Annotation

Mack Bolan returns from Russia to find the CIA has lifted its liquidation mandate. He is granted a stay of execution — for twelve hours.

But no one can stay The Executioners hand as he sets out on his mission of revenge in Washington. His target: a KGB mole responsible for the attack on Bolan's base and the death of his greatest love, April Rose.

Not only has the Soviet spy penetrated the inner circle of the U.S. President, but Bolan finds Moscow's Department of Terror in bed with his oldest enemy — the American Mafia.

The Stony warrior rains a hellstorm of death on the midnight streets of DC, ending in a stunning climax at the Oval Office.

The Executioner is in the city of lies. And he has come to spill blood — drop by treacherous drop.

- Don Pendleton's

- Prologue

- 1

- 2

- 3

- 4

- 5

- 6

- 7

- 8

- 9

- 10

- 11

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- 18

Don Pendleton's

Dead Man Running

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Stephen Mertz for his contributions to this work.

Prologue

"You're a dead man," Hal Brognola informed his icy-eyed companion, as their station wagon cruised through the midnight darkness of rural Maryland. "I think you're aware that there was a liquidation mandate to U.S. intelligence agencies on you. But it's been rescinded."

The passenger's humorless chuckle matched his eyes. "Rescinded?"

"But," Brognola continued as if Bolan hadn't spoken, "the KGB has 700,000 agents worldwide. And every one of them has a description and orders to kill you on sight."

"Then I'm a dead man running. Brief me, old buddy."

"Uh-uh. You promised a trade if I met you like this. A trade is what I get."

A trace of humor broke the ice.

"A fine welcome home," Mack Bolan chided his gruff friend and ally from the Executioner's antiterrorist campaigns and old Mafia war. Bolan had "died" during his final blitz on the Mob, had been resurrected, given plastic surgery and re-christened Colonel John Phoenix with full off-the-record White House sanction. Until very recently. "You know what happened in Russia."

"Up to a point," Brognola conceded. He was Stony Man Farm's liaison with the Oval Office. "We know about Janus. We know that the Macek assassination was the KGB's work, not yours. They came up with a Phoenix look-alike. Hell! Of course the security lid is on tight. The world thinks the Macek killing is unsolved and so it shall remain. Major General Strakhov's frame-up of you was meant for our eyes only. He even sent photographs of you — I mean, Janus — pulling the trigger. Strakhov hates your guts for killing his son."

"Janus is dead," Bolan reported. "The KGB killed him. I saw it happen. And as for Strakhov's son, it was his life or mine. Now fill me in on the home front, Hal. What's been happening in D.C.? What's the word on our mole?"

"Nothing good," Brognola grunted. "Kurtzman is still recovering, but I believe he'll be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Able Team and Phoenix Force are being allowed to continue as before while the President decides what to do. Lee Farnsworth is heading the President's advisory panel on this, appointed by the Man himself. The program is in danger. That hasn't changed."

The program that Brognola referred to was codenamed Phoenix. The command center for Bolan's war against world terrorism was headquartered at Stony Man Farm in Virginia's Blue Ridge country, not far from Washington.

A full-scale commando assault on the Farm engineered by a mercenary named Al Miller had wrought extensive damage to the operation, resulting in the death of several Bolan friends and allies including April Rose, the love of Mack Bolan's life.

April had died in his arms, when she stopped a bullet meant for Bolan.

Her sacrifice would haunt the Executioner forever.

He still could not confront his own emotions over his loss in that early-morning attack on the Stony Man command center.

Colonel John Phoenix buried his grief in a mission to Russia that saw Phoenix framed by the KGB for the assassination of Damien Macek, the guiding light of Unity, an Eastern bloc group that wanted to sever ties with Moscow and shift allegiance to the West.

"Tell me more about Farnsworth," Bolan growled.

"He's still got the President's ear too damn much for my liking," Brognola grumbled, "especially since he was named chairman of the advisory panel to reassess the Phoenix program and report his findings to the Man himself. Also, he won't let anyone forget how Stony Man operations inadvertently got some of his own agents killed."

Lee Farnsworth was head of the Central Foreign Bureau, a U.S. spy agency long at odds with the Phoenix program. Farnsworth had initiated a campaign to convince the President to disband the Stony Man unit. Bolan had suspected Farnsworth being the real architect of the attack on Stony Man Farm that killed April.

"Were you able to backtrack Miller?"

"Negative," Brognola replied. "It dead-ends at the estate in Potomac where Miller trained his commandos for the raid."

"Then that's where I pick it up. Drop me off anywhere along here, Hal. I've got things to do."

Brognola slowed the station wagon and pulled onto the shoulder of the road.

"What things?"

"One thread left hanging from Russia," Bolan said. "I'm cutting that thread tonight."

"KGB?"

Bolan nodded.

"We've been channeling our energies in the wrong direction. Stony Man Farm, the Phoenix cover... we accomplished plenty but we're only fighting the symptom when we focus on terrorists. We've got to tear out this sickness by its roots."

"The KGB," Brognola said again. "But after tonight you've got to come in, Striker. The situation is critical."

In the glow of the vehicle's dashboard lights, Bolan regarded his old friend quizzically.

"You're not telling me to lay off, are you? You know I can't do that. I made a promise to myself. I promised April that I would find the ones responsible and make them pay. You owe it to April, too, Hal. And to Konzaki and Kurtzman and the others who died at Stony Man Farm that night."

"Stop it," Brognola said. "I don't need another conscience. The one I've got is already tearing me to bits as it is. But that liquidation order from our side could be reinstated at any moment, no matter what I do to try to stop it."

"Then I'll be on my own again," Bolan stated. "Like the old days."

"It's Farnsworth you're after, isn't it?" Brognola asked. "You hit him and you are a dead man."

"Not with what I've got, Hal."

It was Brognola's turn to be quizzical.

"What have you got?"

"Tell the President and his investigation committee I'm home with the list."

"What list?"

"Strakhov's list. The masterlist of KGB agents, operations and activities throughout the Western world."

"Don't try to bluff them, Mack," Brognola said. "They know everything. You know that."

"It's no bluff. Tell them."

"Turn the list over to me," Brognola demanded. "Why the hell are we meeting like this? Come in and set it right."

"There's the other thing," Bolan reminded him. "It didn't end when Al Miller died. We both know that."

Brognola stuck a cigar into his mouth and lit it. "So the deal is: keep hands off while you tear after whoever was behind Miller and the attack on the Farm, and you'll turn over the list. And if the President and Farnsworth and General Crawford don't go for this deal? If a liquidation order is issued because you are compromising their intelligence apparatus with your unsanctioned activity?"

Bolan opened the car door and stepped out into the moonless night. His dark slacks, sweater and jacket merged with the midnight gloom. He wore a Beretta 93-R holstered in a shoulder rig.

"It's their chance to take," The Executioner rasped. "There are scum that need killing tonight, Hal. Some in low places, some in high. They've got a tab to pay and I'm in D.C. to deliver — with interest. Anyone who tries to get in my way tonight is only buying trouble."

"I believe that," Brognola growled. "And I believe there are those who'll try."

Hal waited for a reply.

He got none.

He was talking to the night and nothing else.

The night warrior was gone.

Brognola wheeled the station wagon into a U-turn and floored the gas pedal all the way back into D.C.

The Executioner was back in town.

For blood.

Hal Brognola wondered who would be the first to die.

1

"My name is Dr. Beck," Mack Bolan said. "I'd like to speak with Dr. Strumway, please."

The night nurse studied the tall man with the hornrimmed glasses who stood before her holding a black doctor's bag.

She glanced at some papers on her desk in the front lobby of the Hedwick Care Home, then looked again at the stranger who had just walked in.

"I'm sorry, doctor, I don't have a note from Dr. Strumway that he is expecting you, and he may be busy. May I ask what it's about?"

"One of your patients," Bolan told her. "I'd really rather not go into it, nurse. It's, well, the family asked me to confer with the doctor immediately. He is the night physician, is he not?"

It was the right note, Bolan thought as he adjusted his spectacles. The woman was buying it all the way.

She glanced at a wall clock.

It was 1:13 a.m.

"Actually, I doubt if Dr. Strumway is occupied. All of the patients should be asleep." She pointed down the corridor that stretched away from the night station. "Turn left at the corner at the end of the hallway. You'll find him in his office. Third door down."

"Thank you," Bolan said, and he followed her directions.

The nurse went back to reading a thick paperback.

The care home for the elderly was cloaked in the sleep of the aged and the dying. The pall seemed to muffle everything, including Bolan's footfalls as he reached the far end of the hall and cut away from the nurse's line of vision.

He whipped off the glasses and pushed on through a swing door stenciled Stairs.

He had no interest in Dr. Strumway's office except to note that the door was closed, which was all for the good.

As he climbed the concrete stairs three steps at a time, he unsnapped the doctor's bag and tugged out an Ingram Model 10 submachine gun. The compact, pistollike SMG was chambered for .45 ACP rounds in a 30-round magazine and was equipped with a MAC suppressor. He carried extra ammo clips in his pockets and the Beretta 93-R under his jacket.

He tossed away the black satchel as he reached the top floor of the building. The transformation from Dr. Beck to Mack Bolan, Executioner, was complete.

He left the stairwell and headed down another corridor of the nursing home. A night nurse was at her station at the far end of the hallway.

In rapid strides Bolan soundlessly crossed to the nearest door, this one half open, like the others, to a patient's room.

Bolan was able to make out the figure of a woman, in her eighties at least, sound asleep and breathing with difficulty.

The Executioner stepped past the foot of the bed to the window.

He set the Ingram against the wall and eased the window open. It squeaked louder than he expected. He sat on the sill and swung both legs over, dropping onto a foot-wide ledge that ran around this level of the rest home.

The patient in the bed did not awaken.

Bolan leaned in and grabbed the SMG, then pushed the window shut. He did not want to take a chance that a nurse on her rounds might notice it.

The Hedwick Care Home was located on a respectable quiet street of old Arlington. The private-care facility stood flush to a four-story brick office building.

Bolan knew that the two top floors of that edifice were leased by Worldway Corporation.

The Executioner's target for that night.

The seemingly innocuous business was not affiliated in any "official" capacity with the Russian embassy. This clandestine KGB cell was kept isolated from its Soviet superiors in the D.C. area and abroad. It was purely a capitalistic venture, skimming kickbacks and payoffs from assorted shadowy marks in the diplomatic hierarchy of the nation's capital.

Mack Bolan had little interest in the marks victimized by this KGB-backed company.

There were far too many lies and secrets in this bed of supposed honest government. Most of those blackmailed probably deserved it.

The Executioner's interest was in this KGB cell itself.

Worldway had recently begun investing profits in the street-drug enterprise of one Lou Riappi, the local Mafia chieftain.

The Executioner was here to terminate.

There would be night activity behind the tinted windows of the Worldway Corporation.

A drug deal was going down there right now.

The Russians and the Mafia.

An odd couple, for sure. In the past the American Mob had always been anti-Communist. Gouging profits under the guise of honest commerce was the Mob's stock-in-trade. But hard economic times were hitting everybody, especially, it seemed, Lou Riappi, and the D.C. capo had not turned down these much-needed investors in his South American heroin pipeline, which had shown signs of drying up for lack of funds.

Bolan's hatred for the Mob spanned years, back to a time when, on sniper duty in Vietnam, he had learned that his family had been destroyed by extortionists. The young soldier returned home to bury his kin. It was then that he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

The KGB was another story.

Bolan easily made the short jump to the ledge of the office building. Gripping the Ingram in one hand he eased up the window, which gave him access to a dark, unoccupied lavatory.

Bolan's intel had told him of the existence of the cell. He had tracked down the address, then assessed its defenses. He reasoned that a street-level blitz would raise too much hell, giving the people Bolan really wanted a chance to escape before he reached them.

The rest-home approach had been the only way.

Bolan eased inside the red-brick building, then closed the window behind him. He went to the door of the rest room and opened it slightly, taking a quick look outside to get his bearings before the killing started.

Bolan's mission into Russia had closed with his securing a masterlist of KGB world operations from Major General Strakhov's Moscow apartment. But during his stormy assault through the Soviet Union, Bolan had come to fully realize the immensity of what he was truly pitting himself against in his quest to expose Janus and clear his name.

KGB.

The Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti.

Committee for State Security.

Founded as Lenin's instrument of Bolshevik terror shortly after the 1917 Revolution under the name Cheka, this all-purpose tool of internal repression, foreign espionage, subversion, sabotage and social demolition, was successively renamed GPU, NKVD and MGB before it acquired the KGB initials in 1954. Since then, it has been synonymous with terror and coercion, the "sword and shield" of the Soviet Union and at the same time its most widely feared instrument of government.

Relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been deteriorating at an alarming rate, close to a state of cold — and quite possibly hot, nuclear — war, and many analyses of the situation suggested that the problem lay mainly on the American side.

Bolan knew such nonsense ignored what has been happening on practically every continent of the world during the past few years and at a stepped-up pace, all of it brought home to him in thundering fury during his violent penetrations of Russia.

The Middle East — the Soviets supply Syria with thousands of combat advisers and encourage the Syrians to step up hostilities against Israel.

Afghanistan — the Russians launch massive offensives against freedom fighters, including chemical warfare and carpet bombings of the region north of Kabul.

Indochina — the Soviets' Vietnamese client launches an offensive that plunges all the way to the Thai border and begins shelling refugee camps inside Thailand.

Latin America — Cuba and Nicaragua handle the Soviet account and have dramatically stepped up activity in their effort to create a Communist beachhead close to the U.S.

Europe — the Soviets have become aggressive and provocative on the spy front — getting forty-seven of their officials kicked out of France in the process — and in submarine probes of Norwegian and Swedish defenses.

And everywhere within and behind this maze of treachery, greed, power hunger and world control hocus-pocus lurks the KGB, in many respects a government within a government, operating under its own corrupt, bloodthirsty rules.

Bolan realized the workings of this ultimate terrorist spy network were about as representative of the Russian people as his other enemy, the Mafia, was representative of Italians.

He had met enough good Russians during his mission into that incredible part of the world for him to understand that in reality the KGB was a thing, a cancer on the body of the planet.

There was little regard for nationality or political ideology, only dark cannibalistic drives that victimized the vulnerable and meek who were no match for those who would mercilessly exploit, rape and destroy them.

In a word — evil.

The KGB was the new Mafia, in Bolan's book.

The KGB: the spokes and hub of world terrorism.

It had to be stopped.

A war of attrition was the only solution this soldier could see.

The scope would be wider than Bolan's previous antiterror campaign, and the aim of the blows more telling against a worldwide network of evil that made the Mafia seem like a drop in the ocean in comparison.

The spineless diplomats and diverse appeasers who were trying to keep a once powerful, respected nation from regaining its prestige would undoubtedly be aghast at the Bolan Solution to this unholy force that threatened to come dangerously close to bringing every world democracy to its knees, if allowed to continue unchecked. There would be plenty of flack from the home front. Bet on it.

But it would come after this night.

First, the hit.

Then, he would shake the city to its foundation until he rattled loose the power behind Al Miller and the renegade merc's commando assault on Stony Man Farm.

They would pay for what happened to April.

Mack Bolan would worry about the consequences later.

Peering out from his hiding place, Bolan saw an office loft partitioned into cubicles.

At first the area appeared vacant.

Then, directly in front of his position, Bolan saw seven men around a long table cleared to make room for the briefcase full of white packets and another full of money.

Bolan had no trouble telling the hoods from the spies, as if it mattered.

Three Mob types were present: two bodyguards and the man making delivery. These guys were nervous on their feet, their jackets worn open and fingertips close to the hardware holstered inches out of sight.

There were four Russians: three men, chunky, uncomfortable in their late-style American suits that could not conceal bearlike physiques, and a masculine-looking female in her forties with a severe cut to her hair and clothes.

Two weapons rested on the table alongside the open briefcases, a .45 automatic and a Luger, and Bolan was sure the KGB foursome of the Worldway Corporation would have a lot more hidden firepower close at hand.

The Mob's deliveryman was about to finalize the transaction.

"So we close the deal, my friends?" he asked the four Russians.

Bolan stepped from cover with the Ingram tracking on the seven people around the table.

"No deal," growled the Executioner.

He stroked the trigger of the Ingram. The weapon began its dialogue of death, spitting .45 flesh-stitchers that exploded two chests — mafioso runner and bodyguard — pulping them, spraying the air with exploding life forces as they shuddered under the impact of the slugs.

Reflexes in this bunch were automatic.

The other five fanned away in different directions, digging for hardware.

Bolan transferred the silenced machine pistol to his left hand and fired a burst that beheaded one Russian and tore away the left side of the surviving Mafia hood's face. Both of these men had succeeded in yanking out pistols that now flew from dead fingers.

Bolan fell into a low crouch and dodged to the side as his peripheral vision caught one of the remaining KGB men tugging a gun from under his jacket while the other man grabbed the .45 on the table.

The first Soviet agent opened fire with his pistol. The slug whined inches past Bolan, where he had been one heartbeat before.

Bolan triggered another quick spurt of death from the Ingram that ripped into the Russian gunman from navel to heart. The man died on his feet, hammered back into a wall by the hail of bullets. He slithered to the floor, leaving a red smear on the wall behind him.

In the same flash Bolan dipped his right hand beneath his jacket, bringing the Beretta into action. The 93-R buzzed a 9mm hole in the center of the other guy's forehead before he could trigger off a shot at Bolan. He made a funny sighing sound and collapsed.

Bolan's attention focused on the female KGB agent. The woman screamed something in Russian at Bolan and tossed a round from the Luger in his direction that came too damn close. He did not care for killing women, but he coaxed another burst from the Ingram that erased the woman's face in a blur of pulverizing .45-calibcr slugs. She spun around, her dead body knocking the briefcase full of packaged white powder to the floor.

Bolan holstered his Beretta. He slammed a fresh clip into the butt of the Ingram.

The office loft reeked of gunpowder and blood.

The Executioner stepped over some corpses. He snapped the clasp on the briefcase the Russians had brought to the meeting — money that could become a necessary fund in a brand-new war for the Executioner. He held the briefcase in his left hand, the Ingram in his right, the SMG panning his track as he moved, his combat-slit cold eyes doing the same.

He stepped from the loft into a stairwell just as three guys toting pistols charged up the stairs from the floor below. Bolan realized they were the KGB cell's outer layer of defense; two burly bears in front, another bringing up the rear, drawn by the shooting and the woman's yelling.

They did not expect Death.

They got it.

A volley of .45 projectiles ruptured life into spraying blood, transforming the two in front into corpses tumbling backward down the stairs, taking the man behind with them in a tumbling pretzel of arms and legs. Another hail of bullets cut through and made the third sentry as dead as his comrades. The trio rumbled to a stop out of sight somewhere below.

Bolan hurried up the stairs.

The top story of the building held another loft, this one wide open, not partitioned. There were some couches, chairs, tables and a refrigerator by a sink, and a walled-off bathroom in one corner. A floor lamp cast a warm inviting glow on the scene.

Bolan left the stairwell and crossed slowly over the bare floorboards of the room for a cursory inspection of the living area. He fanned the shadowy loft with the Ingram and probing eyes, but he saw no one, only shapes of draped, stored-away furniture.

When he was five feet away from where the area rug showed beneath the furniture, he was startled by a commotion from behind a couch. Bolan almost pulled off a round in defensive reflex, but he stayed his trigger finger in time.

The figure that popped up to confront him was an eleven or twelve-year-old black kid. Sweat beaded like pearls on ebony as his frightened eyes gauged Bolan and the distance to the door like those of a frantic, trapped animal.

Bolan lifted the Ingram and aimed at the kid's head.

"Freeze right there, son. Don't even think about it."

2

The youngster gulped audibly, but stayed where he was.

"P-please, mister..."

"Who are you? What's your name?"

"Joey."

"What are you doing here, Joey?"

"The man who works here..."

"The boss?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess so."

"What's his name?"

"He never told me his last name. That's the truth, I swear! Said to call him Dimitri. Wh-what are you going to do to me, mister?"

"What did you do for Dimitri?"

"I ran things, here and there. You know. Honest, mister."

Bolan did not lower the Ingram.

"Talk straight."

"Dimitri... he told me he had a numbers gig going. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Everybody plays the numbers."

"Not everybody. Forget the numbers. Tell me what you did for these people."

The kid looked street-smart and read the signals that the big guy was not about to blow him away, but Joey was still hip enough to respect a gun pointed his way.

"Ran messages. Envelopes sealed when I got them.

"To who?"

"Somebody different all the time. I swear that's the God's truth. Always to a park or someplace where there weren't lots of people around."

"You look like a smart kid, Joey. You had to know this was dirty."

The boy's eyes locked with Bolan's and some of his fear went away.

"Uh, I got two little baby sisters, mister, four and six. Mama's working two jobs as it is and things are still damn tight. I'm trying to be the man of the house. These men were paying me."

Bolan believed him.

He lowered the SMG.

Bolan set down the briefcase he'd been carrying. He unsnapped it and plucked out a packet of money that was supposed to have bought a couple kilos of heroin. A quick glance at the banded, mint-fresh bills and Bolan guessed the bundle to be twenty-five grand. He tossed the packet to the boy. "Get the hell out of here, Joey. Don't ever come back."

The youth was temporarily frozen to the spot, not by fear, but by the money. His eyes darted disbelievingly between the bundle of notes and the face of the big dude with the gun.

"Beat it, Joey. You're lucky you're alive."

"Thank you, brother." The kid broke into the biggest grin Bolan had ever seen.

Joey tore out of there.

Bolan could not suppress a chuckle. He had to admire the spunk shown by the kid as evidenced by his commitment to his family. What better use for money appropriated from these creeps?

Bolan snapped the briefcase shut and continued his quick visual of the living area of Dimitri's nasty little KGB bunch. He did not cease scanning the shadows around him as he flushed the heroin down the toilet.

Nothing moved in this old loft after Joey's departure except for one silent Executioner. He was looking for something, but he didn't know what.

He caught sight of a calendar thumbtacked to the wall.

An impulse made him step closer for a look.

That changed everything.

There were scribblings here and there in the squares of some dates on the calendar. The notations meant nothing to Bolan. Numbers, first names, last names, Russian words, times without explanation.

He flicked the calendar back a page.

To the date of the assault on Stony Man Farm.

The night they killed April.

And there it was.

A name.

Miller.

Al Miller. A mercenary on payroll from an as yet unknown source, the engineer of the assault on Stony Man Farm.

Bolan had already killed the bastard the morning of the attack.

What did Miller's name on this calendar mean?

Only one thing.

A KGB link to the Stony Man smash.

Damn.

Bolan sensed movement from the shadows across the wide loft. He also heard a creak as someone eased open the stairwell door that Joey had used to make his exit.

The boy coming back?

Bolan hoped to hell not.

He crouched and dodged sharply to his left, continuing a fast turn away from the wall.

At seemingly that precise instant, the stutter of automatic-gun fire erupted from the shadows. Bolan cursed himself for his carelessness.

Someone had been waiting in silence all this time for what they thought was the right moment. But the moment would never be right.

Bullets thwacked into the wall where Bolan had been a second before, shredding the calendar on the wall into bits of paper.

Bolan hit the floor and returned fire with the Ingram, shooting at the muzzle-flashes of the weapon across the gloom.

The ambusher's barrage ceased as quickly as it had begun, followed by a sickly groan. A stack of stored furniture stopped what had to be a dead man, and furniture and corpse tumbled noisily to the floor.

The stairwell door creaked open the rest of the way.

A bulky East European man came through the doorway toting a pistol.

