The Executioner #21: Firebase Seattle

The Executioner #21: Firebase Seattle, by Don Pendleton

January, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Definitely one of my favorite volumes yet, Firebase Seattle is a fast-paced Executioner that features Mack Bolan taking on a Mafia army that is setting up base in Seattle – or, at least, wiping out the base and its backers before the army can get there, presumably to exploit the Pacific North West. Or something; Don Pendleton is light with the details, but it all boils down to a hidden forward base on Puget Sound that’s stuffed to the gills with machine guns and weapons. 

As mentioned previously, Firebase Seattle was the original projected title of the second “Jim Peterson” Executioner novel, following Sicilian Slaughter. I’ve never been able to find out if Pinnacle mocked up covers for the Peterson version – I seem to recall William H. Young in his Study of Action-Adventure Fiction said that they did, and I’ve always wondered if they were the same Gil Cohen illustration as used on this actual published version – but it’s curious that Pendleton waited this long to get to the title. We also know from his interview in Young’s study that Pendleton never read Sicilian Slaughter, so this is clearly not the book that “Peterson” (aka William Crawford) would have written – yet, curiously, the end of Sicilian Slaughter featured a Mafia commando base in Seattle, which is sort of the plot here in Pendleton’s novel. 

Even more curiously, there’s a part in Firebase Seattle where Bolan poses as a news reporter, calling himself “Peterson!” Could this have been a sly in-joke from Don Pendleton, or just a fluke? I have a hunch it’s the former, but I could be wrong; Pendleton does come off a little too “serious” in his books, and it’s clear he doesn’t have the “laughing madly as I indulge myself in my most warped fantasies” nature that I demand in my pulp fiction authors. 

It would be interesting to know if the version of Firebase Seattle written to contract by Gil Brewer was anything like this; as I also mentioned in my Sicilian Slaughter review, Brewer’s manuscript is stored at the University of Wyoming. But then, we also know from a comment Don Pendleton’s wife Linda left on my Sicilian Slaughter review that nothing in Brewer’s manuscript was used in Don Pendleton’s Firebase Seattle. (Speaking of Linda Pendleton, I did not learn until much later that she’d passed away a few months after posting those comments on my review.) 

To be sure, there is little here in the actual Firebase Seattle that pairs with the story promised at the end of Sicilian Slaughter. As we’ll recall, the finale of that book features a commando badass named Mr. Molto who ran a sort of national operation in which he was tracking the Executioner, and he was about to go on the offense. There is nothing like that here – and, so far as I’m aware, Mr. Molto was never mentioned again in the series, even in the Gold Eagle era – but we do get the promise of a mob strike force here in Firebase Seattle, and also the guy in charge of them, Captain John Franciscus, is somewhat like Mr. Molto…but only if the reader strives to make this connection. 

As it is, Franciscus barely appears in the text, and his few appearances do not give a good impression of him: getting kicked down a stairwell by Bolan and then later being rousted from sleep by undercover Fed (and secret Bolan aly) Leo Turin, who goes on to berate a hapless Franciscus. So then this is not nearly the formidable character that Mr. Molto promised to be. 

Speaking of Turin, there’s a crazy part where he and Hal Brognola – the “Head Fed” who is tasked with bringing Bolan down, we’ll recall – hang out on Bolan’s warwagon (ie that massive mobile home that has rocket launchers hidden on the roof), talk strategy, and then drive to some remote mob location and sit there as Bolan blasts the place apart with the rockets. Helicopter pilot Jack Grimaldi also appears frequently, flying Bolan to three combat sites; he has a brief radio discussion with Leo Turin, who is back in the warwagon, and this is the first the two characters talk, though no one knows the other’s name. This was interesting because the characters would all continue in the Gold Eagle books. 

Grimaldi appears from the start, dropping Bolan onto a site on the Puget Sound where Bolan does a “soft probe” and discovers an underground bunker in the process of being built. Bolan’s immediate suspicion is that the mob will be using it as a forward base for expansion into the PNW and on up into Canada, but ultimately Pendleton will take a page from James Bond and concoct this wacky plot where the Mafia, like a low-rent SPECTRE, plans to topple the global economy and then corner all the gold, storing it in an underground vault(!). It was all so preposterous that I was reminded of the similarly-outlandish ideas the Legion of Doom would come up with in the Superfriends cartoon. 

For once Pendleton doesn’t stick to his template, meaning there are no scenes where some one-off local character, usually a cop, will come upon the wreckage of a Bolan hit and then exposit with another character about what might have happened. Also, suprirsingly, Bolan gets laid – courtesy a hotstuff “natural” girl named Dianna who has gotten involved with the Seattle mob scene thanks to her stepfather. 

This is further indication that Don Pendleton is now making The Executioner as escapist as the other men’s adventure pulp of the era; with his high-tech warwagon and resourceful team of helpers, Bolan at this point is like something book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel might have created. Bolan previously shunned getting too close with gals; this time, having saved Dianna and taking her back to his warwagon to wash off her blood, Pendleton develops a steamy sequence where Dianna announces she’s super turned on and basically pulls Bolan into the shower with her. That said, there is precious little exploitation and the entirety of the sexual shenanigans occur off-page…indication that this is not the product of Lyle Kenyon Engel! 

Pendleton, warming to his theme, even introduces another hotstuff gal into the book: Dianna’s mom, Margaret, a “mature” version of her daughter and just as friggin’ sexy, we’re constantly reminded, and there’s a sitcom-esque moment where Bolan comes back from a mob hit and runs into the forty-something babe as she’s walking naked out of the shower. (I am thinking specifically of that episode of Who’s The Boss?, of course.) But, despite lounging around in a robe and making insinuating comments, the older lady subtly informs Bolan she’s too old for him, as if Pendleton had tired of the whole angle. 

Indeed, the two women are summarily dispatched from the narrative once Bolan has rescued Dianna when she stupidly goes to her mob friends to argue on Bolan’s behalf, and Pendleton spends the second half of the novel focused on Bolan and his guy buddies: Brognola, Turin, and Grimaldi. All this is more indication that the lean and mean vibe of the earliest volumes is long gone; Pendleton is now more enamored with Bolan’s high tech warwagon augmentations than he is with delivering taut action scenes, and we have sundry scenes of the guys enthusing over the sci-fi augmentations of the vehicle. 

Which is to say the action scenes are, for the most part, perfunctory. Bolan is so superhuman now it’s not even fun anymore. He parachutes into mob sites, takes down a few guys with his “TranGun” (a tranquilizer dart gun that brings to mind the “Ava” of fellow Pinnacle hero The Penetrator), then later on ‘chutes into another place where he goes in and out without much fuss, until finally wiping everyone out with an M-16/M-79 combo in a harried finale that lasts all of a few pages. 

Bolan also blows up the unfinished underground bunker – and, by the way, the strike force we were promised in the opening pages doesn’t even appear. Pendleton has pulled this before; Firebase Seattle isn’t the first Executioner to promise but not deliver a mob commando force. But at the end of the book Bolan realizes this is his “hardest touch” of the mob yet in his war, and the conflagration he creates will leave a lasting impact on the Mafia. 

There really isn’t much continuity anymore; Grimaldi occasionally refers to the action in Texas Storm, but for the most part Bolan’s life is now a surreal one, venturing from one Mafia site to another in his massive motor home, filled with an emptiness he knows will be a part of him until he dies. Overall, though, Firebase Seattle was my favorite volume in the series in a while; I was happy to see that Pendleton had loosened up a little and decided to make the series a little more pulpy. I still like to imagine though what The Executioner would’ve been like if Lyle Kenyon Engel had gotten his hands on it.