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  Boston Blitz

  The Executioner, Book Twelve

  Don Pendleton

  To all the loyal Bolan-watchers out there who have kept the faith and given meaning to his war, this closer look into the man is gratefully dedicated.

  dp

  “Let there be light!” said God,

  and there was light!

  “Let there be blood!” says man,

  and there’s a sea!

  —Lord Byron, Don Juan

  “Let them drown in their own stinking sea of blood!”

  —Mack Bolan,

  THE EXECUTIONER

  UNIFORM CRIME NETWORK—US/DOJ—ADVISORY SPECIAL ConUS Alert

  Subject

  Mack Bolan, also known as “the Executioner”… operates also under various cover names, usually of Italian or Sicilian origin. American Caucasian, age 30, height 75 inches, weight about 200. Color of hair varies, normally dark. Eyes blue ice, penetrating, obviously highly developed night vision. Sometimes affects costume of black combat garb, commando style, but also known to wear various innocuous outfits in subtle applications of “role camouflage.”

  Characteristics

  Considers the entire world a jungle and regards himself as final judge of who shall survive and who shall not. By conservative estimates, has slain more than 1,000 denizens of the American underworld; considers himself “at war” with all elements of the crime syndicate everywhere.

  Combat veteran of Vietnam, highly skilled specialist in “destruct missions” against enemy commands; received nickname “the Executioner” in Vietnam by virtue of high proficiency this regard. Considered highly adept at penetration/intelligence techniques; military tactician and strategist of highest order; a master at both the “quiet kill” and the “massive kill” disciplines of jungle guerrilla warfare. Expert marksman, various personal weapon categories; skilled armorer and munitions man. All of foregoing constitute subject’s M.O. Wages all-out warfare using all facets of the combat character. Identifies, infiltrates and destroys “the enemy”—sometimes with wiles, sometimes in full-dress frontal assaults. Has been known to use various personal combat weapons as well as field mortars, bazookas, demolition devices, etc.

  Primary personal weapon, however, appears to remain a 9mm Beretta Brigadier equipped with silencer, obviously worked in for precision kills at close range. Latest personal side-arm, described as “a big silver hawgleg” by official witness has been identified as a .44 caliber autoloader, “the .44 AutoMag.” This latter weapon exhibits impressive accuracy at extremely long ranges and should be considered equivalent in every respect to a big-game rifle. During latest campaign, subject was observed wearing both weapons at once.

  CAUTION … subject is regarded as extremely quick on the draw with explosive-reaction combat instincts.

  Special info

  Subject is in continual “state of war” and is considered highly dangerous. All LEO urged exercise extreme caution—DO NOT ATTEMPT MAN-TO-MAN ARREST.

  Subject appears to avoid police confrontation and is not known to have ever assaulted or fired upon LEO; however subject is considered desperately defensive and in constant jeopardy via various determined underworld elements. A rumored “open contract” in amount exceeding 100-thous attracts attention of miscellaneous freelance gunmen in ever-increasing numbers. Subject is therefore under continual duress AND IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS TO APPROACH. Various regional LEA have unofficially authorized “Extreme Precaution Apprehension”—shoot on sight, to kill.

  Background info

  Hometown friends, teachers, GI companions, etc. describe subject as mild-mannered, likable, well adjusted—often even as “soft hearted.” Welsh-Polish extraction, eldest of three children. Mother, father, teenaged sister victims of violent death while subject serving Vietnam combat zone. Brother Johnny, age 15, sole survivor, escaped with severe gunshot wounds. Subject granted emergency furlough from Vietnam to bury family and arrange care minor brother. “Home-front war” began during this period and subject declared AWOL, subsequently military deserter. Following victory over hometown underworld elements, subject pursued successive campaigns in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Phoenix, Miami, DC, France, England, NYC, Chicago, Las Vegas, Puerto Rico. Most recent war zone was San Francisco, where subject crushed powerful West Coast criminal conspiracy with international implications. Unofficial police sympathy noted various quarters LEA, recommend indoctrination programs emphasizing PUBLIC MENACE aspects of subject’s illegal crusade.