A tight cluster of rounds from the Ingram pumped out the guy's heart and sent him spiraling back through the swing doorway, flip-flopping down concrete stairs like a sack of potatoes.

Bolan warily approached the spot where the first assailant had landed amid the furniture.

More KGB material, now very dead.

The guy's skull had been cored by several .45-caliber slugs.

Joey had got away.

And it was time for the Executioner to withdraw.

Fast.

The sounds of the firefight surely would have summoned the authorities by now.

Washington cops are the best in the country, and the fastest at responding to a call.

He hurriedly retraced his steps down the stairwell, stepping over the bodies of the dead as if they weren't there, taking the treaders all the way to street level. He exited through a back door into an alley that ran behind the office building opposite the Hedwick Care Home.

Sirens in the near distance pierced the Washington night, screaming in fast from several directions.

Bolan hurried to his Stony Man-supplied Corvette. He met no one along the way.

The Executioner's battle plan for this first night back in the States had been to take out this KGB cell, then start tracking down leads on the manipulator behind Al Miller.

After that, for the foreseeable future, Bolan had decided to expand his scope of activities to encompass an all-out paramilitary assault on the KGB influence threatening what little was left of a free world. Even if it meant returning to a one-man penetration like the Executioner's war against the Mob.

Crazy.

Right.

But that's what they'd said about the Executioner's other war.

The evil had to be fought, whether the government sanctioned such action or not.

These savages surrounded themselves with a cloak of diplomacy while they poison-gassed and double-crossed and devoured the world map at an alarming pace.

And here was Bolan, colliding head-on with the new enemy. He decided he would die fighting, if necessary.

Bolan climbed into the car. The engine roared to life and he burned rubber out of there, traveling two blocks before he risked flicking on his headlights as he continued his withdrawal.

No one tried to stop him.

* **

"I must say, Dr. Beck, this is highly irregular. It is 2:30 a.m. but I suppose it will be all right. Please ring if you need anything."

The pretty nurse closed the door after Mack Bolan, leaving "Dr. Beck" alone with Aaron Kurtzman.

Kurtzman looked in bad shape. His face was exposed, but much of the rest of his considerable bulk was wrapped in mummylike bandages. Tubes ran from several bottles to somewhere beneath the hospital sheets that covered him.

Aaron "The Bear" Kurtzman had served as the link between Bolan and the operators running Stony Man Farm's computers. Throughout Bolan's antiterrorist actions, the irascible Kurtzman translated the Executioner's needs to the programmers and their answers back to Bolan.

The computer expert had been badly wounded during the assault on the Farm.

Kurtzman turned his head, with obvious pain, and with eyes as sharp as ever watched his visitor come to stand at the foot of the bed. The Bear recognized Bolan immediately, but in his discomfort he tried to inject a little humor.

"Aren't you going to read my charts, doc? I've been out of intensive a whole week today."

"Clean?" asked Bolan, indicating the white room around them.

"Ginty came in from the Farm first day I was out of intensive," said Kurtzman, his voice weak but no less irascible. "There was a transmitter under that goddamn lamp over there and another one in the phone. Ginty pulled them, and next time he was back the place was bugged again. It's a little game we're playing here. They rig the place while I'm doped up, which is a fair part of the time, thank God, and me and Ginty try to locate the new bugs. No one says anything to anybody about it."

Kurtzman would never lose his attitude, or his spirit.

"That's quite a speech, Bear."

"So I'm going nuts with no one to yap at," Kurtzman growled. "Ginty was in to visit five minutes ago. I requested that he be given special permission to visit every hour or so. The room's clean, Colonel. Welcome back to the States."

"Welcome back to the world of the living," Bolan replied. "I'm sorry as hell about what happened to you, Bear."

"Stow that," growled the bandaged figure on the hospital bed. "It's the only way they could slow me down. Not stop me, just slow me down. Now why are you here?"

"Could be just a get-well visit, Aaron."

"Right... Dr. Beck. This town is hot for you, Colonel. Too damn hot for any one man unless he knows exactly what the hell he's doing, moves like the devil and makes every heartbeat count. I have kept up on what's been happening, you see. Hal, and Ginty again. So you are not here to pass the time. I've never known you to 'pass the time' anywhere. So what can I do for you? You had best speak fast. Lucidity comes and goes with these damn painkillers they've been pumping into me."

"Who's trying to bug this room?"

"Who wouldn't? CIA, CFB. It's goddamn alphabet soup in this town, Striker. Take your pick."

"Could the agencies be working together?"

"Doubt it. The Soviets are upping the ante all over the world so the stakes are going up for the spy boys, too. You're not still thinking Farnsworth and his unit were behind that hit on the Farm, are you?"

"Someone backed Miller. Someone on the inside of our top-level covert operations."

"If it was that way, then my guess is that it was the CFB on their own," Kurtzman offered. "No one is getting along right now, in the world or in Washington, D.C. But that's an awful heavy suspicion, Colonel. What would Farnsworth's motive be? He's been in military or government service for twenty years with a spotless record. He can retire a rich man anytime he wants to."

"Tell me about Ginty."

"Ginty? He's been one of my whiz kids since the program got started. I know him socially, as well. He's taken over a large part of my coordination responsibilities to Phoenix Force and Able Team. A damn good man."

"I have an errand that needs running, Bear. This one is so classified it has the touch of death on it, but it's got to get through."

"Let me guess. You've found the Maltese Falcon?"

The Bear started to chuckle at his own joke, the way he always did, laughter rumbling from that barrel chest. But this time the pain from his gunshot wounds made him grimace, and a gasp Bolan knew meant real torture escaped from Kurtzman.

"This is the bottom line, Bear. Are you clear?"

"I... I'll remember."

Bolan reached into an inside jacket pocket and extracted a business-size mailing envelope.

"Where can I stash this?"

"That Bible on the table."

"You've got a busy little hospital room here."

"Too damn busy. I'd like to give this whole damn thing up, Striker, and I would in a minute if I thought there was someone better to do the job." Kurtzman painfully turned his head to watch Bolan place the envelope in the Book of Revelations. "What kind of dynamite are you leaving me with?"

"Something belonging to Major General Strakhov."

"You mean as in KGB Major General Strakhov?"

Bolan returned to the foot of the bed.

"None other. I don't care how clean this room is, I'm not saying anything until you get what's in that envelope translated and tell me what you think. It better be what I think it is. I've already sold it."

"Does Hal know about this?"

"Who do you think bought it?"

"That puts me in a very touchy position," Kurtzman said. "The Stony Man apparatus will continue to operate, at least for the time being. That means when I get out of this hospital, I'll have a job waiting that I want. On the other hand, well, you are the man in charge."

"Trust me," Bolan stated. "Have Ginty translate that Russian as fast as he can and cover his ass from every possible angle while he's doing it. I'll be in touch."

"Ginty is due in with a coded check every hour. I'll get him back here on the double."

"Can you give me a time estimate?"

Kurtzman considered for a moment. "You get to me once an hour, too, Colonel. I'll see what I can do."

Bolan paused at the door before leaving.

"Thanks, Bear. You're the best."

"You damn well better be at your best, Colonel," warned Kurtzman. "This town is wired for John Phoenix. They're gunning for you, and I do mean everyone."

"Yeah," was Bolan's parting shot as he left Kurtzman's hospital room. "Just like old times."

3

As a high-echelon staff member of the Russian diplomatic corps in Washington, Maxim Pavlik's office was located in the most secure section of the well-guarded Soviet embassy building.

Paviik's file cabinets were equipped to destruct their contents at the push of a button and he had access to two secret exits in case of emergency.

Pavlik appreciated being out of the mainstream politics that went on all around him. The KGB agent had always fancied he would make an excellent diplomat if he ever chose to, but he detested the ineffectual blather of these pacifists and cowards, some of whom actually believed that the relaxation of tensions between East and West could be possible someday.

Did the fools not realize this was war? thought Pavlik once again as he pored over that night's routine decoded shortwave receptions.

Of course, you could only go so far.

The shooting down of that Korean airliner — senseless slaughter. It only made more difficult the important job Maxim Pavlik made his life's work.

And the matter of Colonel John Phoenix.

Pavlik was top KGB field administrator of the District of Columbia and environs.

He did not look like a spy, or even much like a Russian, an advantage he always utilized and one that had been partially responsible for his meteoric rise within the ranks. Pavlik affected a stylish London cut to his suits and a fashionable blow-dry look to his salt-and-pepper locks.

He considered the matter of Phoenix.

Central Control was still not sure if it had been Phoenix or Janus, the Phoenix double, who died in flames in Major General Strakhov's dacha a week ago. To be on the safe side, they had decided to assume the charred remains to be those of Janus. Phoenix, of course, had had plenty of time to get out of Russia with assistance from an underground movement that was becoming more and more a thorn in the side of the Soviet secret police.

Pavlik paused in his perusal of decoded receptions and stared at a blank wall of his windowless office. He wondered about his friend, Greb Strakhov. Pavlik and Strakhov went way back to missions together before Greb chose the route of desk jockeying his way to the top behind the cold walls of the Kremlin.

Camaraderie between officers in the KGB is common, due to the organization's rigid vertical chain of command. To Pavlik's way of thinking, his control number in Moscow, his old friend, Greb, had allowed his perceptions to be adversely affected by the death of his son, Kyril, several weeks earlier.

Pavlik thought Greb's idea of condoning the use of an impersonator of Phoenix to discredit the American agent, and actually carrying through with the assassination of Damien Macek, had been carrying things a bit too far.

The proof of this had been Phoenix turning the tables, as the Americans said, leaving Greb's son as unavenged as before and Phoenix on the loose somewhere in the world.

There was the faint glimmer of a chance that the unrecognizable remains in Greb's dacha were those of John Phoenix, true, but Pavlik did not think so. If the two men had fought each other and one died, then it would not have been John Phoenix who perished. Pavlik was certain of this.

He wondered where Phoenix was at this moment.

There was a discreet knock at his office door.

"Enter," Pavlik called, sliding a file folder over the sheets of paper on the desk before him.

Alexei Rosstov entered, a slim young man whose nondescript appearance belied sheer ingenuity for inflicting pain or death. Only three "wet actions" had been necessary thus far under Pavlik's tenure, and Rosstov had demonstrated with each a flair for foolproof originality. He was especially good with a knife. His official position in the embassy was assistant and secretary to Pavlik. Rosstov usually accompanied his boss in public as a bodyguard.

"Yes, Alexei, what is it?"

Rosstov carefully latched the door behind him.

"Maxim, something terrible has happened."

"Something terrible is always happening," Pavlik growled. "Out with it. Our inside man?"

"No. Dimitri..."

Pavlik slammed a fist onto the desk top.

"The site was secure! How many dead?"

"No final body count, but most or many. You know our pipeline into the local police is good, but someone at the top of their security apparatus has this one impossibly classified. We do know Dimitri is dead."

"And the, uh, funds?"

"Gone."

"Gone?" Pavlik repeated. "But I thought the police..."

"A raid? No, I'm afraid not." Rosstov looked uncomfortable correcting his superior. "We have been in touch with Mr. Riappi, or rather his associates, and they assure us..."

"They assure us," Pavlik echoed with a snarl. "We should never have struck a bargain with those vermin."

"Nonetheless, it does not make any sense for Mr. Riappi to double-cross us. This was not to be a onetime transaction."

"That's what Riappi said, at any rate," Pavlik said, bristling. "But you may be right, Alexei. There is another possibility." He reached for the telephone on his desk. "I shall contact Riappi immediately. We shall see..."

He was interrupted by the ringing of the phone.

The two men traded steely glances.

"Perhaps Mr. Riappi has initiated a response," the bodyguard suggested.

"Riappi is not trusted with this number." Pavlik frowned. After a moment of hesitation, he picked up the receiver. "Identify yourself," he said coolly.

"You know my voice," came the reply.

Pavlik did, indeed.

He was speaking to the KGB's sleeper mole planted deep inside the American intelligence and counterintelligence community. A sleeper awakening at long last, but with the subtlety and extreme caution worthy of the care put into the mole's cover and the time waited before initiating the total destabilization of the CIA, FBI and all other such organizations, including the CFB and Stony Man.

"I have told you never to call me here," Pavlik snapped. "Why are you not making contact through prearranged channels?"

"This is too big to wait," the caller confided. "Besides, you know this line is scrambled at both ends and circuited to hell and back to keep it clean, so don't sweat it, okay?"

"You are an insufferable American," Pavlik told the mole. "You are very good, comrade."

''Good as I can be, comrade." The man on the phone emphasized the last word. "Now do you want to hear what I've got, or not?"

Insufferable, Pavlik thought again.

"Proceed."

"Thanks a bunch." The other's sarcasm did not abate. "Okay, here it is and it ain't good. Phoenix is alive. He's in Washington."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight. Brognola just told the President."

"Then that explains it."

"What's that?"

"Uh, nothing. What is the status on Phoenix at this moment?"

"Damned if I know. Brognola is being vague as hell, of course. We're due for another briefing at the Oval Office in about ten minutes."

"Where are you calling from?"

The mole chuckled.

"You'd shit if I told you."

"Not the White House..."

"Relax. Being at the top does have its privileges. Got to go now. Thought you ought to know."

"Uh, yes, you were right, only next time..."

The connection clicked in Pavlik's ear, replaced by the hum of the dial tone.

Insufferable.

Pavlik dialed a number.

"Riappi?" Rosstov asked as he watched his superior dial.

Pavlik nodded.

"It is time we brought Colonel Phoenix and the Mafia together," he purred as he listened to the ringing on the other end. "I wonder if they have ever confronted each other before? I daresay this Phoenix would give them trouble enough. But with the KGB and Mr. Riappi's organization combined to hunt down one man, I think the colonel's fate is as good as sealed. It was Phoenix who killed our people and ruined the transaction with Riappi. As of right now, Colonel Phoenix is a dead man, whether he knows it or not."

* * *

Tension crackled between the four men seated in wing chairs in a loose circle near the President's desk in the Oval Office of the White House. Hal Brognola looked at the heavy curtains drawn against the night, making the Man's inner sanctum even more tomblike.

The chief executive had called another in a series of top-level briefings with Brognola, Lee Farnsworth and supposedly retired Brigadier General James Crawford, in order to keep abreast of "the Phoenix problem" that had reached crisis proportions before anyone, least of all Brognola, could do a damn thing to stop it.

"As before, our discussion here is totally off the record," the President advised the others. "I don't need to tell you gentlemen that the security of our intelligence and counterintelligence networks is in grave peril due to the actions of Colonel Phoenix. Hal now advises me of a significant new development. Hal, brief Lee and the general on what you've already told me."

Brognola tried to gauge the response of Farnsworth and Crawford as he delivered his report to them concerning his meeting with John Phoenix earlier that evening.

The Stony Man liaison fully appreciated the President's sentiment, which had cooled considerably from pro-Stony Man sanction, thanks to a damning set of circumstances and bad timing, coincidence or not.

There was a traitor in their midst.

The string-puller, the real boss, behind the assault on Stony Man Farm could be right here, right now, thought Brognola as he delivered his report.

Al Miller organized the attack on the Farm with moves carefully orchestrated by some dirty bastard with an inside track on Stony Man and all other branches of the U.S. spy network, including the CIA.

Farnsworth?

The boss of the Central Foreign Bureau, a sturdy, blond-haired guy in his forties with the physical conditioning of a man twenty years younger, had sharp, intelligent eyes in a face of chiseled granite.

The CFB was the President's covert espionage arm, operating without official sanction or recognition, exactly as the Phoenix project functioned as the chiefs paramilitary response capability.

Lee Farnsworth could well succeed in his attempts to have the President disband Operation Stony Man, claiming it severely interfered with the CFB's delicate spy missions.

Subsequent events had appeared to give credence to Farnsworth's charges that the paramilitary unit was stepping on the toes of his espionage operations.

The attempted frame-up of Mack Bolan for the assassination of Damien Macek had almost tipped the scales completely in Farnsworth's favor when even General Crawford had begun to doubt the advisability of allowing The Executioner to instigate unsanctioned hits beyond the parameters of his antiterrorist work. Bolan's actions on the night of that bloody Stony Man attack were a case in point.

Brognola reflected that General Crawford was the closest thing to a father figure that Mack Bolan would ever know.

As a Green Beret lieutenant colonel, the soft-spoken Arkansas military man had been Bolan's commanding officer in Vietnam.

It was in the jungles of Southeast Asia that Bolan had first earned the title the Executioner for his Special Forces missions behind enemy lines as leader of Sniper Team Able. The young grunt was credited with ninety-seven official kills... and nicknamed Sergeant Mercy by his buddies for the infinite compassion he always showed to injured Viet civilians.

James Crawford had taken a green recruit from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and molded him into a superb fighting machine capable of survival in any war, in any jungle.

General Crawford had been one of the highly classified few involved in the initial creation of the Stony Man-Phoenix project. Crawford said he felt like a father to the man he knew to have once been Mack Bolan.

But somehow Hal felt it had only been his, Brognola's, insistence that kept the general from agreeing with Farnsworth that John Phoenix might have sold out to the Russians and assassinated Macek. Luckily Bolan uncovered proof of the KGB's Janus plot.

And now. The Executioner had returned.

Brognola had been tight with Bolan since the days of The Executioner's anti-Mafia war.

He had been the first one to approach Bolan with the offer of presidential amnesty and cover as Colonel Phoenix during the closing days of that war.

The ex-FBI agent knew nothing that had gone before in the Executioner's trek through hell on earth that could stack up to what would happen tonight if Bolan got his hands on the man behind the attack that stole the life of April Rose.

Brognola was as sure that the Executioner would mark and kill the man this night as he was sure he could use a cigar right now. But this security crisis had not been enough to drive the President back to smoking, so Brognola abstained for the time being out of deference to the Man.

When Brognola finished his brief report on the conversation he had had with Bolan a few hours before, the President spoke.

"This masterlist of KGB operations, Hal. Do you think it's the real thing?"

"Of course it's the real thing, sir. Uh, why wouldn't it be?"

Farnsworth supplied an answer.

"It seems, doesn't it, that the colonel's behavior has been somewhat erratic of late."

Brognola bristled.

"Erratic? The goddamn KGB had a double of the guy running around killing people to put blame on the U.S., and Phoenix almost single-handedly busted the whole thing to bits. I wouldn't call that too goddamn erratic."

General Crawford's Arkansas drawl chimed in, harder than usual.

"Then explain to me, Hal, why the colonel has not already voluntarily come forward with this list. I certainly hope the death of Miss Rose has not impaired his judgment."

The President nodded in agreement before he spoke.

"The media, not to say the voters, would eat me alive if they ever got wind of covert units like Stony Man or CFB."

Operation Phoenix dated to a former presidential administration, and during his tenure as liaison Brognola had noted that the one similarity connecting the men he dealt with in this Oval Office was that they all weighed the political ramifications of everything.

Brognola could not read the thoughts behind Farnsworth's eyes as the CFB boss turned to the President.

"Sir, this bloodhunt of Phoenix's to avenge a woman's death is ten times more critical if Phoenix really is toting around this so-called master list. The local cops haven't made the connection yet, but the CIA still has an APB out on Phoenix to every one of their field agents in D.C., and they don't give a damn if it's shoot on sight."

The Executioner had involved himself in a Company operation during the track that took him to Al Miller the night of the Stony Man attack. A good agent named Robbins caught a fatal bullet from an Armenian terrorist that was anything but Bolan's fault. In fact, the Executioner dispatched Robbins's killer a heartbeat later, but the CIA did not see it that way and there had been bad blood ever since.

"Mr. President," Brognola said, "Colonel Phoenix knows exactly what he's doing. Trust him, please."

"Under the circumstances, that's kind of a big order, wouldn't you say, Hal? I mean, what if the damn list falls into the wrong hands?"

"It won't if you clear things with the Company," Brognola pressed. "The ultimate target he's going after deserves to be killed. We have him placed as a high ranker in our own intelligence community."

The President's brow furrowed.

"And there's no indication yet as to the identity of this mole?"

"No, sir, but that's who he's after tonight. And he'll do it. It would help if you called off the CIA."

Farnsworth glared at Brognola.

"I hope for his sake that Phoenix doesn't think I was in any way involved in the assault that killed his woman, just because I've been voicing my thoughts about you people."

"The colonel did not tell me what he thought," Brognola said impassively.

At this point Crawford intervened.

"I say we give Phoenix the benefit of the doubt, in recompense for almost doubting him after the Macek thing. Perhaps a time limit should be set. You understand, Hal, your man cannot stray too far from the fold. That would be catastrophic for everyone. The security of our operations must take precedence over the private vendetta of one person, however justified. I say, give Phoenix tonight to see what happens."

"It seems he has something to bargain with," sighed the chief executive. "That list."

"He won't have the list forever," Farnsworth growled.

"Give John Phoenix twelve hours, Mr. President," Brognola pleaded. "He'll have it finished by then. He will have the person responsible."

The President thought about it another moment, then nodded.

"Twelve hours. I'll see that the CIA stays out of it. Phoenix will be on his own. Then I get that list and we settle this Stony Man issue once and for all."

That was enough for Brognola.

Mack Bolan would baptize D.C. with hellfire this night until a blood debt was paid.

Tonight, Washington, D.C, would blow wide apart.

And Brognola knew there was nothing he, Crawford, Farnsworth or the President of the United States could do to stop it.

4

Bolan wheeled his Corvette at a moderate speed for a recon along the winding street fronting the Crawford home.

Retired Brigadier General Crawford, widowed for eleven years, and his daughter, Kelly, lived in a nice suburban home in exclusive Alexandria, across the Potomac, in Virginia.

Alexandria slept in the morning stillness.

Bolan saw the glow of lamplight behind draped windows of the house.

Two vehicles were parked in the half-circle gravel driveway in front of the Crawford home: a Lancia that Bolan recognized as belonging to Kelly and a long black limo with tinted windows.

A warning tremor surged through Bolan's spine.

Mafia crew wagon!

A tremor resurfaced from that fighter's old war against the Mob, when boats like that limo hauled street soldiers, hoods, gunning for Bolan's head.

Except that in D.C, all manner of VIPs rode around in the damn things.

But the warning tremor would not go away.

Bolan drove beyond the trees and foliage that separated the Crawford property from the next spacious lot on the twisting street.

Bolan braked the Vette deep among the shadows, killed the car's headlights and engine, and left the vehicle without making a sound.

He unleathered the Beretta 93-R from its shoulder rig and stalked quietly toward the rear of the Crawford residence.

He had come for a private talk with the man who had been his commanding officer in Nam, a man Bolan respected. He hoped like hell to get some straight answers from the general.

Bolan had asked Crawford to run a complete check on Lee Farnsworth's background. That had been on the night of the attack on Stony Man. Now Bolan wanted to hear what the general had to say in private, off the record.

He also hoped like hell that the general was not in any way involved with the attack on Stony Man Farm.

General Crawford fit the profile of the in-the-know boss behind Al Miller, as well as Lee Farnsworth did.

It was a disloyal thought, but one that could not be discounted.

Bolan half expected the general to be away at this hour. Hal Brognola was duty bound to report to the President the news of Bolan's return and the chances were good that the Man would convene a meeting with Hal, Farnsworth and Crawford, no matter what the time.

But Bolan had to make contact with the general sooner or later, and telephoning was out.

He realized the general and Kelly could well be perfectly safe on the other side of those illuminated drapes.

The general might be working late in his office instead of putting in an appearance at the White House.

Perhaps Kelly was up late, unable to sleep, anxious about her part in the forthcoming Olympics.

General Crawford had requested Bolan to accompany Kelly as unofficial bodyguard when the pretty pentathlete journeyed behind the iron curtain to Zubrovna for an Olympics-class sports meet.

