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  Texas Storm

  The Executioner, Book Eighteen

  Don Pendleton

  For Bolan’s best friends of ’73—

  Cy and Frank, Scott and Jack.

  Our thanks.

  —dp

  It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not man enough to be damned.

  —T. S. Eliot

  I place my life on the same line with the enemy’s. If damnation is the only prize, then let the Universe be the final judge. Meanwhile, I am the judgment.

  —Mack Bolan, THE EXECUTIONER

  PROLOGUE

  “I am not their judge. I am their judgment.” With these words a Vietnam-baptized war machine who had already become known as the “Executioner” declared his personal war against the Mafia.

  The motivation was as straightforward as the man himself. He had come to recognize that the universe provided its own balance: for every action there is a reaction, for every good an evil, for every strength a weakness—and for every injustice there was somewhere a final justice. By their own actions, the mob had provoked a reaction which was as inevitable and implacable as any force in the universe.

  The mob itself had created this War Against the Mafia.

  They had fashioned it from the stuff of which the Executioner was made and fanned it to life with the spreading flames of rampant thugdom.

  The man was Mack Bolan. He was thirty years of age, a career soldier with two Southeast Asia tours behind him when he was called home to bury his parents and a teen-age sister, victims of Mafia terrorism. Bolan had grown up in the neighborhood where his family died. The Mafia was no stranger to him. He was acquainted with their omnipotence and viciousness. But he had been hardly more than a kid himself when he departed that environment. Consumed by the military problems of the larger world, Bolan had matured into manhood along the lines of military destiny, with little more than dim memories of that other world where violence and death also stalked the human footpaths.

  The family tragedy abruptly jerked Executioner Bolan back into the reality of that dark landscape where thugdom reigned, focusing his attention upon the unrestrained plundering of that human estate … and a new war was born.

  “I am not their judge.

  I am their judgment!”

  It must have seemed to this formidable warrior that all the actions and interactions of his thirty years in life had been leading him inexorably along this collision course with that complex human cancer, the Mafia—known also as La Cosa Nostra, the syndicate, the combine, the mob. By whatever name, Bolan saw them collectively as a rapacious horde of thieves and cutthroats, plunderers, degraders of humanity, a destructive growth at the core of mankind. He also became strongly aware of the inability of the nation’s legal structures to counteract this menace.

  Someone, he knew, had to stand and fight.

  Few men living at the time could have been more admirably equipped to assume the role that Bolan felt descending upon him.

  He was, in his own understanding, particularly fit for the job. Something in his genetic makeup coupled with a peculiarly complex “toughness of the soul,” and hardened by years of training and testing in a finite little hell called Southeast Asia had produced something truly unique in an individual human framework. Bolan knew himself. He knew what he could do. And he also knew what he must do.

  This was not the first good man to run afoul of the cannibalistic activities of the organized crime world.

  He was not the first to suffer personal tragedy, to see loved ones victimized, degraded, then sacrificed body and soul to the all-encompassing wave of this ever-advancing cancer.

  Bolan was not even the first to stand and strike back.

  But he was the first to be so magnificently equipped to handle the challenge. The challenge therefore became an obligation. It became, in every respect, a holy mission.

  But Bolan was no philosopher. He would send you one of those humorously quizzical glances from his ice-blue eyes if you were even to suggest to his face that he was an idealist. Bolan would tell you that there is nothing so practical and real as survival. Jungle law is no philosophy—it is reality; this was Bolan’s understanding. And the case at hand seemed entirely clear-cut in that understanding. The mob was out to rape the world and eat it whole. Nothing in the world was stopping them. Something or someone had to. Maybe Bolan could and maybe he could not. He was at least uniquely qualified to try. There was the commitment. Idealist, no. Realist … yeah, sure. All philosophical and moral questions to hell … he had to try!

  And try he did.

  He tried in seventeen consecutive pitched battles that ranged throughout the United States and spilled over into Europe, Britain, and the Caribbean. He engaged the enemy in a stunning and progressive application of one-man guerrilla warfare that left them reeling in confusion or stampeding in panic wherever he surfaced, and his formula for warfare became expressed in the simplest of expedients: Identify! Infiltrate or Isolate! Destroy!

  His name quickly became a legend to the public, an inexhaustible source of interest to the news media, an embarrassing frustration to the law, a cussword filled with crawling fear to the mob.

  Even so, all the world knew that Mack Bolan was a living dead man. His war was hopeless, his odds insurmountable, his chances for personal survival absolutely zero.

  For every Mafioso who fell to his campaign, ten replacements stepped into the line. For each individual lawman who exhibited overt sympathy for the man and his war, a hundred became all the more determined to halt his illegal crusade. And for each small stolen moment of personal victory, Bolan himself realized that the odds against him thus pyramided in geometric progression.

  But he kept trying.

  And one day in late spring, when most of North America was awakening to the annual rebirth, a deadly storm came to the great state of Texas.

  It was a human storm.

  And its name was Bolan.