  Rumors absolutely unfounded repeat unfounded and untrue that various federal agencies are supporting subject’s private war.

  Forward look

  Preliminary indicators show subject headed for new confrontation in or near original battleground where brother Johnny has been in protective concealment in private school. Rumors persist that Johnny Bolan has been kidnapped and spirited away by unnamed underworld elements, probably as an attempt to lure subject into inadvantageous confrontation with “enemy.”

  Informant also suggests that one Valentina Querente was kidnapped with Bolan youth. Miss Querente is reportedly fiancee of subject and has also been in protective concealment.

  If rumors prove true, urge all LEO in eastern U.S. gird for Executioner War without past parallel in ferocity. Similar personal situation is believed original cause of the Bolan wars. It is felt that subject will now be in furious runaway mode with all restraints abandoned.

  All LEO cautions should be considered doubly emphasized.

  EOM. Brognola/Justice sends.

  1: The Message

  At about two o’clock on a broodingly overcast Monday afternoon in Boston’s North End, a tall man with peculiarly icy eyes descended upon the modest billiard parlor owned by small-time Mafioso Julio LaRocca.

  Marty Cara, presiding over the beer bar at the front of the pool hall, was taking advantage of a business lull and preparing for the usual late-afternoon rush.

  Two older citizens of the neighborhood nursed beers and talked quietly at the end of the bar.

  At the rear, two pool tables were in noisy use by a party of North End youths who should have been in school.

  Proprietor LaRocca, a squatly built man of about 35, was quietly pursuing a solitary game of billiards at the opposite side of the house.

  Bartender Cara looked up expectantly at the entrance of the new arrival, then reacted visibly with a nervous movement toward the rear of the establishment.

  The visitor wore a conservatively tailored business suit and a light topcoat, rubber-soled shoes with ripple threads, no hat. The topcoat was open in front and flapping to the sides as the man walked. He halted Cara with a scowl and an almost imperceptible movement of the head.

  The bartender jerked to a frozen stop and, in a voice with absolutely no air pushing it, inquired, “Yessir?”

  The tall man issued a single, cold, command. “LaRocca.”

  “He, uh, what’s that, sir?”

  The man said it again. “LaRocca.”

  Cara threw a panicky glance toward the billiard section. “Back there,” he whispered.

  The tall man with the icy eyes said, “Let’s go.”

  Bartender Cara reluctantly led the way, walking stiffly several paces ahead of the caller. He ignored a crack from one of the kids at the pool tables and made a careful turn into the billiard area, halting across the table from the boss.

  “Guy here to see you, Mr. LaRocca,” he breathlessly announced.

  LaRocca deadpanned a shot off the cushions; then, without looking up from his game, replied, “So?”

  “I guess you better talk to ’im.”

  “I don’t better talk to nobody, Marty,” the “beast of Richmond Street” reminded his employee.

  “He’s, uh, right here, bos
s.”

  “So I’ll be with him in a minute, right here,” LaRocca said.

  He was lining up the next shot when a small metallic object fell to the green felt directly behind the cue ball.

  LaRocca’s shoulders hunched slightly. He glared at the intruding object, then something kindled deep within suddenly flaring eyes and he froze there, poised into the shot and staring at the military marksman’s medal which had joined the game—and which could have but one significance.

  A frigid voice above him suggested, “Finish the shot, Julio. A bucket of blood says you don’t make it.”

  The chatter at the pool tables directly opposite abruptly ceased. A youthful voice over there gasped, “Isn’t that … is that …?”

  Someone else whispered, “Shut up!”

  LaRocca was still frozen by the marksman’s medal. Time moved sluggishly on, and the silence became a living presence. Presently, in a heavily thickened voice, the Mafioso growled, “Whatta you want here with me?”

  “Figure it out,” the ice man suggested.

