Don Pendleton - Council of Kings

He opened the door slightly and looked out, saw an empty hall. He edged into the hall. Safe so far.

He was halfway down the stairs when a blond woman, naked but for blue panties, started upward from below. She was carrying a tall glass containing a small amount of clear liquid, and her eyes were only half-open. She saw Bolan and shrugged.

"Hell, Joey, when did you get home?" She climbed the steps, pecked his cheek and continued upward. "I'm crashed, Joey, smashed and bashed and skunk drunk. Don't you ever tell mom." She stumbled on the top step and slid to the carpet.

Bolan quickly went downstairs, out the door in the family room and over.

Twenty minutes later Bolan sank into a chair in his hotel room and called Johnny.

"Mack! I've been trying to get you all afternoon. Charleen Granger was kidnapped this morning — her husband called me. They said they would phone him, but he hasn't contacted me again."

"Can you come to my room?"

"Be right there."

When he arrived, Johnny told Mack Bolan all he knew about the kidnapping.

"The only thing I can figure is that somebody spotted Charleen's car when we left that loan agency."

"Which is bad," the Executioner said. "Call her husband and see if he's heard anything more."

Johnny did, then shook his head. "The poor guy is still waiting."

"So we have to wait. In the meantime, see what you can do with these." He handed Johnny the sheet listing the access codes. "Did you bring your portable computer with the built-in modem?"

"I'll get it. It's in my room."

Johnny Bolan fetched it, plugged it in and positioned the handset. He dialed the number to Joey Canzonari's home office and made the connection.

Johnny entered one of the codes, and the screen showed the files and subject listings each contained. Quickly he worked through a mass of bookkeeping data, then came to the intriguing code name, "Jupiter." He punched it up and whistled.

"Here it is, Mack. Look at this. A ship named the Karatsu Maru is due here about 1330 hours on the thirteenth. That's tomorrow! It's to come in at Terminal One, berth fifteen. She has 9,783 metric tons, and the load is industrial machinery. Owner is listed as Canzonari Lines."

"Paydirt," Bolan grunted. "Now we have something solid. I'll meet them upstream. But first a couple of unfinished projects. You wait for word from Mr. Granger. I've got a date in back of that gun store."

The Executioner put a quarter of a block of C-4 plastique against the small door of the warehouse behind Northwest Guns, Inc., and set the timer for thirty seconds. It blew the door halfway through the warehouse and started dogs howling for half a mile.

Bolan threw two smoke grenades into the building and dropped a white phosphorus grenade outside. He sprinted to the phone booth on the street that ran by the vacant lot behind the warehouse. He reported the explosion and fire to the police.

Bolan watched from the vacant lot. A few minutes later two police cars arrived, followed by a fire truck that pulled up and doused the last flames of the white phosphorus with foam. Then the police and fire inspectors toured the warehouse, and six more squad cars and two unmarked cars arrived. Bolan, deep in the shadows once again, surveyed the distant scene.

That was one illegal arms dealer out of business for good. And the legitimate gun store would not be damaged by smoke or minor flames, so quick was the fire department's response to his call.

He moved on to another phone booth and called Johnny. Yes, Granger had phoned. The kidnappers had ordered Granger to bring either a hundred thousand dollars or Bolan the Bastard to a meeting set for midnight, only half an hour away. Johnny gave Mack the exact location and Mack gave Johnny some brotherly advice: stay in the hotel.

"The kidnappers know about us," Mack Bolan warned. "They made Charleen tell everything she knew about the Executioner. That's why they knew Granger could contact us. So get out of my room and wait for me in yours. Move it!"

Bolan hung up. It was his battle now.

Bolan tried to beat down his terrible sense of dread and urgency as he drove across the river to Mount Tabor Park. He was to meet the kidnappers "at the top, near the rest rooms." Usually there was time to prepare a battle plan, to position his transport strategically. But it was too late for that now.

He would have to play it as it came.

He passed through the park entrance and continued up a hill along a curving road to the top. There was a parking lot and grass and trees. The rest rooms were on the far side, and he veered away from them and parked below the crest of the hill, out of sight of anyone waiting above. A dozen cars were parked along a rim lookout, filled with what he guessed were a dozen couples not paying much attention to Portland's lights spread romantically below. Bolan carried the Uzi and the silenced Beretta. On his right hip hung Big Thunder. He was as ready as he would ever be.

Bolan ran for the woods beyond the lawn. Ensuring that he was unseen, he worked slowly through the fir trees and brush toward the rest rooms. After traveling about fifty yards he saw a man behind a tree near a picnic table with a rifle beside him and a pistol in his hand. The Executioner bellied closer. He moved another twenty yards behind cover, and in the pale light of an overhead bulb outside the rest rooms saw the mobster from fifteen feet away. Bolan tried out his stage whisper.

"Hey! Bolan the Bastard showed yet?"

The man did not turn. "No, and get back to your damn post."

The Executioner used the silenced Beretta 93-R and drilled a hole through the soldier's head.

He watched and waited. The luminous dial of his watch showed 12:15.

Twenty yards forward, near a big Douglas fir, a figure stood and stretched. Number two. During the next five minutes, Bolan spotted numbers three, four and five. A police cruiser swung through the parking lot, throwing a spotlight on each of the cars, and one by one the smoochers in the Chevys and Datsuns started the engines and roared down the hill. The prowl car made one last circle, sweeping the hill clean.

"What the hell, he ain't coming," someone whispered.

Bolan moved closer to the rest rooms, where he could align two of the ambushers in his field of fire. He pulled down the front handle on the 93-R and fired two rounds. The closer target groaned as he died.

"Was that a silencer?" a voice asked.

The Executioner sent one round into the head of the next target. He died silently.

Two left. Bolan pulled a U.S. Army hand grenade from his combat webbing and hurled it in the direction of the remaining creeps.

It hit the ground, then rolled toward a picnic table and small grill built on blocks. Bolan shielded his eyes.

The blast shattered the night. Someone screamed.

Someone else began firing.

Bolan rolled over and sighted the Uzi on a man behind the picnic table, trying to rise.

"I'm hit!"

Two 5-round bursts from the Uzi rattled through the night to finish him off. The corpse was thrown backward over the table onto the grill, and lay there like a human sacrifice.

The last Mafia ambusher rose from behind a log near the parking lot and fired four times into the area where the submachine gun flashes had appeared. He missed Bolan by six feet, and that cost him his life. Bolan held the trigger down on the Uzi and hosed a double S pattern around the winking flashes of the handgun. A scream followed the roar of the chattergun. Then all was silent.

Crouching, the nightfighter ran toward the rest rooms. There was a Closed sign on the Women's. Inside, Charleen Granger was slumped in a locked cubicle, her eyes puffed up and closed and her lips swollen, obviously from a brutal beating. But that torture had only made her talk, not killed her. A small-caliber weapon had delivered the death blow. Ugly black powder burns surrounded a small purple hole on her forehead.