Blood Dues

Still they carried on the fight and Bolan felt for them, aware in his heart that their own unending battle was as hopeless as his own.

It had taken several calls to make connections with El Toro and arrange the meeting.

A back door on the Caddy opened, and one of the gunners inside covered the dome light with his palm as Toro climbed out. Glancing around at the night, he crossed to Bolan's car and got in, sparing a look for the Ingram clutched in the Executioner's lap. Toro settled into the passenger seat and closed the door behind him.

'How goes the rattling of cages?' he asked.

'It goes. And you?'

'I traced Raoul's lieutenant.' Toro flashed a little conspiratorial smile. 'He was reluctant to confide in me at first. I had to be quite harsh with him.'

Mack Bolan knew how harsh the Latin soldado could be, and he could almost sympathize with Ornelas's second-in-command. Almost, right, but not quite. He waited silently for Toro to continue in his own way and time.

'You still have interest in this Jose 99?'

Mack Bolan felt the involuntary prickling of his scalp.

'I do.'

Toro paused briefly, then said, 'He is Raoul.'

And Bolan saw a couple of the pieces fall together, snapping soundly into place. He recalled the words of Captain Wilson as they stood together at the scene of Hannon and Evangelina's murder.

'The FBI says it has something on him from a routine wiretap on the Cuban embassy. He calls the cultural attache there from time to time.'

Then Bolan replied, 'I see.'

The Cuban raised an eyebrow.

'You are not surprised?'

'Let's say it fits.'

He briefed Toro quickly on what Wilson had told him, and the Cuban's face was going through some changes of its own as he digested Bolan's words. When the Executioner had finished speaking Toro made a disgusted face.

'I underestimated this one's treachery,' he said.

He spent a moment staring out across the beach at darkened water, watching the moon rise.

'This cultural attache that you speak of, Jorge Ybarra, he is DGI.'

Bolan stiffened even though he wasn't surprised to hear what he had already begun to suspect. Still, he was angry at himself for not putting the pieces together sooner, in time to save a few good lives along the way.

The DGI, of course. Castro's secret service — basically a Spanish-speaking adjunct of the KGB.

It fit, damn right.

It fit too well.

'Raoul has the trucks and weapons that your friend is looking for,' Toro said absently. 'Raoul is responsible for stealing them.'

Bolan resisted an urge to put John Hannon in the past tense, to tell Toro all about Evangelina. They were running on the numbers, and every second counted now. There was no time to waste in agonizing over battle casualties.

'For weeks now,' Toro continued, 'this pendejo has recruited gunmen. Omega 7 hides them, but they have a special mission. I believed it was Raoul, but now I see that there is more.'

'What mission?' Bolan prodded.

'Key Biscayne.'

Something turned over sluggishly in Bolan's gut, but he held himself in check, waiting for Toro to continue.

When the Cuban spoke again his voice was emotionless as he began to spell it out.

'One truck filled with explosives, to blow the causeway, si? Three, four others with the marielistas, weapons. All in position early while the people are asleep.'

And Toro did not have to say any more. Mack Bolan had the picture clearly in his mind, and any way he looked at it, it came out as a bloodbath in the streets.

'When do they move?'

'Tomorrow. Dawn.'

The warrior felt a headache start to throb behind his eyes and raised one hand briefly to massage his temples, clearing his mind for what lay ahead.

'We've got a lot to do,' he said simply.

Toro turned to face him, his features lost in shadow inside the sedan's darkened interior. His deep voice seemed to emerge from a bottomless pit.

'My men are working on Raoul,' he said. 'I'll have him soon, I think.'

Bolan nodded curtly.

'Okay. He's yours. I have some stops to make. We'd better synchronize.'

'Agreed.'

They spent the next quarter hour laying plans for the approaching battle. It was completely dark by the time they went their different ways. A darkness of the soul as much as anything.

It captured Bolan's killing mood precisely, as he pushed the rental car through Stygian blackness, following the coastline, with the wild, untameable Atlantic on his right-hand side.

In his heart the warrior knew that the only way to drive the darkness back was with a purifying flame, bright and fiercely hot enough to send the cannibals scuttling back underground where they belonged.

He had the fire inside him now, and he was primed to let it out, to strike a spark that might consume Miami in the end, before it burned away to ashes.

The Executioner was carrying his torch into the darkness.

20

The raid on Key Biscayne made ghoulish sense to Bolan. As a master tactician himself, he could appreciate the plotters' strategic perception. It was a tight plan, well-conceived, immensely practical despite its loony overtones.

Like something from a madman's nightmares, right. But this nightmare was coming true tomorrow in broad daylight.

The fact that it was clearly suicidal for the troops involved meant nothing. The planners would be counting on high casualties, and every man they lost before the final curtain would be one less talking mouth to help police backtrack along the bloody trail of conspiracy. Whatever happened to the shock troops once they were engaged, there would be time enough for them to wreak bloody havoc in the streets before the last of them could be eradicated by a counterforce.

Time enough to orchestrate a massacre, damned right, and throw Miami's affluent society into a screaming panic.

Hell, it was almost perfect.

Bolan did not spare more than a passing thought to motives in the plot. In the end, it mattered little whether Raoul Ornelas was an opportunist seeking ransom for himself, a dedicated rightist striking back somehow at Castro and America, or a turncoat working hand in glove with Cuban agents. Whichever way it cut — a hostage situation or a random massacre — the end result, inevitably, had to be a bloodbath.

Ornelas was committing criminals and addicts, all the human dregs that he could muster, as his front-line troops. There was no way on earth that he could hope to rein them in once they had scented blood. Ornelas had to know that much, and from that grisly certainty, Mack Bolan knew a massacre was what Jose 99 had planned from the beginning.