Violent Streets

The call to Mack Bolan is urgent, almost frantic. Rosario Blancanaless kid sister, Toni, has been raped and beaten — but at least she is still alive, unlike the five otehr victims whose throats were slashed by the Minneapolist maniac.

In a raging search-and-destroy assault, Mack Bolan makes his presence felt throughout the Twin Cities, from the lowest mob hangouts to the police department and into the City Hall itself. A psychopathic killer is being protected by some powerful force.

For Mack Bolan there will be no intermissions, no pardons, no excuses: he will be fighting for one of his closest friends. He is once again judge, jury... and Executioner.

The Bill of Rights was designed by men who were justly concerned about the role of government in the personal affairs of its citizens. Individual rights were thereafter closely delineated in the U.S. Constitution and enshrined as "the American way": a blueprint for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a fair society.

Mack Bolan knew, however, that some Americans regarded this blueprint cynically and selfishly, as a "free ride," an avenue toward their own evil goals unhampered by official restraints — as a "picnic" where every lust is easily sated, every desire freely fulfilled. For many people — even, sadly, for some Americans — "freedom" means only that liberty found in jungle law.

From Bolan's journal: "These violent streets are not part of the America envisioned by Jefferson and his colleagues. Those men saw government as the largest potential threat to freedom. But how hollow is a freedom that cannot guarantee our wives and mothers and daughters freedom from sexual assault, that will not enforce the sanctity of the home and the protection of hard-earned property? What comfort, then, is freedom — on savagely violent streets? It's jungle comfort, John, and that's a hell of a bitter epitaph for the home of the brave."

The last line in that quote was directed at himself — in his new identity as John Phoenix, head of the government's covert-operations group. One may only guess at the line of thought that prompted that cryptic communique to the self. It was a line of thought born of the almost unbearable stresses of his personal campaign against the Mafia, a campaign itself born of his terrible years of war, and of his absence then from his homeland while the country endured stresses of its own — the stresses of great change and of renewed exposure to the predators of our jungle cities.

Mack Bolan, aka John Phoenix, has been at war now for years, but freedom has not been secured. It would be foolish, insane, to imagine that it could be otherwise. But certain freedoms, certain inviolable rights of safety, should be possible and given at whatever the level of society, and when it is those very basic rights that are violated — and violated upon the person of Bolan's closest kin, or the kin of his closest friends and allies — then the war takes on new heat new force, new dimensions of strength, resilience... and attack.

Mack Bolan returned from Turkey seriously exhausted by the demands of defending and maintaining personal freedom. But nothing, no possible restriction of body and mind, could halt him in his response to a plea from his friend Rosario Blancanales. It is in this response that the jungle predators meet their match and comfort is at last taken from the criminal and given back to its rightful recipient, the free citizen. Even Mack Bolan knows, as well as his enemies, that in these times there is absolutely no avoiding the Executioner.

The sleek Lear jet touched down lightly on the east-west runway of Holman Field in St. Paul. Wind-blown rain streaked the plexiglas window beside the single passenger, turning the world outside the aircraft into a dark blur speckled with runway lights. Interior lighting reflected his frown in the oval pane.

They had approached from the east, descending through one of those Minnesota thunderstorms that always seem to reserve themselves for summer and then invariably strike around midnight. It was after midnight now, and the big man was anxious to be about his business in St. Paul.

The Lear's pilot taxied his craft to a slow halt near a western terminal. Holman Field sits tucked into a hairpin curve of the Mississippi River, where it bites a half-moon slice out of south-central St. Paul and Ramsey County. The compact jet's position placed it on the far side of the airfield, well away from the busier avenues occupied by commercial airliners and most private traffic.

Mack Bolan snared a heavy flight bag from the reclining seat beside him and moved out down the center aisle. His plainclothes Air Force pilot met him at the exit port, throwing the door back on its runners to admit a blast of wind and stinging rain.

Somewhere across the looping river, lightning blotched the sky, and was followed instantly by the intestinal growl of distant thunder. Bolan nodded to the pilot, hunched his shoulders against the storm, and descended folding steps into the rainy darkness.

Beyond the concrete retaining wall, near a vacant-looking terminal building, a long, dark sedan sat with engine idling. Bolan took it in at a glance and angled in that direction, slowing his pace slightly in spite of the pouring rain.

As if on cue, the sedan's interior dome light was turned on, revealing the driver's solemn, familiar face, and was quickly extinguished. Bolan picked up his pace, jogging now until he reached the waiting car, and slid in on the passenger's side, flight bag between his feet.

