'What image?' Bolan asked, though he knew.
'What the hell, if you're Italian you've gotta be Mafia. Right?'
Bolan grinned and replied, 'Yeah I know, Jack. I grew up with Italians. I know them, as a people. It's a shame that a speck of dirt is able to tarnish the whole image.'
'You like wops?' the pilot asked, smiling.
'Sure.' Bolan patted his belly. 'My stomach even remembers. It knew every kitchen in the neighborhood.'
Grimaldi chuckled. 'You got your strength from
Bolan replied, 'Yeah, I...' then fell silent when his companion tensed suddenly and craned his head into a scan of the higher altitudes. 'What is it?'
'The fuzz, I fear.'
The earphones crackled then from an outside carrier wave and a breathless foreign voice delivered an officious announcement.
'You understand that?' Bolan asked the pilot.
'It's French Creole, no. But I know what he wants.' Grimaldi touched the throat mike and announced, '
A propellor-driven military fighter plane buzzed them, flashing past in the darkness as a well-enunciated reply came in English.
'Welcome to Haiti.' He pronounced it high-tie. 'Please conform to established flight paths.'
'Roger. Thanks.'
Bolan showed his companion a tense grin and commented, 'Real class.'
'Oh they're classy as hell,' Grimaldi told him. 'Until they decide they don't like you.'
'What was that number you gave him?'
'It's the one I was given to use last time. I don't know, maybe it's a standard code. Anyway, it worked.'
'Anyone visiting Sir Edward can come and go without worrying about customs inspections?'
'That's the idea. I told you, man. He's a hand in their glove.'
'I wonder what happens to the glove,' Bolan mused, 'when I chop off the hand.'
'A glove without a hand isn't worth much,' Grimaldi replied. 'It'll find itself another one. That's what I meant. This war of yours is hopeless, man.'
'Not until I'm dead,' Bolan growled.
'You're already dead,' Grimaldi said.
'Just sit there,' Bolan told his newest ally, 'and watch the dead walk again.'
It was, after all, the land of the zombie.
The land of the living dead.
And Mack Bolan felt entirely at home.
The helicopter circled in a high, wide pass at 'the mansion in the rocks' while Bolan studied the situation through binoculars. Lights were showing from every visible window, and a considerable number of cars could be seen in the vehicle area. Few other details were available, from this viewpoint.
'What's with this 'attack at dawn' jazz?' Grimaldi groused. 'Is it just a tradition? They were always calling us out for dawn strikes in Nam, and I never could figure it out. Why dawn?'
Bolan continued the binocular surveillance as he replied, 'Not entirely tradition. There's a psychological moment involved — also a biological one.'
'Oh well, that answers my question entirely,' the pilot said sarcastically.
'The human animal is a product of the planet,' Bolan explained as he continued the scouting. 'We've developed certain rhythms, both physically and mentally. Dawn is a sort of neutral area. For the guy that's been up all night, it means an inner letdown, a torpor.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. In the jungle sense, it means a relaxation from the perils of the night — that is, for us daylight creatures. That hint of light in the sky means that we've made it through another night, and we can relax now.'
'So you relax and attack,' Grimaldi commented. 'Sounds brilliant.'
'No,' Bolan said. 'You attack the guy who's fallen into a false sense of security.'
'You won't find any false security down there, buddy.'
'We'll see,' Bolan said. 'Put her down.'
'You really going to trust me to come back and get you?'
'Yep.'
The pilot grinned. 'Think you're a pretty good judge of flesh, don't you?'
'Have to be,' Bolan clipped back. 'Put me down.'
Grimaldi put him down, hovering just off the coastal rocks less than a hundred yards outside the high walls of the estate.
Bolan opened the hatch, said, 'Good luck,' and slid to the ground, a drop of about five feet.
Grimaldi leaned over to secure the hatch, murmured, 'Yeah, good luck, what's that?' — and sent the little bird into a heeling climb toward the sea.
Bolan watched him disappear into the dusky overhead, then he took a sighting on his goal, checked his weapons, and moved silently toward the wall.
He was in blacksuit, face and hands also darkened, a gliding shadow in a landscape of darkness.
The moon was gone, and the first faint streaks of morning grayness were edging into the eastern horizon.
The timing had been perfect. So far. It had to be. Ten minutes… that was all the time he had.
He scaled the wall and dropped lightly inside the grounds and moved swiftly on without pause, relying now entirely upon Jack Grimaldi's memories of things that had been — three months earlier.
Halfway across the compound Bolan was suddenly hit with the realization that things were almost
The damn joint was overflowing with people.
Visiting type people.
A large-scale meeting of the mob was evidently in progress, and had apparently been going on all night.
Bolan did not know it yet, but the Caribbean Conclave was in session. He would soon recognize a familiar face or two, and he would wonder if he had dropped into an executioner's heaven… or into hell itself.
And he had less than ten minutes to discover which it was to be.
The dawn was on the march.
And so was Death.
Chapter Fifteen
The biggee
The layout almost perfectly coincided with Grimaldi's diagram. Bolan quickly located the telephone cable and took away their communications with the outside world. He then went directly to the security station at the east side of the courtyard.
It was an elaborate little structure made of choice Haitian wood and polished to a dark lustre, about the size of a large American outhouse but with standing room only inside.
A row of closed circuit television monitors were banked along one wall, providing various exterior views of the grounds — including the wall Bolan had just come over.
An athletically built black man wearing a tight-fitting white suit was standing in front of the monitors, his back to Bolan, yawning and stretching and scratching the back of his head.
