Washington I.O.U.

  Washington I.O.U.

  The Executioner, Book Thirteen

  Don Pendleton

  To the honest men,

  the ethical men,

  the dedicated men …

  wherever the hell they may be.

  Whoever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

  —Walt Whitman

  I am a soldier, not a politician, and I am not equipped to debate moral issues. I do know that what happens to our politicians happens to all of us, and the cannibals are trying to devour them. I can’t allow that. Hell, I will not allow that.

  —Mack Bolan, THE EXECUTIONER

  PROLOGUE

  It had already earned him fame as “the Executioner” in the war zones of Southeast Asia when Mack Bolan’s spectacular brand of warfare was suddenly transplanted to the city streets of his homeland.

  As a U.S. Army sergeant, Bolan’s combat excellence was built of many commendable attributes. His military superiors regarded him as “a natural soldier.” He seemed to possess an almost intuitive “feel” for combat tactics and strategies. He was rated an expert marksman with virtually every personal weapon in the army’s arsenal. On penetration strikes into enemy-held territory, Bolan had repeatedly demonstrated a cool self-sufficiency, nerves of steel, and the ability to complete missions despite overwhelming obstacles.

  In a modern army heavy on specialties, Mack Bolan practiced the oldest specialty in the book of warfare. He was a death specialist. During two tours of combat duty in Vietnam, he had “executed” ninety-seven enemy VIPs, by confirmed count, and he had come to be regarded as a formidable weapon in the army’s psychological warfare efforts.

  And then Sgt. Bolan experienced a personal tragedy. He was called home on emergency leave to make burial arrangements for his father, mother, and teenage sister—all victims of violent death. When he learned that the local Mafia arm was responsible for the triple-tragedy, Mack Bolan seceded from the Asian wars and turned his attention to “the home front.”

  “It looks like I have been fighting the wrong enemy,” the sergeant wrote in his personal journal. “Why defend a front line 8,000 miles away when the real enemy is chewing up everything you love back home? I have talked to the police about this situation and they seem to be helpless to do anything. The problem, as I see it, is that the rules of warfare are all rigged against the cops. Just knowing the enemy isn’t enough. They have to prove he’s the enemy, and even then sometimes he slips away from them. What is needed here is a bit of direct action, strategically planned, and to hell with the rules. Over in ’Nam, we called it a war of attrition. Seek out and destroy. Exterminate the enemy. I guess it’s time a war was declared on the home front. The same kind of war we’ve been fighting at ’Nam. The very same kind.”

  Mack Bolan, indeed, declared a personal war on the Mafia. It was not to be a limited war, not in any sense. It was to be “war everlasting”—that is, everlasting in terms of Bolan’s own lifetime.

  This competent combat veteran held no illusions regarding the eventual outcome of such a war. He knew what the odds were. It was obvious that he would be fighting the impossible fight. There could be but one logical conclusion: the death of Mack Bolan.

  Even so, he infiltrated the enemy camp in his home town, Pittsfield, and began his cool campaign of identification and destruction. Much to his own surprise, Bolan emerged victorious from that initial skirmish, and when he left Pittsfield that Mafia arm was a shambles.

  The Executioner was strongly aware, however, that all trails away from Pittsfield were, in effect, his “last mile” of life. He vowed to make it a bloody mile and to make each step along that wipeout trail as costly as possible to the enemy. He would not “roll over and die for them.”

  He then declared the entire underworld a jungle—an arena in which the only law was survival of the fittest—and his war became a series of guerilla campaigns. Wherever he surfaced, hell broke loose; wherever he lingered, ruin and destruction descended upon the enemy. Before long, the lordly masters of organized crime throughout the nation were beginning to address themselves to “the Bolan problem” with the gravest respect.

  An “open contract” was issued against the life of this blitzing one-man army, with the initial $100,000 bounty on his head pyramiding into astronomical amounts as local chieftains hastily added “area bonuses” in an attempt to discourage Executioner strikes in their territories.

  Meanwhile law enforcement agencies at every level of government throughout the nation were viewing Mack Bolan’s one-man anti-crime crusade with growing alarm, and a tight “Bolan watch” was being federally coordinated toward the apprehension of this “highly dangerous” fugitive. Even internationally, Bolan was a wanted man. Interpol as well as national police in several European nations had reasons for an interest in the activities of the Executioner.

  Thus it must have seemed that every hand was raised against him. Bolan had not, however, expected to be decorated for his actions in this new application of warfare. He had known from the beginning that his campaign would be officially regarded as both immoral and illegal; he was prepared to accept the condemnation of his society. He even accepted philosophically the knowledge that many police agencies were observing an unofficial “shoot on sight—shoot to kill” policy in their attempts to apprehend him.

  From Bolan’s viewpoint, though, the police were not his enemy. He studiously avoided any confrontation with police authority and he had never been known to exchange gunfire or hostilities of any nature with the law enforcement establishment.

