Amy Culp checked her watch again and sighed impatiently. It was only two minutes later than the last time she looked. She was growing more nervous by the second, trying to project Sarah's ETA at the apartment house.
On the telephone, Sarah hadn't sounded as surprised to hear from her as Amy had expected. It was strange — not as though she was expecting the call, but there was something...
At the time, Amy thought she might have interrupted something — maybe Sarah had a man with her — but her friend stressed she was alone. Still, Sarah's voice sounded distant, distracted.
Amy sketched her situation, leaving out the bloody details, and Sarah agreed to come at once. Amy gave directions then settled down to wait.
That was half an hour earlier, and Amy was worrying, wondering how long it could take to drive in from Berkeley. Sarah would be coming in on Interstate 80, across the Oakland Bay Bridge, but once inside the city, any number of routes could bring her into Haight-Ashbury. What was it — ten or twelve miles at most? There shouldn't be much traffic at that hour, but Amy wasn't sure.
She tried to calm herself, running down a list of things that could slow Sarah down. She was probably asleep when Amy called: she would have to dress, brush her hair. If Sarah had company, there would have to be an explanation. There were toll booths on the bridge. She might have to stop for gas, or some coffee to keep herself awake.
It never occurred to Amy that her friend would let her down, forget about her promise and decide not to come. She would be there, given time.
For the first time, Amy was aware of her hunger. She prowled the tiny kitchenette, coming up with a soda and sandwich filling, then settled down to eat. Twice she paused, listening to footsteps in the corridor outside, and each time they passed, fading in the distance. Each time she sat waiting for her racing pulse to stabilize, willing herself to stop trembling.
Amy was clearing the remains of her frugal meal when another footstep sounded in the hallway — soft and slow, like somebody looking for a landmark in unfamiliar territory. Slowing even more, the footsteps faltered then stopped outside her apartment.
Sarah!
She was on her feet and moving toward the door when something held her back. A feeling, vague uneasiness without form or focus. She jumped at the sound of knocking on the door.
Two quick taps, a pause, and two more, separated by perhaps five seconds.
It was the signal she arranged with Sarah.
Giddy with relief, Amy reached the door in two strides and quickly unfastened the chain. She hesitated for a heartbeat with her hand on the doorknob, then turned it, feeling the locking mechanism disen...
Before she could pull it back, the door flung open with a powerful blow. It caught her in the chest and drove her back, reeling and stunned by the impact. Two men crowded through the open entrance, one taking time to slam the door.
Amy had never seen either of them, but she knew at a glance what they were. There was no time to think of Sarah, or wonder how the men found her. Amy didn't even think of screaming as the pair advanced on her, reaching out with grasping hands.
Still recovering from pain and shock, she made her move. She ducked the nearest "elder's" lunge, sliding underneath his arm and dodging toward the kitchenette. Along the way, she scooped up the telephone and hurled it at her enemies. One deflected it with an arm, cursing as he came after her.
Both were grabbing her as she reached the sink, fingers scrabbling for the knife she used to make her sandwich. As she reached it, she was struck between the shoulder blades, driven hard against the counter's edge. She gasped painfully, dropping the knife to the floor.
Blunt fingers seized her shoulder and spun her around. Amy brought up her knee, aiming for the nearest unprotected groin. Her target saw it coming and turned to protect himself. A hard-muscled thigh absorbed the blow.
Hands were clutching, struggling to pin her arms, but she squirmed free and raked her nails across a cheek, plowing bloody furrows. Her assailant cursed bitterly, backing off a step. Suddenly a scarred fist blocked her vision.
Pain and colored lights exploded in her skull. Amy felt her mouth filling with salty blood as her legs turned to rubber. She fell, hard linoleum rushed to meet her.
Drifting in and out of focus, floating in a painful darkness with a ringing in her ears, Amy heard muffled, distant voices.
"Jesus, Benny... I think you mighta busted something."
"Tough. Look what she did to me."
"Hey, what the hell was she saying, anyway?"
"I dunno. Sounded like Daddy."
Cold, malicious laughter carried her into the darkness.
From Mack Bolan's journal:
I've heard it said that the more things change, the more they remain the same. It is strange how endings and beginnings turn themselves around, exchanging places, losing their distinctions. One door opens and another closes.