  1: KNIGHT AT DAWN

  The darkness of the Texas central plains was being diluted at its eastern edge by the mottled gray advance of dawn as a sleek, twin-engine Cessna swept across from the west, winging close above the flat landscape to maintain a low celestial profile.

  Two men ocupied the aircraft.

  The pilot was a dark, handsome young veteran of many low-profile flights such as this—both in the service of his country in adventures abroad, and in the service of others in adventures here at home. His name was Grimaldi. Until recently he had served the enemies of the man who now sat beside him.

  The passenger wore black. He was garbed in a tight-fitting combat outfit of the type favored by those who must advance by stealth into hostile lands. At the moment he was a one-man raiding party. A military style web belt encircled his waist to support a heavy autoloading pistol plus various other weapons of war. Smaller belts angled from shoulders to waist in a crossing arrangement to accommodate miscellaneous munitions and accessories of survival. His face and hands were smeared with a black cosmetic. In the glow from the plane’s instrument panel, only the eyes were clearly visible—steely glints of blue ice that seemed to see everything.

  The pilot glanced at his passenger and suppressed an involuntary shiver. “Coming around on the midland omni,” he announced solemnly.

  The man in Executioner black did not immediately respond to the announcement, but a moment later calmly replied, “Bingo. Tank farm dead ahead.”

  Grimaldi said, “Right. Okay, get set. We’re making a straight-in to the airstrip. You can mark it one minute and forty from the tank farm to touchdown.”

  The other man fiddled with a watch at his left wrist as he crisply delivered a
repetitious instruction. “Keep it on the numbers, Jack. Give me ninety, exactly. Nine-oh.”

  “Sure, I know. That’s from touchdown to full stop.”

  “That’s what it is,” the cold one growled, showing the first traces of emotion. “Unless you enjoy finding yourself in a cross fire.”

  “Nine-oh it is,” Grimaldi replied with a tight smile.

  The Executioner punched a timing stem on his watch as they flashed above a sprawling collection of oil storage tanks, then he began his last-minute countdown preparations. An enormous ammo clip clicked into position in the light chattergun that hung from his neck. Blackened fingers traced out once more the feel and position of munitions spaced along the utility belt while the other hand checked out the security of a waist weapon, the thunderous .44 AutoMag which—for this mission—was carrying scatter loads of fine buckshot. As a final item, a delicately engineered sound suppressor threaded its way onto the shoulder-slung “silent piece”—a 9-millimeter Beretta Brigadier which, through many campaigns, had become virtually an organ of the man and which he affectionately called “the Belle.”

  “That’d better be a dirt strip down there,” he said, as though speaking for his own benefit.

  Grimaldi chuckled nervously as he replied, “It was last time. But that’s still mighty hard territory down there, man.”

  “It all is,” the raider said. He sighed, very softly, and the blue ice glinted with some indefinable emotion. “Just get me in, and make all the dust you can. We’ll take the rest one number at a time.”

  Sure. One number at a time. Grimaldi had seen plenty of Mack Bolan’s “numbers”—in spades. Any way they fell out, it was nothing but bad news for the guys whose misfortune found them on the receiving end.

  But what the hell? This was one of the best-guarded sites the guy could have chosen to hit. Why was it always the meanest ones?

  Grimaldi had been there when the guy hit Vegas. And Grimaldi had been on the wrong side there.

  He’d been there, also, during the Caribbean campaign—which actually had started out as no more than an extension of the Vegas thing. And, yeah, the dumb Italian had started out on the wrong side in Puerto Rico, too.

  So what about this time? Grimaldi shrugged away a little quiver of apprehension and aligned the nose of the aircraft with the tiny dirt strip that came into view just ahead. His hands and mind were going to be very busy for the next minute or so, and for that he was thankful. As for the rest of it … right or wrong, Mack Bolan was his man. There simply was no other way to think of it.

  “Gear down,” he announced quietly.

  Bolan released his seat belt and reminded the pilot, “Start your count when I go out the door.”

  “Sure,” Grimaldi replied.

  Oh, sure. They might have been discussing when to meet for dinner, it was that casual. But that hellfire guy was going to go out that door with blood on his mind. He was dropping into a Mafia hardsite with no less than a dozen pro killers defending it and with God only knew how many local recruits to back them up—and he was going to be hitting that earth out there with every intention of scorching it or dying in the attempt.

  And for what?

  For what damned possible good?

  It seemed to Grimaldi like a hell of a way to live … or die.

  He brought the nose up and cut the power. Then the wheels touched and a cloud of dust swirled into the slipstream.

  “There’s your cover, Mr. Blitz,” he intoned, the words sounding loud and overly dramatic in the sudden silence of the dead-stick landing.

  A dimly lit shack flashed past on his left; his peripheral vision caught unmistakable movement—human movement—as floodlights erupted on all sides.

  Then he was braking for the turnaround as the door cracked open at the far side of the cabin.

  The man in black called, “Tallyho, Jack.”

  Tallyho, yeah. A hunting cry. The guy was gone in a flash of ice-blue eyes. The cabin door closed with a quiet click. And Jack Grimaldi had just brought a very hot war to the peaceful state of Texas.

  Something was rotten in Texas.

