New Orleans Knockout Read online

  New Orleans Knockout

  The Executioner, Book Twenty

  Don Pendleton

  For Jack Petro—

  whose name is not really that,

  and whose town is not really New Orleans—

  a hell of a guy who knows all about wallbanging

  and large living.

  dp

  Right is founded not in opinion but in nature.

  —Cicero

  For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,

  And will not swerve aside:

  It slays the weak, it slays the strong,

  It has a deadly stride.

  —Oscar Wilde, Ballard of Reading Gaol

  The Mob can’t be allowed a free ride. They have to pay the tab, like everyone else. If I’m the only collector, then so be it. But I collect in blood. Mafia blood. And the line forms everywhere.

  —Mack Bolan, THE EXECUTIONER

  PROLOGUE

  “Why defend a front line 8,000 miles away when the real enemy is chewing up everything you love at home?” This was Mack Bolan’s understanding of the problem—the organized crime problem in America.

  He had been a career soldier with twelve years of service and several Asian combat tours behind him. He was a skilled armorer and an expert marksman with every personal weapon in his country’s arsenal. He was also a “kill” specialist—a highly trained and remarkably proficient penetrator of enemy zones. Coupled with all this was the basic man himself—the nerveless, self-commanding, highly intelligent war machine who had earned his code name “the Executioner” by making ninety-eight confirmed kills among the enemy hierarchy in Southeast Asia. In the words of a former commanding officer, Mack Bolan was “a very deadly dude and a terrible weapon in our psychological counterwar.”

  Then Sergeant Bolan had been called home to bury his own dead—mother, father, kid sister—victims of another sort of human savagery. And the awesome focus of this “terrible weapon” shifted to the “home front.” A new war was born—in the most savage jungle of all.

  The Executioner was taking on the Mafia!

  1: REMEMBRANCE

  It was a perfect spot for an ambush. The road was narrow, winding through dense woods, remote—seldom traveled at this hour of night. The terrain was flat, swampy; this was bayou country. Climbing vines clung to the trees and trailed from their branches, interlocking in the air to form an unending network that seemed to encompass the entire forest—bringing it all together in a living unity.

  Yeah. Jungle country, American style. Impenetrable except by water and the thin thread of macadam highway.

  It was Mack Bolan’s kind of place.

  He was rigged for heavy combat. A black suit as snug as his own skin covered him from neck to ankles. Hands and face were blackened. Supple swamp-moccasins reached to just below the knees. Military web circled his waist to support the head weapon, a .44 AutoMag, as well as other deadly items of ordnance. Other belts crossed the chest like bandoliers but were narrower and bore another selection of munitions. A black Beretta Brigadier rode shoulder harness beneath the left arm, and an Israeli weapon—an Uzi submachine gun—dangled from a neck strap.

  On the ground beside him were four harmless-looking fiberglass tubes. They were officially designated “light antitank weapon”—or LAW—and they were far from harmless. The Disposable Age’s answer to the bazooka, these prepackaged armor-piercing rockets came in their own throwaway launchers and could handle most any battlefield job.

  The dawn was still an hour away. All the preparations for battle had been completed, and there was nothing to do now but wait. As was his style, Mack Bolan’s preparations had been elaborate and exhaustive. A pro did not leave the smallest detail to chance. Mack Bolan was certainly a pro. He had lived in this swamp for more than a week. He knew the roadways and waterways, and he had mockedup this operation for dry runs over and over again. He knew what had to be done and how—and he knew full well the elements of chance and the percentages for success or failure—which, in Bolan’s line of work, meant living or dying.

  But, yes, it was Mack Bolan’s kind of place. He remembered his surprise, some years back, at finding a jungle within a march of Saigon. And the Cajun kid—what was his name?—the one that stepped into the VC snare trap and died with a stake through his belly—Clautier, yeah, nice kid—Clautier had remarked that it was no big deal. There were jungles within walking distance of New Orleans, denser than anything he’d seen yet in Vietnam.

  Bolan hadn’t really believed the kid then. Now he believed.

  An armadillo waddled onto the highway and paused for an unemotional inspection of the black-clad human interloper before continuing on to the other side.

  Smart kid, sure, move on. You’re in a war zone. All the armor in Louisiana won’t keep you safe here—so move it on out. Bolan grinned. Some kind of funny-looking animal—like a possum with armor plating. Not funny, though … tragic. The world of nature had abandoned the armor-plating experiment long before man came on the scene. Still the armadillo lingered on. Bolan’s gaze fell on the armorpiercing rockets in their neat little fiberglass tubes. Sure … and the idea lingered on in the minds of men.

  The smile faded from the warrior’s face as he took final stock of the situation. Any minute now a convoy would be rounding that curve up there at Point Able and lining into this brief straightaway. He’d clocked them on three previous runs and there’d been no deviation from the routine. It would take them ten seconds to reach Bolan’s position at Point Baker. In another ten seconds, if they were incredibly lucky, they’d be scooting around the next curve at Point Charlie. In the lead would be a Cadillac limousine—one of the big jobs with jumpseats and a full crew of eight gunners. Certain barely noticeable alterations to the body lines revealed that it was armor-plated like the armadillo, but much more so.

