Texas Storm Read online

  “I could drop in and lift you out, probably.”

  “No, we won’t push our luck on that front.” Bolan tapped a large circle on the map and said, “You make the pick-up here, somewhere along this periphery. Look for my signal. Give me thirty minutes—three zero—with a ten-minute fudge limit. If I don’t make the fudge, then cross your heart and beat it, and please don’t send flowers.”

  Grimaldi scratched his cheek while scrutinizing the chart on his leg. “Okay,” he said. “You’re the doctor. Where do you want the equipment drop?”

  Bolan’s finger moved westward from the compound. “Along this line,” he instructed. “Longitude doesn’t matter a hell of a lot, except I’d like it as close to the depot as you can make it without being detected. Latitudinally, it has to be right along this other pipeline.”

  “Hey! They meet! Inside the compound!”

  “Right. But the one to the depot is operational. They’re pumping boo-koo barrels of crude into secret storage out there.”

  “Don’t try that one, Sarge.”

  Bolan chuckled. “No worry there. The stuff moves at only about five miles per hour and I don’t think I could hold my breath that long.”

  The pilot returned the chuckle, though somewhat forced. He said, “You know …? No, it’s too wild.”

  “What?”

  “If you could get into that control house … For the operational line, I mean. There are operator ports in there, I’ve seen them.”

  “What is that?”

  “Ah, hell, this pipe-lining is a real science. They can stack those lines and call their shots, you know. So many barrels of crude, followed by so many barrels of whatever—gasoline, diesel fuel, whatever. They have dispatchers and the whole bag. On these big transcontinental lines they have switching stations just like in a railroad yard. A dispatcher sits there and pushes the buttons, directing the flow here and there according to load instructions. Well, these ports, see. It’s how they separate the shipments. The stuff is moving through constantly, see, stacked in there like I said with the whatevers. They mark the separation between the whatevers with a little package of radioactive substance. And they have these detectors that react to the radioactivity and tells the dispatcher that here is the beginning or end of a shipment of some particular whatever. So he can route the stuff around, see, without breaking the flow.”

  Thoughtfully, Bolan commented, “So …?”

  “So those lines will move anything you want to drop in there. If you could get to one of those ports.”

  Bolan said, “Well, hell. That’s not so wild.”

  “It’s less than a mile from the control house to that depot, Sarge.”

  Bolan was skulling it. “Sure. I could drop in a timer. But hell I don’t want to blow the whole damned …”

  “Maybe just a small charge,” Grimaldi suggested. “In a leakproof wrap. Just enough to blow one tank. Or if you’re worried about touching off a runaway, maybe you could even set it to blow in the switching station out there, or somewhere along the line. It would give you some beautiful cover for your approach.”

  Bolan said, “Yeah. Okay. It’s a great thought, Jack, thanks. I’ll skull it awhile.”

  “This’s no time for scruples,” Grimaldi groused. “What the hell, a few thousand barrels of crude, what the hell.”

  Bolan replied, “Okay, I said I’d think about it.”

  Grimaldi stiffened and moved his eyes close to the windshield. “Uh oh,” he muttered.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re in the approach. And another bird is crossing our course dead ahead. It’s a … yeah, it’s another chopper.”

  Bolan snapped, “Change course and lay back! Let’s read his intentions!”

  Grimaldi killed his own navigation lights and swung into an abrupt climbing circle.

  “He’s circling in,” the pilot reported a moment later. “He’s … yeah. There go the landing lights. He’s going down.”

  Bolan muttered, “It looks like he’s directly over …”

  “Yeah. He’s landing inside the compound. Whups! Look at all that light, man.”

  The entire security compound had suddenly erupted into brilliant day-bright floodlighting.

  Bolan commented, “Yep, the security is activated.”

  “Shit I wouldn’t have your job with heaven guaranteed,” the pilot said in hushed tones.

  “I wouldn’t either,” Bolan murmured. “But that’s not the guarantee, Jack. Okay, this is a good break. You’ll never find a better time for that running drop. Let’s start.”

