Collision Course

Bolan counted off the minutes on his wristwatch. He watched the dog’s breathing first slow, then lengthen and deepen until he was sure the animal was securely drugged. Confident, Bolan rose and ghosted across the lawn toward the back of the house. The silenced Beretta was out from its shoulder holster and ready in his hands as he came up alongside the building.

He crept forward and reached a window, its blind not fully drawn. He stopped at the edge and slowly bent at the knees and lowered his body until he could peek under the shade and into the house through the dirty window.

Empty beer bottles were lined up on the end table four deep. Just beyond them he saw flickering images on a TV screen. A bed was positioned in front of the TV and Bolan recognized the woman on it from the file Danson had given him as Sheila, Shayla’s younger sister and Sideways’s current girlfriend. She was so skinny Bolan thought the pit bull might have outweighed her.

She opened her mouth and released the rubber tubing held between her teeth. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she pulled the empty hypodermic from her arm.

Grim-faced, Bolan turned away and continued toward the rear of the house. He cut through the lean-to, past the panheads and came around the corner where the smell of the sea was even stronger. He eased up to the screened-in back porch and took stock of the situation. Two men sat at a kitchen table drinking beer and shaking their heads in time to the music coming out of a boom box CD player on the counter next to a sink piled high with dirty dishes.

Bolan scrutinized the men through the open screen door. He recognized Sideways immediately. The man’s gorilla arms hung from a cut-up flannel shirt and swirled with prison tats. A spiderweb had been tattooed on his elbow. The other guy was wearing an oil-stained sleeveless red T-shirt with an Aerosmith decal on the front. His long hair was held back in a ponytail. He was small only when compared to the massive Sideways.

A piece of glass, a double-edged razor blade and a generous mound of white powder were sitting on the table between the men. There was also a pistol. Bolan narrowed his eyes and took in the details of the handgun. It was a Croatian HS 2000.

The shorter man said something and Sideways snorted with laughter. He turned his head and called something out over his shoulder, obviously meant for the woman Bolan had seen dosing herself in the bedroom. When he got no answer, the frustrated biker stood abruptly, obviously pissed off, and stalked out through the kitchen doorway toward the front of the house. The second biker laughed to himself, then polished off his beer. He set down the empty and crossed the kitchen toward the refrigerator. As he bent to reach in and snatch up a full bottle of beer, he heard the screen door slam behind him. He straightened, a puzzled expression on his face as he turned.

Bolan stood before him.

“Who the fu—?” the man began.

Bolan slammed the butt of the stolen HS 2000 downward, and the end of the magazine cracked the biker across the nose. The big man crumpled at the knees and went down. A gash opened up across the bridge of his nose and spilled blood across his face.

Stunned, the biker rolled his eyes up and looked at the nightmare figure looming over him. Bolan slapped the muzzle of the pistol across the man’s jaw, snapping his head to the side. With his face turned up like an offering, Bolan quickly snapped the Croatian handgun back then drove it forward, slamming the butt into the man’s temple and putting his lights out.

Without uttering a word, the unconscious biker bounced off the fridge door and fell face-first onto the dirty kitchen floor. Bolan produced a pair of hinge-style handcuffs from his back pocket and quickly secured the man’s hands behind his broad back. He could hear heavy footfalls approaching the kitchen from the front of the house, so he quickly moved beside the doorjamb.

Sideways stopped cold, incredulous shock stamped on his face, when he almost tripped over the unconscious and handcuffed body of his buddy lying on the floor.

Bolan stepped out and drove the muzzle of the HS 2000 Croatian pistol into the big man’s solar plexus. Sideways grunted and folded like a cheap card table. As he went down, Bolan’s knee came up and clipped him hard on the point of his chin.

Stunned by the second blow, Sideways flopped over on his back, hitting the dirty linoleum hard as he went down. In an instant Bolan was on him, shoving the gun into his face and pinning him to the floor with his other hand wrapped around the man’s neck. Sideways’s eyelids fluttered as he fought to regain his composure after the brutal ambush.

The Executioner’s voice was like a cold wind through a high mountain pass as he spoke.

“I’m going to ask you some questions about where you got this pistol,” Bolan said. “And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”

2

The squalid little Boston bar sat quiet and dark, caught between rundown residential neighborhoods on one side and the sprawling industrial wasteland surrounding a factory park on the other side.

The business was the kind of place that accepted food stamps and cashed welfare checks. On the first and fifteenth of every month it was a pretty lively place. It was early in the morning now, and the last of the homeless had been chased from the alleyway behind the one-story building. The tired old neon beer signs in the grimy front windows were turned off.

The only lights inside the tavern emanated from the crack beneath the door to the combination office and storage room in the back, just across from the entrance to the walk-in cooler. Muffled voices and sounds seeped out through the cheap wood along with the bar of pale yellow light.

