The audience started going crazy.
Love smiled. “Nice.”
“Fuck you.” Bolan beckoned him. “Come within reach of these hands and watch what happens, you son of a bitch.”
Both men knew Bolan wanted Love to come in and take something terrible in exchange for taking the soldier down. Love started juking and jiving. It wasn’t quite the Ali shuffle, but it cost Bolan to keep his opponent in front of him, and he lost sovereignty over his spit line.
The Aryans lost their professional mien and screamed for blood.
“Fuck him up! Kill him! Kill him!”
Love raised his right foot for a leg kick. Bolan gritted his teeth and shuffled backward awkwardly, away from the threat.
For the first time pure venom dripped from Love’s lips as he pictured Bolan’s Waterloo perfectly in his mind. “Nice...”
Bolan took a big step forward and cocked his hands.
Love raised his own in defense.
The Executioner did his own Ali shuffle and switched from left to right foot forward. He cocked his hip and threw the hardest left round kick of his life. He hadn’t been able to sleep more than an hour or two at a time for the past twenty-four. So he had spent it painting coats of clear epoxy across the toes of his shoes, and while they dried he had painted coats inside. The epoxy was guaranteed to dry within six hours. During World War II the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA—had issued steel-toed dress shoes to its undercover agents with instructions on the worst places to apply them to a human body. Bolan had gotten four coats of epoxy in, both inside and out.
He drove the toe of his shoe into Love’s outer right thigh just above his knee.
The problem with epoxy resin was that it was brittle. Bolan felt the epoxy fracture, but the damage was done. Love gasped and staggered back with the impact. Bolan cocked his right hand for the kill. Love raised his own hands in a predictable high guard, and tottered on his remaining leg.
Bolan shifted his stance and threw his right round kick high.
The soldier’s homemade foot fortress dovetailed like a custom-made battering ram into Love’s left armpit. Sawyer Love’s face went white with shock and his jaw went slack.
There was a reason why, when humans had heart attacks, the first major sign was tingling down the left arm. The nerve bundles under the armpits were bad places to get hit. The human heart was on the left side of the body and the nerves there went straight to it. When martial arts had first become popular in the United States, in the fifties and sixties, most books published by the Asian masters incorporated a striking chart, and the effect of a hard strike deep into the left armpit was usually described as “possible death.” In modern martial arts circles it was debated whether this was hyperbole or myth.
Sawyer Love dropped to the concrete.
The crowd in Duivelstad turned into the coliseum of ancient Rome.
Pieces of clothing, including a white dress, and food were flung into the ring as tribute. Bolan raised his fists in victory for the cameras.
“Bring me a bigger one!”
The Aryans recovered from their shock, and flying folding chairs followed screams of hatred and rage. Everyone in the audience had been weapon-checked, but fists and folding chairs sufficed as the Hunger Games devolved into a bench-clearing brawl.
Zavala shouted a well-known refrain over a megaphone. “Tear gas and sting balls! Five! Four! Three...”
Schoenaur pointed his .357 Magnum revolver at Bolan’s head. “Stand down, Cooper!”
Bolan’s gaze narrowed. “Love needs a defibrillator right now.”
Schoenaur was clearly fighting his every instinct to shoot Bolan.
The soldier shouted above the noise like the sergeant he had once been. “Defib, Schoenaur! Now!”
Schoenaur was quite possibly the most corrupt correctional officer in the continental United States, but he was a trained professional and his training took over. “Zavala! AED ringside! Now!”
Bolan glanced over at Scott.
The Aryan Circle leader shook his head and cut his thumb across his throat, silently saying the soldier was dead.
Bolan forked his fingers at his eyes, shook his head and pointed back at Scott.
No, you.
Bolan buckled as he was hit with a Taser from behind.
The Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“OH...MY...GOD...” Barbara Price couldn’t believe her eyes. She had seen Bolan operate on satellite imaging and gray security camera footage. She had seen him in desperate battle in person, but those few times had been in the fog of war. This was her second and most brutal Mack Bolan pay-per-view. A man lay at his feet. Bolan raised his hands in victory as fan debris rained into the ring. A revolver held by a man whose face was just off camera rose toward his head over the razor wire. The soldier dropped to the floor as silver wires spun into his back.
Then the camera cut out.
Tokaido couldn’t contain himself. “Toe kick to the heart! I thought that was a myth!”
“What the hell is wrong with you!” Price shouted.
Tokaido searched for an answer that wouldn’t put him in the doghouse. “Barbara, like we won. Mack won.”
Kurtzman spoke quietly. “Barbara, he’s right. Mack just bought himself breathing room, and by your own recon Mack’s hurt badly. If he had lost, Love would have put him on a gurney and they would have had forty-eight hours to decide whether he lived or died, or done God knows what to him to extract information. Now, I don’t think they’ll dare mess with him until after your meeting on Wednesday. It’s worth celebrating, and you need to start thinking about your strategy for the visit.”
“You’re right.” Price slowly decompressed. “I just can’t stand watching it.”
