EPILOGUE
It has been a curious and a furious 40 hours in England. Bolan had launched an assault upon Soho, and Soho had assaulted him back. A symbol of the times, Edwin Charles had told him; and certainly that symbol covered a great deal more than “this crackling museum of ours.” The domain of violence lurked deeply in every place where men flung themselves off into a shallow forgetfulness of the greater meanings of life, and it surfaced wherever greed and the lust for power were present.
Some good men had died during those brief hours, but so had a pile of rotten ones. Bolan had to figure that as a plus on the world’s balance sheet.
An entire vault of damning pornographic films had been uncovered in the home of the late Mervyn Stone, and burned, and enshrined in a little urn in the entrance hall of the Museum de Sade. Bolan saw that as a conditional plus for the future of a great nation, and as a very graphic hint to the men whose images had been on that film.
Open warfare had erupted between dissident elements of the most corruptive criminal empire in history, and Leo Turrin read that as a very strong plus.
The mystery had unravelled to Bolan’s satisfaction, and while this had no place as a plus or a minus, it did give him relative peace of mind. Major Stone had obviously been bleeding his “members” for a number of years, but not in a manner to cause undue excitement. When the Mafia began muscling in, however, the repercussions were felt in the higher echelons of government, and a quietly delicate investigation was launched. Complicating this circumstance was the item of Nick Trigger’s greed; he lost his power over Mervyn Stone by entering into a clandestine financial arrangement with him, in direct violation of the powers that ruled his life. Both of these men panicked when a harmless old tinkerer was revealed to them as an agent of Her Majesty’s Government, and this was where Bolan came in. Nick Trigger had walked a tightrope between his obligations to family and obligations to self, and that rope had begun to fray long before the final break.
All in all, Bolan had to score the battle as a definite plus for the upward movements of mankind, and as a shattering loss to the other side of the coin.
As regarding’ Ann Franklin, he did not know just exactly how to mark the scorecard. He tried to impart the idea of saving grace to his hostess in the Franklin bathroom at Queen’s House as he groomed himself and repaired minor damages to his person. He sprinkled an antiseptic solution on his lacerated scalp while he told her, “You can’t blame yourself for anything that happened. That is, unless you want to feel responsible for the fact that I’m still alive. You’re to blame for that, all right.”
She was giving him that winsome look from the doorway. “You’re too kind,” she replied.
“Look, you just got conned. It happens to the best of us.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have called him, you know, except that I was so stupidly positive that you were wrong about him. And I was frightened silly. I’ve been going to the Major with my problems for as long as I can remember.” She raised her shoulders and dropped them in a dainty slump. “I thought he could help us,” she added in a tiny voice.
Bolan was grinning. He told her, “Sometimes it’s hard to separate friends from enemies. Like Danno Giliamo. My contact tells me that old Danno is really on the carpet over this deal. He thought he was conning Nick, and all the time he was getting it right in the back. Those screwballs had formed a third front. They were going to deliver my head to the Commissione in a paper bag. Imagine that?”
Ann shuddered. “No worse than me, I’m sure. And that’s doubly true if they were actually running money through my club accounts, as you’ve intimated.”
Her face was screwed into an agonizing fit of indecision. Bolan chuckled and said, “Okay, what is it?”
She said, “Whether you want to hear it or not, Mack, I simply must get this out of my system. Honestly, I still wasn’t certain as to just exactly what the Major had in mind until I walked in there and saw it. It’s that military mastery of his, I suppose. He always did have me thoroughly cowed. And when he joined me outside the Tower, he told me that I mustn’t worry about you, that he would save you if he had to put a gun to your head. Silly me, I believed him. It was that last thing you shouted at me from the stoop that turned my mind to thinking, I mean to really thinking.”
“I told you all bets were off.”
“No, you said that our pact was dissolved. And now. Let’s get this out of my system also. Is it dissolved, Mack?”
He gave her a solemn inspection and said, “Don’t you think that’s best?”
