San Diego Siege (8 page)

Captain Tatum threaded his way through the congregation of official vehicles and came to a halt at the edge of the war zone.

There was no better way to describe the scene there.

The shattered and burning vehicle in the middle of the street.

Bullet-riddled house, shattered glass, abandoned weapons lying about.

A team of medics moving grimly among the dead and the dying.

Firefighters and uniformed policemen everywhere the eye could see.

The uniformed watch officer spotted the Captain, then came over to offer a report. Tatum recognized him as George Gonzales, a twenty-year veteran with the department — a good man.

"Hell walked through here," Gonzales told the homicide chief. "Seven dead, four stretcher cases, two walking wounded. House is pretty well shot up." He glanced toward the gutted bread truck. "Lot of toast in there, but nothing else. We haven't found the driver. So far all of the victims have been identified as Lucasi's people. Somebody really hit 'im hard, Captain."

"What does the little big man have to say about all this?" Tatum asked musingly.

"He's reserving comment until his attorney arrives. Also refuses to step outside the house — or to show himself at any window ... with a hundred cops walking around here...."

"He get hurt?"

"No sir, just his dignity. I'd say he's working his way toward a stroke or something, though."

Tatum quickly squelched a wry smile and instructed the watch officer, "Let me know as soon as the lawyer gets here."

"Yes sir. Well be making charges?"

"You find anything yet to make a book?" the Captain inquired.

"No sir, frankly nothing. It was a one-sided battle, by all appearances. All the firing seems to have come from the other side, whoever they were. Rival gang, looks like. But I haven't even found a weapons violation on Lucasi. All his people are duly licensed as security personnel."

That last was obviously a sore point with Tatum. He screwed his face into a scowl and said, "Yeah, that's nice and neat. How about witnesses?"

"We're working the neighborhood now. So far only one has voluntarily come forward. Lady directly across the street, a Mrs. Bergman. Saw part of it from a bathroom window. Said a man in a white uniform of some kind was crouched behind her wall — " Gonzales paused to point out the spot. " — directly across, there. Said he ran through her property toward the rear just about the time the shooting stopped."

Tatum was scowling toward the burned-out truck, obviously trying to draw conclusions. A small two-way radio at his waist beeped and he reluctantly took time out to answer the call.

"Air Ten has picked up the L.A. special advisor at Lindberg and now has him aboard," was the report. "Do you want him up there?"

"Yeah," Tatum growled. "Give the pilot the general area and tell him to just look for the battleground. He can't miss it."

Gonzales was staring at the Captain as though he wished to know more about this development. Tatum was not yet ready to turn the thing into a circus, however. He knew how the press loved to latch onto a Bolan hit, and he was not quite prepared to go that route. He smiled thinly at the watch officer and told him, "Could be some connection between this and a case up in L.A. awhile back. We're getting a consultant."

This explanation seemed to satisfy the uniformed officer.

The police helicopter was already in sight, wheeling up from the southwest. Tatum watched the little bird come in and settle onto the front lawn, then he went forward to greet the tall young man who had been dispatched from Los Angeles.

The self-introductions were perfunctory and curt, being shouted above the din of the helicopter — but Tatum was sizing up Sgt. Carl Lyons of L.A.'s Organized Crime Division, and he liked what he saw ... intelligent, quick, a lawman with a personal commitment.

As soon as the helicopter and its noise had departed the area, Tatum told the new arrival, "I'm only a minute or two ahead of you so we're starting off even." He introduced Gonzales, who brought Lyons up to date on the preliminary report, then the three of them took a walking tour of the battleground.

They halted beside a sheet-draped lump on the front lawn and the Captain knelt for an inspection of the victim. He pulled the sheet away, studied the corpse for a moment, then went on to the next. After the fourth stop, he commented, "Right through the head, all four of them."

"Massive wounds," Lyons added.

"You said seven dead," Tatum told the watch officer. "Where're the other three?"

Gonzales pointed toward the street. "By the truck."

"Head wounds like these?"

"No sir. Multiple body hits from a small calibre weapon. Looks like they got zipped with a light chopper." He swiveled about to point up the street. "Found two more in the next block, lying along the curb in the street. Not dead yet, but damn near. Same type of wounds, they were zipped."

"You said
six
wounded," Tatum reminded him.

"Yes sir, the others were hit inside the house. They just got unlucky. Wrong place at the right time."

Lyons had moved off to the side and was doing a 360-degree survey of the surrounding terrain.

His attention became riveted to a pair of distant hillocks.

Tatum and Gonzales ambled over to join Lyons, and the watch officer advised, "Forgot to mention, I sent a car up on Sunset Circle to check out a firing report."

