Save the Children (16 page)

"You shouldn't call David names like that, dear," she said softly. "I am his mother, after all."

"I'm sorry." Lana closed her eyes. "I was wrong."

"That's more like it," Denise murmured sweetly.

Lana spit on the floor between Denise Parelli's feet. "I should have said that he's a son of a bitch!"

Denise sighed.

"My dear, my dear. I'm afraid you leave us no choice but to teach you some manners."

"The hard way," David chimed in.

His smile said he was savoring the experience. He nodded to a hood standing next to Lana.

The nearby soldier stepped up and slammed the butt of his shotgun into the small of Lana's back.

She cried out and fell to both knees, scraping them on the rough concrete when the man holding her released his grip.

Against the wall, the children saw this and began whimpering, a strange, eerie sound in the spacious warehouse, as if they knew that the brutalized young woman was the closest thing they had to a friend in this horrible nightmare.

David lifted his hand to the soldier who had struck Lana.

"No more." He looked down at the woman sprawled before him and licked his lips in anticipation. "Not yet, anyway. Business first."

He stepped over to Lana, reached down, cupped her chin in his hand. He jerked her head up so that she had to look at him.

"Don't touch me, slimebag," she snarled vehemently.

"When this is over," he told her with a reptilian smile, "we won't need you for anything. Except for maybe one thing... until you die. That oughta be lots of fun. For me, and for the boys."

Before she could respond, there was the rumble of a truck's engine outside and the loading dock door began to screech upward.

The big trailer rig had been backed up to the warehouse loading dock, its rear doors wide open.

The foreman walked in from the loading dock.

"We're ready to load, Mr. Parelli."

David lost interest in the woman sprawled before him. He looked at his mother and saw the barely perceptible nod. "Load 'em up and move 'em out." He looked back at Lana with a leer. "Then we fix you."

The fashionable neighborhood bordering Evanston was quiet. There were lights on in some of the big houses behind manicured lawns, but few cars moved along the broad, tree-lined boulevards.

Bolan parked Lana Garner's car a block away from Senator Mark Dutton's house, where he lived with his wife and teenage daughter.

Bolan had chosen one of the darkened houses when he parked the car. He loosened the bulb in the dome light and there was no flash of illumination when he slipped out of the vehicle, quietly closing the door and angling for the thick shadows underneath trees.

It took only a few moments for him to make his way through the backyard toward a high wooden fence that closed off the Dutton property from prying eyes.

Bolan paused, listening intently for a moment, hearing nothing from the other side of the fence.

A door slammed somewhere, but it was several houses away. A couple of dogs in the neighborhood were barking sporadically. He heard nothing else, nothing from the direction of the Dutton residence on the other side of the fence.

He reached up, grasped the top of the slats and vaulted over, his booted feet landing with a muffled thump in the backyard.

The rear of the Dutton house was dark. Wind rustled tall evergreens in the yard.

Bolan started toward the senator's residence, slipping the night vision goggles he wore into place.

The sound of the wind almost covered the rush of footsteps from behind.

He dropped to one side, the thought flashing through his mind that this guard was more competent than most. He heard the hiss of a knife blade through air, coming at him.

He spun and snaked his arm out, blocking the stab.

The sentry let out a grunt, pulled back and slashed again.

Bolan felt a line of fire race across his right forearm as he blocked this slash. His left dipped and the Gerber MK II combat knife sheathed mid-chest seemed to spring into his hand.

He pivoted as the blademan danced back again. Bolan snapped a kick to the guard's knee.

The man yelped in pain and staggered.

Bolan moved in, looped his bleeding right arm around the man's neck to stifle a cry. He drove the blade of his knife into the guard's back, expertly guiding it between the ribs, into the heart.

The sentry gave a mighty lurch in Bolan's grip, then went slack.

Bolan lowered the body to the cold ground. He wiped his knife clean on the dead man's jacket, sheathed the weapon and quickly frisked the corpse. He found a Colt .45 in shoulder leather and id claiming that Louie Caputo had been licensed to carry a concealed weapon in his capacity of security coordinator for Tri-State, Inc.

Bolan stood, confident that he had taken the life of nothing more than a Mafia street goon... posing as a private detective... put here by the family to bodyguard the senator.

Bolan's pocketknife had a back door of the senator's house open in less than ten seconds.

It took about three times as long to find the button of a burglar alarm and disarm it, then Bolan stood inside.

The house smelled of fragrant odors from a roaring log fire.

Bolan himself smelled of the brutal night.

Cold.

Sweat.

Tension.

He moved through the strange air of other people's lives, lives he could only guess at.

