Things moved swiftly in the underground tube and he was approaching the toll gate in Queens before he could find his change. He took some more berating while he dug for it, and then he was off and running along the suicide trail toward Long Island.
The VW was slow on the takeoff, but once she got fully wound-up Bolan was hanging in there with the best of them, and the ugly duckling of the auto world turned out to be a pretty sweet little roadrunner, after all.
Bolan knew precisely where he was going, though he had never been there before — the place was no more to him than a spot on a map and a flag in his memory of many whispered conversations. The mob called the joint Stoney Lodge. It was a hardsite, a home away from home for rankholders in the organization and a place where a guy could relax, let go of the cares of the streets and forget territorial competitions. Women, it was said, were absolutely taboo and even the waiters and bartenders wore gunleather. There were grassy fields where a guy could go out and shoot a tethered pheasant, or try his luck chasing down a fenced deer in a jeep. The chef had once been a noted Manhattan restauranteur, or so the story went, and the wine cellar had all the best years of France, Italy, and California.
The five bosses of New York held many of their business councils there and, if the stories Bolan had heard were true, some of the best known politicians in the East had been wined and dined at one time or another at Stoney Lodge. As a hardsite, it boasted a formidable palace guard throughout a twenty-four hour day, and it was regarded as an impregnable fortress. Or so the stories went. Yeah, Bolan knew precisely where he was headed.
He left the Long Island Expressway at Jericho, climbed northward past East Norwich and Oyster Bay, then he was navigating by the seat of his pants and the VW's odometer, carefully marking the tenths of miles between one obscure little road and the next, and picking his way along the inlets and points of Long Island Sound.
It was seven o'clock when he located his target and began a soft recon of the area on foot. The snow was just beginning to come in light flurries out here. It was melting as it hit and the earth underfoot was becoming a bit tacky. The night had a friendly blackness, though, and Bolan had no weather complaints.
A six-foot high brick wall with barbed wire strung along the top separated the site from the rest of the world. Floodlights were emplaced at intervals of about every fifty feet. Bolan remained clear of the lights and walked off one entire side of the plot, and from this he computed the total area behind that fencing at about ten acres. Then he backed off and found a high point of ground from which to make a binocular survey of the interior grounds. The place was lit up like Christmas, and there was little difficulty in picking out the salient features.
The main building was a three story job of stone and heavy timber with porches jutting out here and there at all three levels. A long veranda traversed one entire side at ground level, and Bolan found hints of a larger patio area to the rear. There would be a pool back there, he surmised, and all the gaudy pleasures that normally accompanied the good life. Several smaller buildings were clustered about the primary structure, and the entire building complex was set in about one hundred yards from the front gate. A well-lighted macadam road ran straight as an arrow from the gate to the lodge area, then looped about a good-size parking area and angled off somewhere into the darkness.
Bolan had kept his mind loose as to his reasons for trekking out here. He had known about the joint, he had wanted to see it, and perhaps in the depths of his mind somewhere had been a vague plan to go out there and level the joint, smash it to powder, kill everything that moved, and show the Five Families that there was no such place as an impregnable fortress of safety where they could R and R things up. But there could be no practical value to such a hit — not unless he could chance upon a gathering of the clans. Even so, as purely a mission of psychological warfare it would be a worthwhile operation if he could pull it off properly. But his surveillance was suggesting to him that he could not. There was no way of knowing the defenses until a guy actually got down in there, and then an awful truth might come.
Bolan pondered the situation and finally decided firmly against a hard hit. There were too many variables, too many unknowns, and he was not exactly in the best form. A soft probe, though, as long as he was out here, might be entirely in order. He went back to his bus, wrapped himself in a black poncho, and returned to the observation point. There he stayed for one hour, watching the windows of the big house, occasionally turning the binoculars onto the grounds and along the wall, watching for some activity about the gatehouse. He found no activity anywhere, except for an occasional shadow moving across a lighted window in the lodge, and once he thought he glimpsed something moving through a patch of light on the grounds.
The time was shortly past eight o'clock when Bolan returned to the VW the second time and stripped down to his midnight combat suit. It was a thermal outfit and would provide protection from the cold if he did not stay too long in one spot. As other items of protection, he kept the Beretta and the shoulder rig and added a web belt with ammo pockets to his waist. A light chatter gun from the Meyer arsenal went around his neck and he clipped a pair of fragmentation grenades to the web belt.
Several minutes later the Executioner was over the wall and moving silently on a parallel course with the macadam road. The ground was smooth like a golf green and trying to freeze, and the snow was coming a bit thicker but still not laying on the ground. Soon it would begin to accumulate. He knew that he would have to conclude his probe with all speed and get the hell out before he started making tracks about that hardsite.
Bolan was about halfway to the building complex when he thought he heard something moving toward him through the darkness. He dropped to one knee and froze, the Beretta up and ready, eyes straining ahead to pierce the night and hopefully to get that initial advantage of first glimpse.
The opponent of the moment, however, had a much greater perceptual range and a sense development far surpassing the mere human faculties of Mack Bolan. Almost. Bolan heard the thing snorting and sensed the rush of the attack, and he went over on his side just as the foe loomed out of the blackness, lips curled back and teeth gleaming in a low-pitched snarl, a charging German Shepherd in a killing mood, a black devil of the night, and Bolan nearly tore his head off with two quick phuts of the Beretta.
Bolan was silently damning himself for not knowing better, for failing to understand the total absence of human activity on those grounds. He was in a no-man's-land ruled by killer canines — and the big question now was how many more of them were about. He got an immediate partial answer as another item of snarling death came in from the other flank. The Beretta dropped this one hi mid-leap and one of the fangs grazed Bolan's gun hand as the furry ball hit the ground and slid past him.
There was something particularly unmoral about this kind of a fight, something that jangled at Bolan and ruffled him deep down where he lived. He crouched there, breathing hard and waiting for the next one, and the realization came on him stronger than ever before that man was just another kind of animal, a beast of prey that devoured its victims' flesh, killing to live, and ofttimes living to kill. And in moments of stress such as this, he reverted back to type and became more animal than man.
Bolan felt a terrible kinship with those dead beasts lying there, and in a sudden flash of insight he understood beasts like Sam the Bomber and Freddie Gambella. They had been brutalized by forces they did not comprehend, the same as those German Shepherds. And they reverted to type, the same as those Shepherds had done.