Blowout

by Don Pendleton

  Nothing.

  But the movement set the tufted tops of bull rushes nodding. Both barrels of the shotgun and three-shot burst from the automatics homed in on the motion. Lead peppered the water between the stems. Bolan flattened himself farther still and wriggled back until the clammy embrace was around his waist.

  His toes gouged the muddy floor of the marsh, and touched something solid, hard, immovable. Twisting his head, he looked over his shoulder. It was then that he saw, bulked against the sky, the unmistakable silhouette of a dory — a small, flat-bottomed boat that had been run aground among the reeds. It was the hull of this that his foot had run up against.

  Gasping with the cold, Bolan plunged thigh-deep into the marsh water, shoving the dory out into the channel with all his strength. More gunshots pockmarked the surface of the water, and wood splintered as the boat's timbers were savaged.

  But now he could see the bright flashes against the somber mass of trees. And he had been right — there were four of them. One of the handguns was fifteen feet above ground, wedged into the fork of a gnarled oak.

  Bolan swung the dory around once it was fully floating so that it was between him and the hunters. The Beretta, which he had reholstered when his feet reached the water, was once more in his hand.

  This time he drew their fire deliberately, feinting an effort to hoist himself up over the gunwale and into the boat. He had dropped back and forced his way through the water to the stern when the guns blazed again.

  And this time, his sight line already vectored on the oak, he lined up on the muzzle-flashes as the sniper triggered a long burst and choked death from his own autoloader. He heard a strangled cry over the reverberations of the cannonade, then the snapping of a branch and a crashing of leaves as a heavy body plunged into the bushes below.

  The dory was being carried away toward the main channel that fed into the lake. Bolan gripped the stern post and allowed himself to be towed after it. When he could no longer touch the bottom with his foot, he hauled himself up and over into the boat. But there was still enough light for his pursuers to oversee the maneuver, even though the dory was caught at that moment in an eddy and twirled out of sight behind another reed bank.

  Bolan heard the rasp and crackle of orders transmitted through the UHF transceiver. The guy with the shotgun, who seemed to be the boss, was telling someone to go down to the willow screen where the marsh drained into the lake, for that was where the dory had to go, too. There were no oars, no pole, and Bolan's arm, paddling over the side, wasn't forceful enough to counter the current.

  The shotgunner himself, together with the remaining hood, was advancing toward the reeds. The Executioner could hear the suck and squish of their feet on the marshy ground as they thrust their way between the rattling stems in an attempt to sight the boat veering from channel to channel between islanded clumps of the tufted rushes.

  He wondered who the hell they were. There had been no sign of Lattuada's Caddie. Had they left an outrider who had somehow gotten onto the warrior's trail? It didn't seem likely. He would stake all he had on the fact that nobody had seen him approach the clubhouse. He didn't think the goons in the Caddie knew they had been followed. That left the possibility that someone had seen him leave the building, someone who knew who he was… and feared him.

  So, again, who? The voice on the transceiver was nothing like Hansie's. But he reckoned there had to be a connection. Nothing made sense otherwise. It baffled him just the same, the way the scenario had developed. Because they couldn't possibly have known…

  The current speeded up; the reed banks closed in on either side. The uneven strip of pale sky above was definitely darkening now. But the spiderweb of bare willow branches at the entrance to the lake was still silhouetted at the far end of the channel, and it was advancing fast. Beyond that, Bolan would be as much of a sitting duck as the waterfowl whose squawks he could hear as they settled down for the night.

  Scanning the close-packed vegetation, he saw a furtive movement among the reeds on his left. At once the Beretta barked. A 9 mm messenger of death smashed through the stems. He fired again. There was threshing ten or fifteen yards away among the marsh grasses. A hoarse voice cried out, "Bastard winged me! Fucked up my right arm!"

  "Use the left," the voice from the transceiver grated. "We don't leave here until the bastard is blown away."

  Light suddenly flared above the fringed reed heads, a yellow glow that was transformed into a double shaft that swept across the wood on the far side of the marsh. Someone was maneuvering an automobile among the reeds.

