MacK Bolan: Bloodsport (5 page)

General Wilson leaned across his desk and spoke into the intercom. "Buzz me as soon as you get through to that number. Immediately!" He clicked it off without waiting for a reply. He swiveled his massive leather chair around to face the two majors standing next to his desk. "Is everyone accounted for?"

"Yes, sir," Major Thompson said.

"Injuries?"

Major Felder cleared his throat as if embarrassed. "Well, sir, two. Corporal Donner's trick knee went out when he was climbing the crates, and Private Simms skinned his elbow when he fell on the macadam."

"That's it?"

"Yes, sir."

General Wilson leaned back in his chair with a sigh. "Well, that's not too bad then. Not too bad at all." The telephone buzzed and he snatched up the receiver. "General Wilson here. I'm calling in reference to Colonel Phoenix. That's quite all right... I understand the need for security. In fact, your Colonel Phoenix has taught me a whole new lesson on that subject... Yes, we followed his plan all the way.... Just a few minor injuries.... No, I used my best marksmen, or markspersons, I guess, since two of them are women. They kicked up some splinters, but never came close enough to harm your man or his pigeon... Oh, he was a perfect gentleman. We're going to have to replace some lighting fixtures and doors, but otherwise he kept the live bullets a comfortable distance away. The woman's gun had the blanks, so he let her do the actual killing.... Personally, I thought my men overacted a bit, but I'm assured they were quite convincing in fact.... Yes, I understand. No problem. Just one other thing I'd like to say. That's a hell of a soldier you've got there. A hell of a soldier... No, I want to thank you. And him. If I hear any more I'll be in touch. Goodbye." The general replaced the receiver and leaned back into his chair. "A hell of a soldier," he repeated.

"Yes, sir," the majors chorused.

"Take that road," Bolan pointed.

"That's not a road," Tanya complained. "It's matted grass."

"Take it." She did. "Where are we going?"

"It's your country," he grinned. "I thought you'd know."

"I'm not familiar with this area."

"Me neither, but I know this is the right way."

"How do you know?"

"Because it's taking us away from them."

He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

Tanya didn't smile. "That was a remarkable escape we made"

"Nothing that a dozen trained soldiers couldn't have done," he muttered. "You people still interested in this space gun here?"

She shrugged. "We might be for a few hundred deutsche marks. But what will you do now?"

Mack Bolan was of the opinion that the playacting that she was an ignorant party to should be played for real, real soon, with her as target. But that would be too hasty. The charade must continue, at the risk of being discovered, or even, at any moment, of one of those soldier boys, civilians too, falling for it enough to shoot to kill. Until then, roles must be played out.

"Oh, hell, don't worry about ole Edsel Grendal. I've been taking care of myself for a long time," he said. "I'll be back in business within a couple of weeks."

"How? Now that you are out of the army, your supply line has disappeared."

"You think I'm the only one in this army who's been boosting goods? I know at least three others, including a colonel over in Wurtzberg. After the smoke clears, I'll be back again as a middle man between the sellers and the buyers. Taking my cut from both. Less work, less risk."

"What will you do in the meantime?"

"Well, first thing we do is ditch this jeep. If you have a couple of hundred marks cash, you can take this gun with you right now. Or we can meet sometime next week. Either way we have to split up now. They're looking for a couple, remember."

"True. But one phone call to my comrades and I will be underground within the hour."

"Congratulations."

"I can arrange transportation for you also, if you wish."

Bolan hesitated, as if thinking it over. "I don't know," he said. "I appreciate your offer, but there are more people looking for you guys than there are looking for me."

"You must make up your own mind. However, I should tell you that our people are in need of a weapons expert, and you have demonstrated your worthiness in that area. You are also available, I would guess, considering recent events... You are an outlaw, like I am. And you are an extraordinary fighting man. I think we would be able to hide you out until how did you put it? the smoke blows up."

"Smoke clears," he corrected her. "And what do you want in exchange? This H and K?"

She smiled thinly. "For now, Sergeant. For now."

"You've got yourself a deal, I guess. Nothing to lose." The big man leaned back in the seat.

Nothing to lose.

Except life.

The kidnapped athletes awaited rescue.

Life was more precious by the minute. He would surely not lose it to a hotheaded girl terrorist in the cobblestoned theater of Europe's current crisis. It was a crisis based on a very simple problem. If modern terrorism is not fought and fought hard people in the dwindling democratic and non-communist world will not have to wait for The Bomb.

They will be blasted and ripped into submission on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. The problem being how to make the punishment fit that crime.

The premise is agreed some murders are so horrendous that the most practical solution is to execute the perpetrators. Such murders are murders of perversion involving torture, sex slayings, contract killings, terrorist killings.

