Jersey Guns Read online

  Jersey Guns

  The Executioner, Book Seventeen

  Don Pendleton

  Dedicated with pride and congratulations to the edge-of-hell guys of Vietnam—both those who returned and those who never will—of whom it is now being said, “Your war is over.” For now, sure, let’s hope so. Bolan’s is not. Nor, in the deeper truth, will yours ever be.

  Suo sibi gladio hunc jugulo.

  I will cut this man’s throat with his own sword.

  —Terence, The Brothers, V, viii, 35

  In this war there are no rules, there is no referee. I am the ally, and I am the enemy. And only I will decide the weapons and the arena.

  —Mack Bolan, THE EXECUTIONER

  PROLOGUE

  Mack Bolan’s most persistent nightmare usually found him waist-deep in a flowing river of blood, sticky undercurrents swirling between his legs and trying to pull him down into the flow which also bore faceless mangled bodies with great gaping wounds. The river groaned as it flowed, alive with the muted symphony of violent dying by the legion who had tasted Bolan’s simple applications of criminal justice.

  It was a narrow river.

  On the one bank were amassed the forces of law and order, grim and silent men who stood in disciplined ranks and fired volleys at his head to the cadenced commands of none other than the President of the United States.

  On the opposite bank was a yowling mob of enraged mafiosi. These were scampering about their side of the river in a disorganized and sometimes hysterical fashion, dashing this way and that in a cacophony of gunfire and obscene shoutings, throwing at him everything within their reach, including stones and bones, in addition to the whistling spray of bullets. Now and then a triumphantly screaming band of these would rush down from the high ground overlooking the river, bearing above their heads something almost human, which they gleefully lofted at him from the bank; Bolan inevitably caught the grisly object in outflung arms … and it was always the same sort of thing—a “turkey”—a thing which had once been a sentient human form but was now reduced to a blob of mindless flesh—mutilated and shredded by a fiendish method of torture that ensured the victim a slow and agonizing death.

  Bolan always awakened at this point. Not even in the subconscious realm could he confront “turkey meat” without a mind-wrenching reaction.

  And, of course, in the deeper sense, Bolan’s recurring dream was not a nightmare at all. A nightmare usually portrays some dreaded but unlikely situation—a frightening experience from which the dreamer may awaken to a much more comfortable reality.

  There was no comfortable reality to which Bolan may awaken.

  The “nightmare” was merely a replay in symbology of the man’s normal, workaday world.

  Mack Bolan was the “Executioner.”

  He’d been accorded the chilling tag while serving as a soldier in his country’s service … during another nightmare called Vietnam. As a member of the most modern army in the world, Bolan had been finely trained in the oldest of the arts of warfare—killing—and he had become most proficient in his assigned specialty.

  He was perhaps the only American soldier in the Southeast Asian theater to carry an enemy price tag on his head. As leader of an elite penetration team, Bolan had ranged throughout enemy-held territories on “kill missions” directed against specific targets. The “Executioner” tag accorded him was meant as a tribute to his effectiveness—a tribute by a grateful government and by his peers in the field.

  When the Executioner returned to home soil to wage the same brand of unrelenting warfare against a different enemy, however, he knew that he could expect no plaudits from either his government or his society. A declared War Against the Mafia, on Bolan’s terms, could bring nothing but official denunciation and forceful reaction.

  The law can’t stop the mob … can’t even touch them. Someone has to. I guess what is needed here is a war against the cannibals. The same kind of war we fought in ’Nam. Sure, it’s going to be a lonely battle. But so were all the others. And this one I know I can’t win. So who said you have to win ’em all? Sometimes the most important thing is to simply fight them all. This is one I have to fight.

  So saying, Bolan began his one-man response to the menace of syndicated crime, the illegal combine which had been characterized by official spokesmen as “the nation’s invisible second government.”

