Friday’s Feast

  Friday’s Feast

  The Executioner, Book Thirty-seven

  Don Pendleton

  For the survivors of 5th JASCO,

  wherever you are. God keep.

  The guests are met, the feast is set:

  May’st hear the merry din.

  —Coleridge (The Ancient Mariner)

  This is the sorrowful story

  Told as the twilight fails

  And the monkeys walk together

  Holding their neighbour’s tails.

  —Kipling (The Legends of Evil)

  Welcome to the feast, brothers.

  But I suggest you hold each other’s tails.

  —Mack Bolan

  PROLOGUE

  A GMC motorhome wheeled slowly through the predawn darkness of Glen Burnie, a Baltimore suburb on the Annapolis road. It pulled into a small motel, and halted opposite the darkened office. A smallish, dapper man emerged from the shadows of the building and stepped aboard the waiting vehicle. He was met at the door by a tall man wearing denims, and the two embraced like brothers long separated. And they were brothers, of a sort. The small man was Leo Turrin, a federal undercover agent who had labored diligently for years to bring down the Mafia from within. The other was Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner—a one-man army who had vowed to “shake their house down” (the Mafia) and very nearly had, as the result of more than thirty brilliant campaigns dedicated to that goal.

  The motorhome proceeded on through the parking lot and reentered the sparse traffic flow on Highway 2, a pretty, dark-haired woman at the wheel. She was April Rose, a federal technician under White House appointment to covertly support Bolan’s “second-mile effort” to finally and fully dismantle the Mafia’s American apparatus. She had watched the emotional reunion via the rear-view mirror, and now held up a hand to ackonwledge the restrained introduction: “April, this is Sticker.”

  “Sticker” was understandably shy about showing his face, even to a fellow operative who really had no need to know his true identity. He remained in the shadows amidships, tossing forward a subdued greeting to the lady.

  The two men went into the war room and sat at the small plot table. Bolan poured coffee and asked his friend, “How’s it swinging, pal?”

  “About the same,” Turrin replied casually. “Largest problem, lately, is to keep ahead of the cuts. You know. It keeps getting harder to come down on the right side.”

  “Fewer sides,” Bolan suggested, with a grin.

  “Exactly.” Turrin tasted his coffee, then said, “Guess I’m about to get kicked upstairs and out of the game entirely. Just between us idiots, I’m not a damned bit sorry about that. I’m sick of the life, Sarge.”

  Yes. Bolan could understand that. As April Rose had recently observed, it was not a life at all, but a sort of death. Angelina Turrin would no doubt heartily agree with that reading.

  “When do you make the move?” Bolan inquired.

  Turrin replied, “I guess it’s wired to coincide with your large leap forward. As if you didn’t know.” He grinned. “Hal told me the story. Some of it, anyway. And I want you to know that I said not ‘yes,’ but, ‘Hell, yes.’”

  “Hal” was Harold Brognola, the chief fed. Through him, the White House had made Mack Bolan an offer which no sane man could refuse. Even so, Bolan had found the decision very difficult. He’d accepted the president’s offer—as head of a new super-secret security group—but it was a conditional acceptance. First, and Bolan had made this quite clear, he’d wanted time to mount a final offensive in his personal war against the American crime kingdoms. Secondly, he’d reserved the right to hand-pick his own force to man the new agency. His first pick had been Leo Turrin.

  He told Turrin, now, “It could be from frying pan to fire, pal.”

  “I still say, ‘Hell, yes,’” Turrin replied, grinning. He sipped his coffee and showed dancing eyes above the rim of the cup. “Hal says they’re going to give you a hero’s burial. In Arlington, maybe.”

  “No way,” Bolan said. “I already have a headstone … in Pittsfield. That’s where the bones will lie … where they belong.” His voice went a bit cold. “That’s really where I died, Leo.”

  The little man frowned and said, “Yeah. I know.” It was difficult to talk about such things. “I, uh, guess I never told you how terrible I felt about, uh, all … about your family and all that. Your sister was a damned sweet kid and, uh, a lot like you in many ways. What do you hear from Johnny, these days?”

