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  Blancanales sighed. “Of all the crazy things we’ve talked about … and you’re just now getting this in. I didn’t know you had aches, Gadgets.”

  “Cycle of life,” Schwarz said, grinning suddenly. “It all ties in somewhere, back at some power source. We’re just so many carrier modulations, see, running along a PC board and—”

  “Don’t do that,” Blancanales said, soberly interrupting. “It’s good to let it hang out, sometimes. Don’t keep it stuffed into those spaghetti circuits all the time.”

  Schwarz gave his old friend an embarrassed smile and went aft.

  “There’s a deep one,” the Pol said quietly.

  “Yeah,” Bolan agreed.

  The sober moments had apparently produced an unsettling effect. Blancanales chewed the back of his hand for a moment, then blurted, “I’m worried as hell about Toni, Sarge.”

  Bolan sighed.

  “I shouldn’t have allowed her into this company. God, she’s young, too. And what kind of life is this for a woman?”

  Bolan said, “She told me the story, in New Orleans. I think she knows what she’s doing. Women need fulfillment, too, Pol. Some of them can’t find it with a ring and a promise. You may as well face it—I believe Toni is our kind. Val, now …”

  “I heard you mention her name on the phone. I didn’t want to pry, but—what’s happening?”

  Bolan shook his head. “I’ll know when Johnny gets here. I was assured otherwise but somehow I can’t shake the feeling that this crisis or whatever involves Val. She and Johnny have been like brother and sister ever since—well, I don’t know. I’ve never liked the idea of tying those two together. Johnny’s neck is in my noose—and there’s no way out of that, now. Val’s wouldn’t have to be there. I’ve tried many times to release her and she just won’t release. But Val is not the kind to—Val needs a ring and a promise, Pol. I could never give her that. The only ring she’ll ever wear on my behalf will be a mourning band. And the only promise will be carved on a headstone.”

  The Politician sighed. “I think Gadgets has the right idea. Keep it buried. Guys like us have no right to … You’re right too, you know. If you stand, you stand alone. Otherwise it just gets too damned confused. But I’d still like to check on Toni.”

  Bolan’s gaze flicked to the mobile phone. “Give her a call. Let it ring twice only, then disconnect. Call again immediately and repeat the routine. She’ll pick up on the third call.”

  Blancanales smiled apologetically and instituted the routine.

  Bolan concentrated on the route and began watching for exit directions, visions of Johnny and Val playing lightly just beneath the surface of his mind.

  Del Annunzio’s hardsite in Webster Groves was now only minutes away. Annunzio himself had been leading the charge on Jules Pattriccia. But the hardsite was still there. The battle plan called for a quick haymaker to that vital organ before there could be any concerted recovery from the disaster at Winevat. Everything else would have to stand aside until that important objective had been achieved. The numbers simply would allow no deviation.

  But the depths of Mack Bolan were churning with the unhappy and potentially disastrous developments vis à vis Johnny Bolan’s insistence upon an audience with the warrior in the midst of battle.

  Both Johnny and Val had been kept in low-profile protective concealment since the moment Bolan had put Pittsfield behind him. Their lives were in great danger. The mob would whack them just for simple retaliatory pleasure—or there could be a duplication of the Boston nightmare, when the two had been snatched in an effort to force Bolan into the open.

  Leo Turrin had proven to be the greatest friend those two could ever hope for—and virtually their guardian angel. As the underboss of the Pittsfield arm, he had instant and direct access to whatever may be going down in the area. As an undercover federal cop, he had the official clout to keep the pair under the most stringent security precautions.

  Bolan had decided long ago that the very best thing that he personally could do for them was to get out of their lives and stay out. Of course, that could sometimes prove difficult.

  Johnny should not have slapped leather on faithful Leo—not even toy leather. That was an immense breach of ethics—and Johnny certainly realized that truth as strongly as did Bolan himself.

