For the second time that day, Bolan had shot a monster off that girl’s back, and he felt utterly miserable about the whole thing.
She was undoubtedly feeling rather miserable, herself. The dress was torn half away from her. Ugly splotchy bruises marred that lovely skin in every place that showed, and her eyes were absolutely wild.
She collapsed into his arms and nestled her head on his shoulder as he carried her out of that hellbox.
“Where’s Bruno?” he asked as soon as they reached open air.
“Gone,” she moaned. “They took him.”
“He wasn’t with you?”
“Not now.”
He gazed toward the fiery limousines and told her in a choked voice, “In this game, it’s all or nothing, Sara. I had to go for the numbers.”
Bad off as she was, she noted the anguish in him and hastened to tell him, “No! Not there! They took him away, some other cars.”
Well … that was good, and it was bad.
Good because there was still a chance for Bruno. But a mighty slim one.
Bad because sudden death in an exploding vehicle just beat the shivers out of the slow but certain lingering reality of a turkey-style interrogation.
“Don’t faint, Sara! Suck in your gut and chuck it up if you have to. Scream, cuss, call me names, whatever ticks you. But damnit, don’t faint! You’ve got to help me find Bruno!”
“Don’t worry about me, Mack Bolan.” The voice was tiny but firm. “I understand you now, your war. I truly understand.”
Yes, Sara had been through some hell, herself.
But she was fighting back. God love her, she was fighting back.
9 THE UNDERSTANDING
There was more pain for Sara than problem—pain and a rather jarring loss of feminine composure.
The boys had not been too rough on her—a bit of pinching in sensitive places and slapping around, routine terrorizing.
They’d fondled her where no man had a right to without permission, and indulged in some low street-corner humor and wisecracks.
The really rough stuff would have come later.
Bolan took her to his vehicle, where he gave her a canteen of water and some gauze with which to swab away the blood and other washable marks she’d collected from the dead torpedo. Not much could be done about the welts and bruises she’d picked up before that; only time.
He left her there in privacy and went back for a quick shakedown of the command van.
A surface search of the vehicle and its crew left him with very little of useful intelligence. A couple of maps, some identities, a few odds and ends that might come together later.
When Bolan returned to his own vehicle, Sara was cleanly composed and ready to travel. He took one last look at the site where God or something had intervened in that girl’s fate; then he burned rubber away from that place, leaving flaming wreckage and cooking bodies behind.
Most people, he knew, would find it difficult to believe the depth of horror that had been awaiting Sara Henderson on that bleak Jersey night. Sara herself would not have believed.
Everyday people simply had no mental concept of the deeper depravities that stalked this tired old earth.
Memories of places like Buchenwald and other infamies faded all too quickly from the human experience.
Bolan knew. His “memories” had been kept up to date.
It would not have mattered that Sara had already told the turkey-makers everything she knew, which she had. She’d seen no reason to conceal the truth. She had thought Bolan well clear of the area. And she told them all of it, a couple of times.
No matter if they had been convinced that she’d told all—even that would not have saved her.
The “talk-turkey” theory differed from brain washing and other gentler techniques in that it featured a greatly accelerated and heightened approach—not brain washing, but brain busting.
The technique was based on the idea that human perception and recall is a tricky and often deceptive thing. It followed (quite by accident) the same psychological reasoning as the more socially acceptable “encounter-group” techniques of emotional release. Bits of intelligence could be hidden in the subconscious as involuntarily as could bits of destructive emotions and psychic trauma. The art of turkey-making, however, was far older than the quasi-science of human psychology, and much more effective.
The “encounter-group” technique of psychotherapy amounted to a voluntary submission to emotional shock and nonphysical torture.
Turkey-talk “therapy” was aimed toward the same result, but with a much more straightforward approach, and a much quicker result.
Though the various steps of the technique had never been formulated into a precise discipline, the practice of the art went somewhat along these lines:
Begin with fear and terror, threats, promises of severe physical suffering.
Then induce actual physical pain, gradually. Get the victim to screaming and pleading for mercy.
A lot of stuff would come flinging out of the mind right there, at that point, a lot of stuff the victim never even knew was there.
So, induce more pain. A hell of a lot more. Get the entire physical stystem involved in it, until the victim is flopping about all over the place and yelling his head off.
So, keep it up. More, more, and then a hell of a lot more … until the poor bastard has reached the absolute limit of human endurance. Watch the whole damn nervous system collapse, and listen to what pops out of that.
But keep him conscious and aware. Let off for a little while, give the strength a chance to build back. Then do it again, all the way; get him back up there, and keep prodding until something new splits loose.
Let off again. Be nice. Smile at the suffering shit. But watch how he shrinks back each time you make a gesture in his direction; listen to how he screams if you so much as touch him with a finger. Now you’re getting into the guy; you’re almost there.
So, hit him now with massive shock. Confound the very soul, fragment it, send it screaming through hell. If the turkey is a guy, cut off his cock. If a broad, slice off a tit or shove a busted Coke bottle up her snatch.