  Johnny was the kid brother, sole survivor of the family tragedy, which had brought Mack Bolan home from an Asian war and into war everlasting on the home front. But Johnny’s name was no longer Bolan—perhaps never would be again.

  The eyes brightened as Bolan told Turrin, “I hear he’s doing great. Growing like a weed in that Big Sky country.”

  “You’re keeping wires on him, eh?”

  “Very loosely,” Bolan explained. “I don’t want to jeopardize his cover. And, uh, it’s better this way. Give him a chance for a normal—”

  “Bull,” said Turrin.

  “That the way you see it?”

  “Uh-huh. The kid idolizes you, Sarge. He’ll never forget. And pretty soon he’ll be at the age where he can make his own decisions. You’d better be thinking about that.”

  “I have,” Bolan admitted. “Maybe … after we’ve interred the bones of Mack Bolan once and for all … well, it’ll be a new life. If Johnny wants … uh, let’s just say I’ll be looking through different eyes. And we’ll wait and see.

  Turrin was beaming. “This new life, guy. Is the leap still scheduled for Sunday?”

  “If Sunday ever comes, yeah.”

  “You starting to have doubts?”

  The big man chuckled drily. “The doubts started, pal, with Uncle Sergio’s first cut. And they’ve grown geometrically.”

  “Know what you mean,” Turrin muttered. He took a long pull at the coffee, and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Seems like two or three lifetimes since … God, it’s been a long road, hasn’t it? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering where it would all be right now if you’d never come home from ’Nam. You know what I mean? When I think of all the—God, the Mob had this country in its pocket. We were scrambling around trying to get them on traffic offenses or whatever. Meanwhile they were sprinkling salt and pepper on the whole country, and starting to carve it for the feast. Thought they were God, for God’s sake. Damned near were. Not even the President of the United States was safe from their damned vendettas. Now look at—hey, what I said … about, you know, sick of the life … I didn’t mean … I got no regrets about anything. I’d do it all again. With you, I mean.”

  Bolan was deeply touched by that. But he grinned and said, “You’d do it again without me, guy.”

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  Yes, Bolan knew what he meant. He said, “Thanks, Leo. Same here. Just wish I had a better feel for how far we’ve actually come. What’s the mood in New York?”

  “Desperate,” the little guy replied. “This past week has taken a hell of a toll.” He lit two cigarettes and handed one to Bolan. “You’re hitting them where it really hurts, now. Deep in the moneybags. Ever since the Tennessee thing. Every day brings a new, staggering loss. I don’t know how much more they can take of that. Hey, we both know, attrition at the top hasn’t bothered them all that much. You whack one of these guys and five more spring up to compete for his place in the pecking order. But when you start whacking the moneypots … well, say, the favorite joke around New York these days has to do with which family is going to the welfare today. And it’s not a very funny joke. I mean, like, it’s a whisper joke and you’re very careful who you’re whisper
ing at.”

  Bolan smiled thinly as he commented, “Like, you wouldn’t whisper it to Marco Minotti.”

  “Especially not to Marco,” Turrin agreed, chuckling.

  “What’s his status?” Bolan wondered. “As of Wednesday night?”

  “Very delicate,” said the undercover fed. “The New Mexico thing was going to make him boss of bosses, you know. He came home with his ass in his hands, instead, and he’s been swinging slowly in the breeze ever since. As of about three hours ago, though, Marco was beginning to revive a bit.”

  “Because of Florida?”

  “Because of Florida, yeah. When Marco ate the dust of White Sands, all the gossip suddenly had Tom Santelli at the top of the order. But then before anyone could catch their breath, you had Santelli on the ropes in Florida and another gold mine was … well, they were still trying to calculate the losses when I left there three hours ago.”

  “So the mood is grim.”

  “The mood is damned grim, yeah,” Turrin said. “That’s why I’m here. I’m carrying a message to Santelli.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “Do or die.”

  “Do what?”

  “Stop Mack Bolan in Baltimore.”

  Bolan took a long pull at the cigarette, and blew thoughtful patterns of smoke toward the ceiling of the warwagon. Presently he said, “So they’ve connected me to the Florida thing.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I was trying to cover my tracks.”

