Mack Bolan left the restaurant, drove to his hotel, and took the elevator directly from the underground garage to the lobby. No one would leave a message at the desk for him: no one knew he was there.
He went to the bank of phones, slid into a booth, spread ten quarters in front of him, then dialed a ten-digit number.
The operator asked him to deposit the toll, and he did. Then a phone in Denver rang three times.
There were three clicks as his call was mechanically forwarded to another number, which rang four times and he got a local dial tone.
The dial tone came from a third number in Denver. Bolan punched in a long-distance number for Del Mar, California, and a moment later someone answered the phone.
"Yes?"
"Sentinel here, Strongbase. This phone-number latch-up you developed — you're sure there's no way it can be traced?"
"Absolutely none, guy," the younger voice said.
"How are the installations going?" asked the Executioner.
"On schedule. Today we hooked up the second online computer. We should be fully operational soon. I have something you may be interested in. There's talk about a big gunrunning operation going down within the week. Either in Portland or San Francisco, with the betting leaning toward the Northwest. I have a batch of printouts from Law Enforcement Agencies' headquarters and a special briefing to all like from Justice. Maybe I should run it up there for you to check out."
"I want to know about it."
"I can get a 7 A.M. flight to Portland."
"I'll meet you at the airport. As a test, bring me ten loaded magazines for the 93-R in your checked luggage. You might as well stay a couple of days. Perhaps you can do some research for me up here."
"I'll be there."
"Remember, you'll be strictly backup."
"Suits me fine."
"See you tomorrow."
Mack Bolan awoke at 5:30 the next morning, donned tan slacks and a light-tan sport coat that covered the 93-R and went downstairs. At the newsstand he bought The Oregonian. On the front page was an old picture of him, as well as a sketch of him in his blacksuit with a submachine gun and combat harness. It was a good likeness.
He returned to his room and ordered breakfast.
Then he attached a thick black mustache to his upper lip with spirit gum, donned a pair of reflective sunglasses and a tan beret.
He completed the disguise as room service arrived.
The waiter noticed nothing unusual. Bolan consumed the toast, orange juice and coffee.
The morning paper featured a long story about Mack Bolan and described The Executioner as "a vigilante figure fighting the KGB and the Mafia, or a cold-blooded killer, was depending on your point of view". It even revealed that he had apparently been dead for a year, then had turned up not dead at all but working for the government.
The story detailed that he was wanted by the FBI and the CIA as well as half a dozen foreign intelligence agencies, including the KGB.
The story concluded: Portland Police refuse to discuss the possibility that the Executioner is in town, but the presence of marksman's medals at the triple killing yesterday and the second loan-operation blast seem to indicate that the Executioner is indeed here.
Organized Crime specialists say that both loan firms hit yesterday are known to be closely tied to the Portland Mafia.
Police say they have no warrants naming the Executioner. The FBI would not comment when asked if they have such warrants or if they are actively searching for the vigilante.
The mention of his name in me newspaper sent a chill down Mack Bolan's spine. Obviously it was his contact with Dunbar, the vice cop from Portland whom he'd known in Nam, that had instigated the report, and Bolan had no regrets that his message had gotten through loud and clear. But he knew that any newspaper report would be a distortion, inevitably a falsehood, just another source of future misconceptions.
The true story of Mack Bolan was too searing, too raw, too personal, for the pages of a newspaper. The truth of his own story continued to trouble Mack Bolan himself.
When April Rose was killed, he found himself shifting his entire psyche onto automatic pilot. And in that mode he undertook the Russian hit, the killing of a Soviet test pilot in Afghanistan after the enemy raid on Stony Man Farm in which April was shot dead. The killing of the young pilot was a decisive act for Bolan, because the man's father, Greb Strakhov, became the Executioner's sworn enemy.
The Strakhov war continued through many missions, and was still fiercely unresolved. But immediately following the tragedy at Stony Man — a complicated time for Mack Bolan — some of those missions were more harrowing, more bizarre, than others.
For a start, the Bolan invasion of Russia by way of Afghanistan necessitated the killing of a Canadian journalist, Robert Hutton, who had betrayed Bolan and who ended up as a halo of pink mist when the Executioner helped the guy drop from a helicopter onto the spinning rotors of another chopper below.
