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  Turrin replied, “Hell, I don’t know. I’m just thankful that’s your decision and not mine.”

  “There’s no decision to it,” Bolan told his friend. “I’ll have to play it by ear and hope for the best. But I’ve got to break the silence. That’s for sure. I can’t just sit on my tail and wait for word. It could come gift wrapped, in concrete. I can’t play their game until I know what the game is. Meanwhile, there’s nothing to do but to play my own game.”

  The undercover cop expelled a cloud of smoke, then he rolled down his window and ejected a mutilated cigar. “You know how I feel about all this, Mack. I, uh, considered myself personally responsible for those two people. I thought the security was top drawer. But it wasn’t, apparently, and I guess—”

  “Knock it off,” Bolan softly commanded. “You know nothing is ever that tight. It just happened, that’s all, and now we’ve got to save it. Leo … listen … thanks. I know what all this is costing you. How’s the wife and kids?”

  “Fine, they’re fine,” Turrin replied miserably.

  Following a brief silence, Bolan sighed and said, “There’s an angle to this thing maybe you haven’t thought of. If this engineer puts the squeeze on either Johnny or Val, he’ll learn anything they might be able to tell him. You and I both know that.”

  Turrin shivered and replied, “You could have gone all night without bringing that up. Don’t think about turkeys at a time like this, Sarge.”

  Curtly, Bolan said, “Have to. Could they finger you, Leo?”

  The Mafioso cop released a hissing sigh. “I guess not I’ve been no more to them than a voice on a telephone, once or twice a dim face in the shadows. All they know is that I’m your friend, and theirs. Unless they’ve put something together on their own.”

  Bolan said, “Well … Val is pretty damned sharp. So, uh, you step very carefully, Leo.”

  Turrin snorted and replied, “Look who’s advising who on caution.”

  “This three-way stretch can’t go on forever, buddy. You’ve got to let it go, you know.”

  “What three-way stretch?”

  “The cops, the mob, me. You know what I mean.”

  “You’re not going to deal me out of this one, Sarge.”

  “Don’t intend to,” Bolan assured him. “But as soon as we get Johnny and Val back, then you and I have to face the reality of your situation. I could become turkey meat myself, Leo.”

  Turrin was giving his friend a sick look. “If that’s the way you read it,” he replied quietly.

  “That’s what I read.”

  “Okay. Uh, listen … dammit, Mack. Don’t go handing yourself over to those guys. That won’t help the kids any, you know that.”

  Bolan said, “I might be able to work something out. If it turns that way, I’d like to name you as the go-between.”

  “Sure,” Turrin said quietly.

  “Okay. What’s this coming up? Charlestown bridge?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me out there.”

  “Mack … dammit … I don’t like any of this. I don’t like your frame of mind. I don’t like—”

  “Shut up, Leo. I’ve had my innings. Nobody lives forever.”

  Turrin was glaring darkly beyond the headlamps of the car and apparently choking back some heated comment.

  Bolan chuckled understandingly and said, “Cool it, buddy. We’ve been in worse spots. Right?”

  The undercover cop growled, “Right.”

  The vehicle rolled to a halt on the bridge approach. Bolan gave his friend a searching gaze and asked him, “A wild guess, Leo—what is the game exactly? What do they really want?”

  Turrin’s eyes fell in misery from that gaze as he replied, “Same game as always, Sarge. They want you. If they can’t get you whole-body, then they want to hurt you all they can. If that means sending you Val’s tits and Johnny’s balls in a paper sack, then that’s what they’ll do.”

  Bolan grimaced. “That goes without saying,” he agreed. “But I’m not just talking about that angle. I mean, why the waiting game? Why the silence?”

  The Pittsfield underboss Sighed and his fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Ever play chess, Sarge?”

  Bolan replied, “The game of pawns.”

  “I can’t see anything else, get right down to it. Considering the situation in Boston right now. Whoever snatched Johnny and Val might want something else just a little bit more than he wants Mack Bolan’s head. That’s why the silent game. He’s trying to line something up, I’d guess. You said wild. That’s about as wild as my mind can get right now.”

