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  “He’s probably long gone,” Palmieri whispered back from the stairway.

  “So what the hell did he want here?” Ciglia growled.

  “What did he want at Gulfport?” Gallardo commented, with obvious petulance. And it was the wrong thing to say, to the wrong man, at the wrong time.

  Ciglia lashed out in the darkness at the sound of that sneering voice, catching the offender with an open-handed slap that sent him sprawling onto the shattered railing at the bottom of the stairs.

  Steve Rocco’s defeated tones rose from the darkness to fill the embarrassed silence that followed and to cap the events of the night. “Boss, I got to tell you this. It was Bolan, okay. He held a cannon to my head and made me yell while he tossed grenades. It was a setup. He didn’t want anyone coming down those stairs. He wanted up there, boss. He wanted the upstairs to himself.”

  Palmieri’s big feet were already pounding up the stairway. Lights went on up there as he rounded the curve and hurried on to the top level. Even Gallardo was galvanized into action, reaching the second floor just behind the chief bodyguard and racing into the master suite at full gallop.

  All was silent below until Palmieri’s quiet report floated down the stairwell. “The old man’s gone, Jerry.”

  “So’s your woman,” Gallardo added breathlessly.

  Ciglia growled, “Can you beat that. Now why do you suppose—”

  “What the hell could Bolan want with that old man?” Jake Rio wondered aloud.

  “Nothing good,” Palmieri said testily as he descended the stairs.

  Jerry Ciglia hobbled to a chair and dropped into it with a tired sigh. He said, “Somebody find me a cigarette. And let’s have some lights on. The bastard’s long gone from here now. He got what he wanted.”

  Gallardo brought a cigarette box and a lighter. Ciglia thanked him, then told him, “Hey, Homer—I apologize, huh? I’m sorry I swatted you.”

  “It’s okay, boss. I earned it.”

  “Go up and get me some clothes, huh?”

  Gallardo grinned and hurried back upstairs.

  Someone had found a functioning lamp in the shattered room and turned it on. Steve Rocco sat in a miserable heap on the couch, head in his hands. Everything looked much worse in the light.

  “Well well,” Ciglia mused.

  Nate Palmieri locked gazes with him for a quiet moment, then said, “Guess I better make that call.”

  “Yeah,” Ciglia said quietly. “We’re going to get that old man back, Nate.”

  “I guess we better.”

  “I guess we damn well better.” Ciglia sucked nervously on the cigarette and his eyes danced to some inner drummer as the full implications of that night in St. Louis descended upon him. “You got a good look at the guy, Stevie?” he asked quietly.

  “Not really,” Rocco replied in a muffled voice. “It was dark. I thought it was Huck, at first. He had this flashlight in my eyes. First I knew of trouble, this big cannon was in my face. Then the guy drops one of those medals … and that got to me, boss. I’m sorry but it just blew me out. He’s standing there talking to me in this graveyard voice, looking holes through me. It was him, all right—everything I ever heard about the guy—and he had me shivered.” Rocco swayed to his feet and staggered over to confront his boss head on. “I’m not trying to alibi it,” he declared emotionally. “Just telling it like it was. That guy is—is …”

  Ciglia’s gaze dropped as he murmured, “I know, Steve—I know. Look—the day crew will be here pretty soon. Go on to bed. You look like hell.” The big houseman gave Nate Palmieri a whipped look and slowly climbed the stairs.

  Jake Rio was nervously pacing the floor just outside the blast zone. Ciglia sent him outside with instructions for the handling of the dead.

  Palmieri was at the telephone. He showed his boss a conspiratorial smile and quietly announced, “It’s noisy, but it’s working. What do I tell them?”

  “Tell them,” Ciglia soberly instructed, “that our pigeon has come to us. Tell them I want a steel curtain around this town. Tell them I want to see blood running in the streets. Tell them it’s open season on the old bunch—no exceptions—I want a clean sweep. Tell them—you know what to tell them, Nate.”

