feet more quickly than most men could think about it. He had been Bolan's flank man on a score of sniping missions and had repeatedly demonstrated his value in the sudden eyeball encounters with the enemy that were so common on the deep-penetration strikes. With .44-caliber ammunition worse than scarce in the combat theater, Bolan had endeared himself to Harrington by helping him set up a makeshift armory in which he could make his own ammo.
Harrington was also a deadly sharpshooter with a rifle, preferring the light semiautomatic carbine, and had proved especially effective in a quick-firing, running fight.
For fourteen months he had staged sixteen 'gunfights' daily, six days per week, at the amusement park. He had been fully and anxiously aware of the executioner's trouble at Pittsfield. Bolan had no opportunity whatever to deliver his offer of 'employment.' Harrington recognized him immediately, even through the camouflage of bleached hair and dark glasses. Thank God,' the twenty-two-year-old ex-sheepherder declared happily. 'I thought you'd never get here. You need my gun, don't you? Thank God. Come on, let's get outta this frigged-up funnyland. I been firing blanks for fourteen months. Thank God—thank God you're here!'
Mark (Deadeye) Washington certainly had no integrated blood in his veins, unless it was a fusion of the darkest African tribes. He was the blackest black man Bolan had ever known—and certainly the most dangerous. Washington's specialty was the big high-powered distance rifle with the twenty-power sniperscope. Like Bolan, he had been a sniper specialist. Bolan had only once witnessed Washington's craft—Mark had dropped three running targets from five hundred yards out, and the feat ruled out any possibility of luck or chance. Bolan knew that one does not luck onto three scurrying men a third of a mile away; once was enough to assure Deadeye Washington a chunk of Bolan's respect.
The big Negro came from a unpainted three-room shack on Mississippi's Gulf Coast—and it had not been necessary to draft Mark Washington from the environment. He had joined the army on his eighteenth birthday, several weeks before his scheduled graduation from the dismal little Negro high school, and he had never gone back—not even to pick up his diploma. He had voluntarily extended his duty tour twice, for a total of thirty-three months of combat duty. Then he'd decided to come home and find out what the Black Power business was all about. Less than five weeks later, The Executioner traced him to a one-room echo of Mississippi in a place called Watts. Bolan quietly stated his proposition, and again no draft was necessary. Mark Washington had always known what 'black power' was. It was the same as any other kind of human power. It was, simply, manhood. Manhood's highest expression, for Mark Washington, had been found with a big gun and a twenty-power scope.
Rosario Blancanales had started his Vietnam adventure as a member of the special forces. He had understood the Vietnamese, perhaps simply because he'd wanted to understand them, and he had learned their language and their ways. He had proved himself highly effective in the pacification program, was known throughout the delta as, simply, Politician, and had been an invaluable guide on several of Bolan's penetration missions. He was a pretty fair medic and a gifted mechanic, and he could hold his own in a firefight.
Bolan wanted Blancanales primarily because of the man's chameleonlike ability to blend into any environment. He respected the thirty-four-year-old's natural gift for organization and administration, and he had imagined that some day the Blancanales charm would find an outlet in U.S. politics. He found him, instead, working as an orderly in a veterans' hospital.
'You caught me just in time,' Blancanales told Bolan. 'I was going down tomorrow to reenlist.' The Politician had found an environment he could not blend into. He leaped at Bolan's offer of a new one.
Blancanales took over the remains of Bolan's 'purse,' some several thousand dollars remaining from the spoils of the Pittsfield battle, and attended to the immediate problems of logistics support. He rented a large and comfortable beach house in a lonely area north of Santa Monica and stocked it with foodstuffs and other necessities. The 'first formation' of the Death Squad was accomplished on the afternoon of September 24, with all members reporting into the beachside 'base camp.' Blancanales had already seen to billeting assignments. Schwarz immediately set about developing an electronic-security system. Hoffower undertook a terrain inspection, with an eye to the emplacement of personnel mines and other defensive devices. Zitka and Loudelk began a thorough recon of the entire area, toward the establishment of forward defense positions. Harrington and Andromede began work on the armory. Fontenelli and Washington repaired to the beach to set up a target range in the shadow of the cliffs. Bolan and Blancanales went to San Bernardino to ferret out a contact for the procurement of arms and munitions.
