside it. But this Cooper knows shit, nasty shit, like the kind of shit where he pulls a vein out of your neck and shows it to you while you lose control of all your bodily functions.”
“Well, your man Love is taking on Cooper next Friday. I’ve got backers in Tokyo and Singapore putting up seven figure numbers for the fight.”
“And what are you going to do if Cooper wins, Warden?”
“I don’t know, try to coerce Kal into being his next opponent? What are you going to do, Force?”
Scott frowned. “I believe a best-case scenario for both of us is that Cooper loses, and loses bad. Like to the tune of Love putting him in a wheelchair, but letting Cooper keeps his eyes, his tongue and enough brains left in his head for the Feds if they still have any use for him.”
“I agree, but how do we make that happen?”
“Love will do his part.”
“What about Cooper? You think he’s going to lay down for that? The only leverage anyone has over him is his wife, and according to the Fed lady she’s in protective custody. I don’t know if I have the juice to find her, much less before the fight, and the paying public wants this weekend’s Friday night fight at the Hunger Games to be the best ever.”
“There’s one way I can think of to make Cooper take his trip to the woodshed, and it won’t be willingly.”
“How’s that?”
“The new meat in the Hunger Games needs tenderizing before you throw him in the fire.”
Linder smiled as he saw it perfectly in his mind. “I’ll put Schoenaur on it.”
Chapter 9
“YOU GOT LIBRARY privileges,” Rudy confirmed.
Bolan lay on Rudy’s bunk because climbing up into his own was too painful. In the meantime he reaped the rewards of winning the Hunger Games. He laid his face in ice packs while Marilyn massaged his back. Before she had murdered her boyfriend with a meat cleaver, she had paid for her surgeries as a celebrity look-alike masseuse who specialized in happy endings. Bolan was grateful for hands even more powerful than Delahunt’s, and that nothing untoward was pressing into the small of his back. Black Widow apparently brewed the best coffee in D-Town and the smell that came from the pot on the hot plate she had brought with her sent Bolan’s salivary glands into overdrive.
She kept up a steady patter. “Oh, sugar! When you said bring me a bigger one, you won me over!”
The name Hunger Games wasn’t just window dressing. Two pizzas and two buckets of chicken with biscuits, coleslaw, and macaroni and cheese had come with the winning. Bolan was spreading the wealth. Patrick and Black Widow were stuffing themselves, and Rudy beelined for the chicken bucket. Bolan lifted his head. “Hey, Blondie?”
“Hmm?” Marilyn responded.
“Hold that thought.”
Marilyn slid off and joined Rudy at the trough. Bolan went over to the cornucopia with a disposable plate and took out a few morsels and a spork. “Be right back.” He went to the neighboring cell and stepped inside.
Kal lowered a dog-eared book and shook his head sadly. “I told you not to enter my cell without permission, Cooper.” He put his book aside and rose.
“But I have a Wonka Golden Ticket,” Bolan protested. He brandished the spoils he had held behind his back.
Kal stared very long and hard at an original recipe chicken breast and a biscuit sitting on top of a half pint of mac and cheese.
“You were cool to me when you didn’t have to be, Kal.” Bolan held out the food. “This is a one-time thank-you and propers. You don’t owe me nothing.”
Kal sighed once again, as if he was doing something against his better judgment. “This is becoming a habit, and a bad one.” He took the food and nodded at his bunk. “Have a seat. I allow myself some sweet tea fr
om the commissary on Saturdays. You want some?”
“I have coffee.”
“I know, I smelled it.”
Bolan raised his voice. “Widow, baby? Would you bring Kal some coffee?”
Black Widow squealed.
Kal looked as if he was starting to have a headache. He tore into the mac and cheese with determination. Black Widow came in oohing and ahhing and gasping at everything she saw. Her unheard-of trip into Kalville would be all over D-Town within hours. She stopped short of curtsying before Duivelstad’s resident tower of Black Power. “Here, Kal. I didn’t know how you take it. Do you—”
Kal visibly struggled to be polite. “Black is fine. You’re very kind, thank you.”
Black Widow giggled and handed Bolan his. “Here you go, Coopy.”
Bolan winked.
Black Widow blushed and turned to leave. “You boys have a nice little sit-down.”
Kal’s knuckles creaked around his spork.
Bolan sipped coffee and watched Kal. The longtime man wasn’t forcing himself to eat, he was deliberating forcing himself to ignore every other factor and enjoy it. Kal scraped the foam plate clean, dropped the whitened bones on it and licked his fingers.
“Thank you, Cooper.”
“You’re welcome.”
Kal sipped his coffee. His eyebrows rose.
Bolan nodded. “They say she brews the best in the joint.”
“No one says ‘joint’ anymore, Cooper.”
“Sorry, the overwhelming majority of lockups I’ve known have been in foreign countries.”
“Why do I have no trouble believing that?”
“No idea.”
“You know what your problem is?”
Bolan spread his hands. “I’m riddled with them. Which one do you have in mind?”
Kal’s eyes narrowed. “I believe you can dig this, I am going to explain it to you. Once. Remember that fortress of light you mentioned?”
Prison Code Page 9