  “Maybe it’s not so wild,” Bolan decided. “My mind has been tracking along the same channel. Okay.” He opened the door and slid quickly to the street, then leaned back inside for a final word. “Go back to Pittsfield, Leo. You’ll be of better use there and I want you to stay clear of this town, at least for the rest of today. I’m hitting it, and hard. I don’t want you in the way.”

  Turrin’s face was partially masked and almost grotesque in the reflected light from the instrument panel. He said, “Johnny and Val are in the way, Sarge.”

  “Johnny and Val could be in South America by now,” Bolan growled. “Or at the bottom of Boston harbor. Keep the ears open, Leo. We’ll contact the usual way.”

  Turrin replied, “Yeah. Good blitzing. You know where to go, eh?”

  “I know,” Bolan assured him. He closed the door and faded into the night.

  Turrin put the car in motion and joined the traffic to Charlestown.

  Back there, he knew, went one hell of a man. One hell of a human being. And one hell of a tortured, agonized, and frustrated warrior.

  The old town, Turrin was thinking, had better get set for a shaking.

  She was in for an experience the likes of which hadn’t been felt since …

  Turrin’s face twisted into a wry scowl.

  The redcoats are coming, hell.

  The blackcoat was already there, and he was striding angrily onto a new page of Boston history.

  Turrin had seen that decision forming behind the ice-blue eyes, and there was no mistaking the meaning.

  Leopold Turrin shivered.

  There were times when he resented being anything other than a human being. But there were Angelina and the kids … he was a husband and a father. There were his duties as a cop and the patient years of painstaking undercover work that could go up in one small puff of misplaced sympathy and loyalty.

  And back there, somewhere in the darkness, one hell of a unique human being was striding off into the unknown to take on the whole damned world.

  Yeah …

  There were times when Leo Turrin resented being anything other than a human being.

  And he had to wonder … what was Mack Bolan’s pet resentment? At a time of soul-wrenching decision, what did the Executioner hate the most about his situation?

  The answer to that question, Turrin was certain, would be forthcoming shortly.

  3: Escalation

  One of the earliest recorded uses of psychological warfare occurred during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, three centuries before the Christian era. The brilliant military strategist had pushed his armies in a sweep to the borders of India when he decided to postpone further hostilities. Before withdrawing from the Indian border campsites, however, Alexander instructed his craftsmen to make a number of helmets, breastplates, horse bridles, and other items of personal armor which were many sizes too large for any ordinary man or beast. These outsized items were left behind at the abandoned campsites, and it is reported that the Indian defenders were severely demoralized upon finding this evidence of an enemy force of “giant warriors.”

  Mack Bolan perhaps had never heard of the psychological tactics of Alexander the Great—but it should be noted that Bolan himself habitually made full use of enemy-demoralization techniques in his own private war.

  The three daylight strikes of that first probe of Boston were conducted with this specifi
c goal in mind—to frighten and awe the enemy, to give local reinforcement to the growing legend of the Executioner’s deadliness and invincibility. This, he felt, was the only practical tool in his personal campaign to free Johnny Bolan and Valentina Querente.

  Bolan was a realist—but he was a soldier, not a detective. He knew that he could not hope to match the quality of actual police work being conducted on the pair’s behalf. He also knew that all the odds were against the chance that routine police methods would be effective enough or quick enough to have any meaning to the end result. If not dead already, Johnny and Val were in extreme jeopardy—and their danger increased with each passing moment.

  Bolan the realist knew also that the two innocents were very likely being subjected to some hellish experiences, if indeed they were still alive. He had to get to them, and he had to do it very quickly.

  It was a staggering objective. Boston was New England’s largest city. The city proper could probably count no more than 600 to 700 thousand citizens, but the metro area comprising Greater Boston numbered about 17 cities and towns with nearly three million people and roughly 900 square miles of real estate.

