Bolan pushed his rental car along the Strip, northbound toward downtown and the press of Glitter Gulch. The midmorning traffic was already backing up along the boulevard, fully half of the license plates around him representing states outside Nevada.
Tourists, right.
The lifeblood of a state that lived on transients, milking them for every dime they could afford to throw away on gambling, lodging, restaurants and shows.
The pleasure-seekers burned up their two-week holidays in search of something — fortune, fame, a chance to be "somebody" for an hour or two. The warrior wished them well and prayed that none of them would be sucked into the coming cross fire.
Winds of war were rising on the desert, shaping up to blow a hellfire gale in Vegas, right. Between the Mafia and Yakuza, with their traditions of revenge, blood would flow everywhere, enough to drown some blameless souls along the way, for sure, if they did not find the high ground quick enough.
Bolan knew the players vaguely, but he still had only the most general outline of the game in Vegas. It was far more complicated than his former visit to that Monte Carlo in the wasteland. Then, he only had to worry about the hostiles on a single front.
This time he had stepped into a cross fire and he was not convinced that there were only two belligerents involved.
The Executioner knew the formula for an effective penetration strike against the enemy, had had it drilled into his heart and mind by years of grim experience in the field.
Identification.
Isolation.
Annihilation.
The three-step plan that turned the strongest enemy into a vulnerable target. And he was on his way toward nailing down step one. But the gut was softly telling him that something was amiss in Vegas. He had a general picture of the action from his talks with Captain Reese and Nino Tattaglia.
But now, without the necessary detail, he could only thrash out blindly, engaging random targets and perhaps only scratching the surface of the problem.
There was more to what was happening in Vegas than immediately met the eye, Bolan was sure of that much.
And perhaps he could narrow it down some more by rattling some cages — seeing how the savages scattered and watching where they take cover under fire.
The methodology had worked for him before — on other battlefields, in other wars. And he was certain it would pay off for him now.
In any case the soldier meant to try. It was his duty to the Universe. Warrior Bolan was not fighting this one on his own, had never walked alone along the hellfire trail from the first moment when he chambered up a round and dropped five men outside of Triangle Finance in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, all those many lives ago. The war, which had begun as pure revenge, had quickly metamorphosed into something vastly different, evolving over time, becoming something that controlled the soldier instead of the other way around.
It was a crusade, right. A holy war, in every highest sense of the term. Mack Bolan fought his enemies and wore his scars because he simply had no choice. He had to fight, because he could, and in a world afraid to get involved, that made all the goddamned difference. There was no turning back for Bolan. His war had grown, encompassing cannibals of every stripe, the battlefront expanding to devour the globe. But in his heart, Mack Bolan fought the same fight he had started on the streets of Pittsfield, when he stood beside the family funeral markers and pronounced an oath of vengeance.
He no longer fought for himself, but for all men — the builders and the civilizers who were busy getting on about their lives, too often unaware that it was still a jungle out there.
While the headlines warned them of a danger in the streets, bands of cannibals had organized for systematic plunder and were closing in around them, sometimes in disguise, but always hungry, grasping, never satisfied. Bolan pledged himself to stand between the cannibals and their intended victims. He had put his body on the line, a living sacrifice to honor, duty, decency.
The old words, right.
And he had freshened those old words with blood — his own and that of others, spilled in mortal combat, hand to hand. There would be more to spill before the desert sun went down on Vegas this day. A flash flood, to sweep the wasteland clean — if only momentarily.
The soldier drove with new determination now that the decision had been made. He was taking the offensive, carrying the fire into the enemy encampment, with a vengeance.
And he was starting at the top, damn right.
A sullen angry crew was gathered in the meeting room of Frank Spinoza's penthouse at the Gold Rush Hotel-Casino. Spinoza, cautious underneath his best ingratiating smile, rode the headspot at a massive conference table, Paulie Vaccarelli at his right shoulder for support. The rest were ranged around the table, muttering among themselves. Frank Spinoza could have cut the tension with a meat ax. On his left sat Johnny Cats, the man from Cleveland, with his able second, Tom Guarini.
Beyond the Midwest delegation Larry Liguori was holding forth for Chicago, pausing now and then to confer with his strong right arm, Mike Teresa.
And opposite the others, set deliberately apart from them on Spinoza's right, was Julio DePalma, sole ranking survivor of Minotte's Southern contingent. His forehead was bandaged with gauze and adhesive tape, giving his oval face a bulky look. He was flanked by two unsmiling hardmen who refused to sit, remaining on their stations at parade rest like a pair of guards outside Buckingham Palace. Julio DePalma clearly was not taking any chances, even in the company of friends.
