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  Nightmare in New York

  The Executioner, Book Seven

  Don Pendleton

  For Colonel Edward St. George, who must be Bolan’s oldest living friend. Here’s to you, St. George, and to a most vigorous and active 94th year of life. Kilauea!

  If you think you can reason with evil, then go ahead and I wish you great success. But talking is not my bag. My specialty is warfare and my goal is destruction. I am going to bust this kingdom of evil if I can live that long. I AM GOING TO DESTROY THE MAFIA.

  —Mack Bolan, The Executioner

  PROLOGUE

  Some have said that Mack Bolan was a genius in the tactics and strategies of guerilla warfare. He has been called a death machine, a blitz artist, a one-man army. Newspaper headlines have referred to him as the monster man, the grinder, the awesome avenger, the Mafia nightmare. Whatever the tag, all agreed that Bolan was an executioner without equal; that in this single man stood the greatest challenge ever hurled upon the spreading menace of the Mafia kingdoms of America.

  As is inevitable in cases which catch the public fancy, a great mass of legend arose around the man—some of it true, much of it not so true. Bolan was not, for example, being sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department or the CIA. He did not have a license to kill. Local police agencies were not following him about to pounce on his victims when he was done with them. He did not accumulate a fortune by plundering his enemies’ money caches nor did he, à la Robin Hood, redistribute the Mafia’s wealth. He did not perform ceremonial executions, he did not possess a dozen faces, he had not sworn to kill every criminal in the country, and he did not have the protection of a special Secret Service detail.

  The truth about Bolan’s campaign against the Mafia is not quite so sensationally romantic as the legend; typically, however, the truth is much more chillingly awesome than the fiction. The facts are that Bolan was a man alone pitted against the most staggering array of enemies ever faced by a single man, and that he waged this impossible war without sponsorship or direct support from any quarter. It is true that a highly placed official in the Justice Department did approve of Bolan’s war and was discreetly maneuvering behind the scenes to ease federal pressures toward his apprehension. It is true that Bolan knew the identity of an undercover cop who had achieved high rank in a Mafia family, and that these two did occasionally enjoy friendly relations and an intelligence trade-off. It is true that some policemen did “look the other way” when Bolan was about, recognizing in him not an enemy but a true ally who would accept death rather than engage the law in a shootout.

  It is equally factual, however, that a concerted drive was underway at every level of law enforcement to apprehend Mack Bolan dead or alive. It is factual that a death contract had been let on Bolan by the Mafia, and that bands of ambitious bounty-hunters from every section of the country were determined to collect the $100,000 payoff on that contract. And it is, of course, common knowledge that Bolan was hated and feared by every Mafioso everywhere, so that the full power of the sprawling crime syndicate was committed to the destruction of this lone warrior who challenged their might with such impunity.

  Genius, death machine, blitz artist, one man army—yes, it is true that, in his effect, Bolan was all of these. At the heart of this man, though, lay a sensitive and uncomplicated human being who had simply recognized and accepted the challenge placed upon his manhood. He did not see himself as an heroic figure; he knew well that heroes are usually quite ordinary men who find themselves thrust suddenly into heroic situations. He did not view his actions as a holy crusade which was self-justified; quite often his self-doubts were immense and his revulsion to killing almost overpowering. He did not gladly sacrifice the earlier plan of his life to this gory walk through the valley of death; like most men he had desired for himself the simple things that give life meaning—what Bolan termed “the three F’s of the good life: friends, family, freedom.” Reluctantly he had surrendered this quiet ambition to the three B’s—“bullets, bombs, and blood.”

