Pendleton Don - Executioner 013 - Washington I.O.U.
THE EXECUTIONER: WASHINGTON I.O.U.
They called themselves 'the Wolf Crew' — five carefully selected assassins who were the hit men for the Washington arm of the crime syndicate known to the world as the Mafia .
Now one of the Wolf Crew was dead — strangled by a nylon noose and thrown five storey’s from the roof of an apartment block. There was only one person who could, or would, have done that -- the man who had slashed the Mob's organization to pieces — the man the Mafia nicknamed `The Executioner' ...
MACK BOLAN HAD ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON
Also by Don Pendleton
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THE EXECUTIONER: NIGHTMARE IN NEW YORK
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THE EXECUTIONER: NEW ORLEANS KNOCKOUT
THE EXECUTIONER: FIREBASE SEATTLE
THE EXECUTIONER: HAWAIIAN HELLGROUND
THE EXECUTIONER: ST LOUIS SHOWDOWN
THE EXECUTIONER: CANADIAN CRISIS
THE EXECUTIONER: COLORADO KILL-ZONE
THE EXECUTIONER: ACAPULCO RAMPAGE
THE EXECUTIONER: DIXIE CONVOY
THE EXECUTIONER: SAVAGE FIRE
THE EXECUTIONER: COMMAND STRIKE
THE EXECUTIONER: CLEVELAND PIPELINE
THE EXECUTIONER: ARIZONA AMBUSH
THE EXECUTIONER: TENNESSEE SMASH
THE EXECUTIONER: MONDAY'S MOB
and published by Corgi Books
Don Pendleton
The Executioner:
Washington I.O.U.
CORGI BOOKS
A DIVISION OF TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS LTD
THE EXECUTIONER: WASHINGTON I.O.U.
A CORGI BOOK 0 552 11107 4
First publication in Great Britain
PRINTING HISTORY
Corgi edition published 1974 Corgi edition re-issued 1979
Copyright ©1972 by Pinnacle Books This book is set in 11-on-12pt Baskerville
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2: This book is sold subject to the Standard Conditions of Sale of Net Books and may not be re-sold in the U.K. below the net price fixed, by the publishers for the book.
Corgi Books are published by Transworld Publishers Ltd.,
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Set printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading
Scanned by CrazyAl v1.0 2009
DEDICATION:
To the honest men,
the ethical men,
the dedicated men ...
wherever the hell they may be.
PROLOGUE
It had already earned him fame as `the Executioner' in the war zones of Southeast Asia when Mack Bolan's spectacular brand of warfare was suddenly transplanted to the city streets of his homeland.
As a U.S. Army sergeant, Bolan's combat excellence was built of many commendable attributes. His military superiors regarded him as 'a natural soldier'. He seemed to possess an almost intuitive 'feel' for combat tactics and strategies. He was rated an expert marksman with virtually every personal weapon, in the army's arsenal. On penetration strikes into enemy-held territory, Bolan had repeatedly demonstrated a cool self-sufficiency, nerves of steel, and the ability to complete missions despite overwhelming obstacles.
In a modern army heavy on specialties, Mack Bolan practiced the oldest specialty in the book of warfare. He was a death specialist. During two tours of combat duty in Vietnam, he had `executed' ninety-seven enemy VIP’s, by confirmed count, and he had come to be regarded as a formidable weapon in the army's psychological warfare efforts.
And then Sgt. Bolan experienced a personal tragedy. He was called home on emergency leave to make burial arrangements for his father, mother, and teenage sister – all victims of violent death. When he learned that the local Mafia arm was responsible for the triple-tragedy, Mack Bolan seceded from the 'Asian wars and turned, his attention to `the home front'.
`It looks like I have been fighting the wrong, enemy,' the sergeant wrote in his personal journal. 'Why defend a front line 8,000 miles away when the real enemy is chewing up everything you love back home? I have talked to the police about this situation and they seem to be helpless to do anything. The problem, as I see it, is that the rules of warfare are all rigged against the cops. Just knowing the enemy isn't enough. They have to prove he's the enemy, and even then sometimes he slips away from them. What is needed here is a bit of direct action, strategically planned, and to hell with the rules. Over in 'Nam, we called it a war of attrition. Seek out and destroy. Exterminate the enemy. I guess it's time a war was declared on the home front. The same kind of war we've been fighting at 'Nam. The very same kind.'
Mack Bolan, indeed, declared a personal war on the Mafia. It was not to be a limited war, not in any sense. It was to be 'war everlasting' — that is, everlasting in terms of Bolan's own lifetime.
This competent combat veteran held no illusions regarding the eventual outcome of such a war. He knew what the odds were. It was obvious that he would be fighting the impossible fight. There could be but one logical conclusion: the death of Mack Bolan.
