Dead Man's Tale Read online

  Half the shingled roof had fallen in, and the walls above the rotting piles were fissured where planks had fallen away. But the part of the old boardwalk jetty that was still under cover was firm enough. Firm enough to support a small cabin cruiser, shored up on stocks. Firm enough for one of the piers to be used as a hitching post for the rubber dinghy.

  Firm enough to take the weight of Vito Maccione, standing with braced feet at the inner end, the Ingram MAC-10 subgun in his hands trained on the Executioner as he surfaced by the outboard.

  "Welcome home, sucker. I've been expecting you," the Mafia boss growled.

  "The line's been used before," Bolan replied. His mind was racing. Both his guns were back in the waterproof pouch, along with the remaining stun grenade. The MAC-10 carried a 30-round magazine, firing .45-caliber ACP skullbusters at a cyclic rate of more than one thousand per minute.

  For a man up to his armpits in water, a test of strength with that combination would be playing, as Maccione implied, at sucker odds.

  "Never mind the quality of the dialogue," the mafioso said. "The scenario's already written and there's only one more scene to be played. Stay right where you are — the hands out of the water and held away above the head, okay? — until Campos and the boys come to collect you. After that it's back to the castle, where you're going to tell us what we want to know. Only this time the interrogation will be, let's say, a bit more intense."

  Bolan raised his hands. "Suppose I don't want the part?" he said, playing for time.

  "Quit stalling. Where's that double-crossing bitch?"

  "Right behind you," Bolan said.

  "Don't mess with me, Bolan," Maccione snarled. "Who you think you are? This is a game between professionals and you lost out. Do you really figure I'm going to fall for the oldest trick in the book while you leap out the goddamn lake and slug me from behind?

  Although his hands were held above his head, the Executioner contrived at the same time a resigned sigh and a shrug. In fact he wasn't bluffing.

  The doorway through which Maccione must have entered was on the far side of the decrepit shed. But immediately behind him vertical timbers had rotted away from the boat house frame, and there was an eighteen-inch gap in the wall.

  Katrina Holman stood in the gap.

  "Just push," the warrior said quietly.

  "Look, punk, I told you..." Maccione began. And then, warned perhaps by some fighter's sixth sense, an indrawn breath, a tiny movement behind him, he did start to swing around.

  Too late. Katrina was through the gap with arms outstretched, hurling herself forward to shove the mafioso in the small of the back with all the force she could muster.

  Caught off balance, Maccione tightened his trigger finger long enough to blow another ragged hole in the boat house roof, then he fell. He hit the water with a tremendous splash, the subgun spinning out of his hands.

  The gun sank from sight; Maccione surfaced, gasping, on the crest of the minor tidal wave he caused.

  Bolan was already plunging forward. Lake water swirled and heaved anew as the two men grappled beside the dinghy.

  It was one to one now, and the odds were even in every sense. Bolan had the advantage in height, but Maccione was thicker, heavier, and equally muscular. A certain amount of the Executioner's tempered-steel resilience had also been sapped by the subterranean underwater escape so soon after his ordeal in the cellar.

  For him, then, the combat had to be fast: he had to finish it while his strength held up, and before Campos and the others arrived.

  Maccione's left hand raked across Bolan's face, the faceted stones ringed on his four meaty fingers scratching the warrior's cheek from jawline to ear. Bolan responded with a flat-handed blow to the throat, but the resistance of the chest-high water slowed his normal cobra-quick dart, and the mafioso was able to seize the wrist in a nerve grip that threatened to paralyze the Executioner's right arm.

  Bolan was forced to the one position where Maccione would be strongest — close quarters. He surged in and brought up a knee, but again the water impeded the movement and the motion was reduced to a slow-motion take that Maccione avoided with a sideways twist. It was a twist, nevertheless, that allowed Bolan to break the wrist hold, and for a moment the two men traded ineffectual punches above the waterline with only bobbing heads and half submerged shoulders for targets. Then the warrior's foot slipped on the mud-silted bottom of the backwater and the very situation he fought to avoid was imposed on him. One of Maccione's gorilla arms encircled him just below the surface, pinioning his arms to his sides while the heel of the killer's other hand was jammed under Bolan's chin, forcing his head inexorably back into the water.

  Katrina stood on the weathered wooden deck, a canoe paddle in her hands, but Maccione was out of reach of any blow she could land. She watched horror-struck as the capo leaned forward, increasing the pressure as first the back of the Executioner's head, then his ears and finally the eyes vanished beneath the muddy swell.