"How is she, Pol?" he asked the man behind the wheel.

Rosario Blancanales shrugged listlessly. "She's in bad shape, Mack. And emotionally... who knows?" After brief hesitation, he added, "Thanks for coming, Sarge."

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that, guy," Bolan told him.

Blancanales put the sedan in motion, away from the airport and onto Lafayette Freeway, heading north to cross the wide Mississippi into St. Paul proper. They spoke little as they drove, each man occupied with private thoughts on that stormy Minnesota night.

Mack Bolan was trying to remember when he had last seen his old friend look so harried, so drained. Not in Asia, certainly, where Rosario's vitality and savvy with the natives had quickly earned him the nickname "Politician." Nor later, when Pol joined the Executioner's domestic war against a common enemy. Not even at the bottom, the very worst of it, after the massacre at Balboa in the bad old days.

Bolan decided that his friend had never looked worse, or had better cause.

Perhaps — just maybe — there was something he could do to change all that.

Blancanales, meanwhile, for all the strain evident on his face and in his posture, seemed to draw some sort of solace from the mere presence of his best and oldest friend. Already he seemed to be regaining a touch of the old fire, as if Bolan's welcome arrival from his last mission in Turkey had sparked some internal mechanism and set the wheels turning again.

Bolan noted the subtle changes and was thankful for it.

Holman Field was twenty minutes behind them when Pol broke the silence with a clipped, curt warning.

"We've got a tail," he snapped.

Bolan glanced back over his shoulder through rain-streaked darkness.

"No question?"

Blancanales shook his head. "Negative. The last three turns were for his benefit. He's sticking tight."

A block behind them, headlights hung on their track at an even, measured pace. When Pol accelerated, the twin lights edged nearer; when he stroked the brake lightly, they fell back.

A tail, yeah. No question about that.

Bolan turned back to his friend in the driver's seat. "Okay, we'd better lose him."

"Roger that, buddy."

Pol instantly swung the sedan into a groaning turn, barely making the light and the corner as he swung across two lanes of traffic onto an intersecting street. The tail car never missed a beat, edging out two other vehicles as it slashed a course behind them in pursuit.

Blancanales was an expert wheelman, familiar with the streets and alleys of St. Paul. With Mack Bolan at his side, silently urging him on, he pulled out all the stops, using every trick to shake the tenacious pursuers dogging their tracks. Up and down one-way alleys, through red and amber lights, cutting corners across parking lots and filling stations. Nothing served to shake the dogged hunters.

Outside the car, the driving rain subsided to a drizzle, and the buildings rapidly transformed themselves from large commercial structures to small businesses, finally merging into dark and sleeping residential tracts. Pol's course took them north and east by stages, running serpentine, with the tail car close behind them all the way.

Two minutes into the winding chase, the pursuers gained speed and drew within two or three car lengths of Pol's speeding sedan. Dirty orange flame winked from the passenger side of the tail, followed by the hollow sound of a bullet striking the sedan's trunk lid. Bolan glanced backward in time to see a second muzzle flash, and this time the slug chipped window glass before whining off chrome and steel into darkness.

Bolan reached between his feet and opened the zippered flight bag. He hauled out an Ingram M-10 9mm machine pistol. He snapped a thirty-two-round magazine into the vertical pistol grip, then threaded a foot-long silencer onto the Ingram' s squat muzzle.

The weapon was a man-shredder, conceived during the riot-torn sixties as a lethal "room broom" for use in sweeping snipers out of the urban combat zones. It was designed to fire those 9mm manglers at a rate of twelve hundred rounds per minute, but Bolan had modified and tamed this particular model down to a more economical — and manageable — seven hundred rpm's.

It was more than enough, yeah, in any situation under a hundred yards. And Bolan planned to confront his present foe much closer than that.

He snapped back the cocking bolt, bringing a cartridge into the chamber and priming the lethal little weapon. Pol Blancanales shot a quick glance at the hardware, shaking his head grimly as he recognized the chopper and its capabilities.

"Give me some stretch, Pol," the Executioner said.

"You've got it, man," his driver replied.

Blancanales stomped hard on the accelerator to wring another five miles an hour out of the laboring engine. Behind them in darkness, the trailing headlights lurched, then drew closer, gaining.

"I need a face-off," Bolan said softly. "Choose your own time."

Blancanales snapped his friend a curt nod, craning forward over the wheel, his eyes scanning the dim street from side to side. He saw his opening, in the form of a midnight-dark side street racing toward them on their right.

