Miami Massacre

vehicle, and it was an even bet that she was alive and unwell and that her fate was consigned to the untender mercies of the Talifero brothers. Bolan had to try. In the name of all that Mack Bolan held holy, he had to try!

Chapter Fifteen Requiem for a soldada

Captain Harmon beat the ambulance to the scene by a matter of seconds. Wilson was conscious and grimacing with pain, and his first words to the captain were, 'Well, I met Bolan.'

Hannon said, 'Okay, okay,' shushing him and moving quickly aside to make room for the ambulance attendants.

An intern moved in and took over, quickly assessing the damage.

Wilson chuckled through his pain. 'I'm not dying, cap'n,' he said. 'Don't look so worried. If you think I look bad, you oughta see the other guys.'

A uniformed officer hurried the Kirkpatrick girl away. 'The kid's all right,' Wilson said, following the girl's departure with his eyes. 'Take care of her cap'n. Somebody wants her bad.'

'Yeah,' Hannon mused. 'The same guy who wouldn't think of shooting a cop.'

'No nine millimeters in me, sir,' the Lieutenant protested in a weakening voice. 'Bolan had a Luger. Hell, he saved my butt — hers too.'

The wounded officer was being carefully lifted onto a gurney. Pain rippled across his face. He set his jaws and spoke between tightly clenched teeth. 'It was an ambush. The house . . . and cars, each end of the block. We were almost into it . . . then Bolan came sailing off the roof. Just like Batman. He had a Robin with him, too . . . little guy, down the block.'

'He had what?'

'Little guy . . . in army clothes . . . got hit . . . down the block.'

Hannon would have liked to have heard more, but the lieutenant was being hurried to the ambulance. The attendants scampered in behind the gurney, the door closed, and the vehicle threaded between police cars and fire trucks — and Hannon's first casualty of the Bolan Wars was sped away from the scene of combat.

The captain wearily squeezed the back of his neck and began trying to reconstruct the sequence of possible events in the incredible carnage of Palmetto Lane. It was almost impossible to accept . . . and yet, there it was. Hannon went methodically about his business, with a growing respect for 'the confused kid,' and with the strengthening conviction that 'a death trap' would never be the answer to the Bolan problem.

Then someone yelled from inside the house, 'Captain, we've got a live one in here!'

Bolan was seething inside, tortured by jumbled emotions, damning himself for an entire series of miscalculations and imagined weaknesses. How could he have failed to spot the tail on him, by a jeep of all things! How could he have ignored the repeated indications of stealthy movements all about him, in the yard, in the alley, all around the damn place! She had reconned his recon— then lain back to protect his flank — and for what? She was a soldada— that was for what. A female soldier who could handle the weapons of warfare but not her female heart. Damn damn damn — and Bolan had failed her — he'd gone for the cop at the expense of the soldada— he'd turned away and consigned her to the Taliferi, and god knew what they would do to her — she couldn't even speak English!

He was speeding along the back streets, recklessly daring each intersection to halt his progress, flashing through with head snapping from side to side in a quick scan in the forlorn hope of spotting a likely movement somewhere, anywhere. He was cutting a zig-zag intersection of the back-city, feeling in his bones that the Taliferi would not risk an open run on a major street in that shattered vehicle — and he felt that he was at least angling in the logical direction of travel, toward the upper beach where stood two luxury hotels of conventioneering Mafiosi.

Something in the street attracted his attention as he flashed across his dozenth intersection. He hit the brakes in a squealing slide, powered into reverse, and went back for a closer look. Several pieces of broken glass in sizeable pieces were lying dead center just up the intersecting street. He wheeled about and lunged to the location, got out of the car and walked the area looking for skid marks, other broken glass, any evidence of a collision, and found none. Then he picked up the cobwebbed pieces of glass and inspected more closely. Safety laminated! Windshield glass!

Bolan leapt into his vehicle and laid rubber in a screeching takeoff. He knew now where he was headed, and to hell with the back streets. He angled east at the next intersection and made a power run for the beach drive. Possibly, he could beat them there. He had to beat them. Once the Taliferi reached the guarded palace walls of the Beach Hacienda, it would be adios, soldada.

Perhaps, he thought, this was what they wanted. Something to drag him in, to lure him on — maybe it was already too late for the girl, and they were carting a dead body along just to insure Bolan's continued interest in their whereabouts. Well, they could be sure of that, all right. Bolan was intensely interested. He was deadly interested.

Harold Brognola had come a long way in an attempt to satisfactorily engineer a highly delicate and top secret operation closely involving Mack Bolan. In the very top drawer of the department's strategy against organized crime lay a smouldering and politically dangerous piece of intrigue on which Brognola held the principal mortgage; it was his project, conceived and underwritten by him, delicately maneuvered through the top echelons of government by him, and now entirely dependent upon his ability to bring the ends together into a firm package. He had tried twice earlier to complete that package,1 and both times failed by a hair's shadow to tie the knot. The problem lay in Bolan's elusiveness and understandable reluctance to tarry in the shadow of the law.

The 'inside man' who was conventioning with the family in Miami held a possible entrance to Bolan's presence. Brognola had not come to Miami to 'rescue an undercover agent, though it was convenient for others, even those in the local field office, to think so. Brognola did feel it imperative that he contact the inside man. This man had known Bolan, had worked beside him with each of them unaware of the other's duplicity until a showdown came,2 and was perhaps the one man in the world who could approach Bolan safely without a gun in his hand.

And so it was, in the late evening hours of November 5th, that Harold Brognola was quietly meeting with a Mafia caporegime in an alleyway several hundred feet removed from the Beach Hacienda, a luxury hotel at the edge of Miami Beach's glamor strip. The two men solemnly shook hands and Brognola asked, 'How are things in Bolan's battleground?'

The Mafioso smiled and replied, 'That guy is something else, isn't he. He's got them jumping at their own shadows. And that includes me.'

Brognola raised his eyebrows and said, 'He wouldn't throw down on you, would he?'

The other man rocked nervously on the balls of his feet. 'You never know, with Bolan.' Then he chuckled and added, 'I've had that guy's steel against my neck — but that was before. If he takes time to look, I'm O.K.'

Brognola nodded. 'I want a meet with that guy. I don't know how you could assist, but he runs more in your circles than in mine. I was scouring Southern California for him when he turned up down here. Guess I should have known. So what do you think? Any ideas?'

'Well . . . it's just a million to one shot, Hal. I won't ask why you want the meet, and I don't want you to tell me why.'

'Don't worry, I hadn't intended to.'

'I guess we could come face to face before it's all over down here. I can't promise anything, Hal. What's the drop?'

Brognola handed over a scrap of paper with a telephone number written on it. 'Memorize that and give it back,' he said.