  Close behind the point vehicle would be the Brinks-type truck carrying the goodies—three days’ receipts from the string of mob-owned joints along the Mississippi Gulf Coast—black money from the casinos and the take from girlie operations, contraband booze, the drug scene, illicit rackets of every kind. This particular shipment would also include fifty kilos of uncut heroin plucked from a Central American banana boat at Gulfport just three hours earlier and destined now for a powder plant in the French Quarter at New Orleans. Manned gunports in the van indicated a minimum of three heavily armed guards inside.

  Bringing up the rear would be a second limousine identical in all respects to the lead vehicle.

  About nineteen guns, at least—including automatic weapons. And some of the meanest boys south of the Mason-Dixon, old man Vannaducci’s best.

  Through a nice piece of official larceny, each of them toted “special police” credentials. The armored truck was legitimately registered, licensed, bonded, etc. And still they made their runs along the back trails like the scurrying vermin they really were.

  Vermin, sure. These boys were Mafia, each of them sworn in blood. And each of them was going to die in that sworn blood. As for their black money—it was going to get liberated … into the Executioner’s war chest, about $300,000 by conservative estimate. And people were still saying that crime doesn’t pay. It paid, all right—for the organized psychopaths swaggering about their vicious little kingdoms of syndicated cannibalism—it paid to the annual national tune of about $70 billion—more than the top three U.S. corporations combined—a GNP higher than most nations of the world.

  The Dixie mob was getting its fair share of that. The boys had been having things their way in this area for much too long. The Executioner’s gaze had been focused on Vannaducci’s little empire for some time—and he’d decided it was time for the universe to present the bill to Uncle Van and all his little s
avages.

  The Mafia presence here went back a long way—further back than most people might think. As early as 1890 they’d murdered a chief of police who couldn’t be bought, then bought a jury to get the killers off scot-free. An irate citizenry then lynched the bunch. Hysterical repercussions from that, around the country as well as abroad, saw an embarrassed U.S. Government officially apologizing and even paying damages to the Italian government to still the furor. Naturally, the Dixie mob promptly returned to business as usual, raping and looting the economy of the South with renewed zeal—and nobody had really presented them with a bill of complaint since.

  So now the note had matured. The collector had come. It was time to pay the tab for nearly a century of plunder. “The city that care forgot” had not been forgotten by everyone.

  The Executioner cared.

  His fingers traced the outline of the little transistorized pocket detonator that would officially announce the Battle for New Orleans. He was ready. The jungle was ready. And the glow of approaching headlamps was now sweeping into the curve at Point Able.

  The time had come to throw the first punch for the New Orleans knockout.

  The wheelman reflexively jabbed an elbow toward Jimmy Lista and growled, “Boss!”

  Lista, the convoy boss, jerked upright in the seat, and his eyes flared as he muttered, “Yeah. What? Why the slowdown?”

  “Something’s ahead. On the road.”

  “Accident or what?”

  “Could be,” the wheelman replied. “Looks like railroad flares, just around the curve.”

  Lista snatched up the mike and spat hasty instructions into the radio net. “Peckers up!” He was wide awake now but still fighting the cobwebs from his eyes. “Close up, close it up! I want a tight one-two-three.”

  While the taut responses crackled in from the vehicles that followed, the wheelman remarked, “I don’t see nothing but the flares, boss. It looks funny. I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither,” Lista agreed. “Boot this thing in the ass.” He snarled into the radio mike: “We’re running! Stay up our ass!” To the men in the seats behind him he commanded, “Weapons up and ready! Look alive now!”

  The next few seconds were kaleidoscopic. Though everything seemed to happen at once, a frozen frame replay would bring the events to focus in the following sequence:

  With a strong but smooth acceleration the armor-plated limousine surged forward into the straightaway.

  A gunner in the rear seat excitedly wondered, “What if it’s cops? Whatta we do if—”

  Lista yelled back, “You crazy? With a hot box of horse back there? We’re stopping for nobody!”

  A bright flash lit up the side of the road just ahead as a huge tree came crashing to the ground across the roadway.

  The wheelman yelped, “Christ!” and stood on his brakes.

  Lista screamed, “You dumb …!” and began fighting the driver for control of the vehicle, evidently intending to veer around the blockade.

  The wheelman was protesting, “No, boss! There’s nothing out there but swamp!”

  The men in the rear seats were being flung about by the wild swerving of the vehicle. They were swearing and exclaiming—and one man’s weapon discharged accidentally, the reverberations from that blast adding to the panic and confusion of the moment.

  Then they were sliding into the felled tree, hitting it broadside, rebounding—and the heavy truck that had been faithfully “right up their ass” was crunching in from the other side.

  In perhaps his final flaring instant of electric awareness, Lista caught a glimpse of a tall figure in black loping along the eerily lighted roadway with a weird object slung over one shoulder—and in that instant Jimmy Lista knew.

  “Oh, Christ!” he groaned. “It’s that guy!”

  And then hell really fell in.

