"Hell, I'm sorry I mentioned it," he said uneasily. "Anyway-I've got this kid brother, see. You know about him. He could use some money, too, and-"
"Mack, I'm going to start screaming!"
"Don't do that," he said quickly. "Don't worry, it'll all come out okay. I just thought I should mention the money, just in case."
"I just want you. She was sobbing. "Call it off, Mack. Just come back. Come back right now."
"You're making it awfully tough on me, honey," he told her. "You know what I have to do."
She was regaining control. "All right," she said. "I'll be brave. Is this better?"
"Much better. Be a good girl now and go to bed. I want you nice and fresh when I get home."
"I'll try."
"I love you, Val"
"Oh God, Mack, I love you nutty!"
"It's great, isn't it." His voice was glowing.
"Yes, yes darling, it's great."
"Well- back to work. Stay cool, now."
"I promise. I'll stay cool. You do, too. And Mack..."
"Yeah?"
"I don't care who you have to kill, or how many. You come back here to me."
"I'll be back," he said, chuckling. He hung up, and his smile faded, and he stared glumly at the black box. It was odd, he reflected, how life came in bunches and gobs, and always at the wrong times. He had so much more to live for now than ever before, and he was facing the most perilous moment of his lifetime. He sighed, muttered, "I'll get back, Val,"-fingered a kiss onto the telephone mouthpiece, and The Executioner went off to join the gathering.
Lieutenant Al Weatherbee of the Metropolitan Police sleepily gathered his thermos jug and sandwiches and headed toward the police garage with his young sergeant, John Pappas. "Well, Johnny," he said tiredly, "if our intelligence is good, tonight will be the night"
"You say he knocked off three of their joints tonight?" Pappas asked, grinning.
"Yes, and don't look so happy about it. He's making us look like monkeys too, you know."
They stepped into the elevator and were silent in the descent to the garage. They stood quietly and waited as a half-dozen marked patrol cars gunned up the narrow ramp to the street, then went over to their squad car. Pappas slid behind the wheel and reached over to help
Weatherbee with his burden. "You planning on eating all this in one night?" he asked.
"Oh, between the two of us, I figure we can take care of it all right," the lieutenant replied. "And it could be a long, long night."
"Well, it's three o'clock already, and I just ate at two."
"It could still be a long time till breakfast." Weatherbee settled into the seat, nodded to his companion, and the car eased up the ramp.
"How many units they sending out?" Pappas wondered aloud.
"We'll have a dozen cars in the general area, eight of them assigned directly to us, the other four for backup as required. The sheriff is cooperating on this one, also. He's promised a minimum of ten men in the canyon, on the county side, and possibly some mounted units. I think we'll have him pretty well sewed up. If he shows, and I think he will, I don't see how he can possibly slip away from us this time. Unless..." Weatherbee scratched his cheek thoughtfully and showed his partner a wry smile. "Unless he really is a ghost, like the newsmen have been calling him."
They hit the expressway with the warning light flashing, pulled into the far-left lane, and hurtled along in steadily building momentum.
"I don't think there's all this big a hurry, though, Johnny," Weatherbee said uneasily.
"Never can tell," Pappas replied, flicking a gleaming glance toward his superior. "And I sure as hell don't intend to miss this one."
The lieutenant sighed, scratched his cheek again, and said softly: "'And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.'"
"What?" Pappas said, chancing another quick glance.
"That's from the Book of Revelation," Weatherbee said. "Somehow it seemed appropriate to the moment."
Pappas shivered involuntarily and hunched closer over the wheel. "Armageddon," he repeated musingly. "That's a sort of hell, isn't it?"
"No," Weatherbee said quietly, hanging onto the, door Handle to brace himself in the hurtling automobile, "-it's supposed to be the place where the final battle will be fought between the forces of-Christ!-watch it, will you!"
Pappas had swerved between two slower-moving vehicles, setting the lieutenant rocking and swearing beneath his breath.
"Between the forces of what?" he asked, ignoring the complaint.
"Between the forces of good and evil. Goddamnit, we're going to find our Armageddon right here on this expressway if you don't slow this son of a bitch down. Now damnit, that's an order, Johnny!"
Pappas reluctantly released some of the pressure from the accelerator. "Just hurrying to the gathering," he said, grinning. "I sure as hell wouldn't want to miss Armageddon."
"I'll remind you that you said that," Weatherbee said quietly.
6 - Execution Hill
The Executioner had left his automobile at a carefully preselected spot in dense brush near the crest of a wooded hill directly opposite the South Hills home of Sergio Frenchi, and was making his fifth trip from the car to his "drop" on the side of the hill. "Execution Hill," as he had come to dub the site, was largely uninhabited, with only three or four residential plots on the entire rise of ground, and there were no buildings of any description on Bolan's side of the hill. Nevertheless he had encountered various sounds of human presence during his trips between car and battlesite, mostly distant rustlings and voices; once he heard a male voice cursing vehemently, and on his third trip a horse and rider crossed his path no more than thirty to forty feet ahead of him, the horse slipping and snorting on the steep hillside and the rider speaking to his mount reassuringly.
The Executioner was exercising the utmost caution and stealth, but there was a lot of equipment to be moved, and he was going ahead with his plans despite the obvious patrol activity around his battlesite. He had selected a shallow hollow lying beneath an outcropping of rock which was angled about thirty degrees easterly of, and roughly ten degrees above, the Frenchi estate, and well-screened behind an overhanging droop of evergreens. He had run his trajectory calculations earlier, based on a range of five hundred yards, estimated. Now he had a GI rangefinder with which to refine those calculations, and he was surprised to learn that his estimate had been so close to reality. He applied the corrections for a 530-yard range, then consulted the graph he'd worked up for the Marlin and decided he would need to target fifteen inches above actual target to allow for trajectory drop. He extended similar calculations for the other weapons he had "commandeered" from the armory earlier, devoted another fifteen minutes to making his "setups," then took time for a leisurely cigarette, carefully shielding the tiny glow from any hostile eyes in the vicinity.
As he smoked, he followed a timeworn tradition and scribbled his thoughts in a black leather-bound book. This concluded, he got to his feet and lightened himself, removing everything from his web belt except the.45 and the knife, even emptying the slit-pockets above his knees of the spare clips for the.45, and moved out quietly in a "recon" of the area.
Weatherbee had told him that The Family was lying in wait for his next assault. This could mean nothing but a planned counterattack, and it would have to be a highly personal and concentrated one if it were to be effective. Bolan was not overly worried about their abilities in this regard, not unless the Mafia army had been recruited from combat-trained veterans of recent warfare. He had blackened his face and even the heavens seemed to be in his corner tonight, a nice broken layer of clouds keeping the night a black one most of the time. He paused beside a tree as one of the occasional breaks in the cloud-cover drifted overhead, briefly illuminating, faintly, Execution Hill. As he waited, stony and hardly breathing, a match flared a few yards uphill from his position and he could hear clearly the heavy exhalation of a cigarette smoke. The heavy darkness descended again almost immediately, and Bolen went into motion with it, moving silently in a tight circle up the hillside, homing in on the glowing tip of the cigarette. He came down from above and to the rear, and to within a matter of feet from the smoker. It was a man alone, his back to Bolan, seated on a rock and hunched slightly forward. Bolan unsheathed his knife, felt on the ground and found a rotted stick, and tossed it over the man's head and a few yards downhill. The stick hit a tree and the man's body stiffened.