Blowout Read online

  Annotation

  Mack Bolan is on the avenging trail of a drug baron in Hamburg, when the sudden appearance of a big-time American syndicate hit man puts the Executioner on a lethal sidetrack.

  Evidence of a growing Mafia protection-extortion racket leads Bolan to a trail riddled with bullet holes and missing links - with the enemy always one jump ahead.

  Framed for murder, and targeted by both sides of the law, Bolan escapes into the icy German underground to stalk the mastermind behind the crime cartel.

  In his never-ending war against organized crime, the hunter has become the hunted. But the battle is just beginning.

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's

  Mack Bolan

  Blowout

  The cult of numbers is the supreme fallacy of modern warfare.

  B. H. Liddell Hart, 1944

  I am involved in an everlasting war, and I believe that one man can make a difference.

  Mack Bolan

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Peter Leslie for his contribution to this work.

  Prologue

  Mack Bolan stood looking down at the pool of congealing blood around his feet. Each time the neon arrow above the Black Tie nightclub entrance flashed, the dark pool of liquid leaking from beneath the body turned sickly green.

  Even in midwinter, Hamburg, in northern Germany, was a city of green — green spires, shallow green roofs and evergreen trees pricking through the snow banked on either side of the lake that split the town from north to south. The doors of the white patrol car skating across the icy pavement toward the sidewalk were green and so, a darker shade, were the uniforms of the men piling out as soon as the car screeched to a halt.

  There was a lot of blood: seven bullet holes in the victim's camel topcoat stared blackly up at the streetlight above the nightclub arrow. The blood itself turned black when the revolving amber light on the patrol car roof flashed out of sync with the arrow.

  Twenty seconds ago that lifeless figure had been an indistinct shape hurrying past him toward the steps leading down to the nightclub entrance. A cab was still parked fifty yards away on the far side of the street with its engine idling. The exhaust roar of the killers' getaway car — a Golf GTi — still audible, dwindling away on the far side of the white roofs lining the maze of narrow streets that led to the docks.

  Bolan shivered. Not at the impact of sudden death so close at hand — half a lifetime's fight against organized crime had inured him to that — but it was minus two Fahrenheit and the wind from the east was biting. The kapok-filled black parka he wore over his sweater and slacks could shield him from that frozen breath as long as he kept walking, but it was no proof against the numbing cold that rose from the ground the moment his limbs stopped moving.

  Already a crowd was gathering at the scene of the shooting. The cabdriver came running, his feet sliding on the packed ice of the sidewalk; women in fur coats climbed the stone stairs from the nightclub; windows in the dark facades across the street blazed with light. There was a babble of voices.

  "What happened?" someone asked in German.

  "I heard the shots, I thought…"

  "Three men in a Volkswagen."

  "Only just paid me off after a trip from the Atlantic Hotel," the cabdriver announced to anyone who would listen.

  "All right, all right," the cops called — there were four of them, their breath steaming in the arctic air. "Stand back there. Move along. Is there a doctor…?"

  A thin elderly man in a snap-brim hat and a long black leather topcoat stepped forward and lowered himself on one knee beside the body. Two of the cops held back the curious onlookers, while a third walked over to retrieve a fur hat that had rolled away and come to rest against the frozen slush piled in the gutter. The sergeant in charge of the patrol helped the doctor turn over the slaughtered man.

  Above the riddled camel coat Bolan saw short dark hair, cropped at the neck. Below the coat, checkered pants were tucked into brown leather boots with high heels. Leather gloves sheathed the hands that had clawed ineffectually at the sidewalk's frozen flagstones.

  High-heeled boots?

  Light fell on a livid face as the body was turned over. Staring eyes ringed with mascara, a gaping mouth outlined in scarlet, the camel coat falling open to reveal a heavy fisherman's-knit sweater contoured around two swelling curves, the lower part of the torso dark with blood.

  The victim was a young woman of about thirty with the wide features and high cheekbones of a Slav.

  Chapter One

  The customized Cadillac was so long that the chauffeur had difficulty turning out of the lane that led from the red-light district onto the main drag.

  A cast-iron post once used for hitching horses was at the corner of the alleyway, and to avoid scratching the ivory-white side panels, the driver was obliged to run his near-side front wheel up onto the opposite sidewalk. A slight thaw had come that afternoon, and puddles sat between the ramparts of slush. As the heavy, fat tire thumped back onto the pavement, muddy water splashed up and spotted the black nylons of a hooker patrolling in a fur jacket and tight leather skirt. The woman swung around, her painted face ready to scream abuse… and then, before the angry words could leave her mouth, she shrank back into a doorway, recognizing the car.

  The tinted side windows were closed, but there was no mistaking the whitewall tires or the thin maroon trim circling the Caddy's waist. A monogrammed logo broke the trim in the center of each front door, and there were chromed fishtails below the vehicle's enormous trunk.

  The wide main street was almost deserted. Soon it would be dark, and the winter sky was somber with the promise of more snow. The afternoon tourist trade was on the way back into the warmth, and the nighttime hard-liners were still stretching and yawning.

