Pendleton, Don - Executioner 17 - Jersey Guns

by Pendleton, Don

  The mob, too, liked their comforts. Even on kill missions.

  He let them come, and watched the two lead vehicles jounce into that clearing and tear off on opposing circular paths toward the far end. The third car was a standard crew wagon. It came on through the slot and halted just inside; doors popped open; energetic men found their feet and their weapons in a quick debarkation and an even quicker fanning out across that clearing.

  Then the camper came down, halting right in the slot and squatting there with lights ablaze.

  Pretty damned confident, Bolan was thinking.

  Still, damned effective. He'd had a hard time counting heads and keeping track of the manoeuvres as well.

  He had actually seen twelve heads. There were probably at least twenty, not counting whoever was in that command van.

  All four vehicles had left their headlamps on high beams, and they were taking up positions to flood that entire clearing with light.

  Bolan grinned and leaned into the first LAW.

  He lined up the pop sights onto the steering wheel of that glass-fronted van just as an excited shout from down by the campfire advised everyone present, "Here they are, both dead!"

  "So where's their car?" This, an amplified voice of authority from a loudspeaker mounted somewhere on the van. The man was in there, some man with rank.

  And the dismal reply from the campfire: "Forget it, the guy's gone. I guess he's got their car now."

  "Correction," Bolan sighed as he squeezed the little missile out of the tube. "The guy has not gone."

  The AP rocket whizzed along its beeline of destruction and impacted precisely where Bolan had sent her, and she came in with a happy hurrah and a mushroom of flames as glass, metal, and all else in that immediate vicinity stood aside, and departed, and gave over the night to this ill-behaved and uninvited guest.

  Bolan abandoned the throwaway tube and took up his next fire drop as panic erupted down there, and screams, shouts, and startled commands rushed in to fill the void.

  He hit them with a heavy grenade, dead centre in the campfire, following immediately with another directly on the front bumper of the crew wagon; and now the pandemonium was in full sway.

  "Turn off them goddamn lights!"

  "Oh, shit, shit . . . help me!"

  "Boss! Boss! Al is blowed all to hell and I . . ." "Up there! The bastard's up . . ."

  Bolan was into the night-time sniper, jaw tightened and twitching as he bent to the infrared night scope, and the big piece began jolting his shoulder as scurrying men stumbled into his cross hairs and catapulted out of them.

  There were no blazing headlamps down there now—just blazes period as here and there scattered firebrands from the campfire plus small fires in the two rearward vehicles lent ghastly relief to the ever-growing carnage of the night.

  Bolan's sniper was cracking methodically in evenly spaced retorts to the chattering of automatic weapons off there in the darkness. The invisible infrared floods were doing their bit for the moment, painting the scene ghoulish as viewed through the sniper scope. Bullets sprayed the trees behind him, chewed turf and chipped rock all below him; still the big piece continued its chilling toll of the night, while men screamed, and wondered aloud how he was spotting them, and pleaded for assistance from gods who knew not their names, and simply yelled foul imprecations upon their fate.

  And, after a while, Bolan switched off his infrareds, stowed his gear, and made his withdrawal in an eerie silence.

  He stopped briefly at a service station on Route Thirty-three, stepped onto the service ramp in full combat regalia, and suggested to two pop-eyed attendants that someone call the police.

  He swung immediately northward from there, found the little state road that connects Mercerville to Edinburg, and made fast tracks toward the sea.

  So, okay. It had been hellish, but not entirely damn-foolish. Maybe he would succeed in drawing some of the opposing guns this way.

  So call it eight hundred Jersey guns waiting for him now.

  He smiled faintly into the enshrouding night. The odds were coming down.

  7 THE GAME NAMED

  He had been running the back roads, carefully avoiding major routes and intersections, and his instincts had drawn him past the toll road at Cranbury and on south of Prospect Plains, from where he hoped to angle on eastward to Freehold, thence on to the coast via Neptune.

  This would set him down roughly midway between New York and Atlantic City, with an endless selection of small coastal towns from which to work another angle of escape.

  Twice he had narrowly avoided a confrontation with police authority, and twice he had sent up a shaky thanks to whatever powers controlled chance and circumstance.

  Running head-on into elements of the outfit was one thing; into the cops, quite another. Mack Bolan did not fight cops. They were "soldiers of the same side." His only defence from that quarter lay in studious avoidance.

  And now he was thinking that it would be wise to give the enemy—and the police—some reaction time vis-à-vis the hit near Mercerville. Already, it seemed, he was encountering cross-currents or pursuit in that direction. A wise warrior knew when to strike, when to retreat, and when to simply lie low.

  Thus it was that the Executioner elected to seek a snug harbour for a brief period of détente. It was a matter of pure coincidence that he found that harbour just a few miles to the north of the Tassily farm, near a sleeping village called Tennent.

  It was a trailer camp with a weathered sign announcing a rather unemotional welcome for "Campers and Overnighters—All Hook-ups Available."

  The place was all but deserted; apparently its season had not yet arrived.

