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  Water was beginning to flow from the portal, now, and was spreading rapidly along the decline to the lagoon. Two swamp buggies were overturned and showing their undersides while others raced in crazy patterns toward the outer waters.

  Some of those among the formerly Doomed One Hundred were evidently getting into the spirit of liberation. Fires were breaking out along the line of huts. Sporadic gunfire also marked that moment and it seemed at least a reasonable assumption that the former prisoners were arming themselves with the abandoned weapons of their jailers. The assumption was quickly borne out, a moment later, when flames from the residence hall illuminated the tower area to reveal a disheveled smart-mouth turnkey frantically climbing that tower with two angry men in hot pursuit.

  And then Bill Kessler walked up, hand extended and from ear to ear. Bolan took that hand, and clasped it, saying, “Congratulations. You pulled it off.”

  “Like hell I did,” said the liberated cop. “They were getting ready to feed us to the gators. We all know who pulled it off.”

  Bolan muttered, “Someone else sure wants to know.” He turned toward the shoulder and hit the button to say, “Base … tell the lady her man is alive and well.”

  April’s voice returned immediately, slightly perplexed. “The lady didn’t show. Are those your fireworks?”

  He replied, “Yeah. It’s about over. Tell Alice to send the barges. And ask Flyboy to come in on my channel.”

  “Roger, wilco. Hurry home. The second edge is restless.”

  “Soon,” Bolan promised, and turned a concerned face to Kessler.

  “Who were you talking to?” the guy wanted to know.

  “Never mind,” Bolan told him. “It’s bad news. Jean Russell is roaming around here somewhere, on her own. I intercepted her over on the big island and sent her to the rear. She didn’t get there.”

  Kessler groaned, and whatever he may have said with that despairing sound was lost in the crackling from Bolan’s left shoulder.

  “Flypaper to Striker. God, I see your tracks, guy.”

  “What’s your position?”

  “Directly overhead, at just about service ceiling. Five or six boats are streaming south in fast retreat. Any plans for those guys?”

  Bolan replied, “Alice is waiting for them. Let him worry it. How’s the visibility up there?”

  “Moon’s coming up, getting better all the time. What do you need?”

  “A lost sheep. In a boat, maybe. Can you see anything that might fit?”

  A moment later: “I see what could be a small swamp buggy fighting the current downstream from the lagoon. It’s uh, wait, I’ll get my night glasses.” Then: “Does this lost sheep have long blonde hair?”

  Bolan said, “Bingo. Thanks, Jack.” He turned to Kessler but the guy was already bounding down the slope and running like hell toward the open water.

  Out there somewhere in the moonlight was going to be a joyous reunion.

  And that was great with Bolan. Something along that line awaited him, too, he hoped.

  He grinned and punched his shoulder button, again. “Come and get me, Jack,” he requested, suddenly tired as hell. “Thursday is over.”

  20

  EPILOGUE

  Someone was banging on the door with a persistent rhythm and April was murmuring, “Oh, no, for God’s sake, no—Mack, make them go away.”

  He clinched a towel to his waist, lit a cigarette, and went to the door.

  Brognola stood just outside on the cargo deck of the Starlifter, hat in hand, apologetic smile on the tired face.

  Bolan sighed and said, “Come on in, Hal.”

  The fed replied, “No, I don’t, uh, want to intrude on anything. I see you’re all buttoned down for the night. I guess we’ll be lifting off pretty soon. Other vehicles are just about all loaded. But I, uh, thought you may sleep better with an update.”

  Bolan told him, “I’d much rather take it sitting down, Hal. Come on in. We’ll make some coffee.”

  “No, no. I’ll just be a sec. They finally got the water shut off.”

  “That’s good. Guess I excessed it a bit, there.”