She shook her head. “No. I remain in your hands, if you’ll have it that way.”
Almost painfully he said, “Plus.”
“What?”
He showed her a long, tender smile and told her, “You’re a plus. Keep it that way for the right time, the right place, the right guy.”
“You are the right guy,” she murmured.
“Wrong time and place, m’lady,” he said regretfully, and walked past her and into the bedroom. He snugged into his gunleather and put on his jacket, then went over and cracked the blinds for a window recon.
“You’re leaving now, aren’t you?” Ann whispered.
He nodded his head, rather sadly she thought. “Yeah. That time has come again.”
“Where will you go?”
“Home … wherever that is.”
“And how will you get there?”
He smiled and said, “Through the jungle, m’lady. That’s the only way.” He picked up his gear and strode to the front door. When he look back she was standing just inside the bedroom and following him with a wistful smile.
He waved to her and she waved back. “Thanks, and all that,” she called softly.
He grinned and went out. Somewhere out there in those wet wild woods was a trail home. He might find it, and he might not. But he had to try.
One thing he knew he would find:
Through the Jungle very softly flits a shadow
and a sigh. He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
The little hunter struck out across the shadows and was enveloped in them, and became a part of them, and knew that he would live there … and that one day he would die there.
The Executioner was blitzing on.
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1: FACES
Four faces of death awaited him as he stepped into the main terminal area at Kennedy International. Bolan went on without a pause but his mental mug-file clicked to a halt at a quick make on Sam “The Bomber” Chianti, a contract specialist in the Manhattan-based Gambella Family. The other three faces had no identity beyond the screamingly obvious imprint of Mafia street soldiers.
Bolan casually transferred the topcoat to his right arm, allowing it to cover the hand. His eyes, behind the dark glasses, swept on beyond the four hardmen as he moved smoothly past them and into the flow of traffic toward the helicopter station of Manhattan Airways. They had made him, of course—tagging along behind now, unbunching and fanning out like wranglers on a roundup.
Sam the Bomber was on Bolan’s right flank. The other faces, glimpsed briefly yet seared now into his mental file, were keeping a discreet distance and covering any possible angle of escape, efficiently crisscrossing in the crowd, maintaining the rear seal.
A man ahead of Bolan was complaining loudly to a companion about the high cost of fun at Frankfurt. Bolan himself was thinking tiredly about the high cost of coming home and confronting the enemy unarmed. He had felt it wise to abandon his hardware at London Airport rather than risk detection by the hijack-conscious air marshals. The gamble had been for a quiet re-entry into the U.S. Bolan should have known better. Now he did. Too late.
With death stalking him, the survival instincts of the professional combat man took over and began directing Bolan. Sam the Bomber was moving in, quickly closing the gap between them. Bolan spoke without turning his head or breaking pace. “You ready to die, Sam?” he asked coldly.
“Huh?” the other man grunted, caught offguard by the direct remark and briefly uncoordinated, his hand jerking toward the opening in his coat.
Bolan held the fast pace and snapped a glance at the dumbfounded hood. “It’s a setup,” he growled, his face unconcerned but his guts churning. “Feds are all over me. You too, now.”
“Bullshit,” Chianti replied, vocally rejecting the warning. His eyes, however, were not all that positive, sliding about in an involuntary inspection of the crowd.
“So you’ll be buried in bullshit. It’s your last contract, Sam.” Bolan was rounding the corner to the helicopter station. The flustered Chianti moved a step too close going into the turn. Bolan’s arm moved in a sudden blur, the topcoat whipped across the Mafioso’s face, and Bolan’s elbow slammed into his gut.
Chianti’s breath left him with a whooshing gurgle. A short-barreled .38 revolver which had momentarily occupied his gun hand disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived and dropped into Bolan’s waiting pocket as though the transfer had been a carefully rehearsed one. Bolan’s hammering forearm chopped into the hardman’s throat. He staggered back into the fast moving stream of traffic, going to the floor and taking several pedestrians down with him.
