Blowout

by Don Pendleton

  There remained the enigma of Charlie Macfarlane's last words to Bolan: if Lattuada wasn't the brains of the organization, who did he take his orders from? Fischer and Wertheim, too, had said the American had been hired to mastermind the Team's operations. Charlie, again, had suggested the motive for Dagmar's murder might have arisen from a meeting with this mysterious Mr. Big on the night she refused to see Bolan. But if her dope connection was already blown wide open, what could they have had to quarrel about?

  Heinrich Alberts shadowed the Cadillac skillfully through the Brauerknechtgraben quarter, past the hop market and across the Baumwall bridge to the dock area south of the river. Soon the big car pulled left across a line of trucks and semis, turned into a side street and stopped.

  "Don't follow it," Bolan said. "Wait until we see what gives."

  Alberts borrowed fifteen feet from a bus stop and cut his engine. Hansie Schiller, the scarred vulture man and two other guys with faces like cesspools crossed the side street and piled down a flight of steps into an areaway. There was some kind of sign over the areaway gate, but from where he was Bolan couldn't decipher the wording. He noticed that Hansie was pulling on a pair of gloves as he walked. Lattuada remained with the driver in the Cadillac.

  It was about ten minutes before they reappeared. Two of them were straightening neckties and adjusting jackets as they approached the car. One had a rip in his sleeve. Bolan didn't need a pocket calculator to work out what had happened in that basement.

  The Cadillac made a U-turn and continued toward the eastern part of the city. It stopped at Harburg and Meckelfeld and at three different places in Hammerbrook, and then went on via Nettelnberg to Bergedorf. Most times the routine was the same: the car waiting with idling engine, the goons vanishing into sleazy premises for a few minutes, the fast getaway. An ambulance with siren shrilling passed the cab in the opposite direction within a few minutes of the convertible quitting one location.

  Twice it was Lattuada himself who crossed the street, alone, returning a few minutes later with a nod and a satisfied smile.

  The Executioner didn't need a guide to work that one out, either. The Caddie was evidently on what protection racketeers called a milk run — collecting a rake-off from those already intimidated, Lattuada's job, or making with the muscle to show those who hadn't yet come across the error of their ways.

  Alberts knew most of the places, at least by reputation, although they couldn't always park nearby in case Lattuada's driver tumbled. Some of them were neighborhood drinking clubs, others illegal betting shops or clandestine strip palaces.

  "These joints in the classier districts," the cabdriver said as they approached the outer suburbs, "are probably undercover gambling dives." He shook his head. "I haven't seen one yet that I'd care to go into myself without an escort of your U.S. Marines."

  Bolan nodded. "I wouldn't quarrel with that," he said. But after Bergedorf, with Lattuada still heading out of town, he began to wonder.

  This was strictly commuter country, with flowering shrubs in the snow-covered front yards of neat little rows of brick villas. Farther on, there were trees lining the streets, the houses were set back from the roadway with big picture windows full of indoor plants and an occasional shopping mall sprawled over a sizable acreage.

  What the hell was the mobster doing out here in the stockbroker belt?

  Soon they were in a stretch of open country with black stubble sticking up through the snow and crows speckling the pale sky above ridges of close-packed pines. The clouds were blowing away, and the odor of woodsmoke was sucked into the cab through the heating system.

  As the traffic flow thinned out, shadowing the Cadillac became increasingly difficult. Alberts was a quarter mile behind, and he was lucky to catch the turn-off when the convertible swung suddenly into a gravel driveway between white gates.

  "There's a gas station around the corner," he said, "and I need to fill up. Maybe you'd like to walk back and check the place out while I do that?"

  Bolan nodded. He got out of the taxi. It was good to stretch his legs, anyway. Two hundred yards down the road there was a gap in the trees, and he could see on a rise to the south a row of stables with a clock tower in back of a substantial redbrick building with outhouse wings flanking a three-story central block. The Cadillac was parked between a Range Rover, a Chevrolet Blazer and two smaller cars. Five men were walking slowly toward a portico with white pillars.