He spotted a staircase and moved toward it, careful not to nudge anything in his way, his NVD goggles guiding him.

At first he didn't notice the light, only saw it peripherally as he moved past, then it registered: a thin line of light beneath a tall door leading to the basement.

His gloved hand turned the knob slowly.

A steep staircase descended into shadow.

He took the steps one at a time, breathing slowly.

The basement was well furnished. At the end nearest him was a bar that could easily accommodate twenty or thirty people.

He heard sounds from behind a half-open door between the bar and where he stood. He moved toward it, negotiating a pool table, sliding the night vision goggles up, knowing he had found the senator alone down here in his study while Mrs. Dutton and their teenage daughter slept somewhere upstairs.

Good, thought Bolan.

He eased up to that half-open door to look inside.

The senator was seated in an overstuffed armchair, nursing a drink, his back to Bolan. The politician's attention was riveted to a TV screen that was playing a videotape from the VCR atop the set.

Bolan detected a faint, wheezing sound, and it took him a second to realize what it was.

The senator was breathing heavily, thinking he was alone, entranced by what was on the screen.

Bolan saw it, too.

The image of young girls, no older than eight or ten, looking frightened, terrified by someone off camera. The children were parading naked before the camera as if they were in a beauty contest...

Bolan had to restrain himself from emptying Big Thunder into the man's head. Disgust, rage and bile rose in the soldier's throat, but he kept his hands empty.

The senator was so transfixed by the images on celluloid that he was not aware of the Bolan presence until he touched the Off button of the unit's remote control device, making the young girls disappear to a pinprick of light, then nothing.

The senator saw Bolan and half jumped out of his chair, almost knocking over the drink on a small table next to his chair. Bolan came around to stand before him, clamping a big hand over Dutton's face and pushing him roughly backward into the chair.

Dutton's eyes bulged fearfully as Bolan brought his hand away from the other man's mouth.

"Sound an alarm and I'll kill you right now."

The senator looked as if he didn't need to be told twice. He stared up at Bolan, face white and shaking, his hands gripping the arms of the chair.

"Wh-what do you want?"

"You've got some taste in movies, Senator. Where did you get that tape?"

Too quickly, Dutton said, "I rented it."

"Right. Most video places have tapes like that."

"A friend gave it to me."

"What's his name?"

"I don't remember."

Bolan flared with anger. He backhanded Dutton across the mouth hard enough to draw blood, pop out two of the senator's pearly capped front teeth and rock the chair, but because Bolan loomed over him, Dutton remained seated.

He had no choice.

"I should've known I wouldn't get a straight answer out of a politician the first time out," Bolan seethed. "Let's try it again, Senator. The big question. Where are the children?"

"Don't... know what you're talking... about," Dutton answered stubbornly, wiping away the blood of his split lip with his sleeve. "What kids?"

"I know all the rest of it now," Bolan told him. "I know about Wallace. He supplied the Parellis with the children. And I know the Parellis are shipping out a cargo of those children tonight. I'd be curious to know, Senator, how it feels to have your soul so dead that you can allow yourself to deal in human lives and the young like that, you goddamn monster, but right now I don't have the time. I want to know where that shipment is leaving from. You're going to tell me."

Dutton shook his head, his blood continuing to leak out onto his expensive shirtfront.

"Nothing... nothing I can tell you..."

Bolan shook his head.

"You're being loyal to the wrong people, Senator. Wallace knew about it and he's dead. So is Randy Owens."

"Wallace... dead?"

"They supplied you with some of those children from time to time, didn't they, Senator? That was part of their hold on you."

Dutton looked into Bolan's eyes and seemed to see mirrored there what Bolan saw. The senator sank deeper into the chair, exhaled a heavy sigh.

"I am a monster," he nodded wearily. "You... can't know what it's like." He seemed to begin deflating before Bolan's eyes. "The girls... I never hurt them... didn't want to hurt anybody... I'm like two men... I love my wife, my daughter, dearly... I'm
sick,
Bolan... that's what the Parellis are really blackmailing me with... They're less than human ... and God help me, so am I..."

"Where do they have the shipment?" Bolan asked in a soft voice.

Dutton looked up at Bolan with tears in his eyes.

"Trucking company... Skokie..." He rattled off a street address. "David Parelli owns the place."

"What time are they scheduled to leave?"

"Supposed to be... midnight."

Bolan glanced at his watch.

11:20.

Forty minutes to midnight.

"Bolan... wh-what are you going to do?" Dutton asked in a halting whisper.

"I'm here to collect your tab, Senator."

