Blowout

by Don Pendleton

  Lattuada, on the other hand, didn't customarily do the dirty work himself. So maybe the delivery boys had been told to get the papers… off Bolan himself. And they'd seized the unexpected opportunity to avoid a direct confrontation.

  Why would the gang boss want them? To push Bolan deeper into the shit by leaving them at the scene of some future outrage? Maybe. In any case, they wouldn't be necessary to link him with the Asticot killing, not with his description, a Lattuada tip-off to the police and the fact that he was wanted already.

  Whatever, it was vital to the Executioner to get them back. Apart from the passport in the name of his other fake cover, Mike Blanski, and certain other documents he would need, there were, despite the fact that passport and press card had been stolen from his original hotel room, papers that would justify the Mike Belasko cover if he should need it again.

  He ran across the hotel lobby. The night clerk was on his feet behind the reception desk, staring. The glass entrance doors were still revolving.

  Bolan flung himself into the street. It was still snowing. The tire tracks in the roadway were almost obliterated, and the sidewalks stretched untrodden in each direction. But he could hear hurrying footsteps down the parking ramp. He unleathered his Beretta and gave chase.

  There were two of them, a fat guy and a short, wiry man wearing a fur hat. The fat one jerked open the driver's door of a car at the far end of the underground lot and climbed inside. Bolan ran for the BMW; it was too long a shot for the Beretta, and if he missed they'd be away, leaving him standing there.

  The car was an Opel Manta coupe. The thin guy was dragging his door shut and the car was accelerating up the exit ramp by the time Bolan got the BMW started. He emerged from the lot three hundred yards behind.

  The snow had eased off slightly by the time they hit the outskirts of town, but it was still drifting in the hollows, and occasional squalls of wind sent unexpected flurries streaming toward the headlights on the way back south. The highway surface had been plowed and salted, though there were wide margins of icy slush on the shoulder and bordering the central strip. Bolan was forced to tread hard on the pedal, maintaining the speedometer needle hovering around ninety, to keep up with the Opel.

  Ten miles south of the city the fat man rocketed the coupe down a turnoff and took to a network of country roads around Bad Oldesloe. It was here that the driver showed how good he was.

  The Opel wasn't as fast as the heavy BMW, but it was more maneuverable. The guy was able to take every curve in a controlled slide, and he knew just how much boot to give the car to keep it at the maximum possible speed in these conditions without losing the front wheels. It was all the warrior could do to keep him in sight along the twisty lanes with their icy surfaces and snow-piled hedges.

  Despite the biting cold, he was sweating, trying to keep up with the hoods as they skated right and left at minor intersections, racing ahead to try to conceal which road they were taking at a fork on the far side of a ridge. They roared through only one village, a single sleepy street in a bone-white landscape of farms and stubbled fields. In fifteen minutes there hadn't been one vehicle going in the opposite direction. But at the exit from this village the scriptwriter decided to inject an element of drama.

  The Opel suddenly spurted onto a straightaway that ran for almost a mile along an embankment crossing a marsh. The roadway was wide enough for two cars, and Bolan drove as fast as he dared, aiming to overtake and then swing in directly ahead, slowing as abruptly as he could to force the Opel to a standstill.

  Gradually the distance between the two cars lessened. The BMW swayed slightly on the packed ice, but the tires were biting. The lighter Manta zigzagged crazily from side to side as the speed increased. Soon the details of the coupe, which had been just a darker blur against the nocturnal paleness of the snow, became clear in the illumination of Bolan's headlights. He saw that it was colored mustard-yellow; the single H on the left-hand side of the license plate told him that it was registered in Hannover.

  Halfway along the embankment, Bolan leaned more heavily on the gas pedal. The muffled roar of the engine climbed a few semitones up the scale. The BMW's front fenders approached the sliding rear of the Opel. He shifted the wheel to pull out and draw level.

