Collision Course

by Don Pendleton

  Delgaro didn't see the hatch on the elevator ceiling slide open, nor did he hear the slight popping of joints as the Executioner straightened his arm out, his deadly Beretta in a steady hand.

  Delgaro moved to one side and pressed himself flat against the side of the elevator, his pistol up and ready in hands slick with sweat. He wasn't about to be caught like a rabbit out of its hole when those doors slid open.

  The elevator bell rang as the car settled. There was the familiar slight hiss of air as the doors unsealed and slid open. The discreet cough of the Beretta was lost in those sounds.

  The mobster's head smacked up against the elevator wall. A ragged hole appeared in his temple, and the other side of his head cracked open and sprayed his brains out. The mafioso gunner slid down to crumple on the floor, a trail of crimson smeared on the wall behind him. The pistol fell out of his slack fingers and bounced off the floor.

  Mack Bolan had just done what the Chechens had never been able to do.

  4

  If pressed, Stephen Caine couldn't pinpoint when things had begun to fall apart. Not just the gradual erosion of his personal life, but the future of the entire country grew bleaker by the day as his anger and bitterness consumed him.

  It was a lot like Chinese water torture, Caine decided. Just this slow drip, drip, drip that built up over time until each drop felt like a ball-peen hammer and sounded like thunder. Every day something else happened, another loss, a fresh insult, and his frustration had become intolerable.

  Things started happening and he couldn't really remember doing them, not fully anyway. He didn't black out, but he operated on autopilot for so much of the day that decisions he made on the edge of sleep would be fully formed and operational plans by the time the morning came around. On his own, he felt helpless to act. A majority of the people who actually made the effort to vote had chosen wrong, had bought into the bullshit and the spin machine and now everything was spiraling out of control.

  Caine set the empty shot glass of bourbon on the bar and eased down a few swallows of his Bud Light to cool the burning in the pit of his stomach. He knew he was a cliche. Strangely, that realization really didn't make him feel any better.

  The bar was working class, which he definitely wasn't, but slumming made him feel better. His father would have been right at home here, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and downing bourbon like water while watching the flickering images of sports on the TV above the bar. Caine had learned everything he believed about politics by listening to what his father said and then doing the opposite.

  A talking head on the TV was explaining why collateral damage wasn't the same as those killed by deliberate acts of terrorism. The bartender moved over and took Caine's empty shot glass. She was forty and skinny and tired. She had a plain face and a smoker's squint. Caine had forgotten her name.

  "You want another shot?" she asked.

  "Let me ask you something," Caine said.

  She looked down the bar at the handful of other customers to see if they were happy. Once she decided they were fine she turned back toward Caine.

  Her eyes were green.

  "What's that?"

  "You know what the electoral college is for?"

  "You think you're funny? You think I'm stupid 'cause I tend bar so you can ask me these questions then laugh at me?"

  Caine blinked in surprise. Whatever he'd been expecting that wasn't it.

  "No," he answered her. "I don't think that. I was using the question as a lead-in, more of a rhetorical thing, so I could pontificate. You know, like drunks are supposed to do."

  The bartender looked at Caine, evaluating him. She picked up the empty shot glass and placed it in the steel-lined sink behind the bar.

  "Fine," she said. "The electoral college are the ones who actually cast the votes for the President, right? They look at the popular vote for their state, then cast the votes of their electoral college for the person who won the popular vote."

  "But they don't have to," Caine said. He was starting to feel the bourbon now.

  This caught the woman by surprise, and she gave him a look like he was trying to be sly.

  "No, it's true." Caine laughed. "They are free to cast the electoral votes for whomever they wish. They don't, by law, have to cast them for whoever wins the popular vote."

  "That true?" she asked.

  Caine smiled up at her. "Pour me another good one, if you please." He slid a twenty across the bar, and the bartender smoothly went through her motions. "Supposedly it's because of demagogues," he continued.

