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  Chapter Three

  THE SOFT PROBE

  In the early morning hours of September 27, a trunk line carrying telephone service to an exclusive Bel Air neighborhood was severed. A resident of the area pinpointed the time of the interruption at precisely 6:10 A.M.; she had been conversing with an airline ticket agent at the airport in Inglewood when the connection was lost.

  An elderly man who lives in the gardener’s cottage at the rear of the Giordano estate in Bel Air also pinpointed 6:10 A.M. as the moment when an uninvited guest walked through his back door, interrupting him at breakfast. The visitor was a wiry, dark-skinned man who “walked like a cat.” He wore faded blue jeans, a denim jacket, Indian mocassins, and a rag tied about his forehead. A military web belt with ammunition pouches supported a .45-caliber automatic in a flap-type holster. A long dagger was on the other hip. The interloper bound the gardener with a nylon rope and taped a clean gauze bandage across his mouth, then carried him to the bedroom and gently placed him on the bed.

  Moments after the man departed, the gardener, looking through his bedroom window, saw a man in a “black, tight-fitting outfit” drop over the wall surrounding the estate and move quickly toward the main house. Another man immediately followed, this one carrying a heavy weapon slung about his shoulders.

  At about that same time, a chauffeur on the bordering estate to the north looked out the window of his garage apartment, to see a man in army fatigues—“and wearing six-guns, I swear”—sprinting across the property toward the Giordano estate. The chauffeur tried to call the police, but his telephone was dead.

  Also at about 6:10, an early-rising housekeeper was walking a pet along the curving lane fronting the property. She was startled by the sudden appearance of a military jeep “with two soldiers in it and a big gun in the back.” The vehicle halted at the driveway to the Giordano estate, then backed across the sidewalk with the heavy machine gun commanding the front of the house. The woman fled, after being advised by one of the men to “walk your dog in some other part of hell, lady.”

  At 6:13 A.M. the sedate neighborhood, was jarred by a muffled explosion and a volley of gunshots. A small group of household employees staggered down the front walk at Girodano’s an instant later, led by a man in army fatigues. Some were still clad in nightclothes. They were ushered to the street and withdrew to the other side, clustering together in a hushed knot. Their guide hurried down to the jeep, spoke briefly to the driver, then ran back toward the house. Moments later the jeep bounced onto the street and careered about for a U-turn into the Girodano driveway, accelerating along the curving drive toward the house and trailing a dense black smokescreen, then emerged at the other side and sped up the street with the smoke pot at full delivery.

  The entire area was now blanketed in a dense pall of smoke, but witnesses could still hear sporadic gunfire from within the mansion and the occasional rattling burp of an automatic weapon.

  Silence descended at precisely 6:16 A.M., the time verified by various witnesses. The old man in the gardener’s cottage viewed apprehensively the reappearance of the man in the faded jeans. The man slashed the gardener’s bonds, patted him on the head, and walked calmly out the door.

  The first police cruiser to reach the scene did not arrive until 6:22, just moments ahead of the fire trucks and with the smokescreen beginning to dissipate. Spectators clustered about the police car to deliver breathless reports of the incident. The patrolman immediately radioed for reinforcements and restrained the fire department from entering the premises. Two additional cruisers arrived within minutes. The police then made a careful advance onto the property. A bullet-riddled, pajama-clad corpse was found in the lower hallway, just inside the house, an unfired pistol beneath the crumpled body. The dining room of the mansion had obviously been raked by machine-gun fire; furnishings were splintered; all four walls exhibited multiple punctures at chest-level; china and other fragile items were shattered.

  The body of another man, this one fully clothed and wearing gun leather, was found in an upstairs sitting room. His skull was a bloodied pulp, smashed by the impact of numerous steel-jacketed slugs. One wall of an adjoining bedroom had been destroyed by an explosive blast, the gaping remains of a wall safe bearing mute testimony as to cause and effect.

