There is another Washington concealed behind the spit and polish of the nation's capital. In place of monuments to presidents and heroes, shabby houses testify to broken dreams; children run the streets by day and night, collecting into gangs for self-protection, striking out in anger at society's indifference. The alternate reality of Washington is rich in violence, boasting crime rates that have placed the seat of government among the ten most lethal cities in America. From time to time the mayhem overflows its teeming reservoir and laps against the steps of Congress, leaving bloody stains on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The "other Washington" does not appear in tourist guidebooks or society reviews. It may be found more often on the local nightly news in living color: scenes of savagery and desperation broadcast into stately homes ten blocks — and worlds — away. But for the most part, it is locked away behind the television screen, securely penned inside the magic box. Its horrors are transitory, simply and efficiently eradicated with a touch of the remote control.
Mack Bolan's blitz began within that other Washington. He nosed the rental Ford through streets where garish neon scarcely seemed to touch the shadows, hostile faces swiveling to watch him pass. A decade earlier, the faces would have been predominantly black, but there were Hispanics sprinkled in among them now, and Orientals, cast-off exiles from the island states of the Caribbean. A ghetto still, the other Washington had lost its ethnic unanimity, and with the change had come another rise in violent crime.
One thing about the ghetto had not changed. Its vice was still controlled by absentees who pulled the vital strings on gambling, narcotics, prostitution and pornography. The masters of corruption still went home at night to Georgetown, Arlington, Bethesda, leaving ethnic underlings to bear the heat of periodic crackdowns by police. It was a one-way street as far as profits went, the money flowing out and fattening the coffers of the syndicate. The ghetto was a major source of gangland income, and the Executioner had opted to begin his blitz by striking his opponents where it counted. Directly in the pocketbook.
The numbers bank was one flight up, above a pool hall christened Whitey's by some long-forgotten wit. Bolan drove around the block and parked the car in an alley, underneath the pool hall's rusty fire escape. No passersby had taken notice of him yet, and Bolan planned to have his business finished well before the vagrant street waifs could search out and strip the car.
He spent a moment double-checking armament before he locked and left the car. The silenced Beretta was primed and ready, nestled in fast-draw leather under Bolan's arm. The silver .44 AutoMag, Big Thunder, rode his hip on military webbing, canvas pouches stuffed with extra magazines for both guns circling his waist. He was in blacksuit, having shed his street clothes prior to strapping on the pistol belt, and hidden pockets held stilettos and garrotes, the tools of an assassin's trade.
The soldier was anticipating trouble, counting on it, but he meant to choose the time, the killing ground. There would be lookouts in the pool hall proper, ready to blow the whistle if a strange white face appeared. They would immediately realize that he was not from Gianelli's stable, and while Bolan was secure in his ability to handle sentries, he was hunting bigger game this evening. A firefight in the pool hall would delay him long enough for his primary targets to escape, and so the Executioner was opting for an alternate approach.
The fire escape was fitted with an access ladder, hinged to let it fold up underneath the bottom landing, but the rust of years had covered everything, and Bolan could not risk the screeching noise the ladder would produce on being lowered into place. Instead, he scrambled atop the rental's trunk and leaped to catch the platform overhead, suspended momentarily in space before he found the railing with his fingers, pulling up and over with the agile movements of a jungle cat. The hardest part behind him now, he knew the only other problem would be getting out alive.
Secure from prying eyes until he reached the lighted window that he had selected as his point of entry, Bolan took the metal steps by twos, the lethal 93-R in his hand, prepared to meet all challengers. When he was halfway up, the soldier hesitated, scanned the alley one more time in search of errant witnesses, found none and forged ahead.
The target window stood half-open to the night, and Bolan watched the men inside, taking stock and catching fragments of their conversation. They were four in all — three black, one white — and there could be no doubt as to the man in charge. Without a second glance, the warrior knew that Whitey's was precisely what the name implied, regardless of the clientele downstairs.
A burly mobster sat behind the battered desk, counting stacks of money, riffling the bills between his fingers, thick lips moving as he verbally kept track. His shirtsleeves were rolled up around his elbows, baring massive forearms bristling with hair and mottled with tattoos. His sport coat had been draped across the back of a chair, and he wore a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 beneath his arm.
