Command Strike Read online

  “Who got it?”

  “Nobody of any consequence, apparently. It was a—oh—hold on—more’s coming; they’re feeding me from the printer. Okay. Okay, Hal. I’m buying. Sounds like your blitzing buddy, all right. Listen to me. That guy is not my territory. I don’t want any of him.”

  “Ever hear tell of a golden goose?” Brognola asked quietly.

  “If I see the man, I’ll burn the man down.” Rafferty coldly promised.

  Brognola sniffed and replied, “He wouldn’t have it any other way. The legend is at least ninety-nine percent accurate, Bill. Hell, we offered him a license, way back. I wouldn’t admit that to just anybody, so don’t quote me. He—”

  “It’s true, then. So what do you want from me, friend? What kind of a goddamned—”

  Brognola stepped in to smoothly head off a threatened tirade concerning police ethics. “Don’t get nasty. I said we offered. The guy turned it down flat. It’s his war and he’s the commander-in-chief. Won’t have it any other way. I’m going to lay it on your line, Captain. We would like to be able to call his shots. Since we can’t, then we do the next best thing. We try to run cleanup behind him. Sometimes we can’t do that, even. But I could tell you some stories, friend cop, that would—aw, to hell with it. But if you’ll put your ass where your ethics are, the man could make your job a hell of a lot sweeter. Maybe you could even have a dreamless sleep for a couple of nights running.”

  “So what are you saying?” Rafferty asked suspiciously.

  Brognola replied with a sigh, “I’ve already said it all. Forget that I did. That’s not really why I called anyway. Just wanted you to know that all of my people in your area have been ordered to give you every cooperation in this present emergency. They’re there, friend—use them where you can. Also I have a couple of inside operatives. They’ll be feeding you, and you can believe what they’ll be telling you. They have the combination for your clean phone, also your home number. One of them will identify himself as Sticker. Got that?”

  “Sticker, yeah. Who’s the other guy?”

  “The other guy is not a guy. You’ll know her as Flasher.”

  Rafferty grunted, his only response to that.

  “Don’t sell her short. Flasher is one of my best operatives.”

  “Who’s she sleeping with?” the New York cop growled.

  “King Kong, if that’s where the action is. Put her down for it, if you’re bent that way. But that’s your problem, not hers.”

  Rafferty almost apologized. “Today I don’t even like myself, Uncle. Thanks for the, uh, support. So. What do you want me to do about Bolan? Give him the keys to the city? I couldn’t if I wanted to. He’s not my territory. The boys over at SWAT get full title. So you’d better warn the guy that—”

  “Hold it,” Brognola protested. “I didn’t say I was in contact with him.”

  “Maybe you’d better try. The bulletin from Long Island got here a bit late. That hit went down at about dawn. I’d already been looking at a couple others, right here in my own front yard. Someone hit one of Pelotti’s numbers banks on Lexington Avenue. That was at eight o’clock. At eight-ten, a midtown powder factory went the hard way. And right now my squawk box is talking about something going down in lower Harlem. Tell the guy, Hal. He can’t get away with it here.”

  “He did once already,” Brognola reminded his friend.

  “Sheer luck. If there’s some way you can do it, you’d best call him out. And I mean right now. The entire force is on the line at this very moment. Has been, since we heard of Augie’s death. All leaves are cancelled and overtime restrictions lifted. And all that was before we knew that Bolan was in town. Now … call your man off, Hal.”

  “Goddammit, I’ve told you, he’s not my man!” Brognola fumed. “There’s no way to call him off!”

  “Then he’s a dead man,” Rafferty said, and broke the connection.

  Brognola stared at the humming instrument for a moment, then slowly hung it up.

  He lit a cigar, blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling, and told it, “He’s been a dead man ever since I’ve known him, tiger.”

  Then he punched the intercom and ordered a plane for New York. The chief fed for organized crime was not about to sit this one out in Washington.

  It was going to be a day for tigers, yeah.

  No way was this one going to be left out.

  7

  MOVERS

  Bolan knew that three hits in less than an hour was pushing things a bit—but then that was the whole idea. The lightning strikes were designed to accomplish three specific and interrelated goals: to terrorize and panic the enemy; to induce confusion and indecision in the ranks; to provoke emotional and hasty counteractions by the leadership. Then things would begin to move in this old town.