  So, sure, something was terribly out of focus in Pittsfield. And, moments later, Pol Blancanales added nothing whatever to the peace of Bolan’s subsurface worries.

  “It’s no good,” he reported fretfully. “I worked the combination exactly and now the damn thing is ringing off the wall. She’s not answering, Sarge.”

  And that was not like Toni!

  A muscle worked in Bolan’s jaw as he softly replied, “She’s standing, Pol.”

  “What?”

  “While we take Stonehenge, Toni is standing. She’s one of us. We’ll check her out as soon as we can. Until then …”

  “Yeah,” Blancanales growled. “She stands alone.”

  There was, unhappily, no other way to stand.

  11: CALLING IT

  “Stonehenge” was situated on the eastern edge of a suburban community, a semi-rural estate which had once been the heart of a productive and prosperous farm—most of whose acreage had long ago been subdivided and developed for “country executive” living—presumably for those who found the confinement of city life unpleasant and who had the means to escape it.

  Stonehenge was a code name, of course, assigned by Gadgets Schwarz to the stone-walled, fortress-like cluster of ancient buildings which remained as the only link to an agricultural past. The house itself was huge and impressive, obviously put there by someone with strong cultural ties to European traditions and possessing a fondness for baronial estates. Structured from native stone and whole logs, it rose to three full stories and a mansard roof complete with “widow’s walk” in an open cupola.

  Various incidental outbuildings were clustered to the rear, all of those also of stone except for a relatively new wooden horse barn and corral. The surrounding terrain inside the walls was more or less flat with here and there a gentle knoll to break the monotony, a stand of oak or willow—ten acres of “country executive” living at its best.

  The subdivision lay off to the west and south, the boundaries well marked by a dense stand of trees which followed the entire line and provided a second, outer “fence” for the walled estate.

  Title to the property had recently been transferred to an outfit calling itself “Mid-Missouri Mortgage Holding Company”—a subsidiary of “Midwest Mortgage Bankers Group, Inc.”—itself a corporate structure within “American Associates Holding Corporation” whose primary cash assets reposed in Swiss banks and were manipulated solely by the circle of iron old men in New York known to law enforcement officials everywhere as La Commissione.

  Stonehenge was a hardsite, pure and simple.

  It was, evidently, destined to become the official capitol of the new midwestern empire now being so carefully staked out on the Missouri plain by those ruthless old men whose domain already extended from sea to shining sea across this land which had long ago forsaken baronial ideas and feudal dreams.

  Mack Bolan was damned if they were going to get away with it.

  The often romantically touted Mafia idea was, in fact, nothing but a diehard echo from the jungles of survival which most enlightened peoples had abandoned generations ago.

  Stonehenge was a standing symbol of that echo.

  The Mafia motif was, in effect, a feudal system based upon the supposition that the strongest and meanest man around deserved to be the “chief”—the head man—the king—and that all others should accept his beneficence as and when he wished to dispense it.

  To the worthy would be deeded fiefs of their own, and these in turn would sublet small plots of turf (or “territories”) for lesser lieges.

  Of course, the larger benefits accruing in such a pyramidal system typically went to the man at the top of the pyramid—and th
e maintenance of that pyramid required the constant use of force, fear, intimidation, terror.

  It was not a very democratic idea.

  But it was a very ancient one.

  The chief difference between a genuine feudal system and the Mafia version lay in the angle of approach.

  In a nation politically constituted under such a system, the man at the top was indeed a king or emperor, a sheik or a czar, a fuehrer or a duce. The raping of a nation and a people went on in the full glare of daylight and under the laws of the land.

  In a land where the laws frowned on such behavior, the pyramid could operate only in an inverted fashion, the apex buried deeply underground beneath layer upon layer of “support” gradually building to the surface for a “base” that oozed into every nook and crevice in the upper world that would admit it and allow it to flourish. It was an upside-down pyramid.

  Hence, the term “underworld.”