His three companions lounged in straight-backed chairs and watched the count with hungry eyes, unspeaking. They were dressed like sideshow hucksters: velvet coats and wide-brimmed hats, pegged trousers tapered at the ankles over pointy patent-leather shoes. Draped in chains of gold, the black trio fairly sparkled in the light from naked ceiling fixtures, their fingers glittering with diamonds in a tribute to conspicuous consumption. On the streets they would be viewed with awe as masters of the brute survival game, the men to watch and emulate, but they had come to see their master here, and they kept silent as the mafioso struggled to laboriously count his tribute.
Bolan crouched to take advantage of the partly open window, bracing his Beretta in a double-handed grip and sighting down the slide. Four targets, but he meant for one of them to live and carry word of his encounter with the Executioner. It mattered little to him which one of the runners should survive. But Bolan had already taken stock of who should die.
The hood behind the desk was his immediate concern, the holstered .38 most easily accessible of all the weapons in the room. His runners would be armed, but they would have to fumble under jackets, their reactions hampered by the Executioner's advantage of surprise. And Bolan had another reason for selecting their superior as first to die: it would be doubly galling for a thug like Gianelli to receive the news of his impoverishment from a subordinate outside the Family.
The Executioner's finger tightened on the trigger. The Beretta sneezed, and he was tracking on in search of other targets, wasting no time on assessment of the shot. Round one impacted on the mafioso's upper lip and punched on through, the fleshy face imploding like a rotten gourd, a spout of blood erupting from the wound.
The runners recoiled, scrambling from their chairs and digging under velvet coats for hardware. One of them had spotted Bolan in the window, pointing dumbly, struggling to voice a warning. Round two exploded in his face and pitched him backward, long legs flailing as his wide-brimmed hat took flight.
The second runner had a weapon in his hand, but no time left to use it. Bolan shot him twice, in the chest and throat, before the guy could bring his gun to bear. He saw the life wink out behind dull eyes, the lanky carcass folding in upon itself, and he was tracking onto number three before the second runner's legs gave way.
The final target had already opted for retreat, no longer trying for his side arm as he pounded toward the door. A parabellum round behind the knee was all it took to break his stride, but the momentum sent him into crushing impact with the door. The guy rebounded, leaving bloody traces of himself behind as he collapsed onto the threadbare carpet.
Before he could recover, Bolan entered through the window, crossed the office to unlatch the door and peer outside. A murky stairwell granted access to the billiard parlor below, and he could hear the voices of the regulars, their laughter floating up the stairs. No sign of any scouts attempting to investigate the noise upstairs, no indication that the troops had heard a thing.
He closed the door again, relieved the sole survivor of his .38 and backtracked toward the desk. Between the leaking mafioso's feet he found an empty satchel and began to fill it with the greenbacks from the desktop. He was nearly finished when the wounded runner groaned, a signal that the guy was wrestling his way to consciousness.
The soldier knelt beside him, waiting for his eyes to focus on the face of death. The runner's eyes crossed as the Beretta's muzzle came to rest upon his nose.
"I'm back," the warrior told the trembling thug. "Somebody has the merchandise I want. Somebody should deliver while they can."
"Hey, man, I swear to God..."
"Shut up and listen!" Bolan punctuated the command with his 93-R, tapping it against the guy's forehead. "Your job is to spread the word. You start with Gianelli, and you tell it straight. Somebody should deliver while they have a chance."
"I got it, man, I swear." The beads of sweat were standing up like marbles on his forehead now. "I'll tell 'im."
Bolan left as he had entered, scrambling down the fire escape until he reached the bottom landing, swinging out across the rail and dangling a moment prior to letting go. He stowed the satchel in the rented car's trunk and locked it down, secure as it could be while he was on the warpath.
There was something like a quarter-million dollars in the satchel, no big thing to Gianelli, but still substantial when considered on its own. The capo could afford it, Bolan knew; what he could not afford would be the loss of face, the sheer indignity of being ripped off. The insult would be worse than any loss of income, any loss of life. And Gianelli would receive his message, the Executioner was sure of it.
