A wall of the main gatehouse promptly disintegrated. The catwalk tilted, cracked, then collapsed into the chute.
And that was not all.
The demolished van skittered on, wedging itself into the narrow chute halfway between the two gates. A second explosion triggered itself seconds after the catwalk fell in, and this one outdid the first by several points on the Richter scale. Debris from both gatehouses flew in an almost horizontal movement in a farflung pattern across those bedeviled grounds as desperate voices screamed into the night.
While the displaced pieces were settling, a solitary figure in combat black stalked across the no-man's-land and calmly walked into hell.
As he moved through the shattered area, he pulled a gas mask into place and heaved another smoke cannister far ahead.
He bore a military pack on both chest and back. The massive head weapon, a .44 magnum autoloader, occupied prime position in the right hand. The left held a hand grenade — dead-man-armed with five seconds of fuse.
A pistol yapped at him from the left flank. Without breaking stride he squeezed off two thunderous retorts from the automag — and the yapping abruptly ceased.
He stepped into the smoke and guided his progress with one foot moving along turf, the other scraping paved drive. He was a pack mule, and it was necessary that he move like one. The weight upon those feet was nearly double the usual.
The night was dead, breezeless, unreal, as viewed through the visor of the mask and choked with the heavy atmosphere of chemically produced smoke.
Shadowy figures were running blindly and wheezing in all directions around him.
The guy had found his bullhorn again and was exhorting the troops from some place safely removed.
Bolan the Mule plodded on, pausing only to grip the mag between firm teeth now and then while he heaved another ration of smoke — and he continued thusly, unmolested, all the way to the parking area beside the house.
A fire team with wet towels at their faces occupied the small porch at the side entrance, five of them jammed onto that small oasis of relatively unpolluted atomosphere.
The sighting was instantaneous on both sides.
A volley of reactively hasty fire crackled into the charged environment of doom as Bolan merged back with the smoke. His left arm executed a half-circle in a softball pitch.
The grenade dropped into the pile-up and the HE pummeled the clear zone and scattered smoking bodies in every direction. One of the victims was afire with flames leaping up his back; he rose to hands and knees then pitched forward without a sound.
Bolan sent him a .44 mercy round just to make sure, then resumed the assault plan.
He hit the windows at both levels with a combination of smoke and HE, methodically working his way around the big house while people in there stampeded and screamed for assistance from hired guns who had apparently lost all taste for the wages of war. Guys were running all over the grounds and yelling, yet the direct challenges to the tall man in executioner black were scattered and brief. The big, rolling booms of the automag seldom competed with the more devastating thunder of high explosives that continually puffed and rocked and swayed that hellhouse.
The artificial smoke had become an unnecessary factor by the time Bolan's chestpack gaped empty and limp.
The shattered building was shooting flames and billowing honest smoke from every opening — and there were numerous new ones. Guys were leaping from second-story windows and lying about, groaning, everywhere.
Bolan shed the useless pack and invaded the pandemonium, moving swiftly and surely to the only area that could possibly produce the results he sought from this strike.
He found it where he thought he would — in the sub-basement — he was chilled by the knowledge that he had stood less than two paces from truth on his last trip into here.
Yeah, Toby, the joint held secrets.
The hidden door creaked open to his expert touch, and he found himself in a small lounge area — not much larger than an ordinary bathroom. A tattered chair shared the space with a small table upon which rested a double hotplate and a stained coffee pot, an open box of Baby Ruth candy bars, and a six-pack of Dr. Pepper.
Bolan had actually looked into there the night before, found it empty, and went on.
It was not empty now.
A fat ghoul was standing stiffly against the far wall, staring at the visiting apparition with a resigned snarl.
Yeah, Bolan thought, small damned underworld!
It was the turkey doctor whom Bolan had encountered so briefly, yet so traumatically, on that back door of hell in central Jersey. He knew the guy only as "Sal," and even that was too much knowledge for Mack Bolan to stomach.
He removed the gas mask and told the fat man, "Two Crazy Sals under one roof is too much for my belly."
"There was but one crazy Sal," the guy said haughtily. "I am not programmed by ridiculous emotions."
The smell of Auschwitz and Buchenwald hung heavy in the air between them. Bolan had to fight his trigger finger to keep it cool.
"Spring the door," he commanded icily. "And stand aside."
"Forgive me for not understanding that instruction," said the spirit of scientific savagery.
Bolan helped along the understanding. He shot Fat Sal at the arch of heavy thighs with a 240-grain chunk of nonsurgical steel. The guy screamed and grabbed and fell forward onto his knees, clutching hands instantly dyed red, eyes wild with understanding now.
"How's the perspective from down there, Sal?" Bolan asked soberly. "That's just tab one, spelled Bruno." He kicked the guy out of his path, and the turkey doctor fell onto his side, legs still doubled, and lay there grunting.
Bolan found the springset on his own and opened the trick door, steeled himself, then stepped into the Dark Ages.
A chamber of horrors, yeah. Complete with candelabra and sacrificial altar. Low ceiling, dank cement walls, the smell of mold and mildew surpassed only by that other odor — that turkey smell that chased Bolan's dreams down blood river and haunted his wakeful strolls across hell's back acres.
It was a long, narrow room — dominated by the raised surgical table at the center. A series of eight-by-ten glossy photos lined the wall on one side, telling the graphic story of the shredding of a sentient being in grisly, step-by-step detail, each one carefully dated to preserve he continuity of the crime, each one a picture of the same pitiful wreck who now lay upon that dreadful table with the candelabraum at her head.
Crazy Sal sentenced her to fifty days in the chamber.
Fifty enternities was more like it.
A medical device for intravenous feeding stood at the side, connected to the "patient" by a length of clear tubing. It could be used for blood transfusions, as well.
A small table at the other side held hypodermic syringes and vials of liquid.
Oh, how Fat Sal had struggled to keep this one alive and aware. And, God in heaven, what an awareness.
She had no feet and no hands.
One eye socket was empty and ghastly in the candleglow.
The other eye was intact but had no lid with which to shutter reality — a reality helped along by an arrangement of mirrors placed for unavoidable viewing.
She also had no breasts.
Where genital labia had been was now a smooth skin graft with a miniature artificial penis to facilitate urination.
A crude "badge" had been carved into her abdomen, glowing redly with raised scar tissue that had been encouraged rather than inhibited.
Yeah! Step by step and day by grisly day the dismemberment of a once beautiful woman had gone relentlessly forward.
Bolan's guts creaked with this firsthand realization, shaking his faith in the worth of the whole human experience.
And — yes, Toby — she was alive ... breathing with shallow little grunts, defenseless cyclops of an eye roving the face in a mute plea from the bowels of hell itself.