Blowout

by Don Pendleton

  It was a damp, cold, overcast day with moisture glazing the roadway. The snow had gone, but frost still clung to the hedgerow grasses and transformed the plowed field on the far side into a skating rink.

  Bolan circled the property at a distance of about a quarter of a mile. The fields were big, some stubbled, some plowed, others pricked through with winter crops. Hawthorn hedges, split-cane fencing and an occasional oak tree gave him plenty of cover from which to case the joint.

  The grounds covered maybe six acres, surrounded by a high brick wall, planted with firs, pines and a couple of cedars near the house. Windows stared across the winter landscape from all around the main structure, but in back of the place Bolan saw that he would be hidden by the stables until he was within fifty yards of the boundary wall.

  He approached warily, using hedges, isolated trees and a stand of willows in the corner of a field as cover. When he was no longer shielded by the stable block, he lowered himself into a cut that ran toward the knoll. He could hear voices and an occasional burst of radio music now. Two cars approached along the entrance driveway and then stopped. Doors slammed. Laughter, footsteps, more voices.

  Long grass beaten flat by the recent snow lay between the plowland and the cut, which was half covered by the dead brown stalks of wildflowers. Beneath this screen a thread of water gleamed.

  He made his way toward the knoll very slowly, bent almost double, ducking every few yards to peer through the stems and check out any signs of movement at any of the windows. He saw nothing.

  As the ground began to rise, he saw that the wall itself would shield him now from all but the topmost windows. Unleathering his Beretta, he crawled from the ditch and ran across the frosty furrows until he was up against the brickwork directly behind the stables.

  The wall was eight to ten feet high. Bolan jumped, hooking his fingers over the top. But moisture there had congealed into ice and he was unable to hold on. He tried a second time, and again his fingers slipped. It wasn't until he moved farther toward the gates, where a pine sheltered the brickwork from the frost, that he could make it with a firm enough hold to hoist himself up and over.

  He skirted a vegetable garden, followed a box hedge enclosing a slope of lawn and arrived behind the stable block. A flagstoned pathway led from the rear of the yard to the house. It was laid out beneath a wooden trellis draped with leafless climbing roses, but Bolan reckoned it would be visible from half the windows in the kitchen wing. He prowled toward the far end of the block, where tall gates separating the yard from the entrance driveway stood open.

  At the top of the driveway, cars — a Mercedes, an Opel, a Porsche, a Lincoln Continental — were parked on the gravel sweep in front of the white-pillared portico. He peered around the gatepost. A couple of Jeeps shared the yard with a Citroen station wagon and a Polish-built Fiat sedan.

  Noiseless, swift as a shadow, he slipped into the yard. Crouching down, he sped from vehicle to vehicle, the gun in his right hand, every nerve tensed, on the alert for the slightest movement, an unexpected sound.

  He could have walked up to the front door, asked if the place was a club, what were the membership requirements, how much did it cost, so on. But he had a hunch that wouldn't be smart. Hansie had said the place was ritzy; the grease monkey at the gas station had called it a high-class cathouse. Folks that ran such places didn't always welcome unexpected callers. Bolan preferred to check first.

  The hunch paid off. He stopped and hunkered down behind the Citroen. A dozen stable doors closed off the old horse stalls. Three of them had been left with the top section open. Bolan listened. Distant music. Distant voices. Nothing near. Above his head, the clock on the stable tower struck four times. It was growing very cold; the frost was already making the lobes of his ears tingle.

  The stable roof hid the half-open doors from the house. He catfooted to the first and peered into the dark hay-smelling interior. The stall was empty. So was the next. But beyond the third stall, with a double-door entrance at the far end of the block, was a large barnlike space, and here Bolan could make out the shape of a long automobile partly covered by a tarp.

  He caught his breath. The roof, windows, trunk and most of the hood were hidden, but enough of the lower half was visible to tell him that the car was a Russian-built ZIL limo… with East German plates.

  The wide double doors were locked, but there was a pass door on the left-hand side and this opened easily. Bolan tiptoed into the barn.

