Damage Radius

by Don Pendleton

  As Bolan drained the last of his beer and dropped the plastic cup on the floor at his feet, the crowd began to cheer once more. He looked up to see Booth come walking out of the dressing room and down the aisle to his side. The fighter was surrounded by his manager, a cut man, water boy and other members of his entourage. He wore green boxing trunks and had a towel over his shoulders. A hole had been cut out of the center, and the ragged garment was worn much like a serape. There was nothing fancy about Booth or his people. They simply walked down the aisle to the ring as if strolling in the park.

  The announcer called out Booth’s name and record over the loudspeaker. He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Trevor Clark and his attendants appeared at the back of another aisle. Unlike Booth, Clark was clad in a robe that might have come from the Broadway play Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The men following Clark stood back, giving him room to prance and shadowbox his way down the aisle with the different, iridescent colors catching the smoky lighting like a moving rainbow. When he reached the ring, Clark reached up and grabbed the bottom rope as one of his men grasped the robe at the collar from behind. As he pulled himself up, the flashing robe came off and the fighter’s black skin, slick with sweat, replaced the gaudy robe under the lights.

  Clark began to shadowbox around the ring, mugging for the audience, amid a mixture of cheers and boos.

  Bolan sat in his seat, going over what he needed to do in his head once more. If Booth hadn’t gone down by the end of the third round, he was supposed to shoot him. But that, he wouldn’t do. So he racked his brain, trying to come up with an alternate plan, or at least an excuse, for letting the innocent man live. And while he did, he continued to work out his plan for carrying out the second assignment McFarley had given him.

  Bolan needn’t have worried. Booth had heard of what had happened to the fighter who refused to take a dive the week before, and he was taking no chances. He shuffled flat-footed around the canvas as Clark threw punch after punch. Booth returned one halfheartedly here and there. But all-in-all, he looked like a man who’d been drugged before the fight.

  And he had been. The drug was fear.

  Ten seconds before the first round was to end, Clark threw a right cross that glanced off Booth’s chin. It should have done little more than wake the man up out of his sluggish performance, but Booth threw himself to the canvas on his back and lay still.

  Nearly all of the noise from the crowd had turned to boos. The dive was so obvious that even the least-initiated boxing fan could see it for what it was.

  That wasn’t going to make McFarley happy, Bolan knew. He would have expected a better performance.

  But it did get Bolan off the hook about killing Booth.

  The crowd was on its feet, jeering and hissing and screaming obscenities as the referee counted Booth out. Bolan glanced around him quickly. His first assignment of the night had taken care of itself.

  It was time to carry out the second order McFarley had given him. And he would have no better chance of doing it unnoticed than this moment, while everyone at the fight was focused on the fraud going on in the ring.

  Bolan reached behind him and grasped the end of the Cold Steel Espada in his waistband, behind the extra Desert Eagle magazine carrier. Pulling it straight up, he twisted it slightly to let the opening hook catch on the top of his belt. The seven and one-half inch blade snapped into place as Bolan turned toward O’Banion and caught the man reaching for his gun inside his sport coat, apparently with his own plan for Cooper on this night.

  With one fast, smooth thrust, Bolan slid the Spanish blade through O’Banion’s shirt, skin and into his chest. He felt a slight bump in his hand as the tip of the blade caught a rib, then skidded up and over it before penetrating the Irishman’s heart.

  O’Banion turned to look him in the eye, an expression of total shock and confusion on his face.

  Bolan met the man’s gaze as he pumped the blade up, then down, then quickly withdrew it, closing the tail of the jacket over the jet spray of blood that pumped from the wound. Bolan pressed the jacket tight, causing the blood flow to drip down to the tail and then onto the floor. As the heart bled out, he did a quick 360-degree visual of the crowd. The attention of the people in attendance at the fight was still fixed on the ring as they screamed and jeered. So, without further ado, Bolan sat O’Banion back down in his seat to die as he closed the blade of the knife and shuffled past the seated man to the aisle.

  The crowd was still booing Wimpy Booth as the Executioner exited the club.