Bolan saw it coming too, reading the scene and his comrade's tense body language behind the wheel. Both men braced themselves.

"Okay, buddy," Pol grated over the roar of the engine, "right... about... Now."

Pol cranked hard on the steering wheel of the sedan, working the accelerator and brake pedals expertly to put the car into a tire-smoking turn at the mouth of the darkened side street. The headlights revealed a short cul-de-sac lined with silent, sleeping houses.

Blancanales floored the accelerator, and the sedan leaped forward, aimed directly at the sloping front lawn of a large house dead ahead. Suddenly he slammed on the brakes and twisted the wheel hard to the left, rewarded by the scream of tortured rubber as the car slid into a 180-degree bootlegger's turn. Pol instantly killed the headlights, making the half-spin in sudden darkness.

Bolan was out of the car and crouching, the Ingram poised, before the sedan rocked to a complete halt. His combat senses were pruned and alert, probing the hostile night.

In an instant the chase car roared into the cul-de-sac on two wheels, high-beam headlights knifing through blackness as the driver struggled to right his vehicle. For a split second the onrushing beams were blinding, then Pol Blancanales switched on his own lights, kicking them up into high beam and framing the hurtling attack car in the brilliant glare.

Bolan caught a brief glance of two hard-faced men inside, both bringing their arms up to shield their eyes against the sudden blinding light. The driver was hunched forward over the steering wheel, and the passenger on his right had an arm out the side window, his silencer-equipped pistol blindly seeking a target.

Bolan stroked the trigger of the Ingram, and the stubby machine pistol made a sound like canvas ripping. He tracked the flashing muzzle from left to right in a surgically precise twelve-round burst. A row of neat, even holes blossomed across the attack car's windshield, spider web cracks obscuring the suddenly terrified faces within.

Already dying, the driver tried to control his vehicle for another faltering heartbeat before he lost it all. Bolan helped him get there with another short burst to the driver's side, this time seeking flesh and finding it.

The windshield imploded, and at once the front wheels locked into a death slide, much too sharp, sending the big car into a wide, looping roll that ended with the vehicle upside down across the sidewalk, its nose amid the ruins of a white picket fence. One of the occupants was ejected during that wallowing roll, his rag doll body twisting and flopping across the pavement like a punctuation mark to the auto's emphatic death sentence.

There was little time to verify the hit. Already porch lights were coming on around the cul-de-sac, brightening the grim arena. The numbers were falling, fast.

But Bolan was willing to spend a few of those precious numbers, sure, to find a handle on this brief and lethal encounter. It would not do to quit the field of battle without some effort to identify the fallen enemy.

Bolan and the Politician crossed the street to stand above the limp, lifeless form. Bolan recognized the man as the passenger, out of character now as he lay on his back, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath him, his bloodied head cocked at an impossible angle. A dark ribbon of blood dripped from one ear, staining the asphalt.

"Do you make the face, Pol?" Bolan asked his comrade.

Blancanales shook his head firmly. "No. He's a stranger to me."

Bolan shot a swift glance toward the capsized auto, but another porch light clicked on just across the street, making the decision for him. Together, the surviving warriors trotted back to their vehicle and put that street of death behind them before sleepy residents could spill out onto lawns and sidewalks.

Pol tore out at speed, then slowed the sedan to a more sedate pace, avoiding the risk of a routine traffic stop by roving police. Beside him, in the passenger's seat, Bolan was dismantling the Ingram and stowing its warm components back inside the flight bag.

But the Executioner's mind was not on the mechanical functions of stripping his weapon. No way. His brain was already in overdrive, racing toward analysis and recognition of the real game in St. Paul.

They were stopped at a traffic light when Pol's voice intruded on those dark thoughts.

"I guess I'll have to lose this heap," he grumbled. Then, with a rueful grin, he added, "Just like the bad old days, eh?"

Bolan frowned. "The old days are supposed to be dead and buried, guy."

Blancanales nodded, losing the grin. "So are you, buddy, so are you."

"How do you read this action, Pol?" Bolan asked, changing the subject.

Blancanales shrugged. His face in the dim dashboard light was genuinely puzzled.

"No reading, Sarge. Not yet, anyway. It just won't compute. It's beyond me."

For another few moments they drove along in silence, each warrior preoccupied with his own private thoughts and concerns. Each sought some personal answer, some private point of recognition in the puzzle that ensnared them.

Neither found it.