  “No real harm done. Actually the ’glades were getting a bit dry in that region. They needed it. What I really came to tell you … Interior Department has put a seal on Satan’s Hammock and a couple of bureaus are sending experts down for a full evaluation. So … who can say? It may turn out to be another world wonder or else the stickiest security problem we’ve had in years. It’ll take a while to sort it out. Meanwhile your friend Kessler has filled in a lot of blank spots. He’s a good cop, kept his eyes and ears open the whole while. Your guess was pretty well on target. They were lining up the entire American market for illegal narcotics. I’ve got, uh, some input from Lyons on that. Tell you about it tomorrow. But that was just for starters, probably. God knows what it would have eventually led to. But narcotics alone would have made the investment worthwhile. We’re talking about a fifty-billion-dollar-a-year industry. Couldn’t exactly call that a cottage industry, could you.”

  “Not quite, no. Come on in, Hal.”

  “No, that’s all. Get your rest, you earned it. Oh … also … the divers recovered eight bodies from that hole. Two were dead from gunshot wounds, the others apparently drowned. Anderson was among them.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Yeah. Thought you might want to know that.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Oh—and, uh, Grimaldi has come over, officially. We figured it’s better that way. He may have been dangerously compromised during this operation.”

  “Glad to hear that. Jack will make you an excellent hand. I’ve been worried about his security, myself.”

  “We convinced him that he should start worrying, too. We don’t know how many people managed to escape the big island. And, of course …”

  “What was the bodycount?”

  “Twenty-eight. And it could go up. But less than a dozen have been positively identified.”

  “Papriello?”

  “Nothing positive, no. Several bodies were dug out of the ruins of the main house. But, uh, they were still trying to put the pieces together, last I heard. I’ll, uh, try to get a complete report for your, uh, files.”

  Bolan sighed and said, “Okay, thanks. Either come in or say goodnight, Hal.”

  “I’m leaving. Oh—did April tell you? Santelli and his bunch were back on the street thirty minutes after we booked them. They’re under surveillance, though. Right now they’re on a flight to Washington.”

  “We’ll worry that one tomorrow,” Bolan told him. “Goodnight, Hal.”

  “Goodnight Hey. What the hell you think I been standing out here jawing for? Don’t you have something to tell me? Maybe I could rest better, too.”

  Bolan grinned. “Like what?”

  “Like what the hell happens on Sunday.”

  “Didn’t April tell you? I made that decision when I was seven years old.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Private joke. Don’t worry it. I’ll be in Wonderland on Sunday.”

  Brognola huffed a sigh of relief. “That’s wonderful. Okay. Go back to bed, dammit. And get some rest while you’re there. We’ve got a tough one coming up tomorrow.”

  The chief fed spun on his heels and walked away.

  Bolan closed the door, flung his towel toward the command deck, and rejoined his lady.

  Thursday was over, yeah. But Thursday’s heat was still going strong. “Now, where were we?” April purred, snuggling to him.

  Nowhere. They were nowhere. And, at a moment like this, it was the only place to be.

  Tomorrow would take care of tomorrow.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Executioner series

  CHAPTER 1

  BACK DOOR

  Leo Turrin was completing a hazardous personal contact with Mack Bolan, and was preparing to disembark from the latter’s rolling command post, when Bolan’s driver, the lovely April Rose, sent back
a tense report.

  “I believe there’s trouble at the back door,” the girl called through the intercom.

  Bolan’s eyes moved farther than his lips as he snapped back, “Read it!”

  “I read it one hundred yards to the rear and maintaining through the last three turns. Large sedan with at least two radiating bodies aboard. Unable refine beyond that.”

  “Friend or Foe!” Bolan commanded.

  “Tried it already,” April reported. “Negative. No transponder response.”

  Turrin growled. “Dammit! They’re on me! I’d have sworn I was clean! Dammit, I—”

  “Local cops, maybe,” Bolan suggested tautly. “Let’s try some ears.” He quickly fired up the war room’s communications console and brought a pair of scanners on the line, at the same moment calling forward to the con, “Give us some stretch, April.”