  Reeperbahn — the "street of the ropemakers" — was notorious the world over, synonymous with sin and vice of every kind. It lay west of Hamburg's city center, an artery channeling traffic to the snob suburbs of Altona and Blankenese, leading the forty-ton, twelve- and fourteen-wheel semis away from the docks and the huge fish market.

  It was an inoffensive-looking street, lined with trees, still showing the remnants of streetcar lines where the blacktop had worn thin. Certainly there were nightclubs, nudie shows, even an occasional sex bazaar strung out along its three-quarter-mile length between the botanical gardens and the Nobistor. But, as with the Boulevard de Clichy in Paris, it was in the warren of narrow, cobbled lanes on either side that the traffic in sex flowed fastest.

  The district, known as St. Pauli, was described in the city's official tourist guides as "a quarter of relaxation and frivolities." It depended on how you relaxed and how frivolous you wanted to be.

  In St. Pauli were the Grosse Freiheit, the Kleine Freiheit and the Herbertstrasse, discreetly shielded by hoardings forbidding a
dmission to those under eighteen, where Hamburg's famous "shop window girls" could be ogled displaying themselves in anything from a flimsy nightgown to a black leather ensemble complete with boots, whip and spurs. Here were sex shops selling blue movies, hard-core porn and erotic toys. Here, too, could be found singles pickup bars, live sex on stage, gay Turkish baths and clip joints with telephones on each table where everything was promised and nothing given.

  But none of these delights seemed to appeal to the occupants of the customized white Cadillac. The car glided past a twenty-four-hour bikers' clothing store, a gas station bright with neon, the Chinese Laundromat and a McDonald's steamy with the odor of frying onions. Then, turning left at the Hans-Albersplatz, it ran into a minor traffic jam.

  Cars, delivery trucks and cabs were momentarily stalled as some stranger in town backed a beat-up Opel out from the fruit and vegetable stalls of an open-air market. There was a further halt while the flustered driver tried to nose his way into a one-way street against the traffic flow. The Cadillac's chauffeur permitted himself two short, impatient blasts on the twin-tone horn. Gradually the blocked vehicles dispersed and the big American machine hissed along the icy cobbles toward the river.

  Two blocks inland from the fish market, the car stopped and the driver reached behind him to open the rear door. The man who got out was tall and solidly built, with a craggy face and a wrestler's shoulders. He wore pale brown boots lined with fleece and a hounds-tooth topcoat over his tweed suit. A Tyrolean hat with a bunch of feathers tucked into the band was pulled down over his low forehead.

  He walked unhurriedly into a cul-de-sac, drawing on a pair of brown kid gloves. Despite the latent power in his big frame, despite the strength of his shoulders constantly shrugging within the topcoat, there was something strangely effeminate in his gait. The two ends of the unfastened topcoat belt flipped behind him this way and that as he walked. At the far end of the entry, four steps led between iron railings to a doorway in a peeling stucco facade. Above the doorway, white lettering on a frosted glass transom spelled out the words Club Paradise The big guy climbed the steps and went inside.

  In the street the Cadillac waited, its engine silently turning over. Blue smoke from the fishtails condensed behind it in the freezing air. The light thickened. Here and there along the darkening sidewalks, shop windows lit up. Behind them a ship's siren bleated mournfully on the river.

  Fifteen minutes later the Caddy's passenger returned. He walked back to the car slowly, stripping off his gloves. When the chauffeur opened the rear door, he leaned down and handed a wad of hundred-mark bills into the interior.

  "I steamed in and put the question real nice," he said hoarsely in German. "But the punk came at me with a shiv. Can you imagine? Ripped the sleeve of my coat and all." He held out his left arm, displaying a slit in the thick stuff reaching from the wrist almost to the elbow. "Course I had to teach him a lesson. Then the mother tells me there ain't but a C in the cash register. That earned him a kick. And even then I could only choke just under a couple of thou from the son of a bitch."

  "Forget it, Hansie," a voice said from the back of the Cadillac. "We'll call by and pick up the rest at the end of the week. If he doesn't have it then, we'll send in the Team. Get back in the car now. There's work to do."

  Hansie climbed in. The driver slammed the door, switched on his lights and pulled away from the curb.

  Five blocks to the east, the customized car parked at the end of a cab stand near the St. Pauli-Landungsbrücken ferry terminal, and Hansie sauntered down a paved walkway between two tall redbrick buildings. Several of the houses fronting the passageway were shuttered and empty, but there was an ill-lit grocery store halfway along flanked by a secondhand clothes dealer and a cigar store whose grimy window displayed a selection of lurid pulp romances behind a wire grille. In the road at the far end of the passage, a young man was thumping one of the headlights on a stationary car with his fist. It was the same old Opel, a dark blue sedan, that had caused the Hans-Albersplatz tie-up. Now, it seemed, there was a bad connection in the electrical wiring.

  Hansie turned into a doorway beside the cigar store. A girl in high-heeled shoes and a shiny black raincoat undulated out of the shadows. "Like to come home with me, darling?" she murmured. "Give you a good time."

  He turned furiously toward her. "Do me a fucking favor!"