  Palmieri smiled coldly and spoke into the telephone. “Hello, Charlie. It’s going down right now. The big one. Boss says Scramble Alert. You got any questions?”

  He cradled the telephone and turned a smooth face to his boss. “Charlie had no questions.”

  “Okay, now try to get through to New York. Tell them the same thing you told Charlie.”

  “What if they ask about the old man?”

  “Tell them that old man is dead and just waiting now for his burial. Tell them we’re rounding up all his loyal subjects and inviting them to the services.” He smiled hugely. “You know what to tell them about that old man, Nate.”

  “That old man” was, at that moment, resting in good hands on the back seat of Bolan’s rented vehicle, his head pillowed on Toni Blancanales’s lap.

  “He’s breathing good,” the girl reported to the man up front.

  “Conscious?”

  “In and out. I believe he’s stronger than he seems.”

  “Great,” Bolan said. “I hope your maternal instincts are flowering because he’s your new assignment. I want you to mother-hen him night and day. Get some nourishment into him, but carefully. You can’t risk a doctor or any outside help, so it’s all up to you. Got me?”

  “Got you,” she replied. “Do you have a hideout in mind?”

  “That’s where we’re headed.”

  “Have you seen the boys?” she inquired, referring to her partners.

  “I have,” he assured her. “They’re okay.”

  She sighed. “I guess they’re upset with me. I couldn’t risk a contact. That guy Ciglia hasn’t let me out of his sight since Monday night. Mack—wherever you’re taking me, I’ll need some clothes. I can’t run around in this condition—not even in the company of a ninety-nine-year-old man.”

  He chuckled. “Especially not. We’ll take care of that.”

  “Are you on our case now?”

  “Not exactly. But I expect it’ll work out to the same effect.”

  “I hope so,” she said, pouting just a bit. “I was getting awfully close.”

  “It’s all the same bag of worms, Toni. Touch one and it travels to them all. What were they hoping to get from Giamba?”

  “I’m not sure. Whatever it is, they want it awfully bad. Jerry Ciglia is going to be very upset with you.”

  Bolan chuckled quietly at that.

  He hoped Toni was correct. He wanted Ciglia upset enough to come out swinging with every punch he had. A dangerous game, sure, but the only game to play with an infestation such as this one. He had to bring them out of the woodwork everywhere, primed for a showdown and committed to an all-out war.

  And that was Bolan’s game.

  “This old man is pathetic,” Toni commented dolefully. “I know—he’s probably been as big a rat as any of them, in his time, but this is awful, it’s inhuman. He’s skin and bones.”

  “This old man,” Bolan told her, “is worse than a rat. He’s a piranha, and he’s stripped more bones than you’ve seen. He crawled from the same bag as those others, and don’t for a minute forget that. He’d zap you with a switchblade from his deathbed, and don’t forget that.”

  “This old man, he played one,” Toni crooned softly, recalling the lyrics of a childhood song.

  “One too many,” Bolan told her.

  Yeah. Give a dog a bone.

  “This old man went rolling home.” She sang it like a lullaby, unknowingly voicing the very thought that was in Bolan’s mind.

  Damn right.

  That, too, was Bolan’s game in St. Louis.

  3: THE GUY

  The Giamba empire had been under official police scrutiny for months, ever since Ciglia and his New York troops moved in on the territory. A special tactical intelli
gence unit headed by Lt. Tom Postum of SLPD had been given prime responsibility for maintaining cognizance of the shifting patterns of underworld power in the area, and Postum’s unit was locked into a very tight cooperative liaison with an FBI task force established for the same purpose.

  And the patterns had been shifting dramatically.

  Several aged members of the Giamba Family had quietly “retired” and left the country. A few others had “gone over,” accepting minor roles in the new crime organizaton being forged by newcomer Jerry Ciglia. Most, however, had simply dropped from view—either out of loyalty to Giamba or distrust of Ciglia—and appeared to be awaiting some word or sign from Giamba himself, who was also mysteriously submerged.