  The big cruiser abruptly turned east into a subdivision and accelerated smoothly along a darkened residential street.

  “Read it!”

  “Target is slowing. Target is … okay, right behind us again and now accelerating. The range is one-four-zero yards and closing fast.”

  The radio scanners were revealing absolutely no activity on the police bands.

  A moment later, April reported, “Target resumed one hundred yards and maintaining. It’s a glue job.”

  Turrin muttered, “I told you it was pure paranoia out there. They must have tagged me at the airport. Now isn’t this a hell of a mess.”

  “Not yet,” Bolan growled. He gave the girl some terse instructions, then told Turrin, “Stay with April, Leo. If the worse gets worse, you know what to do.”

  Before the double-lifer from New York could even bat an eye in response to that, the big guy was at the door and the cruiser was in another abrupt turn, slowing momentarily. Then Bolan was out of there and instantly lost in the darkness outside.

  Turrin’s heart was hammering at his ribs as he quickly went forward and took the con beside April Rose. Completely erased were all thoughts of identity games with this lady. She was slowly bringing the big rig to a halt and peering intently at a reddish—glowing electronic screen, which was mounted in the cockpit. “The famous suck play,” she said in a hushed voice, eyes still on the screen. “They’re slowing. They’re stopping. Target is at rest. Okay. It’s okay. He’ll check it out. If they’re clean …”

  His consciousness was dividing, part of it admiring the cool professionalism of this woman, another part marveling once again at the sophisticated systems that were packed into this battleship-on-land, but most of him just worried as hell and feeling miserable about the jeopardy he’d brought here. Not that it was anything new. Extreme jeopardy had been a routine way of life for both men for as long as either could remember. Eyeball encounters such as this one could do nothing but compound the dangers. There were times, of course, when the advantages of a personal meeting were felt to outweigh the risk, and this had been one of those times.

  Hell …

  The relationship with Bolan went back a long ways. And it had been a damned productive one, in many respects. Leo Turrin lived more than a double life. When Bolan had entered the picture, it had become a triple life—and there had been some outrageous times when “the life” seemed to expand into infinite partitions.

  Though a blood nephew to the late Sergio Frenchi, who was a founding father of La Cosa Nostra—and despite the fact he’d been a “made man” since early in his youth—Turrin had returned from military service in Vietnam determined to help break the invisible, but smothering grasp that organized crime was exerting on all of the nation’s institutions. The federal authorities were naturally delighted to have such a well-placed convert. They had given him the code name “Sticker,” a fitting tag since it was Turrin’s assignment to rise as high as possible within the ranks of Mafia power, providing the government with as much intelligence as he could without compromising his position within the hierarchy. Which had not been an easy job, at the best of times. Then when Bolan came along …

  Shi—i—i—t.

  Leo had been a lieutenant, or caporegime, in his Uncle Sergio’s western Massachusetts crime family—in Bolan’s home town of Pittsfield. He had actually played a part, though a small one, in the tragedy which struck the Bolan family and brought Sergeant Mack slamming home from Vietnam.

  That was when Leo Turrin’s “life” had really become complicated.

  For a tense period, during that opening battle, Turrin had been one of Bolan’s prime targets. He’d escaped with his life only after risking it all to reveal his true role to the rampaging jungle fighter.

  As a matter of historical record, Leo Turrin was the sole survivor of the Frenchi hierarchy, in the ashes left by Mack Bolan. For that matter, he was one of the few ranking men to ever survive an eye-to-eye confrontation with that guy. Moreover, it was another matter of historical record that the two men had worked together briefly in an open relationship during those incubatory days, before Bolan brought his war raging to the surface, and was meanwhile posing as a Mafia recruit in Turrin’s cadre.

  Talk about complications …

  Not only did the mob want Mack Bolan’s head in a sack, but the entire police establishment, including Turrin’s own feds, wanted his butt behind bars. And both sides had immediately begun looking to Leo Turrin as “the Bolan expert.”

  Infinite lives, yeah.