And listen to all the shit pouring out now.
And the time has arrived when you can become really creative.
Hit them in their hottest spot. If the guy happens to be a surgeon or a piano player, for example, off with his goddamn fingers … one by one. Show them to him, play catch with them, shove ’em up his ass. But keep him alive. Get a blowtorch or something and cauterize those stumps.
It could go on and on like that, taking the guy apart in pieces, for as long as he could be kept aware and screaming and alive.
All kinds of shit would pour out, maybe even how he screwed Maryjane in the sandbox at kindergarten. These slobs got so goddamn anxious to tell you everything they knew, everything they could conceivably know and not know, they even started inventing stuff, making it up, trying to find something to satisfy you so you’d stop.
But you didn’t stop.
You never stopped until the guy stopped.
You kept right on busting through that brain, shredding that soul, dissolving that personality into scattered bits and pieces; and you kept that poor shit talking turkey until he talked himself dead.
That was the technique.
And if you were a real artisan, a really masterful turkey-maker, you could probably keep something like that going around the clock. Some guys in Chicago had once kept it going for more than three days. Of course, in all fairness to the other masters, they’d had a three-hundred-pound turkey to work with.
Sara, by the grace of God, had been spared that.
Bruno could still be facing it.
But not if there was anything beneath God’s heaven which Bolan could do to prevent it.
Mack Bolan was a mighty tough guy—genuinely tough, in the spirit, where it counted.
He could steel himself to almost anything. But he could not steel himself into an acceptance of turkey mea
t.
He would have killed his own mother, quickly and without regret, before he would allow her to fall into a turkey-maker’s hands.
And he would quickly do the same for Bruno Tassily, if that was the last resort.
He had not thought it necessary to explain such things to Sara. He had not told her why he so quickly, and with such seeming recklessness, had twice that day placed her under the fire of his own guns.
But, in some vague fashion, Sara understood; he knew that. She had received only the merest hint of what could have lain in store for her that night, but it was hint enough and she had made a point to let him know quickly that she understood.
Bolan could only hope that Sara’s understanding would never become complete.
Not every mafioso was a turkey-maker, of course.
Even the meanest of the button men sometimes turned green if someone even mentioned turkey to them. It took a genuine sadist, a really sick mind, to pull that kind of duty, even as an assistant.
So, there were the specialists.
Mike Talifero, it had been said, had a full assortment of such “specialists,” and Bolan would bet a million bucks that each of those command vans cruising the Jersey hellgrounds that night was carrying a Talifero specialist.
These guys were out here to collect the Executioner’s head, and they meant to have it.
They would stop at nothing … and nobody.
And how they would love to get Mack Bolan’s brain to bust, his soul to shred. Just for fun.
That idea did not particulary bother the man in black. He would live until he died; and if he died screaming, well, okay. Bolan did not contemplate his own death.
He contemplated the death of others. Those who roamed and ranged and plundered the human estate, those who degraded life itself and sucked out dignity and meaning and hope.
Yes. He contemplated their deaths even in his sleep.
He would contemplate their deaths even while he himself was dying.
And if Sara understood that, then she’d done a bit of brain busting on her own—but in a much, much gentler fashion.
10 THE SITUATION
Bolan’s modus operandi was slipping badly.
He was a hellfire guy, hit and git, disappear quickly, pop up again at some far-removed spot to hit and fade again. It was guerrilla warfare, and it had kept his hide intact through fifteen major encounters with this enemy.
But now, here in Jersey, the whole game had changed in a most disheartening manner.
He was running around in tight circles, highly visible, with very little design and no plan whatever.
Certainly he was not on a battleground of his own choosing.
Jersey had been on his hit list, sure. But not for this particular point in time. Mainly because it was much too close to one of his most recent theaters of operation.
At first Jersey had been an escape route, not—to his mind—a field for combat. He liked to pick them a bit more carefully than that.
But also he was not prepared for a war with the Jersey mob. In the first place, there was no Jersey mob, per se. The guys up around Newark and Jersey City were hardly more than an arm of the New York group, especially since their ranking member on La Commissione had started getting his tail salted by the feds.
A couple other New York outfits had the Port of New York under contest, including the Jersey side of it.
Trenton, the capital city, had its own special problems, not a few of which were caused by old Stefano Angeletti, the fading boss of Philly, plus varied and sundry oddfellows from just about every Mafia interest in the Northeast United States.
New Jersey was not only a state without a state; it was also a mob without a mob.
The entire area was a refuse bin for everything the states of New York and Pennsylvania wished to toss over—including their underworld garbage.
Leo Turrin had not been exaggerating when he described the problem as a “horrendous mess.”
It was easily that.
Bolan was beyond being amazed at the capacity for American citizens to accept the clearly unacceptable.
But he had always felt a bit numbed with every glance at the state of New Jersey.
