Bolan looked around. From the driveway and the cottage, not another house was visible. Now and then someone might brave the rubble to walk past the rock falls on the tiny beach, but not often.
"I like it here," Bolan said. "Show me the inside."
The door had two locks, two dead bolts with inch-long prongs set into case hardened steel boxes, strapped into the special four-by-four that was built into the doorjamb.
Inside, the younger Bolan gave his famous brother a tour of Strongbase One.
Johnny was proud of what he had done to the place. Two walls upstairs had been torn out and the area turned into storage space. The ground level housed utilities and kitchen, and in the basement was the communications room.
"Everything you see is standardized Radio Shack," Johnny announced, showing off the basement's disorderly array of computer hardware. "These four modems, working on a one-always-on basis, are linked to the electronic bulletin board on the end wall. That board is programmed to display and interact with several key alert situations. I've got about twelve such alerts listed already." As he spoke Johnny touched a switch and twelve horizontal slots on the board lit up with rapidly changing code numbers; two screens flickered to life below the board. "And the computers can parallel and anticipate real-life situations. Something like having a second nervous system."
"What sort of linkup?" Bolan asked.
"We're hooked up with one of the satellites that Kurtzman's being using," Johnny replied. "A relatively low power transmission gives me two-way voice radio with you anywhere in the U.s. For incoming telephone calls, we have a triple dead drop that goes from East to West Coast, back to East and then back here again. That way the calls cannot be traced — by the phone company or by anybody else. We have dual recorders on voice actuation, so you can talk for up to sixty minutes without a break if you want to send recorded transmissions."
"I've got to talk to you about this, Johnny."
Ignoring Bolan, Johnny ran upstairs to fetch two attache cases he had brought inside from the car. As he returned with them he said, "There's a million and a half in greenbacks in these two cases, Mack. That's just from the Canzonari operation. I've collected six other cases like these from your other recent hits. The contents have been stashed in four separate banks and invested in money market funds. So there's no shortage of cash."
"That's not my concern," Bolan said. "You've done a magnificent job here, Johnny. I'll be happy to fund whatever..."
"I knew you'd come around," Johnny interrupted eagerly. "This place can be a link with Stony Man back East, Mack. Don't you see? This is a vital point in one huge triangle — Phoenix Force and Able Team at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, me at Strongbase One in Del Mar and you, Mack, out there."
"Wait a minute, Johnny. Oh, we really do have to talk." With that, Bolan put a strong arm around Johnny's shoulder and led him up the stairs.
In the kitchen, without saying a word, he sat his brother down on a chair at a table by the big window. The sunlight streaming outside illuminated the peaceful beauty that surrounded them, but the kitchen was cool and in shade.
Bolan went to the refrigerator and fished out two beers. The place was well stocked for the kind of afternoon Bolan had in mind.
"I'm going to tell you a story," he began, sitting across from his brother and opening his beer. "I've been feeling bad, Johnny. I'm not good with words, but I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to sketch out something that happened to me. You'll have to fill in some of the spaces yourself. You'll have to flesh it out because I don't have the words. But it's something that happened to me before mom and pop and Cindy were killed. Back in Nam. The story has a moral, I guess you could call it, and that's why I'm telling it to you now."
Johnny Bolan pushed away his beer and looked at Mack. The Executioner's presence filled the room.
"Whatever it was I accomplished in Portland," Bolan said, "I accomplished it far, far too late. To you, we were in Portland to hit the Mafia and the terrorists, to avenge Sandy Darlow and April Rose. But I was there for something else."
"What?"
Bolan's voice grew calmer, deeper. "I was there to take my revenge on all the Councils of Kings. To shove it down their throats one last time. When I think of my buddy... when I see a picture of him in my mind, of my buddy back in Nam, I think of you, Johnny."
As the afternoon drew on, Johnny Bolan heard what it was that Mack Bolan had learned in Vietnam and what it was that made him fight for friendship to such an extent that now he could not bear to expose his younger brother to any of the dangers of the Executioner's world.
To Johnny it was an accounting for events that reached their true conclusion only days ago in Portland. Bolan told the tale in brief, urgent, first-person snatches of image and commentary. But the effect on Johnny's imagination was complete and everlasting.
This is the story Mack Bolan told his brother.
Dusk turned the jungle to an eerie, formless gray. A breeze whispered through the treetops. He had come to know the jungle as a living thing, a breathing thing that gave up no dead.
Bolan let his thoughts slip away, and listened below the faint rustling of leaves.
He stopped beside a thicket. A scraping sound slipped through the leaves around him. He eased the AR to full auto and searched for movement. The jungle surrounded him, held him, breaking his vision with a confusion of vegetation that sighed almost imperceptibly in the pale darkness. Where the hell was Buddy?
Bolan eased himself back a step. The scraping sound came from behind.
Bolan turned in painfully slow motion, the AR's snout moving with him.
The jungle was still.
It was Buddy. He was squatting beside a pool of black water that reflected the deepening, broken sky.
Connecticut was gone from Buddy.
Mack Bolan looked back a million years at the small man squatting in the swamp, shaving his head with a knife.
"Don't do it, Buddy."
"I'm done for, Mack."
"No, you're not." Bolan was crouched beside him.
They talked four inches apart. Buddy scraped his head with his killing knife, shaving the hairs from the scalp, but leaving a full swath from brow to nape. The Mohawk.
Bolan wanted to stay his hand, stop the shaving, as if that would alter Buddy's fate — but Bolan did not want his throat slit.
Buddy shaved and talked in a shaky voice. An orange spider emerged from behind his ear and crawled carefully down his neck.
"I smelled Leslie today. No, really. All of a sudden it just hit me. It was like she was beside me. Can you believe I gave her up to do a second tour? Man, I smelled her hair, her skin." Buddy was lost in himself, talking unevenly as he shaved. "You want to hear something even crazier? I had this memory, finally, of my mother, like I've never been able to remember her. She died when I was three. But today I remembered her giving me a bath."
"Buddy? What was in the letter you got this morning?" asked Bolan, though he already knew.
Buddy swallowed but continued shaving, as if by rote. The spider, which had crawled so carefully down his neck, rode Buddy's Adam's apple as he swallowed, but then danced in alarm as the water came trickling down from Buddy's head.
"Oh, you know. Leslie, ah..." he swallowed again "...Leslie got herself a Jody. I knew it would happen."
"Buddy, you've got to remember..."
"Only regret I have is that I won't be coming back to cut his frigging balls off," Buddy said to no one as he rinsed the short hairs from his blade. It was Buddy's trademark — the knife that was super-sharp but dark. It reflected no light. Bolan could hardly see Buddy now. Their whispers hissed in the half light.