  Bolan knew … the Mafia did exist—it was the most insistent and insidious threat ever faced by men of noble intentions anywhere, and he felt most strongly the obligation to oppose this spreading cancer which was threatening to destroy the institutions of American life.

  The story that follows is the seventeenth installment of Bolan’s war chronicle. Still alive and fighting his way along the “last bloody mile” of his hell on earth, the Executioner has just left behind him a monumental slaughter in Sicily, the home and training ground of the Mafia.

  Wounded and soul-weary, Bolan is on his way back to the U.S. San Diego and Philadelphia are still repairing the damage of Bolan’s most recent hits. Never before had the Mafia been hit with such quick devastation.

  A short rest in Algiers hadn’t really been enough to prepare Bolan for any immediate action. He knew that they’d be looking for him at every gateway city in the U.S. He also knew that they’d expect him to hit where the action was—wherever the law seemed to be overwhelmed by the underworld.

  Boston and Washington were fairly quiet; the local Mafia chapters were still licking their wounds and attempting to put themselves back together.

  Things were pretty lively in the Seattle area, though, surprisingly so. And Detroit showed signs of needing some attention. Maybe later …

  But it was Bolan’s thought to follow-up on his Philly job … and trace some of the missing links to the Manhattan strongholds. And between Philly and New York stood the Garden State of New Jersey.

  A scattering of bedroom communities in Jersey served the Philly-New York axis, and within twenty miles of Times Square, there were at least sixty homes of top Mafiosi—quiet, well-manicured ranch-styles and split-levels. The big action and the bloody deals were kept out of these tree-lined communities. Everything should be nice and peaceful in the neighborhood, right? Gotta maintain the respectable image. No crab-grass, no hippies … and no fuzz, either.

  So, though much of suburban Jersey was quiet and practically devoid of crime statistics, the land was virtually crawling with Mafiosi. Mack Bolan thought it might be interesting to visit the boys at home, to see what the big Jersey guns are up to, and how their garden grows …

  1 DEATH STALK

  It was easier getting back into Jersey than it was getting out. That mad flight out of Teterboro was only a month ago, though it seemed like a year. Some itinerary—Jersey to Sicily, Sicily to Algiers, Algiers to Jersey. Who’d believe it?

  Someone did, evidently, someone who knew it wasn’t going to be Seattle or Detroit. And now Death was tailgating him across that moonwashed Jersey countryside—Death with a capital D but spelled Taliferi—and it was crowding the rearview mirror of his Mustang with blinding headlights and awaiting only the most efficient place to happen.

  Bolan had identified the big crew wagon the moment it swung in behind him; he knew who they were and how they would try it. The Taliferi knew the death game quite well. It was their profession, their calling, their primary function in life.

  The Talifero brothers, Pat and Mike, were the lord high enforcers of the national combine. They took orders from only la Commissione, and their hit crews constituted a standing army of elite storm troopers such as had not been seen this side of Hitler’s Germany. No “button men,” these—no bumbling hit men or muscle specialists—these guys were Gestapo and, yeah, they knew their business.

  Mack B
olan, thankfully, also knew his.

  His business was to stay alive, to carry the war back to the Bloody Brotherhood, and to walk up their backs every chance he could find.

  Forever the realist, however, Bolan knew that his business, at this moment, was at the verge of bankruptcy.

  He was carrying an agonizing souvenir of his Sicilian encounter his in his ribs and in a painful and stubbornly seeping flesh wound of the lower leg. He was bruised and scratched and hurting like hell from head to toe … and he was weary enough to simply let go and die.

  State troopers were swarming the New Jersey Turnpike and busily sealing every exit along that hundred-mile corridor between Philly and New York. Through some inexplicable extension of the combat sense—or of survival instincts—Bolan had sniffed out that maneuver and made his escape from the toll road at almost the last possible moment.

  And now here he was, cruising a lonely back road across central New Jersey with a Talifero head party at his rear bumper.