  They had maybe three hundred yards to go before the road swerved sharply right around a skeletal wood. And it was then that the fat man upstaged the warrior, preempting his plan by veering suddenly left to block the road and stop him passing. Bolan swore, hitting the brakes and running the sedan into the rough snow piled along the roadside.

  But the driver of the Opel was doing almost sixty, still on the wrong side of the road, when a West German army convoy headed by a six-ton troop carrier trundled around the corner ahead of him.

  After that there was nothing Bolan could do but watch him die.

  For once the guy's nerve failed him. He panicked, overcorrecting to urge the car back onto the right side of the road. The rear end broke away, and then he lost it completely. In any case, he was driving far too fast to take the corner on that icy surface.

  The Opel skidded wildly, turned through 180 degrees, cannoned into the side of the second truck in the convoy and then bounced back to hurtle over the side of the embankment and drop from sight. A vivid flash illuminated the cloud of snow flung up by the plummeting coupe. It was followed an instant later by a dull, thumping explosion and an orange fireball tinged with black that gushed up beyond the bank and mushroomed into the sky.

  The convoy shuddered to a halt. Bolan heard men shouting. He was already out of the BMW and running toward the wreck. Soldiers in uniform piled out of the vehicles in the convoy and plowed down through the waist-deep snow covering the bank. But there was no hope of saving the occupants, or salvaging the papers, which, face it, the Executioner was more concerned about. It was impossible to approach within fifty feet of the blazing Opel. The gasoline tank must have ruptured with the initial impact, spilling fuel on the overheated engine. Now the car was lying on its back in the center of an inferno. The tires on all four wheels were alight, and steam from melted snow hissed up to join the oily flames leaning furiously away from the wind.

  A sergeant detached himself from the ring of helpless men surrounding the holocaust. "What the hell happened?" he asked Bolan.

  The warrior shrugged. After the penetrating cold, the searing heat was unbearable. "Must have been drunk," he said in German. "Or stoned out of his mind. I'd been following him for several miles and he was all over the road."

  The sergeant took off his forage cap and mopped his brow. "Some people!" he said, shaking his head. "Poor bastards, roasted alive. But nobody but a crazy man would drive that fast on this road."

  "Hopped-up kids," Bolan offered, thinking of the cargo the fat man's boss had gotten away with, and the young lives it would ruin.

  A series of sharp, individual reports penetrated the dull roar of the flames. "That sounds like ammunition going off," the sergeant said.

  'Teenage gangsters," Bolan agreed. "Probably stole the heap, hoping to sell it to pay for their shit."

  The German clapped the cap back on his head. "There's nothing we can do here," he said. "The thing is, well, we missed the road in this goddamn snow and we're running late…"

  Bolan got it. An official report meant official papers to fill in, meant official bullshit, meant time wasted that could more profitably be spent drinking. The last thing he himself wanted was to be roped in as a witness, but he could hardly take off just like that, not while the soldiers were there.

  "Don't concern yourself with the formalities, Sergeant," he said. "I have business with the burgomaster at Bargteheide tomorrow morning. You can leave the matter in my hands. I'll report the matter to him. It wasn't your fault. Doubtless he'll make the necessary arrangements to send out a salvage team."

  The sergeant looked grateful. "I'm obliged," he said. "We're already running late. You're very kind."

  "Think nothing of it," Bolan said. He added fulsom
ely, "The least a civilian can do is offer help, however trivial, to the men defending the fatherland."

  The sergeant stepped back, saluted and tried to click his heels in the slush. He shrilled his whistle and shepherded his men back to the convoy. The big diesels roared to life and rumbled away.

  As soon as they were out of sight, Bolan hurried back up the bank. The Opel would burn for some time, and he didn't want to be there when villagers from the far end of the embankment, alerted by the pulsing red light, came out to investigate.

  Temporarily he was left not only without papers but also without a lead. But he was convinced the hijacked narcotics, and their eventual distribution, would be centered on Hamburg. And he was determined, whatever the risks, to do his damnedest to wreck the plan. He got back behind the wheel of the BMW and headed for the E.4 motorway, the quickest route back to Hamburg.