  He slid the hard liquor down his throat with a smooth, practiced motion. He reflected that there was a handgun in his car. He didn't believe in guns, not anymore, but it was there, in the trunk. There was no way Charisa would ever have let it into the house, but Charisa wasn't there anymore. He'd lost his wife and gained a gun.

  How great was that?

  Of course he didn't have the house anymore, either. The settlement had been very clear; they split the house right down the middle. Didn't much matter that the slimeball lawyer she'd left him for had a sprawling ranch-style twice the size of their old fixer-upper.

  "Why?" the bartender repeated.

  "What?" Caine blinked up at her.

  "Why demagogues?" She sounded exasperated. "You were talking about the electoral college, remember?"

  Caine gave her a dour smile and shrugged. The bartender snorted and dismissed him, moving down the bar. Someone came into the bar from the outside, and Caine realized it had started to rain.

  He left a good tip by way of apology and headed out the door. Outside the rain turned everything gray. He couldn't stop thinking about Charisa, about everything he'd lost.

  He would never get her back, he knew. Would never get back his Army buddies who'd fallen in Mogadishu, either. Or his brother, Justin, who'd joined the Marines and never came back from Iraq.

  But if Stephen Caine couldn't get justice, he'd get revenge.

  Someone would pay.

  5

  Vincent Paolini had held everything he'd ever wanted in his hands before he lost it all. He'd worked his way out of his childhood of rural poverty and to the university at Naples on a soccer scholarship. His soccer playing had been good enough to make old men cry and present him with an unending parade of female admirers.

  But if blood could tell, then it told in Vincent Paolini's case.

  He was the son of a fifth-generation made man, and he'd learned in the cradle that anyone who pissed off a Paolini had to pay. He'd beaten an American sailor to death in the waterfront bar of Ravenna with a pool cue. Just like that his future as a European professional soccer player had disappeared.

  He'd fled, and his friends had covered for him enough to obstruct the investigation. He joined the Spanish foreign legion, the lesser known refuge of rogues and desperate men than the French version, but just as brutal and just as elite.

  He'd done three years in the Spanish legion while memories in Italy faded. He'd hunted the Taliban in Afghanistan, served as peacekeeper in Bosnia and in Liberia. He'd been trained as a light infantry commando and had been in dozens of firelights.

  During that time his father, now an old man retired to his vineyards and dog breeding, appealed to the Palermo capo. In return for certain services, the capo had promised to use his influence to bury the investigation of the American sailor's death.

  Paolini had killed three people, two men, one a World War II veteran, and a woman to clear his debt. By that time he'd found he had a flair for the Family business and he'd risen to the position of the capo's right-hand man.

  Now, thanks to the mystery hitter, Vincent Paolini was the Palermo capo. Right now the Palermo capo felt something he thought he'd put behind him in the mountains of Afghanistan: fear.

  He was afraid he'd gotten cocky, telling himself that despite the smooth ambush the mystery killer had pulled off, Paolini was still the better killer.

  Had he been wrong?

  He'd just seen f
ive hardened killers gunned down in less than ten minutes. He hadn't seen carnage on that scale since he'd witnessed the ethnic cleansing in Africa as a legionnaire. The guy was good, Paolini admitted. But, dammit, he was better—he had to believe that.

  He had to.

  * * *

  Bolan's muscles strained and jumped beneath his skin as he climbed handover-hand up the elevator shaft, clinging to the thick cables like a spider to its web. He'd sent the elevator up a few floors, pressing multiple buttons so that the passenger car would stop at every floor in between. Once the elevator was in motion, Bolan had pried open the shaft doors and begun his journey upward. He hoped the ruse would give him enough time to hunt down and catch an angle on Paolini.

  He knew that common sense told him to take his information and run. The Palermo capo's operation had been thrown into disarray, and Bolan had what he needed to move up the food chain toward his ultimate prize. The payoff was bigger if Stony Man exploited the information he'd obtained than if he killed a single Italian Mob lieutenant.

  But he was going to do it anyway.