  It boasted a public rest room and shower, an all- night Laundromat, a couple of picnic tables just off the roadway, several rows of unoccupied trailer spaces, and a small office building with a single dull bulb over the door with instructions to "Ring for Service."

  All Bolan desired was a secluded place to park awhile—but not too secluded—and he felt no need to "ring" for anything. He angled the vehicle in the rear of the public buildings, appropriately positioned for a quick out, and spent ten minutes or so studying the detailed maps that had come with the car. One of these was singularly revealing, seeming to pinpoint "patrol zones" and specific rendezvous areas.

  He tucked the intelligence away for possible future consideration, loath now to abandon the plan he already had cooking.

  Then he spotted the public phone booth in the shadows of the Laundromat, briefly debated a call to New York . . . and lost the debate.

  He pulled the car closer to the phone booth and a few minutes later was speaking into a connection to a fashionable hotel in midtown Manhattan. "This is Al La Mancha," he told the familiar , voice at the far end. "I gotta talk to Mr. Turrin; it's very important." "This is Turrin," came the cautious reply. "Who'd you say that is?" "Al La Mancha. Listen, this is pretty hot stuff."

  "Uh . . . look, Al. I was just going out. Why don't you try me in a little while, at, uh . . ."

  It was a familiar routine. These contacts with the most wanted dude in the country were potentially disastrous for "the man from Mass" who rode two steeds through the jungle called life. To preclude any deadly compromise of his cover, as well as to

  shield him from possible official embarrassment at the other side, the friendship with Mack Bolan was necessarily a furtive thing. Early in the wars, therefore, they had worked out the contact routine.

  Bolan knew that Turrin was at this moment digging for the number of a nearby public telephone, which he quickly found and relayed to "La Mancha"—a sort of comic-relief code name for Mack Bolan.

  Early in his wars, some segments of the press had taken to referring to Bolan as "a latter-day Don Quixote"—the fabled windmill-slayer of another grim era of man's misadventures. Therefore,"the man from La Mancha."

  Precisely five minutes following that hang-up, Bolan had another quick connection.

  "That you, La Mancha?
" asked the voice of the truest friend the Executioner had ever known. "It's me. Where are you, Leo?"

  "Downstairs, basement lobby. It's okay. What's your situation?"

  "About normal," Bolan replied, trying to keep the voice light. Leo Turrin was a worrier.

  "Then you haven't been hearing the words I've been getting," came the taut response.

  "I'm not going to ask you where you are, and I don't want you to tell me. Just tell me this: are you anywhere near Mercerville?"

  Bolan chuckled as he replied, "The word's out, then."

  "Yeah, and so is everything else," was the wry rejoinder. "You really know how to stir the pot, Sarge. I hope you hit and ran like hell."

  "I did."

  Turrin sighed heavily, and Bolan heard the snap of a cigarette lighter close to the mouthpiece. "It came as quite a shock. The heads all thought you were down and just awaiting the final count. Tell the truth, I'd started wondering along those lines myself until your friend contacted me today. By the way—"

  "He's okay, Leo. But I hope you covered your end."

  "Oh, sure. I caught the coded flicker and knew right away he was a stand-in. Don't worry, he never knew who he was talking to. Anyway, what I was about to say . . . a guy by the name of Tassily walked into a state police substation tonight and Is this the same guy, Sarge?"

  Very quietly Bolan said, "Same guy, Leo."

  "Well, don't sound so . . . Hear me out. The guy claims he's been a prisoner of the Executioner these past few days—he and his sister—on a chicken farm or something they have down mid-state. The Jersey fuzz don't know whether to buy his story or not.

  They're out at that farm right now, sifting the place down for some back-up. Anyway, Tassily says you're springing southward. Claims you've been studying maps of lower Jersey, particularly that area down below Wharton State Forest. Says he thinks your ultimate goal is Delaware Bay, where he hints you've got a boat stashed."

  Bolan was chuckling now. "Some kind of guy," was all he said.

  "Yeah, well, that's privately the way Hal and I look at it. We guessed the guy is trying to lead the chase down a dead end."

  "You're in present contact with Hal Brognola?" "Yeah. He's pushing the federal troops, from here in New York for the moment."

  "Give him my best. And tell him not to crowd me too much for now. I have plenty to occupy my time as it is."

  The undercover fed was chuckling. "You know how Hal feels about you. But there are plenty of mixed emotions there, buddy. He's got about a dozen top-level bureaucrats just laying all over him. If they ever get the notion that he's dogging it, even a little . . . well, you know."

  "Yeah, I know. I respect the guy for doing his job, Leo. Well . . . I better—"

  "Wait, don't be so touchy. Listen, now, nobody is offering you a license or anything like that, but . . . well, Hal is advising the local officials to buy Tassily's story. It's as good a lead as any they've had. Also, Hal threw in that bit of past history where you seem to favour escapes by sea. He cited the escape at Los Angeles, the one at Miami, in France, the recent one down in Washington where you had a boat stashed on the Potomac. . . ."