  "What's that place?" Bolan casually asked the grease monkey fueling the cab when he returned to the forecourt. "Some kind of hotel?"

  "General Hunziger's?" He shrugged. "New people. Moved in a couple of weeks ago. They sold the horses when they took over from the general. They say it's going to be some kind of country club." He spit on the ground and shook his head. "More like a whorehouse if you ask me. I've seen some of the broads they got in there!" The kid shook invisible drops of water from the tips of his fingers.

  "Maybe they'll keep them in the stables," Alberts jested.

  "Some riding school!" the kid said.

  Bolan was intrigued. It looked as if Lattuada was broadening his activities to include classier material. Since Hunziger's place had just changed hands, and since Lattuada himself had gone in as well as the four thugs, this was probably an exploratory visit, just a softening-up operation before the screws were turned. He wondered where the next stop would be.

  It was no more than three miles away, and they almost missed it. Alberts had been watching for the Caddie, and when it left the redbrick house, he was already moving, several hundred yards down the highway before it turned through the white gates.

  He stayed ahead as the road twisted through a shallow valley and then climbed uphill again through pinewoods laced blackly against a clear sky in the east. They sped along the foot of an embankment, where an access road spiraled up to a small railroad station. "Aumühle," the cabdriver said. "It's the S-Bahn terminus, though the tracks run right on past the East German frontier. Nights, there are freight trains that go all the way to Berlin."

  Opposite the embankment the ground fell away beneath immensely tall cedars to a lake surrounded by dense woods. "The Muhlenteich," Alberts said. "It's all public property now, but until the Nazi years it was part of the Bismarck estate. The property goes almost up to the damn Baltic! There's two thousand acres of forest around that lake, with wild boar and deer, even wolves, some say, prowling around among the trees. In the summertime folks come out here from the city for the fishing and boating."

  Bolan peered out the taxi window. The lake was picturesque, about half a mile long, fringed with willows at the narrow end. There was a weir where it widened out, and an old mill that had been turned into a hotel-restaurant. Two more sizable buildings had been constructed between the road and the water's edge — a stone block with steep gables and a long, low, half-timbered place surrounded by a boardwalk.

  "That's the Fischerhaus," Alberts said. "Built by the Bismarcks in 1760. Place is a hotel, too, now, though it's open only in the summer months. So's the third one. Shit!" He stood on the brakes, and the old Mercedes slewed to a halt half across the road.

  Bolan was thrown forward. "What gives?" he asked, straightening himself.

  Alberts was staring into his rearview mirror. "Fucking Caddie's disappeared!"

  Bolan twisted around and looked out the rear window. The roadway behind them was empty.

  "Must have gone down that dirt road that leads past the millhouse," Alberts said, "and then over the bridge crossing the weir. Must have. There's no other road he could have taken."

  "Where does the dirt road go?" Bolan asked.

  "On into the woods. It's just a forest trail really. Peters out half a mile on in a glade where people picnic in good weather. Come to think of it, I heard they were building a fourth hotel someplace out there."

  "That'll be it," Bolan said. "Can we follow them?"

  "Be a dead giveaway," Alberts said. "I mean, it's not a through road. It doesn't go anyplace. I'm
real sorry. My fault."

  "It happens," the warrior said.

  "Tell you what, though. There's a forest clearing beyond the far end of the lake. I could pull the taxi in there and park. Then maybe you could cut across through the woods until you hit the trail and take it from there on foot."

  "Let's do it," the Executioner said.

  It wasn't easy going. A marsh with man-high reeds fed water into the lake behind the willow screen, and when that had been skirted Bolan found that steep banks, rock outcrops and sudden hollows in the forest floor made it tough holding a fixed direction beneath the closely packed trees. It was a good half hour before he hit the trail leading from the old mill.

  Two hundred yards farther on, around a sharp curve, he saw a movie still of Porsches, Alfa Romeos, Bentleys and customized Mercedes convertibles parked on a gravel sweep in front of a low white stucco building. The place was designed around three sides of a central patio with a pool, springboards, diving towers and summer garden furniture stacked under a tarp. The Cadillac was outside the glassed-in main entrance.