  LaRocca straightened suddenly and threw the cue stick at the visitor’s head, scrambling away in the same motion in a desperate run for life.

  The tall man seemed prepared for the move. He swayed back in easy avoidance of the cue stick and immediately a black autoloading pistol appeared in his hand, seemingly from nowhere. It was equipped with a silencer, and it quietly coughed out two sighing little reports of death on the wing.

  The first bullet plowed into LaRocca’s head, just behind the ear, and the second splattered into the temple. The beast of Richmond Street hit the floor in a skid which he never felt and came to rest in a growing pool of blood which he would never miss.

  Someone in the background exclaimed, “Jesus!”

  Marty Cara was transfixed at the side of the billiard table, eyes glazed with horror and staring at the ugly black weapon in the killer’s fist. His chin dropped and he stammered, “I’m not—honest, I’m not …”

  The tall man commanded, “Tell them! I’m here. Tell them somebody knows why! Tell them!”

  Cara’s eyes remained on the weapon. He licked his lips and replied, “Yessir, I will, I’ll tell them.”

  The icy eyes raked the witnesses at the other side of the room. Two of the boys tried smiles that failed. One carefully put down a cue stick and pointedly showed that both hands were unencumbered.

  The man addressed that side of the house. “Spread the word.” Then he sheathed his weapon in a rig beneath his coat and walked away from there.

  Cara slumped against the table and weakly passed a hand across his face.

  Several of the boys ran to the front of the building to cautiously peer through the window.

  Two others haltingly approached the remains of Julio LaRocca.

  “Did you see that fuckin’ Beretta?” one asked in awed tones.

  “Yeah, but Julio didn’t,” the other replied. “He never saw nothing!”

  One of the oldsters from the bar had moved up beside Marty Cara to stare unemotionally at the interrupted last game of billiards. He reached over and picked up the marksman’s medal and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger.

  “That was Mack Bolan, wasn’t it?” the old man asked in a quiet Italian accent.

  Cara took a shuddering breath. “Yeah. The Executioner. Never saw him before, Gino, but I knew it was him the minute he stepped in here. Something—I don’t know, the way he walked, the way he looked at me. I just knew.”

  “Wonder what he wants here.”

  The bartender again shuddered. “Can’t you see? Hell, can’t you see what he wants?”

  A few minutes after the hit on the Richmond Street pool hall, an excited runner burst into the back room of a small bakery in the same neighborhood—Boston’s “Little Italy” section.

  This was a “numbers shop” operated by Antonio “Gags” Gaglione, lottery king of the North End. Five men were present, including two neighborhood runners, a bookkeeper, Gaglione himself, and his ever-present gunbearer, Willie “Tumbler” Pacchese.

  The bookkeeper had just completed a routine math problem on a pocket calculator while the other men stood a quiet vigil above him.

  As the sixth man burst into the room, the bookkeeper was announcing, “Better lay off a couple hundred on the two-eight combination, Gags. We could get burned bad on that one.”

  Gaglione threw a disapproving glance at the new arrival as he replied, “Yeah, okay, I’ll try to spread some around Chelsea and Revere.” Then he turned full attention to the disheveled man who had just lurched into the room. “Whattaya mean running in here that way?” he growled. “What ten-year-old kid is chasing you now?”

  The runner had no breath to waste and he was not spending it on elaborate explanations. “Somebody just hit Julio LaRocca!” he gasped. “Marty says it was Mack Bolan!”

  Gaglione turned abruptly away and hauled a cigar from his breast pocket. “What’d you say?” he muttered.

  “I said—”

  “Yeah yeah, shut up. What gives Marty the idea he knows Bolan from Boston beans? Julio’s really dead, though?”

  “God you oughta see him, I guess he’s dead enough!”

  A strained quietness descended and ruled the numbers shop. Tumbler Pacchese produced a snub-nosed revolver from a shoulder holster and silently inspected it.

  “Put that thing away,” Gaglione commanded softly. His gaze fell on the bookkeeper. “I thought Bolan was out West somewheres,” he said, as though speaking only for his own benefit.

