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  “What’d you say?” Anders asked.

  Bolan had not been aware that he’d said anything. But the moment passed as he replied, “I said that’s too long.”

  “Maybe not. I keep hearing whispers.”

  “Like what?”

  “You hear of a Chinese guy called Chung?”

  Bolan nodded. “Local muscle.”

  “Right, with full franchise to flex it whenever and wherever. Has a place over on the big island, secret place. The whispers say that Chung keeps political prisoners over there.”

  “For what purpose?” Bolan wondered aloud.

  Anders shrugged. “Maybe for fun and games, maybe for something else.”

  “How many are working this with you?”

  “Right now, just me,” Anders replied, sighing. “The local authorities are clued in, but only at the very highest levels. We’re afraid to show a hand at this stage of things.”

  “You want me to butt out?” Bolan asked quietly.

  “No. You’re here, you may as well wade right in. The water’s warm already. Bring it to a boil. Maybe something good will float to the top.”

  “Okay.” Bolan placed money on the table and got to his feet.

  “Where’re you headed?” Anders inquired, tightlipped.

  “Upstairs.”

  The comic sighed. “I know better than to say anything about that. But you’re crazy, you know. Maybe you got in there once, but you’ll never do it twice in the same night.”

  Bolan smiled and again shook hands. “Great to see you again, Anders. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Sure.”

  “If you have any silent friends in the woodwork, now’s the time to tell me.”

  “I told you, there’s no one.”

  Bolan smiled again and went out.

  He took a small arcade to the main lobby and approached the security desk, scowling. A uniformed guard greeted him pleasantly enough, but the guy was obviously edgy.

  Bolan allowed his shoulder harness to show briefly as he opened his coat to produce an official badge wallet which he flashed at the guy and immediately returned to his pocket. “Fourteenth floor,” he said brusquely. “Disturbance report. Your people check it out?”

  “Well, sure,” the guard replied, his smile still hanging in there. “I called in the okay on that nearly an hour ago.” He snorted as he explained, “Damn flock of birds flew right against a window up there.”

  “I’ll have to check it out,” Bolan insisted. He snared the building register and signed in.

  The guard was protesting, “Well, wait, I better call …” as Bolan moved on to the elevators.

  The guy had the phone to his ear as Bolan stepped into the car and punched off. There would be a reception awaiting him up there, sure. He sprung the Beretta and threaded the silencer aboard, then closed his left fist around a spare clip and waited for that door to slide open.

  He was going in cold, with only the haziest idea concerning the lay of that hellground up there, and less than an hour after a hard-punch hit on the same joint.

  A hellground in the sky, sure—that’s what it would be.

  So what was new? There was nothing new between life and death, not for a guy like Mack Bolan.

  All corners of hell smelled the same.

  3: Blitzing

  Four men were waiting for him in the small lobby at the fourteenth floor, but they obviously were not perpared for a blitz-in. It was a “cop set” of studied looseness—one guy idly shuffling papers at a tiny desk near the elevator, another seated casually in an overstuffed chair along the wall, a matched pair lounging against a door at the far end, above which was mounted a closed-circuit television camera.

  Hardsite security, sure. But not hard enough.

  Bolan exploded into the lobby with the Beretta singing, the first round finding headbone at the desk and sending the paper shuffler toppling backward, round two arching wallward and punching the lounger into a sideways dive, chair and all.

  The lightning one-two caught the whole set with reflexes frozen or dead. Rounds three and four spat across that small lobby to nail the two guys at the door before stunned nerves could react. The fifth round shattered the television camera and the rest of the clip tore the locking mechanism out of the door to the inner sanctum.

  Bolan was ejecting the spent clip and clicking in the replacement as he moved swiftly into the “cool room” where earlier Joey Puli had awaited his audience with the boss of Oahu. Only a few heartbeats had elapsed since the man from death erupted from that elevator. He was moving on tight, blitzing numbers which would make utter failure of the slightest hesitancy. There was therefore no lost motion as he entered the security cubicle and instantly read the situation there.

  The inner door was of the heavy, security-interlock type—perhaps even electronically sealed. Bolan wasted no precious seconds on that door. Without breaking stride, he seized the wooden chair which had last accommodated Puli and heaved it into the mirrored wall. It kept right on going, taking a large area of the wall with it. Bolan dived into the wreckage, with no idea of what he was leaping into other than a flash impression of scrambling bodies in electric reaction.

  The security cell was dimly lit, small, unfurnished except for a couple of stools and a control console. Three men were in there: one now lying on the floor and groaning in the wreckage, another backed against the wall and waving a gun, the other moving quickly toward a door.

  The Beretta coughed in instant reaction to the most immediate challenge. The hardman at the wall died with eyes bugging and weapon firing reflexively into the ceiling. The guy at the door snapped off a wild shot as he disappeared into another room. The one on the floor was dazedly trying to find a path to his weapon when a Parabellum whanger opened his pathway to hell instead.

  Bolan assimilated the security layout of that fourteenth floor suite with a quick glance at the electronic console. It was exactly as his intelligence probes had indicated: Oliveras was almost paranoid in his security precautions. Every door in the joint was interlocked through this master panel.

  The blitz artist paused only long enough to energize the master unlock control before charging on through the doorway. He reached that point just as the third man was sprinting through an arched doorway at the far end of a larger room. The Beretta coughed in pursuit, her zinging little missile overtaking the prey and punching him forward in a face-down slide to nowhere.

  The guy could have been headed for only one point. Bolan followed that trail to its logical end, a room at the outside wall protected by a massive door with ornate hardware.

