"I know," Bolan muttered. "I was there too."
"And you crushed an old man's bad bones into... into the dust and disgrace of his own son!"
"Now you are getting poetic," The Executioner said. "I'll lighten up if you will."
"It's a deal. But I just don't see how you can feel blue after successfully hijacking an already hijacked ship."
"I guess you could say we did just that."
"Sure we did. Not only that, you also busted up an arms shipment landing that would made the Mafia the biggest goddamn gun dealer in the nation."
Bolan raised his left hand gently for some quiet.
Johnny could see that his brother was still troubled. The young man decided not to push it.
They turned off the main highway before they reached the little coastal community of Del Mar and wound down the street next to the water, then doubled back around a canyon that sliced through to the sea. Near the top of the double-back, a lane led off the street. It had been blacktopped recently and blocking the way was an electrically operated lift gate.
Johnny put a card in a slot in the metal box. The gate arm swung up.
He drove down the hundred-foot-long lane, crowded on both sides by eucalyptus trees. There were no other houses on the lane.
From the outside the strongbase looked like any other beach home, slightly smaller than a real weekender, but as big as a cottage could be on the restricted site. The ravine dropped off sharply beside the roadway and on the other side of the house a forty-foot cliff went straight down to the breakers. There was no garage, but a carport had been built over the blacktop against the lane side of the house.
Bolan looked around. From the driveway and the cottage, not another house was visible. Now and then someone might brave the rubble to walk past the rock falls on the tiny beach, but not often.
"I like it here," Bolan said. "Show me the inside."
The door had two locks, two dead bolts with inch-long prongs set into case hardened steel boxes, strapped into the special four-by-four that was built into the doorjamb.
Inside, the younger Bolan gave his famous brother a tour of Strongbase One.
Johnny was proud of what he had done to the place. Two walls upstairs had been torn out and the area turned into storage space. The ground level housed utilities and kitchen, and in the basement was the communications room.
"Everything you see is standardized Radio Shack," Johnny announced, showing off the basement's disorderly array of computer hardware. "These four modems, working on a one-always-on basis, are linked to the electronic bulletin board on the end wall. That board is programmed to display and interact with several key alert situations. I've got about twelve such alerts listed already." As he spoke Johnny touched a switch and twelve horizontal slots on the board lit up with rapidly changing code numbers; two screens flickered to life below the board. "And the computers can parallel and anticipate real-life situations. Something like having a second nervous system."
"What sort of linkup?" Bolan asked.
"We're hooked up with one of the satellites that Kurtzman's being using," Johnny replied. "A relatively low power transmission gives me two-way voice radio with you anywhere in the U.s. For incoming telephone calls, we have a triple dead drop that goes from East to West Coast, back to East and then back here again. That way the calls cannot be traced by the phone company or by anybody else. We have dual recorders on voice actuation, so you can talk for up to sixty minutes without a break if you want to send recorded transmissions."
"I've got to talk to you about this, Johnny."
Ignoring Bolan, Johnny ran upstairs to fetch two attache cases he had brought inside from the car. As he returned with them he said, "There's a million and a half in greenbacks in these two cases, Mack. That's just from the Canzonari operation. I've collected six other cases like these from your other recent hits. The contents have been stashed in four separate banks and invested in money market funds. So there's no shortage of cash."
"That's not my concern," Bolan said. "You've done a magnificent job here, Johnny. I'll be happy to fund whatever..."
"I knew you'd come around," Johnny interrupted eagerly. "This place can be a link with Stony Man back East, Mack. Don't you see? This is a vital point in one huge triangle Phoenix Force and Able Team at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, me at Strongbase One in Del Mar and you, Mack, out there."
"Wait a minute, Johnny. Oh, we really do have to talk." With that, Bolan put a strong arm around Johnny's shoulder and led him up the stairs.
In the kitchen, without saying a word, he sat his brother down on a chair at a table by the big window. The sunlight streaming outside illuminated the peaceful beauty that surrounded them, but the kitchen was cool and in shade.
Bolan went to the refrigerator and fished out two beers. The place was well stocked for the kind of afternoon Bolan had in mind.
"I'm going to tell you a story," he began, sitting across from his brother and opening his beer. "I've been feeling bad, Johnny. I'm not good with words, but I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to sketch out something that happened to me. You'll have to fill in some of the spaces yourself. You'll have to flesh it out because I don't have the words. But it's something that happened to me before mom and pop and Cindy were killed. Back in Nam. The story has a moral, I guess you could call it, and that's why I'm telling it to you now."
Johnny Bolan pushed away his beer and looked at Mack. The Executioner's presence filled the room.
"Whatever it was I accomplished in Portland," Bolan said, "I accomplished it far, far too late. To you, we were in Portland to hit the Mafia and the terrorists, to avenge Sandy Darlow and April Rose. But I was there for something else."
"What?"
Bolan's voice grew calmer, deeper. "I was there to take my revenge on all the Councils of Kings. To shove it down their throats one last time. When I think of my buddy... when I see a picture of him in my mind, of my buddy back in Nam, I think of you, Johnny."
As the afternoon drew on, Johnny Bolan heard what it was that Mack Bolan had learned in Vietnam and what it was that made him fight for friendship to such an extent that now he could not bear to expose his younger brother to any of the dangers of the Executioner's world.
To Johnny it was an accounting for events that reached their true conclusion only days ago in Portland. Bolan told the tale in brief, urgent, first-person snatches of image and commentary. But the effect on Johnny's imagination was complete and everlasting.
This is the story Mack Bolan told his brother.
Dusk turned the jungle to an eerie, formless gray. A breeze whispered through the treetops. He had come to know the jungle as a living thing, a breathing thing that gave up no dead.
Bolan let his thoughts slip away, and listened below the faint rustling of leaves.
He stopped beside a thicket. A scraping sound slipped through the leaves around him. He eased the AR to full auto and searched for movement. The jungle surrounded him, held him, breaking his vision with a confusion of vegetation that sighed almost imperceptibly in the pale darkness. Where the hell was Buddy?
Bolan eased himself back a step. The scraping sound came from behind.
Bolan turned in painfully slow motion, the AR's snout moving with him.
The jungle was still.
It was Buddy. He was squatting beside a pool of black water that reflected the deepening, broken sky.
Connecticut was gone from Buddy.
Mack Bolan looked back a million years at the small man squatting in the swamp, shaving his head with a knife.
"Don't do it, Buddy."