  He was checking his weapons and stuffing last-minute armaments into the chest pouch.

  “Coming around,” Grimaldi reported. “Mark it thirty seconds.”

  “Marked. Don’t stretch yourself, Jack. Forty minutes and git.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Uh, Mack … in case we don’t—if we don’t leave this place together, you’ll know where to find me any time.”

  Bolan gripped the pilot’s shoulder and said, “Jack, you must know—I couldn’t have—”

  “Don’t say it!” Grimaldi snapped, “Remember you said no flowers. That works both ways. Ten seconds, goddamn it.”

  Bolan grinned and got set.

  Ten more seconds, with a hell guarantee.

  Sure. It was the only way to fly.

  Blue eyes flashed, the hatch slid back, and he said quietly, “Tallyho, Jack.”

  And he did not hear the sighing rejoinder: “Tally ho, yourself, you beautiful bastard.”

  Grimaldi was aware of the guarantee on Mack Bolan’s soul.

  21: THE INTROSPECT

  He hit the ground running, burdened with eighty pounds or more of steel and explosives, and tumbled into the ditch which had been prepared for a new pipeline.

  It was a stygian night, with high stratus blotting out the heavens except for a peephole now and then with an occasional feeble starglow. It was Bolan’s kind of night. He could hear Grimaldi’s churning withdrawal, becoming fainter and fainter until smothered in that blackness out there; Bolan had never felt more alone in the world.

  He hesitated only long enough to shake the landing shock out of his head, check his gear, adjust the load. Then he set off for the quarter-mile hike to the hell grounds.

  It was slow going. The soft soil of the fresh ditch sucked at his overloaded footsteps and flowed at him from both sides with every movement.

  He stopped every fifty paces or so to freeze in attentive listening, suspecting the presence of enemy patrols and relying entirely upon audio control of the situation.

  Yes, it was Bolan’s kind of night … and it was also his kind of a fight. He was one with the living unity of earth, an extension of elemental forces, and many times he had walked the blackened footpaths of darkness in an endless search for eternal day.

  During an earlier stage of this survival through warfare, as a young soldier in distant lands, he had wondered at the beginning of each such trek into blackness if that “eternal day” might lay at the end of this particular mission—hoping that it did—suspecting that perhaps it never would—discovering eventually that each night march led only to another night march—learning, finally, with a reconciliation of spirit, that the night forces had taken kindly to this intrepid traveler through the gloom and had accepted him as one of their own.

  The symbolic concept of “eternal day”—and the search therefor—became lost as a personal goal of this warrior. It had meant, simply, the end of warfare—the attainment of peace, human fulfillment, construction of a life instead of destruction of other lives.

  The concept was buried not in Vietnam but in his own home town. Bolan’s nights became transplanted from the jungles of an unpopular and improbable war to the dry deserts of a criminal and impossible war—and the Executioner had said goodbye forever to “eternal day.”

  A night person, sure—and Bolan had long ago pushed all the sentimental ideas about normal life and happiness off the surface of his mind. He n
ever thought about such things, now. He no longer sought a place to live, in the sun. He now walked blackened paths and sought a place to kill, and perhaps to survive, in the night.

  It was a subtle shift of psyche, this transition from “sometime soldier” to “lifetime warrior.” But it was necessary, if a guy meant to be good at his job.

  Deep down where his soul reposed, Bolan was aware of all this. He was, after all, a decent man—and that innate decency had not lost touch with the larger realities, except where they touched upon his own personal ambitions for self.

  And now he had reached that point where the night becomes encapsulated within a three-foot tube buried in the earth.

  He took a last look into the heavens, hoping for a star and finding only a blackened reflection of his own life, and then the Executioner moved resolutely into hell itself.

  22: FLASH POINT

  Once again the night was with him.

  The pipe ended in a large bell section at the half-completed pump station and there was nothing blocking the exit more forbidding than a plastic cover and a thin sheet of plywood.