  The sanest thing for a guy in this situation would be to simply let go and let it happen. It would be so easy, so quick, so final.

  He’d been a dead man since this damn war began, anyway.

  Yeah.

  Make it official, Bolan. Stop and die for the men.

  He had been cruising at an inconspicuous sixty miles an hour since leaving the turnpike, and when the Talifero meat wagon slid up behind him, he’d watched them nuzzle up and look him over, then drop back again for a pacing into a likely shooting gallery.

  The road was narrow and curvy, picking its way through the jumble of factories, farms, and small towns to the east of Trenton. At this hour of the night, only death was stirring along its winding route.

  Just the same, the death crew would be looking for optimum conditions; these boys hardly ever left anything to chance; they were not gamblers, they were sure-thingers.

  Bolan sighed as he casually checked the clip in the AutoMag. Three rounds of .44-caliber massive death were all that remained for the big silver pistol. The Beretta was totally defanged, empty, useless.

  Sure. Time to stop and die, Bolan.

  He angled a faint smile into the rearview mirror and quietly declared, “The hell you say.”

  His foot came down hard on the accelerator, and the rented Mustang leaped forward in instant response, leaving a puff of exhaust gases to mark the spot where the “death stalk” became a two-sided game.

  The big Cadillac surged forward also, under expert command and grimly hanging into the tail slot. The Mustang, though, had been designed for games of this nature. The early advantage was clearly hers. The sleek sportsters swept over the abrupt ridges and power-screamed through the sharp curves as though all the laws of motion had been written into her design specifications—and slowly but surely a gap began forming between the speeding vehicles.

  Bolan was playing only for numbers, though, not miles—counting the seconds of lead he managed to hold into each turn, calculating the increase with each successive maneuver and pitching his combat mind forward into that moment of confrontation which lay inevitably somewhere on the road ahead.

  He knew that one crew wagon on his tail also inexorably meant that others were streaking into the chase—from several directions, no doubt. The fact that they had picked up on him so quickly was no matter of chance or accident. These boys were radio-equipped and -dispatched. They were as good as the cops in an exercise like this one; and in this particular case they had an advantage over the cops—they knew the car Bolan was driving.

  Damn right, these guys knew their business. They had to. It was their only excuse for living. And Bolan had been making monkeys of them for much too long. They meant to get him this time, obviously, and that meat patrol that was now about ten seconds off his rear bumper represented but one statement in that determination.

  So, sure … it had to be a game of numbers. He could not simply outrun them. He had to stop them cold, and he had to do it before the others had time to join the chase.

  And so it was when the Mustang screamed into a darkened crossroads with the Taliferi less than fifteen seconds behind. Bolan caught a brief glimpse of a road sign just as he powered into the intersection; one way led to the town of Roosevelt, the other to Perrineville. Neither meant a thing to Bolan. He was seeking terrain, not towns—a place with combat stretch—and his instincts swung him eastward, toward Perrineville.

  And he found his combat stretch several minutes and twenty numbers later, at a point where the road topped a gentle rise to descend abruptly into a double switch back and over a narrow brook.

  He nearly missed the bridge, himself, the Mustang toeing in at the last possible instant to flash across, a hair width removed from the concrete abutment. Then it took him another ten or twelve precious numbers to halt that forward plunge and to bring the Mustang around in a whining return. He killed the lights and swung her broadside across the narrow bridge, then hobbled up the hillside—sternly commanding his injured leg to behave itself.

  The glow of swiftly advancing headlights was peeking over the hill as he took up his position. Then the chase car was into the switchback, burning rubber in the sudden slow-down, rocking with the momentum of the double curve at high speed, and struggling for a path onto the bridge.

  He could see them clearly as they groaned past his position, could feel the alarm and consternation as eight sets of shoulders hunched forward into the do-or-die curve.

  The windows were down. Bolan could hear the cry of warning that erupted from the rear seat as the headlights swept onto that abandoned vehicle at bridge-center.

