"How many do you make, Rover?"

"They're still coming. I make… five… six… that's it, six and heavy."

Lord Copa was coming out with a full house of his own.

Bolan replied to Anders, "Okay, they're all yours. Play it close. I'll be working another angle."

"Is this a change in the game?"

"That is affirmative. You've got the quail. I'm taking the nest."

Toby Ranger's voice swelled in with, "Negative, negative, dammit! Let's play the call!"

Bolan told her, "You still have the percentage play, babe. Don't screw it up. I'm gone, bye bye."

He turned off the radio and said to Grimaldi, "Okay, you're a hardman. Take us back."

"Back where?"

"Back there. Back to pay dirt."

"You're out of your flipping mind," the pilot said-but already he was altering the pitch of the rotors, biting the atmosphere and lurching into an alignment toward the Copa hideaway.

Toward pay dirt, yeah. Which was simply another way of saying hellgrounds.

Grimaldi's strained tones came through the intercom, "You sure this is what you want to do?".

What he wanted to do? Hell no, it was not what he wanted to do.

Bolan chuckled into the headset as he told his friend, the Mafia pilot, "I thought we were not going to talk about epitaphs, Jack."

"Who's talking about epitaphs? I'm talking about headstones," was the biting reply. "What's it all about?"

"We're going back, that's what it's all about. But I don't want anyone to know it. I want you to drop me into that joint clean, quick, and silent."

"That's impossible."

"So," Bolan replied with a sour smile, "that means you try a little harder. Right?"

"Wrong," said Grimaldi. "It means you die a lot quicker. But if that's what you want…"

It was not what Bolan wanted, no.

But it was what he had to do.

CHAPTER 13

A soldier who goes into combat with an overriding desire to remain alive is not a good soldier. Bolan knew that. The good soldier is the committed soldier-one in whom the overriding desire is to achieve the objective, whatever the cost to himself.

And this was a war.

Toby Ranger knew it and Tom Anders knew it. Carl Lyons and Smiley Dublin had known it when they committed their own lives to the battle. They were all good soldiers.

So the SOG game in Nashville was not a rescue operation. The goal now was the same as in the beginning; nothing had changed except the circumstances. Bolan knew that Anders and Ranger were as concerned about the well-being of Carl Lyons as was Bolan himself. He also knew that this concern did not strongly affect the game plan. They were still playing to win. Which is why they had called on Bolan instead of simply calling the game off and laying all over the opposition in a search and rescue mission.

They were good soldiers, yeah. And Bolan could respect them for that. He could also understand why Toby Ranger was so unhappy with him for calling an audible at the latest line of scrimmage. She had been concerned from the beginning that Bolan would play his own game instead of theirs-worried that he would blitz in and destroy an entire connective layer, destroying with it the SOG game of track and trap from street to penthouse.

Though they had been friends and even lovers, and, though he knew that she respected his own private war, Bolan knew also that Toby had less faith in his approach than in her own. She regarded him as a local phenomenon, here today and gone tomorrow, a tragically temporary tool in the war on organized crime.

She had told him, once, during one of those rare Edenish moments, "I wish I could bottle you, Captain Courageous. That would be your greatest contribution. Maybe then we could inject a tiny squirt of you into every cop in the country. Not much-just one squirt per cop. Then we'd really see things happen in this clouted land."

He had replied to that in a playful tone.

"Could we save a few squirts just for us?"

Her rebuttal, in typical Rangerese: "Don't be flip with me, hero. By the time you're done with yourself, there'll be nothing left to squirt. You spend it with a fire hose nozzle, not with a hypodermic. When you're through gushing, we'll have to bury you with a syringe."

"Are we talking about love or war?" he'd asked her.

"Both," she told him. "You approach both like there's no tomorrow."

True. There was no tomorrow for Mack Bolan. He knew that. And it was why he did not like the quiet game, the waiting game. He had to do what he could while he could. And there was always just today.

But Toby could save her anxieties about this day. He was not here to kill their game. And he was not so fixated in his own brand of warfare that he could not play the quiet game for awhile. He was here to find Carl Lyons… dead or alive. He hoped to find him alive and well. And he would do all in his power to honor the SOG game. But when it came to the final cut- Lyons or the game-Bolan knew that he would come down on the side of Lyons. Because, really, Mack Bolan was not all that sold on the SOG game. He respected those people and he loved them one and all, but he did not believe that their answer to the Mafia was the best answer. He had seen too many such games played to futility-with all that grand investment of time and dollars and excellent manpower going down the drain while the crime masters of America went on strutting their stuff and thumbing their noses at the American justice system.

And, yeah, Bolan's answer was best. To those directly exposed to it, it was final. There were no legal maneuverings, no payoffs under the table, no judicial breast beating for those who spat on the Bill of Rights. These guys knew the name of Mack Bolan's court. They knew also that they came in there naked and went out clothed in the final law of being. They went out dead-sentenced by their own deeds and executed by their own destinies.

I am not their Judge.

I am their Judgment.

I am the Executioner.

Bottle that, Toby. Then put it in an atomizer and spray it in the air that all Americans breathe, and then maybe all the SOGs everywhere could go home and play the quiet games of human love, and happiness, and fulfillment.

It would not happen, of course. One half of one percent of the American community would go on cannibalizing the rest of the body. And the gentle flocks would go on grazing, hardly taking note of the fact that their fellows were disappearing one by one, while harried shepherds patrolled the flanks with nets instead of clubs.

Bolan was no shepherd. He was a sheep, in wolf's clothing. And he carried the largest damned club he could find.

But okay, Toby-okay. He would keep the club sheathed for as long as possible, this time around. And he would play the SOG game-to a point. But that point was placed several paces to the life side of Carl Lyons' grave. This was no game of saviors and crosses. It was the game of life and death. For Mack Bolan, it was the only game in town.

"Would you mind telling me what is happening?" Grimaldi hissed through the intercom.

"In ten words or less?" Bolan asked lightly.

"In whatever it takes. This is as far as I go until-I need to know, if I'm going to-"

"You're right. Okay. As quick as possible, here's the lay. I believe that Mazzarelli's ambitions have exceeded his common sense. It looks like he's trying to pull off some cute game right under his boss's nose. I had only a small whiff of that before I went in there. But I followed the odor and I believe that I stumbled right into the thing. I still don't know what it is, for damn sure. But it seems a dead cinch that Leonetti figures in it somewhere. He-"