When I left Vietnam, it was the closing of a chapter in my life, but the story goes on. Instead of merely coming home, I found yet another front in the war I had been fighting all along. Names changed, faces, too, and the hellgrounds have a different set of longitudes and latitudes, but the mission has not changed at all. It feels as if I never left the jungle.
It's like they say: you can take the savage out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle mentality out of the savage. You cannot reeducate a cannibal to change his diet.
Times and people move on, but the basic motivations do not vary. Love, hate, fear, greed, the hunger for power over other lives. Whatever may be said about a new morality, the ageless standards of good and evil apply today as ever. You do not erase the rules of play simply by changing the name of the game
And the war I fight today in San Francisco is an ancient one, with its roots in those Asian jungles half a world away. War Everlasting, right. Call him Charlie or the Cong, or simply a red-cell reverend — the enemy has never changed his stripes. His tactics and his goals are still the same, carved in dung. He is a torturer and a corrupter, bent on savaging the meek before the meek can come into their inheritance. The only answer to his damned challenge is the same today as it was in that other chapter of the war: fire and steel.
The Universal Devotees itself is traceable to Vietnam, not only through Minh's presence and his leadership, but in the very atmosphere that gave it life. The "Reverend" recruits his followers from a generation raised on dissension and unanswered questions. The Haight was the cradle of a movement to withdraw our troops from Nam at any price, a movement that began in earnest and degenerated into anarchy. It is hard to fault that original idealism, springing out of naive youth, but its culmination was a tragedy on two fronts. Misguided youngsters learned the craft of terror from accomplished masters, and in the end they helped to stop us short of victory abroad while wasting lives at home.
Most of the self-styled "urban guerillas" are gone now, tucked away in prisons or sacrificed in the name of a cause they never really understood, but a few of the survivors are still hanging in there, nurturing their hatred, looking for an opportunity to turn it loose again. They can still find their tutors and financiers among the savages.
Nguyen Van Minh provides them with an opportunity, and worse, he opens up the door for a whole new generation of misguided terrorists. Appealing to the homeless and the hopeless, plying them with drugs and revelations of a false messiah, he has built himself a following with awesome destructive potential. They are a time bomb ticking silently away, buried in the heart of the society that nurtured them from birth.
And it could be the Vietcong all over again, sure. The jungle alone has been changed, one battlefield exchanged for another — and the new one is potentially more explosive than the last.
If the enemy is still the same, unchanging, so is the war. Transplanted, certainly, but losing none of its destructiveness in transit. If anything, the stakes are higher now than they were in Asia, the time factor more compelling. The savages have found their beachhead and they are among us now, not just sniping at our outposts halfway around the world. There is no way to ignore them now in our land, no safety in sitting back and hoping they will go away.
Ironically, it is the Bill of Rights that sheltered those dissenters at the start, and that provides a cloak for Minh today. The document conceived in war, designed for the perpetuation of our freedoms, has become a shield for traitors and subversive wolves among the fold. There seems to be nothing the authorities can do.
But there is something that I can do.
Only cleansing fire can reach the seed-germ of the plague and blot it out; only 1 can purify the ground where poison drops and spreads.
We fight a holy war today. No matter what its name or theater of action, at issue is the future of mankind. There is no ground for compromise, no DMZ or sanctuaries for the enemy this time. Wherever he may burrow in, it is our task to root him out, exterminate him like the savage vermin that he is.
There is yet time for dedicated men to change the way things have become, to snatch the victory away from tainted bloody hands. It will not be a pretty job, or easy, but success at any cost is imperative if we are to survive.
And there is no middle ground this time, no fence to straddle. The surest victims of the terrorists are those who turn their backs and walk away, refusing to recognize the threat.
Today, the war has brought me to the City by the Bay. For two bad yesterdays, the war scene festered in far-off Libya. Tomorrow it will be another battlefield, perhaps a thousand miles from either America or North Africa. But home is where I make it, and before another battlefield, before another enemy can be confronted, it is necessary to achieve the victory here, now, in this place today, where Vietnam is still claiming its victims... From the tortured POWs still behind the lines in Asia, to the dead and dying claimed by terrorist bombs and bullets here at home, my environment is sick with savagery, degradation, abandonment.
The war I fight is my personal commitment, neither thrust upon me nor sold through any promise of reward. I fight here today because there is no decent alternative, not in a land like ours, which is racked by the pressures of decay. Therefore I have no choice, even though this war is essentially mine alone, and is up to me.
