Thermal Thursday Read online

  Thursday, yeah … hot Thursday … thermal Thursday. And so the day began.

  2

  TRULY ALIVE

  Harold Brognola had been in charge of the official U.S. government response to organized crime since shortly after Mack Bolan began his own unofficial war on the mob. The two men had been covert allies through much of the Bolan experience, exchanging intelligence and sometimes joining forces in joint operations against a common threat—but the chief fed had never been completely comfortable with his secret liaisons with a man who was also, at the same moment, prominent on the FBI’s most-wanted list. It was a question of not only official ethics but of personal principles, as well. Brognola was a man of strong moral fiber. The association with Bolan was therefore a troubling one, creating inner conflicts which sometimes approached crisis proportions.

  Once, in fact, Brognola had actually pulled the trigger on this man whom he admired and respected—whom, indeed, he loved like a brother. That the trigger pull did not result in Mack Bolan’s death was nothing to the credit or debit (however you chose to look at it) of Hal Brognola. Fate, or whatever, had intervened—and the remarkable outcome of all that was the incredible fact that Bolan understood and forgave, as though it had never happened. Not so incredible, though, when you really knew the man.

  For all of Brognola’s moral and ethical strength, he knew that Mack Bolan was far more the ideal man than Brognola himself would ever be. The guy was one of those flaming anachronisms, born far beyond his time, capable of a degree of personal commitment and dedication unmatched in modern men.

  Nor was the guy all blood and ice, either.

  In the words of a former Vietnam buddy, “The Sarge is a man who can carry both heart and guts in the same body at the same time.” Indeed—though Bolan had first earned his Executioner tag in the hellgrounds of Vietnam, he had also become quietly known among the medics there as Sergeant Mercy.

  Said one surgeon at a forward medical facility: “This man Bolan has singlehandedly done more for the American cause in the unpacified areas than any official program I know of.”

  It seemed that the Executioner—whose missions as a penetration specialist routinely took him into hostile territories—routinely carried with him unofficial gifts of much-needed medical supplies for the civilian victims of that savage time.

  “More often than not,” the surgeon said, “he came back with a dying old man or woman strapped to his back and a kid under each arm. The man has incredible strength and perseverance. I know personally of one occasion when he carried a maimed child through more than twenty miles of enemy country while under hot pursuit by the enemy. Not only that, he doctored the kid along the way and kept her alive. At his own great peril, of course. And that was only one of many such occasions. It wasn’t the medics who first began calling Bolan Sergeant Mercy. That’s the literal translation of the name given him by the villagers. But that wasn’t his job, you know. He’s not a medic.”

  No, Sergeant Mercy was not a medic. The enemy soldiers and officials knew him by another name, which translates as the Executioner. And he is perhaps the only soldier in modern times to have a price placed on his head by an enemy command.

  So … how to separate the pieces? Was Mack Bolan a cold and methodical killer or was he a courageous and compassionate champion of the human cause?

  Brognola had found the threads of separation and—in so doing—had discovered that there was no separation of the pieces of Mack Bolan’s character. The pieces all fit together into a coherent pattern to produce the total personality of a man who simply could not and would not turn away from his own vision of “right.”

  It was “right” that he kill certain individuals, only because he had become convinced that a higher and vital good was thereby being served. And, of course, that higher good was tied directly to his sense of compassion together with a willingness toward personal sacrifice.

  Ipso facto, Mack Bolan was at war with the mob.

  Also ipso facto, it was a total war utterly devoid of artificial restraints or personal reservations toward comfort and/or convenience.

  Most importantly, though, Bolan’s war was strongly discriminating and selective. It served no “good” whatever to sacrifice innocent victims in the pursuit of right. Unlike the terrorist mentality which killed and maimed indiscriminately in pursuit of a cause, Bolan’s war took excruciating pains to separate the guilty from the innocent, to define the enemy and isolate him within the parameters of a secure war zone before the shooting began.

  The guy had seen too much innocent suffering in Southeast Asia. He did not intend to inflict that same pain on his own people, at home. This was, indeed, the very thing that he was fighting against.

  So, no—Mack Bolan did not cruise Central Park tossing bombs at joggers as his response to crime in the streets. Nor was he a zealot who could justify any price paid for the success of his undertaking. Many times the guy had canceled a scheduled showdown or broke off in the midst of hostilities, at his own immense peril, because of innocent intruders into the scene.

  Paradoxical or not, the guy was practically a saint: a saint with a gun in one hand and a grenade in the other—either of which he would drop instantly to extend that hand to an innocent in need.

  A saint with bloody hands …

  Perhaps that was overstating the case but for Hal Brognola it was not a severe overstatement. Still, there were those troubling moments when the chief fed felt like a man who was balancing precariously upon the edge of a sharp knife. Even now, with the White House itself committed to and covertly supporting the operation, Brognola was uneasy in his role as prime backstop for Mack Bolan’s illegal war.

  And Bolan understood all that, of course. Hell, the guy would be the first to send Brognola packing. He had, in fact, tried to do that very thing many times. And since the furious progression of events during this “second mile” effort, Bolan’s most persistently spoken words were “Get off my shadow, Hal.”