  How could a man alone realistically hope to locate two carefully concealed individuals in that sprawling tangle of places and people?

  The answer, of course, was that he could not possibly do so—not without an amazing bit of luck or miracle—and Bolan the realist dealt in neither such uncertain commodities.

  His only chance was to try to convince the enemy that they had grabbed a tiger by the tail and to induce them to let it go, very quickly and very carefully—or else to hasten to the bargaining table without further delay.

  If Leo Turrin’s assessment of the Boston situation was accurate, then this could be a problem of no easy dimensions. If competitive branches of the syndicate were vying for dominance—if Johnny and Val were mere pawns in this larger struggle—then quite possibly Bolan had been lured into Boston by “somebody” who hoped to exploit the Bolan wars to personal advantage.

  If this were the case, though, it seemed to Bolan that his “somebody” was playing his side of the game entirely too quietly, too cautiously, and leaving entirely too much to chance.

  Bolan’s foes, he knew, were realists also. If indeed the idea had been to lure the Executioner into Boston for a rampage there, then red flags should be waving all over the place. But then, too, it was entirely possible that something had gone amiss, that something had disrupted the original plan, that some last-minute foul-up had messed the play up.

  There were infinite possibilities and an unlimited supply of “ifs”—and Bolan simply could not afford to wait for the logic to fall into place.

  He had to make a move, and he had to do so quickly. He had to hit and keep hitting until the hurt started being felt in the right quarters.

  He had begun the campaign in the most logical place—“at the border,” so to speak. LaRocca, Gaglione, and Lavallino represented a triune of “Little Italy” neighborhood mobsters, unimportant in the overall weave of Mafia influence in Greater Boston, unimpressive in terms of family rank. But their executions would hardly go unnoticed, and this seemed to be the ripest spot to inaugurate the psychological war.

  Bolan had not left behind in Little Italy any oversized pieces of armor, but he had left there a shadow which would grow in size with each retelling of the story—the shadow of an ice-cold hit man who strode with audacity through broad daylight and into the enemy outposts, who called out the names of his victims before coldly gunning them down, who drew and fired his weapons with such blinding speed that witnesses could not agree on details of the strikes, and who left chilling little messages to be repeated over and over again until the shock waves of those “easy hits” had spread throughout the city.

  Perhaps Bolan had studied the campaigns of Alexander. Perhaps not. But the effects of his “border psychology” were just as great as that earlier warrior’s.

  By nightfall the entire city was quivering with the news of the Boston blitz. The newspapers had quickly seized the dramatic implications of the Bolan visit, as had radio and television newscasters—and each of the network outlets at Boston were given large spots on nationwide editions of the evening news to cover the new war in their city.

  Local politicians were interviewed and quoted as “confident” that the police establishment could handle the situation. Several political hopefuls, however, recalled the two years of gangland unrest in Greater Boston and the “ineffectiveness” of the police to deal with that problem. How, they asked, could the same police hope to cope with a full-scale Bolan war?

  An independent television outlet screened a hastily edited rehash of the Bolan wars from Pittsfield to San Francisco in a program which ended with a five-minute “projection” of “Bolan’s Boston Blitz.” The projection seemed, to many oldtimers, like an echo of the famous Orson Wells broadcast of the ’30’s, in which an imaginary invasion from outer space was reported.

  But Mack Bolan was no Martian. He was as American as apple pie and his crusade evoked widespread feelings of sympathy and respect in this cradle-city of Americana. A local disc jockey even suggested that a “phantom ticker tape parade” be conducted along the Freedom Trail, but none took up his idea of scattering torn football pool cards and lottery tickets along the streets.

  If Bolan had captured the sympathetic imagination of man-in-the-street Bostonians, though, he had also succeeded in his prime purpose; he had commanded the respectful attention of underworld Boston, and this was the name of the Bolan game.

  At a “gun and hunt” club, near Stoneham in the northern suburbs, the members of that privately chartered organization got together in a hurried meeting late that Monday evening to discuss the Bolan presence in their unhappy midst.