“So don’t.”
“Last I heard we were helping Mack with this mission, and I’m the mission controller around here. I have to.”
Price squashed her emotions and squared her shoulders. “Aaron?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Let’s see it again. Frame by frame. There are definitely differences and new faces since the Tavo fight.”
“On it,” Kurtzman confirmed.
Chapter 13
C Block, Unit 12
BOLAN ATE TAPIOCA pudding in Marilyn and Black Widow’s cell and watched Team Cooper eat steak. Rudy, Patrick, Bobbie-John and the ladies gorged themselves. A half bottle of D Block, Chinese triad froth had appeared in Bolan’s cell by magic, and he concentrated on slowly ingesting the internal medicine and eating soft foods. Bolan was the hero of the hour in D-Town. Love had literally died at Bolan’s hands and required herculean efforts to resuscitate. The “toe of death” was already a thing of legend. The Mad Dog was currently on display in the infirmary next to the Todd, Rollin and Tucker.
Bolan had a nice little streak going.
He also felt like hell. The two kicks he had thrown had undone all the work the hit medicine had done for him. Everything had started swelling again, and his bruises once more throbbed down to the bone.
Still, victory was sweet.
The soldier’s every instinct told him that Link Whitmore was code source. Bolan looked up to see Kal leaning in the cell doorway. “A genuine toe kick to the heart. Man, you only read about that in old karate books. Hell, you don’t even read about it. That technique falls under the category of arcane reference.”
“Saved you a steak.”
Black Widow giggled, blushed and handed Kal a large foam container and a sweet tea. Kal opened the box and raised an eyebrow. “You saved me two steaks.”
“No, it’s a porterhouse,” Bolan said. “They took out the T-bones so we couldn’t shank anyone with them. According to rumor the salad isn’t anything to write home about, but you probab
ly won’t see hearts of romaine and baby spinach again for a while. I hear the baked potato is awesome.” He sighed and held up his pudding cup. “I can vouch for the tapioca.”
Kal folded himself into the lotus position on the floor and cracked his sweet tea. “Thank you, Cooper.”
“Thank you, Kal. Your help saved my life, and seeing you at ringside meant a lot. I owe you.”
“You do, and do you know how I got a seat?”
“You told the warden that if I lost you’d be Love’s next opponent.”
“That’s right.”
“And he told you that if I won you’d be my next opponent.”
“That’s right.” Kal looked at Rudy.
The hacker shook his head. “The cell isn’t wired.”
“God, I hope not!” Marilyn giggled.
Kal looked intently at Bolan. “Tell me it’s not going to come down to me and you.”
“It won’t come to that,” Bolan confirmed.
“And you know this because?”
“Because I’ll be dead or D-Town will be closed for business before that ever happens.”
The cell went silent.
Kal grunted suspiciously and began sporking into his steak.
Rudy’s fork hovered over his baked potato. “You really mean that, don’t you?”
Bolan ate pudding. “I do.”
The Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia
KURTZMAN STARED AT a very thick, inconclusive and highly redacted file. Lincoln Whitmore was a mystery.
“The man’s a total enigma,” Tokaido opined.
The computer wizard reserved comment. The man had served as a forward observer pilot in Vietnam, reaching the rank of first lieutenant. Whitman had won the Distinguished Flying Cross and earned the Purple Heart in the same mission, being severely wounded when his aircraft took bad flak, but still managing to locate a downed pilot. He had then loitered, using his marking rockets, as he and his crew fired their personal weapons out the windows and doors to hold off the enemy.
After two tours Whitman had gone on to fly for Air America, the only known intelligence agency owned and operated airline, where his record was highly redacted. Two years before the hostilities in Vietnam ceased he had apparently fallen off the planet.
“Air America.” Tokaido was excited. “This guy is old-school cold warrior.”
Kurtzman nodded. Air America had flown money, guns, drugs, commandos, informants, prisoners and anything else that needed to be moved under the radar everywhere from the capital cities to the darkest corners of Southeast Asia. Many of Air America’s pilots and air crewmen had gotten involved in some very bad extracurricular activities. Some had been swallowed by the darkness and never come home. Others had brought some very bad business home with them.
Whitmore had come home, gone to college and gotten his degree from MIT in the fledgling industry of computer science, and then joined the CIA as a legitimate analyst with a desk, a necktie and an ID badge. He’d quit the Company in less than four years for undisclosed reasons, and gone into private work as a computer programmer.
That was when trouble began to find him.
Whitmore’s rap sheet had had the holy hell redacted out of it, as well. The recurring theme was drug trafficking and possession beefs. Throughout the late 1980s he had beaten them all, and many of the cases had been mysteriously dropped. Then in 1992 he had gotten stung in a drug deal and done a nickel in Florida. This was followed by two possession counts and two more stretches. He’d moved to New England, and at the dawn of the new century Whitmore had fallen afoul of Pennsylvania’s three-strikes law and had been sentenced to the stretch that would most likely see him die behind Duivelstad’s walls.
