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  “I guess not, sir.”

  But it did, very shortly.

  “Motorcade on the trail,” Loudelk reported calmly.

  “Roger,” Bolan replied. “Anything to our rear?”

  “Negative,” Loudelk said, from his high observation point. “All clear.”

  “Last thing through the wye was the dented Detroit black,” Washington reported.

  “Roger. You set, Horse?”

  “Horse is set,” Harrington’s voice reported.

  “Then roll it.”

  The whine of a motor-driven winch broke the stillness. A big boulder at the side of the roadway began to dance with vibration, then tilted and rolled abruptly onto the roadway. The winch was silenced. Zitka and Andromede ran out to the boulder, freed a network of cables, and dragged them into the shadow of a high butte.

  The death squad could not have found a better location for an ambush. They were about midway between the blacktop county road and the citrus grove, at a point where the private dirt road curved abruptly to thread between two high-ridged rock formations. The roadblock was dropped directly into the eye of this needle, halfway through and just beyond a ninety-degree curve. The jeep had been unloaded from the horse and was angled into the shadow of the butte just beyond the roadblock, with its big fifty caliber commanding the situation there. Andromede was manning the fifty.

  Zitka had the left flank, Bolan the right, both with light automatic weapons and with good cover on high ground that allowed a good triangulation of firepower.

  Gunsmoke Harrington was at the front end of the needle, ahead of the roadblock. His six-guns were strapped low, and a light automatic was slung at his chest. He would plug any attempted retreat.

  “Coming up on one mile,” Loudelk reported.

  Bolan thumbed the transmitter and snapped, “Roger.” Then, “Backboard, start your move. Hold at the junction of the dirt road.”

  He recieved acknowledgements from Blancanales and Washington, then tossed the radio aside and waited.

  They came on fast, as if they knew the road was their very own, the dust from the lead vehicles all but obscuring the third car in the file. Bruno swung the big Continental expertly into the curve, as he had done so many times before, and then was frantically grabbing for more brake pedal than he would ever find. Bolan could see electrified alarm replace the dreamy smile on the handsome face; he could see Bruno’s body stiffening and the tightened fingers clawing at the steering wheel.

  It was a long microsecond. Then the Continental was trying to climb the barricade and failing to do so as three tons of hurtling metal met sixteen tons of unmoving rock. The grinding crash sent a bodyless head arcing through the shattered windshield, to bounce along the quickly shriveling hood. The passenger compartment continued moving briefly after the forward part had come to rest, telescoping into the flattened engine compartment—and then the armored Rolls smashed into the rear, brakes screaming and horn blaring inanely. Almost instantly the third crash came as the rear Continental plowed into the Rolls.

  To this bedlam was suddenly added the staccato chopping of the big fifty as Andromede began spraying the wreckage with steel-jacketed projectiles. A man staggered out of the third car, firing blindly into the rock walls with a pistol. A higher-pitched chatter responded immediately from both sides of the trap, and the man was flung backward, and down, and dead.

  Incredibly, fire was being returned from the Rolls, and the heavy vehicle was rocking forward and backward, the powerful engine straining mightily as the driver fought to extricate the armored car from the jamming smashup.

  “It’s a tank; all right,” Bolan grunted to himself, noting the battering-ram writhing of the Rolls. He snatched up his radio and barked into it, “Gunsmoke! Bring up the big stick!”

  All three members of the fire team were now concentrating their assault on the Rolls, Andromede from almost point-blank range. Still it snorted and struggled like an enraged bull elephant caught in a bog, and still a sporadic return fire issued from it. Then Bolan caught a glimpse of Harrington sprinting around the curve, a long tubelike object hefted onto his shoulder. He watched him approach to within 100 feet of the Rolls, then drop to one knee and sight in the bazooka. An instant later the familiar whoosh, fire, and smoke of the armor-piercing rocket was introduced to the Battle at the Buttes, the enraged bull elephant was enveloped in a deafening explosion, and its struggles immediately ceased.

  “Awright, awright!” a voice screamed out a moment later. A thickset man staggered out of the smoke and into the open.

  Bolan sprang atop the rock that had served as his cover and called down, “Time to pay the tab, Giordano.”