That was something else Bolan wanted to discuss with the general.

Beretta in hand, he was a soundless, darting shadow melding into the inky blur of shrubbery along the back of the house.

Sure, all was probably A-OK inside the house.

Maybe the limo out front had brought the general home and was on standby.

The warning tremor would not go away.

Bolan crouchwalked along a wall toward the back door. The 93-R and the warrior's eyes swept the night for any sign of danger as he moved, but nothing came at him.

He opened the screen door. It squeaked slightly on its hinges, but Bolan felt confident the sound could not reach inside the house. The window alongside the door remained dark.

Bolan grasped the doorknob, turned it, leaned in.

The door opened inwardly without a sound.

Security was lax in suburbia tonight. Everything was normal... or the general or Kelly did not expect trouble.

Bolan entered the house. He eased the door shut behind him, pausing a moment for his senses to adjust to the atmosphere of this place. In a single heartbeat, the nightfighter's ears and instincts told him nothing was right.

He stood in the darkened modern kitchen.

He heard scuffling.

Indistinct.

Upstairs.

Bolan hustled lightning-fast through the archway from the kitchen to a dining-living room then to his left and the stairway to bedrooms on his right.

Scuffling. Louder now.

Frantic.

A gruff male voice grunted exertion, not words.

Another man swore.

The scuffling sounds grew weaker.

The Executioner padded up the stairs and down a hallway, tracking the noise to the second doorway along the corridor.

The big fighter filled the entrance, the silenced Beretta 93-R tracking on a scene that scorched itself into Bolan's mind.

A bedroom.

Feminine.

Two not-so-feminine guys were trying to hold down and suffocate a naked woman, who was fighting and clawing to stay alive.

Another guy stood just inside the door, gripping a .45 automatic at his side as he watched the action.

The trio was so intent on their murderous activity that not one saw The Executioner.

Something familiar about all three goons registered in Bolan's brain in that microsecond before the kill. He knew their pedigree for sure: hoods.

Street soldiers. Mafia.

A white-hot fury seared Bolan's being.

The thug with the .45 never knew who pulled the curtain on the scenario unfolding before him as The Executioner fired point-blank at his temple. The man crumpled right where he stood.

At the sound of the Beretta's chug, the other two stopped what they were doing and whirled to confront the menacing, cold-eyed figure who wasted their buddy.

Bolan already had the other two in the Beretta's sights.

The lady sat up in the bed, breathing hard.

Kelly Crawford.

Blond. Athletic shape. Bolan had seen this lady in the nude once before. He saved her life that time, too.

The two hoods who'd been trying to suffocate Kelly fell away to either side of the bed. Both men went into crouches as short-barreled .44 Magnums leaped into hands.

Bolan twisted sideways to make a hard target for the duo. One caught a 9mm sizzler through the left eye from the Beretta, rendering him of no more concern to Bolan.

Bolan saw a fleet-footed Kelly snatch a robe and head for the bedroom door and out. Just as well with Bolan.

The remaining hood yelled something and pegged a shot at Bolan that reverberated through the house like a howitzer, but the .45 slug whistled harmlessly through air where Bolan had been moments ago.

Number one was still tumbling to the floor — it happened that fast — when the Beretta coughed again and number two stained the bedspread with a swirl of blood as he toppled over a nightstand lamp on his way to the floor.

Shouts were coming from somewhere out in the night.

Suburbia wasn't used to gunfire.

A car roared to life outside.

Bolan recognized the sound of the foreign sports car.

The Lancia.

Kelly.

Damn.

He ran down the stairs and reached the front door in time to see the Lancia's taillights fishtail their way onto the street as the machine raced off into the night to the squeal of burning rubber.

Movement from the limo.

Driver. Gun.

Bolan crouched, the Beretta tracking a fresh kill.

It was too dark for the hood to see. He hesitated too long before firing.

The Beretta's sneeze was almost discreet compared to the thunder of the Magnum, but 9mm slugs were enough to nail the Mafia bastard to the side of the limo. He left a trail of blood dripping down the crew wagon's waxed finish.

Bolan jogged to the Vette. He climbed in and gunned the powerful engine, laying fifty feet of smoking rubber on the tarmac as he sent the vehicle flying after Kelly Crawford's Lancia.

The first curve in the semirural suburban road took him to the top of a gradual incline.

The Lancia's taillights disappeared over the next rise.

The lady was hauling ass.

Bolan's Vette took the rise so fast it became airborne for a few seconds, hitting the pavement with a thump that jarred the driver to the teeth. Bolan held the wheel steady as the screaming machine cleared the next rise in time to see the collision.

Two vehicles — high-ground clearance 4x4s — were parked fender-to-fender at an angle across the dark intersection at the base of the hill. There was no one in sight, but the hoods would be close, waiting.

Backup team to the guys in the limo, thought Bolan.

There had to be another setup just like this one at the other end of the block in case something happened and the hit went sour, as it had.

Kelly saw the roadblock in time to pump the brakes and guide the Lancia into a sideways skid. The impact of metal on metal sounded as the Lancia's passenger side slammed into the angled front ends of both 4x4s.

Orange streaks of automatic-weapon fire lanced from the higher ground on either side of the crossroads.

The gunfire started only when the hidden snipers became aware of the Corvette's arrival on the scene.

Bolan braked his vehicle to a screeching halt fifty feet from the collision.

He saw nothing moving in the Lancia.

He scrambled over the console to the Vette's passenger side, grabbing the holstered .44 AutoMag that rested on the bucket seat. He shouldered open the right-side door.

The shooting from the intersection resumed with at least two more weapons joining in, their attention diverted from the Lancia to the Corvette.

Bolan unleathered the .44 AutoMag and crouched behind the Vette while bullets tried to pierce the shatterproof glass and ricocheted off the side of the specially armor-plated vehicle.

In the instant before he slammed the passenger door shut behind him, Bolan did his best to pin down the snipers' position. In the sporadic muzzle-flashes he glimpsed three guys firing at him from a cluster. Dumb.

When the firing ceased, Bolan stood quickly, took aim with a two-handed stance and punched out some heavy rounds. There was return fire, but not from the group to his right in the darkness above the junction.

He fell back behind the low-slung car, not before tabbing the sources of two more gunners, to fire five-second bursts at their position.

Another lull.

Bolan stood. Aimed. Fired twice.

Only one gun blazed at him from up there now.

He crouched again.

A shorter burst this time.

He looked up, saw the shadowy form of the last ambusher making a dash for one of the 4x4s. Big mistake. The .44 roared again and a headless man took several paces before collapsing.

Cautiously, Bolan trotted over to the Lancia, slamming a fresh magazine into the AutoMag as he advanced on Kelly Crawford's vehicle.

He heard a racing engine. Another wagon was approaching rapidly from behind.

The other backup team.

Bolan saw Kelly slumped behind the wheel of the wrecked Lancia. His gut turned cold. He opened the car door.

The blond lovely had wrapped herself in a homey terry-cloth robe before fleeing the carnage in her home. The unconscious woman fell sideways out of the car when the door opened.

Bolan gripped her under the armpits to stop her from falling onto the pavement. He gently pulled her out of the car and hoisted the limp body over his left shoulder. Grasping Big Thunder in his other hand, he began to jog back toward the Corvette, away from the wreckage littering the intersection.

Lights were going on in the neighborhood. Curious voices called out.

The approaching vehicle, a Bronco, blasted onto the scene.

Bolan fired a round that shattered the windshield and the head and chest of the driver. Men shouted as the runaway vehicle plowed into the Lancia.

More smashing of glass and metal and human bodies.

Two dazed thugs stumbled out of the Bronco. Bolan finished them off with a couple of head shots that blasted them backward off their feet and into the foliage across the road.

He had not set down the unconscious woman. He leathered Big Thunder and continued toward his car.

Bolan planned to get himself and Kelly Crawford the hell out of there. Fast.

The night was closing in.

5

The Mafia, again.

Like old times, yeah.

Too damn much, in fact, for Mack Bolan's liking.

He propped Kelly Crawford in the passenger seat of the Corvette, then he ran around the car and climbed in behind the wheel. The vehicle rumbled to life. Bolan drove away from that scene of carnage.

He heard sirens, but no police showed along the emergency withdrawal route he had charted before approaching the Crawford home.

He cruised at the legal speed and caught the Roosevelt Bridge across the dark Potomac, back into D.C. The night traffic wasn't heavy.

Bolan and the lady were clear.

He stuck a cigarette into the corner of his mouth as he drove, firing it with the dash lighter.

Think time.

He regarded the blonde slumped sideways in the seat beside him. She rested against the back of the seat, leaning against the door. She was still unconscious, or doing a damn good acting job.

Either way, Bolan cared and did not want to lose her to some freakish accident after all they'd been through. He reached across her and pressed down the door lock.

Her musky scent tantalized him.

She was a tough one, Bolan knew, and a good one.

A potential pentathlete champion, an expert at horse-back riding, fencing, shooting, running and swimming, Kelly had been one of the few Americans invited to compete in an international sports meet in Eastern Europe.

Bolan had not seen Kelly since that day in Zubrovna when the KGB assassinated Damien Macek. But from newspaper accounts he knew she had won at those games, securing a berth on the U.S. Olympic squad.

Initially, Bolan had hardly wanted to baby-sit Kelly behind the iron curtain at the Zubrovna sports competition. He had been tortured nearly beyond his stoic endurance by the death of April Rose.

In retrospect, he now understood the reasoning behind General Crawford's and Brognola's pressuring him to keep an eye on Kelly. The young lady, for all her good points, did have a way of starting trouble, and as the next of kin to a man like Crawford, there was a security consideration, sure.

But of course the bottom line was the universal wisdom that work would be the best healer for Bolan. Along the way, of course, Bolan had taken a real liking to Kelly; a big brother fondness, more than anything else. Though Bolan was honest enough to admit to himself that Kelly Crawford had plenty of what it took.

Her eyes fluttered open.

"That's the second time you've seen me with my clothes off, Colonel Phoenix, and we haven't made love once."

Uh-huh. A real hell raiser, thought Bolan. Twenty-four-carat blond trouble.

Bolan chuckled.

"Is that a suggestion?"

"It might be."

"Not tonight, Kelly. You're in shock right now. You're functioning as if everything is all right and a bunch of men aren't dead back there because they tried to kill you."

She sat up.

"I, uh, guess you're right. It was like this... the last time. I... I didn't know how to react..."

She was referring to the other time Bolan had seen her naked, when he rescued her from the path of a bullet to the head during a detour on the night Bolan would always remember; the night Al Miller's crew killed the woman he loved.

"It's all connected," Bolan told Kelly. "I want to ask you some questions. When what happened back there hits you, it'll tear you apart, girl."

"Woman. And isn't sex as good a way as any to escape that terrible world out there?"

"Like I said, you're in shock. Besides, whatever happened to your charming young French fencer?"

"He was getting too serious. I told him there was someone back home. Where are we going?"

"Where you'll be safe," Bolan told her. "At a friend's."

"I need a cigarette."

He handed her the pack.

"I thought athletes didn't smoke."

"I... I haven't in years. Maybe... maybe it's hitting me... When you came through that door... You are really something, John Phoenix."

"I need answers, Kelly."

"So do I. Where are we going?"

She had the cigarette going in nervous, jerky puffs.

"I've got to know how sincere you are," Bolan rasped.

"Sincere?"

"Before I take you somewhere, you tell me what you know. Then I'll know if I can trust you."

Indignity cut through Kelly.

"For God's sake, you can trust me... they were trying to kill me!"

"Why?"

"I... I don't know," she cried hysterically.

"Sure."

"I don't!"

"I think you do."

"Do you... know who they were?" she asked.

"They looked Like Mafia. They were Mafia."

"Oh, my God."

"Tell me, Kelly."

"I... I honestly don't know. Maybe... maybe my father... no, no, that can't be it."

"What about the general?"

Kelly took a few more puffs from the cigarette, but it did nothing to relax her. Finally, she looked at Bolan.

"You must have thought of it. He's my father. I love him and I thought of it. Everything that happened to you after you and I met in Zubrovna, the assassination, all of it... You wouldn't have been there if you hadn't come with me. My father asked you to accompany me."

"Did you talk to him about this?"

"Not until after the phone calls."

"What phone calls?"

"Anonymous. A disguised voice. I couldn't tell if it was man or woman. They would say one word and hang up. They started calling me on my private line at the house every hour of the day and night, saying just the one word: guilty."

"Did the calls stop?"

"After a few days. It was long enough for me to get the point."

"What did you do?"

"I asked my father all kinds of veiled questions, things about what happened to you after we were separated after the assassination."

"Tell me about your father."

"You don't... you don't think dad's involved in something like the Macek assassination, do you? I can't believe that."

"So you let it drop after you couldn't find out anything from your father?"

Kelly lit another cigarette.

"You know that isn't true. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I searched his desk one night when I thought he was asleep."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing. I didn't have time to find anything."

"The general caught you?"

"Yes. You can imagine the scene."

"Tell me anyway."

She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and lit another. Her hands were shaking as she fumbled with the dash lighter.

"Dad and I usually get along famously," Kelly told the icy-eyed man at the wheel. "We've had some horrendous confrontations over the years but things were going okay lately. But that night was worse than anything between us in the past."

"What did he say?"

"He was the outraged but loving parent. I was told how rotten it was that he couldn't trust me, but that there was nothing in his den for me to find anyway. That I should know he made a point of never bringing home sensitive materials because he did not want to endanger me, and this was how I paid him back. I was contrite, of course. He was right, as always."

Bolan chuckled.

"The general does have a habit of always being right," he agreed, knowing he could not confide in the woman beside him that, as Mack Bolan, he'd known and served with her father in Vietnam.

Kelly looked with distaste at the cigarette she was smoking. She leaned forward decisively and stubbed it out in the ashtray.

"Awful things," she told Bolan, then she sat up and looked at him with new determination. "This is hardball, isn't it?"

"It is that, Kelly."

"Then I don't need cigarettes. If I can fight my way to the qualifying finals for the Olympics, I can survive this without cigarettes. I can handle what happened back there. Uh, thanks, by the way."

"Sure, by the way. Tell me about your dad."

"There's not much more to tell, about dad that is. He's been busy with top security matters at the White House for the past forty-eight hours. I haven't seen him since that showdown in his den. The next morning, someone tried to kill me. I was coming out of the health club where I work out. It's on a side street. A car came barreling down the street and purposely swerved to run me down. It missed me by inches."

"Did you get the license number? Where there any witnesses?"

"No both times. I was too busy diving out of the way. If I hadn't been in such good physical condition, I would have been dead. I remember a dark sedan, but that's all. Then... someone tried to shoot me this morning on the freeway. Tonight I was packing to leave, to get away, when those men... those men..."

Bolan waited while she collected herself.

"Where were you going?"

"I don't know."

"You think your father is behind these attacks on your life?"

"Isn't it possible?" Pain seared her voice. "Maybe... maybe he thinks I've learned something worth killing me for. But I didn't! I don't know anything right now except that I need to get away to someplace where I'll be safe."

Bolan wheeled the Corvette into the driveway of a modest town house on a tree-lined residential street. The working-class folks were asleep at this late hour. He braked the vehicle and started to get out.

"Let's go meet a friend. At least I hope she's a friend."

Kelly came along, somewhat self-conscious of being wrapped in the robe, but there was no one around.

Kelly held Bolan's hand as they moved along a paved walk to the house. She squeezed and released his hand as the big guy rapped on the front door.

Several knocks later a light went on inside. A couple more heartbeats and Bolan knew he was being looked at through the one-way peephole in the door.

Bolan looked at the tiny peephole and said, "Don't turn on the porch light, Susan. Let us in."

There was the sound of an unlocking dead bolt. Then the door swung inward and Susan Landry stood there in a robe of her own, her raven hair as dark as the night. A looker, with the beauty of maturity that Kelly was at least a decade away from acquiring.

Susan paused with her hand on the doorknob. She stood aside and took in Kelly and Bolan with a single glance as they stepped inside past her. Susan's hair was attractively sleep-tangled but inquisitive eyes were as sharp as ever. She closed the front door after them and leaned back against it, sharp blues locking with those of the man she knew as John Phoenix.

"This is going to be interesting. Nice to see you again, Colonel."

The last time they'd met had been the night of the attack on Stony Man when Landry had been too close to the action. John Phoenix had kept her from the line of fire by rendering her unconscious with a not-so-polite punch to the jaw.

Susan Landry did not know that John Phoenix was in fact Mack Bolan. They had been lovers, in the Mafia war days, until Bolan had executed Landry's father for that man's unholy tie-in with Mob killers.

"Susan, this is Kelly Crawford."

Susan and Kelly nodded to each other, but Landry had eyes only for John Phoenix.

"You owe me one, soldier," Landry told him firmly. "I smell a story all over again."

"Kelly needs a place to stay low for a few days," Bolan said. "You're the safest person I know to trust with something like this."

Kelly spoke up.

"Susan, I, uh, don't know what's gone on between you and the colonel before. I don't want to be a problem..."

Susan warmed up for a moment.

"You're welcome here for as long as you want to stay," she assured the younger woman. "My door is always open to a sister in trouble, Kelly." Then she eyed Bolan again as she explained, "This has to do with a punch on the jaw."

"As of right now you're in the middle of a story to top them all," Bolan told the investigative journalist.

"But Colonel Phoenix," said Kelly, "isn't a lot of this, uh, classified? I mean..."

"Tell the lady what you want to tell her," Bolan stated, turning to open the door. "Everything is changing tonight."

He was already outside, stalking toward the Corvette in the driveway when Landry got to the door of the town house.

"Dammit, Phoenix, you wait a minute!"

Bolan climbed behind the steering wheel and gunned the engine.

"I'll be in touch, Susan. Thanks."

"You are the damndest man," the exasperated lady reporter called after him.

He saw Susan and Kelly standing side by side in the doorway watching him drive away.

Sorry, ladies, he thought. And he meant it.

But the hellgrounds were calling.

The Executioner was about to escalate the assault on the bastions of power in the nation's capital.

Everything is changing, he'd told Kelly Crawford.

Damn right.

From deadly to deadlier.

6

High-intensity lamps mounted on tow trucks and official vehicles cast the battleground in stark relief against the Stygian gloom.

A battlefield, Don Sprague thought again.

The Orgcrime skipper had seen plenty in eighteen years on the Washington police force, but nothing, not even the Caputo-Smaldone war, could match this scene of sheer carnage spread out before him now. Well, maybe one time before, he thought on a moment's reflection.

A quiet intersection in rural-suburban Virginia.

like a battleground.

Two 4x4s and a foreign sports car at the junction. Another death wagon off to the side. The front of one of the 4WD vehicles was a mess of mangled metal. The Lancia could have been a drag-strip comedy machine; the driver's side, undented, the passenger side, the side that collided with the 4x4 a misshapen disaster of twisted metal and shattered glass.

And the dead men.

Ten dead men, stretched out and covered at various points around the intersection.

Another four dead men at a house up the road. General Crawford's home.

Fourteen dead.

Yeah, Sprague could remember only one time that came close to this in his years as a D.C. area cop.

The Orgcrime chief turned his attention back to the two men standing beside his car: the local homicide man, a detective named Kelvey, and the VIP Sprague had heard of but never met: Harold Brognola. A White House type.

Kelvey was glaring at the knot of media people clustered restlessly beyond the barricades.

"Those bastards are ready to eat me alive, Brognola."

Brognola fired a cigar.

"You pedigreed the dead in record time. They've got no beef with you."

Kelvey looked at the Orgcrime specialist.

"Thanks for coming out at this hour, Captain Sprague."

Sprague studied the VIP.

"I hope to hell I'm not being used as a pawn, Brognola. I sure would hate that."

"Recap it for Kelvey one more time," Brognola said.

"Tommy Cardoni, Face Stipetto, Geets Romano — those are the only names to give out for sure. Some of the others... same pedigree. They won't be hard to run down. Except for that guy over by the tree. You'll need dental records on that sucker."

"Cardoni, Stipetto, Romano," Kelvey repeated. "That means Riappi, doesn't it?"

"It means that, all right," Brognola grunted. "But keep the lid on that angle. If those media sharks are sharp enough, they'll add it up themselves."

"And those bodies in the Crawford home?"

"The Mafia bait will keep them satisfied," Sprague advised the local man. The Orgcrime officer had a funny gut feeling he could not identify, but it pestered the hell out of him. He glanced back at Brognola. "So we play it like some sort of Mafia rivalry?"

"Exactly," Brognola said, squinting from a swirl of cigar smoke. "That's what it is; that's what we tell the media it is."

Kelvey glanced to Sprague for confirmation. Sprague sized up the precinct cop as a good man more accustomed to domestic squabbles that flare into homicide than gangland slayings.

Sprague's gut feeling got stronger.

"That's your final opinion, too, right, Captain?" asked Kelvey.

"Nothing is final," Sprague grunted, "except death for those fourteen men. But pass it on for now. It looks like an ambush busted up real good by someone who knew exactly what the hell they were doing."

"You can take it from here, Kelvey?" inquired Brognola.

The precinct officer caught the drift.

"Uh, yes, right. Standard homicide, times fourteen. Damn."

Kelvey left to confront the powers of the press.

Sprague and Brognola watched him cut through the clustered activity of investigative and forensic crews. Then the Orgcrime cop, all fifty-eight hardbitten years of him, glared at the VIP.

"Brognola."

"Uh-huh."

"You headed the anti-Bolan thing back when the Executioner was on the loose, didn't you?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

Sprague's glare grew frosty.

"You want to cut the bullshit, VIP? You want to talk, I mean talk straight, or do I just get in the car and drive home now that I've done what I was supposed to do."

"You gave Kelvey a good lead," Brognola pointed out.

"I said cut the crap or I go," Sprague growled. "You wanted me to id those stiffs like you knew I would. But, mister, I don't know of any Mob hit man in D.C. or anywhere else capable of walking through fourteen pro street soldiers and cutting them down like wheat. Uh-uh. I don't know of anyone... except someone who's supposed to be dead."

"You mean Mack Bolan?"

"Who the hell else would I mean?'' Sprague snarled. "I was on the force when that boy hit this town on that damn Mob war of his."

"And you think he's back? Better not utter that around those media people, Captain. Dead men don't kill fourteen hoods."

"Yeah. Right," the Orgcrime vet growled. "It's just that I got this funny hunch that won't go away, Mr. Harold Brognola. Excuse me, but I'm not too damn good at handling VIPs."

"I thought we cut the crap, skipper."

"So level with me," Sprague snapped. "You don't work this side of the street anymore. So this is a Mafia thing. Why the hell does that bring Harold Brognola onto the scene as fast as the local men? There's a tie-in, and this old sniffer can't help smelling it from a mile off. Is Bolan alive? Is he in Washington tonight? Did the Executioner waste these fourteen punks? That's what the funny hunch in my gut is telling me, Brognola."

"Maybe you're just hungry," Brognola told him. "Go home and go back to bed. Sorry for the trouble, skipper, and thanks for the help."

Sprague knew there would be nothing more, although Brognola made no attempt to avoid the cop's icy stare.

But Don Sprague was disciplined enough to know there was no damn good in pushing to shove. Brognola seemed okay. They were just at cross purposes. Nothing personal, but the VIP would divulge nothing more on any behind-the-scenes activity. Sprague did not like it, but there was nothing to do about it right now. Later...

The police captain shot a curt nod to Brognola and climbed back into his car and drove away.

As he drove, Sprague thought about Brognola.

And fourteen dead men.

And another dead man from the not-so-distant past.

Mack Bolan, The Executioner.

* * *

Lou Riappi listened quietly to his yardman's report — too quietly.