  Bolan struggled with every ounce of his strength. In a moment his nose and mouth would be under. He kicked out furiously, hoping to knock Maccione off balance, but the man was standing foursquare with his feet planted wide. No way, that way.

  Past the iron-hard grip choking the breath from his lungs, the warrior managed to breath in a last tortured gasp of air... and hold it. Then he was completely under. But to hold him there Maccione was leaning a long way forward from the waist now, his muscles bunched but his weight less well balanced.

  Bolan relaxed the top half of his body, feigning a swimming away of consciousness and will. At the same time his legs shot out and scissored around the killer's calves while he twisted violently from the hips. And this time Maccione was taken by surprise.

  His feet slid from beneath him and he floundered. Bolan freed his own legs, jackknifed the knees, and thrust forward both heels to slam into the killer's crotch.

  Involuntarily Maccione doubled up with his mouth open. Bolan's linked hands were there to force him facedown beneath the surface, where muscular spasm sucked a choking mouthful of water into his lungs. He jerked back, chest heaving, with water cascading from his agonized face. But Bolan, half out already, leaped forward, rammed his hands on the edge of the deck, and used his feet to kick Maccione back underwater.

  With the deck as leverage, he hoisted himself up and thrust down hard on the hood, keeping him not only below the surface but shoving him between two pilings beneath the deck.

  The water threshed and bubbled. Despairing gurgles percolated through the splash and slap of wavelets against the underside of the deck. Hands scrabbled desperately at Bolan's legs, nails tore his calves. But he maintained the pressure with furrowed brows, teeth gritted and every muscle tensed until the movements slackened and finally ceased.

  Maccione floated out from beneath the deck, the muddied shantung suit stained with blood from the Executioner's split cheek. The scarlet splotches diluted, faded and then washed away as Katrina jerked the dinghy's outboard into life.

  Bolan folded himself aboard and unzippered the neoprene pouch; the craft surged forward from beneath the boat house roof. They hit the open water as Campos and three hard-faced gunners made the grassy bank.

  Katrina banged the throttle open wide and the dinghy squatted low in the lake and screamed away with the outboard roaring.

  Campos opened fire first, shooting an old .38-caliber Police Special with his undamaged hand. He could have left the cylinder unturned, for the range was well over one hundred yards and increasing every second. The hardguys were something else. They were equipped with full-size Uzis — effective range, according to specification, two hundred meters.

  One of the killers fired from the hip, the other two dropped to their knees among the grasses and traded a slightly longer range for a firmer stance. Bolan pushed the young woman to the floor and swung the craft's tiller left and right as he unleathered the Desert Eagle. For a few seconds the wooded lakeside echoed to the clamor of multiple automa
tic fire.

  The guy who tried to get in first by firing from the hip paid for his impatience with his life: Bolan's first shot blew him away and he toppled into the water with half his face missing. The killstream from the others was more accurate: while flame belched from the Uzi muzzles, lethal hornets zipped past the wildly zigzagging dinghy. A slug nicked the lobe of the Executioner's ear, spraying his jacket with blood. Another sliced open the breast pocket of his jacket and tore away the button. Katrina gasped and put up one hand as a bullet parted the hair on top of her head without touching the scalp.

  Exhausting the Desert Eagle's magazine one-handed, Bolan saw that he had scored a second time, bowling one of the remaining Uzi men over on his back with a smashed shoulder. The guy lay thrashing in the grass and screaming while Campos yelled at his companion to fire faster. The warrior pulled the Beretta out of the neoprene pouch.

  But the dinghy was already out of range, heading fast for a bend where the lake curved around a spur in the hillside.

  "Latta, Campos and at least one other gunner are still operational," Bolan said, shoving the 93-R back in his shoulder rig. "Is there any way they could cut us off by car?"

  "There's a road," Katrina told him, "but they'd have to go back to Esch and then all the way around the hills via Boulade. And the lakehead's only a couple miles from the Belgian border." She shrugged. "By the time they made it back up to the castle..."

  But they didn't make the lakehead. Several 9 mm punctures were letting air escape from the rubber stern, and although the bulging bulkheads were compartmented, the dinghy gradually lost speed as it settled lower in the water. They had to swim the final two hundred yards and then make it to the border on foot.

  As they waded ashore Bolan saw the firestreak of missiles above a forest ridge ahead, and then heard the crump of exploding warheads. Seconds later flame blossomed among the trees and a shattering concussion threw rock fragments and splintered branches high into the air.

  "Artillery!" he exclaimed, staring at the brown smoke boiling up into the rain. "Don't tell me Maccione is that sophisticated!"

