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Wednesday's Wrath

The Executioner, Book Thirty-five

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

INTO HELL

The familiar odor met him at the doorway-and it almost stopped him from going in. The one thing Mack Bolan did not need at this moment was another living nightmare. And there was no mistaking that smell, once it had been experienced. But then the nightmare groaned, and there was also no way to turn away from that.

He sent 200 pounds of enraged kick into the flimsy door and stepped quickly inside with the same motion. The thing on the table at room center was far beyond any awareness of that entry. And the ghoul who was bending over it was too engrossed in his art to take note of anything else. But a guy at the far window looked around with a sick grin and immediately elevated both hands in quick surrender to the imposing figure at the door. Some things simply cannot be surrendered. The big silver pistol thundered from the doorway to send 240 grains of howling death splattering through that sick grin.

Another guy ran in from a back room just in time to catch the next round in the jugular. Most of his throat sprayed away with the hit, but the guy just stood there on the back porch of hell for a frozen moment while the brain tried to understand the message. Another quick round plowed in between unbelieving eyes to correct the sloppy hit and verify the unhappy message.

And Bolan now had the full attention of the maniac in the blood-spattered vinyl smock. The guy was about fifty, tall and spare of frame, handsome with a touch of distinguishing gray at the temples, and very nicely dressed beneath the protective Vinyl. "I can explain," declared the turkeymaster. It was not the voice one would expect from a maniac, but calm, cultured—almost detached from the horror at hand.

Bolan replied, "Good for you," and blew away the devil's elbow.

The guy screamed and grabbed for a tourniquet that lay on the table beside his victim. The next round from the AutoMag blew his wrist away and another quickly followed to the knee.

The turkeymaster hit the floor, squawling and writhing for a comfort that was not going to be found. He lay there jerking around in his own blood, for a change, screaming for a mercy he had never accorded others.

A turkeymaster Mack Bolan was not. He'd never hit for pain or punishment—and the shock of those massive hits would not, he knew, produce anything near the mind-cracking agony and helpless horror that this guy had been systematically dealing out to others. Just the same, the guy was hurting like hell and the sounds of that suffering were getting to Bolan's belly. But maybe the guy needed to take to hell with him some small appreciation of what he'd been handing out so freely to others—and someone else was first in line for Sergeant Mercy.

The thing on the table was only marginally alive and blessedly unconscious. Doc Turkey had apparently been trying to bring that shredded mind back into conscious focus. There was no way to know at a glance whether it had been male or female—or, for that matter, black or white, human or otherwise. It was simply a thing—torched, carved, scraped and hacked into a mutilated and shapeless lump—that had been kept alive and, no doubt, aware throughout most of its ordeal.

There was no way to reverse that nightmare or to even salvage anything from it. Bolan muttered, "Go find peace," and put a bullet where an ear had been. Then he turned to the squawling monster on the floor and sent him the same mercy.

Bolan found another gruesome turkey when he checked the back room. This one had been dead for some time—hours, perhaps.

Bolan was shaking the joint down for intelligence when Jack Grimaldi moved inside, a short shotgun cradled at the chest.

"Jesus Christ!" the pilot muttered and quickly went back outside.

"Is it cool?" Bolan called to him through the open doorway.

"It's cool, yeah," was the strained reply. "What is that in there?"

Bolan went on with his search as he called back, "It's a turkey shack."

"Aw, shit," Grimaldi groaned. "Really? Aw, no. I thought that was just a myth. Hey, I didn't know I was bringing those poor bastards to-I really didn't know!"

"It's no myth," Bolan growled. "And you couldn't have changed a thing, Jack. Did you check out the vehicle?"

"Yeah. Clean. Keys in the ignition. It's from Alamogordo."

Bolan went to the doorway and leaned tiredly against the jamb. "Okay. Thanks again, buddy. I'm releasing you. I'll take the car into town."

"It's your game," the pilot quietly replied. "But, you know, you can fly me anywhere. I can think of lots of places better for you right now than Alamogordo. Almost anywhere, in fact."

They'd been good friends since the Caribbean adventure, and more than that. As a mob pilot, Grimaldi had been a steady source of reliable intelligence and he'd risked a lot—he'd risked everything—as a Bolan convert and ally.

The Executioner smiled at his friend the Mafia pilot as he told him, "Thanks for the thought. Save the worry for yourself." He inclined his head toward the nightmare behind him. "That's what they do to their friends, guy."

Grimaldi shivered and turned his gaze elsewhere. "Sunrise soon," he said.

Bolan said, "Soon, yeah. You'd best move it out. Now."

"You're mad as hell, aren't you?"

The tall man in the doorway smiled tightly as he replied, "I can handle it."