  And, yes, the Executioner’s M.O. was a bit different for this campaign. He had pitted enemy against enemy before, on many occasions; indeed, this was a favored Bolan tactic: to trick the enemy into engaging itself. However, he was using a somewhat different twist in this command strike. It was a gut punch he was going for, not a headshot—temporary paralysis of the entire body rather than a couple of jabs to the chin. If Bolan had learned anything from this long and bitter war with the mob, it was that his enemy was infinite and probably eternal. There could be no final, full victory. Victory for Bolan had and would always be limited to a series of successful events, through which he might be able to stop or divert a particular movement, contain a certain sphere of action, or interrupt some domino chain of criminal cause and effect. It had been a long time since Mack Bolan had deceived himself about his ability to win this war. He knew, and had known almost from the beginning, that it was just another ‘Nam—a war of delay and containment, a war of attrition, a war of hopelessness and frustration. But he had gone on fighting this one the same way he’d fought the other one—with determination, dedication, total commitment of the self without regard for personal comfort or ambition. And to hell with all the moralizations, the equivocations, the rationalizations. His war was “wrong,” sure—immoral, illegal, and brutal. But so was the enemy, a thousandfold. They were cannibals, and all of civilized society was simmering in their pots. Not even a missionary—not a sane one—would try teaching the Ten Commandments from inside the cannibal’s pot. He’d get a gun, by God, if he could, and he’d blow their savage heads off—then content himself with teaching the Lord’s Prayer to their kids before it was too late to civilize them.

  Bolan was certainly no missionary. He would leave that end of the job to others. Bolan was a soldier. He had a gun, by God, and knew how to use it to maximum effect. And he was, yeah, blowing their savage heads off, hoping to create a bit of safe turf for the missionaries.

  Even that, he knew, was a lot of wishful thinking. All he was really doing was simply opposing the cannibals—shaking a stick at them and trying to divert them from their meal until the cavalry could arrive. The problem, dammit, was that there wasn’t any cavalry. There wasn’t anybody to really nail these guys, to put them out of business, or even to discourage the expansion into more and bigger pots.

  These cannibals had already learned the litany and they were using it against those they chose to eat. Where’s your search warrant? Where’s your evidence? Call my lawyer and send for the bailbondsman. Change of venue. Plea bargaining. Courts of appeal. Friendly judges, bought and paid for. “Made” legislators and Congressmen, “smart” cops and “wise guy” prosecutors. Amici di l’amicu, or friend of the friends—from the ward heeler clear to the White House itself.

  It was enough to shiver a guy, yeah—especially one who knew the true brutal ferocity of these savages. And Mack Bolan had never learned to live with his shivers. They moved him, commanded him, sent him out and over the top to do battle with those enemies of the people—those gentle people, the good people who shrank from violence, yet who had not common sense enough to realize that there was no such thing as a gentle savage. You could not give them your own litany, yo
ur own protections, your own saving graces—because they would only laugh at them, spit on them, then use them against you.

  Bolan had no litany, no protections, no saving graces. He gave the mob exactly what they feared and respected the most—he gave them another savage, meaner than themselves, deadlier than their own hired goons, more merciless than their own code of conduct.

  But he knew he could not win. At best, he could hope to remain alive and continue the opposition until the people themselves awoke and began to seriously deal with the problem—and he could hope, merely hope, that the savages could thus be contained until the time when Mack Bolan’s “illegal and immoral” war would no longer be necessary. And then, thank God, yes, he would happily lie down and die.

  But, sure, this campaign in New York was necessarily different from the others. He could not possibly kill them all. Even if he could, and did, that would not mean the winning of the war, but merely another successful event. For every boss he popped, another ten hopefuls were waiting to fill the vacancy—perhaps another hundred. As for the soldiers, the ordinaries, those guys were like grains of sand on a beach. Any boss anywhere in the country could snap his fingers and “make” a thousand men—and there would be another ten thousand disappointed ones waiting for the next snap. They bred on the big-city streets like maggots on rotten meat—and that was a job for the missionaries, sure. But for now it was an infinite enemy, yeah—and “the Thing” itself was no doubt eternal—or, at least, for as long as society continued to brutalize its underside and to turn away from the tough moral question of how to deal with career criminals.