  Bolan worked his way clear and checked his numbers. Eight minutes had elapsed. Which meant that he had an outside edge of thirty-two minutes in which to outwit the security system, rout or overcome the garrison force, disable the destruct system, and tidy up a few loose ends of the night, bust out, make his way across a thousand yards of hostile territory to the depot and neutralize that area, then make the rendezvous with Grimaldi.

  Nothing but precise timing could make it work; nothing short of blitzkrieg could make it possible.

  But, sure, it was Bolan’s kind of fight.

  He set the deadline on his wrist chronometer and moved out without further pause, the security system diagrams overlaying his combat-consciousness like a mariner’s chart of rocks and shoals.

  The first obstacle loomed out of the deep dark a few yards outside the building—a slow-moving sentry with a shoulder-slung rifle. Bolan tapped him behind the ear with the butt of the Beretta and left him lay where he dropped.

  The numbers were falling. And there was a hell of a lot to be done between now and then.

  The Klingman property occupied a large section of rangeland in the Great Plains region of western Texas, just north of the Pecos River. Range livestock of several varieties grazed on these lands, sharing the productivity of the area with gypsum, salt, natural gas, and petroleum deposits. To the north and east spread the great agricultural regions which produced a variety of grains, cotton, peanuts, sorghums, poultry, hogs, melons, fruits. Far east and deep south accounted for vegetables, citrus fruits, seafoods, forest products, granite, offshore oil.

  Wrapped together, this fabulous state was indeed worthy of being regarded as “the richest political subdivision in the world.” As a matter of official fact, it was. It could be, if desired, a totally isolated yet entirely self-sufficient political entity—much more so than almost any European nation.

  It was not difficult, then, to understand how some prideful Texans could come to regard their state’s role in national and world affairs as somewhat demeaning to their importance—or the exploitation of their natural resources by “outside interests” as shameful thievery.

  Klingman, himself, was one of these. Rambling notes found in the briefcase that Bolan turned over to Harold Brognola acidly denounced “the Wall Streeters and Carpetbaggers” who, in Klingman’s view, were “taking Texas away from Texans and robbing us blind.”

  The old man had discovered, though, the hard way, that there were worse forces than Wall Streeters and Carpetbaggers afoot in the land. There were, indeed, cannibals—and they had just about eaten Arthur Klingman, whole body.

  There was, of course, much more at stake in the Texas Campaign than the fate of the life and fortune of one Arthur Klingman—a man who, in any event, had damned himself. The old man had come to symbolize for Bolan, though, the entire Texas problem. Mack Bolan was not a foolish warrior. He knew his limitations, and he understood that he could not hope single-handedly to reverse, in a single night, all the unsettling developments which had come to light in this huge and complex state.

  He could, though, zero-in on the fountainhead itself, and hope that the shock waves traveling along that chain of cause and effect would shake the whole structure apart. It was not a forlorn hope, but a very practical one. It was, in combat psychology, a “mission goal”—a vital target which, if properly approached and flawlessly attained, could indeed be regarded as a turning point in the larger war.

  To “save Texas for the sane Texans” meant, to Mack Bolan, simply to destroy irreversibly the stranglehold which the international Mafia had succeeded in establishing at this place, in this time.

  He had to run their asses out of Klingman’s Wells, and he had to do it so decisively that they would not even think of returning for a long, long time.

  As for the rest of Texas—well, that would be up to Hal Brognola and the law enforcement agencies of this great state. Bolan hoped only to make the crack in the dam, the fingerhold that would allow the others to rip the whole damned thing apart.

  That was the mission at Klingman’s Wells, the goal of the Texas Campaign.

  But there was also, as a corollary goal, a promise to be kept to a gutsy young lady with a broad Texas sense of humor.

  “I’ll clear a place for you in that no man’s land,” he’d promised her. “And I’ll try to see that your daddy is standing there with you.”

  So the whole Bolan ideology was compressed here, in this night, at this place.

  He had thought of it as a “flash point.”

  And it was.

