His voice had a lilt to it as he reminded her, “That’s not what you told me this afternoon.”
She was very quietly and very unemotionally weeping. “Don’t die, Mack,” she said in a tiny voice. “Please, please don’t die. Go back to the loft. We can keep you safe.”
“No you can’t. Each hour I spend here now is another fifty guns I’ll have to face sooner or later.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Yes I do. You said something about a sentence of death. That sentence was pronounced a long time ago, Sara. The only way I avoid it is by shoving it back through their teeth. The minute I start trying to duck it, then I’m a dead man for sure. Besides …”
“Yes,” she said in a tightening voice. “Finish it. Besides what? You love it, don’t you? You’re just aching to get back out there and … and—how did you say it?—shove it back in their teeth.”
“Wish me well, Sara,” he requested humbly.
“Oh … God!” she cried, twisting about and throwing her arms around him.
Yes, Him too, he thought bleakly.
Whatever and wherever You are, God, wish me well.
And suffer the young widows their solace.
5 COUNTERPOISE
He was in full combat rig.
The black suit that Sara had designed and built was a better fit than any he’d worn. It was made of an expanding, tough material that moved with him like his own skin; even the pockets hugged close until they were filled with something.
The Beretta Belle occupied her usual position of honor—shoulder-slung beneath the left arm. The AutoMag, fully armed and backed up, now rode heavy military web at his right hip.
A compact, folding-stock autopistol dangled free from a strap about his neck to ride loosely across his belly.
A miscellany of carefully selected munitions dangled from utility belts or lay snugly in the elastic pockets of the skinsuit. These included small fragmentation grenades, percussion pods, incendiaries, chemical smoke compressors, even a couple of small transistorized explosives.
Spare clips for the guns, a stiletto, and several small tools completed the ensemble.
Bruno looked the warrior over and commented, “You must be carrying a hundred pounds over your own weight.”
“About that,” Bolan agreed.
“Does the leg know it yet?”
“A little. But it’ll get used to the idea.”
“Just watch it,” the worried Romanian cautioned in a curiously flattened voice. “Damnit, don’t let them …” His voice broke. He spun about and marched stiffly toward the house.
Bolan stopped him with a quiet call, but the big guy did not turn all the way around.
“Bruno. You’re a hell of a guy.”
“Thanks. You too. Watch those tocks, eh.”
“Name of the game,” Bolan replied, chuckling.
Bruno went on, then, and Bolan stepped over to the vehicle.
He had carefully stowed the rest of his arsenal in the back-seat area and covered it with some empty feed sacks.
The two corpses remained in the trunk compartment.
A lovely young lady occupied a small portion of the front seat.
In a tinkly voice she asked him, “Are we ready to go?”
Gruffly he replied, “We, hell.”
“I can run as fast as you.”
“I’m not running, love,” he quietly informed her.
“Well …”
Bruno burst back upon the scene at that moment, trotting from the rear of the house and waving a heavy money belt above his head.
“You forgot the war chest, Sarge!”
Bolan accepted the fat belt, stared at it for a moment, then shoved it back into Bruno’s hands. “Hang on to it for me,” he requested.
“You crazy? There’s nearly a hundred thousand—”
“I took what I’ll be needing for now. And if I don’t make it through … well, can’t take it with you, Bruno.”
“Hey, Sarge, I can’t—”
“Sure you can,” the Executioner replied brusquely. He pulled the girl out of the car, slapped her lightly on the bottom, and told her, “All ashore.”
She gasped, “Mack, I—”
He stopped her with a kiss, holding her deliciously close despite the intefering hardware.
When they came out of it, Bruno had disappeared.
Their eyes locked together, and a very special message quietly had its say there.
Then the girl’s eyes fled that moment, and she told Bolan, “I-I’ll always remember.”
“Remember, too, what I told you this morning.”
“I will,” she whispered.
He slid into the car and closed the door.
“How did your husband die, Sara?” he gently asked her, through the window.
“I … they just said ‘killed in action.’”
“Then he died living,” the man in black told her. “I intend to do the same thing. But—damnit, Sara—you are a very special item. Promise me you won’t live dying.”
“Promise,” she whispered. She wiped the moisture from her cheeks then, and told him, “The, uh, clothing you wore in here. It’s all patched and pressed and hanging in the back window.”
“Thanks, I noticed,” he said, and then he kicked the war wagon to life and quickly put that paradise behind him … and he did not look back.
The girl ran down the drive and stood there—a pathetic figure with slumped shoulders and dulled eyes—until the glow of his headlamps disappeared finally into the night.
She was walking dispiritedly toward the house when Bruno’s truck lumbered around from the rear and gunned along the drive beside her.
She cried out, “Bruno! What are you …?”
The truck rumbled on past and turned onto the road in Mack Bolan’s wake.
Sara’s hands went to her face, and she held that pose while tormenting thoughts and pictures spilled across her reeling consciousness.
Die living. Live dying. Kill, be killed. Fight, struggle, die, die, die, a million times die—what sort of world …?
Remember what I told you this morning!
Yes, Sara, remember always.