Even so, he infiltrated, the enemy camp in his home town Pittsfield, and began his cool campaign of identification and destruction. Much to his own surprise, Bolan emerged victorious from that initial skirmish, and when he left Pittsfield that Mafia arm was a shambles.
The Executioner was strongly aware, however, that all trails away from Pittsfield were, in effect, his 'last mile' of life. He vowed to make it a bloody mile and to make each step along that wipeout trail as costly as possible to the enemy. He would not 'roll over and die for them'.
He then declared the entire underworld a jungle — an arena in which the only law was survival of the fittest — and his war became a series of guerrilla campaigns. Wherever he surfaced, hell broke loose; wherever he lingered, ruin and destruction descended upon the enemy. Before long, the lordly masters of organized crime throughout the nation were beginning to address themselves to 'the Bolan problem' with the gravest respect.
An 'open contract' was issued against the life of this blitzing one-man army, with the initial $100,000 bounty on his head pyramiding into astronomical amounts as local chieftains hastily added 'area bonuses' in an attempt to discourage Executioner strikes in their territories.
Meanwhile law enforcement agencies at every level of government throughout the nation were viewing Mack Bolan's one-man anti-crime crusade with growing alarm, and a tight 'Bolan watch' was being federally coordinated towards the apprehension of this `highly dangerous' fugitive. Even internationally, Bolan was a wanted man. Interpol as well as national police in several European nations had reasons for an interest in the activities of the Executioner.
Thus, it must have, seemed that every hand was raised against him. Bolan had not, however, expe
cted to be decorated for his actions in this new application of warfare. He had known from the beginning that his campaign would be officially regarded as both immoral and illegal; he was prepared to accept the condemnation of his society. He even accepted philosophically the knowledge that many police agencies were observing an unofficial 'shoot on sight - shoot to kill' policy in their attempts to apprehend him.
From Bolan's viewpoint, though, the police were not his enemy. He studiously avoided any confrontation with police authority and he had never been known to exchange gunfire or hostilities of any nature with the law enforcement establishment.
Actually, many police officers were secretly sympathetic to Bolan's war, and it is felt that frequently individual policemen 'turned their backs' and consciously avoided confrontations with the blitzing warrior. It is known that Bolan's closest friend and contact within the establishment was an undercover agent who was also high in the crime syndicates hierarchy. Another Bolan intelligence contact was a highly placed official in the U.S. Justice Department. Neither of these contacts was on an official basis, however, and rumors that Bolan was being financed and otherwise supported by various governmental agencies are patently false.
Bolan financed his own war, via raids on the enemy's money caches. From the beginning, he seemed to delight in hitting them where it hurts' — in their money pipelines, their 'clout routes' (bribery networks for political influence), and in their juicy semi-legitimate business covers. He had learned early in the wars that the enemy's seeming omnipotence was derived mainly from the power of their great wealth - from their 'bought' politicians, law-officials legal-eagles and unscrupulous businessmen.
The actual source of their power, though, was quickly seen as 'the common everyday moral weakness of mass America. The Mafia's billions come from the dimes and dollars harvested daily through organized gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, bootlegging, narcotics and other mass-interest sources of illegal revenue.
But Bolan was no moralist and, his war was not directed against the common weaknesses of mankind. His war was with the Mafia itself, which he saw as a ravenous leech at the throat of his nation, a monster bloated fantastically by an insatiable appetite for wealth and power, a nightmarish crime cartel with tentacles wriggling out in all directions in a determination to encompass the world.
His first brush with the mob's political ambitions came in New York where he learned that La Cosa Nostra (translated literally, Our Thing, or this thing of ours) was giving birth to an even more formidable Cosa di tutti Cosi, the Thing of all Things, a movement described by worried government officials as 'the nation's invisible second government'.
The new Thing was spreading like a cancerous growth into the financial and political institutions of the country indeed, of the entire world — and it was at Chicago that Bolan saw that the festering pool of politics lent the most natural, environment for the growth and perpetuation of the monster. It was in Chicago that he gained personal insights into the power structure of a society in which the businessman is a politician, the politician is a criminal and, the criminal is a businessman.
This 'unholy trinity' came into sharp focus at Las Vegas, where untold millions of 'Skim' dollars moved steadily from the green-felt gold mines to the graft lined halls of government and finance everywhere. It was an unending stream — and Bolan himself flowed along one such underground river to the sunny Caribbean playgrounds, into a personal experience with the syndicate's international intentions.
It was during the Caribe strike that Bolan formed a sketchy understanding of that brooding conglomerate
which he termed 'the Fourth Power' — an international apolitical force which was bent on world domination — and it was this understanding which launched him into an invasion of the mob's western U.S. trade routes.
