The hit on McCullough seemed to provide one such moment—and one that held much more dramatic possibilities than the original plan. So Bolan was “playing the ear”—which, simply translated, meant that he was following finely developed instincts and hoping for the best.
Instinct can take the warrior only so far, though. The rest must come from that combination of science, art, and heart that produces the superior warrior—and Bolan was aware of that fact, also.
So it was not a psychopath filled with blood-lust who tracked that hit car into the Topanga Canyon wilds on Terrible Tuesday. It was a scientist and artist with a warrior’s heart, sallying forth to bait the dragon in its lair.
The hell of it was that he did not even know what the dragon looked like.
CHAPTER 3
MISTY
The track had swung south at the upper western edge of Los Angeles, following Topanga Canyon Boulevard, a rugged arterial connecting the San Fernando Valley to the coast above Santa Monica. A pea-soup fog was laying in from the sea to drape the mountains and seep along the canyon toward the valley, clinging in turgid pockets of ground-based clouds to the hollows and depressions of that tangled landscape.
For miles, now, the visibility had been fluctuating rapidly from fifty feet to zero in an unpredictable pattern, at times producing a vertigo-like sensation as the big vehicle crept through the twists and turns of the tortuous route. At one early point, April had to remind herself that she was still within the city of Los Angeles—a curious fact, considering the wild isolation through which she was moving.
The tracking would have been impossible without the aid of the Warwagon’s sophisticated systems—and perhaps it was this very circumstance that was producing the occasional vertigo. She was navigating as much by instruments as by direct reference to the road, dividing her attention between the roadway and the terrain-reference monitor of the navigation console, upon which was displayed a road-sector map overlying the grid of the computer-fed electronic vectoring system. It was a fabulous device, embodying the most advanced state-of-the-art concepts of modern technology, a delight that was not lost on the engineering mind of April Rose. She had told Bolan, at their first meeting: “I’d like to meet the person who designed these systems.” More than that, though, April would savor the opportunity to dig into the computer heart that integrated all those diverse electronic subsystems, combining radar-following, microwave radio, lasers, infrareds, and magnetic field detectors into a single display function to provide, at once, target tracking, track orientation, and terrain-route orientation. The result, as translated to the monitor-viewscreen, provided a visual display similar to a roadmap upon which three tiny, pulsing lights revealed the positions of the target vehicle, the Warwagon, and the chase car bearing Mack Bolan. The three were creeping south along the canyon, spaced about two hundred yards apart—and they had been running in this attitude for more than twenty minutes when the monitor signaled a change of track.
April immediately reported the development to Bolan. “Deviation.”
“Roger. Is it a charted road?”
“Negative. This could be end of track. Stand by.”
A moment later the pulse from the target vehicle changed color from amber to red. “Engine shutdown,” she reported.
“Where away?” Bolan radioed back.
“One hundred yards south of my position, fifty yards east.”
“Stand down,” he instructed. “I am coming aboard.”
She found a broad shoulder and pulled the cruiser off the road, immediately activating the audio scans and bringing them on line. The headlights of Bolan’s car swung in behind her a moment later and the big man came aboard.
He threw her a quick smile and two clipped words—“Good work”—and went straight to the rear. He was removing his clothes—and she knew what that meant. With a guy like Bolan it meant war, not romance. Never romance, damnit. It appeared that such never quite fit into his timetable. Or maybe it was just some anachronism called chivalry that stayed the romantic beast. Whatever, her initial misgivings about their close association had borne no fruit whatever. Within minutes after their first meeting, he was ordering her to undress. For war, naturally. Chivalry or whatever, it sort of hurt a girl’s self-image to have a man stare right through her nudity and think of only war. And even when the war was over, for awhile, he had lain down with her nudity to gently touch and console the hurts and bruises thereon with no attempt whatever to capitalize upon the moment.
“What are you?” she’d asked him whimsically, last night, as they lay closely touching, but not really, during the flight from Indiana. “Some sort of monk?”
And she’d known he was smiling, though she could not see his face as he quietly replied, “Some sort of tired. You too, soldier.”
She was, of course. Damaged, too—though, she thought, not visibly. A madman had played kickball with her pubes, among other indignities. There was no way she could have accommodated any sort of romantic involvement with that area of her anatomy. Maybe the general knew that, or guessed it. But at least he could have tried.
“Catch you later, then,” she’d murmured, feeling all warm and good and secure in the strength of his presence. She’d drifted in and out of sleep while listening to his even breathing, and thinking what a comforting sound it was. During one of the “out” periods she’d gotten herself worked up with a little light sleepytime fantasy and raised to an elbow to lightly brush his lips with hers, thinking him to be safely asleep. But even as their lips touched she saw that his eyes were slitted. He lunged away from that light encounter with the big silver pistol rising up between them.
