Blood Dues

And he left her to it, exiting the way he came. The Executioner was out of numbers. It was every man now — every person— for himself.

His business at the Drake estancia was finished, right, but he had not been wholly candid with the woman. Tommy Drake was gone, but the party in Miami was not over yet. Not by a damn sight.

In his gut the soldier knew that it was only just the beginning.

4

Miami is as much a Cuban metropolis as it is American. For more than twenty years the city's heart has been Hispanic, throbbing to a Latin rhythm, crowded with the refugees of Castro's revolution. More than eight hundred thousand of them have arrived since New Year's Day of 1959 — the date of Castro's final triumph in Havana.

Their arrival has transformed Miami irrevocably, for good or ill. Suburban Hialeah and Coral Gables were converted almost overnight to Spanish-speaking enclaves, but the living core of Cuban life is centered in Miami proper, in the district known as Little Havana.

Sandwiched between downtown Miami on the east and Coral Gables on the west, with Flagler Street its northern boundary and a southern demarcation line at Southwest 22nd Street, the district is a piece of Cuba physically transplanted stateside.

Billboards there are generally in Spanish, but shops with English Spoken signs dot the boulevards. The district's central artery is Southwest 8th Street, flowing one way, eastbound, over thirty blocks of shops and sidewalk coffee counters, pushcarts and corner fruit stands. Locals call the main drag Street of Gold, but the gold is long since tarnished; there is grime amid the glitter.

Frigid winds of change had battered Cuban Florida since Bolan's visit early in his Mafia war and again some years later, and much of what was decent, warm, romantic, had been withered by the blast. Ironically, the blight had sprung from the same love of freedom that brought Cubans to Miami in the first place.

During April, 1980, half a dozen dissidents sought sanctuary at the Peruvian embassy in Havana. When the embassy officials would not give them up, Castro retaliated by withdrawing all his sentries from the compound. Within two days some seven thousand Cubans jammed the embassy, attempting to escape communism's iron-fisted rule.

Converting the embarrassment into a propaganda weapon, Castro publicly announced that anyone dissatisfied with Cuba was at liberty to leave. He opened up the port of Mariel to a rag-tag 'freedom flotilla' based in South Florida. Miami exiles flocked to Mariel, attempting to collect their relatives and friends, but as they jammed the port, the Cuban leader was waiting to reveal his hole card.

Every vessel leaving Mariel with refugees aboard was forced to carry several passengers selected by the Cuban government for deportation to America. With new arrivals pouring into Florida at a rate of four thousand per day — more than one hundred twenty thousand of them by mid-June of that year — it soon became apparent that Castro was cleaning out his prisons and asylums, ridding Cuba of its undesirables by shipping them direct to the United States. If proof was needed, the statistics made it plain: within a few months of the boatlift, major crime inside Havana dropped by thirty-three percent, while metropolitan Miami showed a corresponding leap in violent felonies.

Narcotics was the booming modern industry in southern Florida, and with the cocaine cowboys came a radical increase in urban violence. A 1980 FBI report ranked six Florida cities among the nation's ten most lethal, with Miami rated first. At least a third of all the slayings in Miami's murder boom were drug related, and recent Cuban immigrants — the outcast marielistas— filled the local jails in mounting numbers. Soon, their names and faces were in law-enforcement record books as far away as New York, Chicago, Seattle and Las Vegas.

Backlash had been brewing in Miami, fueled by anger and frustration, seasoned with racial animosity. Gun sales were soaring, and old-line residents had started seeking safety in the suburbs, some abandoning the state entirely.

Dade County voters banned the use of public funds to encourage the use of any foreign language, burying a referendum that would make Miami an officially bilingual city.

An active fringe of anti-Castro terrorists had been adding to the violent toll in recent years with bombings, beatings and assassinations. Half a dozen groups were armed and organized at any given time, all plotting raids against the Cuban mainland, scheming toward the liberation of their homes.

Mack Bolan had enlisted in their cause at one time, welcomed the soldados into his own war as allies — but the times had changed for all concerned.

Today, embittered by American 'abandonment' of Cuba since the missile crisis, some of the exiles saw their adopted country as the enemy. Attacks had been directed at the FBI and local law enforcement, airline offices and planes in flight, against the diplomats of nations that acknowledged Castro.

They had been linked to the assassinations of a U.S. President and a Chilean ambassador. The list was long and bloody, and it kept on growing.

Bolan knew the Cuban exiles — or he had, before the sealift — and the bitterness had poisoned everything they touched. In other days, another war, he had relied on them for assistance in the final stages of his grim Miami massacre. They had saved his life — not once, but twice — when he was wounded, cornered, and the Mafia hounds were snapping at his heels.

And one of them, the lovely Margarita, had provided Bolan with a very different kind of aid and comfort, laying down her life as a result.

The warrior owed them something, right, but circumstances altered cases. He had come to southern Florida in answer to reports of mounting terrorism, rumors of a KGB involvement somewhere. And if the exile movement that he once respected and admired had been perverted, twisted into something else...

The warrior checked himself, refusing to assume the worst. Some of the exiles had undoubtedly reverted to terrorism. Some of them might be in league with mafiosi, Cuban agents or the Soviets.

Some of them, right.

But in Mack Bolan's war, you did not slaughter herds of sheep to find the lurking wolf. The soldier made distinctions in selection of his targets. There were allies, enemies and bystanders — each of them indexed and filed away for handling under individual criteria.

There was no room in Bolan's everlasting war for indiscriminate attack, unreasoning response. In every combat situation certain steps were necessary for elimination of the enemy.

Penetration.

Target identification and confirmation.

Destruction.

The warrior had not yet achieved phase one of his attack plan. He possessed a code name, but without some further leads he could chase his tail around forever in Miami. He would have to find a handle on the puzzle, something....

Someone in Miami knew the true identify of Jose 99. It was a simple matter of applying some strategic pressure, rattling some cages, waiting for the proper answers to fall out.

And Tommy Drake had been a starting point. His death was not the end of anything. It was the opening gun of Bolan's new Miami war, and Drake would have a lot of company in hell before the Executioner's Florida campaign was finished.

He was carrying the cleansing fire to mafiosi, terrorists and traitors in Miami. Someone sure as hell was going to get burned.

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