  The ZIL's radiator was cold, but the limo had been used recently because the concrete floor was dark with moisture beneath the doorsills and fenders. Bolan eased open the driver's door. No keys. Nothing in the glove compartment. A faint odor of gasoline, a hint of smoke from strong black tobacco.

  Wait.

  There was something else. Fainter still but at once familiar, a rancid smell that could constrict the throat if it was stronger. He ran to the rear of the car, pushed aside the tarp and opened the trunk. Goatskins.

  The huge trunk was jam-packed with them. Nearby a ladder led to the hayloft. And here, behind a row of trussed straw bales, the rest of the consignment was stacked.

  The discovery put his own visit in a very different perspective. He had reckoned he could always bluff his way out of the place the way he had at the Millpond if he happened to be discovered lurking about the grounds. But not now. This was dangerous material. It was dynamite. There were secrets here that had already cost many lives. He had no illusions: if he was caught this time, his own name would be added to the list.

  He replaced the tarp and let himself cautiously out of the pass door. There was shrubbery between the stable block and the house. Bent double, he dodged from bush to bush, below the windows of the kitchen wing, and approached the main facade.

  Beneath the low cloudfront, night would fall fast. The northern twilight was already thickening, and lights were lit inside the house. Bolan passed under two windows, daring to straighten momentarily outside the third, which was much wider. With a hasty glance he took in what seemed to be a salon — wall-to-wall carpet, cream paintwork with gold trim, modernistic nudes in gilt frames, a crystal chandelier.

  Two girls in shiny low-cut cocktail dresses sat on high stools talking to a white-coated waiter behind a plush bar. A third, dressed in a fringed twenties-style robe that revealed most of her large breasts, was straightening the necktie of a dark-suited, distinguished-looking man with gray hair. As the Executioner watched, she took him by the hand and guided him through a doorway at one side of the bar. A busty redhead wearing high-heeled boots and a black leather pantsuit came into the room with a diffident-looking elderly man and approached the bar.

  Bolan dropped out of sight and headed for the next window. He was about to risk another quick glance when he heard the entrance doors beneath the portico open. "Come again soon, darling," a soft woman's voice intoned. "You know we love to see you anytime."

  The warrior dropped flat behind a laurel bush. A man murmured something inaudible, hurried down the steps, waved once and got into a white Porsche. The doors closed. The Porsche started with a crackle of exhaust, backed up, then headed for the gates, scattering gravel.

  Bolan waited thirty seconds. The cold was biting into him. Somewhere on an upper floor there was a sudden peal of feminine laughter. He rose half upright and continued his tour of the house. On the far side of the portico there was a lighted window that was the twin of the one he had looked through into the salon. A hum of men's voices came from behind it.

  Once more, from behind a bush, he popped up. He saw book-lined walls, leather armchairs, a log fire burning. A stout silver-haired man wearing pince-nez sat behind a giant desk covered with ledgers, box files and sheaves of paper. Bolan wasn't really surprised to see that the guy who stood facing him, gesturing with a manicured hand, was the East German civilian who had rescued him from the ambush in the marsh. Or, to be precise, not exactly a civilian. Bolan's memory bank supplied a name and a uniform to go with the face that had a
lways had for him a disturbingly familiar aspect. It was the context of drugs, smuggling and dockside brawls that had fooled him until now.

  The man was Colonel Gottfried Benckendorff. He was in charge of a political division of the East German secret police.

  It all made sense, of course. As the kid at the gas station had guessed, the place was indeed a high-class whorehouse. It was, as Hansie had said, ritzy as all get out. And it seemed, now, to be acting as a front for some kind of East German penetration of the Federal Republic.

  Unless, of course, the Eastern-bloc presence was temporary and Benckendorff wasn't using the place as a base but merely a convenient, and unlikely, hideout while he was here.

  Whatever, it was clear that, having been cheated of his drug consignment in Lübeck, the secret-police chief had won it back the previous night and was now preparing to lake it home as planned. If he couldn't make it one way, he would make it another, and it was unlikely that a secret-police official driving a Russian automobile would have too much trouble with the Vopos or the customs people when he crossed the border.

