She said, “Selfishness, to a fault.”
He said, “To a sickness.”
A moment later, Sara told him, “It’s almost done.”
“It sure is,” he replied, sighing.
“No, I … meant the layout.”
“I know what you meant,” he muttered.
“Are you going to leave me alone again?”
“Have to,” he said regretfully.
She finished the sketch with a flourish of shading strokes and placed it in his lap. “What if I go crazy and start screaming my head off?” she asked.
“You won’t do that.”
“No, I … suppose I won’t.”
“You’re tougher than that.”
“Darned right.”
“Women are tougher than men.”
“They are?”
“Yes, in many ways. Where it counts.”
“Mack. I’m going to tell you this, but I don’t want you to think … I mean, not to make you feel … Mack, I love you. I mean, love love. Know what I mean?”
Very quietly he replied, “Yes. Thank you, Sara.”
“Thank you,” she said in a small voice.
He stopped the car, leaned across her, opened the door, dropped a grenade into each of those cupped little hands, and sent love love into an open field in the dead of night without even another’s voice for a beacon, and in the shadow of their enemies.
It was a hell of a world.
But the only one they had.
Sara had done her work on a large sheet of tracing paper, the kind used for map overlays. It was a highly skillful piece of work, especially considering the circumstances and the time element involved.
According to Sara’s sketch, a narrow lane led from the main road directly into the hunt club. She had indicated chain-link fencing surrounding the entire property, and she’d written “infinity” for the distance to the rear border—meaning, probably, a very deep tract of land.
The road frontage she had estimated as “about two football fields”—about two hundred yards, then.
The access lane went off at dead center, ran to a recessed gateway “about four car lengths” off the road—eighty feet or so—then proceeded on a slightly curving path to the “clubroom,” a single-story structure which was “twice as wide as my house and three times as long.”
Bolan grinned, despite the tensions of the moment.
Some kind of a gal.
It sat upon a rise of land, this indicated only by shading strokes of the pencil. It could be five feet up, or fifty. Bolan bought it as a small knoll, considering the general topography of this particular area.
The interior of that main building was depicted in exquisite detail. Sara must have remembered it fondly. She’d shown a foyer and a large dining-room/lounge dominating the front, smaller rooms at the rear, marked “Bugle Bar,” “LR Gals,” “LR Boys,” “Powder Room,” “Office” respectively, left to right. Bolan read “LR” as “locker room.”
Other buildings fanned out from the main structure. The stables, leather shop, various other odds and ends. Fox pens and corrals were also depicted. Trails, running into the interior of the property. A meadow, woods, several streams.
That girl had a photographic mind.
And the mental photograph that she had recreated for the Executioner could become a damned nightmare—for a hard hit.
If the place was actually a “camp,” then it would damn sure be a nightmare. There could be … possibly a hundred, maybe more, hardmen inside that fence.
What was that message from “William Meyer & Company”?
Street-corner recruiting? A run on weapons?
Yeah. Easily a hundred, if this was a field-headquarters site.
And the joint was eminently defensible—chiefly because an invader would have a tough time pinpointing power pockets. They could have fire teams set up all around that property, patrols along the fences, patrols on horseback—why not?—and sentries, sentries everywhere.
It was the way the Taliferi operated. Massive power, scorched-earth capabilities. Sure, even in a field exercise. The guys did not gamble. They high-rolled.
But it would mean—unless they’d pulled all of their first-line troops in from all around that region of the country—it had to mean that they were going with a recruited militia. Green troops—street-corner soldiers who even had to go out and buy their weapons before they could join the party.
And all that “sirring” of Mike Talifero, as reported by Sara.
Sure, it fits. And it gave Bolan his “directions to the front.”
This would be no hard hit.
This one would be soft, very soft.
For the big softhearted guy.
A soft probe for Bruno.
14 PURSUIT OF THE FOX
He removed his combat rig and placed it in the luggage compartment with the rest of his arsenal, retaining only the Beretta in shoulder suspension.
Then he donned, over the black suit, the same clothing he’d worn from Philly—Johnny Cavaretta’s fancy threads, just the slacks and jacket.
The silk scarf, which he had used earlier to bandage the leg wound, was again dazzling white and glossy—and he had to wonder how Sara had managed that. He draped it around his neck and let it fall casually just inside the lapels of the jacket. With that decorative effect, maybe the blouse of the skinsuit would look like a turtleneck sport shirt.
Cavaretta’s clothing did not fit Bolan all that well. Too much in the waist, not enough in the legs. He had to compensate for that by wearing the slacks down around his hips, and it came out about right then.
Cavaretta had been one of the VIP hit men, a Taliferi of high rank. Everyone knew, of course, that he was now gone forever. His head had been borne to Augie Marinello as a stand-in for Bolan’s, delivered by the gleeful son of Philly boss Stefano Angeletti—and that had taken some engineering—while Bolan himself prowled around the Angeletti headshed posing as Cavaretta.
Frank the Kid’s glee had been short lived, of course, woefully deflated—as reported to Bolan by Leo Turrin.