  Bolan had found the answer to his shivers—and he could not turn away.

  So, okay, a gut punch this time. Hard enough and deep enough to temporarily paralyze the whole body. And then perhaps the whole body could be manipulated a bit, reconstituted with mismatched pieces, weakened, set up for another fall the moment it found its feet again.

  Command strategy. The three early hits in Manhattan had been different. Nothing had been left behind to tie those events to Mack Bolan. He’d used the red Ferrari, penetrated as Omega, made the hits in approved Mafia fashion, and left plenty of witnesses to tell the tale.

  Gut punching, sure.

  At Lexington Avenue, he’d executed one Salvatore Bona, a Pelotti lieutenant whose “tight” with David Eritrea was in doubt. In the barber shop on 43rd, a Marinello underboss with the same affliction received death with his customary eight o’clock shave. On the edge of Harlem, another loose Eritrea fit had been dispatched from the field of contest. Bolan was moving things, he hoped—forcing a crisis where no clear crisis yet existed except in fearful, ambitious minds.

  But he found the real mover near a shabby apartment above a nondescript delicatessen on Eighth Avenue. Nobody lived there; seldom did anybody go there. It was a cool spot—an offbeat meeting place for certain rankers in the Manhattan territories of the late Augie Marinello.

  Bolan, as Omega, left the Ferrari beside a trash bin in the alleyway and entered through the back door. The Beretta was shoulder-slung beneath the white coat, silencer attached, spare clips on the belt. It was his only arm, but quite enough for this sort of warfare. Special loads of 9mm Parabellum skullbusters gave the Beretta equal ranking with a .357 Magnum at twenty yards, not a hell of a lot less at greater ranges, and the personally engineered silencer interfered very little with ballistics capabilities at short ranges.

  Entrance to the apartment was via a short hallway at the rear of the deli. A youngish guy was seated on the steps, smoking a black cigarette and small-talking with an older man in a white apron. The small talker scrambled to his feet at Bolan’s approach and snapped something in Italian to the man in the apron. The old man spun about and went into the store without a glance at Bolan.

  “What’s he doing back here?” Bolan growled to the sentry.

  The guy was nervous, unsure. “He uh—do I know you, sir?”

  “You’d better not,” Bolan-Omega told him. He displayed the plasticized ace of spades as he inquired, “Who’s here?”

  The guy did a quick take on the card, becoming more nervous. “Mr. Minotti’s here, sir, and Mr. Volpa.” Both were Marinello lieutenants with Manhattan territories. Volpa was big in the financial district—shylocking the brokers, scams, counterfeit securities. Minotti was best known for bankrolling drug buys from Mexico as well as for financing other types of big hits, be it bank jobs, gem fencing, or wholesale recycling of stolen goods. Both were relatively minor in the family hierarchy, but they did command territories. At such a time no wise guy with rank was too small to dream of bigger things for himself. And Bolan knew that these guys were dreamers.

  “Who else?” he coldly asked the sentry.

  The younger man was getting downright scared. A bit green, perhaps—or maybe too much time spent in the relatively soft territories around midtown Manhattan. His voice cracked just a bit as he replied, “Mr. Scuba just sent word that he’ll be a little late. Tony brought the message. That’s why he was back here. Mr. Scuba is—well, something is going down, I hear.” His eyes twitched. He tried something very daring—asking a direct question of a Black Ace: “Have you heard?”

  Bolan gave him about twenty seconds of icy silence in which to repent; then he told him, “It’s going down all over. It’s going down here. Right now. What’s your name?”

  “I’m Johnny Ricco; I’m with Mr. Minotti.”

  “You were,” Bolan said unemotionally. “Goodbye, Johnny Ricco. You won’t want to be around here.”

  In mob language, there was nothing veiled in that statement. Johnny Ricco knew precisely what the Black Ace was saying.

  “I get you, sir—thank you, sir,” he calmly replied, and got out of there.

