Council of Kings (7 page)

The highway was deserted. Bolan sent two rounds from the Beretta toward the fleeing crew wagon, and saw an answering muzzle-flash.

He tried to remember what was along the river.

A few small towns. He was trying to second-guess the man in the Caddy, but his mind was drawing a blank.

The cars rocked along the freeway at sixty-five miles per hour, then accelerated to seventy-five. After a few minutes, the lead car slowed and took an off ramp toward the Oregon side of the huge Bonneville Dam, which spans the Columbia.

There was a parking lot beside the project, and a guard station, both locked.

Bolan spun the Thunderbird around to block the road to the parking lot.

There was no way the crew wagon could pass.

A figure sprang from the Caddy and ran toward the gate leading into the complex. The Executioner followed with the loaded Uzi and Big Thunder ready on his hip.

Evidently there was no exterior guard at night. The man went over the first low gate, and as Bolan pursued he saw the man climb a fence that, according to a sign, led toward the fish ladders. Without hesitation, the Executioner charged after his quarry.

Bolan could see no reason for the hit man to lead him here, but he did not want to lose him now.

For a moment he caught a good glimpse of his enemy under a floodlight.

He was tall and looked muscular. The man vanished around a corner. So far no one had challenged them. Probably few people trespassed there. But Bolan knew that a lot of gunfire would produce armed guards.

The man stopped near a long, inclined concrete plane with a fence on top: the fish ladders. These devices allowed salmon to leap up a series of long ladders, or steps, to spawn; the fish literally climbed upstream around the dam.

The hit man ran along the ladders to a narrow beam that crossed a twenty-foot gap. It was only twelve inches wide, and when he reached the center he spread his arms for balance.

By then Bolan was close enough to use the Beretta.

The round slammed into one outstretched arm. The man fell from the narrow walkway into the concrete fish ladders six feet below. Two feet of water flowed over them.

The man tumbled down three of the wide steps, then came up brandishing a big cannon.

The weapon roared, but its round missed Bolan as he peered over the concrete side. The handgun opened up again and the round whizzed over Bolan's head. The blast reverberated in the heavy concrete-lined enclosure.

Within ten seconds lights snapped on and a spotlight moved around, searching. A voice over a loudspeaker boomed, "Put down your weapon, and surrender. You are in a restricted area of the Bonneville Power Administration. Our guards are armed and will return fire."

Bolan slipped into the shadows. He had missed his chance to snuff the hit man. Now he had to flee before the guards closed in. He retraced his steps.

At the last gate, a searchlight swept over him and away, and he darted into the darkness. A voice called to him from a tower on a loudspeaker, but he ran hard for the Thunderbird.

Once inside he pulled Big Thunder from its holster and drove near the crew wagon. He rolled down the window and slammed three shots into the engine of the big car and a fourth into the gas tank. The Cadillac exploded in a fireball.

The Thunderbird roared through the exit as a Jeep with siren wailing came through a gate from the interior of the complex.

It was no contest. The Thunderbird rolled onto the highway, leaving the Jeep far behind. There was no chance the driver of the Jeep could identify the vehicle or get its license number.

As soon as he had time, Bolan wanted to contact Nino Tattaglia, a mafioso who chose to become an informant rather than spend forty years in prison.

Nino could find out if the Commission had put a new bloodhound on the Executioner's trail. He could find out about this new threat: his name, his home base, his training, his methods.

It took the Executioner almost an hour to drive to the Portland address that was his destination.

He planned to tie up the loose ends of the twin-sister killings before the night was over. Untouched so far was Jody Warren, the loan shark and pimp who had put Charlotte into the situation that had provoked her death.

Warren's kingdom extended over an industrial section of Portland that once contained important ports and was now home to slums, factories, warehouses and abandoned buildings taken over by rats and derelicts. It was after 3:00 A.M. when Bolan found the building he wanted. It was three-stories high; most of the upper windows were covered with plywood.

The bottom floor, now vacant, had once been filled with a miniature farmers market. There was probably a basement, Bolan figured.

He tried a door. The knob turned easily and the door swung open on oiled hinges. Inside a night-light glowed on a small counter. A young black man sat behind it, snoring softly, his head in his arms.

Bolan figured that since there were few blacks in the Mafia, the man was hired help, sleeping on the job. The Executioner removed a pair of plastic riot cuffs from his shoulder bag and looped and tightened one around the young man's hand before he awoke. Bolan's hand, and then a wide piece of tape went over the struggling youth's mouth.

Another cuff went around an ankle, and Bolan put him behind the counter on the floor.

In the first room on the ground floor was a torture chamber, containing whips, ropes, high-watt floodfights, chairs nailed to the floor, a motorcycle chain and numerous brass knuckles. Bolan took two steps into the room and the floor gave way beneath him.

With a desperate lunge he made it back to safety and watched as a trapdoor swung down, revealing a pit below.