  And yet Bolan’s incredible war had not begun with such conscious volition. He had been engaged in a quite different battle, though a conflict considered by some to be just as immoral as Bolan’s personal one. It was in Vietnam that he developed the guerilla specialties which earned the young sergeant local fame as The Executioner. As leader and sharp-shooter of a special penetration team, Bolan had “executed” numerous enemy officials and high ranking enemy officers, often spending extended periods deep within enemy country. Then one of those everyday and little-heard-of brutalities of American life resulted in Sergeant Bolan being called home to bury his father, his mother, and his younger sister. Sam Bolan, an ailing steelworker, had found himself caught in the vicious squeeze of a Mafia loansharking operation. Though he had repaid the principal several times over on a grossly usurious loan, the elder Bolan had been terrorized, beaten and hounded to the limits of human endurance by brutal collectors. Learning, then, that his teen-age daughter had been pressured into prostitution to help retire the loan, Sam Bolan had crossed that line of human endurance, had gone berserk, and had killed his daughter, his wife, and himself. These were the circumstances of Sergeant Bolan’s homecoming. Only young Johnny Bolan, the kid brother, survived to provide the details behind the triple-tragedy.

  When the grieving soldier discovered that there was no recourse to justice under the law, he took justice unto himself and The Executioner shifted his battle zone to the home front. He penetrated the inner family, found the men responsible for Sam Bolan’s misery, and he executed them. As an act of personal justice and vengeance fulfilled, this should have ended things. It did not. A police official in his home town of Pittsfield offered to write off this initial campaign as a gang war if Bolan would just go back to the army and never return. Bolan could not do so. He had become too familiar with the enemy, he knew their evil, and he could not turn his back on this creeping menace that promised to smother all that was good and decent—all that Bolan had felt he had been fighting for in Vietnam. The greater enemy was here, at home, not in a backward little country eight thousand miles away.

  Bolan remained to engage that greater enemy, and the Bolan wars were begun. In a thunder and lightning brand of warfare which was to become his trademark, he smashed the Mafia arm which had dominated his home town, and the war without end and without geographical boundaries was loudly proclaimed by Mafiosi everywhere.

  Following the hit and fade strategy of the guerilla jungle fighter, Bolan transformed the wide world into a jungle of his own making, surfacing here and there for a lightning assault that left the enemy shaken and benumbed, then fading again with all the hounds of hell baying along his trail through the closing jungle.

  The story which follows is the seventh chronicle of the Bolan wars. The first two reports covered his destruction of the Sergio Frenchi Family of Pittsfield and the first encounter with the DiGeorge Family of Southern California. The third report saw Bolan with a new face, thanks to plastic surgery, and a devastating infiltration of the DiGeorge Family which left that kingdom a shambles. Number four reported Bolan’s uninvited participation in the Mafia’s national convention at Miami Beach in a daring raid that violently rocked the Mafia ship of state and showed the collective families of La Cosa Nostra that Mack Bolan was a force to be reckoned with.

  The fifth and sixth segments found Bolan unwillingly overseas and hotly pursued by pyramiding crews of Mafia headhunters through France and England. During the peripheral actions of these two adventures, he has begun to come into a deeper understanding of the true significance of his war with syndicated evil. In this seventh campaign, the realization is strongly upon Bolan that he has been waging a futile brand of warfare. The mob is indeed ever-p
resent, all-knowing, and very nearly all-powerful. A war of attrition can have no meaning here. By sheer weight of numbers he is doomed to lose this war, and the final balance sheet will reflect no measurable impact upon the enemy.

  In Bolan’s own understanding, then, Phase Two of his Mafia War has ended, Phase Three is beginning. The War of Attrition is giving way to the War of Destruction. He will hit them now in their omniscience; in their onmipotence; their omnipresence, he reasons, will then fold under its own weight.

  Bolan is in the saddle, his mount is destiny, his target is the Kingdom of Evil—wherever its ugly head may arise.

  1: FACES

  Four faces of death awaited him as he stepped into the main terminal area at Kennedy International. Bolan went on without a pause but his mental mug-file clicked to a halt at a quick make on Sam “The Bomber” Chianti, a contract specialist in the Manhattan-based Gambella Family. The other three faces had no identity beyond the screamingly obvious imprint of Mafia street soldiers.

  Bolan casually transferred the topcoat to his right arm, allowing it to cover the hand. His eyes, behind the dark glasses, swept on beyond the four hardmen as he moved smoothly past them and into the flow of traffic toward the helicopter station of Manhattan Airways. They had made him, of course—tagging along behind now, unbunching and fanning out like wranglers on a roundup.