"I promise you, there will be action taken," Frank Spinoza told the small assemblage.
"Yeah?" Liguori challenged him. "When's that?"
Spinoza spread his hands, a gesture meant to be effusive, which instead made him look helpless.
"As soon as the commission has a chance to meet and talk things over."
Liguori made a disgusted face.
"A chance my ass. My people have been asking for a meet the past six months and all we get is, "Later, later." Now it's "later," and we got a shooting war, but still no sit-down." He looked around at the others, appealing to them. "I don't know about the rest of you but I'm sick of waiting on New York."
Johnny Cats chimed in at that.
"Damn straight. I don't need anybody two thousand miles away to help me handle Kuwahara and his group. I say we hit the bastards now, today, before we wake up dead some morning."
A general murmur of assent ran around the conference table, washing back at Spinoza like an angry surf. He raised his voice to make it heard above the rumble.
"Wait a second. We're not a bunch of punks who run around and just start whacking people left and right. We're organized. We've got a system."
"That's fine," Liguori countered, "if it works."
"It'll work," Spinoza told him sharply, glaring. "Give it time, Larry."
"Time? Give it time, Frank?" Liguori looked incredulous. "Six damn months..."
Guarini interrupted Liguori.
"You're all out of time, Frank."
Spinoza cocked an eyebrow, feigning surprise as he stared down his nose at the Cleveland consigliere who had spoken out of turn.
"You speaking for the family now, Tom?"
"He speaks for me," Johnny Cats responded, his voice a rumble from inside his barrel chest.
Spinoza shrugged.
"Well, then — you both surprise me. I thought Cleveland had some legs."
"We've got legs," Catalanotte said, bristling. "And I'm not waiting for some lousy Jap to cut them off around the ankles." He leaned across the table toward Spinoza, index finger pointed like a pistol barrel. "I won't let anybody sneak up on my blind side like they did with Bobby, rest his soul."
"A goddamn sneak attack," Liguori blurted out. "Pearl Harbor in the frigging desert."
Spinoza raised his hands again, trying to quiet the uproar with an effort.
"Take it easy, everybody. The commissioners aren't sitting on their hands. No one has anything to worry about."
Johnny Cats snorted.
"Tell that to Bob Minotte, Frank."
"Minotte was..."
"He was set up, goddammit!"
Julio DePalma had been listening to the hot exchange, and now he could contain himself no longer.
Lurching to his feet, he overturned his chair and the two flankers had to step aside as it flew backward, grazing one of them on its way to the carpet. Every eye was on DePalma as he leaned across the conference table, supported on one hand, shaking the other fist at Frank Spinoza.
"Kuwahara's chopsticks set him up and knocked him over while his good friends sat back watching."
Spinoza fought to control the anger rising in his throat.
"We all know how you feel..."
"You don't know shit, Spinoza. Me, I'm not forgetting Bob Minotte. And my people aren't forgetting, either. We're remembering who iced him, and who let it happen."
"You need a rest there, Julio," Spinoza replied stiffly. "You're talking crazy."
"Am I, Frank?" DePalma's voice was balanced on the thin edge of hysteria. "You think so? Maybe you should think about some short-term life insurance."
Spinoza felt the color flooding his cheeks as he faced the rival mafioso, and The Man's words echoed in his head.
Keep the lid on, Frank. We're counting on you. He said, "I'll write that off to your condition, Julio."
"Oh, yeah? Well, write this off, you..."
DePalma came for him, had actually begun the move, when something struck the giant plate-glass window on Spinoza's left. The thick pane shivered, shattered, coming down in a sheet of glistening shards around them, jagged pieces of glass bouncing on the deep-shag carpet, some of them rebounding off the tabletop and causing men to flinch.
But every eye was on the shattered window now, no longer captured by DePalma's rush. Even DePalma himself was staring dumbfounded at the mess, his fists half-raised.
"Well, what the..."
It was Johnny Cats. Spinoza recognized the voice despite its strangled tone and Mr. Cleveland never got the sentence finished. Because something strange was happening to Julio DePalma. One instant he was standing there, both hands raised as if he had been wakened in the middle of a boxer's nightmare, then he underwent a ghastly transformation right before the gaping eyes of the assemblage.
Julio's face was folding in upon itself, imploding, teeth and lips and nose and all sucked inward as if someone might have pulled the plug and all of him was going down some hideous internal drain. His skull appeared to mushroom outward, bits and pieces of it spinning off in free-flight, spattering the hardmen who still flanked him, staining them with viscous crimson streamers.