  “Dumbhead!” the Maffiano screamed. His arm jerked up, and the .38 reported three times. The third report, however, was no more than the spasmodic reflex of a quickly dying muscle. Bolan had fired from the hip in one rapid burst that split the rackateer’s body from groin to skull, and II Fortunato was dead on his feet.

  All in all, the battle had lasted less than two minutes. Zitka took a blackened briefcase and a metal box from the passenger compartment of the Rolls. The heavy weapons and the spoils were tossed into the jeep. Andromede jumped behind the wheel and sped off toward the rear of the needle.

  Zitka told Bolan, “There’s a guy still alive back there. In the tank.”

  Bolan sent Zitka and Harrington on to the vehicles and went to investigate Zitka’s report. He found a frightened young man cringing on the smoldering rear floor of the still-smoking Rolls, tightly gripping a bleeding shoulder.

  “I-I’m just his bookkeeper,” the casualty moaned.

  Bolan holstered his .45, reached into his first-aid pouch, and tossed a sterile compress onto the seat. “Know nothing, see nothing, say nothing,” Bolan growled. “That way you may live awhile.”

  The bookkeeper jerked his head in a vigorous assent. Bolan spun away and ran to rejoin the others. The jeep was already inside the van, and Harrington was pacing nervously alongside the retractable ramps. “Anything else for the horse?” he yelled, as soon as he noted Bolan’s approach.

  “Not yet,” Bolan replied. “Pick up the wagon down at the blacktop. Then head for home—the long way.”

  “Gotcha.” Harrington was already rolling the ramps into the van. Andromede hastened to assist him. Bolan and Zitka sprinted to the Corvette.

  Zitka was reaching for the radio as Bolan spun the sportster around. “How do you say, Eagle?” he demanded into the transmitter.

  “Clean, man, clean,” Loudelk’s drawl came back. “And I missed all the fun.”

  “Okay, split,” Zitka told him.

  “Affirm, I am splitting.”

  Bolan glanced at Zitka and said, “Tell Deadeye about the wagon.”

  Zitka nodded and again spoke into the radio. “The wagon goes in the horse,” he said. “Backboard regroup in the Mustang and head for the stable.”

  “Roger,” responded a strained voice. “Is anything wrong with Maestro?”

  “Naw, I’m just riding shotgun and radio for him. God, it went great, great, and I think we got another boodle.”

  “I see your dust,” Washington reported. “Glad it went good. Next time I want up front.”

  Bolan grinned and reached for the radio. He depressed the transmitter button and said, “Good show, group, all of you, but play it cool now until we’re home clean. Radio silence, beginning right now, except for emergencies. Read?”

  “Read,” replied Deadeye Washington.

  “Gotcha,” said Harrington.

  “Affirm,” reported Bloodbrother Loudelk.

  “Wilco,” Blancanales responded.

  Chapter Seven

  FACE TO FACE

  Captain Braddock was perturbed. Worse than that, he was beginning to feel a bit unsure of himself. He turned away from the large map on the wall of his office and faced his Hardcase-detail leaders. The two lieutenants and four sergeants who stared back at him had been carefully selected for this project. Each was an o
utstanding officer with an unblemished record of police efficiency.

  “All right,” Braddock said quietly, “what went wrong?”

  Lieutenant Andy Foster cleared his throat and ran a hand through his hair. He and Braddock had been friends since police-academy days. “We underestimated the guy,” he flatly declared.

  “He did it so smoothly, I didn’t even realize I’d been sucked in,” spoke up a young sergeant, Carl Lyons. “Not until I started putting the pieces together.”

  “There was a confusion factor,” Foster explained, as though to soften Lyon’s admission. “First off, Giordano comes out in two vehicles. Somewhere along the line, God knows where, he added a third. Carl had no way of identifying the players. Cars were jumping into that procession all the way down to the freeway. It was pretty obvious that Giordano was trying to provoke a fight, and we simply had no way of determining which of those vehicles were Giordano’s, which were Bolan’s if any, and which were just unwitting participants. I ordered Carl to simply stay on Giordano’s tail and report developments.”

  “I kept looking for a sudden strike,” Lyons admitted. “I guess I really wasn’t thinking in terms of a Bolan tail. I was just trying to hang in there on Giordano. We hit the freeway, and I tried to tighten it up some. Then, zot!—I’m trapped into the cloverleaf of the interchange with another car hung on my rear bumper.”

