Blood Testament by Don Pendleton Page B

gangsters fattening on both.
    But it was not the soldier's mission to reform a nation, overhaul a system that had sheltered corruption from the start. His war was limited in scope, his moves restricted to the possible, and for the moment it would be enough if he could save three lives. Achieving that goal in itself might be the death of Bolan, but he meant to give it all he had.
    He owed Brognola that. For all the times when Hal had risked his pension, his life, to offer aid and comfort in a lonely soldier's war against the odds. For offering an opportunity to make his war official, and for maintaining contact when the roof fell in. Beyond all that, the warrior felt a gut responsibility to strike against the cannibals wherever and whenever possible. It was his life, his reason for existence and the driving force behind his endless war.
    He did not share Leo Turrin's fears about a meeting with the President. The Man would not have given Hal two days without some sense of what was happening behind the scenes. Brognola would have been in jail by now, his home and office under guard, if he had not convinced the Oval Office — at least to some small degree — that he was being framed. The President's support would soon evaporate if Hal could not produce substantial evidence.
    In the meantime it was simply that the meeting struck Mack Bolan as a waste of time. He owed the President a certain debt of gratitude for setting him up in the Phoenix program, giving him the freedom to conduct his war worldwide. But any debt had long been paid in blood. He forced his mind away from April and the others, wondering precisely what the White House wanted from him. In the end, he finally decided that it would be best to wait and see.
    No matter what was said or offered, Bolan's obligation of the moment was to Hal Brognola and his family. If he could not retrieve those gentle souls, his mission would be ultimately counted as a failure, and the measure of his vengeance would be nothing in comparison with Hal's traumatic loss.
    If he could not secure the safety of Brognola's wife and children, scourge the animals who had abducted them, his presence in D.C. was nothing but a hollow mockery.
    And he was wasting precious time.
    But before he moved against the enemy, he had a date to keep.
    Mack Bolan braced himself to meet The Man.

8
    Susan Landry pushed her chair back from the computer keyboard, stretching as she double-checked the paragraph that she had just completed on the monitor. She caught a typo and deleted it, reentered the proper spelling of the word and thanked her lucky stars again that she had purchased the machine. With its many functions, the word processor had taken half the effort out of getting stories ready for the wire. The other half, of course, was still the digging — good old-fashioned legwork, phonework, or whatever — and she doubted whether any new technology would ever help reporters cover that end of their beat.
    In fact, she loved the work involved in digging out a story. Though she would complain about it with the best — comparing blisters, insults, the occasional menacing letter — she thrived on the research, the intrigue involved in rooting out corruption, searching for the dirty laundry. It was something she excelled at, and the knowledge of her own ability provided confidence required for tackling the tough — and sometimes dangerous — assignments.
    There might be nothing dangerous per se about her latest story, but it was important to her all the same. It had begun with scrawled, anonymous complaints, alleging criminal mistreatment of the residents at certain D.C. nursing homes. A string of interviews with residents, beneath the watchful eye of smiling nurses, had done nothing to substantiate the stories. But an off-the-record conversation — and a strictly off-the-record payment — with a member of the cleaning staff at one facility had cast a different light upon the scene. Provided with a suitable