  Actually, many police officers were secretly sympathetic to Bolan’s war, and it is felt that frequently individual policemen “turned their backs” and consciously avoided confrontations with the blitzing warrior. It is known that Bolan’s closest friend and contact within the establishment was an undercover agent who was also high in the crime syndicate’s hierarchy. Another Bolan intelligence contact was a highly placed official in the U.S. Justice Department. Neither of these contacts was on an official basis, however, and rumors that Bolan was being financed and otherwise supported by various governmental agencies are patently false.

  Bolan financed his own war, via raids on the enemy’s money caches. From the beginning, he seemed to delight in “hitting them where it hurts”—in their money pipelines, their “clout routes” (bribery networks for political influence), and in their juicy semi-legitimate business covers. He had learned early in the wars that the enemy’s seeming omnipotence was derived mainly from the power of their great wealth—from their “bought” politicians, law-officials, legal-eagles and unscrupulous businessmen.

  The actual source of their power, though, was quickly seen as the common everyday moral weakness of mass America. The Mafia’s billions come from the dimes and dollars harvested daily through organized gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, bootlegging, narcotics and other mass-interest sources of illegal revenue.

  But Bolan was no moralist and his war was not directed against the common weaknesses of mankind. His war was with the Mafia itself, which he saw as a ravenous leech at the throat of his nation, a monster bloated fantastically by an insatiable appetite for wealth and power, a nightmarish crime cartel with tentacles wriggling out in all directions in a determination to encompass the world.

  His first brush with the mob’s political ambitions came in New York where he learned that La Cosa Nostra (translated literally, Our Thing, or this thing of ours) was giving birth to an even more formidable Cosa di tutti Cosi, the Thing of all Things, a movement described by worried government officials as “the nation’s invisible second government.”

  The new Thing was spreading like a cancerous growth into the financial and political
institutions of the country—indeed, of the entire world—and it was at Chicago that Bolan saw that the festering pool of politics lent the most natural environment for the growth and perpetuation of the monster. It was in Chicago that he gained personal insights into the power structure of a society in which the businessman is a politician, the politician is a criminal and the criminal is a businessman.

  This “unholy trinity” came into sharp focus at Las Vegas, where untold millions of “skim” dollars moved steadily from the green-felt gold mines to the graft-lined halls of government and finance everywhere. It was an unending stream—and Bolan himself flowed along one such underground river to the sunny Caribbean playgrounds, into a personal experience with the syndicate’s international intentions.

  It was during the Caribe strike that Bolan formed a sketchy understanding of that brooding conglomerate which he termed “the Fourth Power”—an international apolitical force which was bent on world domination—and it was this understanding which launched him into an invasion of the mob’s western U.S. trade routes.

  In San Francisco Bolan found the confrontation with Fourth Power plans which solidified in his mind the full implications of the unholy alliance—a combine whose only allegiance was to the buck; whose only politics was power; whose only morality was built of corruption, greed and rapacity.

  The Executioner’s call on Boston was for purely personal business, but even this emergency mission developed into another head-on collision with the syndicate’s master plan for unlimited power—and this was the collision which sent Bolan richocheting into Washington for a sweep of the national clout routes.

  Bolan found the smell of Mafia hanging heavy in the Washington atmosphere. A series of ominous events had been taking place in and around the national capital, but they were not political events in the usual sense.

  Obscure but important officials in key governmental positions had been victims of mortal “accidents”—more than a half-dozen in the past few months. Others had quietly disappeared from the scene—“missing” without a trace. A few had simply resigned abruptly—taken “normal” departures.

  Occuring over a period of several months, the events seemed unrelated and without unitary significance except in the minds of a few worried observers of the Washington scene—and even these few hesitated to use the word “conspiracy” to explain the rapidly changing picture of official Washington.

  There was no hesitation on Bolan’s part, however. No other man outside the mob’s top ruling circle has been so close to the reality of La Cosa Nostra and the newly developed concept of Cosa di tutte le Cose. The Executioner has inside information pointing definitely to a mob conspiracy in the hub of the nation’s government—and The Thing of all Things has never seemed more probable as an existent force in American life.

  Bolan had hoped from the beginning to keep his war a simple one. His avowed intention had been to “hit and keep hitting until I shake their house down around them.” The complications had set in early, however, the audacious warrior had been aware of a steady broadening of the battle fronts.

  In Washington he is destined to discover that the focus of his entire life has become pinpointed at this nerve center of America.

  “It’s my country,” he wrote in his Journal on the eve of his sweep into Washington. “It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I’ve ever seen … and I’ve seen a few. I left a lot of buddies behind in ’Nam, guys who will never see home again. So, yeah, this one is going to be sheer hell. But I owe it. I owe it to the guys who won’t be coming home. I can’t let the mob swagger away with this nation’s government in their hip pockets.

  “A lot of blood has been spilled in the defense of this country. Even if the country itself is not sacred, that spilt blood sure as hell is. So what choice do I have, except to spill some more. So this one is for the beloved dead. Let’s call it the Washington IOU. And let the mob pay the tab … with their blood.”

  The Executioner’s battle plans were set, and the strike on Washington was under way.

