It was the latter group that weighed so heavily on Bolan's continuing forward motion. He had discovered the hard way the truth of Henrik Ibsen's declaration: "The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."
And he had learned that no man could stand truly alone, no matter how hard he might try. There was something in the human movement that kept tossing together people of like destiny.
So here he was, in the showdown battle of his war, with a lady fed crossing his trail once again.
No. Not even Mack Bolan could stand truly alone.
He did not, in the final analysis, live only to kill. There kept erupting those inevitable moments when something stronger than war and death entered his dimension of being. And this was one of those moments.
The battle plan was off.
All numbers were cancelled.
There might never be another clear shot at Fortress Detroit — maybe the numbers would never again fall into place — and, yes, there was agony in that decision. But it was not, in the true sense, a decision at all. It was simply a recognition of that which was.
The hit was off.
He had known it the moment he recognized the leggy blonde leading that procession to her certain death. She had abandoned her cover in Vegas to help a doomed warrior shoot his way out of an impossible situation. Now it was time to return the favor — and, no, there was no decision involved.
He dropped a marksman's medal into the gore that marked the remains of Pete DiLani, then he took the lady fed away from that hole in hell.
They found the tunnel and used it, emerging into the confusion at the boat basin just as a procession of police vehicles appeared on the circular drive near the house.
A police car with a PA system was instructing all within hearing to drop their weapons.
A boat that Bolan recognized as the cruiser that had pursued his own empty craft was moving slowly away from shore, loaded to the gunwhales with passengers.
A handful of abandoned "friends" were clustered around the two remaining hardmen in that area, and the talk was far from friendly.
Apparently the shoreline defenses had been recalled to the clubhouse, drawn there by the gunfire within.
It would be a soft withdrawal for the Executioner and his lady, with perhaps no more than one or two sentries remaining to block their path. One or two were hazard enough, of course, and the thing could yet fall apart.
Bolan told the girl, "Your buddies in blue seem to have the situation under control. Go back if you'd like."
She shook her head. "No, that would blow everything. Lead on, Captain Puff."
He took her hand and led her southward along the lakeshore in the beginning of a journey through more hellfire than the starcrossed man from blood had ever contemplated.
The hit on the Detroit hardsite had been aborted — and the deathwatch over Detroit would find its birth in that abortion.
7
Alerted
The Sons of Columbus Yacht Club looked like a disaster area. Police vehicles with beacons still flashing were semicircled about the clubhouse. A line of ambulances was backed into the flagstone walkway, doors open, receiving.
A fire truck stood just inside the walls, inactive. Several firemen were on the roof, tearing out smoldering shingles and tossing them to the ground.
A growing accumulation of shrouded bodies was neatly placed on the north lawn. These were beyond medical help, and were primarily a matter of statistical interest for the plainclothes cop who was moving along that lineup and peering beneath the shrouds.
He quit that inspection to halt a fast-moving litter that was headed for the ambulances. "Who shot you, Favorini?" he asked the lucky one.
Charley Fever turned a pained face toward the detective, glared at him silently for a moment, then said, "How's Sal?"
"They're pumping blood into him," the cop replied. "He'll probably make it. Now mine. Who pumped you?"
"The guy didn't leave his name, Holzer," Charley Fever said, turning away with a grimace of pain.
The cop grunted to the medic and moved on. Who the hell needed names? The guy had left something even better. And a uniformed officer was at that instant hurrying over to deliver another one.
"Found this near a body in the basement, Lieutenant," the patrolman reported, handing over a military marksman's medal smeared with dried blood. Two more DOAs down there. Tentative identification is Tony Quaso and Pete DiLani, but they're pretty messy. We'll have to rely on fingerprints for positive ID."
"Head hits," Lieutenant Holzer grunted. It was a statement of fact, not a question.
"Yes, sir. Dumdums."
Sure. The guy didn't need to leave his name.
Hell had received some wages this night, that was certain, and John Holzer had no doubts as to the identity of the collector. He dropped the little medal into an envelope, marked it, and added it to the growing collection.
The patrolman want off to find the DOA team, leaving the lieutenant to ponder the remarkable evidence of a Mack Bolan hit.
Obviously the guy was as large as his reputation. It was no secret that this Mafia "club" was better guarded than the state prison. Its defenses were regarded as second to none anywhere. Yet the guy had romped in and just laid all over them.
Nothing cute about the guy — no attempt to confuse the evidence or conceal the identity of the one responsible. Hell. He wanted them to know. Those little metal crosses were his signature — a signed confession for every crime.
And, no, it was not too difficult to piece it all together and find a coherent sequence of events.
The guy showed up first in a boat. He dropped anchor in plain view of God and everybody, and began whacking away with a high-powered rifle, dropping three of them in their tracks — head hits, in the dark, at a range exceeding several hundred yards.
Then he'd come ashore. God only knew how, with fifty rifles guarding the joint. But he did it, and apparently brought his whole damned arsenal with him. This was certified by the shaky and barely coherent story of Billy Castelano, perhaps the luckiest man of the night, and didn't he know it. Castaleno had sat in the grass, clutching a marksman's medal in his hand and groaning. While a medic worked on a bleeding skull laceration, Castelano babbled about grenades and "combat stuff' and how the guy suddenly appeared "right out of thin air."
Holzer knew that Mack Bolan did not possess supernatural powers. But there was something uncanny about the guy. They had found the dead sentry propped into the fork of a tree, then Holzer had worked a hunch and straight-lined the guy, tracing him back to the most probable point of landing. A few minutes later the bushbearers discovered the rubber bag containing nothing but a sheaf of ballistics charts, trajectory graphs, and optic calibrations for a Weatherby .460 — which bore out Holzer's earlier diagnosis of a hi-punch weapon figuring into the first three casualties.
Supernatural, no. Supermilitary, yeah.
The weapon was obviously equipped with the most sophisticated optic system Holzer could imagine, and the papers left behind indicated that even this basic accessory had been further refined by a guy who knew what he was about.
The weapon belonged to a guy who worked for what he got. It wasn't as easy as he made it look.
And, sure, John Holzer could respect this man, this determined fugitive who had violated just about every law in the book.
Nothing in the book of rules said you had to hate the guy. In the still quiet recesses of his unofficial mind, Holzer even envied the guy. How nice it would be to cut through the maze of red tape and official legalities ... to just pick up a weapon and go hunting for these cruds.
Yeah. But he couldn't do that.
He trudged back to his vehicle, got in, sighed, and reached for communications.
"This is Hotel One," he told the dispatcher. "Code this for Metropolitan Alert and clear me through to Detroit Central. Also a conference patch to the federal task force, Artillery Armory."