  Bolan did not know precisely what that something was.

  He did know, though, that a strongly apparent odor was emerging from this particular spot on the Texas midlands, one of the nation’s chief oil-producing areas, and that the odor was being experienced at some rather disconcerting points throughout this wealthy state.

  Klingman’s Wells had once been among the most productive oil leases in the midlands. Not now. Several months back, the rich wells of Klingman Petro had abruptly gone out of production, much to the surprise of other oilmen in the area. And an air of mystery had settled upon the place.

  Rumors had it that the old man’s daughter had disappeared and that Klingman himself had gone into virtual seclusion in his Dallas apartment. That in itself was mystery enough. Arthur Klingman was one of the pioneer Texas oilmen, one of the last great independents in this age of corporate giants, a tough old desert rat who could not stand the smell of plush offices and mahoganied board rooms.

  Mack Bolan did not like mysteries, particularly when they involved mob operations. And Klingman’s Wells was now without a doubt a very important mob centerpoint. Whatever the nature of the new activities, quite obviously it was more profitable and therefore more desirable than the harvesting of fossil fuels.

  The most painstaking investigation had failed to reveal to the Executioner’s curious mind the true name of the Mafia game in Texas. But there was more than one way to gain intelligence; if you couldn’t pry it loose then maybe you could blast it into the open. And that was the real nature of this daring dawn strike at a mob command post; it was shock therapy, to be delivered in Bolan’s inimitable style of blockbuster warfare. The shock waves just might rattle something loose and into the intelligence network.

  So—if Bolan had heard Jack Grimaldi’s silent question, For what damned possible good?—he could have replied, “Not for good, Jack, but for bad. When you have an omnipotent enemy then you simply hit him with everything you can grab—you give him all the bad you can muster—and then you check for leaks in that shell of power.”

  Bolan was here for some damned possible bad.

  He had been here many times—but only on paper. He knew this terrain as though he had lived here a lifetime, and he was intimate with each structure, fixture, and device within that compound—thanks mainly to the remarkable memory of Jack Grimaldi, who had chauffeured several flights of Mafia bosses to the site just after the takeover.

  At the moment, Grimaldi was providing some distracting maneuvers with the taxiing aircraft. Bolan was on the lee side of the dust screen and galloping along the backtrack—the chattergun riding in muzzle-down standby, the silent Beretta Belle in hand and at the ready, and he was closing vital numbers on the growing collection of sounds up there in that confused jumble of sand-polluted darkness and choked floodlights.

  The timing could not have been more precise. It was the moment that divided night from day, with just the faintest sliver of gray light moving into the eastern heavens. Bolan had learned long ago that this was the best possible time to catch an enemy off its guard, especially those who have watched through the long and uncertain night.

  And now the sounds up there in that tail of the night were beginning to assimilate themselves for the alert ears that had come in with the dawn.

  A guttural voice that bore no trace of Texas twang was loudly demanding to know the identity of the landing plane.

  Another voice, calling from somewhere on Bolan’s side of the runway, replied that the craft was “… that Cessna, I think. You know—the Three-Ten, the twinengine job.”

  “Must be Detroit,” the first voice decided, showing a tint of nervousness. “Wonder who it is this time. Somebody get that radio—you mean to say he didn’t even identify hisself?”

  Bolan had not slowed his pace, and now he was almost directly across from the point of reception, moving into the floodli
t area. The outline of a low-slung building was framed out over there in the thin slice of gray horizon, a floodlight atop the building sending a swirling beam through dust-laden atmosphere. Without breaking stride he squeezed off two sighing messengers of darkness from the Beretta. The quiet coughing of the Belle mingled with and was absorbed by the explosive shattering of the floodlight.

  In that moment of flare-out a startled face loomed into Bolan’s restricted field of vision, a visage obviously more at home on a Manhattan waterfront than at this unlikely outpost of civilization.

  The guy had spotted Bolan first—may have even heard the gasping reports of the Beretta. His mouth was open in a silent cry and he was flinging himself into a grotesque pirouette while trying to bring a long-barreled revolver to bear on this unsettling apparition from the night. But then the light was gone, Bolan had closed that short range, and the soldier from Manhattan became a shattering reed in the grip of an implacable force which bent him double, cracked his spine, and snuffed out the candle of life as quietly and as quickly as two fingers closing on a wick.

  The only sound from the lightning encounter was a despairing whu-uff as a life took flight and the oddly twisted body sagged to earth.

  Across the runway, someone was declaring, “Hell, the damn light blew out.”

  Several other edgy voices were commenting on the fact, revealing presences which until that time Bolan could but guess at—five or six men, spaced at irregular intervals in a more or less straight line along the other side of the landing strip.

  But there were closer ones. Another form materialized immediately from the graying darkness on Bolan’s side. The guy cried, “Hey! What is—?”

  A 9-millimeter zinger spat across the grayness and between parted teeth to explode in a red fountain of displaced matter, the interrupted question finding a ready answer in the gentle phu-uut of the sighing Beretta.

  This one died loudly, with a bubbling scream accompanying the backward pitch and rattling return to sources.