Why keep such people alive and in a cage for the rest of their lives or, worse, to be released when a mere two-thirds of their sentence is done? But the difficulty arises when it is felt, especially in the older cultures, that the means of execution are barbaric. Hanging is horrible and unpleasant for those who have to do it, order it, witness it. The answer, for Europe, is The Executioner. The Executioner will not miss his shot to give a lady terrorist a better chance in the courts, to keep his hands clean of death. He could never fear death so much that he would sacrifice the possibiliy of a stronger, truer life. No, he would value life, every minute of it, even as his Sergeant Grendal character tipped the play deeper toward death, finally to slip totally into hell and bring all the other evil parts sliding down with him to the darkest depth.

The role was his key to life. And death. The Morganslicht death.

A rifle butt thumped against the door.

"They are almost here," the voice croaked. Hermann saw the car. It is about a kilometer away."

"Danke," Thomas Morganslicht said, throwing off the blanket and staggering out of bed.

He pulled on a thick turtleneck sweater, jeans, hiking boots. The cabins were without any heat, except for the flickering fireplaces.

He tugged the red knit cap over his shiny black hair, pulling it back on his head to allow the sharp point of his widow's peak to show. He liked the way its dagger appearance seemed to startle his men, almost intimidated them. As their leader, he desired every advantage over them he could get. Morganslicht snatched up his gun and shoulder holster, shrugging into them as he walked out of the cabin. Several of his men stood around outside his door, their weapons in hand as they waited for the approaching Saab. The cool sun was peering over the tops of the snowcovered mountain peaks. The men kept moving, rocking back and forth, their breath steaming from mouths and nostrils.

"What time is it, Hermann?"

"Almost six-thirty."

"They must be very tired after their escape, and then driving all night." His voice was more amused than sympathetic. "And how are the prisoners doing?"

"Cold, but otherwise functioning normally," replied Herimann. "They no longer bother to complain."

Thomas grinned. "Good. I thought Rudi would convince them to accept their situation."

The giant called Rudi Blau turned his sixfoot bulk toward them and chuckled damply through massive yellowing teeth. Bundled up in a long black tilde coat and fur-lined hat, he looked like a mutant bear that had inadvertently stumbled into civilization. His eyes were small, too small even to determine their exact color, but his head was a huge round melon. In his right hand he carried a hunk of firewood. He used it to persuade the prisoners, to keep quiet.

If need be he would persuade them into unconsciousness.

Thomas Morganslicht and his guards watched the car puffing up the snow-covered road, its exhaust billowing around it like a pocket of fog.

Hans Regens, who had driven all the way to Frankfurt to pick them up, was still driving.

Tanya was next to him in the front seat. In the back seat, another figure presumably the big American sergeant she had told him about in her communication. The unusual man who had helped her escape. A most independent being, by all accounts, Frightening. Morganslicht frowned. He did not know this American, and he did not like him. It was perhaps necessary to have dealings with such people to get what the group needed, but they were dangerous and should eventually be eliminated. Especially men of such a scale and skills as this one. He had killed Klaus.

Of course, Klaus had not been a very stable person. During the torturing of the two agents, he had not in fact been able to stop. Then it had been up to Thomas to show the proper way to mutilate the enemy, to extend the sport with skill, not lust.

But Klaus was dead and they were without enough weapons.

So they would use this dumb American as much as possible, then kill him. But slowly, maybe more slowly even than with those two damned agents. For demonstration purposes.

The car braked to a halt and the two front car doors opened at once. The driver, Hans, climbed out first, rubbing his neck to shake off the drowsiness of seven straight hours of driving. "The car needs a tune-up," he said, and walked off to get some hot coffee. Tanya slid out next, offering a lingering look at her twin brother.

"Sergeant Grendal," Tanya called out, "we are here."

No response.

"Sergeant Grendal," the woman repeated loudly. Still no response.

She pulled open the back door and ducked into the car, shaking Bolan by the shoulders. He appeared to open his eyes with a start, looking at hir with a confused expression, then he yawned in her face. "Pardon me," he smiled brazenly.

"We are here, Sergeant," she said.

Thomas Morganslicht watched anxiously as the big man in army uniform leaned out of the car and unfolded to his full height. It was a disturbing sight. The man seemed on the surface to be indolent, perhaps doltish, a typical problem for the army: he was a maverick, obviously with some flaw within him, some indecisiveness of character no doubt.

And yet.

And yet behind that veneer of easy confidence and untroubled directness lurked another force altogether.

He could feel it on this chill mountain morning.

It was a darkness. It was something disarmingly strong.

It was a visible danger emanating from this big man. Morganslicht did not like it at all.

Jack Grimaldi dipped the small helicopter down for a closer look at what the commotion was about.

He checked his map for bearings, decided he was about ten kilometers past Fussen, about ten from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The Bavarian Alps stood like Prussian guards between the German and Austrian borders, looming impassibly high in the distance. He hoped he could locate Striker's signal soon. He had little desire to fight the treacherous, twisting air currents that swirled around those mountains. Except that Jack Grimaldi would do anything for Mack Bolan, and death be damned.