  The old-world Mafia had once been a sort of poorman’s aristocracy, the result of a slave revolt by desperate men who replaced official tyranny with a homespun version of their own. It was perhaps not too reprehensible an idea for a time and place where a systemized looting and raping of the powerless was an official way of life.

  This “aristocracy,” however, represented the degeneration of a purer idea.

  The earlier “Society of Matthew” (from the Latin, Matthew: brave, bold) was based on a sort of Robin Hood idea. Early mafiosi stole back from the rich that which had been legally extracted from the poor, spread terror, and exacted tribute throughout the landed and monied gentry—and began to restore some measure of justice to the common folk of the time.

  It is probably true, however, that power corrupts—and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. With the growing success of the Mafia brigands, the reins of terror and oppression were merely transferred from the official fiefs to the underground ones—or shared mutually. The common citizen often found himself squeezed between two masters—one exploiting him from the top, the other from the bottom.

  The two-headed pyramid of power was thus complete—one the mirror image of the other, each side sharing a common base—upon the backs of the people—an apex in both the upper and under worlds. The one systematically aided and abetted the other, each protected the other, and the peasants found their burdens doubled rather than diluted.

  Bolan was well aware of Mafia history.

  And he was thoroughly repelled by the disgusting philosophy that embraced social cannibalism as a “smart” way of life while sneering at every decent and uplifting movement of mankind.

  In his war journal, he had once written:

  “These guys do not build anything. They just destroy. Sometimes they destroy for the sheer joy of it, but usually it is due to common greed linked with a total lack of reverence for anything noble or constructive. They’re like greedy dead-end kids turned loose to shift for themselves at a birthday feast of cake and ice cream: they’ll smash the cake and splatter the banquet room with ice cream, rip down the decorations, and turn the whole party sour—then walk away with a smirk and a strut because they got more than the “dopes.” And if they do build anything at all, it is only toward another smirk and strut.”

  Yes, Mack Bolan understood his enemy.

  They were “stone-agers”—primitives who would keep the world a jungle for as long as decent men turned the other cheek or tried to contain them by civilized methods.

  There was but one way to deal with a primitive.

  You met him at his own terms, on his own ground, with his own methods—the only kind he would ever truly understand and respect. Then you simply eliminated him from the civilized world and returned him to the age where he belonged.

  You killed the bastard.

  Bolan knew that game, knew it well, and the moment had arrived for Stonehenge.

  Gadgets Schwarz had been designated “base support”—a role for which he was now receiving a final briefing as the other two suited up.

  “Soon as you drop us, get it up to the high ground and institute optic and radio surveillance. Pol and I are wired, but let’s have radio silence except for absolute urgencies. If you get a sniff of blues, sound the alert and stand by for evasive disengage. If something else shows, send the word then lay low and quiet it. Leave it to Pol and me to play the reaction.”

  Schwarz nodded in understanding. “Okay. What about the fire assignment?”

  “If we need fire support, we’ll call it in by the grid. Looking straight at the main building from your position, dead center will be ‘Fire One.’ Every click left of center will be a progressive even number—Fire Two, Fire Four, and so on. Right of center gets a progressive odd number.”

  “Okay.”

  “For elevations, count odd for each click above center, even for below.”

  “Got it. Like, if I’m sending two clicks left and two down, you’ll call it Fire Four Four.”

  “Right. You also have the option for free fire, Gadgets, and I leave that to your own head. Just be damn sure you know what you’re firing on. Also, they’re big rockets and there’s only four to the pod, so don’t spend them cheaply.”

  “Yeah, I read that. Hey—you guys don’t do anything wild.”

  Blancanales rolled his eyes at that.

  Bolan grinned sourly and said, “Let’s go see what they have.”

  12: THE FOLLOWER

  The skipper had grabbed a tactical scout ’copter to rush to the scene of disaster, and he’d invited the intelligence boss to accompany him—but Tom Postum demurred, preferring to follow more sedately, and perhaps more thoughtfully, in his lumbering electronic reconnaissance van.