“The universe must love you very much, Sara. Because you’re a woman. And the female of every species is the universe in miniature, the living plasma of creation. She’s the positive, uplifting force, the collector, the preserver, the nest-builder. You’re the bridge of the generations, Sara. It’s up to you to preserve what we men would destroy … without you.”
Okay, sure, she could understand that kind of talk. Even from a relentless war machine like Mack Bolan. And he was more than that, of course. Much more. Yes. He was some kind of man.
She straightened her shoulders and turned back toward the house.
Okay, Mother Sara, preserver of the races and wife of the universe. Get in there and start nesting.
She went inside, turned on all the lights, put the Tijuana Brass on the hi-fi, found her sketchpad, and began designing herself a new summer wardrobe.
6 DRAW PLAY
“What you got, Hugger?”
“A suspicious. Just off Thirty-three by the fairgrounds. I don’t wanta go down in there with just me ‘n’ the kid. Some guy’s camping down there, fire and everything.”
“Where’d you say that is?”
“A box canyon on this little road just east of the fairgrounds, by that new interstate.”
“Our sectionals don’t show no box canyon around there, Hugger.”
“Well, damnit, you better look again! I’m telling you … Whuup! Change that, it’s no suspicious! It’s him, it’s the guy! You get me some help here damn quick!”
“Boss says damnit you sit tight! Don’t try nothing on your own. We’re on the way!”
“I’m sittin’! But you shag ass!”
Bolan smiled a smile that was not a smile and thumbed off the microphone. All he had to do now was to wait. And he’d learned, long ago, to wait.
He had traveled not ea
st from the Tassily farm, but west—clear to the approaches of Trenton; and he’d found his battle site near a place called Mercerville, not far from the state fairgrounds.
The terrain here was not the most ideal, but he had desired to get as far west as feasible, hoping to draw the hounds away from the trails he planned to travel later that evening.
And he’d found a pretty decent site for a fire trap—more or less remote, a bit of woods, some open area with a bit of high ground overlooking it … and an escape path to the rear.
He had covered the area thoroughly in a walking recon, in the dark; then he’d built a small campfire at dead center, dumped his cargo of cold meat and carefully laid it out just so, then moved the vehicle to the elevated land overlooking the scene.
The target range would be about fifty yards. It would be a hellish lay for those foolish enough to be caught down there.
Before summoning the foolish ones, he carefully investigated the back way out, found it passable in the vehicle, then returned immediately to the fire trap and began setting up.
He positioned infrared floods and took range-finder readings from three different locations on the ridge, then set up a couple of LAWs (light antitank weapons) and made them ready, put some heavy grenades out, checked his personal weapons … and went to the radio to spread some blood for the shark pack.
At this range the LAW would do about anything a bazooka could do, and Bolan had a couple of special missions in mind for those deadly dudes.
He also had a honey of a new nighttime sniper piece which had come from the William Meyer & Company “munitions-at-a-price” supermarket in Manhattan—and at a very dear price.
Meyer was more than an illicit arms dealer. He was also a physically shattered survivor of Vietnam, a skilled armorer like Bolan, and a genius at modifying old arms to newfangled kill specifications.
A lifetime victim of warfare, Meyer had found a way to make the human proclivity for destruction pay off in a particularly ironic and profitable fashion … or so he’d told Bolan at the height of the nightmare in New York. Meyer had discovered that munitions makers do not take sides in small wars; they merely build destruction to specification for whatever damn fools want to come along and set it loose upon the world.
Hinting, of course that Bolan was one of the damn fools.
Bolan had never argued with the man. Damn fool or not, he had a job that needed doing, and there seemed to be no one else around who was ready, able, or willing to take it on. It just happened that Bolan had all three of those qualifications; and here he was—damn fool, maybe—but here nevertheless, on a Jersey hillside in the dead of night, waiting his chance to let loose quite a ration of destruction upon the world of damn fools.
And the foolish ones came, recklessly, straining at the bit like so many excited bloodhounds with scent strong in their nostrils, tearing along that lonely road down there like the hounds of hell had done since the beginning of life.
Two vehicles, then a third, and finally a streamlined van sort of thing—one of those houses on wheels which gentler people used to get back to nature without really suffering. And now Bolan knew what the boys were utilizing for their “rolling command posts.”
The mob, too, liked their comforts. Even on kill missions.
He let them come, and watched the two lead vehicles jounce into that clearing and tear off on opposing circular paths toward the far end. The third car was a standard crew wagon. It came on through the slot and halted just inside; doors popped open; energetic men found their feet and their weapons in a quick debarkation and an even quicker fanning out across that clearing.
Then the camper came down, halting right in the slot and squatting there with lights ablaze.
Pretty damned confident, Bolan was thinking.
Still, damned effective. He’d had a hard time counting heads and keeping track of the maneuvers as well.
He had actually seen twelve heads. There were probably at least twenty, not counting whoever was in that command van.
All four vehicles had left their headlamps on high beams, and they were taking up positions to flood that entire clearing with light.
Bolan grinned and leaned into the first LAW.