  But, hell, there was no way to get off the guy’s shadow, now. Too much was at stake. It was not just Bolan’s life—it wasn’t just the elimination of a few pockets of organized crime. What was at stake, now, was a powderkeg international situation and very possibly the fate of a free America in a very restless and troubled world. A guy like Mack Bolan could spell a large difference in that equation. The man’s entire lifetime had been shaping and preparing him for this moment in history, a moment when man and situation coincided for a destined role in the further development of the nation. You could take all the generals and all the cops and roll them together and still not come up with as good a solution as that one man, Mack Bolan, had to offer to the growing problem of terrorist intrigue.

  So, yes, a lot was at stake.

  Brognola’s sole concern, now, was to deliver Mack Bolan whole and healthy to the man in the oval office at the conclusion of this second-mile stroll through hell. That could be a formidable task, especially when the guy in question kept growling, “Get off my shadow.”

  Complicating that situation was another individual who kept urging closer and closer involvement. That individual was presently pacing back and forth while glowering at a large wall chart of the Everglades region. And it helped not a whit that this individual was a subordinate in Brognola’s own department.

  Some individuals simply refuse to be subordinated.

  Especially some female individuals.

  Who also happen to be personally involved in a case. This one looked more like a Glamour model than a federal operative. And she was very deeply involved in the case at hand.

  “Stop pacing, dammit,” Brognola growled. “That isn’t going to buy you a thing.”

  “I don’t need a thing,” April Rose growled back. “And I guess he doesn’t, either. Why doesn’t he report in?”

  “Relax,” said the chief fed. “It’s only an hour past dawn. Give the guy some time, will you?”

  “An hour is plenty time enough,” she mused. “Have you ever be
en on the firing line with that man? Let me tell you, things happen very quickly when Striker is on the job.”

  Striker was, of course, Bolan. It was one of those little bureaucratic hypocrisies that he was never referred to by his own name during covert support. As though not mentioning the name somehow made it all nice and legal.

  “You’re right,” Brognola said, allowing his own anxiety to surface for a moment. “We’ll move on the area in thirty minutes, if there’s been no word by then.”

  “What’s wrong with right now?” April countered. She was a lovely girl—a tall, striking brunette with a body to make men’s minds wander—but she could also be irritatingly pushy, even from a subordinate position.

  “Back off, April,” Brognola gently commanded. “Don’t let personal feelings color your judgment. You have to give the guy room to operate. And you’d better learn that damn quick, if you mean to have a personal role in his life.”

  “What life?” she replied miserably. “It’s not a life. It’s a sort of death.”

  True, too true.

  But Bolan himself would have argued with that finding. “A man is not truly alive,” said an early entry in his personal journal, “until he has found something worth dying for.”

  Brognola told the anxious young lady: “Then that’s what you have to share with him, honey. A sort of death.”

  “He won’t even share that with me,” she sniffed.

  The chief fed sighed and gave his worried subordinate a tender hug. “What Striker has right now is not fit for sharing, particularly not with someone he loves. Try to understand that, from his viewpoint. And try to remember that it’s our job, yours and mine, to help him find something that is worth sharing.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” the lady whispered.

  “Then you help him first by understanding, and by respecting, and by giving him room. He knows what he’s doing and he’s damned good at what he does. But don’t add to the natural jeopardy by hovering about and looking on. We simply can’t do that.”

  “You’re saying I just have to accept him as he is, on his own terms, even if it’s over his own dead body.”

  “Yeah.” Brognola turned away from those suffering eyes. “But it’s only for a few more days. Give the guy that much.”

  And she would. She’d give the guy that much. But Brognola knew how difficult it could be. Hell … didn’t he love the guy like a brother? And wouldn’t he gladly share “a sort of death” with a man of Mack Bolan’s caliber? More, sure, more than that … he’d share the grave itself.

  Hal Brognola was something of a battle-line philosopher himself. And he had an understanding which was roughly equivalent to Bolan’s. It went something like this: To be truly dead, a man has only to disinvolve himself from the higher goals of humanity

  “We’re moving,” he announced suddenly, giving in to a gut decision.

  “You mean right now?”

  Yeah. He meant right now. A “sort of death” could be bad enough. To be “dead” was for sure a hard thing to contemplate. But to be among the “truly dead” was just downright intolerable.

  3

  THE GAMESMEN

  The illicit drug trade was being called Florida’s largest industry, and a harried police establishment was publicly admitting that less than 10 percent of the illegal substances were being intercepted through the combined efforts of federal, state, and local agencies. With an annual trade running into billions of dollars, a math degree was not required to calculate the risk statistics for an enterprising businessman. It was not surprising, then, that an ever-increasing number of amateurs were taking a fling at that market, amateurs from every economic and social sector.

  But it was a statistic also quickly learned by every savvy street kid—and some of those “Kids” had gone on to graduate magna cum laude with degrees in professional crime. Such degrees were characteristically delivered with blood all over them, the bloodiest of all being awarded to the meanest of all competitors.