The situation here was more than horrendous. It was appalling.
So … no. Bolan was not prepared to tackle New Jersey. If the Mafia was an octopus, then Jersey was an octopus whose tentacles were detached and wriggling about the entire landscape on independent and all-encompassing feedings.
Bolan would need a very close-cadence group of numbers to tackle an enemy like that. And that meant painstaking intelligence, planning, logistics, a very precise battle strategy.
At the moment, Bolan was no more than another piece of garbage flung onto the Jersey soil.
His only desire had been to get the hell out of there.
Bruno Tassily and his sister had made it possible for him to achieve that objective. And, sure, he could have done so, without too much sweat, by simply playing his game his way.
Following the diversion hit at Mercerville, he could have scooted free and clear to the coast, and probably, at this very moment, be floating down the Atlantic to freedom and better battlefields.
Very probably he could still do so.
But it would be a “freedom” totally without meaning.
Bolan was not a glory guy. And he was not fighting merely to remain alive. The thing went much deeper than that, into an area of the human dimension which Bolan could not put words to.
Nothing in life could be measured in precise terms of right and wrong, good and bad, black and white. He knew that. And he knew how corny it sounded to talk about “good versus evil,” and the like.
Bolan had discovered, though, that things usually become “corny” only because they are so universally applicable—the “true” does have an annoying way of becoming commonplace, mainly because it has such durability.
But he also understood that “evil” was self-propelling, and much stronger than passive “good.” That latter condition needed a bit of propellant itself if it was going to remain in the race with the other.
Maybe Edmund Burke was simply being “corny” when he declared, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
But Mack Bolan agreed with that statement, corny or not.
Bolan lived that philosophy, cornball or not.
He did not respect meaningless freedom.
He did not cherish “life at any price.”
He did, though, very strongly wish to spring a friend from the shadows of hell.
And he would, by God, do so, if there was any way under the sun.
That was the entire damned “situation” of the moment.
11 THROUGH THE MAZE
“There were three cars,” Sara explained. “I remembered the importance of … I pretended I had a pad and that I was sketching it all. Tried to burn it into my mind as vividly as possible. There was a sports car, some foreign make. I never could tell one from the other, except this was an expensive type. Then there were two big cars, Cadillacs I guess, the kind with the folding jump seats, gleaming black.
“The men all looked very hard, brutal. Except the one. He got out of the sports car, with another man. He was … well, handsome in a way. A little older than you, Mack. About the same general physique, except an inch or so shorter than you. Very expensively dressed, very sharp. A blue double-knit suit with flared legs, wide lapels. Most beautiful shirt I’ve ever seen … I couldn’t even guess at the material.”
“Anyway …” Bolan prompted.
“Oh. He had blond hair, blue eyes. Easy, relaxed, laughed quite a bit, but with … well, I guess with dignity, or reserve. Nothing at all like the other men. But he was in charge; that much was clear. His name was never mentioned. They all addressed him as ‘sir.’ They sirred everything they said to him. He was … I would say … cultured. And obviously well educated, very self-assured.”
“Talked something like this,�
�� Bolan suggested, affecting a refined New England accent. “Harvard College, you know, class of Fifty-nine.”
“That’s him,” she agreed quickly. “Sort of like the Kennedys. You know who he is, then?”
Bolan growled, “One of the Talifero brothers. Probably Mike. Has an identical twin. A pair of rattlers, I’ll tell you that.”
“Yes, I … felt that about him. Even though he treated me very nice. Respectful.”
“What else?”
“They talked for several minutes, inside the camper, but I couldn’t catch much of it. Except that I was to be taken into Trenton. For some … I don’t know for what. But they kept looking at me and grinning. Made my skin crawl. And they’d decided that the blond man would take Bruno with him, wherever he was going. I don’t know why, but I … assumed that it would be to somewhere nearby. Don’t know how I got that impression, but …”
“Think about it,” Bolan suggested. “It could be important.”
She replied, “Okay. But it’s just ahead now. On the left. That service station.”
They were arriving at a crossroad.
This was the place where the kidnap convoy from the Tassily farm had rendezvoused with Mike Talifero and his head party.
The spot being indicated by Sara was a small combination grocery and service station. It was closed.
Bolan pulled in to there and immediately consulted the sectional map that had come with the vehicle.
That spot was marked on the map—circled.
Something else was marked, also, something which he had briefly wondered about and then dismissed as having no consequence that other time he’d studied that same map.
Someone had penciled in a dotted line from this junction to the one where Bolan had paused so briefly about twenty dead men ago—that empty trailer park from where he had telephoned Leo Turrin.
Of course!
So why hadn’t he …?
He asked the girl, in a very flat voice, “Which way did they go from here?”
“Straight ahead, the way we just came in.”
He hit that road with the transmission screaming into an over-demand response, catching Sara entirely off-guard and causing her to lunge about in the seat and clutch at him for support.
Jersey Guns Page 6