Don Pendleton - California Hit

He turned his back and walked away.

Bolan faded quietly into the opposite direction.

Every second counted now. And he wasn't about to scrub this mission even if it was Wang Dang Doo times a thousand.

It was, yeah, a damned important mission.

Wang Dang Doo, and Hanoi too.

It had been one of those private jokes of a handful of scared-out-of-their-skull warriors known as Penetration Team Able. Bolan was the ranking non-com, the team leader. The entire team actually existed as a tactical support unit for the special skills of their leader — Executioner Bolan.

Maybe there really was a Wang Dang Doo somewhere, Bolan never knew. Some of the places they hit over there didn't have a name. Some didn't even have a permanent geographical existence. The enemy in Vietnam had been a highly mobile force. Sometimes Able Team had been required to track a Charlie command post halfway across the deltas before they could set up a strike.

Under Bolan, Able Team had ranged up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. They'd made a few quiet excursions through the DMZ and into the strongholds of the Northmen. Several times they'd found themselves tracking deep into Laos or Cambodia.

There had been no sanctuaries from Able Team. And none, incidentally, for them when they were on a mission.

There had been dozens of Wang Dang Doos. The term, reduced to its utter simplicity, simply meant a rub-out. A wipe-out. A slaughter.

That had been Bolan's specialty.

Sniper, yes. Stiletto man, yes. Garroter, bone-crusher, spine-cracker — yes, all of these were in Bolan's bag of tricks. And he had not been the only specialist in Vietnam. But for the specialty of specialties, Able Team was always the pick of the list. They always got the gory ones. And they got the tough ones because they did the job better.

Able Team had the Executioner.

This was not an item of pride for Mack Bolan. He accepted the medals, the decorations, the special scrolls from grateful villages — but he put them quietly away in a box and forgot them.

Killing people had never meant anything more to Bolan than a distasteful chore which had to be done. He recognized the fact that he had developed a high proficiency in the art of killing, and he recognized also that this proficiency obligated him to a special responsibility. A war needed winning — or, at least, it needed to be contained and controlled. Bolan had the tools, the abilities, and the toughness of soul required for the proper discharge of particularly grisly responsibilities.

He recognized this, but he had taken no special pride in that recognition.

Wang Dang Doo, and Hanoi too.

Yeah, there had been a lot of Bills and Bobs and Toms and Dicks. Kids, most of them, scared out of their skulls — forever wondering why they'd volunteered for this hellfire team. At least Bolan had Korea behind him. He hadn't come into the war with storybook ideas of what it was all about.

Bill Phillips was not the first of the PenTeam graduates Bolan had run into during this new war. He'd even thought once that he could pull together an American civilian version of the old death squads, and he'd actually pulled one together... briefly. The results were tragic; enough so to convince Bolan that it could never work over here.

Herman "Gadgets" Schwartz and Rosario "Politician" Blancanales were the sole survivors of that experiment. They'd squared their account with the law, but they'd have the mob on their asses forever — that much was certain. They were marked men... marked for death.

No more. Not ever again. Bolan would never involve another human being in his private war, not as an ally.

This was a specialty war. A Wang Dang Doo in the real sense, and a job for a loner, without support, a guy who knew every way and every wile, a guy who could stride through rivers of blood to kill again and again... and be willing to take his lumps in that final judgement of the universe.

Yeah. And there it was, of course. Mack Bolan was not a religious man. Not in the ordinary sense of praying and going to church and that sort of thing. But he knew that the universe did not run itself. It wasn't a damn machine which just suddenly sprang into being and then began running down. There was a purpose to the whole thing... somewhere beyond the fragmented understanding of ordinary mortals there was a good reason for the existence of the universe.

If feeling one's self a contributing particle of that universe could be regarded as a religion, then Bolan was a religious man.

In this world of order and purpose, a self-aware particle called Mack Bolan had received some manner of special endowments. He had developed skills, and he had grown into a uniqueness of personal destiny which somehow seemed to have some importance.

Yes, this was a hell of an important mission.

Bolan's war with the Mafia was of some definite importance to the universal order of things.

He was obligated to an exercise of a special responsibility.

He was a Wang Dang Doo type of guy, face it, and he could turn away from his responsibilities no more than he could turn away from life itself.

And, in this hot old town of San Francisco, the star performer of Able Team had again drawn the tough one, the gory one.

This time it would be Wang Dang Doo, and Mr. King too.

And there would be no sanctuaries — neither of geography, nor of social rank, nor of family background-there would be no sanctuaries from this Wang Dang Doo.

The Executioner was tracking the hit.

The decals were off and the warwagon was slowly cruising the periphery of the DeMarco neighborhood.

Bolan knew something about containment networks; he himself had set up one or two in years gone by — and there were certain telltale signs a savvy prey could look for... to give him that extra few seconds of pre-reaction before he found himself bouncing off the net.

The idea was to avoid touching the net. It was like a spring trap... one touch and you're caught.

Bolan had re-assumed his role camouflage, this time with a blue denim jacket instead of the white wind-breaker and lightly tinted purple lenses over the eyes in lieu of the bushy mustache. The effect was about the same — a subtle shift of image that wasn't overly noticeable, not clown-like, simply innocuous. A busy wad of chewing gum kept his jaws in wobbling motion, adding a further distortion to the basic image.

He was about three blocks from the DeMarco mansion when he spotted the first trap car. It was parked at the curb on the corner of Hyde and Pacific, an ordinary street cruiser with engine idling, two uniformed men in front and two plainclothesmen in the rear. The barrel of a sawed-off shotgun was visible above the back seat and a teargas gun lay on the rear deck.

One block beyond that was a neatly concealed roadblock. They were making it look like a minor traffic mishap, with two cars pulled together in a T-formation just outside the intersection, a wrecker visible in the background, one narrow lane of traffic open and being slowly moved along by a uniformed officer.

Most vehicles would be passed on through without too much delay. Certain ones would be maneuvered through the block and into a special "inspection pool" immediately beyond the set-up... probably over behind the wrecker. It was cute, very cute, and once a guy committed himself to that scene there would be no way out.

Bolan was not about to commit himself.

He pulled alongside the plug cruiser and stopped, then slid across the seat and rolled down the window. He said, "Hey man," and popped his gum at the guy.

The uniformed cop at the wheel of the cruiser gave him a scowl and nothing else.

Bolan scowled back and asked him, "What happened to Lombard? It was right here yesterday."