DePalma vaulted backward, going through the motions of a sloppy somersault and touching down upon the carpet in a sodden heap. He shuddered once and then was still, no single tremor of vitality remaining in his flaccid form.
Spinoza was still gaping at the carcass on his rug when one of DePalma's hardmen gave a strangled cry and raised both hands to clasp his face. But he was much too late to catch it now as flesh and bone and blood exploded in a pink halo, the compression spinning him around and draping him across the fallen chair once occupied by Julio DePalma. Only then did Frank Spinoza hear the rifle fire, his conscious mind at last connecting visual and auditory input to complete the picture, danger warnings flashing in his mind with neon-bright intensity.
He pushed off from the table, saw the others moving for the cover of the table, of the walls, and on the way down there was just the briefest impression that another body had touched down on the periphery of his vision. Julio's other hardman, sure, and he was wallowing along the carpet now with red geysers spouting from his severed jugular where steel had triumphed over yielding flesh.
Spinoza felt the carpet on his face, a worm's-eye view with giant furniture surrounding him on every side. He closed his eyes and burrowed down, willing the floor to open up and swallow him alive, to hide him from the rolling thunderclaps and wrenching screams that rang inside his skull.
They were under fire, goddarnmit. Someone out there had the sheer audacity to fire on him, on all of them.
And in the inner sanctum of his empire, yet.
Liguori's words came back to him: "A goddamn sneak attack. Pearl Harbor in the frigging desert." Spinoza hugged the floor and prayed for daylight, for salvation, reaching in his mind for some forgotten god or anything that could transport him far away from there and on to safety. Overhead, his answer was the rolling thunder of a biggame rifle.
Two blocks down and diagonally across the street from Frank Spinoza's Gold Rush, the Executioner sat back and lifted off the twenty-power sniperscope. Slowly, he let the pent-up breath he had been holding whistle out between his teeth, already reloading the rifle by touch. The lever-action Marlin .444 held four rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. It took Mack Bolan something under seven seconds to reload, and he could hear the numbers falling in his mind by the time he had finished, warning him that he was running out of time. Someone in the hotel below him must have heard the shots. And doubtless, someone downrange at the Gold Rush would have heard them coming in. Along the street below him, somewhere, anywhere, there would be someone on the telephone already, jabbering excitedly to the police, reporting shots, a sniper... whatever.
But the Executioner was not finished.
He had picked off DePalma and his backup gunners, but the soldier was not satisfied with the dimension and the impact of his strike. Spinoza's cage was rattled, right, but not enough.
Not yet.
Bolan had gained access to the roof by slipping on some nondescript coveralls, merging with the listless, faceless maintenance crew that each hotel-casino depended on for life itself. No one had questioned his right to be inside the service stairwell or the overlong bag he carried with him. No one seemed to even notice he existed. He had passed at least a score of paid employees on the way up and not one of them had registered the fact that he was new and out of place, a ringer.
So much for the human powers of observation.
He brought the Marlin's polished walnut stock back to his shoulder, adjusting to the eyepiece of the massive twenty-power, sighting in upon the ruins of Spinoza's penthouse conference room. He could see bodies stretched out and leaking on the rug in there, furniture overturned, the scars of his first wild shot on the wall eight feet above the floor. It had been necessary to break through the heavy plate-glass window with his first round to avoid deflecting other bullets off the glass. A single 240-grain slug had been enough to do the job, and Bolan had been looking down DePalma's throat before the mafioso knew exactly what was happening. From there it had been easy.
A simple shot one thousand yards away, beyond the calculated limits of the Marlin's range — but well within the big — game piece's killing distance. Bolan had to calculate the drop on each round that he fired and set his sights above the target, allowing the massive rounds to "fall in" on the human silhouettes with grim precision.
No sweat, sure.
As long as you could work the complicated physics problems in your head while holding your breath and sighting down the barrel of roaring elephant rifle.
No sweat. As long as you remembered that each round you fired was ripping into flesh and bone, separating souls from bodies downrange, sending cannibals to whatever awaited them beyond the pale. No problem.
Anyone could do it, given years of military training and two tours of field experience as the leader of a hunter-killer team in hostile jungles.
It was a goddamned piece of cake.
He would have thirty seconds, maximum, before someone downstairs could make himself understood on the telephone. Half a minute before the troops started reacting at Metro HQ down on Stewart, only blocks away. But half a minute could seem like an eternity on the receiving end of Bolan's pinpoint sniper fire.
And they were starting to recover over there, some cautious heads just poking up above the level of the conference table. He started counting once again, marking each of them, verifying faces and positions through the scope. They might as well have been ten feet away from him. His index finger curled around the Marlin's trigger and Bolan took another breath, releasing half of it, holding onto the rest.