  * * *

  The hotel was in a residential street in the Hamburg suburb of Barmbek, northeast of the Alster. Fashioned by the union of three separate nineteenth-century row houses, it was an ultrarespectable, no-liquor establishment run by three Calvinist spinsters in their late sixties. The frosted glass transom above the central porch bore the name Shangri-la.

  The clientele, as far as Bolan could tell, seemed to be permanent — retired colonials, professional folks in reduced circumstances. Widows exiled from the health spas that had grown too expensive for them shuffled along the creaking, heavily carpeted corridors as slowly as the aging waitress who served bratwurst and stewed fruit among the catsup bottles in the dining room. He figured the place was a near-perfect cover.

  Once he had checked in, he left the small grip he had bought on his way into town by the brass bedstead in a fourth-floor single and went out again to replace the stuff he had left in Lübeck. He also bought a newspaper.

  The lead story trumpeted the success so far of East West disarmament talks in Berlin. On the right-hand side of the front page was a lurid account of a gangland battle in the heart of Lübeck's dockland. Rival gunmen, the story said, had fought with brutal ferocity over a consignment of smuggled narcotics, leaving no less than fifteen dead on the quayside before one of the gangs had made off with part of the consignment.

  Police who had tried to intervene had suffered five wounded, two of them seriously, and customs officials had captured more than sixty pounds of cocaine and heroin, with a street value of millions of dollars, concealed in a shipment of goatskins from Greece.

  In another part of the city, Bolan read, a suspected drug trafficker had been found shot dead in a hotel room occupied by an American named Mike Blanski. No mention was made of the fact that one of the gangs was East German, nor was it revealed that the goatskins had already fooled customs inspectors before the battle had taken place.

  He threw the paper into a trash can and returned to the Shangri-la. Before he did anything else, he had to snatch a few hours' sleep.

  * * *

  It wasn't until the afternoon of the following day that Bolan was certain the hotel was being watched. Waking at dusk on the day of his arrival, he had discovered the snowstorm had increased to blizzard force, virtually marooning him indoors. Now another thaw had set in and there was a cold rain pockmarking the deep snow blanketing the front yards along the street.

  From the window of his room, he noticed a Volkswagen Golf, a tiny soft-top Fiat 500 and a Renault sedan parked on the opposite side of the street against the dirty white rampart thrown there by the snowplow. In each case the driver affected to be reading a newspaper, waited an hour and then moved off.

  How had they known? Charlie Macfarlane's Black Hand Mafia?

  He went to the window once more for a final check. Nobody was parked across the street, but the Golf was back, on the near side this time, a couple of houses away but still in full view of the old janitor shoveling snow off the front steps of the hotel.

  Bolan went to a bathroom in back of the building and looked out the window. Beyond strips of backyard, most of them planted with bare trees or shrubs in pots, a lane ran along the rear of the block. On the far side of the wall bordering this he could see the soft top of a small car. He didn't need to walk out into the lane to know that the chrome strip outside the louvered hood covering the pint-size two-cylinder rear engine would read Fiat 500.

  There was only one thing he could do: find another base, a hole where there wouldn't be a Volkswagen Golf, a Renault sedan and a tiny Fiat parked outside. It could be done two ways: leave openly, draw them after him, then lose the tail someplace, or attempt to leave without them knowing and start over.

  Number two was the better bet. They might make the snatch — and he knew that was what they'd try to do — right here in front of the hotel if he left openly, giving him no time to evade the shadows.

  As darkness fell, he drew the curtains in his room but left the lights burning. Stuffing as many of his new purchases as he could into the capacious pockets of his trench coat, he left enough bills on top of the night table to settle his account, then slipped into the corridor. He had very little money left now, and he couldn't change any more American Express checks, not with Mike Belasko's name in all the papers. So, if he could prevent the elderly Shangri-la personnel from reporting the strange disappearance of a guest to the local police station, so much the better.

