that arena, she felt woefully incomplete until his safe return.
April nodded slightly, as if in response to his thoughts, and broke the eye contact. Bolan turned to Kurtzman. 'Scramble it, Aaron, SOP.'
'Already done.'
'Thanks. Put it upon video.'
'Give me a minute, Mack.' Kurtzman went back to his keyboard. There was more to Bolan's mood than the restlessness of inactivity, plus the anger at a man's betrayal of the country that had given him every opportunity The brief visit to Massachusetts had awakened other memories as well, memories that Mack Bolan the man could never banish, would never wish to banish.
They were of a time when the wrong people were winning.
Strategists used to refer to a 'domino theory' in discussing the Asian war in which Bolan had fought.
But in a town in the shadows of the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, other dominoes had fallen.
Bolan had seen his personal domino theory quite clearly: there was still, back then, one domino left to fall. And it was he who tipped it over, single-handedly wiping out the gluttonous criminal vipers who had been directly responsible for his personal tragedy.
Earlier in the siege against the bloody Cosa Nostra, Bolan had become aware that, like Vietnam, this would be a war of attrition. The strategy was to annihilate the enemy, first as a means of neutralization, ultimately as a means of destruction of the criminal edifice.
Bolan understood that the war of attrition was now, for John Phoenix, a war of containment. He had no delusions about his own capabilities; Mack Bolan, a.k.a. John Phoenix, was one man, and no one man was going to save a vast impersonal world. But one man, sure, could aspire to fight to keep corners of that world free and green, could push back the corrosive advance of those who would replace freedom with fear, democracy with domination. The Mafia was a clear and present evil, an entity motivated solely by greed, by the dark side of the herding instinct, in which men mobbed up to commit evil far beyond the capacities of themselves as individuals. Among the ranks of the terrorist brigades, however, there were some who were motivated by misplaced idealism. However inexcusably wrong-headed their ideas of how they would run society, however vicious their damfool methods of imposing their will, Bolan recognized that one in a hundred of these tagmen were dedicated warriors. They just goddamned put themselves in the cross fire. He would have to be careful. But for the Frederick, Charons of the world, Bolan felt no reluctance to curb his blazing powers of attrition whatsoever. He knew that, to the core of his soldier's heart.
'I've got Hal,' Aaron Kurtzman called.
On the opposite wall was mounted an oversized 5by-5 TV screen. It could be used to display computer- generated graphics, maps, charts, photos, or in conjunction with the communication system.
On it now, there appeared the imposing, graying figure of Harold Brognola, twice as big as life, slightly distorted by the screen's curvature, and looking grim. There had been a time when Bolan and Brognola had been adversaries-unwillingly so, but adversaries nevertheless. In that other lifetime of the Executioner, Brognola had been pledged to bring his head in on a pike, even though he was aware that this man had done more to hobble the Mafia hyena in a few years than Brognola's Org Crime unit had done in decades. After the Las Vegas campaign, however, Brognola the pragmatist took over from Brognola the man, and though cop to the core, he could no longer pursue such a death hunt. By the latter days of the Mafia wars, Brognola was lending active support to the blitzing fighter, and it was he who made the president know that the country needed Mack Bolan in the new wars against the terror-brokers.
Brognola nodded and said, 'Hello, Striker.' He paused, pinching at the bridge of his nose. Bolan could see the weariness in that good face. 'Frederick Charon,' Brognola said finally. 'It turns out he was only the tip of an iceberg.'
'If you find the tip, you find the iceberg.'
'That's right,' Brognola grinned wanly. 'And this is one iceberg we ought a blow right out of the water.'
2
Bolan's chronometer read 1610:30 when April Rose came into his personal billet at Stony Man Farm. He was fully awake before she eased open the door; back in his Vietnam days he had cultivated the facility for combat sleep, had taught himself to relax and recharge the physical and psychic batteries while remaining alert to any signal, any danger or approach.
April was standing just inside the doorway, her fine figure silhouetted by the hallway light.
'We've got a wedge in,' she announced.
Bolan nodded grimly and arose from the bed.
Frederick Charon's computer had finally yielded at least some of its secrets.
'Gadgets and Aaron were working on it most of the day,' April told him as they moved down the corridor. 'Gadgets was pulled away an hour ago. Able Team has been activated.' Bolan dug the last cigarette from a crumpled pack. As commander of the Stony Man Farm cadres, he always felt tension when his men were called into action.
He thought gratefully of Gadgets. The guy made Bolan smile, even though Schwarz was tougher than nails. He was such a mystery half the time.
Believed, from an earlier confession, to have had parents who died in the sixties, Gadgets did in fact have a mother living still, a true eccentric, domiciled with her cats in Pasadena in a distance from reality no less great than the rumor of her death was, which, in her strange and lonely grief, had been her idea to begin with.
Thanks so far, Gadgets. And good luck, great good luck with Able's next one.
The corridor ended at a windowless heavy steel door devoid of insignia. Next to it was a panel containing a one-foot-square glass panel at eye level, a smaller panel at waist level, and a speakers microphone grill. April looked into the larger panel, placed the pad of her thumb against the smaller, and pronounced her name. The steel door slid noiselessly open, admitting her and her only into a featureless antechamber backed by a similar door.
The corridor door slid shut and a red light blinked on above it, shining for ten seconds or so before going out, indicating April was through the interlock.
Bolan repeated her process, pronounced the word 'Phoenix' into the mike. A few moments later he was with her in the War Room. The Bear was at his computer terminal. On the end of the conference table next to him was an ashtray containing his pipe and a scattered pile of computer printouts, most of them dusted with the ash from Virginia's best cut.
'I think we've got something, Mack,' Kurtzman said in his deep voice, not turning. He inputted something and watched as characters raced across his video display, then leaned back and grunted with satisfaction. 'Gadgets and I were able to figure out the format of Charon's signature.' Kurtzman turned to Bolan for the first time. 'That is, the number of letters and characters and so forth of his user code and access protocol.'
'Aaron,' April prompted gently.
'Beg your pardon? Oh, right, sorry.' Kurtzman stuffed dark tobacco into his pipe. 'I tend to forget that computer detective work might not be as interesting to you as it is to me.' He touched a match to the pipe, puffed out great clouds of blue smoke. 'Okay, the bottom line,' Kurtzman said.
'Two bottom lines. One — we're not ready to address the DonCo mainframe yet, but we do know that Frederick Charon has juggled the computer books to disguise the fact that a prototype of the new missile guidance system that his company was developing is now missing, along with the specifications manual that he himself developed.'
'How big a prototype?' Bolan asked.
'Physically? It would be fairly substantial it would have to include a control board and a display of some sort. I'm guessing to a degree, but I'd say two standard twenty-two inch bays, each about as tall as a refrigerator. The manual would be no size at all. Reduced to microfiche which it probably already is it would fit in a small envelope.'
'Okay,' Bolan nodded. 'What else?'
