Don Pendleton - Savannah Swingsaw

Zavlin checked his watch again. He had almost ruined everything by his misuse of the black jargon. He was a master at accents, languages, dialects. But there were a few he still had trouble with, especially the black street talk. It changed too quickly, always adding new words, altering the meanings of existing ones.

He popped the contact lens out of his right eye. The tinted lens had changed the color from blue to brown, but he didn't like keeping it in too long. It irritated his eye. He blinked rapidly and put it back in. Then he left the room, telling the ancient secretary and the guard outside the door that he wanted to get some documents from his car and would return. They weren't to disturb the prisoner, but if he attempted to make a phone call, they were to monitor it. The old crone seemed to get some pleasure from that possibility.

Ten minutes later, Zavlin was driving through Atlanta to meet the three KGB assassins he'd sent for. By now they should already be in position. The prison van carrying Dodge Reed was only a few minutes behind him. Just as he'd planned.

"So what's the plan, Mack?" Shawnee piloted her ancient Celica up the Northeast Expressway to Buford Boulevard, edging just past the speed limit, but not enough to alert any cops.

"The plan," Bolan said sternly, "is to do what I say, when I say. Understood?"

Shawnee swung her head around, the long dark hair whipping off her shoulders like striking snakes. Her eyes glowered. "No, damn it, not understood at all. You may be the famous Mack Bolan, but this is still my squad. The Savannah Swingsaw follows my orders. You want to discuss the details of the plan, fine. We're with you. You want to play leader, then we pass."

"These men are dangerous," Bolan persisted.

"Hey, Mack," Shawnee said with a sigh. "You may have kicked ass in every state of the union, but we've kicked some ass of our own. We know dangerous."

The Executioner decided she was right. They knew danger. But not the kind that came with men like Zavlin.

He had no rules, no mercy. And he was trained in ways to kill that rivaled even the ancient cult of ninjas.

"Well?" she said, glancing from the road to his face with her piercing eyes. "What's it going to be?"

He looked over his shoulder to Lynn and Rita in the back seat. He knew their guns were hidden on the floor under a blanket, but the women were perched on the edge of the seat ready to grab them at a second's notice. They returned his gaze with unblinking stares. Good, he thought. He could see they were a united front. That was important. It was just what he was trying to determine by his rough prodding and insults. See how much of a team they really were, how much leadership Shawnee had. The way all three of them were glaring at him now, he knew they could be counted on to stick together when things started to get bloody.

And they would.

"Okay," he said, spreading the map of Atlanta and surrounding areas on his lap. "You wanted to know the plan. Listen carefully."

They listened, their faces growing paler as he explained.

Zavlin removed his sunglasses, wincing from the harsh sunlight. His one brown eye and his one blue eye squinted immediately. He shaded them with one hand while using the other to unsnap the leather case around his neck and bring the binoculars up to his sensitive eyes.

Yes! There they were. His three KGB assistants were in perfect position. They crouched in the thick dogwood and pink azaleas, waiting for the van, their high-powered rifles clutched in experienced hands.

They were very good. Zavlin permitted himself a tiny premature smile of victory. He carried the folding beach chair that he'd bought at the discount drugstore on the way here to just the right spot under a shady tree and sat down with a contented sigh. Might as well relax. What would happen next was as inevitable as snow in Moscow.

He peered through the binoculars again, adjusting the central focusing drive. His men were dressed in casual clothing: golf shirts, Bermuda shorts, dark socks, loafers. Just what a tourist might be wearing who got lost in the area.

Once they'd disposed of the guns, the only thing that might betray them were the identical calluses on the inside crooks of their trigger fingers. Thick pads from pulling triggers of hundreds of guns.

Built up from years of irritating the skin, like oysters creating pearls from the nuisance of a single grain of sand. To each of those men, that callus was as valuable as a pearl.

He reached inside his shirt to fondle the goldplated ornament hanging from the gold chain around his neck. The object puzzled the few who had seen it, guessing that perhaps it was some sort of shark's tooth, or the claw from a giant leopard.

It was a finger. The skeletal fragment of a finger.

Supposedly the finger bone of the legendary American, Jim Bowie. Not just any finger, but his trigger finger, sliced off at the Alamo by one of Santa Anna's men. Not out of hate, but in tribute to his heroism. The bony digit had been passed down through generations of this same Mexican military family until hard times had forced them to sell it to a private broker. Zavlin ran his fingertips along the gold plating he'd added. There was no way to authenticate this as Jim Bowie's, it could be any finger. He didn't care. He wanted it to be Bowie's, so it was. Certainly he'd paid enough money to the broker, who would know the dire consequences of cheating Zavlin, for it to be real.

Zavlin watched from the shade of his tree, able to see everything, observe his men take aim when the prison van came within range, and fire and keep firing until Dodge Reed was dead. As well as everyone else in the van.

And, should anything go wrong, he would be safely up here. He swung his binoculars down the dirt road. A puff of dust rose and grew like the tail of a frightened cat. He couldn't make out what the vehicle was yet, but it had to be going to the new prison. That was the only place the road led to.

Not a prison yet. It hadn't been completed.

But the walls were up and where they weren't, barbed wire had been strung. The dormitories hadn't been finished yet either, but the plumbing was working and they'd constructed rows of tents for the convicts to sleep in.

Nothing unusual in that.

Zavlin had read of many prisons fighting overcrowding with small tent cities. And recent troubles at Fulton had convinced authorities to use the new prison a little early while they investigated the prison murders, defusing what they feared might be a race war.

A helpful, well-paid secretary, had managed to include Dodge Reed's name among those scheduled to be transferred. The amount of her bribe had been staggering, but it was money well spent, Zavlin thought. The whole KGB operation could be jeopardized if Dodge Reed told anyone what he knew. And that operation was too important to risk. Not when they were so close to striking what surely would be a crippling blow to the entire American society.

The vehicle wobbled closer, still engulfed in the cloud of dust, defying identification. Zavlin glanced down at his men. They scrambled to their positions and readied their rifles. — Zavlin could feel the familiar excitement as he pressed the binoculars back to his eyes, zeroing in on the approaching dust cloud. Public outcry had forced the location of this prison to be changed from the more populated areas to more rustic locales. Getting here had been the biggest challenge so far. But it was for the best. There would be no one to stop what was about to happen.

The plume of dust hugged the winding road, clinging to the bouncing vehicle like a coat of buzzing flies.

Another half mile and it would be on the short straight road that Zavlin had determined was the best location for the ambush.