Cleveland Pipeline

by Don Pendleton

  Eyes that oozed ice watched the digital clock in the console—four minutes to wait for the next call—while hands that had learned to kill coolly and methodically twisted at the fabric of the combat fatigues, impatient now for a kill that would be anything but cool.

  The Executioner was awaiting a very personal collection. And God help Tony Morello if he did not find her alive and well.

  16

  NEAR MISS

  The call came right on time. Bolan scooped up the instrument and said, “Yes, I’m here.”

  Her control was much better now. She asked, “Where do I meet you?”

  “Can you make it to Edgewater Park in fifteen minutes?”

  Pause.

  “I—I think so, yes.”

  “Okay. At the lagoon. Be there. I won’t wait.”

  “Will you be driving the hot little car?”

  He said, “What else. Hurry. You just missed a collection.”

  Less than sixty seconds later, the first big crew wagon nosed out of the estate and headed toward town, followed by three others in quick succession. Bolan had each one close up in the optics as it cleared the gate and made the swing onto the road. Each was packed to the gunwhales with hardeyed men. But nowhere in there did he spot Tony Morello or Susan Landry. Which was something of a surprise. He had half expected that they would take the girl along as a spotter or decoy. But of course there was no reading the Morello mind at a time like this. And Bolan’s gameplan had remained entirely flexible. He was playing strictly to the ear, hoping only for a chance to reach into their midst and snatch that lady back safe and sound.

  And maybe this way was better. Morello must have severely weakened his palace guard by sending out those head parties—four vehicles, eight men per—yeah, severely weakened.

  Bolan was preparing the EVA even as his mind worked the problem. Within a minute after that last vehicle cleared the gate, the warrior was in the armory selecting his weapons. He stripped to the combat blacks and slipped on the battle rig, a belted configuration including grenades, smokers, and incendiaries. Big Thunder, the .44 AutoMag, went to the right hip and the Beretta Belle at the left armpit. Finally, the big punch combo—an M-16 assault rifle with an M-203 nestled below, the mated designation for the M-79. This “big punch” provided a combination of a 5.56mm machine gun with a 40mm hand cannon, the latter handling loads of high explosive (HE), smoke, gas, or buckshot as the need demanded.

  Within two minutes after the departure of the head parties, Bolan was out of his vehicle and running for the wall of the Morello estate, the “big punch” slung across his chest from a neck harness. He hit the wall at full charge and vaulted over, landing on his feet and continuing the charge with hardly a break in stride—in the garden area where he’d stalked Morello and Sorenson in the dark, where now was bright daylight and a startled sentry in mind-boggling confrontation with a real live commando on the hoof.

  The guy spun away from that charge with a grunt of fear, frantically attempting to reach a shotgun which perhaps only moments earlier had been propped against a nearby tree. He hit the ground on his back, scrabbling hands clutching the shotgun at the same moment that a black pistol in the invader’s hand spat silently on the run to chug nine millimeters of sighing death splattering into that constricted throat, a warning cry caught there and pinched off in the dying gurgle.

  Bolan charged on.

  Another guy in the parking area looked up just in time to see the second flaring of that silent weapon and to intercept another sighing missile. This one yelped audibly as life departed, bringing another guy down off the porch with bugging eyes and a handgun springing from sideleather. Bolan ran right over that guy, clubbing him with the Beretta and crushing the larynx with a well-placed kick as he danced on by and leapt onto the porch.

  Another gawked at him from the open doorway. He sent nine millimeters sighing ahead to clear the way, smacking in at forehead center and punching the guy onto his back and sliding in his own fluids.

  It was an old house with a wide central hallway, huge sliding doors leading off to either side, all dark woods and musty odors, a stairway climbing off directly inside the door.

  A handgun yapped at him from above, three quick slugs pounding into the floor near Bolan’s feet. He stepped under the stairwell and dispatched forty millimeters of HE straight up. The big round hit the ceiling up there and blasted on through, sending back a mushroom of fire and showering debris. A section of second-floor railing crashed to the main floor with a smoking body in tow. Bolan followed through with a prolonged burst from the M-16, adding splintered wood and plaster dust to the flames up there. Pounding feet and urgent voices told the story of panic in the palace.