  “And you immediately reported your trouble?” Braddock inquired.

  “Sure. I was in contact with Lieutenant Foster the whole time.”

  “I realized we’d lost Giordano,” Foster said. “It was 3:30 the peak period was beginning, and the freeways were beginning to pack. We’re spread too thin, Tim. If we’d had three times our capability, we still couldn’t have covered all possibilities—not short of a general alert. I had to cover the Golden State, the San Bernardino, the Santa Ana, and I couldn’t even positively write off the harbor.”

  “Yeah,” Braddock grunted. His guts were faintly churning.

  “And remember, we had no way of knowing that Bolan was even interested in Giordano at that particular time. If I’d punched the panic button and sent all the Hardcase vehicles scurrying after Giordano, that would have left the rest of the possibilities free and clear for Bolan to tap. You said he was a brilliant tactician. I had to assume that—”

  “Of course, Andy,” Braddock interrupted. “You played it right. No criticism there.”

  “I played it safe, not right,” Foster muttered. “I alerted the neighboring communities and asked them to put out a soft watch for the Giordano vehicles, and then I stewed and chewed my nails and waited for a contact report.”

  The other lieutenant present, Charlie Rickert, joined the discussion at that point. The man unofficially referred to as “the twenty-four-hour cop” said, “The biggest goof was our failure to tail Bruno Scarelli. I think that was dumb. He was our one sure lead to Giordano’s destination.”

  Carl Lyons flushed a deep scarlet. “I had to make a decision, and I made it,” he said. “I detained Scarelli as long as I could, without tipping our hand. Couldn’t tail him myself, not with that rear fender buckled in on the wheel. When one of those big cars tap your butt, you damn well know you’ve been tapped.” He rubbed the back of his neck and scowled at Rickert.

  “I sent a car to cover Scarelli,” Foster reported. tight lipped. “Got there about thirty seconds late and lost him right back at that same damn interchange.”

  “I still think—”

  Rickert’s knife-twisting rejoinder was interrupted by the appearance of a uniformed officer in the doorway. “Got that report from the Riverside lab, Captain,” he announced.

  “Let’s hear it,” Braddock clipped.

  “It was an armor-piercing projectile, all right. Probably fired from a bazooka. Slammed into the Rolls just forward of the doorpost, angling in from the rear. Instant death for the two men in front. The other scars were made by steel-jacketed slugs from a fifty-caliber machine gun. Each of the vehicles was pretty thoroughly worked over by that fifty.”

  “Thanks, Art,” Braddock replied. The uniformed officer smiled and went away, shaking his head. “Full-scale warfare,” Braddock growled.

  “And the neatest ambush I’ve ever …” Foster commented, his voice trailing off into quiet speculation.

  Rickert reached into his pocket, withdrew a long metallic object, and tossed it onto Braddock’s desk. “There was a small mountain of these fifty-caliber casings in the rocks over against the butte,” he said.

  Braddock picked up the casing and absently turned it end over end in his big hand. “They had that jeep out there, that’s certain,” he concluded. “Now somebody tell me how they can run around in an armed jeep without arousing curiosity? Where are they getting this heavy stuff—the bazooka and all that crap? How the hell did they move that heavy boulder onto the road? How the hell …?”

  Lieutenant Rickert sighed heavily and produced a small notebook from his jacket pocket. “I may have some answers,” he said. “I spent the past three hours sifting through the various reports, and … well, just listen. From the Bel Air investigation: The jeep was last seen proceeding north on Skylane Drive. Yet two witnesses at the next intersection, swear that no jeep came past them. Aside from the police and fire-department vehicles, the only moving thing reported through that intersection, in that time period, was a large diesel semitrailer van. The witness paid it very little attention, and couldn’t recall any identifying decals, or even the color.” Rickert glanced at Sergeant Lyons. “Next I quote from Carl’s report: ‘… and I was forced to follow a slow-moving semitrailer into the cloverleaf.’” Rickert smiled wryly. “You did not specify, Carl. This wouldn’t have been a van-type trailer, would it?”

  Lyons silently nodded his head, staring speculatively into the lieutenant’s eyes.