  The first part of the escape was no sweat. The hotel's clients were all in the funereal dining room, waiting to drown their slices of warmed-over pork in catsup. Most of the staff was occupied there or in the kitchen, and the three spinster owners would be eating in the office behind the reception desk. The back stairs, designed for servant use, led past the kitchen to a basement laundry room that opened directly onto the yard, an area spanning all three of the hotel's "houses."

  Bolan's plan was to scale the wall dividing the hotel from the next-door property, cross the yard there and climb the next wall, and finally let himself out into the lane several houses behind the Fiat.

  One of his chief problems was the weather. Rain had been falling all day, and now darkness had brought mist again. The sooty surfaces of brick and stone would therefore be slippery and treacherous, especially where they were still coated with thawing snow. But what the hell — it was time for action.

  He stole down the dimly lit stairway, treading on the inside of each step to minimize the risk of creaks, and paused outside the bar of illumination streaming through the open kitchen door. A cook in white coveralls was standing in front of a stove with her back to him. Otherwise the place was empty. He tiptoed past and hurried downstairs and out into the yard.

  Making it over the first wall was easy. There was a row of garbage cans lined up by the exit door, and all he had to do was climb them, sit astride the brickwork and drop down on the far side. The yard there had been turned into some kind of patio, with French windows leading from the basement to a flagged terrace ornamented with potted plants. The garbage was kept in a bin just inside the door that opened onto the lane. This was too close to the waiting Fiat for Bolan's comfort.

  He was encumbered by the heavy trench coat and the cargo in its pockets, but he figured he could make it via a shack built against the wall near the house. Using a wooden tub as a springboard, he jumped for the snow-covered roof of the shack.

  He landed successfully, but his foot brushed against something as he hoisted himself up, something that shifted and then dropped into space. There was a shattering crash.

  Bolan froze, spread-eagled on the slanting roof.

  Light lanced the darkness of the yard below him as a curtain was jerked aside. A broken flowerpot lay in the snow by a small mound of earth and leaves. A sash beside the French windows was flung up, silhouetting a man's head and shoulders. 'Those damn cats!" a voice called angrily. "There's another of the begonias gone!" The man clapped his hands loudly, muttered something under his breath, then slammed down the sash. The light, and the falling rain it revealed, vanished.

  Bolan released his breath in a long sigh of relief. Bei
ng nailed as a prospective burglar didn't figure in his plan of action at all. He continued his climb to the wall.

  The next yard gave him no trouble, nor the one after that. It was stacked with lumber, and the descent was as easy as walking down a stairway. If the house owners saw his tracks before the rain melted enough snow to obliterate them, let them work out the scenario for themselves. Cautiously the warrior unlatched the door in the end wall of the final yard and let himself out into the lane.

  The Fiat's twin red taillights were three houses away. Bolan turned up his trench coat collar and hurried toward a tree-lined square at the far end of the lane.

  He was passing under a streetlight twenty yards from the exit when he heard the Fiat's two-cylinder engine cough to life. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the little soft-top turn around and accelerate toward him. Even in his rearview mirror, the tail must have recognized him, which meant it had to be someone who knew him — the vulture-faced thug, for instance, or Hansie himself. Bolan broke into a run and cut across the small public park in the center of the square.

  As the Fiat raced around the perimeter, he sprinted over the far roadway and plunged beneath an arch into a pedestrian mall that sliced the block diagonally and led into a shopping street bright with window displays. By the time his pursuer had driven around the block and negotiated the lights, Bolan had crossed the street and jumped a bus turning into the Adolph-Schonfelder Strasse.

  The Fiat tailed the bus past a condominium development and up the Oberaltenallee but was forced to abandon the chase by the Alte Wohr S-Bahn station when Bolan hopped off and ran up the stairs as a train glided alongside the platform.

  The Executioner made it into the last car just before the automatic doors closed. Through the glass he saw the Fiat abandoned in the station yard, the driver — it was, in fact, the vulture-faced thug — bounding up the stairs in a vain attempt to get aboard.