"Listen ... I'll fly on over to Alamogordo and tie down there for the day. I'll leave my hotel address with the base operator. If you should need some quick wings ..."

Bolan said, "Thanks. I'll keep it in mind."

Grimaldi hesitated for a moment then asked, sotto voce, "Who were the turkeys?"

"You don't really want to know."

"I guess not, no. Okay. Well, I'll be around." The pilot turned away and strode off across the wastelands.

Sunrise soon, yeah. Already the black of night had deteriorated to a dirty gray. Bolan watched his friend disappear into that grayness, then he went back inside the shack and resumed the search. He loaded a tape recorder and several used tapes into the vehicle parked just outside, then threw in a collection of wallets and other personal items gathered during the shakedown.

Ten minutes after Grimaldi had set off on his solo return trek to the plane, the nightmare shack was in flames and Mack Bolan was beginning his journey into another nightmare in the appropriated Mafia wheels.

Grimaldi flew over the burning shack and dipped his wings in a silent farewell. Bolan responded with a flash of headlights and quickly put that scene behind him.

The physical scene, that is.

The images would remain with him to the grave. Worse yet, he'd have to listen to those abominable tapes—the record of two souls descending into hell itself. The turkey techniques made brainwashing a genteel social affair by comparison. It was not brainwashing, but soul bursting. Interspersed with all the shrieks and desperate pleas would be the babblings of a life record in quick and selective playback—containing every sin imagined or otherwise, along with everything else a desperate soul could devise to please its tormentor, so as to shut off that which was already recognized as irreversible.

Yeah, Bolan would have to listen to all that.

And yes, Jack, he was already mad as hell. Not so much because of who they were, but simply because they were.

Bolan had no particular sense of compassion for the likes of Charlie Rickert and Jack Lamamafria, the latter also known lately as Jack Lambert.

But nobody deserved to die that way. Not even with the fate of the entire civilized world hanging in the balance. Did that sound melodramatic? Too bad, then. Because that was precisely the point of this latest game in the troubled life of Mack Bolan: the fate of the entire civilized world.

THE SWIRL

Bolan heard enough from the tapes during the hour's drive into Alamogordo to confirm his guess that the movements in New Mexico were directly related to the recent developments he had just left behind in California. Rickert and Lamamafria had been charged with the security of that West Coast operation, which had been ripped asunder by Bolan's Day Two mop-up of the area. There were overtones of punishment for a responsibility poorly met during the interrogations, but the main thrust had obviously been total recall in an outrageously inhuman "debriefing" of the two Mafia lieutenants. Which merely underscored the importance with which the higher bosses regarded the events of yesterday in California—and especially as they were related to the New Mexico thing.

It was not exactly standard form to so punish an honest failure; in fact, Bolan had never heard of such an occurrence in the past. Such treatment was traditionally reserved for traitors or enemies with important secrets. It was beyond doubt, though, that these tapes constituted a debriefing of friendly personnel carried to unusual extremes.

Something very big was developing, for sure.

Muted rumblings of that something had been emanating from the area for some time. In fact, Bolan had followed the tremors from his recent blast into Arizona and had been tentatively scouting the New Mexico question when the urgent summons from the East sent him airlifting into Tennessee. All he'd found during that brief probe had been whispers and echoes of some quiet underworld activity in the wastelands. Now here he was again, same scene, probably the same situation, except that now the whispers had become shrieks of agony.

But a pattern was developing, for sure.

The flash from Leo Turrin had warned of a "large event" going down in New Mexico—related somehow to the California disaster—with various "important men" hastily dispatched to that area.

As another item in the weave, Charlie Rickert and Lamamafria were the only ranking local members of the California conspiracy to survive Bolan's rampage in Los Angeles. Bolan had last seen Lamamafria, a.k.a. Jack Lambert, lying unconscious on the floor of his Sunset District office. Rickert, the renegade cop, had been turned over to local authorities after assuring Bolan that he would cooperate.

According to Leo Turrin, who had not been in a position to get it all, Someone had "moved heaven and earth to spring a certain VIP prisoner from the L.A. county jail"-and this was somehow related to the thing in New Mexico.

Big Tim Braddock, a recent convert to the Bolan cause and now deputy chief of the L.A. cops, was all but frothing at the mouth as he confirmed Bolan's suspicion that Charlie Rickert's release had, indeed, been quietly engineered, mere hours following his arrest.

Then Jack Grimaldi had provided the cinching element with his report of "ferrying a burial party" from Santa Monica to a lonely spot in the New Mexico wastelands.

"Two pigeons," Grimaldi reported to his old friend, "with two keepers. They had 'em doped and hooded all the way so I don't know who the poor bastards are. There was a car waiting for them, in the middle of nowhere. I had to land on a dirt road in the dark, without lights if you can imagine that."

