"Mack..."

"You tell Captain Hard to stay clear, Tommy. I'll take care of myself."

"Listen..."

"Can't. The numbers are up." The line noise came up again, and then went dead.

Slow as a sleepwalker, Tommy Anders replaced the handset. He turned, looked blankly from April to Kurtzman. It was good to have Anders back in the War Room, by God, but there was nothing he could do now. Kurtzman moved past him and began to rewind the tapes.

9

Mack Bolan did not know how many of the enemy had died at his hand. Though the men he had sent to their just reward probably numbered in the thousands, he was interested in results, not statistics. The Executioner did not "notch his gun." He was not out to prove something, to reaffirm some fragile notion of manhood; nor were his campaigns half-cocked ego trips. The act of killing surely held no personal satisfaction for the man.

But yeah, make no mistake, men had died by his good right hand. He had faced the Armies of the Beast, the men who believed that if they could get in position to lord it over others they could assure their own well-being and prosperity.

Mack Bolan had shown them that all they assured were their own deaths. There was blood on Bolan's hands, but his psyche was free of self-reproach.

Whatever his guilty prey had suffered, they had inflicted ten times as greatly upon the innocent. These people against whom Bolan had pledged his life were nominally human beings, sure. But their morals and instincts were those of the savage. The dark warrior did not rue the fate of any man who had died at his hand. No ghosts came back to haunt his conscience.

And yet there had been casualties in the Bolan wars that the man grieved with all his being.

From the earliest days of the Mafia blitzes, there were men and women who recognized the value of the Executioner's radical methods. Some of these insisted on becoming active allies, on picking up the gun to stand on Mack Bolan's right hand.

Some of them had died.

There was the Death Squad, a ruthless unit comprised of nine of Bolan's old Vietnam comrades. Though disillusioned and demoralized by their countrymen's ambiguous rejection of them on their return, still they rallied around their one-time sergeant to once again put their lives on the line against that country's enemies. Seven of the nine in fact made that supreme sacrifice.

In New York, a lovely young woman named Evie Clifford gave shelter to a wounded Mack Bolan, and died a hideous tortured death at Mafia hands for her act of mercy. In New Jersey, a Vietnam vet named Bruno Tassily suffered the same horrific fate.

Most recently, in Minneapolis, a lovely sensitive Mexican-American woman named Toni, sister to Bolan's Able Team comrade Rosario Blancanales, was savagely assaulted by a deranged rapist. But Toni, if badly scarred emotionally, at least remained among the living.

So Mack Bolan had come to accept that his simple presence could constitute the greatest danger to others. His war must be one of solitude, because for the man against whom a worldwide criminal organization was pitted, to make a friend was to create a potential victim.

It was any warrior's greatest vulnerability.

To care for someone meant a chink in one's armor. The enemy could reach you through the one for whom you cared. Yet caring was something Bolan could not and would not give up, because caring, true caring on the personal level, was what distinguished the man from the vandals lined up against him. In the cosmic sense, the man had to care to fight.

And there were people who would fight along with him, whether he wished it or not.

People like Schwarz, Carl Lyons, Pol Blancanales — his Able Team, fellow fighters for the true freedoms. Like April Rose, who in a baptism in blood had come to his side. Like Leo Turrin, who had tiptoed closer to the edge of the abyss than any of them, operating undercover from the very belly of the Mafia monster. Like Phoenix Force, five men of action and success. These were the good and the strong, and until they triumphed over the barbarians, Bolan would fight on. Each was a symbol, and a constant reminder of why his endless mile had to be walked. These people were with Mack Bolan always, the memories of those who had passed beyond, the spirit of those who lived to battle on.

Among them was one pure and large woman named Toby Ranger.

Fate had decreed that the path of Toby Ranger first intersect that of Mack Bolan during the early days of the Mafia wars. A need to replenish his campaign treasury had brought the man already referred to by the mob as "that bastard Bolan" to the desert mecca of Las Vegas, where he planned to liberate a quarter of a million dollars in cash illegally skimmed from the resort's gaming tables.

What better way to finance the destruction of the criminal octopus than with the enemy's own dirty funds? But as so often happened, the relatively simple mission quickly turned complex. The original strike, on a Mafia mountain hardsite above Lake Mead, turned up an unexpected dividend: the rescue of Carl Lyons, then an undercover cop on loan to the Justice Department.

Lyons in turn led Bolan to Tommy Anders, not yet a federal agent, then playing his comedy act in a Vegas clubroom. Anders had refused to toe the mark for syndicate promoters and booking agents, and had paid for it with a beating and the promise of treatment far worse-until Mack Bolan took a hand.

Anders's back-up act was the Ranger Girls, a quartet of lovelies who took their name from their leader. The first time Bolan laid eyes on Toby Ranger he found it hard to pull them away. She was tall and blond and wide-eyed, and built like something out of a centerfold-the last part was apparent, since she wore peekaboo hot pants and a plunging see-through top that left little doubt about her vital statistics.

With her three partners-Georgette Chebleu, Smiley Dublin, and Sally Palmer, Toby and the Ranger Girls sang, danced, snapped out one-liners, and played fifteen different instruments. Toby Ranger was the kind of dazzling combination of looks and talent that made any man, Mack Bolan included, sit up and take notice. The Ranger Girls were good, damned good, and not only as show-biz performers.

Only at the tag end of his Vegas vendetta, when Toby risked her cover and her life to help him out of what would have otherwise been an impossible situation, did Bolan get an inkling of the truth about the four women: they were soldiers of the same side as he. Under the showgirl cover, each was a federal agent. In fact, the gorgeous brunette French Canadian, Georgette, was fated to give up her life to her adopted country, reduced to something less than human through the insane torture of Fat Sal, the Mafia turkey doctor.

Toby Ranger remained a special memory to Mack Bolan. In those days the blitzer was doubly a wanted man, with a Mafia price on his head, and a federal warrant sworn against him. From this isolation, Toby became someone to whom he could turn, with whom he could even merge, however briefly. She was an agent of reaffirmation, that his fight and his survival were worthwhile. She enabled him to see beyond himself into that cosmic sprawl of uncommon magic.

When the theater of operations moved on to Detroit, Toby reentered the nightfighter's life. At first wary adversary, then reluctant ally, she became ardent, passionate lover. The life Bolan had created for himself, a life of war everlasting, contained little space for R and R. But he did relent to the extent of allowing the lady Fed to share his life for the few all too short days it took to travel to New Orleans, the next hellground. And for those days, Mack Bolan — the complex man within the soldier — was entire and complete and, yeah, human once again.