Inside his skull the numbers sounded like a bass drum. But he silenced them with an effort of will.
There was no room for a distraction now. Whatever happened in the next five seconds, Bolan had to concentrate exclusively upon his targets. He was reaching out to touch someone, damn right, and rattling Spinoza's cage as it had never been before. Anyone who lived through Bolan's shake-up would be looking back across his shoulder from now on, expecting death to strike at any place and time.
A frightened man became a careless man, in Bolan's estimation, and he knew that careless people made mistakes.
In fact, he was counting on it.
Bolan settled into the squeeze, his mind closing the gap between hunter and target before the bullet ever flew. The mental countdown started. Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
It took a moment for the ringing silence to break through Spinoza's mental fog of terror.
Lying prone beneath the conference table, clinging to the carpet as if he might somehow fall off the floor, the capo from New York was trembling violently, afraid to open his eyes and face the damage all around him.
But the silence penetrated, finally, and he risked a peek. His first view was a pair of wing-tip shoes, years out of style but still available in certain stores, and favored by a few of his "executive" associates. He followed them along, over socks and pant legs, rumpled shirt and suit coat, until he found a face.
Or what was left of one.
And he was looking straight at Julio DePalma's. Somehow the bastard's somersault had brought him back around so that he lay facedown, his head turned to the left as if he had climbed down to check beneath the table for his cringing comrades. One eye peered back at Spinoza from the scarlet ruin of that never-handsome visage. All else — teeth and lips and nose and everything — had been punched back into a gaping fist-sized hole that no cosmetic job would ever close.
Sealed casket on this baby, Frank Spinoza thought, and he felt his lunch coming up. He turned desperately away from DePalma's leaking carcass, swallowing hard to keep everything inside and taking a deep breath to clear his head.
It almost worked.
Around him others were also taking note of the sudden silence, cautiously rising from their prone positions to assess the damage.
"Holy mother!" He recognized the voice of Johnny Cats. "That nervy bastard!"
There was amazement in the mafioso's voice, but Frank Spinoza was distracted, puzzling out exactly who and what the man from Cleveland meant.
Who was a nervy bastard?
Who had the sheer audacity to raid his penthouse in this fashion, dropping Julio and both his boys that way, scattering the assembled might of the commission's representatives like frightened children? And the answer hit him like a fist above the heart, bringing lunch and everything back into his tightening throat.
Seiji Kuwahara.
Damn it!
Everyone had seen it coming down to this, except Spinoza. Everyone except Spinoza and The Man.
Spinoza scowled, wriggling backward from his place of concealment, his mind working a mile a minute now. Suppose The Man had seen it coming?
Suppose he staked Spinoza out like some kind of goddamned Judas goat, leading the others to the slaughterhouse for some reason that Spinoza could not even fathom at the moment?
No.
It did not track.
There was no reason for betrayal, not when everything was going well for all concerned.
Tom Guarini was first on his feet, and under urging from his capo, he stood up warily, surveying the damage and whistling softly between his teeth.
"You're gonna need a maid up here, Frank," he said, trying for a light tone and missing it by a country mile. "You got one helluva..." The sentence ended in a plopping sound, as if someone had sliced a watermelon with a cleaver.
Frank Spinoza, on his knees and rising, was just quick enough to see Guarini undergo the transformation from a human being to headless scarecrow as his skull exploded into smithereens, wet pieces of it flying off in all directions. And a moment later Spinoza heard the rifle fire begin again as he dived toward the floor. Inside, he had been half expecting it, knowing Kuwahara would not let them off this easy.
He would make them crawl some more, rub their faces in it, retreating only when he felt the heat.
And where was the goddamned heat, anyway? Someone downstairs must have called police by now. The bastards were taking their time, letting him squirm, sure as hell. Spinoza was certain of it. The heavy rounds were raining down around him once again and Frank Spinoza ate the carpet, squirming back into the sanctuary of the conference table. He was safe there, for the moment, and he would let the others take care of theirs.
He was planning ahead with the slim edge of rationality he still possessed, thinking past this nightmare and on to the other side of it. If he survived, there had to be a change of game plan. He had been sitting on the sidelines long enough and waiting for the coach to send him in. Somewhere along the line, the coach had lost his playbook, and the team was getting murdered out there, right before his very eyes. And Frank Spinoza was not waiting any longer. If he lived — when he got out of this — he would sure as hell be making waves. A tidal wave that could be felt across the frigging ocean... in the streets of Tokyo.