  And if anyone had noticed what he’d done during the pandemonium, they weren’t saying or doing anything about it.

  “BILL GROGAN’S GOAT, BOYO!” McFarley nearly shouted as soon as Bolan had entered his office. “It sounds like things went off even better than I’d expected them to!”

  Bolan stopped in front of McFarley’s desk as the crime boss opened the middle drawer of his desk. The big Webley revolver with the pearl grips crossed Bolan’s mind again, and his right hand automatically inched to his belt, where he could sweep back his jacket and draw the Desert Eagle.

  But there was no need to do so.

  McFarley’s good humor was genuine rather than a ruse. When his hand reappeared from the drawer, it held only the gold nail clippers Bolan had seen earlier.

  “So you’ve already heard what happened?” Bolan asked.

  “Booth went down in the first round,” McFarley said, nodding. “I understand he made quite a spectacle of himself. I suppose I should sign him up for some acting lessons. Sounds like the crowd didn’t buy it.”

  “It wasn’t the most convincing performance I’ve ever seen,” Bolan said. “But no one will ever prove he took a dive. How much did you win?”

  “Oh, not all that much,” McFarley said. “Spread around among a half-dozen bookies, I’d say just under a million.”

  “Not bad for a night’s work,” Bolan said.

  “Well, not much compared to my other endeavors,” McFarley said. “But I like to keep my hand in the boxing game. Reminds me of where I come from, know what I mean?”

  The soldier nodded.

  “By the way,” McFarley went on, “you didn’t do bad for your night’s work, either. The real news is that your second objective was successful. No more Felix.”

  Bolan frowned. “I just walked in the door and haven’t said a word about anything that happened at the fight. Where did you hear about O’Banion? Where are you getting all this information?”

  McFarley laughed as he snipped at the nail on his thumb. “I had another man there, watching you. His job was to call in as soon as the fight was over and give me the details.”

  “So you’re still watching me?” Bolan said, shaking his head in false disgust. In actuality, he was pleased with the way things had gone so far on this mission. Every test McFarley had put him through had taken a few more miscreants off the streets and thrown a monkey wrench into one or more of McFarley’s criminal pipelines. He just needed to disrupt the man’s drug and gun smuggling ops and he could execute McFarley himself and be done with it.

  But Bolan knew he still needed to play the part. So he said, “How many more hoops do I have to jump through before you finally trust me?”

  “Oh, I do trust you,” McFarley replied as he rolled his chair slightly back from the desk and brushed fingernail clippings from the top of his thighs. “It’s just a policy I have. Any time I can have another of my men keeping an eye on someone I send out on a job, I do it.” He paused as he switched the clippers from his thumb to his index finger. “You’ll do the same—watch my other men on occasion—sooner or later.” Finishing with the nail clipper, he dropped it back into the drawer and took out a pencil and a pen. Slowly and quietly, he began tapping them on the desktop as if he were playing the drums to some unheard melody. “But tell me. Why the knife on Felix? That meant a lot of blood. Why not just shoot him with that silencer gun of yours?”

  “You’ve obvio
usly never shot someone at point-blank range before,” Bolan said.

  “Well,” McFarley said. “No I haven’t. At least not personally.”

  “Shooting a man up close blows out more blood than a quick thrust and pump with a knife,” Bolan replied. “Especially since I could use my other hand to cover the wound with his coat.”

  McFarley squinted at the Executioner. “You’ve still got a little blood on your hands. And a bit on your shirt.”

  “Not nearly as much as if I’d shot him,” Bolan said simply.

  “I like it,” McFarley said as he continued to beat his rhythm with the pen and pencil. “I like it. And the way you did it’ll get around. Stabbed him right there in the midst of who-knows-how-many people. Sort of a variation of the old ‘hiding in plain sight’ principle.”

  “It worked out well,” Bolan said. “Everybody will know who was behind it but again, they won’t be able to prove it. Now, tell me just one thing. You and O’Banion go way back if I’m not mistaken. I might almost say you were friends. So why’d you want him dead?”