It was not a deed to endear him to the journalistic world, and indeed Bolan found himself strictly persona non grata in the America to which he returned following his covert, deadly blitz on Moscow.
U.S. politicians, agency chiefs, bureaucrats and law-enforcement officers all suddenly found an excuse to be down on Bolan.
The get-Bolan response was undoubtedly a reaction to their own fears of the big guy, a certain unease they experienced with the legend of the Executioner, a guilt over what Mack Bolan really represented.
So Bolan was very much on his own, and the difficulties mounted immediately. From the extreme and unsanctioned vengeance he wreaked in the sewer city called Washington to his twisting adventures in Kampuchea when representing the League of Families in search of American POW's lost in the blood-soaked world of the Khmer Rouge, Mack Bolan prevailed without ever knowing who his allies were-who would let him live or try to make him die.
Of course, Bolan knew who his real friends were, his true allies.
Aaron Kurtzman, the computer scientist paralyzed in the KGB smash on Stony Man Farm, who now gave secret support to Bolan with all the data resources and computing capacity it was possible to conceive of in the mid-1980's; Jack Grimaldi, the pluckiest pilot in modern history; Leo Turrin, a brilliant guy riding a desk in the Justice Department who showed up to fight alongside Bolan in the most unlikely places; Hal Brognola, the senior warrior of Stony Man along with Yakov Katzenelenbogen, and a national-security diplomat of outstanding powers who could always be relied on to get Bolan in or out of his latest fix; David McCarter, the British hero of Phoenix Force, who regularly became so transformed in the company of Mack Bolan that he achieved heights of reckless daring too hair-raising for dispatches and newspaper reports; Carl Lyons, Mr. Ironman himself, who admitted to only one equal in the world, and that was Mack Bolan. And, of course, the ghost of April Rose, because a phantom of incomparable beauty and courage was as much a friend as he could hope for in a time and a world of irreparable bereavement.
And so many others... Able Team, Phoenix Force, Nile Barrabas of the Soldiers of Barrabas, many extraordinary and powerful men and equally magnificent women, who transformed his recent life from one of shadows to a career of flaming glory once again.
His revival owed everything to the sweetness and the rock hardness of real people who knew him well and would serve him until death; it was that kind of loyalty. He was proud to fight with such allies.
And now, on top of all else, his own resurrection was shared by that of his kid brother, Johnny, survivor of the holocaust that had once struck Bolan's family. Johnny was a young man in his early twenties, raised by adoptive parents, who today lived and breathed Mack Bolan as if his elder brother were himself.
Bolan had a message for Johnny: no buddies.
One day Mack Bolan would explain to Johnny Bolan Gray why it was that he believed that.
On such a day he would explain why something called the Council of Kings had everything to do with that belief.
He would reveal who actually sat on the Council of Kings, and would demonstrate how a thing that sounded so Mob-like, so criminal in the parochial world of Portland, did in fact have its origins in Vietnam.
Unforgettably, Bolan had a buddy called Buddy back in Nam... Hell yes, he knew about the buddy system. And what destroyed it. He knew all about the goddamned bloodsuckers, the destroyers of humanity called the Council of Kings.
One day he would tell Johnny what possessed him about that group of evil power-mongers. One day he would tell his young brother about Buddy. To Bolan's mind the Council, back in those Vietnam days, was more evil than all the Mafia families currently being rounded up in New York City by Justice and the NYPD. No recent mob council could be as vile as the original one that lorded over a jungle land ravaged by a thousand years of foreign kings, and Bolan would eventually get even with everyone who was part of it. That was what motivated him this very day: to strike at those who perverted the word "family".
But first Mack Bolan had business to conduct.
Mob business. Only execution could await the bodycocks who cut into Sergeant Mercy's path even as he tried to cope with the unjust deaths of all his lovers and friends and as he imperiled his own sanity with grief-stricken visions of April Rose, lost forever. But he would not ever imperil the fight itself.
Vietnam... the Mafia miles... the terrorist wars... now back to mopping up the Mob — the same goddamned everlasting war, and it throbbed through Bolan's being like the living, palpitating memory of all the dead whom he loved.
Ah, death, it was indeed the Executioner's very life itself.
One day he'd explain to Johnny how it had all come to this, and he hoped to heaven the young guy would understand.
For the kid's sake.
