ago.
April wore a .44 Magnum with a six-inch barrel in a fast-draw holster on her shapely right hip. She was also carrying a spare gun-holster rig.
The lady handled weapons like a carpenter handled a saw.
But still beautiful, yeah.
No one ever said that tough and competent could not be synonymous with feminine, thought Bolan, and the woman who gave him her heart was damn well proof of that.
Bolan gestured to the spare rig and weapon that she carried over her shoulder.
'For Aaron,' she explained. 'It looks like he and I might be doing more than sitting on the sidelines this time.'
The president could wait.
Bolan grabbed April Rose with one arm and pulled her to him.
She came willingly, pressing herself against the big man with a kiss that was all passion, all love and fire.
'God speed you back to me, Colonel Thunder,' she whispered fiercely in his ear when they were close.
Another kiss.
Then it was time to move out.
Bolan boarded the chopper. But the urge to remain at Stony Man Farm pulled at him stronger than ever.
Someone had breached Stony Man Farm's security.
And there was Konzaki.
Bolan sensed that the lives of all his Stony Man allies were already on the line.
But Hal was right.
You do not turn down a request from the Man.
Bolan was airlifted from Stony Man Farm knowing that there would be no room for miscalculation or fumbling on this coming night that was about to cloak the nation's capital.
It was a jungle out there, Washington, D.C., or no.
And the Executioner was back in town.
6
The familiar low skyline of D.C. was bathed in dusk as Grimaldi piloted the bubble-front Hughes helicopter with Mack Bolan aboard.
No city in America is more drenched in history and legend than Washington.
Bolan knew this city, and he knew something of its history.
This land had been a blazed hellground. The British captured and sacked the city in 1814. It wasn't until the twentieth century that Washington was transformed from an unkempt village into the city of today: a hellground of another kind.
Wonderland on the Potomac, Hal called it.
With the reality of the ghetto only a stone's throw from the power brokers who steered the course of the nation, the city was a study in contrasts. The Washington Monument obelisk, the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial, shrines to the visionaries of equality, were set against some of the worst poverty Bolan had ever seen.
Bolan wore a two-piece suit of subdued blue and a sky-blue shirt and red tie for his meeting with the president.
On his left shoulder, under the suit jacket, the Beretta 93-R pistol nestled in a concealed shoulder speed rig.
Bolan's Beretta had been modified with a new sound suppressor and a flash-hider for night firing. The gun was designed for fast killing. Konzaki had devised a forehand grip that folded down to provide controlled two- handed firing. The 93-R saw action on nearly every Bolan mission.
Another debt to Konzaki.
He also toted a black leather briefcase that contained additional items he liked to have close at hand, including Big Thunder, the impressive stainless-steel .44 AutoMag.
The chopper began descending.
'Coming in,' called Grimaldi above the steady throbbing of the rotor.
If Grimaldi felt exhausted, as he had to be, he wasn't showing it. Bolan at least had caught some shut-eye on the flight to Stony Man from down south.
The eighteen acres of White House grounds were a maze of lengthening shadows on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue. Grimaldi touched down smoothly on a grassy area in back of the executive mansion.
The White House.
More living history.
The British had razed it in 1814 and when the present three-story structure of simple, stately design was rebuilt, the scorched Virginia freestone of the home of every president since Adams had been painted over a stark white, and it had been the White House ever since.
Bolan dropped from the chopper's door before the chopper even settled. The Executioner left his briefcase with the pilot.
History is being made right now, thought Bolan as he hustled at a slow jog from beneath the whirling blades of the helicopter. The Phoenix program spanned more than one administration, but combat specialist John Phoenix had never been called to this house.
Grimaldi cut the chopper's engine and waited.
Bolan approached three husky guys clad almost identically in conservative suits. They met him near an entrance to the building. Bolan made two of these White House staffers as armed Secret Service agents.
'This way, Colonel, please,' said the third man.
They escorted Bolan into a hallway of sedate oak paneling and thick red carpet.
Hal Brognola and another man, whom Bolan recognized as Farnsworth, the CFB chief, stood waiting a few paces to the side of the closed heavy oak door of the Oval Office, the president's inner sanctum.
The two Secret Service agents fell back. The other staffer strode to the door of the president's office, knocked politely, then opened the door and stuck his head inside.
Brognola's permanently five-o'clock-shadowed face wore a tight glower that only barely brightened when he saw Bolan.
Stony Man's gruff White House liaison greeted Bolan with a firm handshake.
'Colonel Phoenix, thanks for getting here so fast.' Hal introduced the man standing beside him. 'This is Lee Farnsworth, Central Foreign Bureau.'
Farnsworth was a strapping, blond-haired man in his early forties who had the physical, conditioning of a man twenty years younger. Sharp eyes that had seen it all were set in a serious, granite face.
Bolan considered what he knew about the guy and the operation he headed.
The CFB was the Defense Department's special unit for intelligence-gathering and covert operations. It was set up to supplement the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon intended the unit to operate around the world.
Bolan knew that the agency had been formed in 1980 during the planning of the raid to free the American hostages in Iran when the Pentagon was dissatisfied with the intelligence data it was getting from the CIA.
Much like the Phoenix operation, the CFB conducted clandestine operations without 'presidential finding,' the legal authorization required by Congress. Bolan also knew that the Senate and House Intelligence committees had not been advised of the unit's existence, as required by law.
The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the Pentagon's regular intelligence unit, were unaware of the CFB's activities.
