Pendleton, Don - Executioner 17 - Jersey Guns Read online

  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 hell grounds 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 particularly 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 theatres’ 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 odd fellows 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 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, 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, 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 whe
re 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.

  "Wow, you come to quick decisions," she commented when they'd levelled out.

  "What hit you?" "A trailer park," he replied tightly.

  "That's it!" she cried.

  "That's what?"

  "It's where I got my . . . The blond man said they would be at the camp!"

  It was odd, Bolan was thinking, how things had a way of coming together.

  It was such a small damn world, and he had to wonder if—via some dimension which the sense perceptions of man had not yet pierced—it was not far smaller than anyone could imagine

  It seemed remarkable to his mind that Bruno Tassily had known Mack Bolan in Vietnam—however briefly. That, moreover, Bruno had worked for nearly a year at the elbow of Dr. Jim Brantzen; that Brantzen himself had been the first sacrificial victim to the Executioner home-front crusades; and that . . . Hell, there was so much of "coincidence" in the lives of men, sometimes a guy simply had to wonder how much of it was truly coincidence.

  Bruno had gone to Vietnam to save lives, Bolan to take them.

  Bruno's war had never started; Bolan's had never ended.

  Bruno had come home from Vietnam to die, Bolan to "live" more vigorously than ever before— Bruno as a man philosophically bankrupt, Bolan just now coming into an understanding of himself and his world.

  And then, from Bolan's near-death arose Bruno's new awareness of some of the values of life.

  The guy had pulled him out of a half-filled creek, sodden, bleeding to death, with a wound one shade lighter than gangrenous. Bruno the conscientious objector had, in effect, resurrected the Executioner, whose only justification for living lay in killing.

  Yeah. Paradoxical. And small, a very small and intricately mazed dimension of being, this place called life.

  Smaller yet. The resurrected Bolan had been beating it along the withdrawal trail, seeking a neutral zone, almost home free when he decided to pull in to a deserted trailer park to let the trail ahead cool awhile. And it was from there that the Executioner's withdrawal game had changed, because of a telephone call which he hadn't really wanted to make, and because of a fear which had been born in his dreams.

  Very small world, yes.

  Because the Executioner was at this very moment hotting it back to that very same trailer park, one which had been deserted such a short while earlier, but one that would accommodate a hell of a lot of big camping vans . . . when they were not out rolling the highways searching for heads.

  An electric little sensation popped from that compartment of mind where men store their most elemental and vestigial thought processes, and it sent an involuntary shiver along Bolan's spine.

  He was wondering where this paradoxical circle of cause and effect would find its natural end. The thing that had wrecked Bruno in Vietnam had been his exposure to countless maimed young bodies.

  How would Bruno "take" the deliberate maiming of his own body?

  Bolan experienced another tremor, and the girl beside him caught it.

  "You're very worried about Bruno, aren't you?" she asked in a tiny voice.

  No sense denying it. He said, "Sure."

  "Me too. Bruno is so . . . sensitive. He has a very low threshold of pain. I have seen him go to bed sick over a stubbed toe."

  Bolan's stomach lurched, and his foot found the floor beneath the accelerator.

  Perhaps Bruno had dreams, also.

  Maybe it was the dreams that had defeated him at 'Nam.

  Maybe he'd had premonitions of his own fate.

  12 MOMENT OF TRUTH

  He parked the car in a cluster of trees about a hundred yards downrange and told his charge, "I'm going to have to leave you alone for a short time, Sara. You follow my instructions to the letter. Get out of this vehicle and go into the middle of that field out there. Lie down. Don't show your head, and don't make a sound, whatever you may see or hear. Don't let anyone approach you, not anyone."

  He gave her two small grenades.

  "Even if you knew how to use a pistol, which I'm sure you don't, you're better off with these. No big deal here. You just depress the little gadget here and throw it like a baseball. For you, throw it to the ground, right in front of your target. But not to close to your own position. If I'm not back in five minutes, take off. But not in this vehicle. On foot. Stick to the fields, away from the roads. Get to a telephone and call the cops, then stay put. If I do get back—"

  "If?" she gasped.

  "If I do get back, I’ll let you know it's me. I'll call you in a way that only I could. Got that?"

  Sara nodded and forced a weak "Yes" through a very dry throat. She took her grenades, carrying them very delicately, and left.

  Bolan watched her fade into the darkness; then he began his own move.

  He circled in from the rear, pausing every twenty yards or so to sample the atmosphere for sounds, odours, presences; and when he reached the perimeter of the property, he settled there for a full minute, frozen, reading the place, getting its feel, its vibrations; then he moved on in.

  The arrival was somewhat anticlimactic. He had somehow expected to find a congregation there. Instead, he found a lone command van and a single crew wagon parked beside it.

  There were no sentries.

  The curtains were pulled across the van's windows; dull light seeped through.

  It was worse than anticlimactic.

  The sports car—and therefore Mike Talifero was not at this "camp."

  And what of Bruno?

  There was but one way to know for sure.

  Bolan sprang the Beretta Belle from her side- leather and affixed the silencer, then followed the shadows to that camper door. He tried it, found it locked, rattled the catch, and rapped lightly with the Beretta, calling out as he did so in a convincing New England accent, "Come on, what is this, you all tucked in for the night?"

  A drapery moved at the big window, and a blunt face appeared there, squinting out through the darkness.

  Bolan stayed with the shadows as he delivered a Talifero laugh and again called, "Going to keep me waiting out here all night, boys? In this no- man's-land?"

  The drapery fell back into place, and he heard a hasty rustling inside; then the door cracked open and a guy inside was apologizing, "Sorry, sir, we just—"

  Bolan never did learn what "we just" were doing. He exploded through that doorway at that instant, and the guy fell away from there with nine-millimetre whistler up his nose.

  Another guy who had been hastily mopping spilled beer from a table just inside hastily released the whole can and nearly turned himself inside-out trying to find a path to his hardware. Another whispering phu-ut from the Belle opened an inside; out pathway right between his eyebrows—and there was something a bit messier than beer to mar that gleaming table now.

  No one was left in sight or sound.

  But then he heard a guy cough from someplace down the aisle, and a te
sty voice called out, "What the hell're you guys doing out there? Stop the grab assing around!"

  Bolan stepped down to there and snapped open a folding door.

  It was the john, and a guy was seated there, pants at half-mast, reading a funny book.

  "Hey, what . . . Jesus!" The reaction to the intrusion began as an angry snarl and finished in fading resignation.