  * * *

  Paolini stood in the shadows and watched the elevator going up, plotting its progress by the lighted numerals above the doors. The lift had stopped on his floor, and the doors slid open to reveal nothing more than Delgaro's bloody corpse. The doors slid shut again and the elevator rose. When it finally halted, Paolini had recalled it and, stepping inside, had quickly pushed the button to send the elevator all the way back down before stepping out.

  All the way down to the basement.

  He snickered. If the mystery gunman was doing what Paolini suspected, then he'd be squashed flatter than a bug under his heel. That is a sign of old age, Paolini thought, predictability. In their business, the business of professional killers, that was a fatal flaw. In the future Paolini intended to make sure he didn't make the same mistakes.

  * * *

  Bolan looked up as he heard the elevator kick into life, and he knew he had mistimed his trick. It was a potentially fatal mistake, but he'd known the risk when he played his gambit and he was prepared to live or die by his instincts.

  He scrambled up the service ladder set into the shaft. Above him the bottom of the elevator smoothly powered down toward him. He was in a race, climbing against the clock, and now time had run out. He'd tried to play Paolini for a fool and had been off by a good thirty seconds.

  That could prove to be a lifetime.

  Realizing he would have to climb faster if he wanted to make it, Bolan stopped to replace his Beretta in his shoulder holster. His right hand slid the muzzle of the weapon into the sling as his left wrapped around the rung just above his head.

  The metal rung was covered in some cold, slimy fluid. Perhaps it was maintenance oil or some other service fluid; in the dim light Bolan couldn't tell. His hand slid off the slick metal, surprising him, and he overbalanced. His hands flung outward and one foot slipped off the rung below him. As he scratched for purchase his pistol fell away.

  Darkness enveloped him as he fell, bouncing off the walls of the elevator shaft. His hands reached out to grasp the rungs of the service ladder. His sudden stop pushed him roughly up against the sheer metal wall again, forcing air from his lungs. His head slammed forward and his lip was split against the steel ladder.

  The agony was a sharp, sudden shock and his tenuous grip weakened and then slipped. He fell backward down the shaft for a second time. His leg was jerked cruelly in its socket and he came to a brutally abrupt halt, his ankle twisted in one of the rungs.

  Hot spears of pain lanced through his leg and muscles and tendons shrieked in protest at the tension.

  Above him the elevator raced down.

  Bolan reached up with one strong hand to pull himself back up. His face was sticky with blood from his nose, and his lips were bloody and swollen as he fought to regain control of his breath.

  Bolan fought himself up into a vertical position. Standing on the ladder, favoring one leg, he stretched out a blood-smeared hand and pried his fingers into the rubber buffer curtain set between the floor-level doors.

  The muscles along his back and shoulders bunched under the strain. With a final desperate exertion, the top half of the fingernail on his middle finger was ripped away, but the doors came open under his grip.

  He looked up. The bottom of the elevator was in plain sight, rushing down toward his upturned face. Bolan tensed then sprang off the ladder rung, reaching out for the opening. He scrambled through the opening just as the elevator filled the space directly above him.

  Adrenaline shot through his body, and Bolan found the desperate strength he needed to live. He pulled himself through the opening just as the elevator dropped past him. He had made it.

  * * *

  Paolini struck the Executioner like a runaway locomotive, driving him back into the open shaft. Their momentum was greater than the elevator's and they hit the roof of the carrier hard. They fell like squabbling cats, punching and striking at each other as they dropped.

  In the split second before they smashed into the elevator roof, Bolan managed to twist his enemy beneath him so that he landed on top of the capo. Paolini kicked his adversary away from him, knocking him back across the elevator roof to the other side of the lift. Bolan rebounded off the wall of the shaft and bounced forward to his knees before coiling and leaping to his feet.

  Both men sprang forward and, locked together, they struggled as the elevator descended to the basement.