  Bolan immediately went up the stairs, rapped on the door, pushed it open in the same movement, and stepped inside the apartment.

  Minotti was seated at the window, glaring gloomily down onto the street—can of Schlitz in one hand, well-chewed cigar in the other. “What is it?” he growled, without looking toward the door.

  Volpa and a beefy man of middle age, obviously the other tagman, sat at a table at the far wall. Volpa was engrossed in The Wall Street Journal. The tagman was reading a comic book.

  Nobody seemed to give a damn.

  Bolan sighed. The Beretta whispered. The tagman’s nose disappeared as shattered parts of his head flung themselves onto the wall behind him.

  Volpa looked up just in time to catch the next whistler squarely between startled eyes. The table overturned as a dream vanished and both bodies joined the march to nowhere.

  A suddenly electrified Frank Minotti leapt to his feet, arms stiffly extended and hands dangling—crying out, shrilly, “For God’s sake!”

  “Peter sent me,” Bolan quietly declared.

  “What!? Who!?”

  “It’s not I’ve Got a Secret, man. It’s Name That Tune. We’re going for one that begins with Peter.”

  “Peter who?” Minotti screamed. “I don’t know no Peter!”

  “Too bad,” Bolan said coldly. “You lose.”

  The Beretta whispered again, before Minotti could even wonder about what he’d lost.

  Bolan stepped outside and closed the door, softly descended the stairs, and ran smack into Johnny Ricco.

  “Cops in the alley!” Johnny gasped. “You driving a red car?”

  “I was,” Bolan-Omega replied. “Remember that I owe you one, Johnny. Beat it on out the front; don’t stop and don’t look back. Try Florida. And be glad you weren’t here today.”

  “Florida, right,” Johnny Ricco said, eyes jerking. But Bolan knew better. The guy would head for the first hole, climb in, button up, and pray that nobody found him. But they would. They would find him. And Johnny would be spilling his guts before they got him out the door. Which was precisely what Bolan desired.

  He watched Johnny dash through the store; then Bolan went to the rear to verify the report. Uniforms were scurrying everywhere back
there. So okay—they had a make on the Ferrari. He tipped a mental hat to the samesiders and went out behind Johnny Ricco. The little guy in the apron was nervously busying himself behind the counter. Bolan growled at him as he passed, “Cops in the alley, Tony. If they come in, send them upstairs.”

  The old man nodded and chirped, “Upstairs, sure. Have a good day.”

  “No way,” Bolan said, and meant it.

  A long black Cadillac had just pulled up to the curb out front. A big man in a chauffeur’s uniform leapt out and ran around to open the rear door for an immaculately attired man with white hair.

  Bolan had that make instantly.

  He had another one, also. Police sirens, screaming along Eighth Avenue and also approaching from a couple of cross streets.

  Bolan did not even have to think about it.

  He stepped onto the sidewalk and gave the chauffeur a glimpse of the Beretta Belle. “Give me your heat,” he commanded softly.

  The guy froze for an instant, then solemnly handed over a Colt .45. Bolan pocketed the surrendered weapon and told the chauffeur, “Come on—we’re traveling together.”

  He watched the chauffeur get into the car, then slid in beside him.

  “What is this?” queried the angry senior citizen in the back seat.

  “I’m just hitching a ride, Barney,” the Executioner told Augie Marinello’s oldest and closest friend. He snapped a glance at the pretty girl seated beside the old man as he informed her, “It’s okay, ma’am. Nothing for you to be worried about.”

  But there was plenty for Mack Bolan to worry about.

  He knew that young lady—knew her quite well, in fact. The hairstyle was a bit different, the costume more sedate, but it was that same sweet, girl-next-door face and those same baby-doll eyes.

  The young lady accompanying Barney Matilda was none other than Sally Palmer, lady fed, late with the Ranger Girls of Vegas and other exotic Mafia ports of call.

  Bolan had not seen this one since Vegas—but he’d lately chanced upon another Ranger Girl who’d been working the same angles as this one apparently was. He’d seen what was left of Georgette Chableu one dismal night on hell’s back porch in Detroit—and, yeah, Bolan had plenty to worry about now.