The dead man had been alone.
Bolan knew it with certainty as he left that place behind, moving across the compound with no effort at concealment. The guy had been on night-watch, in the wrong place at the wrong time. His tab had come due to the universe for past wrongs, and the bill had been collected in full. That was the end of it.
But not for Bolan.
He had come in search of a clue to the purpose of that enigmatic "joint in the desert." And, at least in part, he had that answer. The place had been a school. A school of death, a finishing academy for gunmen.
And the pupils were gone.
The maneuvers Bolan had witnessed earlier had plainly been the mechanical actions of a cleanup crew, tidying in the wake of the Mafia's graduating class.
And where were those "graduates" now?
Already bent upon their missions of pain and death?
The mob had never taken this sort of trouble before to train its palace guard, and Bolan had no reason to believe they were starting now. The pupils of this death academy would be intended for some special post-graduation exercise.
The Executioner's Arizona blitz had begun as a relatively simple thrust against the heroin traffic, a logical culmination of Bolan's progress from the Cleveland hellgrounds, but it had suddenly become much more. A new element had been introduced into the Arizona game — a wild card element that had to be identified and understood if the chains binding this desert state were to be broken. All the indicators pointed to the existence of a paramilitary force under mob sponsorship. Who were they? Where were they now? What was their mission? Such were the questions being raised by the answers discovered on this desert encampment. A subliminal tremor shivered Bolan's spine.
What was awaiting the Executioner in these new hellgrounds?
He quit that place and returned quickly to the gully where he had stowed the warwagon. The answers would find him. He was positive of that. Those answers always seemed to find their way to Mack Bolan's door.
Chapter 2
Jokers
The Mafia had come to Tucson in the 1940s, when enemies from without engaged the nation in global war, leaving the enemies within to devour the vitals of society. Niccolo "Nick" Bonelli, an underboss and junior partner of Cleveland's Bad Tony Morello, had visited the desert spa while recovering from gunshot wounds and decided to stay. Morello had looked askance at his new desert outpost, until Bonelli enlightened him about the miracles of geography and Mexican politics. Overnight Bad Tony's scorn had been converted to admiration for Bonelli's foresight. For three decades Nick Bonelli had mined the illicit Arizona goldfields in his master's behalf, always reserving a healthy slice of power and profit for himself. Of late, Bad Tony had become more concerned with his own eastern machinations, content to let Bonelli run his fiefdom at will, so long as the usual percentage found its way home to the Cleveland coffers. And when at last Tony lost it all in his clash with Mack the Bastard Bolan, Nick Bonelli was on his own, free at last from the puppet master on Lake Erie.
Niecolo Bonelli, at age 55, now headed the most powerful Mafia family between the Rockies and the Pacific. He had climbed the ladder of illicit power from gambling, prostitution, and wartime black-marketeering to achieve ultimate status as the heroin king of the Southwest. His hopes and fortune lay south of the border, and the Mexican heroin his pilots ferried across from Sonora biweekly had financed Bonelli's excursion into more legitimate forms of enterprise. The California families relied heavily upon Nick's southern connection, as did the dons in Cleveland and Detroit. Augie Marinello had used Nick's services before he bought the farm in Pittsfield. Lately, rumor had it that the flow of drugs reached as far as Alaska and the boom towns opening along that last frontier.
Nick Bonelli's strong right arm, underboss, and heir apparent was his son Paul. Paul Bonelli had "legs," everybody said so. Legs and balls. He had "made his bones" with a contract hit at age nineteen and ably assisted in the family's administrative business ever since.
Bolan dredged these facts from his mental index file as he piloted the GMC warwagon north along Interstate Highway 19 into South Tucson. He caught the interchange onto Interstate 10 there, nosing the sleek battle cruiser across the desert toward Phoenix.
During his week in Tucson, the Executioner had searched out Nick Bonelli's hardsite home and his major centers of operation. Automated intelligence "Collectors" were installed on the phone terminals of the hardsite, Paul Bonelli's suburban palace, and the desert capo's major underground clearinghouse. The warwagon's super-sophisticated electronic collection gear could reap the harvest of that data in a ten-second drive-by, and Bolan felt secure in leaving Tucson behind him for the moment.
All of Bolan's combat senses told him that the immediate crisis lay to the north in Phoenix. His days of reconnaissance had uncovered no likely hiding place in Tucson for a paramilitary troop such as the one he sought, and the captured map of Phoenix was another pointer to the next battlefield.
But Bolan had no idea what he would find there.
Phoenix is the state capital and the seat of Maricopa County, widely proclaimed as one of the nation's fastest-growing cities. Bolan's pre-blitz recon had found tourism, mining, and the manufacture of chemicals and electronics gear vying for first place as the state's leading industry there — plentiful targets for a Mafia strike force, but Bolan could not read the minds of unknown men at long range.
Phoenix was also the mob capital of Arizona, the seat of government for a corrupt ruling commission with fingers in every important pie in the state. And these guys were not Mafia, at least not in the blood. Second and third generation descendants of immigrants from Eastern Europe, amoral renegades paying blasphemous lip service to the religion of their fathers. Jews in name, yes, but Nazis in their souls, savages and cannibals devoted to the subversion of every ideal held sacred by their ancestors. They blackened the name of their religion just as the Mafia godfathers blackened the name of an entire race.
Yes, Bolan knew them. And he knew their city. His computer banks and mental mug file were crammed with their names and various connections to the workings of the Mafia's ruling commissioner. Wherever the Mafia had grown and prospered since Prohibition, these other savages were there as well, ever clinging to the shadows as the more flamboyant amici filled headlines and mortuaries, lending their advice and financial acumen where it was lacking in their Mafia comrades, Siegel, Buchalter, Cohen, Lansky. Bolan knew their names and their games.
And he had wanted no part of them in Arizona.
Sure, they were well deserving of the Executioner's attention. He had hung the mark of the beast on one of them as recently as the Cleveland battle.
But Mack Bolan needed no new enemies. He had more than he could handle in a lifetime simply dealing with the Mafia's brothers of the blood, where the battle lines were more or less clearly drawn, the enemies generally recognizable at a glance.
Any expansion of the war would necessarily mean an escalation of uncertainty and the corresponding potential for disastrous mistakes. The fine line between innocent bystanders and civilian savages would necessarily become more difficult to distinguish.
In the past, Bolan had deliberately avoided confrontation with what one observer of the syndicate scene had dubbed the "Kosher Nostra," but there could be no avoiding them now. He was headed full tilt into their capital city.
And the whole deck was wild now in the Arizona game.
The Executioner was in effect facing not one, but two crime syndicates, and he had no idea at the moment whether they were cooperating or at war. And to complicate matters further, there was that lethal "something else," Nick Bonelli's own private army, a paramilitary force of unknown size and strength, traveling unknown paths toward completion of an unknown mission.