Caribbean Kill

descended upon his town and that he was stalking another kind of enemy through the underworld paths of Pittsfield. Weatherbee was shedding no tears over the dead hoodlums — he would not have invested a nickel in a wreath for the mass funeral — but he also could not allow a self-appointed executioner to prowl the streets of his city. He pointed this out to Bolan, and suggested that the soldier return immediately to the more appropriate battle areas in Vietnam.

Bolan, however, had discovered something of his own, as witness this entry in his personal journal, dated the day following the initial slayings:

'Scratch five. Results positive. Identification confirmed by unofficial police report. The Mafia, for God's sake. So what? They can't be any more dangerous or any smarter than the Cong. Scratch five, and how many are left? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? So — I've got another unwinnable war on my hands.'

Yes, decidedly, Bolan had another war on his hands. He knew the Mafia, had grown up in neighborhoods dominated by the lordly Dons — he knew their power, their viciousness, and their patterns of intimidation which could never tolerate a successful retaliation from their victims. They would be after Bolan's head, and they would follow him all the way to Southeast Asia if necessary. If the police had been able to put the story together, Bolan knew with a certainty that the mob's own formidable intelligence network could not be more than a step or two behind.

He was a doomed man, and he knew it.

But, as he noted in his journal, 'I'm dead anyway, I may as well make my death count for something. The cops can't do anything about the mob. The Mafia is a leech at this nation's throat and they know all the legal tricks and shady angles to keep themselves clear of the law. Besides, they're just too big. What they can't beat, they buy. If they can't buy it, they simply stamp it out. As they'll stamp me out one day very soon. But they are going to have to work for it. I won't just roll over and die for them. Ill die, sure, but while they're making it official I'm going to rattle their teeth and shake their house with everything I have.'

For a 'dying man,' Bolan had a considerable amount of shake and rattle left in him. He hit the Pittsfield arm of the Mafia with a thunder and lightning blitz which indeed shook their house down and all but eliminated the Mafia presence in that city — for awhile.

Following that unexpected victory, Bolan faded away like the guerilla expert he was — believing himself to be ten-times doomed now, and determined only to stretch his 'last bloody mile' to its highest toll of enemy lives. He resurfaced in Los Angeles a short while later, this time with a 'death squad' of hastily recruited combat buddies from Vietnam — and the Bolan Wars began in earnest. He lost his valiant squad in the battles for Los Angeles, but he gained a new appreciation of the forces arrayed against him — and a deeper understanding of his own situation. And he began to believe that just possibly he couldbeat the mob at their own game.

From an old friend, an ex-army combat surgeon, Bolan received plastic surgery and a new face — not to retire behind, but to come out fighting in. He called the new face his 'battle mask' — it gave him a definitely Sicilian appearance, and he used this new advantage with a vengeance in exploiting the enemy's greatest weakness: their own suspicion and mistrust of one another. He moved among them at will, sat with them at their councils, plotted with them his own demise — even romanced the Capo'sdaughter. And as he systematically set them up and knocked them down, the Executioner's understanding of this curious enemy deepened. He learned to think as they thought, to speak as they spoke — he became a master at deception and manipulation, aad the death blows began to reverberate throughout the entire empire of syndicated evil.

Stung now to a total response, the far-flung families of La Cosa Nostraassembled at Miami Beach for a summit meeting to discuss ways and means of responding to the Bolan threat. Bolan himself did not receive an invitation. He went anyway, and the summit meeting became a Mafia disaster on a scale never before experienced.

Bolan had many things going for him — nerves of steel, audacity, an utter contempt for death, moral outrage, the ability to discipline himself, military expertise — all of these, certainly, but perhaps the attribute which continued to spell success for this audacious warrior was an almost uncanny sense of timing. His hit-and-fade strategy had the Mafia bigwigs figuratively climbing the walls of their empire with frustration and desperation. Ordinary street soldiers throughout the country developed the nervous habit of continually looking over their shoulders, of going through doorways with extreme care and of sleeping in lighted rooms. The Mafia's businessmen doubled their retinue of bodyguards and sent their families on vacations out of the country. The face value of the murder contract let on Bolan pyramided as territorial chieftains added enticing bonuses to keep ambitious freelancers thick and alert in their areas.