“Sorry!” she gasped.
“My apology,” he muttered, in a flash totally relaxed again and those remarkable eyes retreating behind the slitted lids.
She’d known, then, how frighteningly close she’d been to death—and she’d gained another important insight into this unusual man. He slept with his eyes open and a gun at instant access. How terrible! How horribly grim for any human being to be forever cocked and ready, poised at the edge of the abyss of death, unwilling to let go even in sleep. And she understood, however imperfectly, the terrible price this man was paying to pursue his “impossible” war.
He’d told her later, “Sure, I sleep. But it’s a trick I learned on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It’s a balancing act, sort of. I guess it’s a form of divided consciousness. The part that needs to sleep, sleeps. The part that needs to remain aware, doesn’t. It’s like the mind posting its own sentry. I call it combat sleep.”
A terrible price, yes. And now the man who warred even as he slept was back there in the war room changing the costumes of unending warfare. He was getting into the “black-suit”—a form-fitting nylon affair, which resembled a surfer’s wetsuit but had been designed for far grimmer purposes. Strategically placed slit pockets on arms and legs provided quick and easy access to various small tools and lethal devices—some as old as mankind, others as new as Moonshot and Surveyor. The suit itself had to be regarded also as a weapon of war, if only for the psychological implications, but she knew that Bolan also placed great store in the outfit for the values supplied toward ease of movement, convenience, and concealment. During periods of darkness, the suit rendered him practically invisible.
He was now drawing on the “combat rig”—a system of belts and devices for carrying guns, grenades, ammunition, and other necessities of war. Earlier that same morning April had experimentally tried to get into that rig and found it almost too heavy to lift. She could not imagine packing it around on her person. Bolan hardly seemed to notice the burden as he easily slipped it on and cinched it down.
“Looks as though you’re going for a heavy score,” she commented, eyeing the formidable figure of the warrior as he touch-checked the weaponry.
That granite face was poised between a scowl and a smile as he replied, “The boy scouts say you should be prepared. I try to be.”
“What’s troubling yo
u?”
“Nothing,” he replied coldly. “You ready to truck?”
She nodded her head in mute response, knowing what was troubling the big softy. He still did not like the idea of sending her into jeopardy.
He instructed her, “Give me two minutes. Then you take a recorder pack and find the telephone feeder. Get the wires on and get back here without delay. Then haul it out of here and wait for me a thousand yards south.” He pushed past her and stepped forward to set the mission clock. “If I’m not back in thirty minutes …”
He did not complete the instruction, nor did he need to do so. April understood.
“Be careful,” she said quietly.
“Always,” he replied, lying in his teeth.
Impossibly, it seemed, the big man had been with her for less than a minute. He was no dawdler—and moments like these sometimes seemed to expand infinitely. The audio sensors were just beginning to growl into a lock-on. April quickly manipulated a control at the console to refine the fix. Deep-well rumbles began issuing from the monitor: a metallic click and thump, as though a door or iron gate had been opened and closed; a snarling whine, definitely canine; ghostly mutterings of male voices in unreadable conversation.
“I can’t clarify that,” she told Bolan.
“Fog refraction,” he explained. “Or terrain factors. Maybe both. Did you hear a dog?”
She jerked her head in a curt nod. “Definitely a dog.”
He sighed and went aft again to select another weapon from the armory—and then, without a word, he was out the door and lost in the mists.
April fought a lump in her throat as she set the timer and began preparing for her own EVA. The emotions inside that vehicle had been as thick as the fog outside—yet out he went without a word. But she was beginning to understand that facet of the relationship, also. It had something to do with “staying hard.” Like sleeping with the eyes open. Like loving without touching. Economy! That was the word! Mack Bolan was a very economical man—in everything but war. He could not afford the emotional seepage; he needed it all where the moment was poised between life and death.
Sure. April understood. And she was weeping silently without tears as she watched the spot where the man of her dreams had entered the mists. What a hell of a waste.
“Live large, big fella,” she murmured to the mists. She understood that one, too. In Mack Bolan’s game, it was the only alternative to dying small.
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About the Author
Don Pendleton (1927–1995) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He served in the US Navy during World War II and the Korean War. His first short story was published in 1957, but it was not until 1967, at the age of forty, that he left his career as an aerospace engineer and turned to writing full time. After producing a number of science fiction and mystery novels, in 1969 Pendleton launched his first book in the Executioner saga: War Against the Mafia. The series, starring Vietnam veteran Mack Bolan, was so successful that it inspired a new American literary genre, and Pendleton became known as the father of action-adventure.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1978 by Don Pendleton
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8585-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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