  Katrina laughed. "Don't you read the papers? This is Operation Breakthrough, the big NATO war games exercise replaying the Nazi attack at Sedan in 1940 with modern high-tech equipment."

  "Of course." Bolan remembered the army convoys he'd seen on the Belgian expressway, the truck he'd climbed aboard to escape from Liege. He saw the red Restricted Area warning notices with their white skull-and-crossbones motifs at the water's edge. Dun-colored vehicles maneuvered among the trees higher up the hillside.

  "As an armed civilian with no papers," Katrina began, "I'd like to know how you plan to make it across that territory and contact your own people without being arrested as an Eastern Bloc agent spying on the operation."

  "No problem," the Executioner replied. "I borrowed an army command car a few days ago. If I haven't lost the technique, I could do it again."

  "M-m-make it f-f-fast if you c-can," she said, shivering. "I've never been so cold in my l-life!"

  He took in her rain-drenched hair, the sodden clothes that clung to her body and stripped off his jacket to drape over her shoulders.

  it was then, noticing the ripped pocket and the missing button, that he took out the vital shades for which he had risked so much.

  The slug that missed the warrior's heart and carried away the button had in fact scored a second and more valuable bull's eye.

  In its trajectory, it had passed through an eyepiece of the Zulowski sunglasses and shattered forever the remaining lens of the damaged pair.

  Epilogue

  "According to this official complaint from State," Hal Brognola said severely, "making off with that goddamn command car cost Blue Army an entire division in the war games."

  "That's too bad," Bolan replied. "But..."

  "And Blue Army is us, which makes it worse. It seems, looking for a place where you could make your damned transmission uninterrupted, that you crossed into Red Army territory, and the games umpires..."

  "There's just one thing, Hal," Bolan cut in. "You and me, we're not playing games. Right?"

  "Okay, okay." Brognola sighed. "It's just that... well, if it wasn't for the fact that this is the second time..." He shook his head resignedly. "And all for a pair of smashed spectacles as useless as the original holograms Zulowski sent!"

  The phone on Frank O'Reilly's desk rang. He picked it up. "Security," he said. "Yeah?... Right away?... Okay, wilco." He turned to the Fed. "Mr. Brognola, they'd like to see you in the lab. The chief tech says he has news for you."

  Brognola levered himself to his feet. "Okay," he said to the Executioner, "now for the bad news."

  Upstairs in the small second floor, white-coated assistants were setting up apparatus on a bench. Bolan saw a helium-neon laser similar to the one demonstrated at the NATO research station by Colonel Heller. Beyond it was a hologram plate in a movable clamp — and between them, in a complicated cradle of adjustable jaws, the battered shades he'd gone through so much to bring home.

  "A million to one, I'd say," Bolan mused, staring at the chipped sidepieces, the one empty frame and the splintered lozenge of tinted glass in the other. "A lens cracked and starred like that couldn't pass light through the same way an undamaged one would, could it?"

  "You're worrying needlessly, sir," the chief tech said. "We carried out a few experiments before we called you. Just watch." He turned a switch and plunged the room into darkness.

  A pink glow suffused the bench as the laser hummed into life. Rose-colored fingers manipulated the clamps, maneuvering the sunglasses this way and that... and suddenly, as astonishingly as a conjuror producing huge flags from an empty hat, the meaningless specks on the hologram plate vanished and they saw floating in three dimensions before them a sheet of paper covered from margin to margin in single-spaced typescript.

  The report listing members-designate of the Mob's master plan for Europe had been decoded at last!

  "It was the starred lens Zulowski had used all the time, you see," the chief tech explained. "I guess it was the nearest he could get, optically, to frosted glass in the time he had. The plain, undamaged lens had nothing to do with his hologram!"

  "I'll tell you one thing," Brognola said grimly. He snatched up a phone, punched out a three-digit number. "Frank? Send a photographer up to the optics lab at once. Holography may be a high-tech marvel, but glass plates can get broken as easy as sunglasses, and I'm holding my breath until this report's enshrined in a roll of good old-fashioned 35mm ASA 100 stock!"

  He turned to the Executioner. "Once that's done, maybe we can get around to that backpacking. I guess you could use a couple hours of relaxation now that the mission's successfully terminated?"

  "Terminated?" Bolan echoed. "Latta, Campos and Alexandra Tauber are still at large. We still have to identify and round up the four people who penetrated the security of this safehouse when they grabbed me. The killers who knocked off Alexiou, Whetnall and the woman witness have to be convicted. Lieutenant Benito tells me he has a line on the character who rented the private plane that flew me to Europe. Hal," he said, "this operation only just started!