The Executioner was EVA and crouching on a wooded hillside overlooking Minh's estate. Below, the manor house and grounds were cloaked in fog.
Because of the distance, Bolan replaced the Nitefinder goggles with a Starlite spotting scope, using it to scan the grounds. Through the mist, he could pick out moving figures, details of the big house, everything tinted green in the Starlite's viewing scope.
The gatehouse guards had been replaced and reinforced. Bolan counted three and figured on at least one more inside the sentry box. One of Minh's carbon-copy Cadillacs was across the entrance, replacing the ruined gate, and his "elders" lounged against the tank, smoking and talking quietly. One of them cradled a stubby riot shotgun.
Sweeping on, Bolan spotted sentries traveling in pairs along the outer wall. None was obviously armed, but he was betting on their having pistols and other hidden hardware underneath the trench coats. Soldiers, right, and Bolan knew they would react professionally at the first sight of an intruder.
More were moving around the barracks-style bungalows ranged behind the manor house. Bolan took the bungalows for quarters of the cultists in residence. He wondered if the guards were there to keep strangers out, or to pin the "faithful" in.
As Bolan expected, Minh was going hard. A rapid head count registered thirty soldiers on the grounds, and he counted on another dozen, minimum, inside the house. Make it twice the force he expected. Amy's guess was wrong... or Minh was calling in the troops, gathering his "elders" for a showdown.
Either way it was an army.
And like any fighting force, it had strengths and weaknesses.
With courage, skill and a dash of luck, the Executioner would find those weaknesses and turn them to his own advantage.
Lights were on throughout the manor house, including one in Minh's second-floor study. Bolan focused on the lighted window, zooming in, but fog and draperies combined to hide the inner sanctum from his view. Once, he thought a shadow moved across the blinds, but it could have been imagination or a gremlin in the opticals.
The limpet bug planted on his first probe was still in place, but silent. Bolan fine-tuned the volume on a miniature receiver at his waist, searching for a signal, but nothing was audible through the tiny earpiece he wore.
If Minh was in his study, he was alone and quiet.
Bolan panned back and picked up headlights approaching from the west. His scope zeroed on the Lincoln, running through the fog at breakneck speed. Carter's high beams, reflecting in the mist, made the Continental look like a ghostly bail of fire.
Bolan hadn't waited for the counselor. With a head start, following Highway 101 in a fast dogleg to the Golden Gate, he had beaten Carter by a full ten minutes. He had time to hide his car and jog overland, picking out his vantage point before the Russian mole arrived.
Carter reached the gate, coasting to a stop at the makeshift barricade. Bolan watched as the sentries checked him out, shining flashlights in his face and giving the car a thorough once-over. Carter was protesting the delay, but the "elders" took their time, circling twice around the Continental. Finally satisfied, the shotgunner retraced his steps to the gatehouse for a consultation with the man inside.
Another moment, and the "elders" received clearance from the manor house. The gunner reappeared, waving Carter through.
Bolan tracked the Lincoln with his scope, along a curving driveway leading to the house. He watched Carter park and leave his car, taking the porch steps two at a time. The front door opened before he had a chance to knock, and the lawyer stepped inside.
Bolan lifted off the Starlite scope and sat back on his haunches, waiting. His hand dropped to the mini-receiver, and he boosted the volume a notch, straining to catch sounds from inside Minh's private office.
A knocking, answered by the strong, familiar voice.
"Come."
The door opened, closed again.
"Mitchell... please, sit down."
Bolan smiled at the darkness and tossed a quick salute to Gadgets Schwarz. The only thing missing was a video display.
The Executioner was rigged for war, in military harness. The AutoMag and Beretta occupied their honored places, the military web was weighed with grenades and extra magazines. Resting on the ground beside him was the double-punch combination — an M-16 assault rifle with a 40mm M-203 grenade launcher mounted underneath the barrel. The warrior's chest was crisscrossed with belts of ammunition for the 40mm, mixed rounds of alternating tear gas, buckshot and high explosives.
He could take them now Carter had arrived. But a blend of curiosity and caution held him back. There was still a chance of learning if Minh had other troops and where they were quartered. If Minh had another army on the street, Bolan meant to know about it going in.
Before the killing started, there was still time to kill.