Tatum drawled, "Yeah...." He was sighting toward the high ground which was occupying Lyons' attention. "That would be the western knoll," he informed the out-of-towner. "A guy with a telescopic sight and a good rifle could command this whole neighborhood from up there."

"And looking right along the street," Lyons murmured.

"Is Bolan really that good?" Tatum asked him.

"He's that good," the L.A. cop replied.

The watch officer's eyes had flared at the mention of Bolan's name. In a subdued tone he commented, "It'd take a lot of self-confidence to go for the head from that distance. Did I hear you right? Are you saying this is the Executioner's work?"

"That's what we're trying to determine, George," the Captain replied. "Don't talk it around, though. Sergeant Lyons has tangled with the guy before. Hopefully he can give up a jump on identifying the problem." He grinned without humor. "And I guess the Sergeant has good reason to want to nail Bolan, himself."

"Wrong," Lyons murmured.

"What's that?"

"I owe the guy my life. I'm not that anxious to nail him."

Tatum stared at the young cop for a moment before he quietly inquired, "What did they send me? One for my side or one for his?"

"I'll do my job, Cap'n," Lyons assured him. "But I won't lie to you. My heart won't be in it. I told the same thing to Captain Braddock. So if you want me to turn around and go home then I — "

"Do you smell Bolan around here?" Tatum asked brusquely, shutting out firmly that other line of conversation.

"Faintly, but yessir, I do. I'd like to see some more of the evidence and — "

Another detective had come bustling up and the L.A. advisor gave ground to the obviously urgent nature of the intrusion. The newcomer gave Lyons a curious glance then reported to Captain Tatum, "That house is bugged from top to bottom. Real cute stuff. Radio relays, God's sake, planted outside the windows."

Tatum whistled softly under his breath.

Lyons' facial expression did not alter, but his voice had a crackle of interest as he inquired, "Has your department had this place under electronic surveillance?"

Tatum shook his head. "Never could get it cleared. The local feds have been complaining about the same problem. So unless they just went ahead anyway...."

The L.A. cop said, "Could you check that out? I mean, unofficial but damn quick?"

Tatum gave an eye signal to the other detective. The man nodded and hurried back toward the house, then Tatum asked Lyons, "Are you saying that Bolan ... ?"

Lyons answered the uncompleted question with, "You better believe it."

"I didn't know the guy was that sophisticated," the homicide chief growled.

"He can be as sophisticated as he wants to get. You asked me about Bolan's smell. I can tell you now, it's getting stronger by the minute. I couldn't...."

"You couldn't what," Tatum asked, glancing at Gonzales with a worried frown.

"Well I just couldn't read this hit into Bolan's M.O. First off, he's worked alone ever since the L.A. hit. Secondly, I couldn't see the guy setting up a hit like this. Too risky, too many possible innocent bystanders on the sidelines. But an
intelligence
probe, now ... yeah, it reads Bolan all the way. He sends someone in close to work the eavesdropping gear — and I'll bet I know the guy he sent, incidentally — while covering him with precision fire capability from way the hell up there in a non-residential area. It would be — "

Tatum interrupted irritably with: "You're saying the guy didn't come out here looking for blood?"

"That's what I'm saying," Lyons replied, coolly meeting the hot gaze being directed at him. "He's just probing now, looking for targets. Once he gets set and locked onto the people he really wants, then your war will suddenly get very hot."

"What the hell do you call
this?"
Tatum flared, spreading his arms in a dramatic compass of the battle zone.

"It's a probe, Cap'n," Lyons replied evenly. "Just a light probe."

"Jesus Christ!"
the Captain yelled, and stomped off toward the house.

Gonzales turned a grin to the young cop from L.A. "I think you said the wrong thing," he told him. "I don't know what it is in your town but, in San Diego, seven dead and six wounded is Friday Night Gangbusters. The Captain gets uptight over just
one
homicide."

"He'd better get loose," Lyons muttered. "He hasn't seen anything yet."

Bolan had learned early in his wars that there was no such thing as a casual connection between the mob and the so-called "straight" community. Whether that connection be social, business, political, or simply a chance pairing of golf or tennis partners — Bolan knew enough of Mafia methods to look penetratingly at any contact between the two levels of American society.

There were no off-duty hours for the mob. Its members were always in there pitching, in business and in pleasure, and they lost no opportunity to extend their area of influence in whatever direction opened to them.

The Mafia was a cancer. It grew and acquired dominance in the same manner as any cancerous growth — by extension — by moving into weakened adjacent matter and absorbing the resources there into its own spreading designs.

A wise man did not provide hospitable accommodations for a cancerous growth within his own body.