  Were the killers calling up reinforcements?

  Bolan tensed, every nerve quivering, his eyes squinting through the thickening dusk, alert for the smallest movement as the muzzle of the Beretta traced an imaginary sightline along the reed bank. Now he could hear the grinding of gears, a laboring engine. A second pair of headlight beams scoured the darkness below the trees. Bolan lay flat along the dory's duckboards.

  Through the stems he saw a brighter light moving. A spotlight, perhaps mounted on one of the cars, was quartering the marsh. He gritted his teeth. Within the next few minutes, things were going to get kind of rugged.

  They did, but not the way he expected.

  A sudden fusillade, shocking in its ferocity — a rasping, tearing, earsplitting barrage.that stunned the senses — ripped apart the dusk. Bolan jerked upright. Submachine guns — three, if not more!

  A second deadly volley hammered his ears. One of the handguns fired a burst. The shotgun blasted twice.

  He didn't get it. None of that lethal hail was coming his way. The dory floated serenely toward the lake. At the edge of the marsh, men were shouting. The SMGs spit fire a third time. He heard a heavy splash. The voice from the transceiver was killed in midsentence. There was a massive rustle of wings, a flapping along the surface of the water as all the birds on the lake took off. A three-shot burst from the handgun was drowned by the clamor of a single SMG. Then there was silence.

  After the flickering incandescence of muzzle-flashes, the approaching darkness seemed denser than ever. Bolan saw the dim tracery of willow branches pass overhead. Turning slowly, the flat-bottomed boat drifted into a stretch of open water. In the distance, the lights of the millhouse restaurant mirrored themselves on the leaden surface of the lake. Nobody opened fire on the Executioner.

  There could only be one explanation. The history of the Lübeck operation was repeating itself: one gang of killers was being jumped by another.

  Yeah, but there was one big difference: in the Baltic port there had been a million-dollar prize of smuggled narcotics. And here? No prizes, unless the Executioner himself was of value to the second group, alive rather than dead.

  The dory eddied toward the lakeshore and grounded gently in a grassy inlet behind the hotel next to the Fischerhaus. Bolan shivered. Frost had already rimed the blades of grass. He rose upright and was preparing to jump ashore when a tall, dark figure materialized from a clump of bushes ten feet away. Bolan's hand streaked toward his shoulder rig.

  "Don't shoot. I'm unarmed," a voice said quietly.

  The voice carried conviction. Bolan believed it. When the owner of the voice held out a hand, he grasped it and leaped from the dory to the grass. He saw with astonishment that the man standing before him in the gloom was the East German civilian who was supposed to have been the consignee for the doctored goatskins in Lübeck.

  "No questions," the man said before the warrior could voice his surprise. "You have become involved, Herr Belasko, in something that doesn't concern you. I bear you no ill will, but I have to warn you that this tolerance cannot indefinitely be extended if you persist in your… investigations."

  "Just give me a lead," Bolan said. "Or at least satisfy one point that's bugging me. How come you…"

  "No leads," the East German interrupted firmly. "Be content with your good fortune. The persons hoping to kill you have all been… eliminated."

  "So thanks. But why sho
uld they, I mean, why should you…"

  "You're soaking wet, Herr Belasko. And no doubt quite cold," the East German said. "I have a car, two in fact, available. Allow my driver to take you a few hundred yards along the highway and into the woods, where I understand you have a taxi waiting…"

  Chapter Twenty

  "My God, Mike!" Zuta exclaimed. "What happened? Where have you been? I've been back for hours, out of my skull because I was afraid the police had you. Nobody even saw you leave, for heaven's sake!"

  "I'm sorry, Zuta," Bolan apologized. "But I had to get out."

  "You know I think you should stay here," Zuta said tartly. "At least for the moment. It's not safe for you to be around, and it's certainly not safe for you to go out through the club when there are clients there. You never know who might see you. What got into you, Belasko? Where did you go?"

  "I went to Aumuhle."

  "Aumuhle!" She stared at him. "But that's out in the country. Why did you go there?"