He lined up the pop sights onto the steering wheel of that glass-fronted van just as an excited shout from down by the campfire advised everyone present, “Here they are, both dead!”
“So where’s their car?” This, an amplified voice of authority from a loudspeaker mounted somewhere on the van. The man was in there, some man with rank.
And the dismal reply from the campfire: “Forget it, the guy’s gone. I guess he’s got their car now.”
“Correction,” Bolan sighed as he squeezed the little missile out of the tube. “The guy has not gone.”
The AP rocket whizzed along its beeline of destruction and impacted precisely where Bolan had sent her, and she came in with a happy hurrah and a mushroom of flames as glass, metal, and all else in that immediate vicinity stood aside, and departed, and gave over the night to this ill-behaved and uninvited guest.
Bolan abandoned the throwaway tube and took up his next firedrop as panic erupted down there, and screams, shouts, and startled commands rushed in to fill the void.
He hit them with a heavy grenade, dead center in the campfire, following immediately with another directly on the front bumper of the crew wagon; and now the pandemonium was in full sway.
“Turn off them goddamn lights!”
“Oh, shit, shit … help me!”
“Boss! Boss! Al is blowed all to hell and I …”
“Up there! The bastard’s up …”
Bolan was into the nighttime sniper, jaw tightened and twitching as he bent to the infrared nightscope, and the big piece began jolting his shoulder as scurrying men stumbled into his cross hairs and catapulted out of them.
There were no blazing headlamps down there now—just blazes period as here and there scattered firebrands from the campfire plus small fires in the two rearward vehicles lent ghastly relief to the ever-growing carnage of the night.
Bolan’s sniper was cracking methodically in evenly spaced retorts to the chattering of automatic weapons off there in the darkness. The invisible infrared floods were doing their bit for the moment, painting the scene ghoulish as viewed through the sniperscope. Bullets sprayed the trees behind him, chewed turf and chipped rock all below him; still the big piece continued its chilling toll of the night, while men screamed, and wondered aloud how he was spotting them, and pleaded for assistance from gods who knew not their names, and simply yelled foul imprecations upon their fate.
And, after a while, Bolan switched off his infrareds, stowed his gear, and made his withdrawal in an eerie silence.
He stopped briefly at a service station on Route Thirty-three, stepped onto the service ramp in full combat regalia, and suggested to two pop-eyed attendants that someone call the police.
He swung immediately northward from there, found the little state road that connects Mercerville to Edinburg, and made fast tracks toward the sea.
So, okay. It had been hellish … but not entirely damn-foolish. Maybe he would succeed in drawing some of the opposing guns this way.
So call it eight hundred Jersey guns waiting for him now.
He smiled faintly into the enshrouding night.
The odds were coming down.
7 THE GAME NAMED
He had been running the back roads, carefully avoiding major routes and intersections, and his instincts had drawn him past the toll road at Cranbury and on south of Prospect Plains, from where he hoped to angle on eastward to Freehold, thence on to the coast via Neptune.
This would set him down roughly midway between New York and Atlantic City, with an endless selection of small coastal towns from which to work another angle of escape.
Twice he had narrowly avoided a confrontation with police authority, and twice he had sent up a shaky thanks to whatever powers controlled chance and circumstance.
; Running head-on into elements of the outfit was one thing; into the cops, quite another. Mack Bolan did not fight cops. They were “soldiers of the same side.” His only defense from that quarter lay in studious avoidance.
And now he was thinking that it would be wise to give the enemy—and the police—some reaction time vis-à-vis the hit near Mercerville. Already, it seemed, he was encountering cross-currents or pursuit in that direction. A wise warrior knew when to strike, when to retreat, and when to simply lie low.
Thus it was that the Executioner elected to seek a snug harbor for a brief period of détente. It was a matter of pure coincidence that he found that harbor just a few miles to the north of the Tassily farm, near a sleeping village called Tennent.
It was a trailer camp with a weathered sign announcing a rather unemotional welcome for “Campers and Overnighters—All Hookups Available.”
The place was all but deserted; apparently its season had not yet arrived.
It boasted a public rest room and shower, an all-night laundromat, a couple of picnic tables just off the roadway, several rows of unoccupied trailer spaces, and a small office building with a single dull bulb over the door with instructions to “Ring for Service.”
All Bolan desired was a secluded place to park awhile—but not too secluded—and he felt no need to “ring” for anything. He angled the vehicle in the rear of the public buildings, appropriately positioned for a quick out, and spent ten minutes or so studying the detailed maps that had come with the car. One of these was singularly revealing, seeming to pinpoint “patrol zones” and specific rendezvous areas.
He tucked the intelligence away for possible future consideration, loath now to abandon the plan he already had cooking.
Then he spotted the public phone booth in the shadows of the laundromat, briefly debated a call to New York … and lost the debate.
He pulled the car closer to the phone booth and a few minutes later was speaking into a connection to a fashionable hotel in midtown Manhattan.
“This is Al La Mancha,” he told the familiar voice at the far end. “I gotta talk to Mr. Turrin; it’s very important.”
Jersey Guns Page 4