  A shaky voice up there called down, “Ease off, ease off! You can have it!”

  “Bring it down!” Bolan commanded icily. “Hands on the head and moving spryly!”

  They came down with surprising spryness, horrified gazes stuck to the big angry man in black.

  “Out the door and don’t look back! Quickly! Quickly!”

  There were three of them. Bolan snared the tail man and shoved him ungently against the wall. “The lady!” he growled.

  “Downstairs I guess,” the guy gasped. “Basement.” Scared eyes showed the way.

  Bolan shoved the guy on out the door, with the advice, “Tell your amici to keep it moving all the way to hell.” The guy hit the ground running.

  Flames were spreading through the upper floor when Bolan located the basement stairway. Lights were on below, and he could hear someone groaning painfully. It was an L-shaped stairway with a landing halfway down. He sent a machine gun burst into the wall at the landing, then quickly followed with his own presence there.

  Nothing came at him.

  A man’s body lay at the bottom, only the torso in view. “Don’t shoot,” the guy groaned. “It’s okay here. Don’t shoot!”

  Bolan cautiously descended the stairs. It was okay there, yeah. Large, open room with plenty of height. A movie studio—or it had been, once. Now everything down there was just torn to hell—couple of expensive-looking cameras, studio lights, couple of beds, couch, a kink rig with wrist and leg irons, sound equipment—all of it bullet-riddled and reduced to junk.

  The guy on the floor was Freddy Bianchi.

  Both legs were practically cut away from the guy just above the knees. He’d been shoestringed with an automatic weapon.

  Bolan coldly said, “Dammit, Freddy, how’d you get that?”

  The guy was trying to get a belt around one of his thighs for use as a tourniquet. And he was in hellacious pain. “Gimme a hand,” he pleaded.

  “I want the girl.”

  “She ain’t here. Help me.”

  Bolan shoved the muzzle of the M-16 against the guy’s throat. “Okay,” he said quietly.

  “Look, I’ll tell you! But do something, dammit! I’m bleeding to death!”

  Bolan knelt in the guy’s blood and silently went to work on him. A moment later he told him, “Okay. Maybe you won’t bleed to death. But I think you’re going to lose those legs, Freddy. Maybe not, if you get quick help. Who did it to you? Morello do this?”

  “He finally flipped completely out,” Bianchi groaned. “Crazy as hell. He’s crazy, I tell you.”

  “Tell me something new,” Bolan suggested. “Where’s the girl?”

  “He took her. Lammed out right behind the boys. Back way. I tried to tell ’im. Keep the girl for bargains, case it goes to hell. Aw naw. Wrong thing to say. He got it into his head. I saw it, I saw it getting there. Wants to make her a star.”

  Bolan growled, “What?”

  “Yeah, a snuff star. You know how that goes.”

  Bolan’s raging gaze took in the shattered studio. “Why all this, then?”

  “You figure it,” Bianchi said. Those eyes were rolling up, the pain and shock having their way there. “He’s got a better one on the ship. Probably going there. That’s where I’d look, Bolan. And I hope I’m right.
Hope you kill the crazy bastard. Do me a favor. Shoot ’im in the crotch. Let ’im bleed to death through his prick. You’d never believe the shit I’ve took off that maniac. Then he does this to me. Shoot ’im in the prick.”

  “This is going to hurt you, Freddy,” Bolan said. “I have to get you out of here. The joint’s on fire.” He hefted the guy the most painless way possible and started up the stairway. Smoke puffed down on them.

  Bianchi groaned, “Take the back way. Cellar door—leads outside.”

  The big double doors had already been flung open and left that way. Morello’s way out, no doubt, with something very precious to Mack Bolan under tow. He carried the shattered man up the stairs and into the fresh outside air.

  The old joint was going fast, flames leaping high above the rooftop. There were no signs of lingering personnel on the grounds.