  The big cypress had been carefully selected, restraining vines hacked away, then the tree trunk drilled and charged with enough plastics to ensure a clean and instant drop. Detonation was perfect, and the fall just as Bolan wanted it. There would not have been time, even had Bolan been so inclined, to yell, “Timber!”

  They came into it on a cadenced count, practically bumper to bumper, the lead vehicle trying to change the game at the final moment only to slide in sideways on screaming rubber. The other two vehicles promptly plowed into the wreckage—and the battle was half-won right there.

  Bolan’s set position had been about fifty yards in advance of the roadblock point—that is, downrange; he was now behind the procession. A second or two before the moment of impact, the blitz artist was up and running, closing on the scene with studied timing and with massive firepower at his ready disposal. A tree across the road could momentarily stop that bunch, but it could not neutralize them—not without the most incredible luck, and Bolan was not a warrior to stake the success of an operation on mere luck.

  But even the most meticulous planner could not foresee every eventuality—and the very worst had come from that pile-up of vehicles, from Bolan’s point of view. The heavy truck had punched into the side of the lead Caddy, screwing it around so that a surviving headlamp was throwing a beam of light along the back track, directly along Bolan’s only possible path of advance. The problem was, of course, twofold. The beam was both blinding and illuminating him—and the resolution of the problem cost a couple of numbers to his timing. He was still some thirty yards downrange when he halted and drew the AutoMag, coolly sighted along the ventilated barrel, and squeezed off a 240-grain resolution. The big bullet thundered along that beam of light and wiped it out. But already there were sounds of recovery down there—cautious cries in the night, the whirring of a starter coaxing a dead engine, vehicle doors springing open.

  A couple of numbers off the count, yeah. He’d hoped to catch them stunned and stupid. But now …

  Not much threat from the lead vehicle. It was a mess. People in there were yelling for help, and one guy in particular was screaming bloody murder.

  The armored van seemed none the worse for the pile-up, except that the engine would not respond. Gunports were manned and obviously ready with ugly snouts protruding and waiting for a target.

  It was the rear limousine that posed the gravest danger. The engine hood had popped open, and there was broken glass strewn about, but that seemed to be the extent of the damage. A couple of guys were staggering from the open doors of that one, and they both had Thompsons.

  Bolan moved warily into position and dropped to one knee, jettisoning all but one LAW. The boys with the choppers found him just one breathless second after he’d aligned the pop-up sights and sent a whoosher streaking into the rear section of their vehicle. It penetrated with a doomsday clap that blew a halo of hellfire to envelop all three vehicles and to make instant tumbling torches of the two machine-gunners.

  So now they were stunned and stupid again—those who were still alive. Someone over there in hell was screaming for heavenly mercy. Bolan sent some, in the form of another whizzing rocket that smacked into the crumpled passenger compartment of the lead vehicle. All four wheels of the Caddy left the ground with that one, and the gas tank joined the act just as the vehicle touched down again. The secondary gasoline explosion welded the limousine to the nose of the van, sent displaced chunks of automotive steel hurtling through the night, and spread a rushing pool of flames beneath the armored truck. A gunport there was hastily abandoned; an instant later a ventilation hatch creaked open, and Bolan could hear the sounds of panic inside.

  He was in motion again, reading the situation in a wary approach to the blast zone. Both Cadillacs were demolished. Twisted and mutilated bodies, some of them flaming, littered the whole area. Gasoline-fed flames were enveloping the armored van and all four wheels were ablaze.

  And now there were no human sounds to disturb the night.

  The armored truck was fast becoming a bake oven, no doubt of that. The men inside could probably sweat it out for another minute or so—but Bolan knew that t
here could be no fight left in them now.

  It was done.

  He abandoned the remaining LAWs and closed on the situation with Uzi at the ready. At his approach, the driver of the van screamed out through licking flames: “Okay! I’m coming out! Don’t shoot!”

  The ice-water tones of the Executioner flowed across the hellground. “So come. Hit the ground running and don’t look back.”

  The guy tumbled to the ground and lay there for a moment beating out flames on his clothing, then staggered to his feet and floundered into the marshy land at the side of the road to disappear into the night.

  The boys in the vault must have been watching. The back door immediately swung open and a pan icky voice called out, “Us, too! We surrender!”

  “Same deal,” was the cold response from the edge of hell.

  Three uniformed men leapt out of there as if in a single movement, arms raised, coughing, and soaked with perspiration.

  “Not the swamp,” Bolan instructed. “Down the road. Fast as you can move it.”

  He watched them till they were out of sight, then quickly entered the vault, grabbed the goodies, left his calling card, and withdrew.

  After all was said and done, then, right on the numbers.

  And, yes, Bolan remembered … many things. So would the New Orleans mob. They would remember all of the Executioner campaigns along that twisted and bloody trail that began at Pittsfield and broadened at places like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Miami, San Francisco, Detroit, and at many stops and pauses beyond and between—and, sure, they would know. They would understand that this quick punch to the gut in a Louisiana swamp was but the prelude to a blitzkrieg war that would soon engulf this entire region.

  They would remember, they would know, and they would be falling all over their asses to get set for it.

  The Executioner had come to the town that care forgot.

  2: ANGLE OF APPROACH