  Advancing cautiously, Bolan saw that the driver was still at the wheel. He stepped quickly back in among the trees. He couldn't risk being seen here at this time, at least not until he had checked out the reasons for Lattuada's visit.

  Formal gardens had been landscaped around the building, and it was some time before the warrior worked his way around to a position on the far side of the glade where the white stucco walls hid him from the guy in the Cadillac. The patio pool was iced over and there were still traces of snow on the tarpaulin and along the roof of an outbuilding behind the main block. But the ground here was clear and Bolan was able to tread noiselessly, swift as a shadow from tree to tree on the deep carpet of pine needles.

  By the time he reached a vantage point with enough cover to satisfy him, he guessed from the slamming doors and the sound of gunned engines that most of the parked cars had taken off. He had heard, too, over the soughing of the cold wind among the branches overhead what could have been raised voices, a hubbub of angry exchanges.

  He raised his head above the screen of bushes where he was crouched. There was nobody in sight. The windows on this side of the clubhouse were shuttered. Checking that the Beretta slid easily in its shoulder rig, he bent double and ran between leafless raspberry canes and a row of bean sticks toward the building.

  There was a final stretch of lawn to be crossed, a rose garden spined with heavily pruned bushes, and then he was flattened against the wall beneath the eaves. He sidled toward the entrance. As he approached the corner, doors slammed again and he heard the deep, thrumming exhaust note of a multicylinder engine. He peered around. The Cadillac was accelerating away toward the mill.

  Bolan shrugged. What the hell. He hadn't a hope of getting back on their trail now. By the time he regained Alberts's cab, and the cabdriver backed up and turned onto the highway, the Team could be in the outskirts of the city.

  He walked openly around a gable end and crossed the deserted patio. It would soon be dusk. Crows were cawing among the treetops, and there was a smell of woodsmoke in the air once more. Peaceful country scene, Bolan thought. Time for a quiet drink by the evening fireside. Sure.

  "Call the police, Helmut," a woman's voice said angrily. "Who the hell do they think they are? Frightening away customers, acting like…"

  "Ah, cut it out, Helga," a man interrupted. "What's the use? You know.as well as I do…"

  Bolan looked along the inner facade of the clubhouse. French windows stood ajar just beyond the pool. He crept toward them.

  "That fucking fairy!" the woman shrilled. "That bitch! If I could get my hands…"

  "Don't make yourself silly, sweetheart. What could the cops do? What evidence do we have? They could put us out of business…" fingers snapped"…like that, and you know it. All they have to do is sneak in some teenage hophead, some underage kid from that snob private school at Reinbek who takes a drink, and then tip off the law… and our license is gone."

  "Yes, but…"

  "All they have to do is stage a few drunken brawls and rough up a couple of clients and, look, no customers! All they have to do in these woods is wait for the wind and start a little fire, and there's our capital gone up in smoke. Apart from that, you know as well as I do that no place like this is run strictly on the level. There's the girls, the bedrooms, the three sets of books. They could easily find…"

  Bolan pushed open the French windows and stepped through. "Pardon me."

  He was in a small oak-beamed bar with paneled alcoves and a wall-to-wall red carpet. A woman of about thirty-five with short platinum-blond hair and a lot of makeup was standing by an overturned chair holding the torn edges of a silk blouse together. Behind her a thickset man with a heavy mustache was leaning over the bar as if he had a bellyache. Maybe he had at that, because when he raised his head to stare at the intruder, Bolan saw that there was dirt on his face and ail down the front of his suit and shirt. His lips were split and one of his eyes was almost closed. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded thickly. "What do you want here?"

  Bolan had an answer ready. The previous dialogue had given him a lead, and it would explain his American-accented German. "Forgive me for bursting in," he said in what he hoped was a scholarly voice. "I teach languages at the school in Reinbek. Two of our lads are temporarily missing, just playing hooky, most likely, but they were seen coming this way. I just thought I'd ask if you'd seen…"

  "For God's sake!" the woman cut in. "We have enough troubles of our own without running a bureau for missing brats!"