  Little credence had been given to rumors of Giamba’s voluntary exile to Latin America. Such a move could be checked out and verified; there was no evidence to support the rumors. It was also generally believed in police circles that old man Giamba was still alive and “lying low” somewhere in the St. Louis area. The situation therefore seemed dangerously unstable and highly explosive. Some official worriers were predicting an imminent and unavoidable street war and, indeed, informant rumors of a Ciglia purge of Giamba loyalists had been growing day by day.

  The Giamba mansion had been under direct surveillance for weeks, as were several other known centers of mob activity in the area. Telephone wiretaps had been authorized and instituted, and what small intelligence could be gleaned from the enigmatic mutterings harvested from that source only served to deepen official fears of a full-scale shootout between the dissident underworld factions.

  Tom Postum was prepared for the worst, then, after being roused from his bed in the early morning hours with the report of an “apparent bombing” in the Giamba residence. He immediately relayed that information to his superior at Tactical Command, then hurriedly dressed and lost no time getting to headquarters for a full assessment of developments there.

  Postum calculated a spread of less than twenty minutes from receipt of the call in his bed to the moment he walked through the door at Tac Command. Yet his watch commander was waiting for him with phone in hand and baffled curiosity on his face.

  “Guy on here says he’s Mack Bolan,” the sergeant reported. “Asked for you by name. Says he has important information for you.”

  Postum frowned as he replied to that, “No time for games, Willis. I want to set up a—”

  “Better take the call, Lieutenant. Whoever this guy is, he seems to know all about the blast at Giamba’s.”

  Postum snatched the phone and spoke sharply into it. “What’s the game here?”

  A voice of quiet authority replied, “It’s no game, Postum. I want you to know that I have Little Artie under my wing. He’s alive and safe—for the moment, anyway. Now Ciglia, unless I’ve misread the guy completely, will be moving quickly to cut losses and consolidate his position. He—”

  “Just a damn minute!” the cop snarled. “I believe you are Mack Bolan!”

  “That’s what I’ve always been told,” that voice quietly replied. “Do you want to hear this or don’t you?”

  Postum gave the watch commander a confirming nod of the head and an eye signal, then resumed the conversation while the other cop scrambled over to the intercept system.

  “How long have you been in our town, Gangbuster?” he asked casually.

  “Long enough to know the size of the problem,” was the cool reply. “Ciglia is in full charge here, now—working a franchise directly from New York. He’s going to turn your town and your state into a mob playground like there’s never been before, or so he believes. He just might pull it off, too, if he can get past the problem of one frail old man.”

  “Giamba, of course.”

  “Right. Ciglia has been trying to finesse through a smooth transfer of power to save local fireworks but Artie wouldn’t play that game, not even under starvation and other subtle tortures. Finesse really isn’t Ciglia’s normal game. I believe he’s been acting under restraints from the New York head shed. Now that I have Giamba, those restraints mean nothing. Ciglia has probably already written the old man off as dead. I’m expecting him to be moving very quickly now along the other path.”

  Postum could hardly believe the audacity of the bastard. “Do you know what you’ve done, dude?” he asked disgustedly.

  “Sure,” that strong voice replied. “I’ve killed the hopes for a smooth transfer of power. I read that as a plus, not a minus.”

  “What’s this plus-minus bullshit?” Postum spat bitterly. “I’m talking about blood in the streets, man! You’ve thrown the town into a gang war, that’s what you’ve done!”

  “Which simply means that the town has a fighting chance,” the cool bastard replied. “Isn’t that better than total defeat? How would you like to be carrying your morning reports to a mob torpedo for the rest of your life, Postum?”