  For a second, McFarley almost looked sad. “Enforcers for a business like mine are a lot like boxers,” he finally said. “They get old. They aren’t as good at their jobs as they once had been. It becomes necessary to get rid of them.”

  “Well,” Bolan said, “do me a favor. When I get too old, just let me know and I’ll fade away into the sunset on my own. Won’t even ask for a pension.”

  The words brought laughter to the Irishman’s face again. “We’ve got a long time before that becomes an issue,” he said.

  “Then fill me in on the current issues,” Bolan said. “You mentioned something about big money coming my way instead of the peanuts I’ve been working for.”

  “Right you are, boyo,” McFarley said. “Why don’t you take a chair and we’ll talk?”

  Bolan took two steps to his right and dropped down into a stuffed armchair. “What have you got?” he asked.

  “A problem that originated in Colombia,” McFarley said. “I had three million dollars’ worth of cocaine flying into the swamps. Coast Guard planes picked them up and they had to drop the whole bundle over the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “And…?” Bolan prompted.

  “And I hold the position that the Colombians owe me the three million bucks,” McFarley said, still working on his fingernails. “It was their fault they got caught.”

  “Let me guess the rest,” Bolan said. “They say the loss was unavoidable, and blame you for not paying off the right people or otherwise ensuring that the shipment got through.”

  “Right on the nose,” McFarley said. “So what I want you to do is go to Colombia—”

  “—and get your three million dollars back,” Bolan finished for him.

  “Not exactly,” McFarley said, finally putting down the pen and pencil and ending his drum roll. “I want four million. The fourth is for interest and what the civil courts call mental anguish.”

  “Not to mention the fact that it’ll show that you don’t screw with Tommy McFarley,” Bolan added.

  “Precisely,” the criminal kingpin said. “It shouldn’t be hard. I’ve played nicey-nice with Eduardo Guzman—he’s the cartel leader I deal with. I’ve phoned and told him not to worry, that I’m sending one of my best men down there to negotiate a settlement. I happen to know he keeps around thirty million dollars, U.S., in a safe in his office. Just take four. I don’t want to close down that pipeline. In spite of this recent disagreement, he’s been a good man to work with. So don’t take more than the four million. But leave the rest of the money stacked on his desk so that whoever finds it will get the message. I’ve laid the groundwork. You should be able to get in with no trouble.”

  “How about getting out again?” Bolan asked.

  “That could get a little trickier,” McFarley said. “Since you’re going to kill him to add the icing on the cake of my message.”

  Bolan stared at the man. “I’ve heard of Guzman,” he said honestly—Stony Man Farm had an entire file on the cartel man. “He’ll have guards around me all of the time.”

  “So you’ll kill them, too.” McFarley shrugged. “You’ve proved you can take care of yourself when you’re outnumbered.”

  “They’re going to pat me down just like your own men did when I first started coming here.”

  “So you slip a weapon past them. You’ve proved you can do that already, too. Or you can find a weapon inside his office—I’m sure he’ll have something. You can always just kill him with your bare hands if you’re alone in the office with him. I’ve got a feeling you know how to do that as well.”

  “I do,” Bolan said. “But I don’t want to try to kill all of his men empty-handed.”

  McFarley waved a hand across his face as if the statement was nothing. “You can pick up guns on your way out,” he said.

  Bolan frowned. “Like I said, I’ve heard of Guzman. I’ll have to get back to the airport and completely out of the country before I’m beyond his reach.”

  “That you will, boyo, that you will.” McFarley leaned into his desk and smiled. “But the risk is worth the payoff. That fourth million? It’s for you when you get back.”

  “I can’t fly commercial, you know.”

  “I know,” McFarley said. “I’ve got a private plane and a pilot ready to take off as soon as you are.”

  Bolan shook his head. “No way,” he said. “I don’t know your man or your plane. I have a guy I’ve used in the past who I know I can trust. It’s my head on the chopping block here, Tommy. I either use him or I don’t go.”

  A look of doubt clouded the crime boss’s face for a moment, then he finally nodded. “Okay. You feel more comfortable with your own man, you use him. But whatever cut he gets, and the expenses, come out of your million.”