The would-be boss of Wonderland would read him loud and clear.
Francesco Scopitone had not answered to his given name in twenty years. His friends, acquaintances, police detectives and the like all knew him more familiarly as Frankie Scopes. And sometimes when he wasn't listening, the more courageous or foolhardy called him Frankie Scars.
The nickname was a natural, but its careless use could lead to fatal accidents. No matter that the history of Frankie Scopes's disfigurement was common knowledge. He preferred to act as if the scars did not exist, and his associates who planned on staying alive had grasped the wisdom of incurring temporary blindness in his presence.
Frankie Scars had been a handsome boy in childhood and on through adolescence, but like countless other boys his age, he had been drawn to the fraternity of street gangs, petty crime that sometimes escalated into brutal warfare. On the evening of his eighteenth birthday, Frankie's clique, the Gladiators, had collided with the Saracens — a rival gang — in mortal combat. Three boys died before police arrived, and Frankie had been slashed across the face, bone deep from ear to ear, emerging with a grisly, twisted smile that wrapped halfway around his skull.
The county doctors had advised him to consider plastic surgery, but Frankie's family had been poor. With seven mouths to feed and frequent bouts of unemployment, Frankie's father had ruled out expensive medical procedures. By the time he was old enough and rich enough to make arrangements on his own, it had become a point of honor to retain the scars and challenge any living soul to mention his disfigurement. Within the syndicate and on the streets, his brute ferocity was legendary. Homicide detectives in New York and Washington suspected Frankie Scars of intimate involvement in at least a dozen homicides, but witnesses were an endangered species, and the mutilated thug had never come to trial.
In recent years his business was narcotics. Murder was a necessary adjunct to the business or, some said, a sweet fringe benefit that Frankie Scars enjoyed. Unauthorized competitors could normally expect a single warning, often painful and humiliating; if they failed to take the hint they were assassinated publicly or else they simply disappeared.
Lately, Frankie was considering a war against the Colombians. Conveniently amnesiac concerning his own roots, he hated foreigners with an evangelistic zeal more common to the 1920s than the mid-1980s. Frankie loathed the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, Arabs, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. He especially despised Colombians because they held a stranglehold of sorts on premium cocaine, and they refused to quake in fear at his approach. The nervy bastards seemed to thrive on violence, dealing out sadistic punishment to traitors and informers, littering the streets with bodies in a style that Frankie Scars was forced to view with grudging admiration.
Two weeks earlier he had dispatched a pair of gunners to eliminate the leader of a ring that was importing flake direct to Washington from Bogota. His soldiers had been missing for three days before a jogger was attracted by the odor rising from the trunk of an abandoned Chevrolet in Hyattsville. Authorities had found a human jigsaw puzzle inside the trunk, bits and pieces severed, trimmed and rearranged with what appeared to be a chain saw.
It was time to teach the Indians a lesson, and the only question left in Frankie's mind concerned the where and when of the instruction. There had never been a question in his mind concerning how to do the job. Such foolish insolence could not be cured, it could only be annihilated, and the problem now was pinning down the clique, securing an address, a location, where his gunners could surprise a group of them. Nicky wouldn't like the bad publicity, but once he had a chance to think it over, he would realize that there had been no other choice. So sure was Frankie in his mind, that he had already decided to proceed without the capo's blessing.
But in the meantime there was business, product to be moved and money to be made. The world kept turning in spite of the Colombians or anybody else, and Frankie Scars was not about to let life pass him by.
Phase one of his campaign to purge the Indians was economic. In the short run he could undercut their prices, take a loss on street sales while he waited for phase two, the military phase, to coalesce. He had connections in Bolivia, and while their product couldn't hold a candle to the pure Colombian cocaine, its lower quality allowed for lower prices on the street. When the Peruvian was advertised as pure Colombian, the budget rates were even more astounding, and the customers were lining up from Constitution Avenue on back to Arlington with hands out, nostrils flared. He could supply them at the discount rates for two or three more weeks before the costs became prohibitive, and in the meantime he had spies and gunners scouring the city, searching for a target that would put them on the map.