The Bell dropped five hundred feet in seconds, the better for him to get a closer look at the two men fighting in an open field. One of the men stopped just as he was about to throw a punch into the face of the smaller man and looked up at the helicopter. The smaller man did not bother to look up. He took advantage of the distraction to dig a sharp blow into his opponent's hefty stomach. The bigger man doubled over, clutching his middle, allowing the other to club him across the face with both hands clasped together. Jack decided it was nothing but a personal matter, certainly nothing to do with the Sarge or his mission. Just as he was about to pull away, he saw the reason for the fight. A beautiful, buxom girl ran out from behind a bush and hugged the smaller man, covering his face with grateful kisses. As the bigger man writhed on the grass, the happy couple looked up at Jack and waved a thanks. He grinned and waved back, swinging the chopper back up into his surveillance pattern.

It was nice to see the good guys win sometimes, he grinned. Which was exactly why an ex-contract pilot for the Mafia was out combing the hills and valleys of southern Germany with a map and a radio receiver tuned to a highly refined frequency, sent out by a tiny transmitter designed and built by one Herman "Gadgets"" Schwarz, the resident Thomas Alva Edison of Stony Man Farm.

Grimaldi had been following the transmission since Bolan had activated it inside the Saab.

Jack had kept the chopper at its maximum distance of eight kilometers so as not to tip off Bolan's new buddies... But he had lost them somewhere here in the mountains. Apowerful jamming signal had cut him off completely. "Stay hard, Sarge," Grimaldi had said aloud. "But stay alive." Then a faint but distant beep-beep sounded in his headphones. He maneuvered the chopper until he found the strongest signal. The doctor finds the pulse, he thought happily. And so he manhandled the throttle for maximum speed.

Bolan did not move. Not an inch. Not a breath. He kept his hands in plain sight and studied Thomas Morganslicht's shouting, contorted face.

Nope, he'd never met this man before; a quick sortie through his photographic memory had revealed that much and no more.

So the big guy stayed cool, looked appropriately confused, waited for an explanation of why that 9mm Luger was waving menacingly in his face.

"Thomas!" Tanya snapped, stepping toward him. "Was ist loss hier?

"Yeah, buddy," Bolan asked. "What is the matter?"

Thomas Morganslicht looked at the two dozen or so of his faithful who had gathered around to investigate his hollering, and he could see the mixture of curiosity and doubt in their bovine expressions. He knew that the amount of their loyalty was based on the sum of their collective experiences of fear, and therefore he aimed to unsettle them all with a shrill threat or two in the direction of the American.

Thomas holstered his Luger and laughed. It sounded like a stick scraping cement. "Just a little test of courage, Sergeant Grendal," he said, wiping the chill sweat from his forehead. "Like you have in your American universities. Fraternity, uh." He turned to his sister. "Wie heist das?"

"Initiation."

"Ja. Initiation."

He smiled.

Tanya looked at her brother with concern, but forced a hearty laugh. Several of the gathered group chuckled amiably and began to disperse. Rudi the bear did neither. He had been staring at Bolan with something more than contempt, perhaps even more than hate.

Occasionally one of his thick cracked lips would curl up into a half-snarl, displaying his repulsive teeth and gums. He tapped the hunk of wood methodically against his leg. Bolan glanced around the hardsite as if he were taking in some charming scenery.

By the time his eyes had swung back to the front porch of Thomas's cabin, he had estimated the personnel strength at about thirty, mostly armed with East German copies of the Soviet Makarov pistol. He had also determined that the hostages were being held in the locked garage a few cabins down, where two armed men stood guard. He had also noted the dried blood on the end of Rudi's log.

"Perhaps we should step inside?" Tanya urged her brother. "We have much to discuss."

"Yes, of course. But first, Rudi must search you, Sergeant Grendal. It is merely a, uh."

"Formality?" Bolan offered.

"Right. A formality."

"This better be a hell of a fraternity." Bolan leaned up against the wall of the cabin as Rudi frisked him roughly, occasionally using the wood club to prod.

Bolan endured the search for concealed weapons silently. He had planted Gadgets's transmitter within the Saab, rather than on his person.

He would need that transmitter. It was Grimaldi's means for locating the scene of action in order to pick up the hostages.

Rudi finished up his search and gave Bolan one last prod with his log. "Just this," he growled, tossing, the Beretta to Thomas.

"Clean of heart, pure of spirit," Bolan laughed, turning around. He smiled at Thomas and Tanya in turn, but let his smile rest on Rudi for a few extra seconds.

In those seconds, although his expression did not change, Bolan conveyed a silent message, a promise of things to come.

The driver, Hans, came out of one of the cabins, a mug of steaming coffee cupped in both hands. "Was noch?" he asked Thomas.

"Unload the weapon and drive the car to Munich. Wait there for further instructions."

Thomas then opened the cabin door and waved Bolan in. "'Shall we, Sergeant Grendal?"

Bolan entered the cabin without looking back at the car. Within a few minutes the transmitter would be on its way to Munich, with Jack Grimaldi following close behind, pursuing a signal and waiting for a coded message. Well, yeah, the Executioner had been alone before. Maybe he preferred it that way.