  There had never been a moment, though, when Leo Turrin was confused about the direction of his loyalties. He very deftly fielded all the demands from both sides of his street while walking blithely down the middle, hand in glove with Mack Bolan. And it had proved to be a highly rewarding relationship, entirely symbiotic to both partners. Each owed much to the other. Neither would have come so far alone, and both knew and respected this truth.

  It had only been very recently that the official hand of Washington had reached down in forgiveness and recognition to surreptitiously stroke Mack Bolan’s ruffled fur. The guy had, after all, broken just about every law in the book … many times over. What the government belatedly began to realize, though, Leo had known in the gut almost from the start. This guy Bolan was something different, entirely different. The world had probably not seen his like since the age of chivalry. The motivations of this superb fighter had nothing to do with any vendetta or revenge mentality. Bolan’s commitment was much too wide, and far too deep, to be powered by such shallow preoccupations. The family tragedy had served only as a sparking, as an awakening to truth. Bolan was, to put it as simply as possible, a guy who could not turn away from that truth. He’d broken the law, sure—but not out of any disrespect for that law.

  Indeed, Bolan had broken the law because he had seen no other way to preserve it for those who deserved its protections. Hell, the Mob was running high, wide and handsome—taking what they wanted when they wanted it. And he saw that “the law” would not or could not contain them.

  Well … Bolan had an answer for the Mob.

  He perceived them as a nation within the nation, as an enemy nation bent on the destruction of all the noble American ideals. They were using our own noble rules against us—and winning—but here was a guy who would not sit still and let them win. In his own way, he reacted. It was not Leo’s way. It was not a cop’s way. Mack Bolan was a soldier, and a damned good one. He merely did what good soldiers do when their country is in jeopardy—he went to war. And whatever anyone else might call it, Leo Turrin knew that it was a glorious war, a worthy war, a damned deadly necessary war.

  And he was winning it, yes.

  Unless …

  April Rose was fiddling with the console controls. She flashed a sympathetic glance at her passenger and murmured, “Don’t blame yourself. These things happen, Sticker.”

  “Not usually twice,” the Sticker growled.

  She was refining the focus of the optics system and “augmenting” the infrared with laser pulses. Fantastic damned systems, yeah. A hellishly red image was beginning to flicker
from the screen now, the picture somewhat like that of a film negative weirdly lit from behind by red lights. The outlines of an automobile glowed feebly within that image, behind which the brighter negatives of two men were framed in a tight two-shot from the shoulders up, both heads turned to the right as though peering through the window on the passenger side.

  This ghastly image had hardly resolved when bright red pencil-flashes erupted just beyond the window, two quick pulses which streaked across the viewscreen to terminate at each human skull, jerking both of them into a sudden displacement down and away.

  April’s own head jerked slightly in empathetic reaction, and she let out a soft little sigh.

  Turrin squeezed the girl’s shoulder, muttered, “Hang tough, kid,” and went out of there.

  He met his pal the warrior at about the halfway mark along the dark street and told him, quite humbly, “I’m sorry, Sarge.”

  “Not as sorry as them,” Bolan replied in a matter-of-fact tone. He was removing a strange-looking silencer from his Beretta pistol—one of his own developments, no doubt.

  “Them who?”

  “Ike and Mike Baldaserra. What’s their connection, these days?”

  Turrin whistled softly and said, “I dunno. Last I heard of those two, they were doing time in Atlanta.”

  Bolan agreed with that. “That’s my make, too. Maybe you could find out, very discreetly, who’s sponsoring them and why they tailed you from New York.”

  “Did they do that?” Turrin inquired with a sigh.

  “The airline stubs in Mike’s pocket make it look that way. And the car is an airport Avis. That doesn’t read like a direct local conection. Do you think?”

  Turrin shook his head and said, “Guess not. Damn. Well, maybe that’s a blessing. Or maybe it’s not.”

  “Depends on what you like the best,” Bolan agreed.