In San Francisco Bolan found the confrontation with Fourth Power plans which solidified in his mind the full implications of the unholy alliance — a combine whose only allegiance was to the buck; whose only politics was power; Whose only morality was built of corruption, greed and rapacity.
The Executioner's call on Boston was for purely personal business, but even this emergency mission developed into another head-on collision with the syndicate's master plan, for unlimited power — and this was the collision which sent Bolan ricocheting into Washington for a sweep of the national clout routes.
Bolan found the smell of Mafia hanging heavy in the Washington atmosphere. A series of ominous events had been taking place in and around the national capital, but they were not political events in the usual sense.
Obscure but important officials in key governmental positions had been victims of mortal 'accidents' — more than a half-dozen in the past few months. Others had quietly disappeared from the scene 'missing' without a trace. A few had simply resigned abruptly - taken `normal' departures.
Occurring over a period of several months, the events seemed unrelated and without unitary significance except in the minds of a few worried observers of the Washington scene — and even these few hesitated to use the word 'conspiracy' to explain the rapidly changing picture of official Washington.
There was no hesitation on Bolan's part, however; No other man outside the mob's top ruling circle has
been so close to the reality of La Cosa Nostra and the newly developed concept of Cosa di tutti Cosi. The Executioner has inside information pointing definitely to a mob conspiracy in the hub of the nation's government -- and The Thing of all Things has never seemed more probable as an existent force in American life.
Bolan had hoped from the, beginning to keep his war a simple one. His avowed intention had been to `hit and keep hitting until I shake their house down around them? The complications had set in early, however, the audacious warrior had been aware of a steady broadening of the battle fronts.
In Washington he is destined to discover that the focus of his entire life has become pinpointed at this nerve centre of America.
`It's my country,' he wrote in his Journal on the eve of his sweep into Washington. It's not perfect, but it's the best I've ever seen ... and I've seen a few. I left .a lot of buddies behind in 'Nam, guys who will never see home again. So, yeah, this one is going to be sheer hell. But I owe it. I owe it to the guys who won't be coming home. I can't let the mob swagger away with this nation's government in their hip pockets.
`A lot of blood has been spilled in the defense of this country. Even if the country itself is not sacred, that spilt blood sure as hell is. So what choice do I have, except to spill some more. So this one is for the beloved dead. Let's call it the Washington IOU. And let the mob pay the tab ... with their blood.'
The Executioner's battle plans were set, and the strike on Washington was underway.
CHAPTER ONE
THE GAME
The woman jumped out of her vehicle before it was fully parked and ran smack into the waiting arms of Horse Lucchese and Tommy the Sandman Roberts, two of the meanest hit men in Washington. Without even a hello or by-your-leave the enforcers grabbed the flustered beauty and roughly hustled her into the shadows at the side of the apartment building.
Bolan left his car at the curb out front and flitted along in quiet pursuit, making full use of the natural cover of darkness and closing just enough to maintain visual contact.
Obviously something had gone sour and the Executioner wanted to know precisely what that something was.
He'd been on Claudia Vitale's tail for nearly a week, dogging her around Washington on an eighteen-hour day surveillance - and she had been a very busy little bagwoman for the Capitol mob.
Bolan did not ordinarily devote so much time and attention to a payoff courier — he either hit them or forgot them, But this one was something else. Dropping bags around venal Washington was just a moonlighting sideline for Mrs. Vitale. At the stroke of eight every morning she turned back into the sedate and capable Chief Administrative Aide to the venerable old patriarch of Capitol Hill, Congressman Harmon Keel.
&
nbsp; And, yeah, this made Claudia Vitale a very item special item in Mack Bolan's book of warfare.
She didn't actually tote payroll bags around Clout, Ville, of course. What she carried were tidy little envelopes which could be inconspicuously passed at bureaucratic gatherings and social-set happenings.
Bolan's chief interest had lain in the recipients of those envelopes.
Not that the courier herself was unworthy of a man's interest. She was the kind who was never inconspicuous, whatever the crowd. Belled hips, alluringly sloped in the upper approaches and firmly rounded at the bases. Long legs, exquisitely, tapered from full thighs, all of it together. A hipped little waist exploding upwards towards softly voluptuous womanhood and delicately molded shoulders. Swan neck, smooth as velvet and gracefully supporting a head of classic Roman beauty.
On those evening rounds, she looked more like a Washington VIP-league call girl; Bolan had to wonder if she'd once doubled in that capacity, also.
She'd been an easy mark to watch.. Bolan could spot her walk from a block away. He knew all the little gestures as she conversed or dined or sipped at a cocktail. She was, highly animated, a very much alive and interesting woman. He had been close, enough often enough to know the flash and sparkle of those dark eyes, and he could tell by the tilt of her head if she was bored, interested, sad or mad.