Don Pendleton - Day of Mourning

The girl's eyes rolled back in her head.

She was deadweight coming at Bolan.

Ali expected Bolan to catch the nude form.

Bolan sidestepped, the AutoMag tracking back to Ali.

In the heartbeat it took for Bolan to sidestep the blonde and let her collapse against the nearest wall, the wounded black dodged out of the condemned tenement, back onto the sidewalk.

Bolan raced after him.

The big blitzer cast a glance at the crumpled figure of a naked woman on whom the tables had turned. She was unconscious.

A car engine roared to life in front of the building.

The Ford that belonged to the CIA was stolen again.

Bolan reached the front steps of the deserted tenement just in time to see the Ford flash past a sporty Lancia that was parked near the tenement. The fleeing car disappeared from sight around the corner of the building.

Nothing moved.

Bolan held in a bitter curse that burned in his throat.

He turned and reentered the building.

He walked by the unconscious blonde into the room where he had killed the two other blacks.

Bolan checked the dead men's wallets.

Drivers' licenses identified the deceased as Sam Catcher and James Lee Brown. Some pictures, miscellaneous junk, what looked like a gram of coke wrapped in tin foil snug in each wallet.

And each pocketbook yielded two hundred fifty dollars in brand-new bills.

Bolan grabbed a blanket from the bed and went back to the young woman.

There was no time to waste. Gunfire in this area could go unreported. It often did. But Washington was the most policed city in the nation. The call-in could already have been made.

He wrapped the blonde in the blanket.

There was nothing erotic about her nakedness. She was too unconscious to be sexy.

He picked up the strap purse she had instinctively grabbed in flight. He checked the handbag and discovered the ownership papers of the Lancia.

He carried her outside.

He moved around the building where he had seen the sports car. He placed the girl in the passenger seat, then got behind the wheel. He went through her purse again and found the keys to the car.

He found something else in the young lady's purse that he checked on as soon as he steered the Lancia safely a couple of blocks away.

It was the lady's driver's license.

And the deadly maze took on one more curious twist.

The damndest one in a night of damnation.

Her name was Kelly Crawford.

Bolan felt his gut clench.

He checked Kelly's address.

General Crawford had a daughter named Kelly.

The same General Crawford who had been Bolan's commanding officer in Vietnam, and had been instrumental in setting up the Stony Man Farm operation.

Kelly Crawford.

The general's daughter.

Out cold in a blanket and nothing else in a car driven by Bolan.

Some night, yeah.

And the killing had only begun.

Bolan had not intended this night in Washington to be one of rescuing damsels in distress or engaging everyone he encountered in pointless firefights. Sometimes, though, a man is forced into pure reflex response.

Kelly Crawford, case in point.

Bolan braked the Lancia for a moment at a drive-up pay phone and looked up General Crawford's residence in an area directory. It was listed and matched the address on the license in the young woman's purse.

He drove west on Constitution, through the moderate night traffic. Cruising at the legal speed limit, he took the Roosevelt Bridge across the dark expanse of the Potomac into Virginia.

The blonde in the blanket and nothing else batted her eyes open as Bolan swung south in the direction of the general's home in the upper-class suburbs of Alexandria.

Kelly Crawford said nothing to Mack Bolan. She glared straight ahead into the night as he drove, pulling the blanket tighter around herself, not even acknowledging the man beside her with a glance.

Bolan could see nothing of General Crawford in the girl's physical appearance. She must have taken after her mother.

Retired Brigadier General James Crawford and his daughter lived in a neighborhood of winding streets, the homes set back from the streets on manicured lots separated from each other by trees and evergreen hedge.

A porch light went on when Bolan wheeled the Lancia to a stop on the half-circle gravel driveway in front of a sprawling bungalow.

The door opened and General Crawford stood there.

The girl in the blanket ran past her father into the house, out of sight.

Bolan stepped in and punched off the porch light. He closed the front door.

The general watched the big man with steady eyes, noting the AutoMag holstered at Bolan's hip.

"Colonel Phoenix, would you mind telling me what the hell is going on here?"

The general's warm Arkansas drawl was taut with concern.

This man was the closest thing Bolan had ever had to a father figure, after his real father.

Sam and Elsa Bolan had instilled in their son the basic morality of right and wrong that inspired Bolan to this day.

General Crawford had taken a green young recruit and made of him a combat-hardened veteran. The general made a soldier out of Mack Bolan in Vietnam.

Crawford visited Bolan in the earliest stage of the Phoenix program when Bolan had been holed up recovering from the plastic surgery that had transformed The Executioner into John Phoenix. There had been some briefings after that, but Bolan had not seen General Crawford from then until this moment.

Bolan nodded in the direction the general's daughter had taken.

"You've got some trouble, General."

"I've had trouble with Kelly since the day Lucy died eleven years ago. Come in, Colonel. Drink?"

"I could stand some coffee."

"In the kitchen."

Crawford led the way.

They sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the coffee to perk.

"I've only got time for a quick stop," said Bolan.

"Tell me what happened."

"Kelly has rough friends."

"A black guy?"

"Three of them. Two of them are dead. Datcher and Brown, if it matters."

"It doesn't. One got away?"

Bolan nodded. "Wounded."

"That would be Jones. Were they... harming my daughter?"

Bolan told the general what happened.

The general registered no outward emotion as he listened. He stood and prepared the cups of coffee.

"Tell me about Jones," Bolan requested when he finished his report.

The general handed Bolan a cup of coffee.

"Grover Jones. He started calling himself Damu Abdul Ali a few months ago."

"How long has Kelly known him?"

"A few months. I expressly forbade Kelly to see him again. She decided it was because he was black."

Bolan knew the general better than that.

"What was the reason, sir?"

"I told Kelly what I found out," said Crawford. "Jones was a GI stationed in Germany until eighteen months ago when he was busted as the head of a full-scale drug operation he operated on the base where he was stationed. The murders of a German national and a Turk were involved, but it was never proved that Jones pulled the trigger. None of it was ever proved, as a matter of fact. But there was enough circumstantial evidence to get Jones bounced out of the service with a dishonorable."

"How did he meet Kelly?"

"Jones fought the proceeding right to the end. He was stationed in D.C. while his appeals went through. Kelly was working as a cashier at a PX snackbar."

"Jones may have changed his name, but he hasn't changed his style," said Bolan. "The men I took out were hired hands to do the dirty work while Damu Abdul stayed out of the rough stuff with Kelly."

"What rough stuff?" asked Crawford. "What did Kelly get mixed up in?"

"Have you been briefed on the Stony Man situation, sir?"