  Sam the Bomber was on Bolan’s right flank. The other faces, glimpsed briefly yet seared now into his mental file, were keeping a discreet distance and covering any possible angle of escape, efficiently crisscrossing in the crowd, maintaining the rear seal.

  A man ahead of Bolan was complaining loudly to a companion about the high cost of fun at Frankfurt. Bolan himself was thinking tiredly about the high cost of coming home and confronting the enemy unarmed. He had felt it wise to abandon his hardware at London Airport rather than risk detection by the hijack-conscious air marshals. The gamble had been for a quiet re-entry into the U.S. Bolan should have known better. Now he did. Too late.

  With death stalking him, the survival instincts of the professional combat man took over and began directing Bolan. Sam the Bomber was moving in, quickly closing the gap between them. Bolan spoke without turning his head or breaking pace. “You ready to die, Sam?” he asked coldly.

  “Huh?” the other man grunted, caught offguard by the direct remark and briefly uncoordinated, his hand jerking toward the opening in his coat.

  Bolan held the fast pace and snapped a glance at the dumbfounded hood. “It’s a setup,” he growled, his face unconcerned but his guts churning. “Feds are all over me. You too, now.”

  “Bullshit,” Chianti replied, vocally rejecting the warning. His eyes, however, were not all that positive, sliding about in an involuntary inspection of the crowd.

  “So you’ll be buried in bullshit. It’s your last contract, Sam.” Bolan was rounding the corner to the helicopter station. The flustered Chianti moved a step too close going into the turn. Bolan’s arm moved in a sudden blur, the topcoat whipped across the Mafioso’s face, and Bolan’s elbow slammed into his gut.

  Chianti’s breath left him with a whooshing gurgle. A short-barreled .38 revolver which had momentarily occupied his gun hand disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived and dropped into Bolan’s waiting pocket as though the transfer had been a carefully rehearsed one. Bolan’s hammering forearm chopped into the hardman’s throat. He staggered back into the fast moving stream of traffic, going to the floor and taking several pedestrians down with him.

  Bolan went on, leaving the confusion behind and merging with the main swirl through the gates. He snapped a backward glance as he crowded into the waiting helicopter and quickly located two anxious faces in the pileup at the boarding gate. The doors closed behind him and Bolan found a seat. Moments later the big ferry craft was lifting into the air. Through the window Bolan saw Sam the Bomber, his face a study in rage and frustration as he stepped into a phone booth.

  Bolan sighed and fingered Chianti’s .38 through the fabric of his jacket. So now it would be a race with time. The chopper would be putting down in midtown Manhattan in a matter of minutes. And another head party would be scrambling to get there ahead of him.

  Bolan tried to relax, knowing that he could not. He scowled darkly at his reflection in the window. A guy did not go to his own execution all sweetly composed and ready for a gentle sigh into that last breath of life. Not this guy. His last breath would be a snarl, not a sigh.

  The Midtown Station was perched atop a skyscraper not far from Grand Central Station. The ungainly craft settled onto the rooftop landing pad and Bolan was the first passenger to the door. He showed the crew man his pistol and told him, “Go ahead and open up, but don’t let anyone out for one full minute. There might be some gun play when I hit that roof. Understand?”

  The crew man’s face paled. He nodded his head in understanding.

  Bolan asked him, “Is the escape hatch forward, same as on the military version?”

  Again the crew man nodded.

  “Okay. Remember, one full minute.” Bolan found the emergency exit in the copter floor, opened it, and quickly dropped to the roof of the building. The rotors were still chugging overhead as he swung out beneath the belly and ran for the steps to the elevator area.

  In the periphery of his vision, Bolan saw a large man with both arms extended step from behind a bricked area directly opposite the landing pad, and at the same moment a heavy-calibre handgun began to fire. Whistling slugs tore across Bolan’s path and plowed into a ventilator housing just beyond. The guy was targeting on him from a firing-range stance, one hand grasping and steadying the gun wrist as he continued to coolly squeeze off round after round.