All of this simply illustrated the interesting fact that few living mafiosi possessed a really clear idea of what the Executioner really looked like.
Bolan left few survivors in his wake who could provide any sort of coherent description of the man. Since the face job by Doc Brantzen, early in the wars, there were no official photographs of the blitzing warrior. From an occasional and brief eyeball encounter with the law, here and there, various police artists had rendered composite sketches which bore a resemblance—but only a resemblance—to the man in black.
Of course, as Bolan had learned long ago—as far back as that other war, in ’Nam—most people “see” with a clarity and precision which is nowhere in the class with photographic film.
A truly “photographic mind” was a human rarity.
The human mind, Bolan had discovered, was a paradox of itself—a living dimension of space-time, which also, odd as it may sound, created space-time.
More than two thousand years before Einstein, a Greek dude of the old world had observed that, “The world is composed of nothing but atoms and voids. All else is illusion.”
And the observation was true, even in this modern age of scientific brilliance. It was, in fact, truer than ever. The deeper the scientists probed into the heart of “matter,” the more stark became the reality that the world is indeed composed of little more than “atoms and voids”—with the accent on voids, or nothingness—sheer energy, arrested here and there in submicroscopically frozen bits that the brilliant minds labeled “matter.”
Put a couple hundred billion of those arrested bits together in a losely packed mass, and maybe you’ve got an atom. Keep putting billions upon billions of atoms together and maybe you’ll come up with something which the human mind can perceive—something to “see” or “touch” or “smell” or “hear.”
Sure. Bolan was no science-theoritician, but he could understand such
things.
The “mind” becomes aware of what the sense perceptions allow inside; and, conversely, the sense perceptions allow inside—to a large extent—only what the “mind” has already been programmed to recognize. Few men living would even claim to understand what the “mind” actually is.
And who had ever actually “seen” a spring breeze?
You felt a movement of something across your skin, sure. Maybe you saw a motion within the branches of trees or in the blades of grass at your feet, and maybe you picked up an odor perception of blooming things which was carried along in that “breeze.”
But all you saw were effects. You never saw that rustling movement of molecules in transit.
And few people ever saw Mack Bolan—not enemy people, anyway.
They experienced his effect.
They usually saw no more than something dark and deadly, moving swiftly like a breeze through the limbs of trees and shaking things up and moving them around and scattering them in its path.
And this, of course, was what they “recognized”: the effect, the motion—the frightening, mind-numbing, terrifying vision of death in motion.
During those other moments when Bolan chose to walk among them, he was a careful blending of other familiar perceptions. He was “one of the boys” or “just a delivery guy” or “the telephone guy” or something equally innocuous. Sometimes he was a “boss” image, fearful in its own right, benumbing to some minds, perception-scattering through its imputed power over life and fortunes.
And the mob’s own modus operandi contributed to Bolan’s success with such masquerades. An organization which is based on fear, secrecy, deception, and brutality has a price to pay for the use of those lower attributes. Bolan collected that payment whenever the time seemed right.
And that time seemed right, once again, at this moment in the shrouding Jersey night.
A crew wagon with only one guy inside pulled casually into the little lane and rolled to a quiet halt a few yards short of the chain suspended across the gateway to the place called Boots and Bugle.
Three men stood there, one on either side and the other at dead center. There was a tension in the air there, an alertness mingled with nervousness.
The middle guy stepped down to stand beside the door on the driver’s side of the Cadillac, eyes roving the interior of that vehicle.
The window slid down under silent electric power, and the man in there asked the gate boss, “Do you have a light? Four cigarette lighters in this bomb, you would think that one of them would work.”
That voice was collegiate New England, calm, relaxed. The guy was wearing sharp threads, a damned scarf, really, lightly tinted sunglasses—at night, yet.
The gate boss hastily dug into a shirt pocket and handed over a Zippo lighter. Helpfully he said, “Maybe it’s a fuse, sir. You want me to check it?”
The “big-time torpedo” lit his cigarette and passed the Zippo back. “No, that’s all right,” he said, blowing smoke toward the guy in the response. “I’ll have one of the boys inside look at it. Is Mike here?”
“He … Yes, sir, he came in a little while ago.”
“Well, I don’t believe it. I have been chasing that guy all over central Jersey.”
“You’ve caught him now, sir,” the gate boss assured the Executioner. He chuckled as he passed the sign to the gate crew.
The chain came down.
And the Executioner went in.
So, okay. So far.
He rolled casually along the drive, just Cadillacking along, senses flaring into the lie of that place.
Sentries, yeah.
Here and there he caught the glow of a cigarette out there in that darkness, a cough, a muttered word borne along on the evening breeze.
The encampment, yeah. Field headquarters. Division point.
This was it. This was where the Jersey guns were stacked, awaiting directions to the front.
He passed a dignified, lighted signboard em-placed on golf-green lawn, depicting a young lady on horseback, wearing boots and riding breeches and a bright red jacket, jumping a rock wall; in the foreground, the head of a fox with a malicious smile.