  The lieutenant from Tac Intelligence simply could not believe this guy! He sputtered, “I’m not debating the ethics of—with a … what the hell is this, mister? You’ve got a hell of a goddamned nerve calling me up like this and …”

  The guy at the other end of that tense line was chuckling quietly at Postum’s rage. The cop shut himself off abruptly and flashed a sheepish grin at the watch commander.

  “You’re something else—do you know that?” he said calmly to the most wanted man in America. “Are you the one bombed the Giamba place awhile ago?”

  “I am. It was just a couple of flash grenades, but it got what I wanted.”

  “Uh huh. What else do you want, Bolan?”

  “Twenty-four hours.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Twenty-four hours of what?”

  “Police cooperation.”

  “There you go again! You’re a loony, guy!”

  “Maybe so,” the guy said, sighing a bit sadly. “But I keep on hoping. Look, Postum, I called you because I’ve been assured that you’re an intelligent cop. And you are in the tactical game so why not think tactics? Let the war rage. Look the other way, and give it twenty-four hours. The enemy will engage itself and I’ll be in there helping both sides exterminate the other. This time tomorrow I’ll be out of your town, and what’s left of the local mob and their corrupted politicians won’t be worth the expense of jailing.”

  “That’s crazy and you know it. I can’t sell a—”

  “I know you can’t.” The guy chuckled again. It sounded like ice clinking into a deep glass. “That’s the major difference, I guess, between a cop and a soldier. I am a soldier, Postum. And I have to think tactics. Actually, I called to tell you that the war is definitely on, and to suggest that you get your quiet cops to safety.”

  “What quiet cops?”

  “Your intelligence unit has, at my count, a minimum of six undercover men working the—”

  “Okay, okay!” Postum interrupted quickly. It made him nervous to hear even departmental officials discussing his undercover operations. Here this guy was.… “Now let me tell you something, Bolan. I appreciate your concern for the safety of police officers but it doesn’t buy you a damn thing. We’re not looking the other way here, mister, and we don’t need your kind of help to solve our problems. What’s more, if I—”

  “Sorry,” the guy cut in. “My time is up. Good talking to you, Postum. Stay hard.”

  The line clicked dead and the Tac lieutenant turned his irritation to the watch commander.

  “Not enough time,” the sergeant reported, shaking his head. “It came through a north side exchange. That’s as far as we got.”

  “That damn guy,” Postum said wonderingly. “Did you hear that damn guy?”

  The watch commander was smiling soberly. “Too bad, isn’t it? Sounds like an okay guy. Tragic. Very tragic.”

  “Save that shit for his funeral service,” the lieutenant savagely commented. “But don’t bother to write it down—there won’t be time enough to forget it.”

  “Mack Bolan,” the sergeant went on, his tone u
naltered, “in St. Louis. Can you beat that? I never suspected the guy would turn up here.”

  “Don’t make it sound like such an honor,” Postum growled. He was moving toward his office as he spoke. “Pull that tape and make sure you got a good print. Then call the captain and tell him I want to bring it in for his evaluation.”

  “Oh—I meant to tell you. He’s called a meeting of unit heads, his office, in …” the sergeant glanced at the clock, “… five minutes.”

  “Check that tape,” Postum called back. “I’ll take it with me.”

  He went into his office and closed the door, then sat on the edge of his desk, pulled a knee up and clasped it in both hands, and allowed the pent grin to break across his usually sober face.

  “That damn guy,” he murmured admiringly.

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  About the Author

  Don Pendleton (1927–1995) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He served in the US Navy during World War II and the Korean War. His first short story was published in 1957, but it was not until 1967, at the age of forty, that he left his career as an aerospace engineer and turned to writing full time. After producing a number of science fiction and mystery novels, in 1969 Pendleton launched his first book in the Executioner saga: War Against the Mafia. The series, starring Vietnam veteran Mack Bolan, was so successful that it inspired a new American literary genre, and Pendleton became known as the father of action-adventure.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author᾿s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1975 by Pinnacle Books, Inc.