The top cock, Jimmy Needles, got his nickname from the way he liked to torture people, especially women. Needles everywhere: through the eyelids, under the nails, up the rectum. On women, other places. Everywhere.

But at the moment, Jimmy Needles could not hide his acute discomfort under the boss's scrutiny. Eyes like black marble behind an ever-present squint revealed nothing. Jimmy licked his lips too much, and they were still dry when he finished his report.

"That's it, sir. Uh, fourteen dead."

Riappi's open right hand lashed out with a blur, slapping the yardman's head and whole body backward with the sharp crack of a pistol shot.

Jimmy Needles landed in an armchair and tried not to cringe.

The D.C. boss towered over him.

"You stupid fuck," Riappi snarled. "I give you a simple job to do, and you lose fourteen men! You think this won't drop in my lap? You think we don't have enough trouble already?"

There was one other man in the den of Riappi's Maryland estate, a den lined with shelves of unread books and copies of paintings he knew nothing about. But the decor provided ample soundproofing when Riappi's wife and kid were underfoot. No problem now, though. He'd packed them off to visit relatives.

It was 4:00 A.M.

"I sent Tommy and Face, they picked the crews," Needles insisted defensively when he saw the boss was not about to hit him again. 'They were good men, Mr. Riappi. You know that!"

Riappi lost interest in abusing his yardman. He turned to the third presence in the room.

"How do you read this, Sal?"

Sal Valachi was Riappi's consigliere, a loyal holdover from the organization of Lou's Uncle Gus, inherited by Lou — who had been about to take it anyway when Gus died. Lou considered himself lucky because this way Sal had come along as a friend. Lou treasured the older man's advice, which was rarely, if ever, wrong.

In his mid-fifties, Valachi stood in perfect physical condition. Sal had been dumping weighted-down stiffs into the East River when Lou was still looking up his grade-school teacher's dress.

"If this'd happened a couple years ago, I'd've said we had Bolan trouble," Valachi told the boss.

"Bolan?" echoed Riappi. He waved an irritated gesture. "Come on, Sal. Bolan's dead."

"There were fourteen good men out there, Lou," the older guy pressed. "They ran up against a hell of a something. You explain it."

"There are ways to explain it," grunted the boss. "Like those goddamn Commie Russians. This smells like a spy play to me. I want that Pavlik guy brought here."

Jimmy Needles, chastised but apparently forgiven, rejoined the conversation. "Uh, maybe this Phoenix guy is like Bolan."

"Pavlik did call to warn us about Phoenix," Valachi said pointedly. "Don't forget, the Russians have as much to lose as we do. More, if you think about it. Pavlik's whole scam with us is separate from his KGB business. His bosses would raise hell if they found their people dealing in smack like Pavlik plans to do. Uh, just like New York wouldn't be too happy with you."

"Us, Sal." The capo glared at the older man. "When the headshed sends a Black Ace around, if they send one around, you remember that, huh? They'll have your balls for breakfast right along with mine."

Black Aces.

No one knew when one would show up. They were La Commissiόne's autonomous enforcement arm, identifiable by the coded ace of spades, killers with an open license to kill, answerable only to order, stabilization, within the organization worldwide, no matter how many hits, no matter who they tagged out.

The Mob's very own Gestapo.

The old man is right again, thought Riappi.

Pavlik and his people had not rubbed out Tommy Cardoni and the others.

Riappi thought on it some more.

"Maybe it was the blacks," he growled at Valachi. "That horse was meant for the ghetto when Pavlik and that Dimitri clown offered us a better price." Riappi smashed a fist into his open palm as he warmed to the idea. "That's it. Those blacks are tough. They got wind of the deal. They hijacked us."

Valachi appeared unimpressed. He shrugged and started to light a cigarette.

"If you say so. I'm still wondering about Phoenix. Or is it Bolan?"

Riappi flared and slapped the cigarette from the startled consigliere's fingers.

"Goddammit, Sal, don't be talking any more about Bolan! That was my uncle's time, not now!"

Valachi recovered from his surprise and said in a low monotone, "Careful, Lou. I'm on your side. Remember that. You're letting this get to you. It's late. We're all edgy."

Right, thought Riappi. He backed off.

"Okay, Sal. Bottom line. How serious are you about this Bolan crap?"

"Bottom line on Phoenix first," Valachi countered. "You know the blacks aren't organized. We've got seven street gangs on tab for what we sell, and they're at one another's throats all the time. It's stretching it to think something like the hit on us at Crawford's house was organized this fast by them."

"Maybe the ambush wasn't set up so fast," grunted Lou. He looked meaningfully at Jimmy Needles. "Maybe the Commies got a pipeline into my own organization."

"Now, Mr. Riappi, you know that ain't true," gulped a hardguy no longer concerned with needles, only with saving his own hide and trying not to sweat too much.

Valachi intervened.

"Phoenix is the only lead we've got," he told Riappi. "This could have everything to do with what happened to our drug deal tonight, but not the way you think. We sent those men to Crawford's because of Phoenix, right? Now fourteen of the boys are dead. I'd say Pavlik gave us a damn good warning. We've got a bigger problem here. His name is Phoenix."

"I still want those goddamn Reds out here where I can eyeball 'em face to face and clear this thing up." Riappi looked at his yardman and grinned. "Maybe give my man Jimmy here a chance to play with his needles, huh, Jimmy?"

The top cock interpreted this as a sign of forgiveness for having sent Cardoni and the others to their deaths. Jimmy Needles stood and got back some of his street swagger.

"And there's still that daughter of the general's. I wouldn't mind playing with that little chickie, sir."

"There'll be time enough after I've had my talk with Pavlik," Riappi said. He turned to the phone. "The bastard never gave me his own number, but there're ways I can get through to him. This is still my territory. I'll have those Commies fried alive if they..."

He had his hand on his desk phone.

Valachi lifted a cautioning hand.

"Hold it, Lou. Listen to another idea." The tone of Valachi's voice said that he was working it out even as he spoke. "The Russian will be at the top of Phoenix's list, too. Our KGB pal is all over the Crawford thing."

Riappi nodded as he listened.

"Uh-huh, that's it, Sal. Our Commie creeps are the perfect bait for the perfect trap to put Phoenix right on the fucking spot." The D.C. capo suddenly felt good all over as a plan so simple, so foolproof, fell right into place. "Jimmy," he told his enforcer, "round up some more men. This time I want guys better than Tommy and Geets and the others. Here's what I want you to do."

7

The grim-faced warrior piloted the Corvette through the dark D.C. streets for a meeting with a man named Ginty.

This soldier, Mack Samuel Bolan, had traveled a long road through hellfire on earth to this point in time.

It had begun in his hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, as one man's war against a malignant force that was spreading everywhere a young GI looked. Bolan's mother, father and teenage sister were slaughtered by a thing that appeared to be beyond the reach of the law. The young soldier had returned from Vietnam and exercised the only real option open to an honorable man of Bolan's capabilities and thinking.

From Mack Bolan's journal: "I cannot fight an enemy eight thousand miles away when another is destroying and eating up all that matters at home."

The Executioner had declared war on the Mafia and come closer to winning that war than any one man had a right to expect. That led directly to the antiterrorist campaigns of John Phoenix. And a beleaguered government besieged by terrorism from all sides recognized, however covertly, the true value of the Executioner.

Bolan had managed the transition easily enough once he rationalized the terms of working within the system.

The enemy had not changed, after all.

The real enemy was the evil urges of Animal in Man, the primeval cannibal strain in the species that fed on greed and lust, obeying only force and aggression, a malignant tumor on the soul of civilization.

But now... what had become of that self-reliant combat specialist from Nam?

He fought the good fight with good people against an enemy for ideals that mattered, sure. Very much so.

Except that along the way he had allowed himself, his abilities and soul, to be appropriated by an impersonal bureaucracy, a labryinth of dirty tricks in an espionage community of which Bolan had never wanted part. He became enmeshed in the shadow world of trapdoors and trick mirrors and sudden death, where nothing and no one were as they seemed.

Bolan was dead certain of only two truths in the predawn chill as he drove through the sparse traffic.

April Rose was dead.

He had loved that woman. Spiritually. Emotionally. Physically.

The boss lady of Stony Man Farm had been everything Bolan thought a woman should be, and more.

The feeling had been mutual, and the only time either of them ever regretted choices of sacrifice and duty over "normal" lives came when they were together.

April had made the supreme sacrifice. She gave her precious life for Mack Bolan.

Survivor's guilt drove Bolan like a fever — a condition that he worked to control now that he was this close to the one he wanted.

He'd gone to Eastern Europe as Hal and General Crawford urged him to. He'd tangled with the damn KGB right across Russia. But now, now, by God, he had put it all behind him and it was time to deliver the final tab to a Soviet mole in the U.S. government: the real killer of April.

The one responsible for April's death will die tonight.

Sure, the man who fired the killing shot had died one heartbeat after April with a blast triggered from Bolan's AutoMag. And the merc who led the attack was dead, too.

Who is the mole?

Bolan had figured it to be Lee Farnsworth, considering the timing of the attack on the Farm with the CFB boss's aboveboard approach to the President requesting the disbandment of the Phoenix program.

Bolan still could not shake a deep gut hunch that Farnsworth was the planted Russian sleeper agent who was just now awakening to sabotage America's espionage operations around the world from within, operations vital to U.S. national security.

Except that the waters were now muddied by more than the blood of those who had already died this night.

He considered Kelly Crawford.

What of her story about her father, the man Bolan wanted to trust most of all?

The Mafia dead, back around the Crawford residence, were real enough.

That meant, if Kelly was right, that not only was the general the mole but also that he slept with Bolan's old enemy, the Mafia.

Trapdoors and fun mirrors.

And sudden death.

And more to come.

Bolan knew that when he hit the mole, the whole spiderweb scheme would fall apart, including the KGB drug operation he'd busted up at Worldway earlier.

More Mafia.

He would move in and wipe them out. Then April would rest in peace and so would the conscience of one Mack Samuel Bolan.

His next step had to be to finger the mole.

Farnsworth? Crawford?

Or someone who had not yet come under Bolan's suspicion?

He didn't think so.

It had to be someone in the inner circle.

Identify and kill.

Simple as that.

Yeah.

Except for the presence of Lou Riappi's Mob.

Not to mention the future of John Macklin Phoenix after he liquidated a high-ranking insider near to the President, whoever the mole turned out to be during the next few hours.

Bolan did not consider this; it was not important to him.

All that mattered was evening up the score for April and the others lost in that attack.

He hoped Ginty could help.

After that, let the chips fall where they may.

* * *

Like chips of ice, thought Tom Ginty. The words ran through his mind every time he looked into the cold steel gaze of the colonel. Tonight, though, Ginty thought those eyes were harder, colder than he'd ever seen them.

Eyes ready to kill.

It was 4:45 a.m.

Ginty was riding shotgun as the Stony Man commander accelerated the Vette away from their contact point, two blocks east of the Federal Building.

"What do you have, Tom?"

Ginty withdrew two folded letter-size computer printouts from his coat pocket and handed them over.

"Something I'm glad to get rid of," the computer whiz admitted. "Bear said it was top priority. I channeled it through with a special bypass code he gave me."

Bolan did not attempt to read the printouts in the fleeting streetlights. Each time the strobelike flashes caught Bolan's face, Tom Ginty saw killer eyes as they appraised him.

"I knocked out a drug deal tonight, Tom. It had Maxim Pavlik's touch all over it." He wagged the printouts before pocketing them. "Any documentation?"

"Uh, no sir. First we've heard of drugs. I mean, from the local embassy bunch. Pavlik's man, Rosstov, is a hard one to pin down. He could've set it up."

"It was Pavlik," Bolan decided, "and Rosstov. This list is from their higher-ups. If the superiors in Russia knew about Pavlik's moonlighting, it'd be the Gulag or worse for him. How about a name for our mole?"

"Negative. This is a current list, active. All contact with a sleeper would've been severed years ago. At least, that was Aaron's thought on it. But you've still got plenty there, sir, more than plenty. Their worldwide network."

"Run into any interference?"

"Negative again, I'm glad to say. A clean computer hit, tapped and gone. That list... it could get lots of people killed, Colonel."

They had made a full circle around the block, Ginty noticed.

Bolan braked the Vette right where Ginty had been picked up.

"A lot of people are going to get killed, Tom. Scum that are begging for it. Disappear for a while, huh?"

Ginty started out of the car.

"That's what Bear said, too. Don't worry about that, Colonel. I'm gone. But, uh, Colonel, just one thing, if it's okay to ask. Uh... what are you planning to do with that list you had us translate?"

"I just told you, Tom."

"Uh-huh. Ho-lee. Well, uh, good luck, sir."

"We'll need plenty of that, guy. Not just me, not just you. All of us. A whole damn country."

Ginty stood for a minute on the dark, deserted Washington street watching the taillights of the Corvette recede toward only God knew what.

Luck.

Right, thought Ginty.

The way the world was going these days, this grand old nation needed plenty of that.

It also needed men like John Phoenix.

God bless you, Colonel, Ginty thought as he turned up his collar against the predawn chill. He started back to his own car and a life and a wife well behind the front lines of the war he had just discussed with the icy-eyed soldier.

In God we trust.

Right.

And in men like the colonel.

* * *

Posing as a lower-echelon paper pusher over a restricted phone line, Bolan learned from an alert- sounding Russian embassy operator that Pavlik would not be in his office until the afternoon of that day.

That meant Bolan had to confront the KGB officer at his Georgetown town house.

Good.

Pavlik resided on a tree-lined residential street of similar structures evenly spaced apart by manicured lawns, a suburban dream or a suburban nightmare depending on how you looked at it.

Bolan looked it over closely on a seemingly casual recon cruise past the Pavlik address.

Pavlik's home was a red-brick duplex with its own roofed carport to the side.

Bolan could make out the shadowy shape of a diplomatic limo in Pavlik's parking space, and he also thought he discerned the figure of the limo's driver leaning against the deeper shadows of the parked vehicle.

The pinpoint glow of a cigarette confirmed a man's presence.

It looked like Pavlik had his chauffeur on standby. He would be jumpy after the hit on Worldway and its aftermath: a half dozen dead including Dimitri, their field man and their Mafia connection.

The Russian's residence disappeared from Bolan's vision.

He steered the Corvette into a smooth right turn and braked the vehicle at the curb on a cross street.

Bolan left the car, padding through inky blurs of shrubbery, backtracking the half-block distance to the town house. He made no sound. He unleathered the Beretta from its shoulder holster.

The trained jungle fighter merged with the predawn gloom, covering the stretch of ground in heartbeats. The AutoMag, reloaded, rode in leather low on his right hip.

The Executioner skirted the garage and the man leaning against the luxury sedan. A lighter flared briefly as Bolan passed. He was able to confirm that the guy was in chauffeur livery right up to the peaked cap.

Probably an employee of some limo service, thought Bolan.

Bolan crouched at the back wall near a window that emitted a light glow from behind drawn draperies. There was a narrow crack at the bottom where the curtains did not quite meet the windowsill.

He cautiously peered inside, the Beretta gripped tightly and ready in his right hand. Every combat instinct was alert in the quiet gloom around him for any sign of another presence behind the house.

A dog barked sharply several backyards away, then it was quiet again.

The Executioner probed, undetected,

From his vantage point Bolan could see a dining room. A swing door to the left had to lead to the kitchen.

His line of vision centered on the hallway visible at the end of the lighted eating area. The corridor would lead to the garage where the chauffeur waited at the limo. From his position, Bolan could actually see only the front vestibule.

Two men stood at a walk-in closet, one of the men helping the other into his coat: Pavlik and his bodyguard-assistant, Alexei Rosstov.

The two went through the preliminary activities of getting ready to leave.

Better and better, thought Bolan.

He had to make Pavlik talk.

He could end it then.

He lightly retraced his steps, hugging the shape of the town house while the two men inside turned off lights.

The Executioner took out the chauffeur with a snappy judo chop that would put the man out for hours, but not kill him. As he passed out and started to sprawl, Bolan moved in and caught him to prevent any commotion. Bolan dragged the unconscious driver out of the garage and hid him in the nearby shrubbery.

The eastern horizon breathed the gray light of a false dawn. Small birds started twittering. It would be light soon. The nightscorcher would rapidly lose the cover of darkness.

He grabbed the peaked cap from the head of the unconscious driver, then moved back toward the limo. He opened the door of the driver's side without a whisper of sound.

At that moment, two men bustled out of the house with no awareness of the presence of Mack Bolan.

Bolan got behind the steering wheel of the Cadillac, rested the Beretta on the plush front seat alongside him and started the limousine's engine.

Bolan eased the Caddy forward without looking around after the men climbed into the car.

"Airport," one of the men instructed the "chauffeur" in a heavily accented East European rumble.

Bolan steered the big car to the right out of the driveway, pulling another right when he came to the cross street where he had stashed the Corvette.

Bolan braked the Caddy.

"Why are you stopping?"

Bolan gripped the Beretta and flashed around, the 93-R trained on the man who sat on the right side of the back seat.

Alexei Rosstov.

The two KGB men moved fast for concealed hardware.

Not fast enough.

The93-R chugged once.

Alexei Rosstov died with a nasty curse on fleshy lips and a Walther PPK halfway out of a shoulder speed rig. His head was haloed by a red splash, skull and gray matter yielding to a 9mm puncher that sprayed the interior of the Caddy.

The man's body slumped sideways against the door. The second Russian's jaw remained slack when he saw his faithful assistant blown away. He forgot all about the weapon he'd been reaching for.

Bolan leaned over and deftly removed a Luger from a shoulder holster, then pressed the hot muzzle of the Beretta against the forehead of the surviving Soviet.

"Maxim Pavlik," Bolan growled. He nodded in the direction of the waiting Corvette. "Get out. You and I are going for a ride."

8

The Russian in the back seat had trouble swallowing. He did not move. The Beretta was pointed at the center of his forehead by an Executioner who was finished playing chauffeur.

The man blinked and looked over Bolan's shoulder.

Bolan sensed that something was wrong.

Dead wrong.

A trap!

Beads of sweat pearled the Russian's greasy hairline. He regarded the grim-looking stranger with a mixture of fear and false bravado.

"You had better put down your weapon and surrender," he said in heavily accented English.

Bolan paused.

He glanced up the street at an approaching vehicle.

An unmarked stepvan truck glided toward Bolan's position to block his escape route. The truck halted sideways across the intersection in front of the limo and the Corvette.

A swift glance out the rear window of the Cadillac told Bolan the same thing had happened at the other end of the block: another stepvan had pulled across that intersection, blocking it. Drivers climbed from both vehicles.

Washington was full of traps tonight.

More than usual.

And it all fit together in the heartbeat it took the nightscorcher to swing his gaze back to the jerk in the back seat, who had lost all pretense of bravado; only frantic fear remained.

"Nice try, whoever you are," said Bolan.

The Russian misread the voice and thought he had a chance.

"You understand then? A mistake, yes? I am not Maxim Pavlik, of course. A... a joke, is it not?"

"Not funny," Bolan rumbled. He triggered another chug from the Beretta even as he started out of the limo, and he did not look back to see the result of yet another violent death in the back seat. He left the door open to avoid making any sound.

He split fast back to the Vette. The drivers of the stepvans crouched, aimed in Bolan's direction and opened fire with semiautomatic weapons.

Ingram MAC-10s, Bolan guessed, like the machine pistol he'd used a few hours ago for the hit on the Worldway operation. The same Ingram Model 10 now waited for Bolan in the Vette.

The enemy started firing with sound-suppressed weapons. The dull popping sounds carried faintly in the quiet open air. Louder to Bolan's ears came the thuds as the incoming rounds spanked the Vette and the Caddy from both ends of the street.

Bolan gained cover behind the Vette in a loose roll and tugged open the door. He holstered the Beretta and grabbed the Ingram at a moment when there was a lull in the firing.

In the sudden silence, he heard a strange noise.

A sound like small metal wheels rolling in a metal track.

And house windows going up, doors opening and voices calling, curious about the muted sounds of battle in their idyllic neighborhood.

Bolan positioned himself behind the low hood of the sports car, then straightened and pulled off a quick burst at the nearest target.

The driver of the stepvan to the rear of Bolan's vehicle did a spasmodic dance backward when the row of slugs shredded his chest, blowing dead matter out of his back. He tumbled into the side of the truck and pitched face forward into the street.

The deep-throated roar of several motorcycles being kickstarted rattled the predawn half light.

The rolling sounds Bolan heard had been the rear sliding doors of both stepvans being opened by men riding shotgun with the drivers. These men dodged back behind cover and, along with the surviving driver, opened fire at the Vette from under the vans.

The fresh volley of incoming rounds punctured the Corvette's outer skin, but the vehicle's underlying armor-plating was strong enough to stop anything short of a high explosive.

Bolan climbed into the Vette, gunned it to life and steered a hard right-hand turn across someone's carefully kept front lawn, kicking up clumps of sod in the car's track.

His first priority, Bolan decided, was to pull this firefight the hell away from the civilian sector, at least from such a heavily populated area. But then, reasoned the warrior, as the Vette rumbled across more private property, through a thick hedge and onto a side street parallel to the first, there had been no other course of action open to him. To track down the mole he had to interrogate Pavlik, which was what had brought him here.

He would lure these ambushers from this neighborhood where innocent residents might be hit or used as hostages, if it came to that; perhaps lives had already been taken back there by stray bullets.

If he pulled the sleazeballs into the open, then they would be his meat. And Bolan would do the butchering this time.

He got one parting glimpse of the scene in his rearview mirror before the hedges blocked his view.

Three motorcyclists came roaring out into the street from each of the trucks. The six machines were the trail-bike types and obviously street legal. They stood high on their knobby tires, the shortened exhaust pipes emitting a staccato roar as the black-outfitted, helmeted riders tore after Bolan.

Bolan upshifted, and the Vette shot forward onto a short straightaway.

Traffic on the residential side streets was still sparse.

A rumbling mechanical cleaner with big brushes and splashing water lumbered around an intersection almost at the same moment as the Corvette.

Bolan tugged into the turn, deftly avoiding the huge machine and correcting his vehicle at the same time. The cleaner's operator let go of the controls, causing the water to splash out into a wider slick than usual. The man scratched his head as he looked from the racing Vette to the six sinister-looking dudes on bikes blasting after the car in grinding pursuit.

The sweeper's driver ducked for cover in the cab of his machine. Bolan sped away from the scene but he saw it well enough in his rearview mirror as the Vette unleashed its souped-up horsepower, courtesy of Stony Man's mechanics, and carried him toward the maze of exit ramps.

The six riders behind him had trouble holding their bikes straight when they hit the slippery pavement at the intersection. But most of Bolan's pursuers made it.

One biker took the turn at too sharp an angle and he lost control. The bike fell sideways, trapping the man's leg beneath the sliding machine. The momentum propelled both machine and man onto dry pavement, mangling the leg into nothing before the bike's front wheel struck a curb. The impact separated man from machine, hurling the rider into a tree trunk that cracked the man's spine.

Bolan drove at high speed, overtaking one vehicle that pulled out of the way under the Vette's onslaught.

Bolan wheeled the vehicle southward, past the massive structure of the Watergate Complex that blocked out the first rays of the day's dawn. Bolan kept his eyes on the mirror as the car sped on toward the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway.

The five pursuing motorbikers popped into view quite a way back behind the Corvette.

Bolan twiddled his CB dial as he drove.

He picked up the channel he wanted.

A voice over the frequency commanded, "Flanks. Report in. Flanks."

"Have him in sight," a response crackled above background static. Probably one of those guys back there, Bolan figured as he coaxed a couple more horses from the powerful engine. The low-slung Corvette raced ahead on the parkway along the Potomac.