  At 6:30 the police found Emilio Giordano, owner of the property. Jack Matsumura, the gardener, was holding a lonely vigil and sadly contemplating his employer’s state of being from a respectful distance. Giordano was apparently alive and unharmed but, in Patrolman Harold Kalb’s assessment of the situation, “in one hell of a fix.” The millionnaire was spread-eagled across a fertilizer pile at the edge of a flower garden, face-down, wrists and ankles tied to wooden stakes. Giordano was completely naked, and he was booby trapped. A bewildering maze of fine wires criss-crossed over and under his body, terminating in a taut arrangement with the pins of two hand grenades, one between his hands and the other between his knees. A large black hand had been painted onto the flesh of his back.

  Kalb sent another patrolman to radio for the bomb detail, then knelt gingerly close by and tried to comfort and reassure the carefully breathing victim. Giordano would risk not even the muscular contractions of speech, and it was a strange and strained twenty-minute wait for the experts of the demolitions squad.

  Following another few minutes of painstaking and nerveracking work by the bomb unit, it was discovered that the grenades were nothing but practice dummies. Giordano became hysterically enraged and fainted. It was sometime past eight o’clock before the police were able to question the fifty-year-old millionnaire, and even then he could add very little to their meager knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the crime.

  According to Giordano, he was awakened by a tall man with blond hair who was weirdly suited “in an outfit like the commandos used to wear.” The man was pressing the muzzle of a military-style .45 automatic against the base of Giordano’s nose. The man ordered him to get out of bed. Giordano habitually slept nude; he tried to get dressed, but the man shoved him into the hallway before he could make a move toward his clothing.

  Another man hurried out of the room behind them; the blast came an instant later. The tall man escorted Giordano down the stairs. “And by some other nuts who were shooting up the place” and into the rear yard. Another man (“… looked like an Indian”) joined them there. “They threw me on that pile of filth,” Giordano related, “and told me I could live for as long as I could lie perfectly still. How was I to know those things weren’t real?”

  Giordano identified the two dead men as his security guards but professed total ignorance of the identity of the intruders. The significance of the black hand that had been painted upon his back was not lost on the detective sergeant who questioned him; Giordano himself, however, offered no reason whatever why his tormentors would have done such a thing. He cited robbery as the only possible motive for the attack but declined even to estimate the amount of cash stolen.

  A general shakedown of the area by the police yielded few additional clues. A uniformed security guard two blocks away from the scene reported the passing of a military vehicle carrying two men and a heavy gun “a few minutes after the explosion.” Two attendants of a service station at the major intersection just beyond that point, however, were certain that no such vehicle had come their way. They had heard the explosion also and had been looking for some sign of unusual activity. They were unable to report the disturbance, they added, because their telephone had gone dead minutes earlier.

  The police investigation continued in the Bel Air neighborhood through out most of the morning. At ten o’clock a hurriedly requested police file was being verifaxed from Pittsfield to Los Angeles. At 11:30 a hastily convened police conference at the Los Angeles Hall of Justice was told, “It would appear that Mack Bolan, the man called The Executioner, has come to Los Angeles. Apparently, he has not come alone. It would seem that he has brought a private army with him. All hell is going to break loose in this city
unless we can do our job quickly and effectively. This is to be a maximum effort. Get Bolan!”

  As these words were being spoken, the object of police concern was conducting a conference Of his own. The scene was a comfortable beach house a few miles north of Santa Monica. The Terrible Ten were assembled on the patio. The atmosphere was informal and relaxed. Bundles of currency were stacked on a glass-topped table. The tinkling of ice against glass was the only sound as Mack Bolan lit a cigarette. He rocked his chair back to balance on the rear legs and quietly announced, “Well, it was a bit sloppy here and there, but we’ll get better. We’ll have to. In a soft probe like this one, timing isn’t all that important, but …” He pinned Blancanales with a hard stare. “Politician, you were forty seconds early with that smokescreen. Bloodbrother was still wiring the grenades when the smoke got to us. If those had been live grenades …”

  “I got worried,” Blancanales admitted. “Too many spectators. I was afraid somebody would do something stupid.”