  She stepped back as the light fell across his face. "Hansie! Christ, I didn't see you. I didn't know…"

  "Who the hell do you think I am?" He slapped her hard across the face. "Take me for a mug again and you'll end up with a few scars. Now beat it, bitch. Take fucking ten. I got business in here."

  "But, Hansie, this is my spot! Shit, the other girls-"

  "Fuck the other girls. Now shove off before I really smack you."

  She stepped past him into the alleyway and hurried off with her head lowered. In the light the brutish face was still scowling. "And tell your pimp to come across on time this week if he knows what's good for him," he shouted after her.

  Hansie trod lightly down a wooden cellar stairway and shoved open a padded door covered in red felt. There was a worn patch above the handle where innumerable hands had rubbed the material through to the wood beneath. A stocks blue-chinned man with a bald head was polishing glasses behind a bar at the far end of the low-ceilinged room. Two dozen tables covered in red-checkered oilcloth stood around a tiny stage beneath a battery of photofloods.

  "Hansie!" the bald-headed man exclaimed. "You're an hour early, my friend." He glanced toward the stage. "The three gays ain't due to start their act until seven. And the law's been leanin'…"

  "Fuck your gays. As if they needed it," Hansie said conversationally. He walked across the room toward the bar, pulling on the brown leather gloves.

  The bald-headed man licked his lips. "If you've come about the money…" he began nervously.

  "You know damn well why I came, Rudi. Two grand, wasn't it? Well, the boss says you can add another century now, by way of interest."

  "Hansie, I ain't got it. Honest to God, I swear it! You gotta give me time. For pity's sake…"

  The big man looked around the room. He gestured at the tables beneath the pink-shaded wall lamps, the threadbare velour of two «discreet» booths behind the stage, the dials and knobs of a complex music center under the rows of bottles behind the bar. "You mean you got no clients? The girls don't pay up? The fags ain't coming across with their percentage? The mugs all took a vacation in East Berlin, maybe?"

  Hansie smiled. Yellow horse teeth gleamed dully in the mirror behind the bar. "Come on, Rudi," he said. "Friends of mine been in this dump checking up this week. You had sixty-seven people in here last night and more than a hundred between midday and midnight on Sunday. Sprinzel's delivered you a case of Jack Daniel's and three of schnapps this morning, along with four dozen Canada Dry and a load of Cokes. And you're telling me business is bad?"

  "I didn't say that. I… Ferdy Kraul's boys was in!":he bartender burst out. "They smacked the wife around and threatened to break the place up. There was six or seven of them. They took all I had. I couldn't do anything else, Hansie. I couldn't."

  "There you are, you see," Hansie said softly. "That's what happens when you fall behind with the insurance payments. That's what you pay protection for — to help us stop loudmouth punks like that from turning a guy's place over. You better come up with the premium now in case it happens again."

  "Hansie, I don't have it. I told you. I need time. You gotta give me time."

  The big man leaned his hands on the bar and nodded genially. "That's a nice tape deck you got there," he said. "Let's have some music, huh?"

  Rudi switched on the center and spun a knob beneath the illuminated dials. His fingers were trembling. At once the room was filled with the heavily accented beat of an accordion band playing a schmaltzy tango that must have dated from the 1930s.

  "Louder," Hansie said. "I always like to hear a good tune."

  The volume
of the music increased as the barman turned the knob again. "Hansie…" he said.

  The big man moved very quickly for a person his size. His two hands shot out to seize the lapels of the barman's jacket. Leaning back and flexing his arms, he dragged the guy facedown across the counter. And then, as Rudi cried out in fear and alarm, Hansie hauled him over and smashed his knee into the prostrate victim's face.

  Rudi dropped to the floor, groaning. Hansie grabbed his collar and dragged him to his feet. The enforcer was as swift and as light on his toes as a boxer or a ballet dancer. One leather fist darted out and split the flesh over Rudi's cheekbone. A hook to the pit of the stomach doubled him over, and as soon as he straightened on rubber knees, a vicious kidney punch slammed into the small of his back. The edge of the enforcer's hand, hard as a plank, finally caught him across the throat.

  The sounds of the struggle were drowned by the blare of accordions. Rudi's mouth opened and closed each time the blows thudded home, but the only voice audible was a nasal tenor issuing from the stereo speakers above the stage.

  Hansie pirouetted around his victim as he began to fall, seizing him under one arm and behind the neck in a half nelson. Locked together, the semiconscious bartender and his attacker swayed between the tables in a grotesque parody of a ballet duet.

  A knee suddenly struck the base of Rudi's spine, and the lower half of his body arched forward so that the corner of a table dug into his groin. As he was dragged back toward the bar, his legs jackknifed to ease the agony in his genitals. Hansie sped up the froglike convulsions with a well-placed kick to the ankle.

  The song was lost in a shrill scream of terror that could be heard even over the amplified clamor of the accordions. Rudi was struggling desperately to free himself from the forearm that was now wedged rigidly under his jaw. Hansie had shifted his grip; the gloved fingers of his free hand held an open cutthroat razor in front of the barman's eyes.