The bottom was filled with Nam-type sharpened punji stakes pointing upward.

He went along a hall to another room. Soft noises came from behind the door. It was locked. He quickly picked the lock and swung the door open.

In the dim light he saw six wooden cages made of two-by-fours, each four feet square and each containing a naked girl.

Four were white, two black.

All but one was asleep. She curled up and glared at him.

"No, not again!" she cried. "I'll do it! I'll do anything now!"

He tested the floor, then stepped to the cages and wrenched the wooden and wire doors off their hinges. He told the captives to find their clothes and get away if they could.

The next room could have been a drug-cutting room. There was no trace of illegal substances in the room, but on a long table was a set of sensitive scales.

Hearing something behind him, he turned as a large black man hurtled toward him. Bolan sidestepped the diving man and drove his knee upward into his side. The man hit the floor, rolled and returned to his feet, arms held wide like a wrestler's. He started to reach for a revolver at his belt, but Bolan's 93-R came up first and chugged once, drilling a small neat hole through the attacker's heart, dropping him to the wooden floor.

Bolan spun as the door opened. A tall black girl entered, wearing only a short see-through nightie. She saw the girls getting out of the cages and smiled.

"Hey, honkie, if you really want to help us, come this way. That white trash lives on the third floor, and almost nobody gets up there to see him after he sets the switches. Come take a look." She was about five-ten, with a centerfold body, and seemed totally at ease.

She motioned, and he followed her out of the room and along the hall to a door at the end. It opened into a room in which a circular stairway wound upward.

The black girl led the way. At the second story Bolan saw the thick metal plate that, when in position, sealed the upper floors from below, and saw how it could be reinforced with two-inch bars of steel.

Fortunately the metal door was open; unfortunately there was no ladder continuing to the top floor.

The black girl stepped off the stairway and pointed down a dimly lit hall.

"He calls it the Hallway of Terrors. See how shiny that part of the hall floor is? It's usually electrically charged with enough juice to kill the giant rats that run round this place."

"What's in the rooms?"

"I don't know. I've never been farther than this. In one of them is another circular staircase to the bastard's private lair. He's got one or two ladies up there who we never see. He gets his supplies from a small dumbwaiter, too small for any of us to get inside." They entered a room containing a cot, a dresser and two wooden chairs.

"A good short on that electrical field should blow out all the power in the place," Bolan said.

The black girl shook her head. "He built it with that in mind, at first for the rats. Then he surged the power and put in a whole box of circuit breakers and automatic resets. The controls are in that room." She pointed to the opposite end of the hall.

Bolan picked up a wooden chair and threw it onto the electrified part of the floor.

Blue flames shot outward. The chair's legs smoldered where they touched the floor. Then the zapping electrical fire died.

The Executioner counted how long it took for the circuit-breaker resets to activate the power again.

After twenty seconds the power returned, sending smoking, crackling, blue flames along the hall. After thirty seconds it went off again. As soon as the smoking stopped he charged across the electrified part of the floor, kicked open the door to the control room, then raced inside and turned off the electrical skillet just before the power was due to return.

The room was about ten feet square, with a second door, open two inches, on the opposite wall. Bolan stepped into the small sunken space where the door swung open, the only unused space in the room. The rest was filled with snakes, enclosed by a three-foot Plexiglas wall that was concave to prevent their escape.

A nest of diamondback rattlesnakes owned one part of the floor, which had been covered with sand, rocks and soil. A pair of king cobras were coiled near the center. A few sections of logs were scattered around. All anyone had to do to get across the room was jump over the wall, travel ten feet through the snake den, and jump over the other three-foot barrier to the far door.

Bolan watched. Dozens of small snakes writhed on the sand, matching the color so well they were easy to miss. About fifty black two-foot snakes slithered throughout the enclosure. Bolan figured every snake in the pit was poisonous.

Where did the other doors in the hall lead? He looked down the hall as the power returned and the chair again smoldered. One door had been nailed to its frame — the bright silver heads of twenty penny-nails showed. The black girl stood at the edge of the electrified floor.

Bolan asked, "You have any hair spray?"

"Sure. Two new cans. Why?"

"Get both for me as fast as you can."

She vanished. Bolan turned back to the snakes. He could see no pattern in their movement, no safe route through their midst.

He would have to risk it. There was one element that all wild animals feared and gave way to. He hoped that the snakes obeyed this universal law of nature.

The, black girl returned.

"I found three," she said. She tossed them one at a time across the electrified floor, and he caught them, put one in each side pocket, took the last and hit the pressure button. A fine chemical spray jetted out. Good, lots of pressure.

He used his cigarette lighter to ignite the hair spray. A second later he had a small blowtorch, blasting a column of fire a foot long. He leaned over the plastic barrier and aimed the fire at a nest of small black snakes, and they slithered away. The sand-colored ones were next, and they retreated also, leaving two square feet free of snakes.