  The door was several inches ajar but swinging closed when Bolan got there. He hit it at full gallop and went right on through. A small guy at the opposite side was caught in the backswing; he was stumbling backwards, falling, a snubbed .38 in one paw discharging into the floor. A Parabellum sizzler exploded into the guy’s face as Bolan ran over him and moved on into a large, lavishly decorated room.

  It was a bedroom, and more, sporting a circular bed outfitted with a variety of kinky devices. There was also a bar, a sunken bath, a small gym in one corner, an efficiency kitchen, a miscellany of overstuffed furniture. Oliveras evidently did most of his living here in this one room. But not at the moment.

  Joey Puli was the only occupant of the room. He was tied to a chrome kitchen chair near the bed. His mouth was bleeding, his face puffy and discolored. The little Hawaiian stared at the new arrival with haunted eyes and muttered, “Look at what you got me into.”

  Bolan growled, “Where’s Oliveras?”

  Those glazed eyes shifted to the far side of the room. “Hiding in the closet.”

  Indeed he was. Wearing silk pajamas and holding a snifter of brandy as though it were a gun, dulled eyes flicking in search of some way out of the box, the Lord of Oahu greeted Judgment with a despairing groan.

  From two paces out, Bolan flipped a death medal into the brandy glass and quietly announced, “There you go.”

&
nbsp; The fat man leaned weakly against a rack of five-hundred-dollar suits and groaned, “Wait. Let’s be sure about this.”

  “I’m sure,” Bolan said coldly. “Kiss it goodbye, guy.”

  “Wait. Please. We can work this out. Anything you want. Just name it, you got it. I’m a rich man. I can give—”

  Bolan stepped back and commanded, “Get out of there.”

  Oliveras grabbed the door jamb and pulled himself upright, then all but fell into the room. The glass dropped and rolled across the floor, spilling its contents.

  “I’m a sick man,” Oliveras whimpered.

  Bolan shoved him to a chair opposite Puli as he replied to that. “Not for long,” he assured the guy. “Unless you know some way to make me very happy.”

  “Whatever you say. I swear. Anything.”

  The guy desperately wanted to live. How desperately, though?

  Bolan quietly asked him, “Why all the mobbing-up here in Hawaii?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Oliveras muttered.

  “Then you’re not going to make me very happy.” Bolan turned a frigid gaze toward Puli. “You want to do the honors, Joey?”

  “Just untie me and then watch me,” the Hawaiian huffed.

  “Wait a minute,” Oliveras said quickly. “You mean people like Dominick and Flora?”

  “Yeah. People like that.”

  “I’m not really in that. Protocol says, sure—they check in with me then go on their own way. But I don’t know what they’re doing here.”

  “Who’s sending them?”

  “Well—you know.”

  “Tell me so I’ll know for sure.”

  “The old men.”

  “Which old men?”

  “You know.” The fat man was fidgeting uncomfortably, eyes downcast, studying his hands. “The council-men.”

  La Commissione. Sure, Bolan knew that. But these people had the fear of omerta born into them. Such innate defenses had to be approached properly.

  “You’re telling me nothing, guy!” Bolan declared in an icy voice. “My time is up. So is yours.”

  “Wait! This is level! I’m nothing to those people—nothing! And they tell me nothing!”

  “So what should I wait for, Oliveras?”

  Those troubled eyes rolled upwards and the big man shuddered under the onslaught of conflicting emotions. “Chung,” he sobbed, the voice barely audible.

  “What about Chung?”

  Another shudder, then: “He’s the center man.”

  “What’s he centering?”

  “I swear I don’t know.”

  The Beretta sighed without warning. The huge bulk of the boss of Oahu corkscrewed off the chair to land in a seated position on the floor. Joey Puli’s eyes flared wide, then closed above gritting teeth. Blood was pumping in bright spurts from a rip in Oliveras’ shoulder.

  The guy’s face was a total blank, head swiveled in stunned contemplation of the gushing wound. A huge hand flopped heavily to that area and fat fingers tried to stanch the flow.

  Bolan’s stiletto whipped through the sashcord that held Puli in his chair. “Your turn, Joey,” Bolan said as he freed the little guy’s hands. “You want to carve him or shoot him?”

  “Wait!” shrieked the bleeding man from the floor. “Chung has a place over on Hawaii, the big island. Something big, something really hot! I don’t know where it is, exactly. In some valley, away from things. Big place!”

  Bolan made no comment to that. He was staring at Puli. “Well?”

  “The knife,” Puli replied weakly, on to the game now and bravely trying to carry his end of it. “I’ll take him a piece at a time.”

  That was the end of Oliveras’ omerta—the sacred oath of silence. He struggled to his knees, babbling in the release. There was not much to be made from it in the form of hard intelligence, but Bolan went away from there convinced that he now knew at least as much as Oliveras himself knew about the “big thing” in Hawaii. He also went away with pretty good directions to the next front.

  They left the boss of Oahu kneeling drunkenly in his own blood on his bedroom floor, and Bolan and Puli withdrew through the carnage of an Executioner hard hit, then descended to the main lobby via the elevator.

  They paused at the guard desk while Bolan tersely reported to a confused security cop. “It wasn’t birds, guy. You’d better call Honolulu Central and tell them to bring a meat bus with them.”

  Then they moved unchallenged through the lobby and out the door on the beach side.

  Puli, speaking stiffly through mangled lips, marveled, “You are something else, mister. Please don’t ever get mad at me. Or are you, anyway?”

  Bolan chuckled and told his new admirer, “You’re not the enemy, Joey.”

  “Thank God,” the little guy replied. And he said a silent prayer for all who were.

  Buy Hawaiian Hellground Now!

  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.

  Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-8573-4

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

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