The soldier watched as the politician's hand began to move slowly toward a drawer in the small end table.

Good, thought Bolan, he's going for hardware. It'll make the fight even fairer. Because the rage that coursed through the warrior made him realize that he would have felt no remorse at choking the senator to death with bare hands right where he sat. The man was too dirty to let him live.

But no, let the scum try to save his life.

Dutton's hand was almost out of the drawer now, and Bolan saw the unmistakable shape of a small handgun.

Far enough.

The sleek Beretta filled Bolan's fist and a single discreet chug echoed in the basement's silence as a 9 mm stinger pinned the politician against the armchair.

Bolan turned to the VCR that sat on top of the TV set.

He ejected the child porn tape from the machine, then turned around to Dutton's lifeless body and dropped the foul video on the dead man's chest.

He left the room, noiselessly retracing his way out of the house, briefly recalling that he had wondered, after his first visit with Dutton at that fund-raising dinner earlier tonight, if he was not going soft when he had let the senator off the hook. But then, Bolan realized now, he had been in the process of putting the picture puzzle together.

No, the Executioner was not going soft.

He took as much satisfaction as ever in eliminating lice like Senator Mark Dutton.

He felt sorry for the senator's wife and daughter having to find the body in the morning. They were victims of the rottenness of Dutton's soul. But so were the children Bolan had to rescue before David Parelli and his mother sent them off to whatever unspeakable fate awaited this shipment of helpless human cargo. These were the victims whose welfare drove Bolan. The children.

And the puzzle of a cop named Griff, a man tormented by inner devils, who figured into this somehow.

And, of course, the woman.

Lana.

Where was she?

Griff's and Lana's whereabouts were the only puzzles left on this night of sudden death.

Bolan returned to the Camaro and gunned it away from the curb, U-turning to head west, toward the next suburb over, Skokie, and the address Dutton had given him.

It was time for the children to be saved and the Parellis to pay for their sins, past and present.

And time had almost run out for those kids being shipped from that Skokie trucking company at midnight.

Bolan wondered about a cop who could be friend or foe.

A kidnapped woman, in danger.

Missing children.

The time bomb that had been ticking beneath Chicago was about to explode with awesome fury.

Retribution time, yeah.

The Executioner only hoped he would be in time.

Aaron Kurtzman practically jumped out of his skin when the phone rang.

The
phone.

The one unlisted even in top classified government circles; the line connecting the Stony Man Farm command center computer room with a scrambler and relay system outside the standard loops of even such ultrasecret government agencies as the CIA or the FBI.

There were such sensitive lines in and out of the Farm, to be sure, but this was the line over which Bolan and only a very select few others made contact.

Kurtzman had been doing his best, as he went about his duties in the computer room, trying not to think about a guy named Bolan in a city named Chicago.

Not that there weren't enough things for him to worry about. Able Team and Phoenix Force were both out on dangerous missions at the moment, and that was plenty to occupy a guy like Kurtzman who took it almost personally any time another mission came up for the fighting men of the Farm. The difference of course was that Able Team and Phoenix Force were a bona fide part of that team.

Mack Bolan had elected to sever ties with Stony Man, to walk alone through the fields of fire.

Kurtzman did not have any new information for the big guy, except some surface background on Lana Garner, but it was just that Kurtzman wanted more than anything at that moment to know that his friend Bolan was okay.

The odds against the Executioner increased with each new campaign he decided to undertake, and Kurtzman had an uneasy hunch that tonight in Chicago could be the chanciest blitz since the Executioner had gone back into the cold.

The odds had never been higher.

Kurtzman answered the phone.

A gruff voice he immediately recognized said, "Bear, this is Hal."

He tried to conceal his disappointment.

Harold Brognola was the Farm's White House liaison. He had been the man to bring Bolan his assignments when the Executioner had worked for the government. Brognola had long been a close friend and supporter of Bolan and his cause, and he continued to be one of the key supporters... off the record... of the one-man wars waged by Bolan against the forces of evil.

'"Lo, Hal."

"Any word from our man?" asked Brognola.

"Afraid not. I was hoping this might be him."

"I'll get off the line to keep it clear in that case," Brognola grunted. "I'm worried about him this time, Bear."

"You and me both, buddy," Kurtzman growled. "One guy taking on the whole damn Chicago Mafia would be bad enough odds, but with the police and so many intangibles..."

"I know," Hal said grimly, "and the word out of Chi is that holy hell is busting loose. The streets are running red with blood."

"Let's just hope it's not our guy's."

"Yeah, let's."

"Phone me the minute you hear anything."