When the area was cleared as far as he could reach, Bolan jumped over the wall and swept the torch from side to side in a two-foot arc as he moved across the room.

Halfway across the flame sputtered. He lit the second can and continued.

When he saw the slowly weaving head in front of him he stopped. One of the king cobras did not retreat from the fire.

Bolan let it sense the heat. He thrust the flame upward and singed its eyes and skin, and it moved away.

Behind him, the snakes were closing in almost as fast as he moved forward. A big diamondback rattlesnake slithered forward, curiously watched his boots, then coiled and rattled. That brought a dozen more rattles as other snakes sensed the danger. Bolan sensed danger, too, but continued, even as the second cobra approached him. The flame flickered, and he removed the third can from his pocket. It refused to light. He tossed it at the deadly snake. In the split second that its head darted sideways to hit the can, Bolan's boot caught the cobra on the side of the head. The force of his kick lifted it off the floor and flung it to the far. In the same movement The Executioner reached the far wall and vaulted out of the pit. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and glanced back. His path was again covered by the killer snakes.

He turned and looked into the next chamber in this house of horrors. His face twisted in surprise, and he cursed at the trial awaiting him.

Through the center of the twelve-foot-square room ran a double barbed-wire fence. On the fence hung two red triangular signs with white lettering: MINEFIELD.

The floor was covered by two feet of sand, gravel, a few small rocks and some rotted sagebrush. The dirt had been laid out with a small hill in the middle, sloping down toward the door. There were a hundred places to put land mines. Were they really there, or was it a bluff? The ceiling had originally been painted white but now showed evidence of an explosion: the center had been sprayed with shrapnel and the black smoke of a blast.

A piece of yellow paper had been taped to the low circular retaining wall around the sand, which cleared an area so that the door could open, Bolan stooped to read the writing on it:

Welcome to Desert Acres. Your short walk through this mine field should be eventful. More than forty different mines are planted here, and some where nobody would expect them. Most are normal U. S. Army antipersonnel mines, which are easy to dig in and easy to set off with the merest touch. A few highly interesting mine-bombs are planted here as well. These are homemade, and at least one is a "positional" type device. It is currently exactly level. If it is tilted, it will blast you straight to hell.

Incidentally, the ceiling and walls of this room are specially constructed with ship plate steel.

Good luck on your little journey. It should be a most memorable one. A last tip. Don't attempt to walk around the walls. The last person who tried got one hell of a surprise — and is no longer with us!

Bolan examined the sand. He knew most of the Army mines forward and backward.

One look at the snakes behind him made him decide. Without a blowtorch he could not return through the snakes. He had to proceed.

He checked for snakes in the sand. There were none. Then he leaned over the retaining wall and examined the surface of the "desert." He saw a slender wire-loop trigger extending a quarter inch from the sand. Carefully he studied the position from which this mine could be dug out.

It was an old trick, to string several mines together. When the digger started removing one, he set off another, and the party was over.

Bolan found three mines interlocked in a tight row. Working on them one by one, still leaning over the wall, he removed the sand meticulously. When he was sure no others were attached, he worked faster and removed the first mine, then the second and at last the third. He left the dirt disturbed so he could tell where to walk.

As he stepped over the wall into the sand, he wished he could blast a path to the far door with the Uzi, but in the confined space one blast would set off another, and he'd have no protection from the shrapnel. His fingers moved cautiously over the sand, not in a straight line to the far door, but in a lateral direction, around the side of the small hill. The shortest route would be the most heavily implanted.

Bolan found no mine for a two-foot span, so he carefully scraped a line across the span three inches deep. He found a trigger barely two inches under the surface, a foot from the last mine.

Sweating, he slung the Uzi over his back to get it out of the way, then removed the mine and put it to the far side, where he would not kick it or place it near a sensitive mine trigger.

Ten minutes later he had removed four more mines and was halfway across the room.

He remembered that the note said something about mines being where no one would expect. What did that mean? The Executioner looked at the retaining wall by the other door and decided he had to clear another three feet, step to the wall and jump to the floor.

No! There would be a mine planted under the floor, he realized. Make it all the way across and then blow yourself up when you thought you were home safe.

He knelt in the safe sand and stared ahead. He had angled his approach toward the end of the retaining wall beside the door, which was open slightly and swung inward.

One more mine came free. It was a different type, and Bolan hoped it could be laid on its side. He held his breath as he put it down, then exhaled.

His fingers found yet another type of device an inch under the surface.

It was ten to twelve inches, square. He detoured around it.

Bolan moved one more routine antipersonnel mine and stood. His foot could touch the wall. But the more he studied this side of the wall the more he realized it was different from the other side.

Four inches from the wall a loop trip wire extended from the retaining boards.

Bolan removed another mine so he could step closer to the door, then leaned over and swung the door inward so he could examine it and the wooden floor. Two mines lay there, with boards resting on the triggers.