  “I know you were. So were they. That’s why they’re figuring Baltimore for today.”

  Bolan cocked an eyebrow at his friend as he asked, “They’re onto my timetable?”

  Turrin chuckled without humor as he replied, “Your six-day war, you mean. I don’t know about that, Sarge. I do know that … well, they have a big wall map in the inner sanctum. Little black flags are stuck in that map, starting with the thing in Tennessee last week, and one for every day since. The black flag is already up for today, and it’s flying from Baltimore. They’re calling it Black Friday, day of the vulture.”

  “Day of what?”

  “Of the vulture. There’s this legend from the old country about the feast of vultures—something about the last man on earth picking the bones of the dead for his victory feast, something like that. Anyway, day of the vulture.”

  “They’re that sure I want Santelli, eh?”

  “They’re sure, yeah. Look, I hate to admit this, but I still don’t know what was going down in Florida this time. I mean, it’s a super-secret. Nobody talks about it outside the chamber. But it was big, it was very big, and I do know that every boss on the council had a chunk of it. Another quiet joke making the rounds recently says that there’s a run on the Swiss banks, so many guys have been tapping their stashes to get in on Santelli’s gold mine. Now those men up there are scared as hell. They’re all heavily invested and it’s going to hell under them. Their caucus went on all night. They were still in session when I left there at two o’clock, and probably still are. The vibrations I get are that it is not all lost yet. The Santelli investment, I mean. The drift is that they are concentrating on cutting their losses in Florida and hoping to recoup on the other end.”

  “And the other end is …”

  “Baltimore, right.”

  “Is there a Tennessee connection, Leo?”

  “I get that feeling, yeah. Santelli controls the whole eastern seaboard south of Jersey. He had pieces of the Atlanta action, I know for sure. And he lost a couple of fingernails when you whacked into Kentucky the other day. So you’ve been nibbling at the guy’s empire, even before Florida. I think he’s very much involved in Tennessee.”

  Bolan quietly inquired, “Any word from our man there?”

  “I don’t hear those kind of words,” Turrin replied quickly. “The least I know about that, the better.”

  Bolan sighed and said, “Right. Okay. So what happens after you deliver the message to Santelli? Back to the headshed for you?”

  “Wrong,” said Turrin, smiling faintly. “Bite your tongue, guy. You’re forgetting my unique standing in the outfit. I’m the Bolan expert, remember. And it’s do or die in Baltimore.”

  Bolan was frowning as he responded to that. “That’s going to cramp my style, Leo.”

  “Depends on how you look at it,” the fed replied soberly. “We could work it out. To your advantage.”

  “I’d rather you just check out. Don’t wait for Sunday. Are Angie and the kids…?”

  “They’re safe, yeah. Three days ago. But I can’t check out early, Sarge. You know that. Hell, I have a job, too.”

  Bolan stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. He sighed and said, “Okay, we’ll work it out.”

  Turrin quietly reported, “They’re sending troops to Santelli. I don’t have all the particulars, yet. But they’ll be drifting in all day, from various places and by various means, and they’re coming heavy. To do or to die. My official assignment is consigliere to the war effort. Which means that I’ll be in Santelli’s shadow, no doubt, most of the time.”

  Bolan grinned at that. “Trusted advisor, eh?”

  “Yeah.” The fed chuckled. “This is one aspect of the life I’m going to miss.”

  “For at least an hour,” Bolan suggested wryly.

  “Seriously. I love to waltz these guys around the track. And the bigger they are, the sweeter it is.”

  “Just don’t lose the beat, pal,” Bolan commented, sobering.

  “The beat goes with the territory,” Turrin replied, sobering also. He checked his watch and slowly rose to his feet. “I’m running short.” He called forward to April, “Drop me on the next pass, honey.” Then, to Bolan, “Don’t wire me, Sarge. These guys are all jumping up each other’s asses and it’s pure paranoia out there. So let’s keep it loose. I’ll contact you, and we’ll work it out as soon as they’ve settled me somewhere. For starters, I think it’s maybe the hardsite on the bay.”