Meanwhile 'the bastard' blitzed on, surfacing here and there for a quick hit and an even quicker fade-out, and Bolan's 'last bloody mile' became an ever-widening wipe-out trail which ranged across the ocean into France and England, then back to New York City for a pitched battle there and another quick fade.

Timing kept Bolan moving, kept him alive — but intelligence and planning and a finely tuned military poise kept him beating the mob at their own game.

Mack Bolan was more than a war machine, however. He was also a man — subject to all the dreams and desires of any mortal — and his soul was growing weary of its burden of continual warfare, unending violence and ever-flowing rivers of blood. He did not regard himself as a crusader or as an avenging angel — but simply as a man who was doing a job which could not be avoided. Many times he contemplated the comparative ease which death offered him. Frequently he railed against his 'leper' status, self-imposed, which necessarily alienated him from all lasting human relationships. Occasionally he succumbed to a dark melancholy which drove him into deep introspections and philosophic searches.

Through all this inner writhing he remained Mack Bolan, the Executioner, one-man army par excellence, and through it all he developed a meaningful philosophy — or perhaps, simply, a deeper understanding of his own unique situation. In that understanding there was no possibility of a personal victory. If the mob did not eventually get him, then the police would. He was doomed, whether he surrendered or fought on — the only difference being that his doom could have some positive value for the world if he continued to fight the good fight. So, life for Mack Bolan had boiled itself down to the simplest of terms: kill to live, live to kill. Fight on, and go out like a warrior — or give up, and die like a caged rat. He did not regard the latter alternative as an option worthy of the smallest consideration. He would die as he had lived — to the point.

Though sought by virtually every police establishment in the nation, Bolan never fought cops. His war was with the Mafia and — whether the police accepted the idea or not — the cops were his allies, not his enemies. He also exercised great care to keep non-combatants out of his battle zones. There is no record of any innocent bystanders being caught in the crossfire of a Bolan campaign. It is known that frequently, in fact, he scrubbed missions and broke contact when it became apparent that bystanders would become involved, and several of these occasions were at great peril to himself.

It was at Chicago that Bolan finally came to grips with his own inner turmoil and accepted once and for all his place in the universe. 'A man's character is his fate,' said Heraclitus, the early Greek philosopher — and Bolan discovered at Chicago that this same truth applied to societies as a whole. He found there a city chained by its own character, and he left it that way, though minus a few characters it would never miss, -and continued along his wipe-out trail to Las Vegas, the city of chance and very nearly the city of Bolan's last chance.

The Mafia counter-war reached its greatest proportions ever at Vegas, and the national enforcers thought they had the Executioner sewed up for sure in this town where the comfortable end of the averages perennially rode with the house. Once again, however, the astute militarist uncannily read the offense and turned it to his own advantage — and he left Vegas with all the chips.

He also left with $250,000 of the mob's money, one of their helicopters, a pilot and an accountant, or 'bagman.' The helicopter represented but the first leg of a devious route to the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico — the money, 'skim' from Vegas casino profits, was but the latest installment of a continuing cash movement onto the 'Caribbean Carousel,' a new scene of intense activity for the international syndicate. Thus Bolan's escape from Vegas was also his springboard to the next battleground. It seemed a virtual certainty that the survivors of the Vegas battle would recover from their stunning defeat early enough to read Bolan's play and arrange a reception for him at flight's end.

Bolan was a military realist, not a wishful thinker. He had known that the Vegas deception could last just so long, and was expecting the trap that awaited him at Puerto Rico. It was another calculated risk, little different than all the others. The important thing was that they had revealed their hardsite to him.