“This is Turrin,” came the cautious reply. “Who’d you say that is?”
“Al La Mancha. Listen, this is pretty hot stuff.”
“Uh … look, Al. I was just going out. Why don’t you try me in a little while, at, uh …”
It was a familiar routine. These contacts with the most wanted dude in the country were potentially disastrous for “the man from Mass” who rode two steeds through the jungle called life. To preclude any deadly compromise of his cover, as well as to shield him from possible official embarrassment at the other side, the friendship with Mack Bolan was necessarily a furtive thing. Early in the wars, therefore, they had worked out the contact routine.
Bolan knew that Turrin was at this moment digging for the number of a nearby public telephone, which he quickly found and relayed to “La Mancha”—a sort of comic-relief code name for Mack Bolan.
Early in his wars, some segments of the press had taken to referring to Bolan as “a latter-day Don Quixote”—the fabled windmill-slayer of another grim era of man’s misadventures. Therefore, “the man from La Mancha.”
Precisely five minutes following that hang-up, Bolan had another quick connection.
“That you, La Mancha?” asked the voice of the truest friend the Executioner had ever known.
“It’s me. Where are you, Leo?”
“Downstairs, basement lobby. It’s okay. What’s your situation?”
“About normal,” Bolan replied, trying to keep the voice light. Leo Turrin was a worrier.
“Then you haven’t been hearing the words I’ve been getting,” came the taut response. “I’m not going to ask you where you are, and I don’t want you to tell me. Just tell me this: are you anywhere near Mercerville?”
Bolan chuckled as he replied, “The word’s out, then.”
“Yeah, and so is everything else,” was the wry rejoinder. “You really know how to stir the pot, Sarge. I hope you hit and ran like hell.”
“I did.”
Turrin sighed heavily, and Bolan heard the snap of a cigarette lighter close to the mouthpiece. “It came as quite a shock. The heads all thought you were down and just awaiting the final count. Tell the truth, I’d started wondering along those lines myself until your friend contacted me today. By the way—”
“He’s okay, Leo. But I hope you covered your end.”
“Oh, sure. I caught the coded flicker and knew right away he was a stand-in. Don’t worry, he never knew who he was talking to. Anyway, what I was about to say … a guy by the name of Tassily walked into a state police substation tonight and … Is this the same guy, Sarge?”
Very quietly Bolan said, “Same guy, Leo.”
“Well, don’t sound so … Hear me out. The guy claims he’s been a prisoner of the Executioner these past few days—he and his sister—on a chicken farm or something they have down mid-state. The Jersey fuzz don’t know whether to buy his story or not. They’re out at that farm right now, sifting the place down for some back-up. Anyway, Tassily says you’re springing southward. Claims you’ve been studying maps of lower Jersey, particularly that area down below Wharton State Forest. Says he thinks your ultimate goal is Delaware Bay, where he hints you’ve got a boat stashed.”
Bolan was chuckling now. “Some kind of guy,” was all he said.
“Yeah, well, that’s privately the way Hal and I look at it. We guessed the guy is trying to lead the chase down a dead end.”
“You’re in present contact with Hal Brognola?”
“Yeah. He’s pushing the federal troops, from here in New York for the moment.”
“Give him my best. And tell him not to crowd me too much for now. I have plenty to occupy my time as it is.”
The undercover fed was chuckling. “You know how Hal feels about you. But there are plenty of mixed emotions there, buddy. He’s got about a dozen top-level bureaucrats just laying all over him. If they ever get the notion that he’s dogging it, even a little … well, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I respect the guy for doing his job, Leo. Well … I better—”
“Wait, don’t be so touchy. Listen, now, nobody is offering you a license or anything like that, but … well, Hal is advising the local officials to buy Tassily’s story. It’s as good a lead as any they’ve had. Also, Hal threw in that bit of past history where you seem to favor escapes by sea. He cited the escape at Los Angeles, the one at Miami, in France, the recent one down in Washington where you had a boat stashed on the Potomac.…”
Bolan sighed and agreed. “I guess it fits.”
“Sure it does. Simple police logic. And the hit at Mercerville fits like a hand in the glove. The Jersey troopers are considering rushing everything they can spare into a coverage along U. S. 206 South. That’s the fast route to Wharton. They’re spread pretty thin already. So … But I guess they’ll buy Tassily. Need I say more?”
“There’s one very large fly,” Bolan quietly decided.
“And what is that?”
“The boys won’t buy Tassily. They’ve been laying over that farm like a mother hen all this week. They’ve seen the guy going and coming freely, and they were in there several times on a shakedown. His story won’t hold water in their bag, that’s sure. You’d better get the guy and his sister out of there, Leo. Protective custody or whatever it takes to keep them covered until this thing blows over.”
“Yes, I see your point. Okay. I’ll get on that as soon as I hang up.”
“Tell me something, Leo. With cops crossing tracks all over this damn state, how is the mob operating so openly? They’re running regular armed convoys around here.”