  Bolan sighed and agreed. "I guess it fits."

  "Sure it does. Simple police logic. And the hit at Mercerville fits like a hand in the glove. The Jersey troopers are considering rushing everything they can spare into a coverage along U. S. 206 South. That's the fast route to Wharton. They're spread pretty thin already. So ... But I guess they'll buy Tassily. Need I say more?"

  "There's one very large fly," Bolan quietly decided.

  "And what is that?"

  "The boys won't buy Tassily. They've been laying over that farm like a mother hen all this week. They've seen the guy going and coming freely, and they were in there several times on a shakedown. His story won't hold water in their bag, that's sure.

  You'd better get the guy and his sister out of there, Leo. Protective custody or whatever it takes to keep them covered until this thing blows over."

  "Yes, I see your point. Okay. I'll get on that as soon as I hang up."

  "Tell me something, Leo. With cops crossing tracks all over this damn state, how is the mob operating so openly? They're running regular armed convoys around here."

  Turrin released a hissing sigh, and Bolan knew that he was in for a classroom discussion. "You've never spent much time in Jersey," the undercover man pointed out. "You couldn't know well, it's a most unusual state, let's put it that way. The present administration is going through all manner of nightmares trying to correct the . . . well, it's just a horrendous mess. The problem is as much geography as anything. The whole place lies in the shadow of New York and Pennsylvania—almost completely overshadowed. The greater population is massed along those borders, with Philly and New York City providing more of a swing to the state than anything Jersey can get together within her own borders. That urban mass up around Newark and Jersey City is actually feudal states within their own right—and that's just an accentuation of the general problem everywhere in the state. The corruption is just . . . well, don't let me start on that. Just get this understanding, buddy. You are in the heartland, the mob's green acres, and if they want to chase you around in armed convoys, don't think for a minute there's anyone to really oppose them."

  "Okay. That fits my reading."

  "Sarge, there's not even a national television outlet into that state. The people of Jersey get their contact with the outer world via Philly, Bethlehem, and New York City. They don't even have a newspaper with state-wide circulation."

  "Yeah, I get that. A state without a state. You say the present governor is—"

  "He's trying," Turrin replied, sighing. "But then, there's all that cloud from beyond the borders, and the very real political power of the city-states."

  "Well. Maybe I'll look around some while I'm here."

  "Good Christ! I was afraid you were starting to lean that way! Perish the very thought, Sarge."

  "I hear that Augie Marinello is leading the charge this time."

  "He is. From here, though, on his fat ass." "I guess he's a bit unhappy over Philly."

  "In spades. By the way, you can forget the gradigghia, for now anyway. Augie got your message from Sicily. He put out an edict yesterday. No more imported guns. He was simply appalled by the slaughter in the Old Country."

  "I see. What you are telling me—"

  "I'm telling you that you did a good job in Sicily. Next time why don't you just take a quiet ocean cruise."

  "Okay," Bolan replied, sighing. He lit a cigarette and listened to Leo Turrin's tight breathing for a charged moment; then he said, "I'd rather go into an operation with a bit more visibility ... but .. I guess I'm here, aren't I?"

  "Aw, no, Sarge. No. Come back if you want, and I'll help you set up some solid Intel. But not now. There's just too much working against you. Get out and take some R and R."

  "It just tears my guts, Leo. To think of these guys running around like savages, lord of the domain, doing whatever they damn please."

  "I know how you feel. Hell. But you've survived this far on cool, Mack. Go on surviving, damnit. We need you. This whole dog-eat-dog world needs you. Hey. I can talk to you like that, can't I?"

  Bolan chuckled. "Sure. What's happening up north?"

  "Newark-Jersey City? About two hundred guns are happening, I'd say. Manning the ramparts into New York. Don't try it."

  "I get the feeling you're nudging me somewhere, Leo."

  "Try Atlantic City, Sarge."

  "Why?"

  "Because there's a boat headed that way. It's the Lotta Linda. Off the boardwalk, north. Steel Pier. Anytime after midnight."

  Bolan chuckled again. "You're so damn cute. Well, I'll give it a look. Thanks, Leo. Uh, don't forget the chicken ranch."

  "I'll get right on it. Stay hard, man."

  "Name of the game," Bolan said quietly, and hung up.

  He signaled the operator and settled his overtime charges, then returned to his vehicle
, deep in thought.

  The name of the game, he thought, wryly, was beat it!

  But . . . he was just a few miles north of the farm.

  If there was the slightest chance of ...

  After all his pains to cover his tracks around that place . .. Well, Bruno couldn't be expected to know. It was all Bolan's doing, anyway. He'd leaked in there and talked the guy out of passive living, and if the guy was in a mess now, then it was Bolan's mess, not Bruno's. Certainly not Sara's.

  Some nightmares had an uncomfortable propensity for coming true.

  And Bolan just could not shake from his head that latest twist in skin-crawling dreams—that one wherein a chicken ranch becomes a horror-farm of screaming turkeys.