Within seconds the Executioner would gain the open killing ground he sought.

The main artery was barely traveled at this waking hour.

Bolan knew Washington like he knew the jungle. Washington was also a jungle — but of a different type.

By the time the Corvette whizzed underneath the Roosevelt Bridge overpass, the traffic momentarily thinned to nothing.

Buildings gave way to grassy knolls framing some exits that channeled daytime tourists to the Lincoln and other D.C. memorials.

Plenty of open killing ground at this hour.

Heartbeats away.

The rap over the CB rattled some more.

"We're closing in. Passing the Lincoln monument."

"Okay, he's boxed in. Move!"

Right, thought Bolan.

They think they've got me.

I've got them.

Who's right.

Let's find out!

The whispered light of dawn transformed the Potomac into a serene silver ribbon to Bolan's right.

Open terrain to his immediate left.

No traffic.

Bikers closing in.

Yeah.

Bolan jerked the steering hard to the left, simultaneously jamming the brake with his right foot. He held the wheel and geared down, flicking the stick in a short throw, even as the tail end of the Vette slewed around the length of its wheelbase.

The Vette executed a grinding, shuddering 180-degree turn amid the billowing white smoke of burning rubber. The terrain whizzed by in a mad kaleidoscope. The blurred landscape flashed past the skilled driver's line of vision as he fought for control of the wheel and maintained it. Bolan's senses reeled with the stabbing screech of the wild ride.

When he had the Vette straightened, he pointed its nose right at the five oncoming bikers.

He felt his features freeze into a masklike grimace as every atom of his being iced to combat-cold. He tromped the Vette's gas pedal, upshifting smoothly, the gear lever an extension of his arm, as man and machine rocketed back the way they had come.

The Corvette lanced forward into the ranks of its pursuers before they had time to slacken speed or escape the path of the charging vehicle.

Bolan nosed the Vette head-on into the two leaders of the group, their big bikes roaring side by side.

Both riders had semiautomatic weapons, Ingrams and Uzis slung over their left shoulders. The man to Bolan's right managed to ease his piece forward, while he kept his right hand on the bike's handlebar accelerator. He triggered off a burst, dotting harmless nicks into the Vette's bulletproof windshield an instant before the car's front end slammed into both bikes, pitching both men and their machines to either side of the Corvette. The death vehicle buffaloed right on through the formation of the three remaining bikers, all of whom appeared to be armed with semiauto machine pistols.

Two of the riders opened fire. Bolan did not even hear the rounds impacting the Vette's specially made body.

The killground expert repeated the grinding maneuver, high powering the Vette into another wide turn that had him hurtling southbound on the parkway again, pursuing those foolish enough to track the tracker.

The three motorcyclists up ahead did not consider turning to fight, but increased their speed to try to escape Death, which now hounded their heels at seventy miles per hour.

One of the bikers lagged behind the first two in the high-speed chase.

Bolan dialed in the local police frequency on his CB as he edged in behind the slowest rider.

The biker managed to aim a pistol over his shoulder in the seconds it took the Vette to gobble up the distance between them. The dangerous front fender came abreast of the guy. The man triggered a short burst. More nicks in the windshield.

A voice on the police channel was chattering about "a goddamn war" as an excitable dispatcher interjected, ordering all cruisers within the Georgetown area to close in on the exact position of Bolan and his traveling death show.

Bolan did not forget the backup crew he'd heard in radio contact with the bikers, the crew closing in on the parkway from the Lincoln Memorial.

He cut in on the police frequency, which was full of cars responding to the directive. A SWAT team was being dispatched.

"This is John Phoenix," Bolan spoke calmly into the hand mike. "Process that, headquarters, on your Blue Code, Delta Contingency. Contact Harold Brognola, White House, for Priority One verification."

There was a moment of static crackle as other ears absorbed the unexpected voice and directive.

"Uh, we read you, Phoenix. Will process. Uh, what the hell is going on? Over."

"Am in pursuit of three men, no, make that two, involved in Georgetown incident at Maxim Pavlik's house," Bolan reported. "Over and out." At this point he tugged the Vette to the right slightly, a sharp jar that nudged the lagging biker at the exact moment the guy decided to jump the curb onto the grassy knoll. The punch of the Vette's front end caused him to lose control. The bike's front wheel slammed into the concrete lip. The sudden obstruction of the machine's forward progress had the man gyrating through the air. Bolan did not give a damn how the scum landed, whether he survived or not, as long as he was notched out of the fray.

The surviving motorcyclists pushed their machines as fast as they'd go, the high-pitched chopping of their engines melding with the screaming Vette gaining on them.

The two remaining bikers hugged an extreme edge of the parkway lane along the Potomac, racing along almost opposite to each other.

The three vehicles blasted through the new day, a city awakening unsuspectingly around them. People on the sidewalk along the path of the chase paused to gaze at the sight of the sporty machine chomping up highway behind two mad motorcycling fools, then the bystanders dived for cover when they saw the guns.

Bolan rolled down the window on the driver's side of the Vette as he closed the gap between himself and the biker to his left, who pulled off the parkway onto the shoulder. With the wind whistling by his ears, Bolan took aim with the AutoMag. The mighty hand cannon roared above the rushing noise.

The punch of the .44 skullbuster pitched the motorbiker into a spread-eagled somersault over the handlebars. Rider and mount flipped in a topsy-turvy tangle of grinding metal and flesh as the Vette flashed by.

One bike remained ahead of Bolan.

Then everything changed, as Bolan had expected it to since intercepting the CB chatter.

A big tractor trailer rumbled the wrong way down an exit ramp. This would be the backup the motorcycle hit team had conversed with; they had timed their play perfectly.

The last biker laid on a burst of power, opening the distance slightly between him and the Vette, and rocketed off the parkway onto the shoulder and the grassy area beyond.

The semi-trailer rig wheeled across the roadway to stop directly in the path of Bolan's charging Vette.

Bolan downshifted, pumping the brakes like crazy, riding out the skid and screeching into a sideways turn that slowed him some before he tapped acceleration out of the engine at just the right time.

He finally slowed down beyond the shoulder, on the opposite side of the road from the biker, the Vette clearing the behemothlike rig by no more than a foot or two.

Bolan counted three forms up there — and the last biker.

The hellgrounder rolled to the grass from the passenger side of the Vette as gunfire opened on his position from the rig and the biker across the parkway.

Bolan heard sirens rapidly closing in from several directions.

The local police making the scene, too.

The incoming fire lulled momentarily.

He leaned low around the front end of the Vette, aimed the mighty AutoMag with two hands, and Big Thunder spewed new hellfire into the fray as hungry .44 flesh-manglers sought a place to feed.

Hellfire time.

All the way.

9

Bolan took out the last biker.

The helmeted, black-leather-clad figure across the parkway left his motorycle forgotten on the ground and focused his attention on the Corvette and its driver, pausing only long enough to slam a fresh clip into his Ingram.

The pause gave the Executioner time enough to lean around the front of the Vette and cancel the creep's tab.

The man saw the big guy in black aim the stainless-steel AutoMag that looked awesome even from that distance. The motorcycle hit man swung his reloaded Ingram into firing position and ducked, looking for cover behind the tractor-trailer rig that straddled the parkway. But he was not quick enough. Death caught him unexpectedly. The creep's heart burst apart and a baseball-sized hole erupted in his back. He spun backward to the ground, the Ingram flying out of his lifeless grip.

Bolan pulled back behind the Vette as heavy semiauto fire lanced in his direction from the truck's cab.

He heard a voice shouting. "Get out, goddammit, get out! Get him!"

The doors of the rig's cab opened tentatively for a second or two, then were flung outward as the driver and shotgun rider clambered down from opposite sides, leaving the spokesman inside. This activity caused another lull in the gunfire.

Bolan took advantage of it. He popped up over the Vette's tail end this time.

The voice from the rig warned the others.

"Watch it!"

Bolan could see the two men who had stepped from the truck toting weapons, moving double-time.

Bolan squeezed the trigger of the AutoMag. The .44 slug twirled one guy into a dead man's spin and pitched him to the ground in an awkward tumble.

The gunner on the ground and the guy inside the cab each pegged off a burst at Bolan. He went down for an instant as the incoming rounds bounced off the body of the Vette.

He came up again, but the driver had disappeared. The Executioner fired a shot at the cab, shattering the truck's windshield, and he knew instinctively that the slug had not found meat.

Then the cops were moving toward the scene from three separate directions: down the road leading from the Lincoln Memorial and from north and south along the stretch of a suddenly very busy parkway.

A commanding voice, indistinguishable at first, snarled orders from a loudspeaker atop one of the advancing police cruisers.

Bolan palmed a fresh magazine into the AutoMag and held his position.

* * *

"All of you men, put down your weapons!" Captain Don Sprague snarled a second time into the handmike, his voice carrying across the second battle scene he'd seen in the past couple of hours. "This is the police."

Damn, thought Sprague. We're heading straight into it.

He eyed the killzone as they approached it from slightly higher ground.

The tractor-trailer rig was parked across the road. Sprague counted five bodies along the parkway, and he'd just seen one biker stiffed by the big guy in black crouched behind the Corvette. Another dead man and one or possibly two live ones could be seen around the truck rig. Blood and stringy guts glistened, sparkling across patches of pavement in the glow of a rising sun.

Sprague glanced at his driver.

"Get us as close as you can on that knoll, Charlie. But keep yourself under cover."

The uniformed driver led the pack of three police cars that followed Sprague's unmarked one to form a loose line looking down on a very tense, soundless scene.

Sprague could almost smell the fuse burning as he and his driver climbed from their vehicle and sighted handguns along the trunk and hood of the car. Men from the other cruisers did the same, but those officers were aiming pump shotguns. What's going to happen next, the Orgcrime cop wondered.

Other police cars closed off the parkway to all traffic from north and south. The SWAT team hadn't arrived yet, and the chopper he'd called in for was nowhere in sight.

Another question played tag through Sprague's analytical mind.

The riddle of all that had happened in the town since midnight. Déjà vu tremors would not let Sprague alone.

So his name is Phoenix — the guy down there looking kill-ready — as Sprague now damn well knew him to be, waiting for the next roll of the dice.

Phoenix.

The name had crackled over the radio, as cool as, well, as cool as the guy behind that Vette, thought Sprague.

Phoenix.

The man responsible for all those dead men around the home of General Crawford. Mafia hoods.

Phoenix, thought Sprague.

Damn you, Phoenix.

Are you Bolan?

The death of Mack Bolan, the Executioner, had seemed so damn genuine when Sprague saw the news on TV; the Executioner's charred War Wagon in Central Park, all of it. He'd even had copies of the official NYPD reports and those of two government investigative agencies channeled to his desk for his personal review, and the thing had seemed airtight.

Right.

Except this is the age, the city, of hocus-pocus, outranking even Hollywood in that privilege, because around Sprague's block, they played this shit for real.

So Bolan is dead and Phoenix is raising hell with paramilitary hits against Mafia hoods, thought Sprague.

Right.

He would get to the bottom of this. Damn straight. The Orgcrime specialist smelled setup.

First things first, though.

Sprague crouched there with his .38 Police Special aimed across the hood of his car, looking over the scene below while he spoke into the PA mike, its cord stretching out from inside the car.

"One last time, all of you men down there, throw down your weapons and step forward with your hands raised. This is your last warning."

Sprague's voice echoed across the sun-warmed scene of river and greenery.

An inarticulate snarl came from the cab of the tractor-trailer rig, followed by the single blast of gunfire from somewhere near the truck.

"Agh!"

The gasp came from next to Sprague. He looked. Charlie the driver had not sought enough cover. The uniformed man tumbled back, his mouth frozen open in a startled O of shock, his left eye a fountaining geyser of spurting red.

Oh, my God, thought Sprague.

He spoke into the PA mike again.

"They've killed a cop," he screamed. "Open fire!"

Okay, Bolan or Phoenix, you got a good cop killed, Sprague's mind raged. Now you have to deal with...

* * *

Bolan had been gauging the police presence boxing him in when Sprague ordered his men to open fire.

In that fractured splinter of time the warrior saw the silk-suited figure pull himself back into the trailer rig's cabin after firing the shot that killed Sprague's driver on the knoll. In that instant, the mental mug file implanted in Bolan's psyche from his Mafia war days went to work. The Executioner had changed his looks and name and life, but not the habits he had developed to keep himself alive and dangerous all those Mafia days.

Yeah, Bolan knew Silk Suit.

The punk's name was Jimmy Needles.

Sicko.

Sprague's order had not even registered with his man when The Executioner swung Big Thunder Jimmy Needles's way and blew the bastard into welldeserved eternity. The jolt plastered the hood against the truck's door as exploding brains splattered the huge semi-trailer's cab.

That left one of the thugs.

Behind the truck.

The gunman opened fire, as a score of cops commenced riddling the semi-trailer rig, temporarily forgetting the man at the Vette, seeing that he had capped a cop killer.

Bolan grabbed the briefcase of money from the Worldway hit and dodged away from the Vette. He scrambled down a small incline that took him below the line of vision of those above. He spotted a drainage pipe, big enough for a man to move through and needed for channeling heavy-rain runoff into the Potomac. It was bone dry now. The drainage tunnel ran beneath the parkway and Bolan guessed it would come out well behind the police lines.

He crouched and moved hurriedly through the long dark stretch of piping.

Overhead, the gunfire trailed away to nothing.

Bolan emerged into daylight.

And came face-to-face with a heavyset, salt-and-pepper crew-cut guy in his fifties.

The guy wore cop like a name tag. He'd been the one Bolan saw giving directives over the PA moments ago. He now stood waiting for Bolan, not threateningly but with his right arm extended straight down at his side, gripping a .38 Police Special.

"Hold it right there, hotshot."

Bolan paused, Big Thunder also aimed toward the ground. Bolan scanned the parkway. Most of the cops had left the cover of their cars and approached the scene of the trailer rig and the Corvette. Others went to investigate the bikers who'd lost it on the parkway.

Cop and Executioner were alone in their confrontation several hundred yards from the other activity.

"My name is Phoenix," Bolan told the cop.

"I know." Sprague identified himself by name to the fighter in black. "I'm the Orgcrime skipper in this town. You and I need to have ourselves a talk."

Bolan holstered the AutoMag.

Sprague did not holster his weapon.

Two men locked gazes like dueling steel.

"Some other time, Sprague," Bolan replied, as he started past the cop. "You've cleared me if you followed through the procedure I instructed over the radio."

"They cleared you," Sprague acknowledged, not breaking eye contact. "Now you prove something to me, hotshot, and you go nowhere till you do."

Bolan did not want trouble with cops, certainly not in his Phoenix persona, and he read Sprague as sharp and honest. Bolan instinctively liked the guy.

"Okay, Sprague. We'll scratch each other's back. I tagged Jimmy Needles back there."

"I saw that. We appreciate it. He killed a good cop. That's not what we're talking about."

"Riappi still run things in this town?"

The cop flared.

"The people run this town, mister. Riappi has what he calls a family, but it's nothing like the old days when his Uncle Gus gave us grief. That's what we talk about, Colonel." Sprague emphasized the last word with a touch of cynicism. "Let's talk about a couple of years ago and a hotshot named Bolan."

Bolan remained impassive, but he still admired this devoted officer.

It had happened before, Bolan's name and past hurled into the face of John Phoenix. A few had recognized him, a few more had guessed and most of them were dead, so it was nothing new. But it made the Phoenix mission extra delicate at times. Like right now.

The SWAT team had arrived on the death scene. It would not be long before attention would be diverted to the men confronting each other in this culvert.

"I don't think you're grasping the priorities here, Captain." Bolan put a hard edge into his voice. "I suggest you allow me to exit tactfully here and now, or a lot of very official repercussions and embarrassments from on high are going to come down right on your head."

"You think I give a damn about your fucking political pull, hotshot?" Sprague bristled. "I've had it up to here with characters like you making a mockery out of the law in this town. I saw what looked like a Nam battlefield earlier in Potomac. I saw another slaughter, a black woman and her kids, two hours ago. Now that." He jerked his thumb in the direction of the carnage near the truck. "I'm about to puke from what you people are doing to the system in this town. Goddammit, the system is what holds this civilization together. You got a better way this many million people can get along?"

Something the cop said wrapped an icy fist around Bolan's gut.

"The woman and her family..."

Sprague's granite face turned sour.

"Cara Brown," he intoned from a memorized report. "Twenty-eight, held two jobs, dispatcher for a cab company and worked at a laundromat, divorced, three kids, eldest son, Joey aged twelve, two infant daughters. Gunned down while they were getting into their car outside the tenement where they lived. Suitcases all packed. Looked as if they were pulling out. Don't worry, I don't have you fingered for that."

Sprague tracked his .38 up on John Phoenix. "Enough. You're coming downtown with me, pal. I want fingerprints and any other form of id I can think of to trace you back to a guy named Bolan, and I don't give a shit about your White House pull. If you are Bolan, by God, I'll..."

The man who was Bolan never allowed weapons to be pointed at him, by anybody.

Bolan executed a fast martial-arts kick that sent the .38 Special spinning from the cop's hand. Sprague made an instinctive move to recover the pistol, Bolan moved in with a swift karate chop that caught Sprague behind the ear. Bolan caught the police captain before he hit the ground and gently laid him on the grass. The Executioner figured the officer would be out no more than five or six minutes.

Bolan picked up the briefcase and jogged away from there.

A police helicopter approached the parkway from the southeast but did not see Bolan as he merged with the crush of state and government workers moving briskly to their jobs.

He moved among them, putting distance between himself and the battleground along the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway and a cop named Sprague.

Bolan knew what his next step had to be.

It would be the most audacious penetration yet in a long career of audacity. And like those other times, this upcoming thrust would really have nothing to do with audacity at all — except as a tool. There was just no other way.

Bolan had to penetrate the White House.

In broad daylight.

He'd find Hal Brognola and General Crawford and Lee Farnsworth there and, yes, the President of the United States.

The nightscorcher had to tear this thing apart where he found it, and that's where answers would be found.

He had no answers right now.

Bolan seethed with a rage that kept him wound tight, like a grenade with the pin pulled and seconds left to detonation.

A twelve-year-old named Joey.

Twenty-five grand from a stranger in black had not been enough to get the kid and his mom and sisters out of their ghetto existence, away from the likes of Dimitri and Pavlik. Those scum only understood one thing — death.

Joey had been strong, stronger than some men Bolan knew; he realized that much from those few tense moments at the Worldway offices.

But Joey and his hard-working mother had not been strong enough to escape the clutches of those who had decided to cancel the loose ends of their failed operation just for the hell of it — loose ends who had only wanted a way out and now were dead forever.

Add them to the tab.

Along with April and Konzaki and those other friends and allies who had died on the night of the Stony Man attack, and the wounded, like Bear Kurtzman, and the scared, like Tom Ginty.

Bolan hailed a cab and gave the address of a safehouse where he could make necessary alterations in his appearance for his penetration of the White House.

Bolan would not walk in as John Phoenix.

There was too much of a chance they would try to make him stay.

Anyone's life could be sacrificed for a look at the list Bolan toted in an inside coat pocket.

That list, yeah.

Turn it over to the authorities, or use it as The Executioner had used his knowledge of Mafia and terrorist activities in his fight since the beginning. Keep Strakhov's KGB list, or turn it over?

That would depend on who the mole was.

In the safehouse, Bolan showered, then prepared himself for what he had planned so carefully. He stashed the briefcase containing what could be the beginnings of a new war chest for The Executioner. He estimated the contents of the bag to be close to half a million dollars. A good start in any league.

Bolan had the feeling that today, whatever it brought, would change his life.

In a more important way, though, a day like any other for this man on his strange, violent odyssey through life.

A day for living large.

A new day for The Executioner.

10

Hal Brognola strode, lost in thought, along the walkway past the Rose Garden. Stony Man's White House liaison squinted against the early-morning sunshine and fired up his first cigar of the day.

At this moment, the President would perhaps be attending a staff meeting somewhere in the White House.

Brognola had spent enough time at the executive mansion to know that it had sleeping quarters for situations exactly like this when people are required around the clock, but with dead times such as these to accommodate the President's schedule.

Lee Farnsworth had turned in after the briefing with the President about Brognola's midnight meet with Bolan and, so far as Brognola knew, Farnsworth had not left his guest room since then.

Crawford had rushed home immediately upon receiving word of the shooting and deaths that had occurred in and around his residence — and the disappearance of his daughter — and had not yet returned.

Brognola had been unable to sleep.

Everything that meant anything to Brognola, including his sense of worth in the eyes of his wife and family, had gotten all twisted up in what was going down in Washington.

He needed answers.

He needed to talk with Mack Bolan.

There's an Executioner in town, and he's busy at his trade, Brognola thought. Too damn busy to realize the whole Phoenix thing could fall like a house of cards in a hurricane if today happens wrong. Or does he realize it and just does not give a damn?

Brognola did not have a clue, and it irritated the hell out of him.

He did know Mack Bolan had not been the same since April Rose died in Bolan's arms.

With a thing like that to carry, who wouldn't change? But did the change include Bolan turning his back altogether on the Stony Man operation and White House sanction?

Somehow, and he could not explain why, Brognola did not believe Bolan would take that course of action. He had expected, well, he'd expected they'd just go on until Bolan suggested a new direction, then the Stony Man group would accommodate the big guy, whatever it may be, when the time came. But this, Brognola now realized, was assuming that Bolan continued to remain a team player.

There was the matter of the mole to be considered. The mole had to be rooted out, but it had to be done the way everything in government was done: by team playing. There were too many agencies, too many disparate interests, not to have the whole ball coordinated.

But with the death of April, the man now known as John Phoenix had changed, yes. Brognola did not like it. He didn't like any of it. Not at all.

A white House aide approached, extending a cordless walkabout phone.

"A call, sir."

Brognola took the device.

"Brognola."

Let it be Bolan.

It wasn't.

"Don Sprague," a voice said.

"What can I do for you, Captain? I thought you and I were done with each other for a while."

"Sure you did. You got a verification request on a Colonel Phoenix a little while ago."

"I did."

"I'm down here on the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway," Sprague continued. "There are twelve dead men down here, Brognola. That's twenty-six dead today, and it's not even nine o'clock yet. You think the media looked bloodthirsty at Crawford's? Man, this town is going to shake over this. So is a certain presidential administration."

"What's the connection between the Crawford thing and what you've got?"

"Mafia is the connection," Sprague replied. "And a guy we discussed a while ago who's supposed to be dead."

"Mack Bolan is dead, Captain."

"So you say. I want Phoenix, that's what I say, Brognola. The man assaulted a police officer, namely me, and he's tied right in to those twenty-six homicides, and you damn well know it."

"Don't push this, Captain."

"Don't threaten me, VIP, it doesn't work. I'm saying Phoenix is Mack Bolan. Nothing's hit this town like what's happened this morning since the last time that guy blazed through. You can't change a man's fingerprints. I'm digging to the bottom of this."

"Why?" Brognola asked in a different tone.

Sprague did not give.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means, what is Phoenix doing that you don't like? I take it these twelve dead you're talking about, if they're anything like the first fourteen, were not, shall we say, leading lights of the community."

"Okay, VIP, I'll explain it to you just once." Sprague sounded weary all of a sudden, the way Hal felt. "I've invested thirty years of my life as a cop in this town, dedicated to the proposition that the law works. It's not perfect, but it's the best system we've got and it's the way we do things around here. I'm not going to have thirty years turned to shit by this Phoenix guy. I don't want a government-subsidized killer strutting around my city blowing away whatever private citizen he doesn't happen to take a liking to. That's not the way to do it around here. I don't think our taxpayers want that, either. Is that enough of a speech, Brognola?"

