Detroit Deathwatch

'Who — the big guy? Thought you knew. Hell, he introduced you.'

'Yeah, but who introduced him?' Holzer wondered in a choked voice. He went out of there without another word to the man from Vice and hurried into the strike room.

The fed with the newspaper glanced up, then went back to his reading. 'Stryker come back through here?' Holzer demanded.

'You've got a complex, mister,' the fed said, and that's all he said.

Holzer had something as he hurried on across the large room and through the babble of organized confusion, but it wasn't a complex. It was a shaking gut and the certain sinking conviction that he had finally 'placed' the tall man in his mental mug file.

But, hell, surely it couldn't be. No guy would try that. No guy in his right mind would stroll right into the enemy's war room, peer over the shoulders of the general staff, and engage them in debates on strategy and tactics.

No guy — well, okay, maybe one guy would. Maybe he would, at that. Some guys just worked harder, and that's why they worked better.

All the same, John Holzer was going to feel like the chump of the century if it turned out to be — if he'd actually been standing there talking to — hell, puppy-dogging the guy all over the damn place … oh, God!

He found the make sheets and went through them one by one — front view, profile left, profile right... hell, it could be. Artist's conceptions weren't all that great, not all the time — a composite sketch depended a lot on the reliability of the witness's observational powers. But, yeah, it could be the guy!

He dropped the sheets and ran to the corridor, dying a little with each pace of the trip.

The guy called him by name — knew him! How'd he get that? The same way, maybe, that Holzer got 'Stryker'? By just simply asking somebody?

What did the guy have, for God's sake, a photoelectric mind? Could he walk into a strike room like that, casually look it over, and walk away with the entire counterplan blazed across his brains?

If Holzer couldn't find the guy — if he couldn't nail him and make him produce proper identification — what then? What could he do? Run to the skipper and tell him to change the game? Just because a kid lieutenant from Grosse Pointe thought he'd entertained Mack Bolan unawares in watch headquarters?

Holzer ran to the main lobby and on through to the outside, spent thirty seconds or so in a visual search there, then reversed course and ran through to the vehicle area.

There was not a sign of the guy, not anywhere.

So ... what now, Holzer?

Nothing, that was what. Who'd believe it, anyway?

But he knew the guy now, knew what he looked like, knew how he walked and moved and held his head, knew the sound of his voice and the flash of those remarkable eyes. Yeah. No introduction would be necessary the next time.

Stryker, eh?

The knot in John Holzer's belly melted, and he found himself laughing inside.

The Metro Unified Strike Force had become the struckee. Supernatural, no. Supermilitary — yeah, hell, yeah!

And crazy, sure, like a fox.

14 Conditioned

Since that first desperate battle at Pittsfield, BoIan had been conditioning his survival instincts for the inevitable armed confrontation that must someday occur between himself and the law.

It was a negative conditioning.

Cops were just people, sure — no better and no worse than most. The greater number of the ones he's run into were pretty good — decent guys struggling to do their job well, husbands and fathers doing their best with family responsibilities, professional soldiers with a hell of a thankless task and uncertain destinies.

A cop played the game of survival every time he hung a gun and donned the badge. It was a necessary game for a species of planetary life that had learned to think and act for itself but not to discipline itself.

Most people even disliked the sound of the word: discipline.

So, sure, cops were necessary if men were to live together in a responsible and disciplined society.

Mack Bolan was not at war with those men in blue — even if nobody knew that but himself. It was their job to enforce the law. Bolan was breaking it. Bolan was out of step, not them. He had never disliked a man for doing his duty as he understood it.

Bolan would not kill a cop. The war wasn't worth that. The war involved more than simply wiping out rattlesnakes. There existed a deeper plane — a primum mobile, or prime mover — that said that right had to triumph over wrong.

There was no way to cut it and say that it was right to shoot a cop. No personalities involved, no good or bad guy consciousness at stake, that badge of law was a symbol of freedom in a society of equals. This was Bolan's understanding. The badge proclaimed that the law of the jungle did not rule here, that men of reason had come together to fashion and hold a responsible society, that the jungle would not be allowed to encroach upon that clearing.

The man wearing the badge patrolled that jungle, of course, and sometimes he fell victim to it. Crooked cops were simply another testament to the imperfection of man. The man could not debase the badge, however; the badge itself was a perfect idea, and it merited respect from those who sought its protection — from those who wished to live outside the jungle.

Bolan, waging war from that deeper dimension, the primum mobile, would not shoot at such a symbol of right. And so the conditioning, the negative approach to the strongest instinct within a warrior's breast — that problem of survival.

In the jungle, a threatened entity did not pause to intellectualize his predicament. He reacted instinctively — with either fight or flight. With flight impossible, the cornered beast would struggle to the death, utilizing every fang and claw at his disposal.

And this was what worried Bolan, the man. He did not desire that the warrior survive an armed confrontation with the badge. He would exhaust every possibility of flight within reach, but when the corners closed about him, he wanted to be certain that all fangs and claws of the survival instinct knew when to draw back, lie down, and die.

Without, perhaps, calling it that, Bolan consciously cultivated an overlying death instinct — an innate self-destruct switch to open the grave and fill it with Mack Bolan's personal war.

He was going to die, anyway, eventually. He would not die with friendly blood on his hands.

He would not kill a soldier of the same side.

The only option, if the war was to continue, was to evade them. Evade and hide are not synonymous terms. There were times when, in order to properly evade the cops, it was necessary that he walk among them.

The penetration of the strike headquarters at Detroit Central was such an exercise.

He needed to know what the soldiers in blue were up to. He had to know where and how to move across that jungle of survival that they all trod, without confrontation. And he especially wished to know if they were watching a particular section of jungle that the Executioner strongly desired to invade.

And they were.