He left Spinoza propped against the safety railing, and he disappeared again, descending on the rusty fire escape. The metal structure made a rasping sound of protest, but it held.
And Joey knew, too late, exactly what the chemist had been listening for before the roof fell in.
The goddamned fire escape.
Beneath him, Joey felt the shudder of a small explosion, heard it seconds later through the shattered windows of the lab. And he was smelling acrid smoke before the soldier reappeared, the painted hands and face all sooty now, the graveyard eyes intent upon Spinoza as he crouched at the mafioso's side.
"You're out of business," he explained unnecessarily.
"Okay."
It took Spinoza's strength to get it out, and there was nothing more to say.
"Scarpato has a package that belongs to me," the soldier said. "I want it back intact. The heat stays on until he comes across."
Spinoza nodded slowly, understanding why he had been spared. He was to be the gunner's errand boy, although he wouldn't get much mileage out of these legs now.
A fire alarm was jangling in the alleyway below. The soldier straightened and fished a hand inside one of his many pockets, coming out with a metallic object, which he dropped into Spinoza's lap.
A marksman's medal.
But what the hell?...
Spinoza's mind was trying to make sense of that, and when it hit him like a blow above the heart he glanced up fearfully.
And found himself alone.
The big commando was gone.
Spinoza settled back and tried to concentrate on anything besides the pain. At last, he settled on the message he would give Scarpato, if he lived. If help arrived before the ancient building burned right out from under him and fried him like a burger on a barbecue.
He had a message for the capo, and he did not dare forget a single word of it. His life was riding on delivery, and Joey did not plan to throw it all away. In fact, he would enjoy the look on Vince's face when he received the word.
Scarpato owed him that much, anyway. For all his trouble. For his legs. And for the empire Joey knew he would never share.
The would-be capo owed him, and he was going to pay. In full.
* * *
Bolan held the Uzi's trigger down and let the stubby weapon empty in one protracted burst, the parabellum manglers raking corrugated metal walls and stacks of packing crates. A sluggish gunner went down kicking, thrashed across the bloody concrete for a moment, finally lay still.
And Bolan was slamming home a fresh magazine, already moving out for other cover when the hostile weapons opened up again, their chorus sounding like a clap of thunder in the echo chamber of the warehouse. The soldier hit a flying shoulder roll, came up behind an unattended fork lift, bullets ringing off the metalwork above him, chipping at the cement floor on either side.
Scarpato's warehouse on the riverfront had suddenly become a trap, and Bolan knew that he could lose it here within the next few moments if he let his guard down for an instant. He was cornered and outnumbered, but it wasn't over yet.
He had anticipated light security around Scarpato's warehouse during daylight hours, with a rental cop or two on hand to watch for vandals. Instead, he had unknowingly intruded on a group of hungry gunners marking time between engagements with Giamba's troops, and one of them had spotted him before he had a chance to disengage. He had already taken three of them, but that left eight or nine aiive and waiting for a chance to bring him down.
The warehouse was a temporary storage place for contraband of every sort, from stolen cigarettes, appliances and guns to bootleg liquor, records, videocassettes. The illicit goods arrived by truck, by train, by river barge and quickly vanished into retail outlets scattered all around St. Louis, making money for Scarpato while it chipped away at Art Giamba's income.
The warrior's plan had been to torch Scarpato's warehouse, leave message with the watchman if he found one and be on to other targets. Instead, the Executioner was fighting for his life, and time was running out as the hostile gunners moved to close the ring about him.
Bolan did not plan to make it easy for them. Squeezing off a measured bust to keep them back and down, he ducked beneath a blizzard of return fire, freed the round white phosphorous grenade from his munitions harness, pulled the pin. The can's five-second fuse would not allow his adversaries time to pitch it back, and he was counting on their anger and surprise to further slow reaction time, provide him with the edge required to make his desperate gamble work.
The soldier came erect behind the forklift, squeezing off another automatic burst, his Uzi sweeping back and forth. His enemies were scrambling for cover when he made the pitch, and Bolan watched the thermite egg bounce once atop a pile of crates before it disappeared from sight.
Retreating in the face of scattered pistol fire, he crouched behind the forklift, waiting, running down the doomsday numbers in his mind. Another second now, and then the phosphorous grenade exploded with a whooosh of superheated air, expelling smoke and white-hot streamers that would eat through corrugated steel and packing crates and human flesh with equal ease, igniting scores of secondary fires wherever hissing coals touched down.
He heard a gunner screaming near the center of the spreading conflagration, risked a glance in time to see the leaping human torch clear cover, running blindly now. His comrades were abandoning the ship, and Bolan waited for them to reveal themselves, the Uzi awaiting targets.
A rush of movement on his left, and two men cleared the shadow of a boxed refrigerator, running for their lives without a backward glance. They made it halfway to the double doors before a stream of parabellum manglers overtook them and brought them down. They sprawled together on the concrete, mingling their blood.
Another pistolero, breaking to the right, and Bolan stroked the Uzi's trigger lightly for a 3-round burst that took his face off.