"It'll do, but you don't get Phoenix. I don't know where he is myself at the moment, Captain."

"I'd like to believe you."

"You can."

"Uh-huh. Okay, when you see Phoenix, tell him what I said. This is between him and me. He made it that way with that damn karate chop of his that punched me out. I'm not going to stop until I prove or disprove the Bolan connection. You tell him that.''

"I'll tell him, Sprague, you damn fool."

"We'll see," said one brave cop, and the connection went dead in Brognola's ear.

* * *

Sprague delivered a clear, concise report of the situation to the department's deputy chief, and an assistant from the district attorney's office and Clem Walker, a SWAT team leader.

Morning sunshine angled through the windows, warming the office of the number-two man on the Washington force, but doing nothing to thaw the frosty mood as the men listened to Sprague's report.

Sprague started with being pulled from a cozy bed at 4:00 a.m. to identify fourteen Mafia stiffs in and around the residence of Brigadier General James Crawford, retired. He related his conversation with Brognola and tossed in his thoughts linking the MO to the Bolan Effect. Then he brought his listeners up to date on happenings at the town house of Soviet embassy aide Maxim Pavlik, the murder of two as yet unidentified males in Pavlik's Cadillac, and the subsequent battle on the parkway.

Sprague completed the report with a wry, "As you can see, gentlemen, it's been a busy morning."

The deputy chief, seated behind his desk, packed a blackened briar pipe with tobacco from a leather pouch and did not look happy.

"The Soviets are raising hell, and the damn Feds stonewall us. Caught in the middle again."

The district attorney's man leaned forward intently.

"We've angled into something big, that's for damn sure. The White House all of a sudden is interested in Jimmy Needles. Captain Sprague, have we heard anything at all about a KGB-Mafia tie-in in this town?"

"No, but that doesn't mean a damn thing," the Orgcrime skipper said. "This is buried too deep for the grapevine to carry. But there's plenty at stake, or all those hoods wouldn't be dead. Riappi is the one factor we're sure of. I say concentrate on him."

"The dead men from this morning that we've been able to id have all been traced," the lawyer from the DA's office interjected. "There are no direct links from any of them to Riappi. Most were supposed to be employees of a licensed security service — even Jimmy Needles, Lou's yardman. Jimmy must've screwed up royally to be sent out on a head-hunting mission."

Walker, the SWAT teamer, spoke.

"I'd guess Jimmy's screwup was whatever the hell happened at General Crawford's. By now, every trace that Jimmy ever existed will have been wiped out from inside the walls of Riappi's estate. That's why I think Jack's suggestion is the one to ride with, and fast."

"Let's hear it, Jack," the deputy chief urged from a cloud of pipe smoke.

"Riappi and Jimmy Needles had the Russians' help in trying to kill Phoenix this morning, unless I'm reading this all wrong. And I don't think I am," Sprague offered before the DA's aide had a chance to speak. "That's where the White House connection comes in. Brognola and this guy Phoenix, and whoever they represent, are working some operation against the Soviets, and Riappi fits into it."

The assistant DA had no trouble picking up the train of thought.

"You want to stake out Riappi's home and wait until Phoenix shows up."

"Exactly." Sprague nodded to the SWAT boss. "That's where Walker comes in. We stake out Riappi. We've got no cause to go busting in there as it is, but my guess is that Phoenix will hit that Mafia site with the same style and execution as the two actions we've already seen this morning. When that happens, we've got plenty of cause to march in and tie it up in one neat package."

The district attorney's man looked skeptical. "That would be a first, but it could happen. I say do it."

The deputy chief forgot about his pipe. He looked almost convinced.

"We're screwing with the White House, let's not have anyone forget that. This could be our careers on the line."

"Not to mention some of our lives," Walker commented quietly. "We'd best get rolling on this. Whoever Phoenix is, he moves fast. Twenty-six dead in two hours. I'm taking two teams on this."

The men stood. The deputy chief and the DA's man walked Sprague and the SWAT leader to the door.

"If we could count on the Feds to nail Riappi along with whatever Russian angle they're working, I'd say no," the deputy chief commented. "But the Feds have never worked clean with us, damn spy games and politics, and I don't think anyone in this office believes that twenty-six bodies should litter the streets of this city without an explanation to the taxpayers."

"The taxpayers'll get what they pay for this time," Walker grunted.

The DA's man locked eyes with Sprague's an instant before he and Walker exited the office.

"I'm curious, Captain. What will you do about John Phoenix if he is Mack Bolan?"

Sprague's eyes went flint tough. So did his voice.

"I don't know," the Orgcrime captain admitted. "But I've got a real strong feeling I'm going to find out before today is over."

11

Maxim Pavlik wondered if he and Alexei Rosstov had made a profound error in judgment in agreeing to this face-to-face encounter with Lou Riappi on Riappi's home ground.

The D.C. area KGB supervisor and his bodyguard had been spirited away from his Georgetown town house in a tinted-glass limo much like the one Pavlik usually used.

It had all been the idea of the man who now stood facing Pavlik and Rosstov from behind a cleared desk. The two Russian embassy "aides" were shown into the private library of the man who, Pavlik knew on verified authority, controlled all Mafia operations in the Washington area.

As the Soviet men stepped forward, Pavlik did note one object on Lou Riappi's desk: a .45-caliber automatic pistol.

A heavyset, graying man in his mid-fifties locked the double library doors behind them, then folded his arms across his chest and stood with his back to the entrance, as if defying Pavlik or Rosstov to try to leave without permission.

Pavlik glanced sideways at Rosstov, but he could not read his bodyguard's marblelike gaze.

It had been Riappi's idea to spring the trap on John Phoenix when the dangerous meddler attempted to make contact with Pavlik at his Georgetown residence. It had seemed a clever move to Pavlik at the time. But now, the Russian could not be so sure.

Pavlik felt no small amount of satisfaction knowing Riappi's man, the odious Jimmy Needles, had gone about substituting two others as decoys while a professional, almost paramilitary, hit team would spring the trap when Phoenix showed.

Pavlik privately considered this a favor to his friend and colleague, Greb Strakhov.

The death of John Phoenix would once and for all avenge the killing of Strakhov's son at Phoenix's hand and perhaps bring peace to Strakhov's tortured soul.

Pavlik hoped so, but now he felt a sense of panic inside that perhaps he had given Riappi too much power; fear of Pavlik's KGB overlords, including Strakhov, had, Pavlik now realized with a flash of clarity that ached, made Pavlik overly cautious in his dealings with Riappi.

Too much caution is as bad as too little; worse, Pavlik realized with the same clarity. Too much caution breeds overconfidence, making it easy to be sucked into a trap like the one in this innocent-appearing library of a very dangerous man. A terrible mistake.

He had started to feel the warning tremor up and down his spine when the chauffeured limo ferried them onto the walled grounds of Riappi's estate. From inside, the grounds had appeared to Pavlik to be like a military installation ready for an enemy attack.

Pavlik lost count of the soldiers he saw toting weapons; tough, vicious-looking men he saw on the short drive from the front gate to the main house. Then there had been the humiliation of having been kept waiting.

How odd, the KGB agent reflected briefly. I feel more threatened, more vulnerable, in this supposed sanctum of letters and learning with only these two men and that .45 to contend with. Of course the middle-aged man by the door would be armed and ready, too.

Pavlik wished like hell that he could read Rosstov's mind. Did the bodyguard have a plan? Pavlik had too long ago been relieved from his duties as an active operative, working his way up to a desk job. He felt a pang of something he had never felt in the old days.

Fear.

"I am not accustomed to being kept waiting, my friend," was Pavlik's opening remark to Lou Riappi.

"Can it," Riappi snarled. "We're not friends. This is all business, understand."

Pavlik quickly realized he had chosen the wrong approach; he tried not to show the panic he felt constricting his throat muscles, making it difficult to speak. He cursed inwardly at having to clear his throat. He was sure the Mafia boss could smell his fright.

"I was hoping, Mr. Riappi, that by this stage in our enterprise we had transcended the concept of associates and had come to regard each other as, perhaps, a bit more."

"You're a slimeball Commie," Riappi barked. "You come up with anything yet on who hit our contact boys this morning?"

Stung, Pavlik kept a straight face.

"I am sorry, no, but Alexei here and myself have taken steps to cancel the loose ends that remained from Dimitri's operation."

Pavlik thought of the black boy, Joey, who had run messages for Dimitri and knew faces and names. There could be no chances taken. Pavlik and Rosstov had traced the boy to his family in the city's sprawling ghetto. Rosstov did the work. Pavlik banished the vision from his mind. He had lost his taste for such things.

"You damn well better. If I hadda do it over again, buster, I'd never deal with you Reds."

"Believe me, the feeling is mutual," the Russian replied stiffly. "But you needed capital and, to put it even more bluntly, I had use of the white powdered death your kind deal in. Dimitri's operation at Worldway gave us access to countless wholesale outlets. So you see, we are two of a kind, you and I. We are partners, and as partners, if not friends, I would like to know what has become of our mutual enemy, Colonel Phoenix."

Riappi grabbed a moment's pause by sinking himself back into the chair behind his desk. Then the Mafia capo leaned forward, elbow on the desk; his eyes did not blink from the Russians standing before him.

"We're not partners," Riappi rasped. "Not anymore. Get that through your thick skulls, both of you. As for Phoenix, he's, uh, still on the loose, but we're going to get another crack at him real soon."

Rosstov, who had been listening to the exchange, remained impassive.

"Not partners?" Pavlik echoed, momentarily nonplussed. "Perhaps you had better explain. Whom do you think you are dealing with? I am not without considerable influence, as you well know, with the power behind me of..."

Behind the Russians, still at the door, Sal Valachi chuckled without much humor.

"You sure are a wordy bastard, guy."

Pavlik stopped his speech but could not stop the maggots of foreboding gnawing at his insides.

"Nonetheless, the, ah, Phoenix problem concerns both of us, does it not? Why do we not utilize each other's resources?"

"I said can it, so can it," Riappi snapped. "All deals between us are off. I don't give squat for who or what you got behind you, understand, boy? You guys are tired old spies on my turf. I got muscle in this town to squash you."

Alexei Rosstov exploded into action.

The hulking bodyguard moved low and fast to his left, putting himself midway between the man behind the desk and Valachi.

Rosstov pawed under his sports jacket for the shoulder-holstered Walther PPK .380 automatic he carried in a speed rig.

Riappi reacted like a striking snake.

His hand clawed the butt of the .45 on his desk and swung the automatic in an upward track that followed Alexei Rosstov all the way.

Riappi triggered the .45.

The automatic bucked in the capo's fist. The acoustics of the library's book-lined walls muffled the report as a pencil of orange flame spit a heavycaliber projectile aimed with marksman's skill at Rosstov's left eye. The screaming slug struck slightly off target, blowing away part of the Russian's forehead and face.

The impact spun the bodyguard, tossing his bulk backward to recline in an armchair that faced Riappi's desk. The dead man's head tilted at an acute angle far over the back of the chair, draining raw muck that stained his clothing and the furniture.

Pavlik did not reach for his own weapon.

It all happened too fast.

Valachi had moved from his position by the door even as Riappi fired. The aging mobster caught Pavlik from behind in a murderous mugger's throat grip. The consigliere had never lost his street reflexes. He could have crushed Pavlik's windpipe, killing him easily.

Valachi gripped the Russian only long enough to dip his free hand under the left lapel of Pavlik's jacket, relieving the KGB man of a Walther PPK identical to the one Rosstov still clutched in his hand.

The consigliere held the gun and pushed Pavlik away from him.

Pavlik stumbled a few feet, halted himself and invested another second or two comprehending the reality of the dead matter bleeding all over the armchair; dead matter that moments ago had been Pavlik's only hope out of this room.

He knew he was face to face with his own fate.

Pavlik looked from the corpse to the Mafia chieftain now seated behind the desk. The .45 automatic was aimed directly at a spot between Pavlik's eyes.

"What do you desire of me?" the Russian asked Riappi quietly, without inflection.

Riappi set down the .45 and leaned back in his chair, as if relaxing. His eyes did not relax.

"That's better. The only reason I've had to tangle with Phoenix is because I made the mistake of throwing in with you. You're the one he's after, Pavlik. I'm going to use that."

"But you have already used me as bait once this day," Pavlik protested. He felt a sheen of sweat turn cold across his forehead. "If Phoenix did not fall for the decoys at my town house, as you say, what makes you think..."

Riappi did not listen. He looked over Pavlik's shoulder at Valachi.

"Okay, Sal."

Pavlik turned, the fear of death draining his face of any color, but Valachi only grabbed his arm.

Riappi read the panic in the Russian's eyes.

"You're just frosting on the cake, Pavlik old buddy," Riappi said, chuckling. "See, we've got more bait, real bait, upstairs right now. Someone Phoenix feels real close to. A woman."

"Th-the general's daughter, Kelly?"

"Naw, not that one, you fool. Someone you don't even know about. A journalist. Someone asking tne wrong questions in one of my all-night joints early this morning. A sharpie who manages the dump for me had her backtracked, and now we got her upstairs, all locked away."

"And Crawford's daughter?"

"The hell with her," the Mob boss snapped. "That screwy thing at Crawford's place was your angle, not mine. This other bitch, Landry, she'll pull Phoenix in."

"And when that happens?"

"What do you think? You saw the way this place is hard. Phoenix will come for you and Landry, and this will be his last stop."

"This is your home..."

"Shut up and worry about yourself. Sal, take bait boy upstairs."

"Right," said Valachi.

He tugged Pavlik's shoulder forcefully.

Pavlik moved forward, but when he reached the door he used one last moment to turn and look at the man behind the desk.

"You could have killed me... as you did Alexei."

"Don't give me any trouble, and you'll walk away from this when it's done," Riappi promised. The young turk nodded absently to the corpse staining his armchair. "This stumblebum was just to get your attention. If you don't want to wind up like your comrade, you play ball. You read me loud and clear now?"

Pavlik regained some composure.

"Ah, most assuredly, I understand. In fact, in the elimination of Colonel Phoenix, you may consider me most obligingly at your service."

Riappi snorted.

"Get him out of my sight, Sal."

Valachi led Pavlik from the library.

"Okay, upstairs with the bimbo," Valachi said, propelling the hapless Russian in front of him.

"And Sal, get someone in here to clean up this mess, huh?"

Valachi sent a distasteful look at the lifeless form sprawled across the armchair. "Right, Lou. On the double." And he closed the library doors after himself and the unprotesting Pavlik.

Riappi avoided looking at the body in the chair. He went over to the liquor cabinet where he poured himself three fingers of whiskey. He admitted to himself that it was too early for a drink, but the hell with it.

He had a hunch he'd been dealt the hottest crisis to confront his organization since he had inherited it from his uncle.

The D.C. capo knew he had to handle Phoenix at his level in the chain of command within the Mob, or the crap would really hit the fan. And that's all Riappi would be if Leo "The Pussy" Turrin and those other hotshots on La Commissiόne's ruling council in New York got wind of his dealings with the likes of Pavlik.

Uh-huh, thought Riappi, Sal is straight on the money again about having to squash Phoenix before too much of this leaks to the top.

Riappi wondered if Valachi could be right about John Phoenix being Mack Bolan.

It could be, Riappi reasoned.

Dammit all, it just could be!

Riappi stood at the French windows of his library of unread books and gazed out at the heavily patrolled grounds of his sprawling property.

He sipped the whiskey and felt a warm glow spread through him. The warmth also came from the crazy idea of Valachi's that really did not sound so crazy the more he thought about it.

Riappi had no use for Pavlik and his Commie bunch. He would have killed Pavlik like he did the stooge in the armchair, except he had a hunch there would be some way a kidnapped KGB supervisor might be exploited monetarily.

These clowns aren't that tough, not if Pavlik is any indication, Riappi thought. He decided there could be real cash squeezed from that Red dummy. Then maybe he'd have Valachi cap the guy, maybe not.

And what about Phoenix?

And Mack Bolan?

Did the Executioner ride again?

Phoenix would come to this Mafia hardsite, the converted estate, in rural Maryland. Riappi had no doubt of that.

Phoenix would die here.

And if a dead Phoenix turned out to be Mack Bolan?

Riappi could not stop the grin that pulled seldom-used muscles in his lower face.

If he came forward to La Commissiόne with the head of Mack Bolan, the feared scourge that Turrin and the others had been duped into thinking was dead... If he came forward with Bolan's head in a sack, a man of Lou Riappi's ambitions could write his own ticket in the Organization from then on.

Come on, Phoenix, thought D.C.'s Mafia boss.

Come on, Bolan.

Let's do it one more time.

You black-suited bastard from Hell.

12

Hal Brognola watched as the President expertly fielded questions at a scheduled news conference on the White House lawn.

The President and a Third World dignitary in tribal dress shared a small podium with aides and security personnel. The chief executive and the African diplomat shook hands for the media, cordoned off some thirty feet away.

The clicking of cameras punctuated requests for more questions, but the President of the United States cut the session short and excused himself, accompanied back into the White House by tightly grouped Secret Service agents.

The cluster of media men and women began dispersing under the watchful eyes of other White House staffers.

From where he stood watching, Brognola sensed someone approaching him. He turned to find General Crawford.

The general looked worse for the wear he'd been through since midnight.

Hal asked the most important question first.

"Any word on Kelly?"

"Nothing. Just fourteen dead men slaughtered in my house and just down the street and ray daughter missing." The general's Arkansas drawl sounded strained. "I sure would like a talk with Phoenix... hell, you and I know who he is, Hal; let's call him Bolan. I wonder how long it will be before Farnsworth has to be told."

"That could be a big mistake," said Brognola. "The cat would be out of the bag then about the government-sponsored fake of Mack's death, the cover-up, the covert stuff. The President doesn't want that, does he?"

"I don't know what the President wants," Crawford snapped. "All I know is that I want my Kelly home safe."

"You're forgetting, General, we have no proof yet that Phoenix was involved in the action at your home."

"Come on, Hal," Crawford countered, "the man is back in town for what, ten hours? And already it's like a slaughterhouse out there. I want a talk with him, dammit, and so do you."

Brognola set a match to the stogie clamped in the corner of his mouth.

"Uh, you've got me there, sir. I'd like words with Mack, too."

"This masterlist of KGB operations he claims to have..."

"He has it."

"You think it's legitimate?"

"The man we code-named Striker does not strike like that, sir. You know that. Bolan strikes true. The list is real enough. It would give us enough to counter Soviet strategy anywhere in the world where it's Us against Them. That list will make all the difference."

"That's why I want the damned thing in the right hands," Crawford grumbled. "I know how Striker feels about having to hunt down the ones responsible for the attack on Stony Man and the deaths of those people. I understand because I feel the same way. But if Bolan is killed tonight before he turns over that list... Hal, we both know we can alter the course of history with what he's carrying.

"Other people know it, too. That list should have already been entrusted to us. The feeling of the advisory board is that the Phoenix program be allowed to continue with cosmetic modifications to satisfy Farnsworth. But Mack's vigilante actions could change everything."

"Could be, General, that none of this will mean diddley to the man we're talking about."

"Why's that?"

"Our man could be getting tired of government subsidy, for one thing. You know him as well, or even better than I do."

"Bolan should know better," Crawford drawled thoughtfully. "In the jungles, I taught him the importance of teamwork to the overall operation, always."

"There had to be a couple times when Striker bent or broke the rules even back then."

Crawford chuckled in spite of himself.

"Some notable times, and more than a couple. But this time the stakes are higher than a lousy jungle war."

"Yeah, but the principles are the same."

"The only principle I'm concerned with is that my daughter be returned home safely. Why in bloody hell is the Mafia of all things involved? Bolan is the man with the answers, and he owes us an explanation and that list of Strakhov's."

A new voice came from slightly to their right and behind them.

"Maybe Bolan would like some answers, too."

Brognola and General Crawford turned to confront one of the media people, most of whom had already left the grounds along the standard route.

The journalist who eavesdropped on Brognola's conversation with the general had drifted away from the pack, apparently without anyone's notice, and eased in from the two men's blind side.

Brognola eyeballed the big guy who was outfitted in casual attire with two cameras and a small tape recorder strapped around his neck. He wore sunglasses and his hair, with a touch of gray at the temples, was combed straight back from the forehead without a part. A bushy mustache adorned his otherwise cleanshaven face.

General Crawford bristled.

"You're off limits, mister."

Brognola touched the general's arm, not taking his gaze from the newcomer.

"Hold it, General. Speak of the devil," he said to the "photo journalist." "How do you do it, man? Unbelievable. The tightest security site in the world, for crying out loud."

Crawford got it then, too.

"Well done, mister," he said to Bolan, "however the hell you did it. Those media people are screened cleaner than clean."

"Tricks of the trade," Bolan grunted. "Let's make this fast." His nose twitched above the fake mustache. "Damn face spinach is driving me crazy."

Brognola looked around. The three of them were out of earshot.

"Uh, unfortunate choice of words, Striker. What you're pulling tonight is being considered crazy by a lot of people."

Crawford's drawl turned into a growl. "I don't know how much of my conversation with Hal you overheard, Striker, but I want my daughter back. Now where is she?"

"She's safe, General. Kelly is where she wants to be for right now. That's all you have to know."

"It's not all by a damn sight," Crawford grumbled. "I demand an explanation of what happened tonight."

"I can only give you part of it," replied Bolan, "because that's all I've got. I came here for some of the rest."

"Let's hear it," Brognola urged.

Bolan locked stares with Crawford.

"Your daughter thinks you mean to harm her. She's under the impression you may have sent those Mafia hoods I took out tonight. They were trying to kill her when I arrived."

Crawford's jaw dropped.

"I sent them? Why, that's outrageous. Why would Kelly think such a thing?"

" Remember the night you found her going through your desk?"

Comprehension arid something else caused the general's expression to pale.

"Oh, God. My little baby... how far apart my daughter and I have grown, and I never realized it until now." Then he blinked away the emotion and looked at Bolan again. "And you won't tell me where she is because you think she might be right, is that it?"

"That's it, General."

"Then I take it you still don't have a solid make on this Russian mole," Brognola said.

"It's one of you White House VIPs," Bolan answered. "That's the only way it plays, Hal."

"Play it for me then."

"Only a handful of people had the inside intel it took to feed Al Miller what he needed to stage the attack on Stony Man. You people. Before the Macek thing in Zubrovna, General, I asked you for a security backcheck on Farnsworth. I went to your house tonight to get that report. That's why I'm here now."

"Everything on Farnsworth checked out," the general told Bolan. "We scanned everything back to the man's grade-school days."

"If you can invent a man like you did John Phoenix," said Bolan, "then a living, breathing being could doctor a whole new history with enough cover to stand the double-check."

"What do you mean, you?" Brognola asked. "I don't like the sound of that word. Are you one of us, Mack?"

Crawford's jawline hardened.

"And if you are, hand over that list Hal says you have."

"We'll know those answers in a little while," Bolan countered. "Maxim Pavlik is the connection between the mole and Miller's attack on Stony Man, and a drug deal between Pavlik's people and the Mob."

"So that's the tie-in with Riappi."

"Part of it, but it goes deeper. I hoped you'd have something on Farnsworth. I had to find that out first. You don't. So the next step is still Pavlik and that means Lou Riappi."

"There's something you should know, and it's not good," Brognola said. "The local police are angry that we haven't briefed them on all this killing that's been going on. There's a cop..."

"Sprague. I know. He's onto it, Hal. I've got a hunch about this one. This could be the last mission for John Phoenix, whether I pull through all right or not."

"That's a bit extreme, isn't it, soldier?" Crawford grumbled. "What about the list?"