But many supposedly wise businessmen had played around with accommodations for the Mafia cancer. Almost without exception, these men were eaten quickly and easily and were either passed on through as excrement or absorbed into the growing body of the cannibal.

The same thing happened to bored socialites who seemed to think that a hoodlum in the drawing room or even in the bedroom, was "chic" — or at least an interesting conversation-piece.

There were also those straight citizens who unwittingly found themselves in a social or business contact with one of "the boys" and then found it too painful or too dangerous to withdraw from that association. Violent intimidation and blackmail were favorite tools of the cannibals; they never hesitated to apply them unsparingly. The end result for these victims was about the same as for all the others — they were used and abused until every resource had been plundered, then absorbed or eliminated.

Much has been said and written to romanticize the American mobster. Bolan had heard the stories concerning their high moral values, their gallantry to women, their concern for the underdog, their patriotism and love of country, their support of charities, their exalted sense of brotherhood and personal ethics within their own organizations, their high ideals regarding family and community.

And it was all sheer hogwash.

Bolan knew them for what they were. They were rapists, thieves, sadists, terrorists, murderers. The American mobster was a bloated and self-seeking cannibal who answered to no morality which did not serve to feed his savage lusts and voracious appetites.

None of this had anything to do with being Italian. Often it was their Italian relatives and neighbors who suffered the most at the hands of these unconscionable despots.

Bolan was no psychologist or sociologist. He was not even interested in determining the environmental factors which produced priests, artists and mobsters from the same neighborhood or even from the same family.

He would leave those complicated considerations to those who were trained to study such phenomena.

Mack Bolan's mission was to identify the gangsters, to isolate them and to eliminate them. He was not hampered by intellectual moralizing or agonizing over the questions of force and violence, right and wrong, the constitutional rights of wrongdoers or the legal trickery of the American justice system — all of which had been manipulated by the mob into a protective bubble which insulated them from any effective counterattack by the law-enforcement community.

They owned policemen, in high positions and low. They had their own judges, prosecutors, councilmen, assemblymen, congressmen, bureaucrats — the mob had their own "second invisible government" which saw to their protection at every level of American life. Except for one.

They had no immunity from the Executioner.

Mack Bolan was no zealot — nor was he a romantic idealist. He was a military realist. He had pledged to defend his country against all enemies, external and internal.

The mob was an internal enemy.

He could draw no realistic line of distinction between this enemy and that one.

The Mafia stood as the most visible and dangerous enemy in his area of perception. He would, until he drowned in his own blood or theirs, fight that enemy with every resource at his command.

The threat at San Diego was shaping into one of those confrontations which Bolan had hoped to avoid.

The problem was similar to the routine dilemma of the war in Vietnam: in order to get at the enemy, you often had to destroy an entire friendly town.

Bolan had managed to keep the major thrust of his homefront wars directed into the hardcore operations of the enemy — into their clout routes, the overtly criminal activities, into pitched battles with their armed forces and execution missions against their leaders.

At San Diego, it was beginning to look like the civilian community might be unavoidably involved in the resolution of the problem.

The intelligence probes had paid off handsomely, but the yield was also very troubling to this dedicated warrior.

Tendrils of the Mafia cancer were woven throughout the fabric of this great little city's business and social communities. The in-growth was still tenuous, however, and the encroachment had not yet reached the cannibalistic stage. But Mack Bolan knew his enemy. And he had learned quite a bit, in a relatively short time, about the city of San Diego.

And, yeah, this was one city he could not avoid. Some of the area's most solid citizens had been trekking to the tar pits of licensed greed — in many cases, perhaps, unaware that a band of cannibals were lurking there in the shadows, patiently awaiting the opportunity to ensnare them there and devour them — that some were already being eaten.

A sober and troubled electronics expert stored his surveillance tapes in a fireproof box and turned a thoughtful frown to his friend, the Executioner.

"So now what?" he asked, sighing. "So now the siege is ended," Bolan replied quietly.

"You mean we pack up and walk away," Blancanales said.

"No. We storm the city."

"Oh, well...." The Politician scratched his nose, glanced at Schwarz, and said, "What's the first target?"

"The tar pits," Bolan told them.

"The tar pits?"

"Yeah." Bolan was buckling into his AutoMag.

"You mean like the LaBrea tar pits, up in L.A.?"

"Something like that," Bolan said. "Only these are invisible.''

Schwarz and Blancanales exchanged puzzled glances. They were accustomed to Bolan's sometimes cryptic utterances, but this one left them blank.

"They've dug bones of woolly mammoths and I think dinosaurs out of LaBrea," Schwarz commented.

"We're after bigger game than that," the Executioner assured his crew.

"It's still a rescue mission?" Blancanales wanted to know.

"That," Bolan replied, "is exactly what it is."