The hostile fire was spotty now, and careless. They were firing for the hell of it, the soldier knew, defying fear of death by making noise and knowing all the while that they would have to break for it or burn.
They broke for it, all four at once, and Bolan heard them coming now, despite the hungry crackling of the flames. He had the Uzi leveled, waiting, and he held the trigger down as they emerged from cover, ripping through the stubby weapon's load at 750 rounds per minute. Bolan stitched a blazing figure-eight around the four and watched them scatter, stagger, reel and fall. One of them struggled briefly, tried to rise, then melted into death among the others, leaking life and hope through mortal wounds.
Bolan dropped a marksman's medal on the forklift's seat and took himself away from there. The fire was growing, feeding on itself and on Scarpato's contraband, already sending smoky feelers out to prod the fallen bodies where they lay. Outside, he found a fire alarm and smashed it with the Uzi's metal folding stock, proceeding in the direction of his rental car and safety.
The direction of another target, right.
Scarpato would receive his message, loud and clear, despite the lack of living messengers to bear the word. Another dozen soldiers lost, his warehouse going up in smoke... The would-be capo from New York would soon be totting up his losses, sure. He would be anxious to respond, in one way or another, to the Bolan blitz.
Scarpato might release the girl unharmed and hope for one of Bolan's rare but celebrated truces.
Or he might react the other way, coming out swinging hard with everything he had.
The hellfire warrior knew his odds. He understood his enemy.
And Bolan would be waiting for Scarpato, whichever way he came.
14
Captain Tom Postum watched the firemen stripping off their respirator masks and shedding heavy tanks of oxygen, already reeling in their hoses, making ready to leave the warehouse. The arson team would linger on awhile but it was over for the front-line troops.
A stench of burning cloaked the waterfront and mingled with the old, familiar river smells, but nothing could di
lute the subtle, sickly sweetness of that dark odor. And it made Postum glad that he had passed on lunch.
He scanned the line of shrouded corpses stretched out in the shadow of the warehouse, wrinkling his nose because the stench was rising off them as much as from the warehouse. And the captain knew it would take dental records to identify them... if they were ever identified at all.
"Some friggin' mess." The short lieutenant at his side spoke softly, almost reverently in the presence of the dead.
Tom Postum nodded. "Yeah. Some mess."
"You figure Artie caught 'em by surprise?"
"I wouldn't want to second-guess the lab on this one."
Postum drifted toward the warehouse, skirting the sheeted bodies, the lieutenant on his heels. The double sliding doors were standing open now, although they had been warped by heat and would no longer open all the way. The strike-force captain hesitated for a moment prior to entering, examining the corrugated metal doors.
"See that?"
He pointed out two holes the size of silver dollars, set perhaps a yard apart, their blackened edges still hot enough to sear the fingertips.
"White phosphorous?"
"I'd say."
"I haven't seen that since Da Nang." The short lieutenant frowned. "Giamba and Pattricia are playing rough."
Postum kept his opinion to himself and moved inside. The concrete floors were flooded, and he had to watch his step. Despite the open doors, it was smoky in the warehouse, and the stench of burning flesh was stronger here. The captain knew at once that he had stepped into a charnel house.
The lieutenant whistled softly, scanning row on row of blackened crates, some of them broken open and water stained.
"Scarpato had a lot of shit in here." He sniffed the smoky air. "I'd say we found ourselves that load of hijacked cigarettes."
"You'll never tie New York to any of this mess."
"Too bad."
"Too bad is right."
"Well, if it's any consolation, Tom, the bastard lost a lot more here than any court would fine him on a first offense."
The strike-force captain frowned. It wasn't any kind of consolation at all.
He recognized the leader of the arson team and flagged him down. A couple of detectives from his strike force were already huddled with the fire department's team, comparing their preliminary notes, but Postum knew what they would find.
His friend from arson spelled it out.
"The fire was definitely of incendiary origin, in case you couldn't guess. Some kind of chemical explosive was employed to set it off. I'll need a lab report to pin it down for sure, but from the visuals, I'd say that it was thermite. Probably a military-style grenade.
"Okay. So, what about the casualties?"
The man from arson made a sour face and shook his head. "They're dead. They burned."
"All right. I'll need an inventory of the stock on hand — what's left of it."
"No sweat."
A homicide detective had been examining apparent bullet scars on the blackened carcass of a forklift parked against the northern wall, and now his voice was excited as he hailed Tom Postum. "Say, Captain, over here!"
"What have you got?"
With stainless forceps the detective lifted something small, metallic, from among the sagging springs that had comprised the forklift's seat. Their leather covering and cotton padding had been burned away, reduced to ash, but something had remained. It glittered dully as the homicide investigator dropped it in a plastic bag and tagged it with his own initials, handed it across to Postum for examination.
Cautiously the strike-force captain turned the bag over in his hands, pretending for a moment that he did not recognize the marksman's medal.
"What the hell?"
"Some kind of military decoration."
Postum told them what it was, returned it to the young detective, watching as he took it gingerly, as if afraid that it might bite.
