Chapter Eighteen
Niente
Bolan steered the girls quickly and quietly toward the wall, then halted about twenty-five yards out and pulled them to the frigid ground. Pandemonium was reaching new heights behind them as men ran shrieking about in thunderous confusion in all directions around the furiously burning building. Bolan checked his watch and murmured, "Just a few seconds now, just — "
And then two more explosions rent the night and compounded the pyramiding confusion. The section of wall just ahead lifted and crumbled, leaving an opening large enough to drive a track through, while back in the other direction the Stoney Lodge arsenal went up in a towering fireball, and secondary explosions from its stores were providing an impressive monologue of their own as Bolan and his charges ran out of the rapidly lightening scene, through the break in the wall and on into the blessed darkness ahead.
He escorted them as far as the van, then told them, "Stay on the road and keep going double-time, and don't look back. A couple of friends are waiting for you at the crossroads."
"You're not coming?" Paula cried.
"Not just yet. I'm rear-guarding. Go on, get!"
They got, Rachel throwing him a last moist look with humble eyes, Paula smiling bravely and tossing her head into the take-off. Bolan watched them disappear, then he climbed into the vehicle and made a lights-out approach to the break in the wall, where he parked and set up shop.
He opened the side doors, flung off the overcoat and draped a heavy .45 calibre chopper around his neck, then began hastily lugging stuff to the debris piled about the broken wall.
Things down in the compound were getting more frantic, if anything, but he could make out a small group running toward his position. Then two more appeared out of the darkness to his right, charging down along the outside of the wall. He whirled into the challenge and flung both men back with a short burst from the chopper, then spun around to check the progress of the group approaching from the interior.
That group were about halfway between the lodge and the wall, beautifully outlined in the backdrop of leaping flames. Bolan selected his weapon, waited, then raised a grenade launcher to his shoulder, sighted along the short range, and let fly — corrected, flew again, and then again, and the walking Une of explosions hurled bodies off at weird angles to the Une of advance, and the advance faltered and halted, and some guy down there was groaning, calling for help, and the entire group withdrew with their wounded.
Bolan let them go. He was busy with other things. He was performing the clumsy task of being both loader and gunner for a long, shoulder-fired rocket launcher known as bazooka. And down there in the pandemonium he had noted a cluster of men running into the building where Paula and Rachel had been kept; he carefully sighted it in, then punched off, and the armor-piercing missile whooshed off, closing the range with a shattering impact. The building lurched and puffed. Bolan saw no one running back out of there; already he was reloading and pivoting on his knee to line up on the big flaming mess of Stoney Lodge.
Again and again the ornery rockets whizzed down the range, the old structure huffed and puffed and began falling apart faster than it could burn, and men stopped running around down there and began thinking seriously about some way to remain alive.
Bolan knew that they were beginning to get their heads back where they belonged. A heavy returning fire from automatic weapons was feeling for his position, and he was wishing that it was time to begin vacating.
He glanced at his watch and put the bazooka aside in favor of the grenade launcher. Foot soldiers were coming again. He began laying in his pattern, carefully watching his flanks, every few seconds casting a glance toward the sky over the crossroads where MacArthur and Perugia were waiting for the girls.
Finally it came, the pyrotechnic display that told Bolan, "A-OK, man, we got 'em," and not until then did Bolan heave a sigh of relief and begin his cautious withdrawal.
He stowed his weapons in the van, cast another glance skyward at the final settling cinders of the signal flare, and made a quiet run toward the next firing line.
Freddie Gambella was staggering around outside in his shirtsleeves with not even any damn shoes on wondering Christwhat had happened! Talk about 1-2-3, if that rotten shit was behind all this — well of course he was behind it — it didn't take no mental giant to figure that out! First that little popping sound and all the damn lights going off, then before Freddie could even adjust his eyes to the dark, wham, there goes the goddam front of the house and the whole damn place is already shaking, and then wh-wh-wham, the biggee, the whole goddam side of the house falls in and Freddie is laying over in a corner someplace, practically standing on his head, and the goddam joint is on fire, and he thinks his arm is broke, yeah, sure as hell if's broke, and Christhow did that sonuvabitch pull that off Freddie wanted to know!
Somebody, he didn't even know who, was helping him outside, and Freddie was yelling the senator, the senator, save the fuckin' senator, you asshole!
The guy is telling him, forget the senator, forget 'im, that made son of a bitch is blowed to hell, clean to hell, and Freddie realizes then that this is Augie Marinello saying this.
And Augie has this blood all over his face, it looks like maybe his head is a little bit broke open, but he's walking around and tellin' the boys what to do. Some guy is yelling for water, and that would be like pissing on hell, that would almost be funny, the joint is a long ways beyond any water now.
Freddie hears his own voice yelling to forget the water, forget it, get those men out of there, get those goddamn blessed made menout of there, for God's sake two years work is laying in there, get those men out of there!
And this guy, this lieutenant by the way of Augie Marinello, is giving him this wild eye and telling him that there ain't nothing left to get out of there — no bosses, nobody, no made men, not nobody — and God knew Freddie and Augie had guardian angels sitting on their shoulders 'cause they were the only ones to get out.
And there's Augie, staggering around in his own blood, yelling at his boys to get it together. It's like a nightmare, a crying screaming waU-climbing nightmare. That joint, that beautiful goddam joint, that fuckin' impregnable beautiful hardsite joint is gone to hell and everybody with it, all those million dollar made men't.
And that wasn't all, Freddie soon learned. More explosions, Christ the goddamn wall, Christ the goddamn powder house'tKa-boom and another ka-boom and lookit that shit fly!
Where was the sonuvabitch doing it from? And what with?
Yeah, Freddie Gambella was staggering around out there in the cold in his shirtsleeves and not even any damn shoes on, watching his world collapse around him.
"Them fuckin' broads!"he heard himself screeching. "You run and get them fuckin' broads and drag their asses over here. I'm gonna stand out in the open where he can see me, and I'm going to stick my cock down their throats and choke 'em to death like that — we'll see what mister smart-ass thinks about that!"
Someone was saying, "Ay, Mr. Gambella, take it easy, you're in bad shape, here you better sit down."
And someone else was saying, "Mr. Gambella, he already sprung the broads. I guess that's the first thing he done."
Again he was screeching, "Bullshit, don't tell me no sprung d'broads. You take some boys over there and bring 'em to me!"
The guys were giving each other knowing looks, then one of them shrugs his shoulders and says something dumb, something like, "That was FranMe, I know damn well that was Frankie all the time." He jogs off toward the little house, and some other boys trot off after him.