  Bolan snap-fired two running shots from the .38—both missing, but close enough to send the gunman scurrying for cover. A confusion of shouted commands and the sounds of running feet accompanied Bolan to the stairway which led to the raised deck, where a little guy with a big gun appeared at the top just as Bolan was starting up. The man at the top tried to dodge but Bolan’s instinctive trigger finger had already dispatched an untidy hole directly between the retreating eyes. The gun went over the railing as the small man flopped onto the stairway. Bolan stepped aside to be clear of the falling body, then raced on to the top as a thick voice from below called up to him, “You ain’t got a chance, Bolan! We got you sealed on this roof!”

  Bolan did not doubt the truth of that for a moment. But he had three seal dissolvers left in the revolver and he meant to spend them wisely. He sprinted across the raised area, then launched himself into a rolling dive as an assortment of handguns began unloading on him from the elevator shelter. He took a searing hit in the meaty part of his left shoulder then another burned across the flesh of his hip. Firing from the prone, Bolan squeezed off three deliberate shots into the crouching figures at the elevator, toppling them like dummies in a shooting gallery. Then he sneered away the pain alarms from the shrieking shoulder and lurched to his feet for an eyes-on confrontation with the final remaining obstacle to freedom. The guy was bent forward at the waist, a big auto-loader thrust out in front of him, and he was wildly jerking the trigger against an empty or jammed magazine, slowly backing into the elevator car.

  Bolan transferred the now useless .38 to the equally useless and dangling left hand and sent a mental command to the damaged limb to hang on for just another moment, and he went in after the quickly dissolving seal. The guy saw death coming for him and his eyes began to roll. The automatic clattered to the floor and the hood’s hands went to the back of his head. He croaked, “Jeez, Bolan, I—”

  Bolan’s good right hand shot out to grab the guy’s tie, and he catapulted him out of there in an arcing swing from the throat just as another group charged to the top of the stairway from the helicopter area. The guy was dancing around just outside the elevator, trying to keep his footing against the wild eviction fling. Guns thundered from the stairway and the Mafioso’s dancing took on a freakish quality as he stopped t
he hot missiles meant for Bolan. The elevator doors, closing, also intercepted a grouping of sizzling metal. Then the car was in motion and Bolan was alone with his empty revolver and a steadily building pain in his shoulder. The pistol slipped away from numbed fingers and his lifeblood followed closely, dropping into bright scarlet spots on the floor. He wadded a handkerchief and jammed it roughly inside his shirt, holding it tightly and grinding his teeth against the new onslaught of harsh sensation.

  The firefight on the roof had seemed to last an eternity. Actually, hardly more than a minute had elapsed since he dropped from the belly of that chopper. Men died in a fingersnap; time seemed to stand still at moments like that. It was not standing still now. Bolan’s shoulder wound was bleeding furiously, and he could literally feel the life energies seeping away from him. He had not escaped, he knew—only delayed the end a while longer.

  The elevator was an automatic express between the roof and the thirty-eighth floor. He left it at that level and took another car to the sixteenth floor, then doubled back to the twentieth. There he carefully cleaned up some wet splotches of spilled blood and went looking for the stairway, taking care not to leave a telltale trail of crimson.

  The arm was beginning to stiffen, his coatsleeve was soaked, and the bleeding was showing no signs of letting up. The grazed hip was stinging like hell but had bled very little and was obviously not going to give him much trouble. Not that he needed any more. Those guys on the roof would not be giving up all that easy. At that moment, Bolan knew, they were swarming the building in a determined effort to keep him sealed in there. And, of course, in a minute or two there would be cops to contend with. There would always be cops, as dependable as heat in hell.

  The shoulder was not hurting much now. That was a bad sign. Also his legs were getting rubbery and his eyes were becoming unreliable. The truth bore in on his dizzied consciousness—he would not find that stairway, and it would not do him much good if he should. He was losing consciousness. He stumbled, and threw his good hand out to steady himself against the wall. Instead he fell against the frosted glass of a door and his hand came to rest on the doorknob. Artful letters on the door told him that Paula’s Fashions lay just inside.