Bolan had imagined that, yeah. And he'd asked his friend, the Mafia pilot, to repeat the performance. Now it seemed that Leo's fears had been right on target. Something big was going down, for sure. It was directly related to the California thing. Maybe it was an action-reaction sequence. That would explain all the urgent parleys in New York while the Los Angeles thing was falling apart.

Yeah, maybe so.

It was now very obvious that the council of bosses—weak though their coalition might be at the moment-had not been all that concerned about outsider Bill McCullough and his ambitious stretch toward a West Coast takeover. The vaunted "California Concept" had probably been at their fingertips the whole while, awaiting nothing more than the proper moment for the cannibals to step in and make it their own. Until Bolan happened onto it. But they'd not been concerned about McCullough. They'd had Rickert and Lamamafria inside that operation right at the top.

And it was guys like McCullough who kept the mob fat, happy, and immortal—even at a moment when you'd think they were going down for the final count.

Mack Bolan should have remembered that.

And he should have remembered the litany of the Mafia:

If you can't steal it, extort it;
If you can't extort it, join it;
If you can't join it, corrupt it;
If you can't corrupt it, hit it;
If you can't hit it, buy it;
After you've got it, eat it.
And if you can't get it, eat it on the run.

Yeah. You could say what you like about the Italian brotherhood—whatever else, they were the most persistent and successful cannibals of them all—and people in Bill McCullough's league should have learned that long ago.

People like Hal Brognola and Mack Bolan should not have forgotten it. The American mob was not down for the count. They'd bounced back with amazing resiliency. If Bolan could not stop them here, quickly and resoundingly, then he might as well forget the briefly ignited hopes for an end to this damnable war. It would go on for as long as Mack Bolan lived. Which, of course, could mean for only another hour or two ... all things considered.

IMAGES

The turkeyman was using the name Philip Jordan and his spanking new driver's license gave the address of a modern apartment complex in Alamogordo. Bolan drove past the place in a slow pass to a small shopping center a few blocks beyond. The day was still quite young, though, and none of the stores were open, but he found a public telephone at the edge of the parking lot and made three quick long distance calls. He spoke briefly to contacts in Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York, then went on to a small, all-night grocery and made a few purchases.

It was nearing eight o'clock when he returned to the apartment building. The place was now stirring with life—since it was the time of day when most people were beginning their daily work routine. Bolan remained in the car for several minutes, getting the feel of the place. Two men and three women, all young, entered the parking area during that period, got into cars, and went their separate ways. That and other quiet clues combined to present the picture of an abode for singles. The general layout was of three moderatesized buildings, grouped around a small swimming pool and patio, with tennis courts at the rear and parking for about fifty cars. That parking lot now held no more than a dozen vehicles; apparently most of the tenants were off about their daily business.

Bolan lit a cigarette and studied the layout until he was pretty well oriented, then he gathered his stuff and went directly to Jordan's apartment. It was at patio level, opposite the pool. A quick glance at the lock provided the clue to the proper key from Jordan's own key ring. He unlocked the door and stepped inside, with the air of a man who owned the joint.

Small, studio style. One room encompassed living, dining, and kitchen areas—a single small bedroom and bath. But nice enough. Neat and clean. The refrigerator contained milk, eggs, some vegetables and nothing else. Canned soups and vegetables in the cupboard. Brown bread, packaged rice. No cigarettes, no booze, no meats. The guy was an ascetic.

A small table by the couch held a neat stack of magazines. No Playboys or Hustlers, though. Scientific American, Psychology Today, Commentary and several others of that caliber, all current. And all had been forwarded via the mails to Dr. Philip Jordan from a Maryland address. Uh huh.

Wastebaskets were empty and clean—even in the bathroom. The trash compactor in the kitchen area held a fresh bag with nothing in it.

Bolan was beginning to wonder if anyone actually lived there.

But there was a neat array of toilet articles, partially used tubes and bottles, occupying the bathroom chest. A laundry hamper in the bedroom closet contained two barely soiled towels, two pairs of socks, two sets of underwear, two white shirts. Clean suits, shirts, and an assortment of subdued ties hung neatly in the closet.

Neat and clean, yeah. Bolan was remembering that calm look, the cultured voice, the careful attire. And he was projecting that image into this apartment, developing an insight into the man who had called this place home—a well-educated, handsome man in his forties or early fifties, unmarried or at least living alone at the moment, fussily tidy, practically ascetic and almost antiseptic in lifestyle, perhaps a vegetarian and almost certainly an intellectual. Doctor Philip Jordan. Doctor of what? Besides turkeys.

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Excerpted from Wednesday's Wrath by Don Pendleton. Copyright © 1979 Don Pendleton. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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