"That's new, eh?" he mused.

"Yes. It is new since this morning."

"Air spotters," he muttered.

"What?"

"It's for visual identification from the air."

"The helicopters," Evita decided. "They have been added to the hunt, no? But it will be night very shortly. The marks and the helicopters will mean nothing in the night."

Bolan said, "These will. That's luminescent paint."

"We can peel them off."

"No," he replied quickly. "We leave them' on. This can be turned to our advantage. Listen, Evita, you'll have to drive the jeep. I hate to put you in charge of a hearse, but..."

He was interrupted by the squawking of the radio inside the Chevy, as a testy New England accent swelled in from a noisy background to demand, "Ground Four, Ground Four, what have you got? Report, dammit!"

Evita was counting the four decals atop the car with exaggerated stabs of a forefinger. "I believe you are being paged," she said.

Bolan grinned and leaned in for the microphone. "That's a chopper," he told her. "I could hear the rotors in the background."

He thumbed the mike into transmit mode and put on his street voice. "Ground Four," he announced casually. "Nothing here. Another farm shanty. It's clean."

"Air One, okay," came the noisy reply. "But stay close to the damn radio, eh? Go on to the next checkpoint."

Bolan was gambling. He showed Evita crossed fingers and thumbed on the transmitter again. "Bullshit," he snarled. "It's damn near dark and all we've done so far is roust a bunch of peasants. I say we're wasting it."

"So you got something brighter in mind?" was the response from the chopper.

"Yeh, and I can see it from here," Bolan's street voice replied. "There's a strip mine just up into the hills. Can you see it?"

"Air one, naw, we're running the beach right now. You got a feeling about that place?"

"I got so much feeling I'm getting hard," Bolan reported.

The guy in the helicopter chuckled and said, "Okay, follow your needle, tiger. Call in as soon as you get up there."

"Ground Four, right, you'll be the first to know."

Bolan threw the mike onto the dashboard and turned a worried face to the girl. "Well now we'll see," he told her.

"That was very clever, learning his position," Evita commented. "You act very well, Mack Bolan. You could have made it in Hollywood."

He grinned and said, "Yeah, just another wasted life. Where did Mack Bolan go wrong, eh?"

"More men should be so wrong," Evita said soberly, then the she spun about and marched to the jeep, climbing in without a glance at the cargo behind her.

Bolan sighed and slid into the Chevy.

Yeah, already Fairyland was far behind them. Big Eve knew it. And she'd found another corner of hell to hang her hat on.

So had Bolan. He was about out of ammo for the Thompsons — and they were hardly worth the trouble of dragging around. With a coordinated air-ground search by Lavagni plus the unknown quality of police threat awaiting him at Puerta Vista, the gauntlet seemed to be shrinking in around him.

The jeep pulled up beside him and the girl showed him a tense smile. "I want you to know," she said, "that I agree with your choice. Perhaps I am the bad cop. But I must follow my conscience. And my conscience tells me that the good cop would help you, Mack Bolan, not conspire for your death."

Bolan said, "Thanks. I like this hat too, Eve."

Her smile brightened then abruptly disappeared, and the jeep leapt forward.

Bolan see-sawed the Chevy into the turnaround and plowed on after her.

Yeah, she'd found a new corner of hell, all right.

Where had Mack Bolan gone wrong?

Somewhere between hell and paradise, in a lost corner of that great jungle called life.

And he absolutely would not have had it any other way.

Chapter Nine

Paydirt

They arrived at the mining site in the waning moments of twilight and Bolan drove the Chevy right through the flimsy gate. Evita swung in behind him and they proceeded along the dusty road to a lip overlooking the ugly white gash in the mountainside.

He parked on the overlook and scrambled out for a quick recon of the area. Heavy equipment stood idle here and there along the strip. No lights were showing and there was no evidence of a watchman.

Evita joined him at the front bumper of the jeep and told him, "The spot is perfect. Send them over from here. They would not be discovered until morning."

He replied, "No, let's get all the mileage out of this thing we can. Listen… I can handle what needs to be done here." He pointed to a small building, constructed of cement blocks and snuggled into the lee of the mountain a few hundred feet downrange. "That should be their explosives storage. Shoot the lock off if you have to but get inside there, Evita. Look for dynamite, in sticks. Get me four or five. And pick up blasting caps, fuses, you know."

She said, "Yes, I know," and took off on a run for the blockhouse.

Bolan swung about to the rear of the vehicle and started dragging out bodies. One of them he placed in the driver's seat and slumped him over the steering wheel. The others he scattered about the landscape and placed weapons in or near their hands.

Then he returned to the vehicles and went to work on the Thompsons, specifically on the ammo drums. Between the bunch, he hoped to be able to come up with at least enough of the heavy ammo to reload one drum almost to capacity.

By the time Evita returned from her errand, panting but glowing with success, Bolan had his stage set and he was ready for the next big gamble.

He kissed her, sat her down on the ground and brushed the dust from her nose. "Okay," he said. "Now here is what we are going to try."

Charlie Dragone was seated irritably in the transparent bubble of "Air One" and closely watching the rocky shoreline as it slipped past several hundred feet beneath him. He pressed the throat-mike and asked the pilot, "How're we doing on fuel?"

"About ten minutes left," Jack Grimaldi replied. "For all the good we're doing, we might as well..."

"Shut up!" Dragone snarled.

They had hit it off wrong from the very start. Dragone did not like wise-guy nobodies who didn't know their place.

He punched in the radio command channel and said, "Air One to Ground Control. It's almost dark and it's been nothing but zip. Whatta you think? Do we keep it up?"

Quick Tony Lavagni's voice returned immediately, vibrating excitedly into the earphones. "I was just about to give you a call, Charlie. Listen, I think I got something going down here on the waterfront. See if you can reach Latigo and tell 'im to close on Puerta Vista."

Latigo was in Air Two, screening the west side of Glass Bay and out of radio range of the east side surface vehicles.

Dragone replied, "You mean him and all his ground scouts?"

"Yeh, let's get 'em all together. At least headed this way."

The chief triggerman acknowledged the instructions, then he punched into the other communications channel and relayed the word to Earl Latigo in Air Two.

This had hardly been accomplished when an excited voice swirled in faintly on the air-to-ground net. "Air One, Air One, can you hear me?"

Dragone busily punched his transmitter into that channel to reply, "Yeah, I hear you. Who's this?"

"Ground Four. And shit man I hit it!"

"You hit what? Talk straight out, buster!"

"Ass, man, ass! It's in a jeep and full of juice!"

"This is Ground Four? Where are you? At that mine?"

"Yeah. Get it up here, eh?"

"Well wait a minute! Are you sure? The boss thinks he's got something, too, down here on the coast. I'm sending all the cars his way!"

"Great, you do that," replied the exultant voice. "I don't need no help anyway. I got this guy boxed in tight, and man his juice is all mine!"