"Well, I'll be damned."
The lieutenant shook his head disgustedly, a frown etched deep into his meaty face. "I heard the guy was still alive, but shit..."
"What guy?" the young detective asked. "You know who did all this?"
"I've got a fair idea," Postum said.
"You ever hear the name Mack Bolan?" his lieutenant asked rhetorically.
"Well, sure." It took another heartbeat for the message to soak in. "You mean... right here?"
"It's possible," Postum said. "We can't confirm it yet."
"I'd say it's pretty well confirmed."
The captain turned on the lieutenant, pinning him with frosty eyes. "It's damn well not confirmed. You know as well as I do you can buy those medals at a hundred different shops and swap meets here in town."
"You saying it's a smoke screen, Captain?"
"What I'm saying is we check it out from every angle, and refrain from jumping to conclusions. If Giamba's setting up a blind, I want to know about it."
But the words had left an unpleasant taste behind. And Postum knew that this was no red herring, no elaborate blind to keep detectives chasing shadows while Giamba and Pattricia settled things with Vince Scarpato on their own. The strike-force captain wished it was that simple.
And in a way it was.
Tom Postum wondered why he felt compelled to cover for the Executioner. The strike-force captain knew precisely who had trashed Scarpato's warehouse and the hoods inside it, just as he had known who was behind the other shootings at odd strategic points around the city.
Bolan was attacking, and carrying his private brand of warfare to the enemy. The stakes were high, and Bolan might not be successful... but at least the guy was doing something.
Still, Postum wondered at his own reaction to the lieutenant's logical assumption. Did he owe Mack Bolan something? Was he in the big man's debt?
The answer was an easy one. Of course. He owed his life to Bolan, and there was nothing he could ever do to pay that debt in full.
But that was private, and it had no relation to his duty to the badge he wore.
Like hell.
With twenty years in harness, Postum knew it was impossible to separate the two — the private and the public life — to any great degree. A man might have his secret sins, but every time he buckled on a gun he brought his private thoughts and attitudes along. There were no perfect cops, no magically detached machines in human form who left their hearts and minds behind them when they donned the uniform.
Tom Postum was a cop, and good at what he did... but first of all, he was a man. That made him fallible, imperfect, and eminently human underneath his shield.
He had originally joined the force for reasons that were strictly personal. A firm belief in justice under law, for instance. A desire to see that goodness triumphed over evil in the end. Except there wasn't any end, as far as he could see. Instead of victory, there were a thousand stalemates where the adversaries faced each other briefly, backed away, and tried again from other angles.
It had become a game and Postum couldn't quite get used to that. Not even after twenty years.
He still believed in law and justice, though the two were sometimes mutually exclusive now. And he believed in working problems out within "the system," even though the slick machinery was rusty now, and prone to jamming at the worst of times.
Recently Postum had begun to wonder if the system really worked at all.
He thought a lot about the victims, lately, and the way that they had been forgotten in a system set up to protect them from the cannibals. He sat in court and watched indictments thrown away on technicalities, dismissed upon the flimsiest of motions, in a process that was little more than a revolving door for putting felons on the streets. The victims paid — in blood and tears, in broken dreams and shattered lives — but where was justice in the scheme of things?
One man, at least, had found its pulse, and he was doing something to redeem the broken promises. One man had taken all the weight upon himself, and he was drowning, but he
was taking plenty of the heavies with him for damn sure. If there was a way to help him out, extend a hand of friendship...
No.
The Executioner was everything that Postum had despised when he emerged from the police academy and started working on the streets. The guy was a vigilante and a killer, no doubt about it. A self-appointed law unto himself. Each time he pulled the trigger, he was targeting the Constitution, attacking everything Tom Postum stood for.
Except that the soldier had never dropped the hammer on a cop, or on an innocent civilian. And that had to count for something. If Bolan chose his targets independently, at least he chose them well. And unlike other vigilantes out of history, the modern "Death Squads" and their ilk, he had no private ax to grind, no secret prejudice or profit motive to distort his aim.
The guy was fighting on behalf of justice, and that made Postum's job a thousand times more difficult.
For he would have to bring the soldier down.
It was his duty — to the badge he wore, the oath that he had taken when he put it on. If he allowed a private Executioner to stay at large, preempting the established courts, he would be throwing in the towel, surrendering his own beliefs in justice and the rule of law.
It sounded hollow, and the strike-force captain was concerned by what was happening inside him now. The Executioner had saved his life, but that did not relieve Postum of his duty to the law, the citizens who paid his salary each week. He owed them safety from open warfare in the streets, from trigger-happy vermin who mistook the city for a giant free-fire zone.
And yet a part of him would gladly have retreated, left the field to Bolan and his own dramatic brand of war, content to sweep up his leavings and go from there. Assuming that the system was corrupt or simply inefficient, why not tear it down and try again? Why bother going through the motions when they got you nowhere? It was so much easier to strike a match and watch the mother burn.
Except that Postum was too civilized for that.
And so was Bolan.
Missouri Deathwatch Page 10