  “He was tearing up Frisco just yesterday,” Pacchese put in sourly. “That’s a long jump—Frisco to Boston.”

  “Maybe he heard about airplanes,” a runner snickered.

  Pacchese gave the man a hard stare. “You find something funny?” he snarled.

  The runner spread his hands and turned away, muttering, “So let’s all have a good cry.”

  A seventh presence entered that back room at that precise instant and the runner found himself turning directly into a voice of coldest steel.

  “Gaglione.”

  The single word was spat out quietly but it carried throughout the room and with absolute authority.

  The numbers’ king was frozen in a flat-footed stance, bull head swiveled to the sound of doom. Pacchese’s gun hand was grafted to the button of his coat, fingers spread and reluctantly pointing the way to possible salvation.

  The bookkeeper was staring at the big guy who was poised just inside the doorway, his fingers gripping the pocket calculator as though he were about to run a computation of life expectancies.

  Nothing was moving in that room but tumbling thoughts, racing blood, and thudding hearts.

  Gaglione said, “Come on in and let’s talk. When did you get to town? Been laid yet?”

  Even the bookkeeper knew it was a dumb try.

  The tall man with the death face tossed a marksman’s medal into the room. It hit the floor and slid across to rest against Gaglione’s foot.

  The numbers king sighed and bent down as though to pick up the medal, but as he went down he hissed to his bodyguard, “Take him!”

  That which immediately followed was somewhat blurred in the memories of the surviving witnesses. One account has a gun in Bolan’s hand even before he tossed the death medal into the room; another insists that the Executioner allowed Tumblers Pacchese to make the first break, then beat him to the draw.

  The evidence at the scene shows only that Pacchese died of gunshot wounds of the head and heart. His gunhand was also drilled squarely through the middle, the bullet passing on through into the abdomen—this indicating that the bodyguard was not allowed to complete the draw.

  Antonio Gaglione suffered a single but massive gunshot wound through the top of the skull, this official coroner’s finding substantiating the eye-witness stories that the numbers boss died while bending over to pick up a marksman’s medal from the floor.

  Again the Executioner left the succinct message to the surviv
ors: “Tell them I’m here. Tell them somebody knows why.”

  Fifteen minutes after this attack, a plumbing and heating contractor known as “Pipes” Lavallino was gunned down in his upstairs offices near North Station, in the presence of a dozen witnesses. In an almost identical pattern, a marksman’s medal and a terse message was left behind.

  At four o’clock that same afternoon, an emergency session was convened at Boston’s City Hall. An open circuit teleconference was conducted with lawenforcement agencies in California, Florida, New York, and Washington—with the result that “advisory” delegations were immediately dispatched from those agencies for temporary duty assignments with the Boston police.

  The official report, rendered by the office of the mayor at six o’clock, concluded with this paragraph:

  “Consensus opinion is that Mack Bolan has shifted his operations to this area and that a full-scale Executioner war is in store for this city and suburban communities. The Greater Boston Unified Crime Prevention procedures have been activated and placed under the central coordination of Detective Inspector Kenneth J. Trantham. Program priorities to be shared by two major efforts: (1) apprehend Mack Bolan, dead or alive; (2) ascertain whereabouts of Johnny Bolan and Valentina Querente to publicly produce them alive and unharmed at the earliest possible moment.”

  Tell them I’m here! Tell them somebody knows why!

  By early evening, all of Greater Boston knew that the Executioner was there.

  Aside from the police, however, only a small handful of now desperately frightened men knew, for sure, why Mack Bolan had come to town.

  He had come to bust that town wide open. He had come to rattle and pound and terrorize until two very dear lives were shaken from the deadly grasp of the most malevolent criminal force in existence.

  He had come to rescue his kid brother and the woman he loved from a fate which even Bolan would not contemplate.

  And … if he were too late … if Johnny and Val were already beyond help … then only God and the devil knew for sure what Mack Bolan would do to the underworld of Boston.