  Bolan understood those statistics, too. And he knew that the risk factor for professionals was far more favorable than the one-in-ten factor for amateurs. For the organized professional, moreover, the risk factor was perhaps one chance in a hundred for being caught in the act—and the risk of actually going to jail was probably 10 percent of that.

  So it was a very lucrative field of endeavor for the professional criminal, and this fact would inevitably give rise to another factor. Given a thousand-to-one shot for illicit profits on a grand scale, Bolan knew from past experience that the meanest of all would be moving very determinedly to take it all over.

  All of which, of course, would increase by quantum leaps the risk factor for the amateur entrepeneur, the loser paying with his own blood.

  And, lately, there had been many such losers.

  The grim truth of the matter was that the mob made better cops than the cops. They knew all the angles and avenues, all the sources and middlemen, and they would not hesitate to apply money and force in their domination of the trade lanes.

  But some smart operator had apparently discovered an even better game. Really, it was not much different from the hijack game of the Prohibition era, in which many mobsters made fortunes by cashing in other men’s investments. The new Florida game apparently worked much the same way. Let the kids and other amateurs make their buys and smuggle the stuff into the country—thereby assuming most of the risks—then the smart operator would simply knock them over and take the stuff for himself. It was even possible that the source or middleman who sold the stuff in Colombia or wherever was under the control of the same man or men who controlled the hijackers.

  It was a neat game, yeah.

  Bolan knew that it was something along this line that had been worked in the present situation. For sure, Grimaldi’s source knew where the buy had gone down, knew how it was being transported, and knew where it was to be received in the U.S. The guy had the whole timetable. The mob could have made their hit at any point along the way. Playing the percentages, though, the hit would come only after the product had safely entered the country.

  Grimaldi had pre-empted that schedule, making his own “hit” at an intermediate point—which is how Mack Bolan happened to be playing delivery man in that dawn drop—and which is why five dispirited young people were far better off than they probably realized.

  They sat in the dirt just inside the small hangar, sipping beer from cans and conversing in hushed tones. The conversation froze and all eyes turned his way as Bolan stepped inside. He gave a curt nod and strode past the group without a word.

  He found Grimaldi at a rickety desk in the office of the temporary base camp, bent over an aeronautical sectional chart and busily applying pencil and protractor to a small problem in navigation. The pilot looked up with a grin and reported, “I think we struck some paydirt.”

  “How much?” Bolan inquired quietly.

  “Maybe a whole yard.” Grimaldi fingered a penciled circle on the chart as he explained, “The guy beat it straight to this hammock, here. It’s maybe a thousand yards in diameter, maybe a bit more. It’s inhabited. I counted two large buildings and maybe half a dozen smaller ones, grouped around a small lagoon on the west side. Or maybe that lagoon is a large pond. I couldn’t really get a good angle on it without becoming too obvious. Either it’s a lagoon or a pond sitting right at the edge of the land area.”

  Bolan eyed the map as he asked, “What’s that big island just to the north?”

  “That one’s the kicker,” the pilot replied, grinning broadly. “Remember I told you about Tommy Santelli’s sugar cane investment?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “That big island just to the north is Tommy’s farm. I flew some guys in there a few months ago, right after they took it over. How much you want to bet he owns the lagoon hammock, too? You could damn near swim from one to the other. Or wade it. Course, I wouldn’t want to do either. That’s ’gator country. And snakes. God knows what else.”r />
  “You’re sure the guy went to the small island?”

  “No doubt about it. He was hurting. I saw two guys carrying him toward the buildings.”

  “Any chance you were spotted?”

  “Not much. I played the sun all I could. For sure the dude in the boat didn’t spot me. From the way he was handling that swamp buggy, I’d say he wasn’t seeing much of anything. The guy just barely made it, Sarge. We got damned lucky on that one.”

  “The kids tumble to what you were doing?”

  “I doubt that. I think they were all in a state of shock, most of that flight.”

  “Give you any trouble?”

  Grimaldi smiled. “Not really. Watch the tall blonde, though. She tried to vamp me.”

  Bolan returned the smile. “But you were strong.”

  “As a rock. They’re okay kids. Sort of confused, right now, and wondering what the hell. I gave them a six-pack and told them to cool it.” He spread his hands. “What can they do?”

  “They can thank heaven for large favors,” Bolan muttered.

  “They know that. They saw. That’s why the shock.”

  “You tell them anything, yet?”

  “Naw. That’s your department.”

  Bolan sighed and lit a cigarette then stared at the chart for a moment. Finally he said, “I guess we need to update Alice. Will you take care of that for me?”

  Alice was Hal Brognola, waiting somewhere in the wings with a hot-hot force of federal marshals, poised to strike upon signal.

  Grimaldi replied, “Sure. Just an update?”

  “That’s all.”

  “You don’t want to talk to him?”

  “Not yet, no,” Bolan replied quietly. There was a bit of strain in the relationship at the moment, due entirely to Bolan’s own misgivings about the future being charted for him by Brognola and others in Washington. And, no, he was not yet ready to talk to his old friend from the Wonderland by the Potomac.

  “I’ll just, uh, report the developments,” said Grimaldi. “And tell him to hang loose.”