Mack Bolan was a master at what he termed "role camouflage." He had developed the art in Vietnam and perfected it in such places as Pittsfield, Palm Springs, New York, and Chicago.
It had not let him down yet.
The choice of weapons was the next consideration.
The Beretta would, of course, be at the top of that list. But he needed a grabber, a heavy punch, something that would not unnecessarily encumber him, something that...
His decision focussed around the newest thing in the Bolan arsenal.
He had field-tested the thing two days earlier, and found it awesome.
It came in a handsome little attache-type case and it was such a new item that factory ammo was not yet available. For this honey, Bolan had taken the time to make his own ammo.
It was called "the .44 Auto Mag" and it was the most powerful going in hand guns. It was three and a half pounds of stainless steel yeah, stainless steel and measured overall eleven and a half inches. A guy with a small hand wouldn't want to get involved; it took a big strong hand to cope with the recoil from more than a thousand foot-pounds of muzzle energy, and especially long fingers for a comfortable grip and trigger-squeeze.
The Auto Mag had been designed primarily as a hi-punch hunter's handgun, and she'd drop anything that the heavy rifles would bring down in most big-game situations. Bolan had experimented with different loads, and he'd finally settled for a combination of twenty grains of powder charge behind a 240 grain bullet, for damn near 1400 fps of muzzle velocity and a performance uniformity that was really outstanding.
At twenty-five yards the big bullets tore up a one-inch bull in rapid fire, and with a two-hand stance he'd grouped a full clip of those blitzers into an area the size of a man's heart at a range of one hundred yards.
Amazing, yeah.
It was a hell of an impressive looking weapon, too all silver with ventilator ribs across the top of the barrel she looked, in fact, just mean as hell, and this was one of the reasons Bolan selected the Auto Mag for the mission. The psycho warfare was almost as important as the other.
The Beretta was sighted in for a pointblank range of twenty-five yards; Bolan had the Auto Mag worked in for precision targeting at one hundred yards; between the two he figured he had a good one-two punch capability.
And there would be no dangling weapons on shoulder straps, nor any of the usual encumbrances of big-punch arms.
He shoved the Auto Mag into the waistband of his denims and concealed the overhang beneath the wind-breaker.
So... he was ready.
Russian Hill was ready.
Bolan just hoped to hell that Mary Ching would not be found among the enemy.
Either way, Bolan had survived another crisis point.
He was coming out shooting.
7
Tiger of the Hill
Tony Rivoli Jr. was literally born into the DeMarco Family. His father, before him, had been captain of the palace guard through most of the early family history. The elder Rivoli had come west with DeMarco to stake out the virgin territory and he'd been the Don's trusted companion and personal gun during those bitter years of war, intrigue and the establishment of empire.
Big Tony had taken a DeMarco niece as his wife, and Little Tony had always regarded the mansion on Russian Hill as his natural home. He was born in the big oval bedroom on the third floor; later that entire level of the house had been converted into an apartment for the Rivoli sub-family. Little Tony still lived there alone now, except for the steady parade of San Francisco's finest flesh, whom he managed to smuggle in while the old man slept.
Anna Rivoli, Little Tony's mother, died of natural causes one week following her only child's tenth birthday. Quiet household gossip insisted that she "drank herself to death." Big Tony was killed in a gun battle with a rival outfit in the early fifties, almost two years to the day later.
From that moment forward, Little Tony Rivoli's life had followed a curious pattern. The Don never publicly recognized him as a blood relative. He was always, "My old friend Tony Rivoli's kid... little Tony." But DeMarco had gone through the formalities of having himself legally declared the boy's guardian. He'd given him a home, an education, and later a position in the official household. But there was no warmth between the two, no obvious family ties, and certainly no hint or suggestion that little Tony would one day share in the DeMarco estate.
In fact the old man frequently reminded Rivoli that his "good fortune" depended entirely upon the Don's continued good health.
"That gun there was your papa's best friend, Little Tony," the old man liked to remind him. "It's yours, too, you know. That's the blood between you'n me, and don't you forget it. When I lose the need for your gun, then we've lost our common bond. You better remember that and you better stay on your toes. And you for damn sure better keep me alive as long as you can. 'Cause when I go, Little Tony, every damn thing you got in this world goes with me."
Rivoli was twenty-five when first he heard the whispered story that his father's death had been, perhaps, an unnecessary event. There had been tensions in the official family, rivalries, and a jockeying around for power pressure from without and stress from within. As the story goes, Don DeMarco had begun to suspect the loyalty of Big Tony and he had sent his house captain and old friend out on a personal hit purely as a test of that loyalty. And he had sent him into a "set-up" an ambush from which there was no possibility of return.
Curiously enough, this rumor served only to intensify Little Tony's loyalty to the Don as though he were trying to prove by his own example that the old man had been wrong about his father. This was supposed to explain why Tony Rivoli Jr. had become the tiger of the DeMarco palace guard. Certain members of the official family had their private reservations about this explanation, and they would quietly express their own ideas about Tony Rivoli's tigerhood to anybody but the tiger himself. Whatever the background, Little Tony was elevated to full captaincy in a formal "blood and kisses" ceremony on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, and he had been the militant spirit of DeMarco House ever since.
Nobody except Don DeMarco now called him "Little Tony" to his face. The tag had become a ridiculous one, anyway. The "House Tiger" stood just under six feet tall and weighed close to two hundred pounds. Hardened gunmen became nervous under his casual stare, and visiting dignitaries treated him with cordial respect.
It was common knowledge among the palace guard that Mr. Rivoli had "a mean streak" especially concerning his women. He never had any particular woman more than once, and frequently his "victims" were carried out in the dead of night bloodied and whimpering. Only once had an official complaint been brought against him in this regard, and on this instance the complainant had failed to show up in court. She had, in fact, failed to show up anywhere, ever.
At the time of Mack Bolan's smash into San Francisco, Tony Rivoli was thirty-three years of age, which put the two tigers into roughly the same age group. Bolan was not much taller and no heavier than the Tiger of Russian Hill. Each had come into a certain formidable reputation for ferocity and dedication to a cause. But these similarities met only on the surface of the men.
Mack Bolan's savagery was directed only upon the savages of his society. Tony Rivoli's ferocity seemed to be an inherent part of his inner nature, and it was directed primarily into a defense of savagery as a way of life.