  The “smoke screen” had cleared out and the scene was straight out of the tactical training manual when he arrived. Grim-faced and heavily armed young SWAT cops in flak jackets were deployed in hard containment teams wherever the practiced eye could see along the approaches to the combat zone. A mobile base unit with direction-finder antenna patiently rotating was pulled onto the relatively high ground across the road from the old salvage yard. Small scout teams were moving vigorously in both directions along the fence, and everywhere lay the heavy atmosphere of grim purpose and official determination.

  But Tom Postum knew that it was already too late for any of that. He pulled in beside a Quick Reaction Vehicle and caught the eye of the unit leader who was standing disconsolately alongside. He recognized the cop as “Four Unit One.”

  “What went?” Postum asked him.

  The young sergeant shook his head and made a wry face. “Some damned fancy footwork,” he replied. “Skipper’s inside, Lieutenant. Don’t get too close to him, though. His vibes are approaching critical mass.”

  Postum winked solemnly and eased his van past another couple of QRVs which were parked along the access road. As he swung through the gate, a familiar white sheet marking a somber lump caught his eye off to the right.

  “There’s one,” he muttered.

  He never got to two and three—reaching, instead, infinity just around the bend.

  “Oh God!” he groaned, upon confronting that sea of DOA markers.

  He halted the van and just sat there for a long moment, his mind struggling with the enormity of the thing—the carnage, shattered vehicles, the gutted and charred ruins of a once-sizeable building—and cops, cops everywhere, poking into the post mortem of an Executioner blitz, lab men strolling around, coroner’s people running about with wraps and baggies.

  A QRV driver came over to stand beside his open window.

  “Ever see anything like this, Lieutenant?” the youth asked solemnly.

  “Not since a place called My Lai,” the intelligence chief replied quietly.

  “Oh. You were there?”

  “Like now,” Postum growled. “After the fact.”

  “Look at those vehicles,” the young cop said. “It took a lot of hell to leave them in that shape. Worse junk in the yard, now. I heard the skipper say one of them had been a self-p
ropelled bomb. How could he get that from a mess like that?”

  “Ask him,” Postum replied absently.

  “Not me,” the kid said, and walked away.

  A paramedic team was scrambling around down there in the ruins, hot on the scent of something. Apparently someone had found a live one.

  Postum did not wish to see what they would drag from that wreckage. He backed his vehicle around and went out of there. He turned right onto the main road and slowly followed the fence line to the gaping hole at the northwest corner, then stopped again and got out for a closer look.

  It was obviously a fresh break—and, just as obviously, a small explosive charge had done the work.

  A SWAT cop standing there apologetically told him, “Sorry, sir, this area is sealed for the lab team.”

  Postum nodded his head, accepting that without comment, and walked slowly across the road to a slightly elevated knoll immediately opposite. He found some interesting tire impressions in the soft dirt there, grunted, then straightened up with hands on hips to meticulously survey the hit zone from this point of view.

  The intelligence man grunted again then, and returned to his vehicle. He went into the van and ran a plotline to the point of last-known radio contact, then bracketed the “smoke zone” and ran a few more plotlines.

  Sourpuss Postum was not grinning now. He may never, in fact, do so again.

  He went forward and sent the vehicle into motion again, U-turning along the backhaul and rolling slowly, seeking an inconspicuous and probably little-used trail cross-country.

  He found it, less than a quarter-mile along—a backcountry dirt road bearing away from the delta lowlands and pointing the way westward.

  A few minutes later, he found himself staring at an access ramp to Interstate 70. Again he consulted his graph and again he frowned.

  He called in to headquarters and told his watch commander: “Willis, this is priority hot. I want you to get me a computer program access into a historical bank—or maybe anthropological. Tell them what we want and let the experts figure it out. Maybe you should query first Washington University. If they can’t supply it, they should be able to put us onto someone who can.”