  “Arnie the Farmer’s old joint?”

  “That’s the one. You know the way?”

  Bolan knew the way, yes. He took a hard pull at his cigarette and said, “The day of the vulture, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Executioner let the smoke go and watched it drift overhead. “So be it, then,” he said quietly.

  And so it would be.

  CHAPTER 1

  BACK DOOR

  Leo Turrin was completing a hazardous personal contact with Mack Bolan, and was preparing to disembark from the latter’s rolling command post, when Bolan’s driver, the lovely April Rose, sent back a tense report.

  “I believe there’s trouble at the back door,” the girl called through the intercom.

  Bolan’s eyes moved farther than his lips as he snapped back, “Read it!”

  “I read it one hundred yards to the rear and maintaining through the last three turns. Large sedan with at least two radiating bodies aboard. Unable refine beyond that.”

  “Friend or Foe!” Bolan commanded.

  “Tried it already,” April reported. “Negative. No transponder response.”

  Turrin growled. “Dammit! They’re on me! I’d have sworn I was clean! Dammit, I—”

  “Local cops, maybe,” Bolan suggested tautly. “Let’s try some ears.” He quickly fired up the war room’s communications console and brought a pair of scanners on the line, at the same moment calling forward to the con, “Give us some stretch, April.”

  The big cruiser abruptly turned east into a subdivision and accelerated smoothly along a darkened residential street.

  “Read it!”

  “Target is slowing. Target is … okay, right behind us again and now accelerating. The range is one-four-zero yards and closing fast.”

  The radio scanners were revealing absolutely no activity on the police bands.

  A moment later, April reported, “Target resumed one hundred yards and maintaining. It’s a glue job.”

  Turrin muttered, “I told yo
u it was pure paranoia out there. They must have tagged me at the airport. Now isn’t this a hell of a mess.”

  “Not yet,” Bolan growled. He gave the girl some terse instructions, then told Turrin, “Stay with April, Leo. If the worse gets worse, you know what to do.”

  Before the double-lifer from New York could even bat an eye in response to that, the big guy was at the door and the cruiser was in another abrupt turn, slowing momentarily. Then Bolan was out of there and instantly lost in the darkness outside.

  Turrin’s heart was hammering at his ribs as he quickly went forward and took the con beside April Rose. Completely erased were all thoughts of identity games with this lady. She was slowly bringing the big rig to a halt and peering intently at a reddish—glowing electronic screen, which was mounted in the cockpit. “The famous suck play,” she said in a hushed voice, eyes still on the screen. “They’re slowing. They’re stopping. Target is at rest. Okay. It’s okay. He’ll check it out. If they’re clean …”

  His consciousness was dividing, part of it admiring the cool professionalism of this woman, another part marveling once again at the sophisticated systems that were packed into this battleship-on-land, but most of him just worried as hell and feeling miserable about the jeopardy he’d brought here. Not that it was anything new. Extreme jeopardy had been a routine way of life for both men for as long as either could remember. Eyeball encounters such as this one could do nothing but compound the dangers. There were times, of course, when the advantages of a personal meeting were felt to outweigh the risk, and this had been one of those times.

  Hell …

  The relationship with Bolan went back a long ways. And it had been a damned productive one, in many respects. Leo Turrin lived more than a double life. When Bolan had entered the picture, it had become a triple life—and there had been some outrageous times when “the life” seemed to expand into infinite partitions.

  Though a blood nephew to the late Sergio Frenchi, who was a founding father of La Cosa Nostra—and despite the fact he’d been a “made man” since early in his youth—Turrin had returned from military service in Vietnam determined to help break the invisible, but smothering grasp that organized crime was exerting on all of the nation’s institutions. The federal authorities were naturally delighted to have such a well-placed convert. They had given him the code name “Sticker,” a fitting tag since it was Turrin’s assignment to rise as high as possible within the ranks of Mafia power, providing the government with as much intelligence as he could without compromising his position within the hierarchy. Which had not been an easy job, at the best of times. Then when Bolan came along …