"Likewise, Hal."

"Will do."

They broke the connection.

Kurtzman replaced the receiver and leaned back in his wheelchair, watching the phone as if that might get Bolan to call in faster. But he knew that the situation in Chicago would prevent Bolan from phoning in.

"Give 'em hell, big guy," Kurtzman said to the silent instrument.

There was a large-living spirit on the loose in Chicago this night, delivering justice and retribution to those who had escaped them for far too long.

Bolan.

The eternal warrior, thought Kurtzman.

Ever on guard.

Ever vigilant.

Weary of war.

But unable to stop because there was always a task at hand.

Kurtzman wondered what Mack Bolan was doing at this moment...

Mack Bolan bellied beneath thorny berry bushes that were frozen solid.

Stray fragments of moonlight shone on the icy terrain.

How quickly a suburban industrial park with its vast complexes and fenced-in perimeters became a hell-ground, he thought.

He had shed the overcoat and was combat-ready in blacksuit again, his face smeared with camouflage cosmetic. The NVD goggles were in place, and Big Thunder rode low on his right hip. The Beretta nestled in shoulder leather beneath his left arm, military webbing with ammo, grenades and the like draped across his chest, the MAC-10 looped from its strap beneath his right arm.

The Parelli-owned trucking and shipping company was separated from other similar concerns by open acreage across which Bolan had jogged until he came to within thirty feet of the perimeter.

Lamp standards inside the property cast circles of illumination here and there, but there were still plenty of patches of relative gloom and it was toward one of these that he made his way.

He reached the fence.

He used a set of tiny but effective wire cutters to clip a hole large enough for him to squeeze through.

He came erect and darted forward, crouching next to a wall of a warehouse that sat next to the one-story office building.

Tractor trailer trucks were parked everywhere like dozing metal beasts.

The low rumble of one truck's engine, idling somewhere on the other side of the warehouse, drifted through the still night air to his ears.

As did the scrape of shoe leather of someone approaching.

A sentry. Bolan hit the ground, then rolled into the legs of the guard who now came around a corner of the building.

Bolan jerked the guy's legs out from under him with his left hand.

The man fell next to Bolan, and before he had time to cry out, a pair of fists, fingers intertwined, slammed into the base of his skull.

The rifle-toting man went limp.

Bolan waited a few more seconds to be sure the man was patrolling alone, then he stood up and looked around.

This was the place, all right.

He had expected guards, but he did not think they would be expecting him. They would not know yet that the senator was dead at Bolan's hand... that the senator had talked... and would think the well-kept secret of this terrible operation had died with Floyd Wallace and Randy Owens.

Bolan went back to the corner of the warehouse where he could get a better view of the compound next door.

A high chain link fence topped by several strands of barbed wire ran all the way around the truck yard.

Inside were a dozen more tractor trailer trucks, parked in two neat rows near another building with a high door. The door was closed at the moment, but Bolan guessed that this building was used for truck maintenance.

The warehouse that interested him the most was the one with a truck, its idling engine the one he'd heard, backed up to the loading dock.

He glanced at his watch.

Ten minutes to midnight.

He'd made it in time, but not by much.

He saw movement inside the warehouse through the open door. Taking a small pair of compact binoculars from a slit pocket of the blacksuit, he unfolded the instrument and put it to his eyes.

The scene inside the warehouse leaped into focus.

He felt the rage inside him burn more than ever. The kids were there, all right.

He could not tell how many of them because his field of vision was restricted, but he could see at least half a dozen... a variety of races, frightened, scared, crying... being marched toward the truck by two hardmen carrying shotguns.

One of the children, a little girl about nine, lagged behind too much to suit a guard.

The slob reached out and gave her a shove that staggered the child.

She tried to catch her balance, failed and fell to the concrete floor.

The guard reached down, grabbed her arm and hauled her roughly to her feet. His mouth worked, and though Bolan could not hear from his position, he could guess at the filthy language that the guy was heaping on the little unfortunate.

Bolan's first impulse was to unleather Big Thunder and go in shooting, but a cooler part of his mind, the part that belonged to the savvy combat specialist, told him firmly to wait.

Charging in like that would not accomplish anything except to get some or all of those kids killed in a cross fire.

He needed a distraction.

He faded away from the corner of the warehouse.

Three minutes later, there was movement in the shadows to the rear of the truck yard.

Several mercury vapor lamps cast a high-intensity glow over the front part of the compound, but the spill of light did not reach to every corner here in the back, where Bolan found a small gate in the rear fence.

Two sentries with Uzis had been positioned nearby.