"Later. I'm leaving now. I trust both of you to keep this conversation between us."

"Then you don't believe the things Kelly thinks about me," said the general. "Good. Tell her to contact me, please, Mack. I understand what you're doing. It's what you have to do."

The "journalist" fired a glance over Crawford's shoulder.

"We've got company."

Brognola and Crawford glanced along the walkway behind them.

Lee Farnsworth approached from a side door of the White House.

"Gentlemen," the CFB chief said to Brognola and Crawford, "the President wishes to see us now."

Brognola tried not to look nervous. He looked back to explain or say something to a role-camouflaged Bolan.

He should have known better.

The "media man" had disappeared.

13

Bolan shed his journalist cover and made a routine check of Susan Landry's home phone. After many rings, Kelly Crawford answered and tearfully begged him to hurry over.

Bolan watched Kelly pacing the living room of Susan's town house like a caged animal. He listened to what she had to say.

He had arrived at Susan's residence moments ago.

She was gone.

Kelly wore one of Susan's outfits, and it looked good on her. The young woman told Bolan what had happened, but she never stopped walking.

"Susan showed me her closet where her clothes were and told me to help myself. Then she showed me where the shower was and left me alone. When I came out, she was gone."

"No note, nothing?"

"Nothing," Kelly acknowledged in a brittle voice. "I'm sorry. I... didn't think something like this would happen. She did leave on her own, didn't she, Colonel?"

"No way anyone followed us here, kid."

"Maybe it's something that doesn't involve us," Kelly offered. "Maybe something else Susan is working on came back at her."

Bolan considered this.

"Too much coincidence," he decided. "She left on her own. I suppose this happened after you told her what happened at your home?"

"Yes. You... said it was all right, remember, when you dropped me off before you left."

Bolan felt like pacing, too. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth instead and fired it up.

"That lady is too sharp for me," he muttered through a cloud of smoke.

"Where do you think she is, Colonel?"

"I don't know. I only know she thinks she's hot on the trail of a story. She should've stayed here like I thought she would. Damn."

Kelly stopped.

"What do you and Susan mean to each other, if it's not too trivial a question."

"I'll let you know when I figure it out," Bolan replied. He moved toward the door. "I've got to pick up her scent."

The ringing of a phone in the kitchen stopped him in his tracks. He felt Kelly's eyes watching him. He grabbed the receiver.

He said nothing.

"I wanna talk to Phoenix," a voice snarled.

Bolan felt his fist tighten around the receiver.

"You've got him."

There was a snicker from the other end.

"Thought there'd be a chance I'd find you there. Phoenix. If I didn't, I was gonna give the message to anybody. You'd get it soon enough."

"Who is this?"

"This is Lou Riappi." The statement confirmed what Bolan knew. "I got the Landry woman."

"Sure you do."

Another snicker.

Then Susan's voice.

Not speaking.

Screaming.

Then the connection went dead.

He hung up the phone and started toward the door.

"Wh-where are you going?" Kelly asked uncertainly.

"Someone wants me," said the warrior on his way out. "They tried once today. You think they'd learn."

"Wait!" Kelly rushed him and grabbed his sleeve. "What am I supposed to do?"

"What Susan should've done. Keep your pretty head down. It might not hurt finding another place to hide for a while."

"My father..."

"Put everything on hold for now," Bolan advised her.

"You think I was right? My own father is involved..."

He paused in the open doorway, turned and looked down into the young woman's fresh, beautiful, very worried face. He had grown fond of her.

"There's no time to talk now, and I don't want you in the line of fire, Kelly."

"Okay, Colonel. I understand. I'll get away from here. I'll stay to myself. But will it be... for long? I mean, like for days?"

"Try a few hours," Bolan told her. "Contact a man named Kurtzman." He told her the name of the hospital where she could find him. "Kurtzman will tell you when it's safe to come in."

"But, Colonel... is my father involved as a spy?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "I'm on my way to find out. Good luck, Kelly."

"You too, Colonel," she said as she watched him stalk away.

* * *

Susan Landry could feel the Russian pig's eyes undressing her as she sat tensely on the edge of the bed.

She had been a journalist around Washington long enough to place his accent.

The man sat backward on a wooden chair. His eyes made her skin crawl, but Landry saw a way she could use the lust gleaming there.

Her fellow prisoner had been roughly shoved into the bedroom where they had locked Susan away.

The bedroom was feminine enough, some lace but not too much, and Landry wondered who they must have kept here: there were bars on the windows and a lock on the door, which opened only once when the man now stripping her with his eyes had been brought in to join her.

He looked Western enough at first glance, but the fashionable cut of suit and stylized hair did nothing to hide that lustful gaze.

Pig eyes, she thought again.

"If you're going to stare at me, could we at least talk?" she said to him.

"Of course." The man smiled slightly, not a nice smile, and continued running his gaze over her. "Despite my, ah, shall we say abrupt entrance just now, believe me, you are in worst trouble than I, miss. I know it for a fact. You do understand this?"

"Where am I?"

"Does it matter? I am a man of means. I assure you I have much to bargain with. I... can help you, my dear."

Susan put what she hoped was the right mixture of doubt and caution into her reply as she appeared to consider.

"You... can get me out of here?"

"Perhaps, yes."

"What... do you want me to do?"

She wondered what the lecherous Russian had up his sleeve.

"Ah, wonderful. You are beginning to take my meaning. For a start, perhaps, you could stand and remove your clothing while I watch."

There it is.

Landry stood and faced the stranger. She tried not to think of what she should have done, like not leaving the young woman Phoenix had entrusted to her and venturing into the after-hours bar that she knew had Mob connections. Whispers of the killings at the Crawford home were sure to be fresh enough to pick up and funnel into a story. Pulitzer material. Sure. For being locked in a room with a goddamn pervert, type Russian.

She heard someone, it must have been herself, give a long resigned sigh, and she stood and lifted her fingers to undo the top button of her blouse and work downward.

The journalist forced herself to take a sinuous, undulating step toward the transfixed creep in the chair.

He probably thought all women were to exploit anyway, so why not enjoy the vulnerable victim while he waited in the bedroom with her. Or had he been put here specifically for this? Somehow, thought Landry, it doesn't matter, not with a pig like this.

No Phoenix to the rescue this time, girl, Landry told herself.

She got close enough to smell the man.

Not even a Mack Bolan to count on, like all those years ago...

The last button of her blouse came undone, and Susan started to slip it from her shoulders. But just as the creamy tops of her breasts came into view, she glided behind him. She instinctively knew this was just what the creep liked.

When she was out of his view, Landry removed her blouse all the way and draped it teasingly over the Russian's shoulder.

"But, darling," she forced herself to say, "wouldn't you at least like to know my name?"

The man did not look around at her. He snickered smugly.

"Hardly. I am only interested in using you, my dear. Now. Take care of me."

"With pleasure," Landry snarled.

The tone of her voice caused the Russian to turn. His eyes widened when he saw the heavy, longnecked decanter the woman was grabbing from the vanity behind him.

She swung the decanter with all her might and she heard something break, not the decanter, when the heavy carved-glass container caught him in the left temple with a snapping sound.

His eyes rolled back in his head, and a strange noise rattled in his chest. He toppled sideways out of the chair and fell heavily onto the floor. Landry hoped the sound did not carry downstairs.

The Russian lay still.

She put on her blouse. Then, still cautiously, she took a closer took at the man. A thin trickle of red snaked from his ear.

Dead.

Too bad.

Landry rolled him over to see if he had a wallet. She found it inside a coat pocket. She quickly inspected it.

Maxim Pavlik.

Russian embassy.

"Great, Landry," she said aloud. "Just great."

The thump of the dead man collapsing to the floor did not bring any response from beyond the locked door of the bedroom prison.

Three hoods had short-circuited her at the afterhours club when she made the mistake of asking the wrong question of the wrong person.

Now, here she was.

But she had read her captors well enough.

Mafia.

And this place they kept her in was an estate somewhere just across the Maryland line.

She'd seen watchful, patrolling gunmen everywhere she had looked.

Landry understood it now.

They were using her to trap the man she had such confused feelings for.

John Phoenix.

Phoenix would come for her, she now realized.

And they would both die.

There was no way one man could assault this walled fortress and effectively deal with all the firepower she'd seen out there.

Not even John Phoenix.

Never say die, dammit, she told herself. Okay, Landry, one dead, how many to go?

She held on to the decanter and tiptoed to the bedroom door to wait.

Landry would not give an inch.

The first one through that door would win himself a bashed-in skull, and so would anyone else coming near her.

The lady journalist had plenty of fight, and she intended to be no goddamn lady at all.

14

Jack Grimaldi powered the bubble-front Hughes into a smooth liftoff. The helicopter climbed steadily over the midday brilliance of the District of Columbia.

Grimaldi had been Bolan's pilot during the Mafia war days. He had credited Bolan with having steered him from a bum course in life. Stony Man's ace flier had a playboy's disposition and the looks of a movie idol, underpinned with nearly unparalleled hellground flight experience and an undying commitment to Bolan and the Phoenix operation.

Grimaldi flew the chopper on a course due north and glanced at his only passenger.

"We'll be there in a couple of minutes."

Bolan uttered a near silent response and continued with his preparations.

Already the layout of Washington's angled avenues and green expanses of parks and monuments and impressive government buildings fell away behind them as did the sprawling ghetto of the inner city, always a harsh contrast from the air to its neighboring shrines of governing wealth.

The chopper zoomed over the outer reaches of surburbia, and the terrain became rolling meadow and green forest, pockmarked here and there by a condo development or shopping mall.

Bolan put finishing touches to the cosmetic job on his appearance. He wore snappy, expensively tailored threads beneath which Big Thunder rode in a speed-draw hip rig attached to his belt. The Beretta 93-R was well concealed in a special snapaway shoulder rig.

Bolan affected the proper cocky attitude and glared at Grimaldi.

"How's it look?"

"Too much like my old days," Grimaldi muttered, "flying guys like you around the country."

"Then I'm ready, Jack. Any time."

Grimaldi turned troubled eyes on his passenger.

"I don't like this. The recon... you told me to take it at one pass so I did, but trap was all I could see down there. I know that's why you're going in like this, but what about those cop stakeouts I spotted? Man, they've got Riappi blanketed and are just waiting for something to happen, and I do mean Special Weapons and Tactics. That is one hot landing zone I'm dropping you into."

"The hottest," Bolan replied. "There's just no other way."

Grimaldi had responded on the first ring when Bolan had contacted him. The flier explained that he was on twenty-four hour standby after Kurtzman had alerted him to Bolan's presence in D.C.

This was Bolan's first contact with Grimaldi since the pilot had transported The Executioner above Washington and environs on the night of the assault on Stony Man Farm.

Now, Grimaldi eyed the terrain whizzing by beyond the Hughes's Plexiglas front as he slacked off on their flight speed.

"That's the hardsite up ahead. We go in?"

"In," the passenger affirmed, studying the property.

Mack Bolan memorized the salient features of the Riappi estate as Grimaldi banked the chopper for the approach.

Forty acres or so. The main house and outbuildings perched atop a ridge, amid a cluster of dogwood. Undulating terrain flowed to lower elevations from either side, serving as sort of buffer zones. A high brick wall ran the perimeter of the grounds, giving it a respectable enough look from the outside. Inside the main entrance of the wall, he saw a guardhouse. Heavily armed sentries. Three- and four-man armed patrols were all over the place.

"This is it," the pilot sighed. "No second thoughts?"

"Plenty of 'em," Bolan replied. "Take us straight in, Jack. Set down on the pad behind the main house. I get out, you take off."

"And I'm back on the scene in thirty minutes."

"On the button. If I'm not by that landing pad and ready, don't even touch down."

"The other thing," Grimaldi said. "Bear gets the list you hid. I'll find it okay. I've got all of it, guy. I just don't damn well like it."

Bolan's face remained impassive for the men he could now see below cautiously watching the Hughes.

"So who does? Here we go. Give me the scared gofer look."

Grimaldi went into the act, not looking sideways or any other way at the big guy in expensive Italian threads, as he set the chopper down.

* * *

The big dude who stepped from the chopper wore an undercurrent of absolute control and muted power like a visible aura.

"Headshed," Valachi opined.

Lou Riappi and Sal Valachi watched the reception from a window of the capo's library.

The body of Alexei Rosstov had been hauled away. So had the armchair. A new one sat in its place.

"Make him?" Riappi asked his consigliere.

Valachi shook his head.

"Headshed," he repeated.

Valachi lifted a small radio from a waist clip and passed a guarded all-clear to his troops.

"Hell, I was afraid of this," muttered Riappi. "All those damn killings raised a stink upstairs. Damn."

"Put out the welcome mat," Valachi advised the younger man. "You could feed him the Bolan idea."

There came a discreet knock at the library door. One of Valachi's boys handed in a leather wallet.

The consigliere glanced at it, then handed it to his boss.

Riappi looked, then glanced back at Valachi.

"An Ace of Spades."

"Better check it."

"You're damn right we better check it," the D.C. Mob chief snapped. Riappi unpocketed a ring of keys and used one to unlock a drawer in his desk. It contained the very special telephone he had not had occasion to use since assuming control of his uncle's organization.

Riappi pulled out a notebook from beneath the phone and glanced in it. Then he lifted the receiver and punched through a long combination on the relay diffuser.

The answering monotone sounded metallic, like a voice module on a computer.

"Identify yourself."

"Area Four," Riappi responded. "I need confirmation on a Black Ace."

"Hold."

Pause.

Clicks.

Then Riappi heard, "Identify."

"Area Four."

"Proceed."

"Uh, okay, uh, I want a make on a black card."

"Number?"

Riappi glanced at the id.

"Uh, zero four, dash, zero seven, dash, one three one."

Pause.

"I am sorry, sir. That is classified."

Riappi choked back a snarl.

"Classified? Who the hell am I talking to?"

"You may take this up through standard channels."

The connection went dead in Riappi's ear.

He slammed down the receiver then tossed the phone roughly back into the desk drawer.

"Goddamn bureaucracy! Sometimes I wish we were in my uncle's time again, Sal. The family looked out for their own interests in those days, didn't they? None of this Black Ace bullshit."

"How are you going to play this?" Valachi asked.

Riappi calmed down as he eyed his consigliere.

"How should I play it?"

"I'd keep him the hell away from the Russian and the woman you've got locked upstairs," Valachi suggested. "Tell him the killings are a local business dispute. Let the street gangs take the heat."

Riappi considered this, then shook his head.

"Uh-uh. I don't think so, Sal." Riappi got a gleam in his eye as he chided sarcastically, "Maybe you're losing the edge, old man. If I play this right, show this Ace I got the situation under control, it'll look real good, won't it?"

"You're asking for trouble, Lou."

"Shut up," Riappi snapped, "before I decide you can be replaced." He nudged the id back across the desk toward an expressionless Valachi. "Give this back to our guest and show him in."

15

The Executioner had been quietly walking through the Mafia's ranks since the third campaign of his long-ago one-man war that had somehow melded with the present one of the soldier now called Phoenix.

The skill of role camouflage and props kept by Bolan from his past Mafia campaigns got him inside Riappi's hardsite.

Now he had to find Landry and Maxim Pavlik, if he was here, and get them the hell out, alive.

Within thirty minutes.

Bolan never took needless risks, and role-playing an Ace inside Riappi's den of savages carried a damn sight more risk for him than breaching White House security. That had simply been a matter of outfoxing disciplined military and cop minds.

In this zoo, security came from primal instinct. These guys could smell the difference when a stranger walked among them unless the penetrator knew all the tricks, all the moves, all the nuances.

The way Bolan did. And it did not hurt that Leo "The Pussy" Turrin of La Commissiόne happened to be a highly placed undercover Fed, the highest; a friend and ally of Bolan.

Riappi was a wiry, medium-sized guy in his thirties when he had made his bones, his first hit, long ago. He had demonstrated an early predisposition toward inflicting pain, and had risen through Mob ranks driven by savagery as much as the "in" with his Uncle Gus.

Bolan recalled intel that old Gus had started distrusting his nephew heir apparent in his last days, before supposedly buying the farm of natural causes. At that time, rumors were rife that the ailing capo had some help in attaining the final end.

These days Lou Riappi carried himself with the macho swagger of a street soldier but with the first signs of dissipation setting in, like a retired middleaged athlete.

Bolan did not offer a hand.

"Call me Omega," he instructed the boss of D.C.

Riappi met Bolan on his feet when Valachi held the library door open for the "Black Ace."

The new arrival crossed the room authoritatively and took the seat behind Riappi's desk.

The boss took this in, then raged angrily at his consigliere.

"Dammit, Sal, move your butt the hell outside that door and leave us alone. Now."

Valachi left them alone.

"That's a bad way to treat your man," Bolan commented. "I knew Sal when your uncle was alive."

"Uh, care for a drink, Omega?"

"We talk business."

"Sure. What the hell. Sal didn't seem to recognize you."

"I had a different face then."

"Right, sure. Guess I got a lot on my mind, but you're right. I shouldn't take it out on old Sal like that."

"Not so old."

The boss chuckled unconvincingly, the swagger in place. Riappi accepted the situation in his library and sank with an air of casualness into his chair facing the desk.

"Uh, right again, Omega. Must be a habit with you boys, eh? So how're things in New York?"

"Concerned. Your area has been picked up by the wire services and two of the networks for their news reports this morning. What the hell is going on?"

"Uh, you might think I'm nuts..."

"I might think a whole lot more if you don't make it good," growled the "Ace." "That's what you've got to worry about."

"Uh, right. Okay. Bolan."

Bolan appeared unimpressed.

"Bolan?"

"I'm talking Mack bastard Bolan," Riappi rasped. "Doesn't that grab an ear for me?"

"Talk."

"These guys, the ones who are dead, Jimmy Needles and them... I know Bolan's supposed to be dead, but what if he's not?"

"You need more than that, Lou. As a diversion, the idea stinks, I'm only going to ask you one more time. Some of your associates think you don't have a handle on things. They don't want all this heat you're pulling down. Something like this — the media, the public, they need a sacrificial goat. The publicity... it hurts all over. Business, I'm talking about, Lou."

"Bolan is business, ain't he?" Riappi snarled. "He cost plenty of bucks in the old days. It could happen again."

"No good."

Riappi's eyes got a look.

"How would you like the guy's head, Bolan's head?"

"You've got it?"

"Uh-uh, but I'm going to get it. Today or tonight."

Riappi needed some more line, Bolan realized.

"That could change things," the "Ace" conceded.

"Damn right it would," the boss said, brightening. "There's a guy running around this town name of Phoenix. I've got this hunch... Well, it was Sal who came up with the idea, but it could be that this Phoenix is Mack Bolan. Phoenix hit us today. He's the one who took out all those men."

"New York is not pleased."

"Right, right, but you did say all that could change if I brought in his head."

"What makes you so sure you'll get his head?"

"You saw the manpower I got patrolling these grounds. That's for him. Phoenix."

"You never have trouble with your neighbors with crap like this?"

Riappi pretended to chuckle.

"Uh, no... the lots are real far apart, and I don't figure it'll take all that long."

Bolan played just the right touch.

"You could be lucky on this one, Lou. Things have been happening lately, things hard to explain unless there's something to your idea. What makes you so sure Phoenix is going to walk into this trap you've got for him?"

Riappi chuckled for real.

"Upstairs. I got two people he wants, bad. A woman and a Russian diplomat."

"Diplomat?"

"Hey, but not to worry. The guy's dirty. Not with us, but I know, okay? Phoenix is hot to cap him, so I snatched the guy and brought him here."

"That might not have been so smart."

"Uh, well, Omega, it seemed like a good idea at the time."

"Who's the woman?"

"A journalist by the name of Landry. She's connected to Phoenix. He knows she's here — I told him."

"You'll have to kill the two."

"Right, I figured that."

"Why aren't they dead already? We don't need them alive."

"Well, uh, I thought you might wanna see them, talk with them, I mean. I mean, I didn't know you were coming, of course, but in case the headshed..."

"We take them out now," ordered the "Black Ace."

* * *

Don Sprague and Clem Walker were posing as telephone linemen. The Orgcrime cop and the SWAT team leader were perched atop two telephone poles that hugged a ridge of cottonwood. Their surveillance position overlooked Riappi's main house and much of his land.

Walker's SWAT teams were inside two phone-company vans parked at the foot of the poles that hosted Sprague and Walker. They were communicating by two-way, hand-held radios.

The two "linemen" had observed the arrival of a family VIP through their binoculars.

Something about the guy triggered quivers in Sprague's mind, a similarity... something, someone. The thread on the thought ran out.

Walker glanced at his watch.

"Mr. VIP has been inside ten minutes."

The two men were impatient atop their perches, belt contraptions looped around them in approved lineman manner.

A brilliant sun shone down, comfortably warm.

"All those dead, the publicity, it had to bring the boys down on Riappi," said Sprague.

"And there's the Bolan angle."

"Yep, there's that."

"Uh, I was thinking, skipper."

"Think out loud, Clem."

"You'd damn well better watch your ass from here on in, Cap. There's plenty of folks that run things who might not want it known to the general public that Bolan is alive, if he is. Ever think of that?"

"I have."

"So what d'ya think?"

Sprague did not take his binoculars off the doorway through which the VIP had gone.

"I just hope Phoenix does show, Clem. Whether he's Mack Bolan or not. I could be starting to see things his way. Man, there's a rat nest down there that needs cleaning..."

* * *

The Mafia is a living hierarchy held together by custom and tradition in a rigid social structure governed by quiet ritual, not unlike the military in that one respect.

It only took Bolan two minutes in the presence of Riappi and Sal Valachi for the master role-player to read the parts being played between these two men fairly accurately. Bolan had spent enough time in and near the Mob ranks.

The relationship between the young turk boss and the old-line consigliere— the inner stress obvious to a sensitive outsider in a heartbeat — reminded Bolan of his own enlisted days in the Army. He recalled the scorn with which middle-aged, seasoned noncoms of World War II and Korean experience regarded the twenty-one-year-old wet-behind-the-ears OCS wonders they were supposed to take orders from.

That was old consigliere Sal and cocky Lou the boss.

Four hoods lounged in a foyer at the foot of a stairway in a hallway outside the library.

"Sal, tell Omega about the manpower we got out there," Riappi ordered airily as he, the "Ace From New York" and Valachi briskly started up the elegant winding stairway.

Valachi paused, uneasy about divulging such security matters, but he had lived his life by the rules of his organization.

"Well, sir," he told Omega as they climbed the stairs, "I've beefed up the patrols, and I've got the men armed with..."

Time for a curve, thought Bolan.

"What were your people doing at this Crawford's house?" he demanded of Riappi.

They reached the landing at the top of the stairs.

Riappi led the way to the left.

"That's what I'm trying to find out. Those guys musta been moonlighting, is all I can think of. They know that crap don't get it with me. But we've got nothing to do with Crawford, if that's what you're worried about, Omega. Do we Sal?"

The consigiiere did not respond.

He stopped in front of the last door on the right, down a hallway from the landing, and Riappi and Omega stopped with him. Valachi produced a key from a chain.

"This is where we got them," the older man told Bolan, as if Riappi had not even addressed him.

"Let's all have a look," said the "Ace."

Direct order.

Valachi inserted the key in the lock, gave the key and doorknob a twist and pushed the door inward. He stepped across the threshold and held the door open for his boss and Omega.

Bolan registered a quick glimpse of a bedroom when the door eased in.

He saw the sprawled figure of a man stretched across the bedroom rug, the upper half of the man's body visible, but not enough for the three in the doorway to see the thin ribbon of blood tracking from the ear.

There was a sudden commotion inside the room along the wall just next to the doorway.