  His own leg kicked in reflex as another panicky leg straightened on the brake pedal and that big limousine with eight headhunters aboard went into its death slide.

  The Caddy was out of control even as it reached the bridge, hunching down onto locked wheels and crabbing into the narrow passageway.

  The rear end struck the approach abutment a glancing blow, slamming the heavy vehicle into a full fishtail and a broadside plunge along the bridge—twenty-one feet of Detroit steel grindingly attempting to fit itself within a fifteen-foot cement straitjacket.

  The crew wagon was a disaster of disintegrating metal even before it reached the Mustang. It blew on, taking the smaller car with it to the other side. Bolan’s vehicle fell away there and spun off onto the embankment, flipped, and came to rest on its top in the brook. The other car took an end-over-end tumble off the roadway and rolled on for another thirty feet or so before shuddering to a final halt on its side.

  Bolan began his approach in a complete and deathly silence. A moment later came the weak cries and ghastly mouthings that assured him that he was not getting off all that easy—a mop-up operation was clearly in order.

  One of the hardmen had been ejected from the vehicle during that wild plunge across the bridge. The remains were obviously beyond mop-up and even beyond identification; it looked as though he’d been caught in that meat grinder between rending metal and abrasive cement.

  Bolan stepped around the soggy pile of hamburger and went on across the bridge, moving slowly to favor the protesting leg and warily approaching the pile of junk which had seconds earlier been a proud testament to man’s engineering excellence.

  He encountered another grisly bag of pulverized flesh on the roadway at the point where the crew wagon had taken off on its cross-country roll. From that point he had only to follow the trail of broken bodies, counting three more between the road and the shattered vehicle.

  That would leave three still to be accounted for; and from the sounds of the night, they would soon be beyond mop-up also.

  The vehicle was lying in the shadows of high bushes, but with enough illumination from the bright moonlight for Bolan to see the two men who were folded into that steel trap.

  And, yeah, they were in bad shape.

  Both were conscious, though, and carrying on a groaning conversation.

  “Can’t feel my legs. Think my back’s broke.”

>   “How ’bout Carlo? Where’s Carlo?”

  “Fuck Carlo. Where’s that fuckin’ guy? Where’s he?”

  “Dunno. Who cares now? We’re gonna die here, Bill.”

  “Maybe you are.”

  “We both are.”

  Bolan joined the conversation then, his voice low-pitched and coated with ice.

  “Yeah, you both are,” he announced solemnly.

  A hand moved into the wreckage to pluck a revolver from numbed fingers. Another hand came in and clamped itself over a bloodied mouth and nose.

  “How many in there?” asked the ice man.

  The one who had been addressed as Bill replied, “That you, Bolan?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I knew we’d meet someday.”

  “Congratulations, you were right.”

  Bill groaned and gargled deep in his throat as he asked, “What’re you doing?”

  “Mopping up.”

  “Leave us be.”

  “Can’t.”

  The guy moaned and tried unsuccessfully to move his head for a better look at the big cold bastard outside. “What’re you doing to Campy?”

  “Helping him die.”

  “Bastard!”

  “Don’t feel left out,” the cold voice suggested, and the hand moved to the other face.

  “Wait! Goddamn it, wait a minute!”

  “Too long already.”

  The guy was mumbling angrily into Bolan’s fingers. “Look, don’t! Lemme die my own way!”

  Bolan slid the hand aside. “Okay,” he said quietly. “If you want to die talking.”

  “About what?”

  “How many crews are after me?”

  The guy snickered, choked, coughed painfully, then told the big man outside, “Enough. You’re dead already, bud.”

  “So give me something to worry about.”

  “You’ll never get out of this fuckin’ state alive.”

  “How many crews, Matthew?”

  The guy coughed again, and sticky warmth flowed onto Bolan’s fingers. He turned the head to keep the guy from choking on his own blood, and again asked, “How many?”