  Bolan nodded his acceptance of the deviation and turned his gaze onto Fontenelli. “Good show with the jeep, Chopper. Beautifully executed. I guess the cops are still searching Bel Air for it.”

  Fontenelli grinned, warming noticeably under the praise. “I hope it drives ’em nuts,” he said.

  “How much goop did you use, Boom?” Bolan asked musingly, shifting to Hoffower.

  “You said enough to eject the safe. I ejected it.”

  Bolan grinned. “You sure did. To the other side of the room. I was wondering if we could have gotten along with a bit less goop, though. That blast must have been heard clear down at city hall.”

  “Yeah, I overdid it a little,” Hoffower said lightly. “First time I ever blew a safe. I added a bit of fudge factor, just in case.”

  Bolan blew a cloud of cigarette smoke at the stacks of currency, then picked up a packet and tossed it at Hoffower. “This is the way it looks after a good blow,” he said. “Now picture a pile of green confetti, and that’s how it would look after a bad blow. Keep that in mind.”

  Hoffower grinned and tossed the money onto the table. “I’ll keep ’em good.”

  Zitka coughed, cleared his throat, then said, “Okay, tell me how late I was gettin’ the civilians out.”

  “Almost a full minute,” Bolan replied evenly. “The old colored man downstairs was caught in Gunsmoke’s crossfire. If Gunsmoke hadn’t shoved him into the pantry … well … What delayed you, Zitter?”

  “The upstairs maid was on the can,” Zitka solemnly reported. “I hurried her all I could.”

  An amused titter ran through the squad. Someone said, “Praise the Lord and pass the toilet paper.” Zitka turned flaming red.

  “So we learned a lesson,” Bolan commented, when the laughter had subsided. “We need to plan the human element into future timetables. Let’s keep it in mind.”

  “You just can’t figure everything,” Zitka groused.

  “So—that puts the burden of individual initiation on everyone’s shoulders,” Bolan replied. He angled his gaze toward Schwarz. “You have any problems, Gadgets?” he asked quietly.

  Schwarz soberly shook his head. “Timing was great from my standpoint. I was up out of that PT and T manhole at 6:05, on the button.” He winked at Hoffower. “Only way to cut a cable, man. Get with me someday, Boom, and show me how to make those little specialities. Anyway, the timer was set for 6:10. I left Flower there, at the manhole, and cut across to the house. Got there at 6:12. Went in right behind the blast. Planted my little gems and was clear at 6:15. Picked up Flower Child at 6:19, and here we are.”

  “No trouble at the cable,” Andromede reported. “Went off at 6:10, right on schedule. Sizzle, crack, pop—that easy. But oh, my nerves!”

  Mark Washington laughed softly. “I could see you poppin’ up outta that hole,” he told Andromede.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Had you right in my crosshairs. Scares bird turds outta you, handling those little explosives, don’t it? If you’d been black like me, you’d have turned white.”

  “You could see me that good?” Andromede asked incredulously.

  “Sure. When ol’ twenty power lays onto you, the veins in your eyeballs looks like the Martian canals.”

  “How was your view of the house?” Bolan asked.

  “Pretty fair, on the north side and the back. Too many trees in front, but I could get the general drift of things even there. At the rear, though, I could’ve picked off anybody trying to break out. I guess.” Washington smiled and added, “Some lady was swimmin’ naked down on the east slope.”

  “Yeah?” Harrington asked interestedly.

  Washington was still smiling. “Yeah. ’bout two streets down, little round swimmin’ pool in the backyard.”

  “How does a big, fat tit look in a twenty power?” Zitka asked.

  “Like a big, fat tit, I guess,” Washington replied evenly. “But this one’s wasn’t fat. They was skinny and pointy-lookin’.”

  “I saw you, Deadeye,” Loudelk reported quietly, his voice rising softly above the ensuing chuckles.

  Washington turned an owlish stare onto the Indian. “Huh?”

  “I caught a couple of flashes from your scope,” Loudelk explained. “You better remember that. When you’re sighting toward the rising or setting sun, you better do something about reflections off your lens.”