  Bolan took his burden to the front sector, well clear of the burning building, and left him in the grass beside the drive. “I owe you, Freddy,” he told him before he left. “I’ll send help, depend on it.”

  “Shoot ’im in the prick,” was the last thing Freddy Bianchi said to Mack Bolan.

  And, at the moment, Mack Bolan could have cheerfully done so.

  The real anger—the deeper anger—was at himself, though. He had allowed himself to be programmed by personal feelings, and he’d just kicked the whole Cleveland campaign down the drain … for nothing, probably. For a cocky kid who would not accept the rules of the game, who’d gone off blind and headstrong to slay dragons the gentle way … refusing to believe that there was no gentle way.

  So he’d loused up the entire game. The only handle he had was going up in flames. The only inside man was now far ahead and scurrying to his “impregnable” hardship.

  And Bolan knew. He’d lost the game. He’d lost the girl. Morello had won both. A lunatic had turned the trick at Cleveland. Bolan knew, yeah, because he was aware that he’d screwed up more than the River Base hardsite. During that agonizing wait for Landry’s second call, he’d killed the time with a listen to another recorded conversation from the latest collection.

  He was such an expert in everything, sure. So why hadn’t he known that Christina had twin screws. In that murky water, how was a guy to know—unless he’d taken the time like an expert should to look up the nomenclature for that old scow? Personal feelings again, yeah. His mind had been divided, too fragmented in the need to justify himself to that cocky twit of a girl. So he’d dropped only one of Christina’s screws. A bit crippling, sure, but not absolutely disabling. A few minor repairs, and she was getting set to limp out again at four o’clock.

  The time was now three-fifty.

  In another few minutes, the lunatic and the cocky twit would be on their way “north” in a warship. And she was a warship, with more than a hundred foreign savages ready and willing to repel boarders. More, and worse, she boasted a “movie studio” where cocky twits could be reduced to shredded, shrieking, mindless flesh while the cameras recorded for sicky posterity the total disintegration of everything human.

  Bolan halted tiredly at the door to the Warwagon and raised pained eyes to cosmos.

  She was not a twit but a lovely young woman with a mind of her own and the courage of her convictions. But even if the “twit” had fit—and no matter what the fit—he could not abandon her to that, whatever the cost to himself or to the world at large.

  Something very cold, and very deadly, and very determined was settling into the Bolan psyche.

  He had lost Cleveland, okay.

  But he had not yet irretrievably lost everything else.

  And, by God, he would not lose anything else. Not even a twit.

  17

  PHASED

  Bolan pointed the battle cruiser toward blood and threw caution to the winds, contacting his friend Leo Turrin on the mobile phone.

  “This is Striker. I’m on the mobile so watch it.”

  “I gotcha. It’s okay here. You sound hot.”

  “I am. I suggest you call Wonderland [Washington] and tell the man to get set for another crisis. I’m about to attack a foreign flag vessel in U.S. waters.”

  “I guess you know what you’re doing,” Turrin commented solemnly.

  “Not really. I’m just doing what must be done. Tell the man she’s a gunship with a pirate crew. That could help. If she goes down then she needs to be raised, combed, and exposed for what she is. There’s a man here who can help. He’s cooling it somewhere right now but I’m sure he’ll come out when the heat is gone. I’d rather not name names on this open loop. Tell the man I’m sending an electronic program on Channel Zebra. He’ll recognize the help when he sees the name and pedigree. The guy is clean for my books and I trust him. Tell Wonderland I said that. Also—”

  “Hey, uh, this is beginning to sound like a post mortem memo.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it,” Bolan said grimly. He sighed into the transmitter and added, “Way the ball bounces sometimes, buddy. A wild card turned up in my deck. Scrambled the play here pretty badly. I’m just trying to recover what I can.”

  “Let it go,” Turrin urged. “Kill the play. Save it. Bring it back another day.”

  “Can’t do that,” Bolan told him. “That wild card is a warm one. The wildman stole it. I have to steal it back.”