Bolan went on, leaving the confusion behind and merging with the main swirl through the gates. He snapped a backward glance as he crowded into the waiting helicopter and quickly located two anxious faces in the pileup at the boarding gate. The doors closed behind him and Bolan found a seat. Moments later the big ferry craft was lifting into the air. Through the window Bolan saw Sam the Bomber, his face a study in rage and frustration as he stepped into a phone booth.
Bolan sighed and fingered Chianti’s .38 through the fabric of his jacket. So now it would be a race with time. The chopper would be putting down in midtown Manhattan in a matter of minutes. And another head party would be scrambling to get there ahead of him.
Bolan tried to relax, knowing that he could not. He scowled darkly at his reflection in the window. A guy did not go to his own execution all sweetly composed and ready for a gentle sigh into that last breath of life. Not this guy. His last breath would be a snarl, not a sigh.
The Midtown Station was perched atop a skyscraper not far from Grand Central Station. The ungainly craft settled onto the rooftop landing pad and Bolan was the first passenger to the door. He showed the crew man his pistol and told him, “Go ahead and open up, but don’t let anyone out for one full minute. There might be some gun play when I hit that roof. Understand?”
The crew man’s face paled. He nodded his head in understanding.
Bolan asked him, “Is the escape hatch forward, same as on the military version?”
Again the crew man nodded.
“Okay. Remember, one full minute.” Bolan found the emergency exit in the copter floor, opened it, and quickly dropped to the roof of the building. The rotors were still chugging overhead as he swung out beneath the belly and ran for the steps to the elevator area.
In the periphery of his vision, Bolan saw a large man with both arms extended step from behind a bricked area directly opposite the landing pad, and at the same moment a heavy-calibre handgun began to fire. Whistling slugs tore across Bolan’s path and plowed into a ventilator housing just beyond. The guy was targeting on him from a firing-range stance, one hand grasping and steadying the gun wrist as he continued to coolly squeeze off round after round.
Bolan snap-fired two running shots from the .38—both missing, but close enough to send the gunman scurrying for cover. A confusion of shouted commands and the sounds of running feet accompanied Bolan to the stairway which led to the raised deck, where a little guy with a big gun appeared at the top just as Bolan was starting up. The man at the top tried to dodge but Bolan’s instinctive trigger finger had already dispatched an untidy hole directly between the retreating eyes. The gun went over the railing as the small man flopped onto the stairway. Bolan stepped aside to be clear of the falling body, then raced on to the top as a thick voice from below called up to him, “You ain’t got a chance, Bolan! We got you sealed on this roof!”
Bolan did not doubt the truth of that for a moment. But he had three seal dissolvers left in the revolver and he meant to spend them wisely. He sprinted across the raised area, then launched himself into a rolling dive as an assortment of handguns began unloading on him from the elevator shelter. He took a searing hit in the meaty part of his left shoulder then another burned across the flesh of his hip. Firing from the prone, Bolan squeezed off three deliberate shots into the crouching figures at the elevator, toppling them like dummies in a shooting gallery. Then he sneered away the pain alarms from the shrieking shoulder and lurched to his feet for an eyes-on confrontation with the final remaining obstacle to freedom. The guy was bent forward at the waist, a big auto-loader thrust out in front of him, and he was wildly jerking the trigger against an empty or jammed magazine, slowly backing into the elevator car.