  "Easy, Helga," the man said. "Watch it now." And then, turning to the warrior, he said, "Naturally, sir, we discourage any member of the school from coming here. If any boy did come, we'd refuse to serve him and ask him to leave. But, in fact, none have so far, and I certainly haven't set eyes on any today."

  "I didn't really think you had," Bolan said truthfully. "But I figured it might be worth asking. If you should, perhaps you would be good enough to telephone the director at Reinbek?"

  "Sure," the man said. "Of course."

  Bolan murmured his thanks and backed out. He'd seen and heard all he needed to. As he walked away, he heard the woman say, "I still think we should call the police."

  And the man answer, "Forget it. Look, just forget it, will you?"

  Since the Cadillac and its occupants were gone, there was nothing to stop Bolan taking the dirt road back to the mill and then walking along the highway until he reached the forest clearing where the cab was parked.

  It took him five minutes to reach the bridge over the weir. Lights showed through the windows of the old millhouse, where tailcoated waiters were setting silver for the evening meal. The sky was still clear, but it would soon be dark.

  He walked past the Fischerhaus and the hotel beyond it. There was no sign of the Caddie. Perhaps they had already been visited. Or maybe they had nothing to hide, were too «respectable» to make worthwhile targets.

  Beyond the lake Bolan quit the highway to make a diagonal cut through the wood to intersect the clearing. He was fifty yards along a narrow trail when the shotgun blast sent pellets screaming through the leaves just above his head.

  There was game in the forest, and dusk was open season for bird hunters, but the Executioner wasn't taking any chances. It might have been a shot from an inexperienced, or irresponsible, gun. But in the circumstances…

  He was flat on his face on the forest floor, the Beretta cocked in his right hand, before the crows preparing to roost in the treetops had flapped angrily into the sky.

  A second shot decided him. The charge stripped leaves from the evergreen bushes bordering the trail where he had been only an instant before. There could be no doubt: someone was gunning for him right here in these woods.

  Supporting himself on his elbows, he glanced swiftly around. The trail ran for another fifty yards before it veered away past the huge bole of an ancient oak. The evergreens grew thickly on either side, a
lthough they seemed to be spaced farther apart near the old tree. The shots — from the deafening quality of the reports, Bolan figured they must have been fired no more than twenty or thirty yards away — originated somewhere between the trail and the highway. Basically there was only one way to go.

  Still facedown, he edged back beneath the bushes on the far side of the trail from the highway. Behind them a thick undergrowth overlay the pine-needle carpet, and after that the ground dipped toward the reeds and the marsh. He was worming his way through the undergrowth when the shotgun roared for the third time — nearer, he guessed, though the gunner was wide of the mark.

  He heard the swish of branches, the rustle of leaves, but he could see nothing through the tangle of stalks surrounding him and the green canopy above. Crab-like, he tried to hurry toward the reeds.

  Once again the shotgun blast made his ears ring. And then there were two more reports, sharper, dryer cracks, more like the amplified snapping of a twig. Medium-bore handguns, probably.32 caliber.

  And they came from two different places.

  So there were at least three killers hunting him in the woods.

  Two of the handgun slugs zeroed in uncomfortably close, one plowing into the earth only inches from his nose, the other zipping through leaves near his gun hand. The marksmen must be sighting on branches that Bolan couldn't help stirring as he moved, and then firing just below. He shoved himself backward as hard as he could, levering with his elbows on the iron-hard ground until the surface sank beneath him and he slid feet first into the reeds.

  At that moment there was a concerted volley of shots, and the reeds, swayed, nipped, scythed down by the deathstream, died all around him. The handguns, he could tell now, were automatics, and he was almost certain there were more than two of them, apart from the original shotgun guy.

  Icy cold gripped Bolan's ankles. His feet were immersed in water. He half turned, eyes straining through the twilight to catch a glimpse of a moving figure between the tossing stalks.