"I believe you," Bolan panted. "But I was just about home clean when you jumped in."
"I'm sorry, Mack. They brainwash you in those police academies. A guy gets all hung up on..."
"Forget it. You're right and I'm wrong. Hell, I'm as wrong as a guy ever got."
"Not quite," the cop reminded him. "You didn't throw down on me, brother." He laughed nervously.
"Although, for a minute there, Sergeant, I sure thought you had."
Bolan was breathing raggedly through his mouth and forcing some big ornery-looking bullets into the clip of the silver hawgleg. "You'll have to take me in dead, Bill," he declared quietly.
"Shit I'm not taking you anywhere," Phillips replied. "My gun's empty and I guess I'm at your mercy."
Bolan chuckled.
The Sergeant said, "Did you know that Gadgets Schwartz and the Politician are living here now?"
Bolan's head snapped to attention and he asked, "In San Francisco?"
"Yeah. You haven't been in touch, eh?"
"Hell no. Last thing in the world those guys need now is my touch of death. They holed up?"
"In a manner of speaking, yeah. They've got new names. Gadgets is doing electronics work for a guy down on the marina. Politician is doing something at the Boy's Club. He was always good with kids, you know."
Bolan said, "Yeah." He sighed. "They okay?"
"Yeah, they're great. Worry about you a lot. Keep track of your banzai war, you know."
"They have any money problems?"
"Not that I know about."
Bolan gave his old friend the cold stare and asked him, "You keeping track of my war, Bill?"
The cop said, "Sure."
"It was no accident that you showed up at DeMarco's"
"Course not. I've been sitting there waiting for you to show since three o'clock this morning."
Bolan grinned suddenly and said, "You're the spade cop out at the gate awhile ago."
Phillips showed him a baffled smile. "Where were you?"
"I was around. So... you came gunning for me."
The Sergeant dropped his eyes in embarrassment. He changed the subject. "Hell, I can't get used to looking at that face, Mack. What was wrong with the old one?"
Bolan shrugged. "Seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess it doesn't matter which face I'm buried with."
The dark face of the law clouded with an unhappy thought as Phillips said, "This is just a temporary truce, Mack. We'll probably meet again, if you ever come back to San Francisco. And I can't... I mean, you know. So don't come back."
Bolan reminded him, "I haven't left yet. I'll be around awhile."
"God, don't. Get out. Blow this town, man. It's hot. Captain Matchison wants your ass with a burning passion."
"Brushfire," Bolan commented thoughtfully.
"How'd you know?"
"I hear. Are you with Brushfire, Bill?"
"Yeah."
Bolan said, "Well, good luck. Everything okay with your life?"
"Until today, yeah."
"These tough Frisco cops didn't give you a hard time?"
The black man snorted, "Hell, I'm a tough Frisco cop myself."
Bolan agreed, "That you are." He got to his feet, squeezed the other man's shoulder affectionately, and told him, "Blow, cop, before we get into another Wang Dang Doo."
They shook hands and Phillips said, "That was a hell of a place, wasn't it."
"It was," Bolan agreed.
"So is this place, Mack. It's Wang Dang Doo times ten. Believe that."
A muscle rippled in the Executioner's jaw and he replied, "I believe it."
"Get out."
"I can't."
"The mission that important?"
Bolan sighed. "I think so."
"End of truce," the cop said. "Goodbye, soldier. Next time we meet, it's Wang Dang Doo." He glanced at his watch. "You might still have about thirty seconds to beat the grid. That's what we call the containment network. Thirty seconds, if you're lucky."
He turned his back and walked away.
Bolan faded quietly into the opposite direction.
Every second counted now. And he wasn't about to scrub this mission even if it was Wang Dang Doo times a thousand.
It was, yeah, a damned important mission.
10
Able Team
Wang Dang Doo, and Hanoi too.
It had been one of those private jokes of a handful of scared-out-of-their-skull warriors known as Penetration Team Able. Bolan was the ranking non-com, the team leader. The entire team actually existed as a tactical support unit for the special skills of their leader — Executioner Bolan.
Maybe there really was a Wang Dang Doo somewhere, Bolan never knew. Some of the places they hit over there didn't have a name. Some didn't even have a permanent geographical existence. The enemy in Vietnam had been a highly mobile force. Sometimes Able Team had been required to track a Charlie command post halfway across the deltas before they could set up a strike.
Under Bolan, Able Team had ranged up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. They'd made a few quiet excursions through the DMZ and into the strongholds of the Northmen. Several times they'd found themselves tracking deep into Laos or Cambodia.
There had been no sanctuaries from Able Team. And none, incidentally, for them when they were on a mission.
There had been dozens of Wang Dang Doos. The term, reduced to its utter simplicity, simply meant a rub-out. A wipe-out. A slaughter.
That had been Bolan's specialty.
Sniper, yes. Stiletto man, yes. Garroter, bone-crusher, spine-cracker — yes, all of these were in Bolan's bag of tricks. And he had not been the only specialist in Vietnam. But for the specialty of specialties, Able Team was always the pick of the list. They always got the gory ones. And they got the tough ones because they did the job better.
Able Team had the Executioner.
This was not an item of pride for Mack Bolan. He accepted the medals, the decorations, the special scrolls from grateful villages — but he put them quietly away in a box and forgot them.
Killing people had never meant anything more to Bolan than a distasteful chore which had to be done. He recognized the fact that he had developed a high proficiency in the art of killing, and he recognized also that this proficiency obligated him to a special responsibility. A war needed winning — or, at least, it needed to be contained and controlled. Bolan had the tools, the abilities, and the toughness of soul required for the proper discharge of particularly grisly responsibilities.
He recognized this, but he had taken no special pride in that recognition.
Wang Dang Doo, and Hanoi too.
Yeah, there had been a lot of Bills and Bobs and Toms and Dicks. Kids, most of them, scared out of their skulls — forever wondering why they'd volunteered for this hellfire team. At least Bolan had Korea behind him. He hadn't come into the war with storybook ideas of what it was all about.
Bill Phillips was not the first of the PenTeam graduates Bolan had run into during this new war. He'd even thought once that he could pull together an American civilian version of the old death squads, and he'd actually pulled one together... briefly. The results were tragic; enough so to convince Bolan that it could never work over here.
Herman "Gadgets" Schwartz and Rosario "Politician" Blancanales were the sole survivors of that experiment. They'd squared their account with the law, but they'd have the mob on their asses forever — that much was certain. They were marked men... marked for death.