Bolan transferred the now useless .38 to the equally useless and dangling left hand and sent a mental command to the damaged limb to hang on for just another moment, and he went in after the quickly dissolving seal. The guy saw death coming for him and his eyes began to roll. The automatic clattered to the floor and the hood’s hands went to the back of his head. He croaked, “Jeez, Bolan, I—”
Bolan’s good right hand shot out to grab the guy’s tie, and he catapulted him out of there in an arcing swing from the throat just as another group charged to the top of the stairway from the helicopter area. The guy was dancing around just outside the elevator, trying to keep his footing against the wild eviction fling. Guns thundered from the stairway and the Mafioso’s dancing took on a freakish quality as he stopped the hot missiles meant for Bolan. The elevator doors, closing, also intercepted a grouping of sizzling metal. Then the car was in motion and Bolan was alone with his empty revolver and a steadily building pain in his shoulder. The pistol slipped away from numbed fingers and his lifeblood followed closely, dropping into bright scarlet spots on the floor. He wadded a handkerchief and jammed it roughly inside his shirt, holding it tightly and grinding his teeth against the new onslaught of harsh sensation.
The firefight on the roof had seemed to last an eternity. Actually, hardly more than a minute had elapsed since he dropped from the belly of that chopper. Men died in a fingersnap; time seemed to stand still at moments like that. It was not standing still now. Bolan’s shoulder wound was bleeding furiously, and he could literally feel the life energies seeping away from him. He had not escaped, he knew—only delayed the end a while longer.
The elevator was an automatic express between the roof and the thirty-eighth floor. He left it at that level and took another car to the sixteenth floor, then doubled back to the twentieth. There he carefully cleaned up some wet splotches of spilled blood and went looking for the stairway, taking care not to leave a telltale trail of crimson.
The arm was beginning to stiffen, his coatsleeve was soaked, and the bleeding was showing no signs of letting up. The grazed hip was stinging like hell but had bled very little and was obviously not going to give him much trouble. Not that he needed any more. Those guys on the roof would not be giving up all that easy. At that moment, Bolan knew, they were swarming the building in a determined effort to keep him sealed in there. And, of course, in a minute or two there would be cops to contend with. There would always be cops, as dependable as heat in hell.
The shoulder was not hurting much now. That was a bad sign. Also his legs were getting rubbery and his eyes were becoming unreliable. The truth bore in on his dizzied consciousness—he would not find that stairway, and it would not do him much good if he should. He was losing consciousness. He stumbled, and threw his good hand out to steady himself against the wall. Instead he fell against the frosted glass of a door and his hand came to rest on the doorknob. Artful letters on the door told him that Paula’s Fashions lay just inside.
Bolan pushed on inside just as his legs gave way altogether and
the floor of the office floated up to receive him. A feminine voice squealed something in an alarmed falsetto, and impossibly long and shapely legs ran over to stand beside him. Then a pretty face was hovering above his and a disembodied voice gasped, “Oh wow! I know who you …”
Bolan had lost his dark glasses somewhere back there in the fracas. Sure, everyone knew who he was. That face of his had been plastered across newspapers, national magazines, and television screens so often that it had become almost as familiar to the American public as John Wayne’s or Paul Newman’s.
His voice sounded to him as though it were coming from someone else as he feebly commanded, “Call the cops and leave!” Death crews left no witnesses, and suddenly the most important thing in his spinning mind was to warn this girl of her danger. “Quick, get out before …” The words became entangled in his tongue and he lost them.
Another pair of legs floated in from somewhere. The same voice he’d heard before was declaring, “It’s that guy, that Executioner.”
“Some executioner,” said another, less excited, female. “It looks as though he tried once too often.”
With his final erg of conscious energy, Bolan whispered, “Don’t get caught here with me. Run, now—split!”
Then the most incredibly beautiful face he had ever seen was hanging there just above his, inspecting him with a concerned smile, and he took that image with him into the beckoning whirlpool of utter blackness. Perhaps, he thought, he would not die with a snarl, after all. If he was dying, then it was with a quiet sigh of deepest regret.
2: BODIES
Bolan dreamed of lush Elysian Fields and of cavorting with beautiful naked nymphs with impossibly long legs, and of skinny-dipping in sparkling pools where the nymphs grew Mafia heads beneath their arms. The dream seemed uninterrupted and endless, and when he finally opened his eyes he could not be sure that he had been or was not still dreaming.
Assault on Soho Page 16