He was expecting a delivery tonight, in fact, and had arrived an hour early at the warehouse to ensure security. The flake was coming in by truck, a dozen hefty plastic bags sewn into the upholstery of tacky furniture, three loaded chairs concealed within a shipment of two dozen. On arrival, Frankie's men would strip the chairs, retrieve the bags of crystal, stuff the chairs with pre-cut foam and ship the whole lot off to one of Frankie's discount shops in Delaware. The flake would stay behind, and by this time on Monday it would be fulfilling fantasies for congressmen and bureaucrats across the city.
Frankie checked his watch and nodded to the lookouts posted on the loading dock. The truck was due, and he would give them fifteen minutes more before he closed the warehouse, rerouting to the backup drop.
A sudden glare of headlights cut across the loading dock, and Frankie heard the truck now, engine growling, air brakes hissing as the driver put it in reverse and backed it in. The stevedores, all armed in case of unexpected trouble, were proceeding toward the dock, and Frankie followed, one hand wrapped around the roll of cash he carried in the pocket of his trench coat. He was passing through the giant doors, had one foot on the concrete apron, when the world exploded in his face.
The moving van appeared to swell before his eyes, as if it were inhaling monstrous breaths somehow, and then it detonated, roof and sidewalls peeling back along the welded seams, a fireball rolling outward and sizzling across the dock. The flames consumed his lookouts and a couple of the stevedores before the rest could scatter, left them dancing on the platform like burning puppets wreathed in flames. He was driven backward by the shock wave and the sudden heat. Automatic-weapon fire erupted from the firelighted darkness of the parking lot, precision bursts dispatching fiery dancers.
It would be the Colombians, he knew, and Frankie Scars was cursing, digging for his side arm, searching for a target in the firelight. From the shadows of the warehouse, several of the stevedores were firing blindly from the cover of a forklift, spraying useless rounds. Frankie Scars was braced to make a run for their position, take his chances with the unseen gunners in the darkness when a larger weapon coughed out there, beyond the margin of the firelight, and the forklift suddenly exploded into flames. He saw two bodies airborne, others wallowing across the pavement in a lake of fire, and something snapped inside of Frankie Scars.
He bolted, giving up his meager cover, and pounded back into the warehouse toward the distant sanctuary of his office and the weapons hidden there. He would surprise the bastards yet, if only he could get his hands on some of the artillery he kept in case of an emergency.
Before he made a dozen strides, the mobster's legs were cut from under him. He did an awkward belly flop and felt the pistol skitter from his fingers, lost before he could react. It took a moment — too damned long — for Frankie to regain the feeling in his legs, and when it hit him, there was nothing he could do but scream.
From out of nowhere one of the attackers loomed above him, reaching out and rolling Frankie over with his foot. From where he lay, the big bastard didn't look like a Colombian, all dressed in black that way, but you could never tell. The mobster's full attention focused on the cannon in his hand, and Frankie recognized it at a glance. It was a frigging M-16, with something like a stovepipe mounted underneath the barrel. He didn't have to ask the bastard what it was — not after sitting through selected clips from Scarface seven times.
"What the hell..."
He knew precisely what the gunner wanted, but he was intent on buying time. One of his own hitters might emerge from hiding, pop the bastard where he stood.
But no one came to rescue Frankie Scars.
The man in black crouched beside him with the muzzle of his cannon smack in Frankie's face.
"Somebody has a package that belongs to me," he said. "Somebody should deliver while they can."
"A package?"
"Spread the word."
The guy was rising, leaving. Frankie Scars could not believe that he was going to survive. He didn't understand a fucking word the guy had said, but he would spread the word, yes. They would be hearing him from hell to Sunday once somebody got him out of there, tried to save his legs. He had no wish to spend the rest of his forsaken life as Frankie Stumps.
It was eternity before he heard the sirens, heralding the swift approach of fire trucks, with an ambulance, and at the sound of their arrival, Frankie Scars wondered where he went wrong in his life.