Johnny's survival would depend on it.
Disguised, the Executioner left the hotel and toured two more possible loansharking hits, then drove to the north side of Portland, to Portland International Airport.
The 9:55 flight arrived ten minutes late.
Johnny Bolan Gray marched down the ramp wearing a tie and jacket and carrying a briefcase. These two Bolans, one half the age of the other, both branded by the same vigilante cause, were now together in the middle of the heat, dead center in the limelight as the local media brought the Executioner story right up to date. Mack Bolan decided to risk it nevertheless. He knew that role camouflage could serve as well defensively as offensively, and he put that into play. Right now he was just a guy in Portland, Oregon, who was meeting his brother. Maybe some business deal, or just family business. Nothing of note.
Johnny glanced at his brother without recognizing him, looked away, then looked back and smiled. The Executioner showed the kid the front of the morning paper.
"Sounds as if you've been busy," Johnny said. "Shall we go to your hotel? I've got a bundle of material for you."
At the hotel, Johnny took a room on the same floor, then showed Mack what he had brought.
"The LEA report on the gunrunners came over the computer late last night." He handed Mack a sheaf of printouts. "I've got a printout from Justice on the Portland Organized Crime Task Force. They list the Canzonari family and all of its businesses. There's some information about a gun store that seems so clean and legal and aboveboard they think it must be dealing in illegal arms somehow. That's about it."
Bolan turned to an inside page of the morning newspaper and folded it back.
He looked at the picture of the black girl and another of the battered roof of a Datsun in a parking lot.
"Last night this woman jumped from a fourteenth-floor window. Her sister's quoted as saying that the girl was in financial trouble, may have been involved with loan sharks." Bolan glanced briefly at Johnny as he spoke.
Johnny nodded slowly. "I'll look into it."
Bolan examined the LEA reports on the guns. The texts boiled down to one grisly truth: a huge shipment of arms was heading for the West Coast, possibly camouflaged as industrial machinery.
It was thought to be arriving between the twelfth and the fourteenth. Today was the tenth.
It was believed that a ship, of Japanese registry, would be carrying small arms of all kinds, machine guns and submachine guns, small mortars, hand grenades and LAW rockets and launchers — enough of an arsenal to wage a small war.
The LEA spokesman feared the guns would be handled by one of the West Coast families, making available fully automatic rifles and submachine guns to every Mafia soldier in America. The rest of the weaponry might go to Terrorists training somewhere in the continental United States.
"Let's get moving. You try to find this woman in the paper, the sister of the dead girl, and I'll check out that gun store."
An hour later Bolan was standing outside a gun shop on the east side near the approaches to Ross Island Bridge. The sign over the door said NORTHWIEST GUNS, INC., and in smaller lettering, Firearms of all types, Loading Equipment, Camping Gear, Surplus. It was the kind of store Mack Bolan could get lost in. It displayed a dizzying assortment of weapons: air guns, fancy target pistols, Uzis, Ingrams and others that he hadn't even heard of. He talked to a clerk and moved on. Nowhere did he detect any kind of weapon or even a round that was not legal.
In the back corner he found an armorer repairing guns and rifles. The man had a small machine shop and could make parts.
The only problem with the store as a whole was proportion. It was built inside a warehouse. When Bolan went outside, he realized the exterior was almost twice as large as the shop within. That left one hell of a lot of room for storage. He would check that out later.
The Executioner drove past one of the brothels on the list. He watched two cars turn into a parking lot in the back. Bolan parked in the street. Nobody could see the customers entering through the front. Another car rolled into the lot. If the brothel had this much business in an afternoon, it must be roaring at night.
Bolan found a phone and called the Portland Central Police Station. He reached Lieutenant Dunbar.
"Dunbar, I just drove past a whorehouse. It's still in operation. Why?"
"Hey, guy, we got other things to do besides bust hookers. Like a girl who took a leap out of a fourteenth-story window. Besides, we closed down three houses last night. Any idea what it does to booking when we bring in fifteen girls and about twenty johns? It raises hell with the whole operation."
"So you want me to raise hell in this town? Work on it, guy." Bolan hung up and drove away. As he neared the hotel, he wondered about the gun shipments. How could you fool the port customs officials that guns were really industrial machinery? They must have a system. Big bucks under the table? It would be interesting to find out.