  “That kind, eh! Uh-huh. Same one you mentioned this morning?”

  “The same, yeah.”

  “Maybe I have something that will change your mind.”

  “Not hardly. What do you have?”

  “We were talking about fatcat politicians.”

  “Yeah. I’m too late for that, Sticker. I’ve blown it.”

  “Maybe not. Remember when I gave you the rundown on your wild card? The pedigree, I think I said, was very prestigious.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Wonderland ran a check on the grandfather. Looks clean on the surface but there are deep shadows on the X-rays, buddy.”

  “X-ray any politico, Sticker, and you’re apt to find shadows somewhere in the background.”

  “Yeah, but these are in the foreground, Striker. Get on a clean line and I’ll give you the startling details.”

  “There’s no time for that now. You’ll have to give me what you can right here.”

  The little guy sighed heavily into the long-distance connection. “How do I put it? There’s very good reason to believe that the grandfather is your fatcat. I could mention a couple of committees in a certain seat of government which this guy controls also, which could give a lot of credibility to that smell you were talking about. If you get my meaning.”

  “I get it, thanks,” Bolan replied, the voice suddenly very weary.

  “What I’m saying, pal, is that you don’t want to believe everything you may read in a wild card.”

  “I get your meaning. Thanks.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah I’m fine. I was just thinking of something. Uh, thanks for the info. It doesn’t change anything. Not unless you can offer absolute proof that I’ve been conned by a very clever twit.”

  “Guess I don’t know what a twit is but it doesn’t matter. I have no proof of anything. But the nose gets accustomed, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. Hey. Light a candle, huh?”

  “It’s already burning,” Leo said, and signed off.

  Bolan mechanically worked another combination and sent his file to Washington. Only one man had the retrieval code and that man was Harold Brognola, top cop in the Justice Department. There was nothing “official” in the arrangement. In fact, Brognola would be in serious difficulties if his involvements in Mack Bolan’s war should become known. But the two men worked together, each scratching the other’s back in their unofficial joint war on organized crime. If Bolan should not survive the night, then “Wonderland” would at least be privy to his findings on the Cleveland scene. And maybe all would not be lost, after all. From the tenor of Leo’s report, the head fed was already boring into the
Ohio problem.

  And of course the meaning was plain vis à vis Susan Landry and her maternal grandfather, one Franklin Adams Paceman. If the guy was the political front for the Cleveland Pipeline … then Bolan could no longer accept anything concerning his understanding of Susan’s interest in the proceedings as valid.

  A journalist, looking for a “story”?

  Or a secret watchdog looking over the goodies in madman Morello’s jurisdiction? And why not that? Everyone who’d ever dealt with Morello knew that the guy was unstable. His own organization had once contemplated a contract on his life.

  There were, of course, an endless list of scenarios which could be developed around that lady.

  None of them meant a damn thing. Not in this present situation. Whoever and whatever the lady may be, Bolan was absolutely certain that she was in the gravest of all possible circumstances. There was but one scenario to be developed in that vein. And Bolan knew that one well. Far too well.

  No, Leo, it didn’t mean a damn thing.

  The bad ship Christina was going to meet Mack Bolan.

  First, though, there was a fated appointment to be kept with Morello’s headhunters. He wanted those guys out of the picture, no matter how the rest of the thing turned out. Too many atrocities had already been visited upon Cleveland’s straight community by that Gestapo force. Men such as Ben Logan could not be abandoned, either.

  He found them where he knew he would, bracketing the lagoon of Edgewater Park with their war chariots, chafing under the wait, and beginning to conclude that their quarry was not going to show. The vehicles were spaced out about fifty yards apart, in communication by radio—and Bolan had them in his monitors.

  “He ain’t coming, Gus.”

  “You let me decide when he ain’t coming, Harry.”

  “Maybe we got the wrong place. Maybe he already came and went.”

  “Maybe you worry too much, Rocky. Sit tight and keep the eyes open.”

  “Did she say a Jaguar, Gus?”