  "For just that reason, because it is out in the country, at the end of the S-Bahn line. That way nobody could possibly recognize me. Besides, I wanted to take a walk." He was suddenly sore. He didn't like being nagged as if he were a hooky-playing schoolboy.

  At first he had intended to give Zuta a rundown on the whole trip, to ask her opinion on the alternatives suggested by the sinister events of the afternoon, but her own irritation made him decide to clam up and stall.

  He'd been eager to trace Lattuada, to complete the puzzle, to solve the mystery from the comfort of a safe-house, trying to work it out on the basis of intel fed to him by a woman, a woman he'd allowed to talk him out of action because it might be dangerous!

  Danger was his business; danger was his life.

  So where was the one-man wave of destruction whose implacable campaign of retribution against evil had earned him the title of the Executioner?

  It was in Aumuhle — where the peril had actually stimulated him — that the question had finally posed itself, that he had finally gotten wise to the fact that a week, a whole goddamn week, of inactivity hadn't fazed him one little bit!.

  It bugged the hell out of him. Face it, the only battles he had fought in the past few days had been in the sack. That wasn't Mack Bolan's style.

  As soon as Zuta left, he crept downstairs intending to sneak out through the club entrance while the waiters were setting up for lunch. But this time the padded doors with their porthole windows were locked, and he couldn't get through from the apartment to the club.

  That threw him some. They hadn't been before. Then he saw the waiter who normally served food in the apartment, the one with the face like a side of spoiled beef. He knocked on the glass to attract the guy's attention and mimed that he wanted out.

  The waiter shook his head and wagged a negative finger. Bolan rapped again and gestured authoritatively. "I have to go out for a few minutes," he called out when the man was close to the window. "Do you mind unlocking these doors?"

  The ape shook his big head again. "Miss Zuta says it isn't safe for you to leave today. Better you should stay in the apartment, okay?"

  "I'd like to go down the road to buy some cigarettes."

  "I'll get you some cigarettes from the bar. What brand do you want?"

  Two misses and one to go. "Also," Bolan said, "I have to hit the post office."

  "I'll send a boy with the message."

  The warrior shrugged his shoulders. He went back upstairs. Short of breaking down the doors, there was nothing he could do. Even then the gorilla in the white jacket might consider it his duty to stop him. In any case, Bolan didn't know how wise the waiter was to his own situation, and he didn't want to screw things up for Zuta. She'd done a lot, even if she was overdoing the baby-sitting bit.

  Mulling over the events of the past few days just made Bolan angrier. Baby-sitting, hell! More like protective custody. Zuta the jailer, he thought. It was time to break out.

  He started to think. These were old houses. There had to be a servants' stairway somewhere in back. Perhaps it had been blocked off from the apartment and the accountants' floor when the transformation was made. He figured it was worth climbing up to the attic floor to check. Leaving the apartment, he walked up instead of down.

  It was some kind of public holiday, so the accounting floor below was in darkness. As Zuta had said, the topmost level was devoted to storage and supplies — stacked tables and chairs, an upright piano covered by a sheet, two obsolete refrigerators, cartons of canned food and cases of liquor. There was a back staircase, too. He found out that it bypassed the accounting department, the apartment, even the club, and led straight to the kitchen in the basement. But there was no point in the Executioner playing Santa Claus among the chafing dishes; he'd still have to surface in the club to get to the street.

  What the hell, he thought. Maybe he would just wait until Zuta returned. He didn't want to implicate her by drawing attention to himself. He didn't want Zuta to end up like Dagmar.

  He was on his way back up to the apartment when his foot kicked something on one of the steps. He stooped to pick it up. In the dim light filtering through a frosted window that most likely looked on an air shaft, he saw that the object was a matchbook, the sort of thing given away to advertise hotels, bars and restaurants. Then, straightening, he noticed for the first time a narrow door on one of the stairway's half landings.

  It was painted the same color as the wall, flush-fitting, with a latch and mortise lock. At one side of the door frame a key hung on a nail.