Bolan was not interested in that gate. He would go in another way. The sentries had to be neutralized, though, and the way the two guys were standing under that light, he could not take them down with the Beretta. Someone else was liable to see them fall.

He moved to the fence in a patch of almost total darkness and reached out to rattle the chain link.

One of the guards stiffened and looked around as he heard the sound.

"You hear that?" the guy grumbled to his companion, his words barely audible to Bolan.

The other guard shook his head.

"I didn't hear anything."

"Yeah, well, I did. I'm gonna go check it out."

Carrying the subgun ready in his fists, the punk started walking slowly down the fence line while the other guy shook his head and muttered to himself.

Bolan stood stock-still until the man was about five feet away, then shot him in the throat with the Beretta.

The guy dropped his Uzi and grabbed for his neck, trying futilely to stop the sudden spurting with his hands, his knees buckling underneath him. He slumped to the ground, twitching once or twice before lying still.

The other sentry heard the clatter of the falling subgun and the silenced whisper of the Beretta that was not loud enough to be identifiable at that distance in the open air. He tensed, pointing the muzzle of his own weapon at the shadows into which his partner had disappeared.

"Jerry!" he called softly. "Jerry, what are you doing down there?"

Jerry didn't answer.

The guard waited another moment, then nervously started toward Bolan.

Bolan watched him come but did not move or make a sound.

The guard spotted the body of his buddy then and froze in place, sweeping the Uzi from side to side as he looked for something to shoot at. Seeing nothing, he knelt beside Jerry's sprawled form.

The guard hardly felt the bullet that smacked into the top of his head, splintering his skull and ripping through his brain. His body hit the fence and bounced off.

Bolan looked around.

No one seemed to have heard the commotion in this back corner of the lot, or at least no one was sounding the alarm or rushing to investigate, and that would have to do.

Most of the activity on the trucking company property remained centered at the loading dock on the far side of the center warehouse.

Bolan turned back to the body of the first guard, the one called Jerry.

The corpse was wearing an overcoat and had a cap perched on his head, the kind with fur flaps that folded down over the ears and fastened under the neck.

Bolan had the coat and the headgear off the dead body in a matter of seconds. He shrugged into the coat and settled the cap on his head.

He strode out of the shadows, heading for the trucks across the open space like a man who did not have a care in the world.

He was three-fourths of the way there when another sentry broke away from the building and trotted toward him.

"Hey, Jerry," the guy called. "What's wrong? Where's Ted?"

Bolan jerked a thumb over his shoulder back toward the fence and kept walking.

"Back there. He got sick."

The other guard fell into step beside him.

"Sick? What the hell's wrong with him?"

Bolan shrugged and kept walking.

The shadows cast by the huge trucks were only a few feet away now.

The guard caught at his arm.

"Don't you think we'd better go see what's wrong with him?"

"Suit yourself."

Bolan stepped into the shadows, the other guy still beside him.

The concealment was all Bolan had been waiting for. It could only have been a matter of seconds before this guy tumbled to his impersonation anyway.

He spun, his right fist flashing out in a sidearm slash, the hard edge of his hand crashing into the guard's throat, crushing his larynx.

The man staggered, sputtered, tried to bring his own subgun up into firing position.

Bolan did not give him a chance to do that. He lifted the MAC-10 and raked the barrel across the punk's face, opening a ragged slash. Then he drove the weapon in a fierce blow up into the guy's jaw, snapped his head back.

There was a sharp crack as the man's neck broke. The sentry slipped to the ground.

Bolan waited, the MAC-10 ready to spray death from his hands, until he was satisfied that no one else was coming to check on him, at least not right at this moment.

He doffed the cap and overcoat, slung the Ingram back to its place beneath his right shoulder. He crouched so that he could slip underneath one of the massive eighteen-wheelers.

He opened the small plastic bag containers attached to his belt and went to work, molding a plastique charge against the gas tank of the truck, setting the timer for four minutes.

With the children already being loaded up on one of those other trucks across the property, he could not allow himself any longer than that.

Staying beneath the trucks, he moved on, skipping the next two trucks but rigging a charge on the one after that, setting the timer to go off at the same time as the first one.

By the time he was finished, he had the gas tanks of four of the trucks rigged to blow in two and a half minutes.

Now to save the children.

So far he had seen no sign of the Parellis or Lana Garner.

He felt sure that they were all here somewhere, but finding them might have to wait until after his diversion commenced.

He knelt next to a wheel of the last truck and got ready to sprint toward cover of the warehouse wall.

What he saw in the next few seconds changed his plan.

A smaller door next to the big loading dock entrance opened.