  1: THE GAME

  The woman jumped out of her vehicle before it was fully parked and ran smack into the waiting arms of Horse Lucchese and Tommy the Sandman Roberts, two of the meanest hitmen in Washington. Without even a hello or by-your-leave the enforcers grabbed the flustered beauty and roughly hustled her into the shadows at the side of the apartment building.

  Bolan left his car at the curb out front and flitted along in quiet pursuit, making full use of the natural cover of darkness and closing just enough to maintain visual contact.

  Obviously something had gone sour and the Executioner wanted to know precisely what that something was.

  He’d been on Claudia Vitale’s tail for nearly a week, dogging her around Washington on an eighteen-hour a day surveillance—and she had been a very busy little bagwoman for the Capital mob.

  Bolan did not ordinarily devote so much time and attention to a payoff courier—he either hit them or forgot them. But this one was something else. Dropping bags around venal Washington was just a moonlighting sideline for Mrs. Vitale. At the stroke of eight every morning she turned back into the sedate and capable Chief Administrative Aide to the venerable old patriarch of Capitol Hill, Congressman Harmon Keel.

  And, yeah, this made Claudia Vitale a very special item in Mack Bolan’s book of warfare.

  She didn’t actually tote payroll bags around Cloutville, of course. What she carried were tidy little envelopes which could be inconspicuously passed at bureaucratic gatherings and social-set happenings.

  Bolan’s chief interest had lain in the recipients of those envelopes.

  Not that the courier herself was unworthy of a man’s interest. She was the kind who was never inconspicuous, whatever the crowd. Belled hips, alluringly sloped in the upper approaches and firmly rounded at the bases. Long legs, exquisitely tapered from full thighs—all of it together. A nipped little waist exploding upwards toward softly voluptuous womanhood and delicately molded shoulders. Swan neck, smooth as velvet and gracefully supporting a head of classic Roman beauty.

  On those evening rounds, she looked more like a Washington VIP-league call girl; Bolan had to wonder if she’d once doubled in that capacity, also.

  She’d been an easy mark to watch. Bolan could spot her walk from a block away. He knew all the little gestures as she conversed or dined or sipped at a cocktail. She was highly animated, a very much alive and interesting woman. He had been close enough often enough to know the flash and sparkle of those dark eyes, and he could tell by the tilt of her head if she was bored, interested, sad or mad.

  Right now, at the tired end of this evening, Bolan’s reading on Claudia Vitale was that she was “scared out of her skull.”

  And with damned good reason. The Horse and the Sandman were not particularly known for polite conversation and social graces.

  They had maneuvered the woman to the rear entrance of the building.… Bolan knew where they were headed. He doubled back, went in through the front door—delayed only momentarily by the efficient security locks—and proceeded directly to the top floor. He emerged from the elevator just in time to see the others disappearing inside the Vitale apartment.

  Something about the look on the woman’s face as the Sandman shoved her through that doorway struck a sympathetic chord in Bolan’s mind. He decided to go in for a direct reading … but not without a quick recon of the battle zone.

  The Executioner quietly backtracked his own route to the ground level, then went to the rear exit and let himself outside. He stood on the small porch for a moment, casually lit a cigarette while his eyes probed the dimly-lit parking area.

  He scored immediately, finding the thing he’d expected to find.

  The outside man.

  He was seated tensely at the wheel of a Pontiac LeMans, a beefy man with a nervous cigar. The parking lights were on and the engine was running, the vehicle parked rear-end to the building and ready for a fast departure.

  Hell, it was
a setup for a hit.

  Bolan went on down the steps and walked directly to the Pontiac. The guy’s eyes were following his progress with a curious and indecisive stare.

  Bolan stepped right up and tapped on the window. It rolled down immediately and the stereo sounds of a tape deck drifted through the opening.

  The Executioner’s ominously-tipped Beretta Belle drifted in, attaching herself to a point directly between a pair of suddenly-flaring eyes. She coughed once, quietly and almost apologetically, and death whispered in between those eyes and shuttered them forever.

  Bolan opened the door and eased the messy remains onto the floorboards, then he turned off the ignition and the lights, rolled up the window, locked and closed the door, and went back to where the action was.

  The apartment door yielded to the first delicate probe. Bolan swept on inside.

  All the lights were on. The woman’s handbag was lying on the floor just inside the door. It was nice, simply decorated but reeking of affluence—sliding glass doors at the end of the living room, small balcony outside, Washington Monument visible in the background.

  A large TV-stereo combo served also as a bar, but there was no action there.

  An open doorway led to the bedroom, also brightly lighted. The shimmering cocktail gown the woman had been wearing was now lying in a wad just inside the door; other, more intimate articles, were strung along in an erratic path to the bathroom. That door was partially closed. The unmistakable sounds of a bathtub being filled with water were the only sounds in the place.

  They had not, Bolan knew, rushed up here for a quick community bath.

  He hit the door with a commanding foot, sending it banging into the party, the Belle close behind and at the ready.

  Horse Lucchese caught the full force of that moving door and he went over head first into the tub with a startled cry.

  The Beretta’s whispering death overtook him there, two of her grim little messengers plowing into the rear of the gunner’s skull at cerebellum level to liberate bubbling blood and jellied matter into the swiftly discoloring water.