Turrin released a hissing sigh, and Bolan knew that he was in for a classroom discussion. “You’ve never spent much time in Jersey,” the undercover man pointed out. “You couldn’t know … well, it’s a most unusual state, let’s put it that way. The present administration is going through all manner of nightmares trying to correct the … well, it’s just a horrendous mess. The problem is as much geography as anything. The whole place lies in the shadow of New York and Pennsylvania—almost completely overshadowed. The greater population is massed along those borders, with Philly and New York City providing more of a swing to the state than anything Jersey can get together within her own borders. That urban mass up around Newark and Jersey City is actually feudal states within their own right—and that’s just an accentuation of the general problem everywhere in the state. The corruption is just … well, don’t let me start on that. Just get this understanding, buddy. You are in the heartland, the mob’s green acres, and if they want to chase you around in armed convoys, don’t think for a minute there’s anyone to really oppose them.”
“Okay. That fits my reading.”
“Sarge, there’s not even a national television outlet into that state. The people of Jersey get their contact with the outer world via Philly, Bethlehem, and New York City. They don’t even have a newspaper with statewide circulation.”
“Yeah, I get that. A state without a state. You say the present governor is—”
“He’s trying,” Turrin replied, sighing. “But then, there’s all that cloud from beyond the borders, and the very real political power of the city-states.”
“Well. Maybe I’ll look around some while I’m here.”
“Good Christ! I was afraid you were starting to lean that way! Perish the very thought, Sarge.”
“I hear that Augie Marinello is leading the charge this time.”
“He is. From here, though, on his fat ass.”
“I guess he’s a bit unhappy over Philly.”
“In spades. By the way, you can forget the gradigghia, for now anyway. Augie got your message from Sicily. He put out an edict yesterday. No more imported guns. He was simply appalled by the slaughter in the Old Country.”
“I see. What you are telling me—”
“I’m telling you that you did a good job in Sicily. Next time why don’t you just take a quiet ocean cruise.”
“Okay,” B
olan replied, sighing. He lit a cigarette and listened to Leo Turrin’s tight breathing for a charged moment; then he said, “I’d rather go into an operation with a bit more visibility … but … I guess I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Aw, no, Sarge. No. Come back if you want, and I’ll help you set up some solid intel. But not now. There’s just too much working against you. Get out and take some R and R.”
“It just tears my guts, Leo. To think of these guys running around like savages, lord of the domain, doing whatever they damn please.”
“I know how you feel. Hell. But you’ve survived this far on cool, Mack. Go on surviving, damnit. We need you. This whole dog-eat-dog world needs you. Hey. I can talk to you like that, can’t I?”
Bolan chuckled. “Sure. What’s happening up north?”
“Newark-Jersey City? About two hundred guns are happening, I’d say. Manning the ramparts into New York. Don’t try it.”
“I get the feeling you’re nudging me somewhere, Leo.”
“Try Atlantic City, Sarge.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a boat headed that way. It’s the Lotta Linda. Off the boardwalk, north. Steel Pier. Anytime after midnight.”
Bolan chuckled again. “You’re so damn cute. Well, I’ll give it a look. Thanks, Leo. Uh, don’t forget the chicken ranch.”
“I’ll get right on it. Stay hard, man.”
“Name of the game,” Bolan said quietly, and hung up.
He signaled the operator and settled his overtime charges, then returned to his vehicle, deep in thought.
The name of the game, he thought, wryly, was beat it!
But … he was just a few miles north of the farm.
If there was the slightest chance of …
After all his pains to cover his tracks around that place … Well, Bruno couldn’t be expected to know. It was all Bolan’s doing, anyway. He’d leaked in there and talked the guy out of passive living, and if the guy was in a mess now, then it was Bolan’s mess, not Bruno’s. Certainly not Sara’s.
Some nightmares had an uncomfortable propensity for coming true.
And Bolan just could not shake from his head that latest twist in skin-crawling dreams—that one wherein a chicken ranch becomes a horror-farm of screaming turkeys.
Leo was right, too, of course. He simply was not ready for a Jersey operation.
As sure as God made lush green valleys, though, the Executioner would be returning to Jersey one day … prepared!
He fired up the war wagon and kicked her southward.
For now, he could run past the Tassily farm, reassure his mind, then angle on down to Atlantic City. It was the only route of sanity.
Or so he thought.
New routes, beyond Bolan’s immediate power of manipulation, were at that very moment being plowed by the Jersey guns.
8 FROM THE TREETOP
He cruised by the Tassily farm in a slow pass, taking a reading of the situation there.
A police car was in the drive, beacon flashing; another was pulled more toward the rear of the place, out by the sheds, no lights showing except an interior lamp, the driver’s door standing open.
The house was lit up all over, as were the outbuildings. The yard floodlights were on.
But he had seen not one thing moving back there, no signs of life whatever.
The scene struck him as unnatural.
He seesawed across the road and went back, pulling into the drive with headlamps extinguished and motor idling.
Then he saw it, the thing in the driveway beside the police cruiser—a crumpled human form.
He descended into that place with all his senses flaring into the alert.
There was not a sound about, except for the faint whirr-click of the cruiser’s beacon and a muffled squawking from its radio.
The uniformed trooper was lying face-down in the drive. He had been shot in the back of the head. He was dead.