Inside the room, against the far wall, crates of liquor devoid of tax stamps and cases of hijacked beer were stacked toward where Frankie Bonanno kept his desk, which was piled high with invoices, shipping recipes and defunct tax forms. A cheap accountant’s calculator sat on the desktop next to an overflowing ashtray where a cigar smoldered.

Next to the ashtray was a lady’s compact mirror with coke residue smeared across the glass and a sticky razor blade. Beside the mirror was a HS 2000 Compact Croatian handgun.

Just like Robert Scone, Frankie Bonanno was a big man. His forearms and shoulders were huge and hard from his time working the docks and cracking skulls. He was equally comfortable behind the controls of a forklift or swinging a sawed-off Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The knuckles on his hands had been broken so many times they were huge and misshapen.

His thin, greasy hair was swept back and plastered into place with the liberal use of gel in a vain attempt to cover an emerging bald spot the size of a tea saucer. His ruddy, acne-scarred complexion matched his alcoholic’s broken-veined nose. His pig eyes were scrunched tightly in pleasure as the skinny blond woman’s head bobbed up and down in his lap.

Suddenly the door to the office swung open in a swift arc and a living shadow rushed into the room. There was a whirl of dark fabric as a black overcoat came open and the masked specter’s arms snaked out. The gloved hands were filled with deadly technology.

One hand swept downward and leveled a sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R on the huddled form of the cowering blonde. The left hand swung out from the intruder’s coat and tracked straight onto the fat jowls and flabby chest of Frankie Bonanno.

Behind his mask Mack Bolan smiled.

There was a small mechanical click as Bolan’s finger depressed the trigger on the stun gun and twin electrode darts fired out and hammered into Frankie Bonanno. There was a crackle as 2,000,000 volts sizzled into the big mobster. Immediately the sickly sweet stench of charred flesh filled the cramped little room.

Bonanno’s shriek of pain morphed into a choking gurgle as he began to spasm and jerk in his seat, pants still down around his thick, hairy ankles. Blue bolts of electricity arced from the fillings in his teeth in an uncanny effect that produced a mouthful of fire.

Bolan hit the juice again and pushed another charge into the mobster.

The fat man looked up and saliva dribbled from his gaping mouth. Then there was a pause, two heartbeats long, as Bonanno slumped helpless in his chair.

Bolan turned his balaclava-covered face toward the cowering woman. “Get out,” he ordered.

The woman looked up at the Executioner in stunned disbelief. Mob hitters were not known for compassion, and she clearly suspected some trick.

“I said get out!” Bolan snapped.

This time she did not hesitate. The woman scrambled to her feet and scurried to the door.

From the chair Frankie Bonanno lifted his head, still confused by the events unfolding around him.

“Who are—?” he began.

“Shut up,” Bolan snapped. He pressed the cold muzzle of his Beretta against the oiled expanse of Bonanno’s forehead. “If you so much as twitch I’ll splatter your brains across the wall.”

Frankie Bonanno froze. The mobster was deeply afraid. When the masked gunman had burst through the door, his first thought had been the Feds. But one man did not make up a SWAT team, federal or otherwise. A lone man meant a freelancer, and if that was true then Frankie wondered why he was still alive.

Bonanno watched as the figure in black pulled a pistol from behind his back. The handgun was identical to the weapon already sitting on the desk, a factory-new Croatian HS 2000 pistol. The man dropped it with a clatter that shattered the overflowing ashtray and spilled cigarette butts across the desk and onto the floor.

The man dropped something smaller onto the desk between the two HS 2000 pistols. It was the size of a quarter and when Bonanno saw it lying there, an involuntary groan escaped him. His eyes showed sullen fear as they moved from the microprocessor chip on the desk back up to the intruder looming above him.

“Three months.” Bolan said, voice harsh. “Three months ago a six-man team took down the supply dock of Las-Tech in Jersey. They got away with a shipment of chips just like that one. Chips that can run the supercomputers needed to control the centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, say in Iran. Microprocessors sophisticated enough to turn scud missiles into guided munitions.”

“I—I—” Bonanno’s mouth worked uselessly as he tried to force his brain to come up with some lie that might save his life.

“Then suddenly a capo in Palermo has those same microchips on the open market and they go to an arms dealer in Bosnia, then multiple loads of Croatian pistols start flowing back through Palermo out of Sarajevo and into Jersey. And look, you happen to have one.”

“Sarajevo is in Bosnia, not Croatia,” Bonanno muttered.

Bolan stepped forward and cracked the butt of his Beretta across the mobster’s face. His nose exploded and sprayed blood. His hand flew out and struck the open bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey sitting on the desk and knocked it over. Amber fluid gurgled out of the bottle and began to spread across the desk.

“You think I need geography lessons from you?” Bolan asked, his voice flat. “Next time you get funny I put a bullet in your kneecap.”

“I don’t know anything—”