  What wasn't clear was how he had known where to send his heavies to steal back the hijacked drugs. And what the swamp battle, presumably also directed against Lattuada, had been about. Especially since it took place well before the raid on the warehouse.

  One of those questions was answered almost at once. A dark-skinned, slender girl wearing her hennaed hair in a crazy Afro came into the room carrying a tray of drinks. She was dressed in thigh-high silver boots, black wool tights and a flame-colored sweater.

  Sally Ann! You could rely on her to do — and be — the unexpected.

  But what was she doing here?

  The answer suggested itself in the way she looked at Benckendorff, picked a thread from his sleeve, and pouted impishly in reply to something he said.

  Not a double, as Kraul had claimed, but a triple agent…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mack Bolan frowned. If Sally Ann was, as he guessed, working primarily for East German intelligence, running errands for the Team and at the same time liaising with Kraul, that would certainly explain a lot of things.

  The fact that the East Germans, for instance, had been alerted — almost — in time to foil the hijack of the goatskins in Lübeck, the fact that Benckendorff knew where they had been stashed in Hamburg in time to make his second, successful, attempt, and the fact, maybe, that he had been on hand to take the heat off Bolan himself during the swamp ambush.

  It might also explain the girl's apparent invulnerability during the battle at the snowbound crossroads and the subsequent attack on Kraut's headquarters as well as certain inconsistencies in her behavior before and since.

  But the big question remained.

  Why should an East German intelligence chief mastermind the transfer of an illegal narcotics shipment into his own country?

  The question provoked a follow-up. Were Benckendorff and his killer squad in West Germany just to organize the drug transfer? Were they part of an existing network? Or had they been sent specifically to set up a new spy ring, of which the drugs were in some way an important part?

  Bolan had to find out. He determined to force an entry into the house and see what he could dig up. The time had come for action. Silent as a ghost, he made his way to the corner of the building and turned to recon the facade that was farthest from the stables.

  This time there were no fire escapes. But there was a yew tree at one side of a sunken garden, and a jutting branch that brushed the wall near a window that looked as if it could belong to a second-floor hallway.

  Bolan made for the tree. There was only one lighted window to pass at ground-floor level. Behind it he could hear laughter and three voices — two women and one man. The curtains were drawn, but not right across. Through the gap he glimpsed pale flesh, a brass bedstead, a tangle of limbs. The people in there wouldn't be listening for the scrape of combat boots on the bark of a tree.

  It was a prickly journey, making it to that branch, but the warrior found it firm and solid. From the far end he was able to step down easily onto a wide window ledge. The window was a casement and the catch was fastened across. Bolan unstrapped the knife from his left ankle, inserted the blade between the two halves of the frame and pushed until the catch sprang back. He eased up the lower section and slid into the house.

  A wide hallway. More carpet. Subdued light coming, from a chandelier above the stair head at the far end. The doors, four each side, were cream, with the panels picked out in gold. One of them opened as he passed, and a brunette holding the edges of a bathrobe together peered out. "Tell them to bring another bottle," a man's voice called from inside the room.

  The girl stared at Bolan. "If you're looking for the john, dear," she said, "it's the other corridor, right at the stairs. Greta should have told you."

  He murmured something that could have been a thank-you and kept going. Fortunately the gun, held close to his thigh at arm's length and screened by his coat, was on the side away from her.

  The stairwell was circular. Two shallow flights curled down, one on each side, to an entrance lobby floored with black-and-white marble. The hallway he had just left was mirrored by another on the far side of the wall, again with four doors on each side. He took a passage leading to the rear of the house. Ten steps, one more door each side — the place was certainly wired for action if all those rooms were for girls' use — then a T-junction with corridors running left and right.

  Bolan turned left because the kitchen wing and the stables were that way and there had to be back stairs in a house this size. There were, past the open door of a linen closet, past a king-size blue-tiled bathroom with a sunken tub, past a woman humming and the whine of a vacuum cleaner. The stairs themselves led past a huge kitchen bright with copper, glass and stainless steel to cellars beneath the house. An electric kettle hissed steam quietly at the kitchen window, but there was nobody to be seen.