  “I’ll use the Polaroids next time,” Washington mumbled humbly. “Thanks.”

  Bolan fidgeted slightly and asked, “Could you have covered our withdrawal okay, Deadeye? I mean, if there’d been a pursuit?”

  “Some of you, sure. Not the jeep. Like I said, too many trees on that side. I could only catch a glimpse of things, now and then. You know how the twenty power reduces the field. But I did see the cops coming. I could have diverted them long before they ever got there—if I’d had to. Didn’t have to, though. You had a three-minute lead on them. Now if some of those other cats had come poppin’ outta the back of the house … well, the range was only just over 400 meters. Yeah. I could’ve covered that angle okay.” He chuckled merrily. “And I could’ve plowed a furrow right up fat-ass’s behind, the way you had him strung out there. Man, he wasn’t even breathin’ hard.”

  Bolan grinned. “It was good for his soul, I’m sure,” he commented.

  “Yeah.” Washington tugged at the tip of his nose. “I’d like to tell you something, Sarge.”

  “Okay.”

  “You run a sweet hit. It looked good, mighty good, from where I was. I didn’t see nothin’ wrong with the timing. It went just like you said—even to the cops.”

  Bolan sobered. “It has to stay that way. And especially where the police are concerned. We have to avoid them at any cost.”

  “Any cost?” Fontenelli growled.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “I don’t get this love affair with the fuzz,” Fontenelli grumbled.

  “You want to get yourself a bluesuiter, Chopper?” Bolan asked quietly.

  “Not ’specially. But if it comes down to, like between me’n them—well …” Fontenelli cast a quick survey of the assembled faces. “Well … I’m not sure I’ll want to break and run.”

  “You’d better break and run,” Bolan said ominously. “You understand this. You deliberately shoot a cop, and you’re out on your ass. Now understand it. You’re out. I don’t even like the contingency plan we had with Deadeye on today’s strike. Shooting at a cop isn’t much different than shooting into a cop, from the cop’s point of view. All of you, now, understand this thoroughly. As long as we are just cleaning out the sewers, people will be rooting for us. Secretly, maybe, but still cheering. But you kill one cop, or one kid, or any other innocent bystander, and the cheering ends, soldier—it ends right there. The cops stop looking the other way and the news people stop romanticizing, and suddenly you’re just another piece of sewer filth yourself. And then, Robin Hood, you’re to hell out of business.”

  “Sure, sure,” Fon
tenelli agreed quietly.

  “All right.” Bolan was studying the tips of his fingers. “I don’t want to belabor the thing, but what I said in the beginning is just as certain as the sunrise. I’ll shoot dead in his tracks any man who tries to turn this squad into a ratpack. There’s still time to get out if anybody has decided he doesn’t like the setup.”

  A strained, almost embarrassed silence ensued. Bolan gave it full play before he smiled, cleared his throat, and began speaking again. “Fine. We all know the score. Now let’s talk about operations. Today’s soft probe was a success from every angle. Giordano was my only sure link with the western branch of the family. Now he knows we’re in town. He knows we’re onto him. We killed two of his boys, we wrecked his house, we took a chunk of money away from him, we humiliated him, and we showed him that he is living strictly at our pleasure.” The smile broadened. “That’s a helluva bitter mouthful for a Mafia honcho to chew on. He will be laying quiet for a few hours, at least until the cops stop poking around the neighborhood. Then he’ll start braying like the tin god he is. He will start threshing around and flexing his muscles and demanding our heads on a Mafia platter. This is precisely what we want him to do.”

  Bolan turned an amused gaze onto his friend Zitka. “Remember that operation at Vanh Duc, Zitter?” he asked.

  Zitka responded with a broad grin. “Yeah,” he said, his gaze sweeping the circle of faces. “The Ninth was conducting a sweep into long-time VC territory. No contact, no contact, everywhere they probed. Knew damn well the northmen were around there, but they just kept fading away. All the Ninth flushed during a ten-day sweep was a bunch of terrorized villagers. So they sent us in.”