He heard an unintelligible barrage of words as a heavy, glass decanter swung in rapid descent toward Valachi's skull.

Valachi responded with a swiftness that belied his years and barrel chest. He ducked defensively and blocked the female hand gripping the bottle with enough force that the defensive gesture ripped the decanter from the assailant's fist. Valachi pivoted and grabbed another feminine wrist in his left hand and pulled her into view.

Landry, of course.

The journalist hellcat spun under power of the tug from Valachi, who twisted her arm until she glared, all outraged womanhood unleashed, at the men in the hallway.

"You filthy..." she began, then she recognized one of the faces, and it popped out of her before she could stop it. "Colonel!" Then new panic flared when she realized what automatic reflex had done. "Oh, hell."

"Colonel?" Riappi repeated blankly.

"Phoenix!" Valachi snarled.

Landry stood between the men.

Everyone grabbed for guns.

16

Bolan's strategy had been direct enough, played with sufficient skill and audacity to dupe Riappi and his consigliere up to this point. As a visiting enforcer from the powers that be in Riappi's world, Omega would get hold of Landry and escort her to Grimaldi's chopper when it arrived, whether Riappi and company liked it or not, trusting bluff and luck to see it through.

But Landry's blurted recognition, in the second before her considerable common sense took over from nerves stretched too taut, changed everything.

Valachi released his hold on the woman's wrist with a push that cleared her from the line of fire. But the move was intended to free the Mafia adviser from any encumbrance as he reached for his hardware.

Riappi backed away from the bold outsider until the wall stopped him. His hand darted beneath his lapel in a reflex response, but not fast enough. The D.C. boss opened his mouth to shout, to alert the troops lounging in the foyer at the foot of the stairs.

In that heartbeat, Bolan crossed his right hand to palm the Beretta, his other hand snaking around in a quick-draw fast for the hip-holstered .44 AutoMag, the two weapons simultaneously tracking up and around in a two-fisted combat stance.

Bolan held his ground in the doorway of the bedroom. The stainless-steel hand cannon drew a bead on Valachi's forehead. The Beretta pointed squarely at the bridge between Lou Riappi's eyes, the menacing snout mesmerizing the D.C. capo.

The frozen tableau was straight out of thirties Chicago — gangland style: the moll, the hoods, the G-man.

The sound of nothing filled the room.

Landry remained motionless several feet away.

No one else moved.

Valachi and Riappi were each in the act of reaching for his own concealed piece.

Bolan held his gunman stance.

"This is the end of it," he said in a deceptively soft voice that did not carry to the soldiers in the foyer below. "If you want it that way."

"What'd you have in mind?" Riappi's voice scraped like a shovel across dry pavement.

"All I want at this stage is to get the lady out of here," Bolan stated.

"You've got it. We cooperate, right, Sal?"

"Cooperate shit, you spineless piss-ass punk," Sal Valachi grumbled unexpectedly.

Riappi blinked.

"Huh?"

Valachi unlimbered his piece, a short-barreled .44 Magnum.

Bolan let it happen. He'd read it right.

Valachi spit at Riappi and raised the pistol.

"You're not fit to lick your Uncle Gus's shoes."

The young turk boss screamed.

"Sal, no!"

Bolan and Landry watched Valachi trigger a round. The blast hammered their ears as a heavy slug cored through Riappi's skull and brains to slap them murallike across the ceiling. The Mob chiefs body fell backward into a sitting position in the corner near the bed, making a stain across soft pastel wallpaper.

Not a peep from Landry.

Valachi looked up at Bolan and Big Thunder, still aimed at him.

Something happened to the old hood. Valachi's eyes changed and his body seemed to sag, to relax in a strange way with the weariness of a man every bit his years, as if feeling all those years for the first time.

"Go ahead," Valachi told Bolan in a quiet voice, almost a plea. "Do it. It's all turned to shit."

"Your world always was," Bolan told the guy.

And he blew away Sal Valachi with a roar the from the mighty AutoMag that seemed to shake the mansion like an earth tremor. The .44 slug splattered the life right out of Valachi, who pitched backward until the bed stopped him. The consigliere crumpled into a dead heap atop the punk boss he had killed.

The rumbling echoes of reverberating gunfire melded into hurried scrambling sounds from the foyer below.

Bolan tossed the Beretta to Landry.

"Hope you remember how to use this."

She caught it expertly on the move toward the bedroom doorway, the three dead men forgotten.

"We've got to stop meeting like this," the gutsy female chided the man she knew as John Phoenix.

Bolan moved across the room toward the body of Pavlik, away from what remained of Valachi and Riappi.

"I've already got his wallet," Landry said.

Bolan returned to the door where Landry had crouched to aim the Beretta down the corridor, while Bolan sighted over her toward the landing of the stairway.

It's all coming full circle, thought Bolan. This man and woman had fought like this not so long ago. He and Landry functioned against the threat from the stairs like a well-mechanized team.

The first two hoods who scrambled into view got perforated by a barrage from the Beretta and the AutoMag.

Landry pegged a 9mm hole through the left nostril of one guy toting an Uzi submachine gun. The other Mob soldier had his head exploded into a red sunburst, courtesy of Big Thunder.

One of the bodies toppled over the railing of the landing and disappeared from sight. The headless one tripped, spurting backward to the hallway carpet as if tugged by an invisible wire.

The Mafia thugs behind the first two never made the landing. The others dodged back out of sight.

The smell of cordite stung their nostrils.

"I want Pavlik's wallet," he told her in the lull after the echoes of gunfire in the house faded.

Frantic whispering, bustling movement could be heard on the stairway around the corner from the landing.

Bolan got the impression of men on the run, shouting to each other, distant sounds of response approaching from the grounds outside.

Landry handed over the wallet.

"A cheap price to pay for your getting us out of here."

A foolish guy showed his head around the corner of the wall down at the landing.

Bolan triggered a round that blew the fool away in a hammering cacophony that sent the dead man somersaulting his way down the stairway. He heard the noise of the others getting out of his way, and the rumble of reinforcements storming into the foyer came from outside.

"We're not out yet," Bolan remarked dryly. "How did they bring you here?"

"Limo. Crew wagon. A fleet of them downstairs. There's a window at the end of this hallway. I saw it when they brought me in. It's not barred like the ones in here. Colonel... I sure am sorry about flubbing it."

"Here's your chance to earn some points." Bolan gave her a buddy nudge of the elbow and moved past her, leaving the cover of the doorway. "Get ready to make for that window," he whispered in parting.

He dashed up the length of the hallway, holstering Big Thunder as he reached the landing. He grabbing an Uzi where a dead man had dropped it.

Appearing at the top of the stairs, The Executioner and his newly acquired machine gun sighted down on a foyer now full of Riappi's troops, cautious without a leader.

Bolan counted ten heavily armed Mafia men. He opened fire with a long burst from the Uzi. The weapon stuttered and bucked in his grip, wildly ejecting spent shells as the clip fed hot death into the fifing chamber of the cooking Uzi. The volley of cutting lead turned hoods into rupturing, spasming puppets with their strings cut, a weird ballet as flesh-shredding projectiles toppled all the hoods into a carpet of dead bodies.

Bolan stole another two clips from the belt of the Uzi's previous owner, popped one magazine in his pocket and another into the Uzi, then hurried back along the hallway before more foolish men ventured up.

Landry waited for him at the doorway. They made the window together. Bolan lifted it and climbed out with the woman behind him.

The roof of the house slanted downward from the end window to overhang the roof of the garage where three limos sat and six yardmen stood watching the house.

These hoods did not expect their executioner to appear from where he did as Bolan started firing from atop the garage.

Shouts and grunts filled the air as a long burst from the Uzi canceled life and six savages died, staining the driveway with spreading pools and rivulets of blood.

Bolan moved to the edge of the roof and lowered himself to the ground. He reached up and helped Landry down. They both turned in time to see one of the three-man patrols approaching at a run from around the northeast corner of the house.

Bolan and Landry both fell into a crouch and fired at the charging patrol.

One of the hoods caught three 9mm sizzlers in the chest. Another yardman had time to fire one shot from a pistol he aimed, but the range was all wrong and when Bolan's Uzi stuttered it took out the other two clowns.

Riappi's estate would be crawling with soldiers, but now Bolan and Landry had a chance.

They hurried toward the nearest limo.

17

"Do you see what the hell I see?" Walker yelled.

He and Sprague observed the scene of violence inside the walls of Riappi's property, near the five-car garage of the house, from atop their telephone-pole vantage point.

Sprague scrambled down. Walker did the same.

"I see it," Sprague declared. "It's what we've been waiting for. Let's go."

Both cops hit the ground at a run toward the phone-company trucks parked nearby. Each man climbed behind the wheel of a van and pulled away from there in wide U-turns that spit up sprays of gravel from the shoulder of the county road.

The two vehicles, loaded with SWAT teams, high powered in the direction of the front gate of Lou Riappi's property.

Using his radio, Sprague called in the local Maryland cops standing by in the vicinity.

All units closed in.

On the Executioner, Sprague wondered.

He'd find out.

He damn sure would.

Right now.

In the hellground up ahead.

* * *

Bolan dashed to the nearest crew wagon, a current-year Lincoln job he guessed would be bulletproof like the rest of the limos parked before him.

Landry kept pace with him. She jumped into the passenger side a moment after Bolan.

He heard a jabber of Italian from nearby.

Two young men appeared in a side doorway of the house and pegged shots at the limo. Bullets ricocheted.

Italian, thought Bolan. Imports. Illegal aliens brought in by the holdful aboard ships from the old country. Cheap manpower, tough as nails, scraped from the slums of Naples.

Bolan paused before slamming his car door shut to hammer off two rounds from Big Thunder that blew both imported hoods to hell.

He twisted the ignition key. The steel-plated battleship purred to life with barely a sound and rocketed Bolan and his companion away from there with barely a touch of the gas pedal. Bolan floored it.

A pack of yardmen, all heavily armed with automatic weapons and shotguns, were clustered in the driveway around the front of the house.

The limo came at them too fast for anything but frantic Italian panic. The wagon plowed right on through, the air shocks dampening the crunch of bodies being run over as the wagon sped on toward the gate. Some gunfire followed the vehicle from what remained of the hoods back there. Then more guys ran out of the house and also fired after the receding limo, but the vehicle had already reached beyond their range.

Bolan steered the boat smoothly into the straightaway for the main gate, which he figured to crash through.

"Oh-oh," Susan groaned.

Bolan saw it, too.

He tapped the limo's brakes and reduced his speed when he saw the flurry of activity happening around the front entrance: shooting, bodies sprawled, men with their hands up and guns thrown down. Camou-fatigued urban SWAT men poured in through the opened iron gates, taking prisoners of the survivors of Riappi's security crew.

Bolan slowed the Lincoln some more when he saw three marked cop cruisers and a telephone-company van with siren and flasher charge through the gate, racing up the driveway toward the house and the limo.

He heard the rotor throb of an approaching helicopter and looked up to see a bubble-front Hughes approaching from the west for a landing on an expanse of land several hundred yards away.

Bolan gunned the crew wagon's engine. The limo squealed off the driveway and commenced a bumpy angle toward the chopper.

The police cruisers that had raced toward Bolan's car continued on toward the home of the Mob boss and the scattering of yard soldiers.

The phone van veered away from the pack, bumping and jolting over the undulating terrain, straight on a collision course with the Lincoln.

Bolan recognized Don Sprague behind the wheel of the van.

The Executioner had never fired on or imperiled the life of an officer of the law. He considered them soldiers on the same side no matter if his work crossed wires with theirs. He would not endanger Sprague's life.

Bolan tapped the brakes and the Lincoln ground to a stop in the meadow not far from where Grimaldi had settled the Hughes on high idle, ready to lift off, but ready to join the fray if needed.

Bolan and Landry and Sprague jumped from their vehicles at the same moment.

Sprague had been alone in the van. His men and the other SWAT teams were deployed for cleanup around the front gate and for closing in around the house where sporadic gunfire crackled at first, but now simmered to nothing.

The boss was dead. There was nothing for these soldiers to fight for. They would be deported back home, most of them. Big deal.

The big deal for Bolan was a cop named Sprague who positioned himself partially under cover behind the van but with enough clearance to aim his .38 Police Special at the driver of the limo.

Landry half crouched, like a sinewy mountain lioness ready to bolt, her eyes darting between the big guy with the .44 AutoMag and the Orgcrime skipper drawing a bead on him.

Bolan did not raise Big Thunder.

"You freeze, mister," Sprague ordered. "I'm keeping enough distance between you and me. No karate this time. One move and ycu are dead."

"I believe that, skipper."

Bolan holstered the AutoMag.

"You're coming in with me, mister. I am taking you in."

Bolan shook his head.

"Sorry, Cap. I'm climbing aboard that chopper over there and lifting off."

"I swear," Sprague rasped, "one wrong move and I'll blow your head off, and I don't care how much pull you've got."

Bolan nodded to Susan Landry.

"Captain, I don't believe you've met the lady. This is Susan Landry. Maybe you've read her columns in the papers."

"What the hell's she got to do with this?"

"She can tell you that. I've got work to do. The point is, skipper, you're not about to shoot anybody who has White House authorization in front of a syndicated columnist."

"Damn you to hell, buster, you are smooth enough to be Bolan."

Landry snapped at that. Her eyes blazed at Phoenix.

"Bolan!" she half exclaimed, half asked, her eyes locked with his across the roof of the limo.

They raised their voices to be heard above the idle of the chopper.

"The work I have," Bolan explained to Sprague, "it means more than this." He nodded toward the cleanup operation. SWAT cops rounded up prisoners in and around the main house. "I had to get Susan out of there. Riappi was nothing but a nuisance factor."

"Some nuisance," Sprague muttered. "How many men have you killed today, Phoenix... or Bolan? Or doesn't that bother you?"

"They weren't people," the big guy snarled. "And there's one more left for me today. Then the hunt really gets started."

"One more? The Russians. Pavlik. You're talking KGB."

"Pavlik is dead," Bolan told the cop. "Don't let the embassy's ranting fool you. He was their KGB director for D.C. He has fresh blood on his hands. That mother and her three kids this morning."

"And you killed him?"

Landry stepped forward. She handed Bolan's Beretta back to him.

"I take that honor, Captain."

"It's bigger than Pavlik," Bolan growled. "Pavlik we knew about. The person left is masquerading as one of us. He's the one who's been doing all the real damage and had a lot of good people killed, Sprague. My people. Our people."

"And you know who this person is?"

"I've got a damn good idea."

"And you're going to deal with him?"

"I am."

Sprague indicated the dead around the garage of the house.

"Like you did over there?"

"There's no better way," said Bolan. "Part of you has to know that. Now do I walk, or do you kill me?"

Sprague did not lower the .38.

"Dammit... are you Bolan?"

"You know me as Phoenix. You have orders not to impede my work."

"You are one slick dude," the cop conceded, almost admiringly.

"Now what kind of cop are you?" Bolan demanded of the guy.

Sprague lowered his pistol and straightened from his shooter's stance. He did not look happy.

"I'm a cop who ought to know better. But I follow orders, damn you. Disappear."

Bolan turned and jogged toward the waiting chopper without another word to the cop who turned away and started up the incline toward the house.

Bolan was almost beneath the chopper's slowly rotating blades when he sensed Landry catching up to him. He stopped and faced her abruptly.

She collided with him and their faces were a breath apart, hers looking questions and something else up at him.

"That was no answer you gave Sprague back there, but it was the one he had to buy because he is a good cop," the tough lady told the big warrior. "I'm not Sprague. Are you Mack Bolan?"

"Yes, Susan, I am."

A heartbeat passed.

"Well, I'll be..."

"I told Sprague the truth. I have work to do. It won't wait."

"What... should I do?" She still absorbed it.

"Tell them."

"Tell them? Tell who?"

"Anyone you want. After today, after what happens next, it's all a different ball game, anyway. Tell the Mob. Your readers. Tell Sprague. Tell anyone who cares. I'm back. Bolan is back."

"And us?"

"We have to wait for us, and everything else. I may have waited too long already, but I had to come here to find something out for sure."

"Thank you," she told him and did not budge an inch from the way her curves pressed against his body. "There's... a lot I don't understand. There's one thing I understand for sure, though, and I want you to understand it, too."

Her arms snaked around Bolan's neck. Landry lifted her face to his and her kiss was a fiery yet tender promise.

When the kiss broke she only looked into Bolan's eyes for another second. Then she stepped away, turned and started walking toward the house without looking back.

Bolan boarded the helicopter, and Grimaldi commenced liftoff before Bolan had slammed shut the Plexiglas door.

"Where to, soldier?"

"The White House, Jack. On the double. It's time for the windup."

18

The four men waiting in the President's Oval Office, including the chief executive himself, stood as one when an aide showed in John Phoenix. His side arms were taken from him, leaving Bolan alone with the four men to study their reactions at the first heartbeat of recognition.

They had been seated in the grouping of wing chairs near the President's desk.

Lee Farnsworth stood slightly apart from the others. The Central Foreign Bureau chief wore a tense expression.

General Crawford did not look so surprised, nor did Brognola, who did look as if he could use a cigar more than ever.

"Colonel Phoenix," greeted the President dryly. "Good of you to remember us. It's been some time."

"I've been busy, sir. And we might as well clear one thing up right away. My name isn't Phoenix. It's Mack Bolan."

Brognola sighed resignedly but said nothing.

Crawford stepped forward.

"Soldier, I, uh, suggest you seriously reconsider. You're invaluable to your country..."

"My country won't lose me."

"Uh, what did you have in mind, Striker?" asked Brognola.

"No more Striker, Hal. I'm going out on my own again. This isn't the way for me. I swore once in the early days that I'd never risk the lives of my friends for what I had to do. When I went back on my word to myself and took on the Phoenix sanction, it got a lot of good done but it got April and too many others killed."

"We had a deal," the President reminded Bolan. "You brought back a certain masterlist from Russia. I agreed to give you your lead for twelve hours and hold off the CIA and the other agencies who wanted you. You, in turn, would supply the identity of this mole and hand in the list."

"You'll have the list, sir," Bolan assured the Man, "when I've walked safely away from here. But right now it's my insurance."

"Perhaps we had best sit down and talk this over," the President suggested. "If you're not going to work with the government, why do you want that list?"

Bolan joined them in the loose circle of wing chairs. He made sure to take the seat between Farnsworth and Crawford.

Brognola glowered.

"I think I've got the answer to that, sir. A one-man war against the KGB." He looked to Bolan for affirmation.

Farnsworth studied Phoenix in a new light.

"Mack Bolan." He looked to the President. "That's going to upset a lot of apple carts, sir. Stony Man is poison."

The President made an irritated sound.

"Yes, yes, I understand the political liability of all you people. My only prayer and explanation is that I inherited you from a previous administration."

Crawford leaned forward.

"Isn't it about time we heard about this mole you've been tracking down?"

"It is time," Bolan agreed, nodding.

"The mole is the one I've been after right from the start. He's the inside man who gave Al Miller the intel Miller used to attack the Farm. Miller, his mercs, Pavlik and everyone else we knew about, they've all been taken care of, and after today it's going to be open season on their whole octopus operation and everything they stand for. But the mole... April can rest when he's dead.

"Elaborate measures were taken to keep me away from identifying him. Most of it was Pavlik's work. Pavlik had a drug deal going down with the local Mafia family. When I hit their contact tonight, Pavlik convinced Lou Riappi it would be in Riappi's interest to take me on. They'd already made plans to kill or kidnap Kelly, the general's daughter. That was part of a plan Pavlik cooked up to throw suspicion on General Crawford, away from the real mole. I know the general isn't the one, because Riappi told me he's clean and Riappi had no reason to lie about that."

"If it's not the general," said Brognola, "that's narrowing it down some, isn't it?"

Crawford watched Bolan, as did the others.

"Let's have it, son."

"I saw Miller's name scribbled on a calendar when I hit the drug drop this morning," Bolan told them. "That ties Miller to Pavlik's bunch and the mole straight to the KGB, too." The Executioner turned to face the man seated in the chair next to him. "I had a gut feeling about you all along, Farnsworth. You're as dirty as they come. You're the mole."

Bolan read panic before training took over in Farnsworth, and the CFB boss regained his granite expression.

"I haven't heard anything from this except the wild conjectures of a lunatic."

The President nodded sternly.

"I trust you have some proof of these allegations."

"Right here."

Bolan produced the wallet Landry had given him during the firefight at Riappi's. He tossed the wallet into a startled President's lap.

The President picked it up and examined it.

"Who does this belong to?"

"It belonged to Maxim Pavlik." For some reason, now that Bolan was face to face with the scumbag responsible for April's death, he did not feel blinding flashes of hatred. He felt nothing but a cold precision to get the job done. "There's a page of phone numbers in that wallet in what looks like Pavlik's hand. Farnsworth has three private unlisted numbers, and they're all on the page."

Everyone's eyes turned on Farnsworth who looked cool, but not like before.

Brognola looked ready to lynch the CFB man.

"And that's proof enough for me."

Crawford nodded.

"Good work, son."

The President did not want to believe it.

"Well, Lee, speak up. This doesn't look good at all. Let's hear your defense."

"I still haven't heard a thing that would stand up in a court of law," Farnsworth sneered. "What're you going to do about that?"

"This," Bolan whispered.

The Executioner lunged forward and across before anyone could stop him, grabbed Famsworth's necktie and yanked the guy forward out of his chair.

Bolan lashed down with the edge of his stiffened hand in a lightning movement. There was a snap, and Farnsworth continued forward. Bolan released the tie and allowed the dead man with the broken neck to slump to the floor of the Oval Office.

That put an end to the conversation for a moment.

Bolan stood.

So did the others.

There was an echo of death in the room as the man looked from the corpse to Bolan. The Executioner was already marching toward the door.

"Good riddance," Brognola growled, drawing his eyes away from Farnsworth's lifeless body. "It should've happened before he could do so much damage."

"Now what?" Crawford asked.

"Yes," said the President to Bolan, "you must reconsider leaving... this can be taken care of.''

"It's done, sir. The media has it."

"Why?" the chief executive wanted to know. "Why are you doing this?"

"Savages are loose out there. I don't need to tell you men that. They've taken away everything I have except what I can do back to them. We had to try the Phoenix thing, but I can't play all those rules for a system that will allow a Farnsworth to slip in. I have to go the next mile alone."

"You realize," said the President, "the pardon handed down to you for your Mafia activities was conditional. All bets are off if you walk out of this office like this."

"You fight them your way, sir, I'll fight them mine. You play by your rules, I'll do the same."

"The KGB," said Crawford slowly. "You've taken on one impossible enemy there, son."

Brognola chuckled grimly.

"So have they, General, so have they."

The President decided. He extended a hand to the icy-eyed warrior awaiting his response.

"My predecessors should have known they took a wildcat to their breast. If my administration survives what you have done today, Colonel, I can't say what official policy will be toward you. No promises. No deals. You're going to be everyone's target out there. But you've done too much for this country for me to try and tame a wildcat right now. And... we will be expecting a copy of that list you have."

Bolan shook hands with the Man.

A snappy nod to the general and Brognola was enough of a farewell for these hellground-tested brothers-in-arms. He had a feeling he would be seeing them again.

The Man From Ice turned and walked away from the three men and the corpse on the floor, toward the door.

Beyond that door stretched a savage new trail of commitment for warrior Bolan through worldwide hellgrounds flaming hotter than any he had ever traveled.

The man who had been John Phoenix left the President's office.

The Executioner left the White House.

No one tried to stop him.

Mack Bolan entered his future.

Table of Contents

Don Pendleton's Dead Man Running

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18