  Bolan was curious. He unhooked the key and pushed it into the lock. It turned easily. He opened the door and saw a long passageway. Walking along it, he struck a match now and then to light the way. There were no doors and no windows, but after around fifty feet there was a right-angle turn. He felt his way along a farther doorless and windowless section, longer than the first, and found himself at the top of a steep flight of stairs. At the foot of this was an unlocked door. He opened it, and discovered he had walked into a broom closet.

  It seemed a long way to come just to keep the club's storerooms swept. He struck another match. Sure enough — brooms, mops, an ancient Hoover, shelves of polish and cleaning fluid, a galvanized pail. Bolan frowned.

  Striking another match, he saw another flush-fitting door at right angles to the stairway. He opened this and stepped into the hallway of a comfortably furnished small house. Through an arch he could see chocolate easy chairs on buff broadloom, with an expensive component stereo in a mahogany cabinet against one ivory wall.

  Someone's house? Frowning again, he turned and walked into a kitchen that was as bare and sterile and unused as a shot glass in a Calvinist church vestry. Beyond the virgin refrigerator, one more door opened on three steps that led down into a closed garage. In the gloom the dim shape of a large, long automobile filled most of the floor space. He felt for a light switch, found none and lit a final match from the violated book.

  For the first time the gold words printed on the shiny black laminated matchbook cover registered with him: Die Mühlenteich — The Millpond. Dining. Dancing. Swimming.

  He struck another match and looked at the parked car. It was an ivory Cadillac with whitewall tires, tinted windows and maroon trim. The number on the license plate was HH777-CDE.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Bolan read the score this way. Zuta Krohn ran an expensive club patronized by bad as well as good guys, and nobody was putting the bite on her for protection. Other club owners, and folks who ran dives of various kinds, in and out of Hamburg, from the smartest to the cheapest, were paying through the nose to an organized gang led by Hansie Schiller and masterminded by Ferucco Lattuada. These two paragons of the consumer society, accompanied at times by certain lieutenants, visited their victims in a large and distinctive automobile. The last of these trips had been to the Mühlenteich Club at Aumühle.

  Zuta Krohn lived in an apartment above her club, but she also had a small house nearby. The two were joined
by a passageway that, if it wasn't secret, was at least concealed. In that corridor he had found a matchbook emblazoned with the name of the Mühlenteich Club. And at that club he had seen the car that was now in Zuta's garage, the car in which he himself had once been taken for a ride;

  Bolan figured the Cadillac belonged to Zuta, and she had made the trip to Aumühle with the others, remaining hidden by the tinted windows except at the Mühlenteich, where Bolan hadn't been watching, anyway.

  He remembered the words of the angry blonde. That fucking fairy! That bitch! If I could get my hands…

  He'd thought the second epithet, like the first, referred to Hansie Schiller, the way gays are sometimes characterized as feminine. But he'd been mistaken. The blonde had been talking about two separate people.

  Inescapable conclusion: the mysterious big noise, the boss to whom Lattuada and Hansie were answerable, the brains behind the racket, was Zuta.

  She was also the woman who'd taken him in and saved him from the cops, the «legman» who'd supplied him with all the underworld gossip, his protector from Hansie and his playmate of a thousand faces.

  How come? How could all that stack up?

  Bolan left the garage and went back to the house's living room. He sank into one of the chocolate chairs and tried to straighten out his thoughts.

  If Zuta was the boss, then apart from hiring Lattuada and planning the racket that put the whole of the Hamburg underworld in her hands, she must also have been the one who had decided Bolan's investigations were an embarrassment, the kind soul who'd ordered the Dagmar Schroeder killing and fixed the frame that had saddled him with it.

  It must have been Zuta who had put the word around St. Pauli that the warrior was to be brought in after he had escaped from the courthouse. Zuta who had briefed Hugo to finger him for Hansie. Zuta who had ordered the day-and-night watch on the Shangri-la. And probably Zuta who had persuaded Arvell Asticot to double-cross, with Lattuada's help, the East German buying the narcotics.