  “It’s worth the cost,” Bolan said. “So let me make sure I’ve got everything straight. I fly to Colombia, lose my weapons to Guzman’s guards, go into his office and get him to open the safe. I take four million bucks and stack the rest on the desk, and somewhere in there I kill him. Either with a weapon I’ve snuck past his men or in some other way. Then I get out of his house however I can, get to the airport, fly back to you with the money, and keep a million for myself—minus my pilot’s fee and plane expenses.” He paused. “Have I got it all right?”

  “You’ve got it all right,” McFarley repeated. “Any more questions?”

  “Yeah,” the Executioner said. “You don’t happen to have a red cape with a great big S on it I can wear trying to pull all this off, do you?”

  McFarley burst into laughter. “I know it’s risky,” he said. “But a million dollars is a million dollars. And you’ve proved that if anyone can do all this, it’s you. Sorry there’s no cape. But look on the bright side.”

  “I’m not sure there is a bright side in all this.”

  “Sure there is,” McFarley said. “You may not have Superman’s cape but if Guzman happens to have any Kryptonite on hand, you aren’t allergic to it.”

  The Executioner nodded slowly. “No,” he said. “I’m not allergic to Kryptonite. Just lead.”

  18

  “You know, Sarge,” Jack Grimaldi said from behind the controls of one of the Learjet. “You never cease to surprise me.”

  Bolan, dressed in a lightweight white suit and a burgundy shirt, open at the collar, turned to his long-time friend. “How’s that?” he asked.

  “McFarley has his own planes and pilots. I’m just surprised he didn’t make you use one of them.”

  Bolan chuckled. “This whole op has pretty much been McFarley and me feeling each other out,” he said. “The man’s not stupid—he’s tested me over and over. Granted, those tests have allowed me to put down a bunch of bad guys, but they’ve been tests of loyalty, nonetheless.”

  “And this is another test?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Of sorts,” Bolan said. “It’s a real assignment, of course. Actually all of the tests have included real as
signments that profited the man. He wanted to see just how far outside the law I’d go. Now, he not only wants his money back, he wants to see if I’m willing to work outside the bounds of the U.S. in a country where no U.S. federal agent has any jurisdiction.”

  Grimaldi grasped the microphone from the control panel in front of him. They had passed over Panama a few minutes earlier, and the pilot advised the tower that he would be requesting to land in Bogotá.

  The Executioner looked out through the windshield for a moment and saw the towering Andes Mountains in the distance. Then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes for a few moments. He had been in Colombia more times than he could remember.

  In the eighties and nineties, the Medellín Cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar, had exercised a near stranglehold on cocaine coming into the United States. But, as inevitably happened to such large drug operations, other syndicates had wanted a piece of the action and gradually chipped away at it. And while it hadn’t put an end to Escobar’s business, he had been forced to decrease it somewhat after he was finally arrested.

  Bolan couldn’t help but shake his head in awe at the dishonesty and stupidity of the way the Colombian courts had handled Escobar. He had been assigned to country-club type prison of his own design and allowed to do pretty much as he pleased. For a time. He escaped and was eventually shot and killed in a gun battle.

  Another thing that had slowed the Colombian traffic was that their government had been pressured hard by the U.S. to take action on the coca leaf growers. In the past, the only times they hadn’t “looked the other way” was when they were accepting their payoffs. A lot of that had been halted since, and special Colombian narcoterrorist tactical teams and undercover operatives, working hand-in-hand with the American Drug Enforcement Administration, went on frequent search-and-destroy missions to eradicate the crops and arrest the guilty.

  But even with all of these efforts, cocaine continued to flow steadily out of Colombia into the U.S. And while the Colombian trade had faded slightly, countries like Peru and Bolivia had been ready and waiting to fill in the gaps. Often, regardless of where it was grown, the coke came through Mexico these days, and the competition between the Mexican cartels had produced unprecedented violence all over America’s southern neighbor. Especially at the border areas. And it was finally spilling over into California, Arizona, New Mexico and other states.