  He stepped into the room, eased open a padded door blocking off the living quarters and found himself in a long corridor that ran the length of the house's rear facade.

  This was the area of maximum risk because he reckoned the place was divided into two separate spheres of influence characterized by the salon and the library — areas, respectively, of physical and moral corruption — and if he wanted to eavesdrop on the people peddling the latter he would have to make it to the far side of the house. For it was clear that this side, where the bar, the kitchen and the blue bathroom were located, was the preserve of the high-class hookers who made such a convenient front for Benckendorff. And, possibly, if their «clients» were big wheels in the army or the administration, a useful base from which secrets could be funnelled eastward.

  Bolan was a third of the way along the passageway when he heard footsteps clack on marble, a rumble of wheels and a faint tinkle of glassware. He froze. The noises were coming from behind a door that separated the corridor from the entrance lobby. He glanced swiftly around him and saw another door. Opening it quickly, he slipped in and pulled it shut behind him.

  He found himself in a cloakroom among rubber boots, tweed hats and mackinaws hanging from hooks on the wall. His hip pressed against the cold curve of a small sink. The noises grew louder. He heard a door open. Crouching down, he put his eye to the keyhole.

  The white-jacketed waiter from the bar was wheeling a trolley stacked with cups, saucers and dirty dishes toward the kitchen. Bolan waited until he heard the guy-begin unloading the stuff into the dishwasher. Waiting, he realized suddenly and clearly that his own self-imposed mission, too, was now dividing into two separate spheres of action: one, to destroy the Zuta Krohn-Ferucco Lattuada conspiracy, clear himself of the murder charge and incidentally clean up some of the filth that was tainting the city; two, to unveil the secrets of the East German spy ring, if that's what it was, and above all to bust wide open whatever plans Benckendorff had for the distribution of the hell dust concealed in the smuggled goatskins.

>   The secret-police chief was the link that joined the two together, but for the Executioner they were two separate objectives, two targets that he could no longer hope to drill with a single shot.

  He eased open the cloakroom door, cased the passageway and stepped out. Thirty silent paces later he reached the passage that led to the front of the house. Then he rounded the corner. The library door was at the far end, past Teutonic-looking busts on plinths and nineteenth-century seascapes on the wall. There was no cover for someone who wanted to listen, but Bolan recalled Sally Ann's entry with the drinks: she hadn't appeared through this door but from the side of the room, so there had to be another door somewhere.

  Yeah, as he approached the deeply recessed library doorway, he saw a flush-fitting door, colored cream like the passage wall, between two of the gilt-framed oil paintings. He leaned his head close to the library door and listened. Was Sally Ann still in there with the two men? One male voice… two… the first again… a higher, lighter pitch, a gurgle of laughter.

  Positive.

  Bolan turned the handle of the flush-fitting door and went through. He was in a small kitchen. The usual equipment, very modern. Two doors, one to the library, one that obviously led toward the central entrance lobby. Spiraled around a steel shaft, an open ladder-stairway giving access through a circular opening to a room on the floor above.

  The Executioner hesitated. He figured the room up there would be private, very private, indeed, and — as far as the girls using the house and their clients were concerned — secret. Entry strictly reserved for Benckendorff and his confederates.

  He had to go up there and take a look. But if, as he suspected, the upper room was blocked off from the rest of the house, he'd be trapped the moment anyone left the library.

  What the hell. It had to be done. He tiptoed to the library door, bent down and used the keyhole again. The silver-haired guy with pince-nez was still behind the desk. Sally Ann lay back in an easy chair nursing a glass of something. Benckendorff wasn't in view. Bolan guessed he was pacing up and down in front of the window, because the volume and clarity of his voice varied according to whether he was facing the door or had his back to it. The door was solid, heavy and thick. Even at their clearest, Benckendorff's sentences came to Bolan in fragmentary form.