Pendleton, Don - Executioner 17 - Jersey Guns Page 6

  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 ploughed 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 head shed 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 ended abruptly and disastrously with the rear section wrapped around a steel light standard.

  A secondary explosion 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 centre 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 amidships.

  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.

  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 non-physical 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 system 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 Mary Jane 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 meat.

  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.