  Five minutes into his remaining numbers, he had disabled the electronic alarm systems. Another five minutes and the Mexican barracks plus assorted buildings were gooped for doomsday with three-minute fuses. By halfway into that fuse time, he had stealthily clubbed and garroted his way through the rear entrance of the hacienda and was standing in the corner of a darkened passageway which led to the large, sunken living room. Through the open double doors he had a view of a huge stone fireplace, a sparse sprinkling of Spanish-style furnishings, and four human beings.

  One of these was Woofer Tolucci. A couple of small Bandaids decorated the fierce face and he seemed to be partially supporting his weight on a makeshift walking stick.

  In the background stood a Mexican—a six-gun strapped to his hip, cowboy style—a very modern machine-pistol dangling on a neck strap.

  Arthur was there, and only half dressed. He looked about ready to blow a gasket and he was angrily telling Tolucci something in rumbling, muffled tones.

  The other half of the Klingman khaki outfit—the shirt—was adorning his daughter, Judith. It was all she wore, but it was a fetching arrangement. She stood beside her father, straight and poised as a good daughter of the Lone Star should—shirttails and all.

  Whatever Klingman was saying, Tolucci evidently was not buying it. He cut off the old man’s angry speech with a string of obscenities.

  And then the barracks began to blow, loud rumbling explosions spaced a few seconds apart, one coming upon the other in a series that trembled the earth beneath the hacienda and sent Tolucci staggering toward the window.

  “What the Christ!” was the head cock’s initial reaction, delivered with a voice which really did not wish to know, no, not at all.

  The Animal recovered quickly, though, and before the doomsday goop had fully spent its chain he was whirling toward the door and hobbling quickly off to the scene of disturbance.

  “Stay here!” he yelled over his shoulder to the Mexican gunner. “If they give you any shit, shoot ’em!”

  “Si, Capitain.”

  Bolan held his position and checked Tolucci by, hardly an arm’s reach away. He watched him to the outside, then Bolan stepped into the doorway of the sunken room, the Beretta extended.

  The Mexican was appreciatively studying the backside of Judith Klingman as she leaned into a window sill
, trying to get a view of the activities outside.

  Arthur Klingman was staring straight up the bore of Mack Bolan’s Beretta.

  The Belle chugged a pencil of flame, something grisly happened to the Mexican’s temple just above the cheekbone as a severed eye popped free and bounced to the flagstones several yards from the crumpling body.

  The old man froze, stunned, as his daughter pirouetted away from the window with a little shriek. Pieces of soldado skull had splattered her and she was eyeing the ghastly stains with no show whatever of good humor.

  Klingman mumbled, “I thought that was for me.”

  The icy tones of the Executioner informed him, “I’m here to save your wells, Klingman. My time is short. You’ll have to get yourselves out. Give me a count of sixty after you see my back. Then you take Judith straight to the new pump station, I mean straight! Down through the pipe and all the way to the end. Wait for me there. I’ll try to pick you up. If I’m not there in thirty minutes then you’re on your own.”

  A fire had returned to the Klingman gaze. He told Bolan, “I want to help. I have a right. You told me I could bury Flag Seven. Okay. Let me bury it.”

  “No way,” Bolan replied coldly. “That’s a war zone out there, Klingman. Take your girl and git! That’s the best help you can give me. At the count of sixty!”

  He spun away without a glance at the girl, crossed quickly to the door, and stepped outside.

  People were running about out there in the glow of the burning buildings, shouting in confusion and firing weapons at the moon or something. Above it all could be heard the barking growls of the head cock yelling for someone to check out the goddamn lights and get them working.

  Bolan brought added spice to that party as he moved swiftly across the edge of confusion, hurling grenades and cutting away with the chattergun at everything swirling across his line of vision.

  He heard Tolucci snarl, “There he is! Miguel! Where the hell are your fire teams!”

  Bolan had accomplished the immediate objective—to divert attention away from the route to be traveled by the Klingmans—and already his excursion across those hell grounds had taken a fearful toll of the enemy. Guys were lying all around those grounds, chopped up and bleeding and calling for help in Spanish. But no assistance seemed to be materializing for the luckless ones. Tolucci was regrouping his forces and shouting them on from some point in the background of action. They were trying to flank him, sending fire teams out to each side.