  When Bolan had been in the Army, he'd undergone training in defense against attack dogs. The premise had been as simple as it was brutally effective. You gave the animal an arm, knowing it would be bit, then the free arm came down like a bar and wrapped around the back of the dog's head where the skull met spine. The man then fell forward and the beast's neck snapped like a stick of rotten wood.

  Bolan's arms broke the clinch and one forearm pressed hard against the Italian's face. His other arm slid into place behind the man's neck, right where the skull met the spine. He began to push.

  Paolini could feel his neck begin to break. Terror lent him a superhuman strength but to no avail. His huge fists hammered into Bolan's midriff, his knee attempted to maul Bolan's crotch, but the Executioner ignored the blows, the damage, the pain.

  The elevator settled into position on the ground with a subtle lurch, just enough to cause Bolan's injured leg to buckle. He tripped back and fell through the open maintenance hatch, dropping straight down through to the elevator compartment below.

  His purchase suddenly gone, Paolini tumbled forward, as well. His momentum carried him down through the elevator hatch to land on top of Bolan. A backward elbow caught the Italian in the face, stunning him for a second as Bolan lunged for the pistol lying on the floor next to Delgaro's limp hand.

  Bolan lifted the pistol just as the elevator doors slid open and Paolini's heel cracked hard against his wrist, sending the handgun spinning off out of the compartment. Bolan twisted back toward the Mob enforcer and saw him clawing his own Croatian HS 2000 out of a shoulder sling. Bolan brought a hammer-hard fist up from the hip and smashed it into Paolini's temple, staggering the man as he tried to rise to his knees.

  Bolan's other hand lanced out and tried to take the pistol from Paolini. The two men struggled for control of the weapon. Bolan drew back his left hand to strike the other man again.

  Paolini squeezed the trigger, and 9 mm rounds riddled the roof and walls of the elevator as he continued jerking the trigger. The pistol bucked and kicked in their hands as Bolan tried to wrestle it free, slugs stitching a crooked line across the wall toward the control panel.

  Three soft-nosed slugs smacked into the delicate electronics and chewed their way through the thin outer casing. The elevator doors finished sliding open as sparks flew in rooster tails. The lights went out the instant Paolini pulled the trigger on the final bullet in the handgun.

  Once again darkness enveloped Bolan.

  Paolini swung wildly in
the darkness, his knuckles clipping Bolan on the chin. The American's head snapped back and he rolled with the force of the blow, letting it carry him back away from the mafioso.

  As he finished his backward somersault, he felt the cool hardness of a concrete floor. He had cleared the elevator, but the basement was as dark as a tomb.

  Bolan rose and reached out a hand to either side of him in the pitch blackness. He walked quickly forward, lifting his feet high and putting them down flat to avoid tripping in the dark. Despite his precaution, he nearly tripped over some obstacle and he used the noise to dodge hard to the left, coming up against a wall.

  He pressed his back against the structure, his ears straining to catch any sound. Silence was the key. When you fought with one sense gone the surest way to victory was to deprive your opponent of his other senses.

  He stood motionless, fighting to control his breathing, painfully aware of how loud his ragged, gasping breath had to be. After what felt like an eternity he regained control of his body.

  Holding his breath, Bolan strained to listen.

  Soon the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears deafened him to the point that he was defeating his original purpose. Slowly he exhaled, struggling to keep the escaping breath silent.

  Then he heard it. He heard Paolini breathe. He couldn't be sure, but it had seemed, in that instant, that Paolini was no more than a few yards from him.

  Bolan began to move. He kept his back flat against the wall, his hands reaching out far to the sides to feel for obstacles. He moved slowly, crossing one leg over the other. He swallowed tightly, concentrating on pinpointing Paolini's exact location.

  Five steps and then he halted. He could hear no sound. Tension gripped him, but only for a moment. Bolan had spent too many years on the hellgrounds to be killed by indecision.

  He swallowed tightly and then stepped away from the safety of the wall. He couldn't hear Paolini moving, and he froze. After a short while he heard the strained outlet of escaping breath and realized Paolini had been listening for him.