So who was the fox?
The whole thing could be a cute game engineered by Mike Talifero, a draw, an invitation which the Executioner could not refuse. The guy might be sitting up there in that clubhouse right now, waiting, a malicious smile on his psychopath face.
Bolan sighed and cruised on.
It was no fox hunt, he reminded himself.
It was a turkey chase.
Even if he wound up, himself, the turkey.
15 INSIDE BOLAN
Mack Bolan had not always been a hellfire guy.
Friends and acquaintances of his earlier years were, without exception, shocked over his identification with murder and violence, the unyielding and unrelenting dedication to war everlasting.
His seventh-grade teacher remembered the clear-eyed youngster vividly, and with fondness. “He was a quiet boy. Very smart, a natural scholar. Never rowdy. Very athletic, though. ‘Curious,’ I guess, is the best single word to describe him. He was the most curious child I ever had. Everything interested him.”
A high-school friend, one of the few who was ever very close to young Bolan, remembered, “Mack was a funny guy. You respected him. And you liked him. He was always out front, leading … you know, just a natural leader, never a pusher. But sometimes … well, you just felt like he wasn’t really there. I don’t mean nutty. I mean … his body was there, but his mind was somewhere else. Mack was a loner.”
Another friend, a girl, told a reporter, “Mack was a boy I always felt secure with. I could say things, and he wouldn’t make fun of me about it. He talked to me sometimes, too, I mean seriously. He told me once that he felt like an observer of life more than a participant.”
The essence of these candid portraits of the man was more or less accurate. Bolan was indeed a “loner,” though not the hermit type who retreats from the world behind a protective shell of cynicism and distrust.
An “observer,” yes, certainly. He had never become overly subjective about this thing called life. Even as a very small child, young Mack was more aware of his environment than of himself. He was an observer, very objectively so, and he generally approved of what he saw. He always had the feeling, during the developing years, that he was standing just apart from the rest of creation, never actually immersed in it but still enjoying it, appreciating it. And yet he could feel so strongly about the problems that he noted there, could sympathize so deeply with those who suffered.
He was not, as the psychologists would say, “ego-motivated.” He would undertake independent actions, yes, but seldom out of any desire for personal gratification or reward. He was not “materially ambitious.” Positive actions usually came about as a result of some outside stimulus—he was “impulse-activated.”
The rest of the personality seemed to close around that potentially destructive fact, providing him with a high sense of personal ethics and an underlying dedication toward positive acts of human excellence.
He had never been what one would term a “religious” person. His army personnel file listed him, in this respect, as “No Preference.” But Bolan did have a deep religious sense. Undefined, and only vaguely understood perhaps, but he did possess a somewhat formulated concept of a “universal ethic.”
The army psychologist who okayed Bolan for the volunteer penetration-team duty in Vietnam had notated the record thus: “Subject subscribes to universalist concepts, appears to be motivated by transcendent ideals (over and above everyday morality). Subject will command himself.”
Bolan had been invited to apply for the army’s officer-candidate program. He declined, three times by the record, although he was a career soldier. It appeared that he was one of those persons who shied from official authority; but he was recognized by officers and men alike as a natural leader. Others followed out of genuine respect, not because of the stripe
s on his sleeve.
He had, from the age of about fourteen, kept a daily journal, in which he recorded passing thoughts, particularly impressing events, rambling ideas. Even the most cursory inspection of those journals would convey to the reader a lasting impression that they had been written by a singularly unique individual.
An entry at the age of seventeen: “I stand at the edge of creation and watch the parade go by from my grandstand seat. So powerful, so beautiful, and so important. But where am I? Why do I not march in the parade also?”
When he was twenty, and in the army: “Some people were built to march. Others to watch, and wonder why the others are marching, and to where.”
A few hours after his first “kill,” in a legitimate war: “He was looking into the sun, and suddenly I was down there with him, looking into his eyes. I saw the entire universe in there. Then I was back where I belonged, my eye to the scope where it had actually been all the while, and I gave him back to the universe. May his soul forgive mine.”
Sergeant Bolan had returned many men “to the universe” while engaged in acts of war and in the service of his country. And, in the midst of that other war, his very personal “homefront war” erupted. His father, his mother, his kid sister lay dead in the home where Mack Bolan was born. He was sent home to bury them and to arrange care for an orphaned minor brother.
And the world had never again been the same—the grandstand seat gone forever, Mack Bolan marching, marching, marching … all the way through hell.
The hell-fire guy sent the Cadillac beneath the portico and to a gentle halt just uprange from a gleaming Mercedes.
The building was brightly lighted, but quiet.
Paired-off sentry teams strolled at the edge of light, in all directions about that knoll.
The door captain was looking his way and acting like he wanted to call something over as Bolan stepped from the vehicle, but something else was distracting the guy, from the inside.
He lunged about suddenly and grabbed the glass door, jerked it open, poising on his toes as though about to leap.
Mike Talifero swept out of the building, waving his arms and muttering to himself, a big guy hurrying along behind him.
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