  “Uh-huh. The plot thickens. Now—from the statement by Giordano’s accountant, the sole survivor of the ambush: ‘Mr. Giordano thought we were being followed on the way out there, and we even waited at the back road to let them catch up; he was trying to lure them into a trap. But the only thing that came along was a big diesel truck. It was a blue-and-white moving van, I believe.” Rickert angled a glance at the captain. “It, uh, could be entirely coincidental. Then, again, there could be an answer in there.”

  A fire had been lighted in Braddock’s eyes. “The clever bastard,” he murmured.

  “You think it’s too strong for coincidence?” Foster asked.

  “I’m not leaving anything to coincidence!” Braddock snapped. “Not when Bolan’s hand is in it.” He whirled around to his desk and shuffled through a pile of papers, came up with one, and hastily skimmed down the typewritten lines. “Here it is,” he announced. “This is the transcript of the interrogation of Gerald Young, the accountant. He was questioned as to why Giordano had felt they were being tailed. He says: ‘Well, I thought so myself. There were these same two cars that kept showing up behind us. One was a blue Ford sedan, late model, and the other was an older station wagon, a big one. Maybe a Buick or a Mercury.’” Braddock’s eyes swung to Carl Lyons. “Ring any bells, Sergeant?”

  The young officer’s eyes were haunted pools of revelation. “The blue Ford joined the procession at Lani Way,” he growled. “The wagon joined up at the arterial, just behind me. We hit the on ramp in that order—the big Continental, the Rolls, the Ford, me, the station wagon. Then everything got scrambled up when we moved into the freeway traffic. I was concentrating on the Rolls.”

  “They had you spotted all the way!” Rickert howled. “Hell, boy, they suckered you and packaged you off neat and clean.”

  “How the hell was I supposed to keep on Giordano and every other damn car on the freeway at the same time? I never gave a passing thought to those other cars—and certainly not to a semi. Who would?”

  “Carl is right,” Braddock muttered. “Anyone would have jerked up damn quick, though, if a military jeep with a wicked-looking machine gun on the rear deck had jo
ined the parade. That clever bastard. That’s how he’s doing it. He’s using a Trojan horse. He could pack a small armored unit in that van.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if the sonofabitch had a tank in there,” Foster declared.

  Braddock ignored the remark. “Carl—think carefully now. Which vehicle actually sprung the trap on you? The Ford or the wagon?”

  “Neither one,” Lyons replied immediately. “I’ve been trying to … I was so pissed off, I … Wait, now. I was wondering why he was going so slow, and it … Sure! It was a sports car, a red sports car!”

  “What make?”

  “Damn, I … Out-of-state tags. I remember, now, I was thinking, if you can’t drive on our freeways, even with a roadrunner like that one, then keep the hell off. Then I started around him, and that was all she wrote.”

  “The timing for that little trick must have been fantastic,” Foster observed. “And it couldn’t have been just a spontaneous thing. They had to have radios in those cars.”

  “Goddammit!” Braddock said softly.

  “That adds an entire new dimension to this thing,” Rickert put in.

  “Why not?” Braddock muttered. “Why shouldn’t he think of radios? They’re as much a military tool as a gun. And hell, you can practically buy them in dime stores nowadays.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “We have to completely revamp our strategy. Let’s see if we can’t find a way to intercept their radio signals. Andy, I’m making that your responsibility. Electronic intelligence gathering is a sophisticated science, so you’ll have to dig up some expert assistance. Try the FCC—hell, try the army and the navy, and the CIA, if necessary—but let’s get something working on this angle.”

  “This is a smoothly oiled machine we’re going against. These guys are going to make us look like monkeys unless we …” He left the statement dangling and turned worried eyes to twenty-four-hour Rickert. “Well, Chuck, it looks like you’ve called the play on this thing. Let’s learn all we can about these vehicles they’re using. Get the information to all units as quickly as possible. Shake as many people as possible onto this semitrailer. A thing like that must be hard to conceal if it isn’t in motion or parked in a terminal. Check out every possible lead, anything and everything unusual regarding the use or the location of a van-type semi. Follow up on the weapons angle, Carl. You just don’t pick up bazookas and machine guns at the neighborhood hardware store. Look into recent purchases of sophisticated radio equipment. I want an around-the-clock effort. I want every—”