Chapter Three
The Soft Probe
In the early morning hours of September 27, a trunk line carrying telephone service to an exclusive Bel Air neighborhood was severed. A resident of the area pinpointed the time of the interruption at precisely 6:10 A.M.; she had been conversing with an airline ticket agent at the airport in Inglewood when the connection was lost.
An elderly man who lives in the gardener's cottage at the rear of the Giordano estate in Bel Air also pinpointed 6:10 A.M. as the moment when an uninvited guest walked through his back door, interrupting him at breakfast. The visitor was a wiry, dark-skinned man who 'walked like a cat.' He wore faded blue jeans, a denim jacket, Indian mocassins, and a rag tied about his forehead. A military web belt with ammunition pouches supported a .45-caliber automatic in a flap-type holster. A long dagger was on the other hip. The interloper bound file gardener with a nylon rope and taped a clean gauze bandage across his mouth, then carried him to the bedroom and gently placed him on the bed.
Moments after the man departed, the gardener, looking through his bedroom window, saw a man in a 'black, tight-fitting outfit' drop over the wall surrounding the estate and move quickly toward the main house. Another man immediately followed, this one carrying a heavy weapon slung about his shoulders.
At about that same time, a chauffeur on the bordering estate to the north looked out the window of his garage apartment, to see a man in army fatigues...'and wearing six-guns, I swear'—sprinting across the property toward the Giordano estate. The chauffeur tried to call the police, but his telephone was dead.
Also at about 6:10, an early-rising housekeeper was walking a pet along the curving lane fronting the property. She was startled by the sudden appearance of a military jeep 'with two soldiers in it and a big gun in the back.' The vehicle halted at the driveway to the Giordano estate, then backed across the sidewalk with the heavy machine gun commanding the front of the house. The woman fled, after being advised by one of the men to 'walk your dog in some other part of hell, lady.'
At 6:13 A.M. the sedate neighborhood was jarred by a muffled explosion and a volley of gunshots. A small group of household employees staggered down the front walk at Giordano's an instant later, led by a man in army fatigues. Some were still clad in nightclothes. They were ushered to the street and withdrew to the other side, clustering together in a hushed knot. Their guide hurried down to the jeep, spoke briefly to the driver, then ran back toward the house. Moments later the jeep bounced onto the street and careered about for a U-turn into the Giordano driveway, accelerating along the curving drive toward the house and trailing a dense black smokescreen, then emerged at the other side and sped up the street with the smoke pot at full delivery.
The entire area was now blanketed in a dense pall of smoke, but witnesses could still hear sporadic gunfire from within the mansion and the occasional rattling burp of an automatic weapon.
Silence descended at precisely 6:16 A.M., the time verified by various witnesses. The old man in the gardener's cottage viewed apprehensively the reappearance of the man in the faded jeans. The man slashed the gardener's bonds, patted him on the head, and walked calmly out the door.
The first police cruiser to reach the scene did not arrive until 6:22, just moments ahead of the fire trucks and with the smokescreen beginning to dissipate. Spectators clustered about the police car to deliver breathless reports of the incident. The patrolman immediately radioed for reinforcements and restrained the fire department from entering the premises. Two additional cruisers arrived within minutes. The police then made a careful advance onto the property. A bullet-riddled, pajama-clad corpse was found in the lower hallway, just inside the house, an unfired pistol beneath the crumpled body. The dining room of the mansion had obviously been raked by machine-gun fire; furnishings were splintered; all four walls exhibited multiple punctures at chest-level; china and other fragile items were shattered.
The body of another man, this one fully clothed and wearing gun leather, was found in an upstairs sitting