The vehicle in back was a sheriff’s car. He found the two deputies by the brooder house. Also shot dead.
Bolan came upon the live one inside the house. A state trooper, young, twenty-five maybe, with a bullet in the gut and suffering like hell.
He knelt over the guy and asked him, “You okay?”
The cop’s eyes flared into that confrontation with the man in black, and he groaned, “I was.”
“Then you still are,” the Executioner assured him.
He broke out a battle compress, sprinkled it with antibiotic powder, and applied it to the wound.
“Hold it down tight,” he suggested. “You’ll make it if you can stand the pain. What happened here?”
“Gunmen,” the cop replied through gritted teeth. “Surprised us … took Tassily and … his sister.”
“How long?” Bolan asked, in a voice pitched from hell.
“Not … long. Few minutes at most.”
“What were they driving?”
The young officer’s look was an even mixture of pain and self-disgust. “That’s the … dumb part. Big camper. You know … these … Land Rover things. Who would’ve thought …?”
Bolan said, “Okay, don’t push it. I’ll get you some help. Did you see which way they went out of here?”
“Sounded like … up the road.”
Bolan was rising to take departure when the cop’s hand flopped over to pull weakly at his arm. “Those guys … they’re … worst kind. Camper wasn’t all. Two limousines came in … after. They wanted those people … worst way.”
“So do I,” the Executioner grimly assured the cop; then he pulled away and hurried out of there.
He paused briefly at the cruiser out front and got on the police radio. “Officer in trouble,” he reported. “Tassily farm, you know where. Send an ambulance, and scream it!”
The police dispatcher wasted no time over technicalities. He obviously “knew where” very well.
Bolan ignored the terse requests for further information and put that place quickly behind him.
And, yes, the hounds from hell had barked up a very mean tree this time.
Mack Bolan was deadly enough in his most passive moments.
And now that black-clad doomsday guy was seething with anger, trembling with determination, the usually expressionless face twisted into a torment of anxiety and utter resolution.
The hounds were to discover very quickly that they had tried to tree a dragon.
Bolan knew this jungle well, and he knew how to read the signs left there. He found the fresh impressions left by the heavy van as it cornered too tightly onto the back road to Trenton, and he found other signs beyond there which told of a gleeful and reckless joyride toward the headshed of local power.
Once he thought he’d actually caught a glimpse of their lights on a curve far ahead, but the terrain was working against him this time.
He swung away from the track a few miles east of the next junction and gambled on a cross-country plunge along a narrow dirt trail which, he hoped, would put him somewhere out front of the turkey-land express.
It did, and he was, and he met them at that back-country crossroads in the moonless night with perhaps fifteen seconds of advance preparation.
He was lined and targeted into the crossroads itself, and he met them there as they flew through in convoy procession, the two crew wagons leading.
The first car through the target zone took a LAW hit on the forward door post, exploded immediately into flames, and went into a cartwheel down that narrow road.
Car number two was already into the wreckage of the first casualty and pulling like hell for freedom when the next rocket slammed into her rear quarter. She went to ground on an expansive cushion of flame, then blew straight up with raining droplets of fiery gasoline and settled in a screeching heap directly in the path of the oncoming van.
The van jockey was already pulling brakes with everything he had, and now he overreacted with a lunging turn on locked brakes and blew through the flaming wreckage in a broadside skid that e
nded abruptly and disastrously with the rear section wrapped around a steel light standard.
A secondary exposion rocked the remains of the first car and flung shards of heavy glass and metal all about that disaster zone at the same moment that the camper came to rest.
Bolan, however, was like a homing missile with but one objective in mind. Totally ignoring the crew wagons and what was left of their passengers, he walked through that raining chaos with the big silver AutoMag thrust forward at chest level, headed unerringly for the turkey wagon, and the first man to come stumbling out of there was met in the doorway with 240 grains of exploding fire power right in the center of the forehead.
Another was trying to eject a revolver through a twisted porthole; the AutoMag again roared massive anger, and a mutilated hand was quickly jerked back inside.
He did not wait for the debarkation, but went in after them. The driver was bent over the steering wheel in his luxuriously padded seat, hands clasped to a bleeding face. Bolan jerked the head back, thrust the snout of the silver pistol through clenched teeth, and blew that fucking head off.
Another guy was seated at a small table just down the aisle, except that now the table was riding the guy’s chest and pinning him to the wall. The butt of a pistol was showing from one of the guy’s pockets, but he was too stunned even to go for it.
Bolan left him with a grotesque third eye that made the three as one as he passed on into the interior.
He found the “boss”—a guy he vaguely recognized as one of the top torpedoes out of Marinello’s Manhattan head shop—emerging from a curtained-off area at about midships.
The guy was dragging Sara Henderson along in front of him—a thoroughly terrified and bug-eyed Sara—and he was bleeding all down the front of her from the shattered hand that pinned her to him.
The other hand held a pistol at her head, and the guy was yelling, “Okay, now! Watch it, Bolan!”
Bolan watched it.
He watched a 240 grain extension of cold fury plow right past Sara’s pink little ear to splatter that ugly face behind it, leaving not even a dying reflex to tickle that trigger at her head.
Jersey Guns Page 5