“What do you think?” Tokaido asked.
“I think at some point in the seventies Whitmore was transporting the sweet stuff for Air America, or on his own time. I think he never quite recovered from his injuries and I think he got a taste for it, and it’s a taste he never shook.”
“Getting high on your own supply,” Tokaido quipped. “It’s the road to ruin.”
“It’s the road to D-Town, anyway,” Kurtzman agreed. “If you’re disciplined, heroin is probably the easiest addiction to hide from the outside world.”
“Until you make a mistake,” Tokaido commented. “And Whitmore was working for the CIA. They got some people over there with very sharp noses.”
“That’s how I see it. They let him leave quietly, and because of his past service—or things he knew, or both—they got some of his cases overturned or dropped. Then at a certain point they cut their losses and set Whitmore loose.”
“So we have an ex-CIA agent-computer expert engaging in shenanigans in the library.”
“Shenanigans is a mild way of putting writing code for the Aryan Circle behind the walls of Duivelstad. Most white supremacists are hardly worth the skin they inhabit, but the Aryan Circle count some very bad people with some very nasty habits among their ranks. Homeland Security has been eyeballing them awfully hard for the past few years. From what I’ve gleaned there have been rumors and chatter for months that they are up to something very big. I think what Mack has found confirms it.”
“So what are we going to do about it?”
“Well, until we get another love letter from Mr. Rudolpho, I suggest we work on breaking Whitmore’s code.”
The Library, Duivelstad
BOLAN CHECKED HIS portfolio. The code informed him that the Farm’s bottom line was that Lincoln Whitmore had a very high order of probability of being Duivelstad public enemy number one. There was also a very high probability that he was in cahoots with the Aryan Circle, and they were up to something very bad. These were things Bolan had already suspected. A consensus of opinion was nice, but the soldier had hoped for something a little more conclusive.
Rudy rounded the table and spoke low. “I might have something, but I’m not sure.”
Bolan slid his eyes over to the circulation desk. Renzo was laughing at something Whitmore had said. He was a charming old son of a bitch, Bolan had to give him that. “What?”
“I was working on ‘Jersey.’ The President will be in New Jersey at the end of the week, and it was close in the code stream, real close, but it kept not working. And then I realized I was forcing it.”
“And then what did you realize?”
“That if I took out the h the word Jericho worked perfectly.”
“And the walls came tumbling down?”
“Yeah, and when I plugged that in it gave me more words.”
“The symbolism seems a little obvious,” Bolan remarked.
“And Link is an old man, institutionalized, a drug addict with an inconsistent supply stream. He never expected to have his code discovered, much less broken, and he likes the symbolism.”
Bolan looked over at the ancient, incarcerated cold warrior behind the circulation desk flirting with a beautiful woman he could never have. “There is that.”
“So you like it? ‘And it came to pass at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city. So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets, and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat.’”
“You’re good,” Bolan said.
“The Aryans will shout, but who’s going to blow the horn and tumble the walls of D-Town down? You think the Aryans have a tunnel?”
Bolan decided to show a card. “The Puerto Ricans have the only tunnel in Duivelstad that goes anywhere.”
Rudy was incredulous. “You whipped Tavo and Billy the C gave you his tunnel?”
“No, the C doesn’t know I know, yet.”
“So how do you kn
ow the PR’s have a tunnel?”
Bolan raised an eyebrow.
Rudy sighed. If asked, he would have said nothing his cellmate did or said surprised him anymore. Save that it would be a lie. The man just kept topping himself. “Yeah, whatever. So if the Aryans don’t have a tunnel, then how do they tumble down the walls of D-Town?”
Bolan gave Rudy the eyebrow again.
Rudy sighed when saw it. “They have a bomb.”
“I’m thinking maybe more than one, if they want to get out of here and kill the President.”
“Jesus. So what do we do?
“I need you to directly contact my people ASAP and get me their full report, and tell them what we think and see if that generates any leads.”
“I can’t see how any of that will generate any proof on the bad guys.”
“I don’t need proof, I just need enough to point me in the right direction, or enough to start something and force their hand.”
The Warden’s Office
“HE KILLED LOVE,” The veins of Schoenaur’s huge wrist and right hand danced and crawled as he methodically squeezed a racquet ball. Since the infamous Cell Block C handshake, Schoenaur had gone back into training. Since having his nose broken he had redoubled his fast-draw practice in the bathroom mirror every morning. “Killed him with his toe.”
“How is Prisoner Love?” the warden asked.
Zavala answered. “According to the doc, Love suffered a massive heart failure induced by violent external trauma. Said he’s never seen the like.”
“And his ring career?”
Zavala shook his head. “Over.”
Schoenaur scowled. “We gave you Cooper on a platter, Force. What the hell happened?”
“Cooper killed Love with his toe. I don’t think anyone could have predicted that.” Scott regarded Schoenaur drily. “And for that matter, I was under the impression Cooper was pissing fire, shitting ketchup and could barely walk, much less wield death with both feet.”
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