  Present at that meeting were the ruling heads of “the Middlesex Combination”—territorial bosses of northwest suburban Boston. Chief among these were Manfredo “Manny the Clock” Greco of Waltham and Terencio “Books” Figarone of Cambridge, both of whom were regarded as political and financial power-houses in the Massachusetts crime structure.

  Figarone was a legal eagle who had been disbarred from the practice of law during the Bobby Kennedy anti-crime crusade. He had also, until that time, been a visiting lecturer and honorary professor in one of the area’s most prestigious schools of law.

  Greco’s rise to underworld eminence had come through labor circles. As a young man he had been an apprentice watchmaker in one of the nation’s oldest time factories, and Manny the Clock had never lost his respect for the importance of time in human affairs. Manny was fond of pointing out that none less than Albert Einstein knew a guy couldn’t amount to much unless he took time into his calculations.

  Manny Greco always knew precisely what time it was—and he had called this meeting to commence at exactly ten o’clock.

  At exactly ten o’clock the meeting commenced. Five territorial bosses were in attendance and they met behind closed doors in the “game room” while their cadres pondered the imponderables of sudden death over beer and peanuts in the main lounge.

  The “Shot ’n Feathers” was a hardsite. Its defenses—when they “went hard”—were considered the best in the East. The location had once been a soggy marshland, bypassed and abandoned by the march of progress and even by an adjoining country club golf course, until Books Figarone stumbled onto the site and picked it up for a song some ten years earlier. Close enough to the city proper and yet isolated enough to provide the maximum privacy in a highly developed region, the site had lent itself admirably to the requirements of the Middlesex Combination and had especially proved a restful spot for jangled nerves during the past two years of gangland unrest.

  A rock wall ten feet high surrounded the entire six-acre site, with the only access via a narrow wooden bridge which spanned a shallow drainage ditch across the front of the property. The clubhouse occupied a rise of ground just inside the gate. The slopes at sides and rear provided plenty of open
space for skeet-shooting and rifle ranges, also a small “game yard” enclosed with chicken wire for live target shooting at trapped birds.

  The clubhouse itself was not overly pretentious, consisting of a small central lounge and two elongated wings housing various recreational and business facilities. A basement room beneath one of the wings served as a pistol range with automated targets in human form which “screamed” when hit in vital spots. Beneath the opposite wing were emergency “hard rooms”—minimally outfitted sleeping facilities in tense times for overnight guests.

  Behind the central lounge area was a small appendage which served as a kitchen and storehouse. The entire building was constructed of prefabricated concrete sections, and it was regarded as fireproof, bulletproof and utterly impregnable.

  Even so, the ten o’clock meeting of that Monday evening got underway in an atmosphere of jittery apprehension. More than a dozen armed sentries patrolled the approaches to the hardsite and another half-dozen or so roamed the grounds inside the walls. The windows of the building, although equipped with bulletproof glass, were heavily shuttered, and armed men walked the roof.

  The Middlesex Combination was taking no chances on a surprise visit from Mack the Bastard.

  And, as Books Figarone angrily proclaimed at ten minutes past the hour of ten, “Look, we didn’t come here to praise the guy—we came to bury him, so let’s not have any more free propaganda on his behalf, eh.”

  “Call it propaganda if you want to,” Manny the Clock shot back, “but I tell you the guy has a precision works inside his head. He’s like a Swiss movement. I say he knows exactly what he’s doing. If he says somebody knows why he’s knocking over our downtown boys, then somebody sure knows why.”

  “I had a call from Al not two hours ago,” Figarone argued patiently. “He assures me that they know nothing whatever about the Bolan kid. In fact, Al is more disturbed about all of this than we are.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Andy Nova, the boss of Medford. “I didn’t even know the guy had a brother. I sure don’t like the idea of bum-rapping a snatch, not with this Bolan nut picking up all the marbles. I have to go along with Manny. I think somebody in this town is pulling a fast one.”