Descending to the armory, he chose his gear for the excursion. His main weapon was Interdynamic's KG-99, complete with combat foregrip and conversion to selective fire. Each magazine held thirty-six 9 mm parabellum rounds, and Johnny stowed sufficient extras for a major siege. A secondary backup was the SPAS 12 riot shotgun, awesome in appearance, devastating in its capabilities. Two bandoliers of double-ought and rifled slugs would keep the SPAS spewing death. The younger Bolan's side arm was a Heckler & Koch VP-70, a double-action autoloader packing eighteen parabellum rounds per magazine. Grenades, incendiaries, timers and a satchel of plastique completed Johnny's shopping list, and he was almost ready for the road.

The hardware went into his Jimmy 4 x 4, a custom tank that came complete with CB unit, ramming bumpers and assorted hidden extras that he could call upon at need. The armor plate and V-8 engine cost him something when it came to fuel efficiency, but he could cruise at eighty, with another fifteen in reserve, and dashboard-mounted radar jammers kept the smokies suitably confused. The heavy wheels were registered to Jerod Blake of San Diego, an identity Johnny could corroborate with bogus driver's license, credit cards and social security number.

Rolling out of Strongbase One, he activated the security devices that protected him against intruders in his absence.

It would be a sorry burglar who attempted to invade the Bolan sanctuary; he would live — no point in cluttering the yard with corpses — but for days thereafter, he would wonder if survival was worth the pain.

He caught the eastbound ramp for Highway 8, the interstate he would follow into Gila Bend. A bag of jerky and a thermos of coffee would suffice to keep him fed and wide awake throughout the drive. Six hours, give or take, and he would be in Santa Rosa. With his brother.

If Mack was still alive.

Whichever way it went, Johnny Bolan was coming. If he couldn't help the brother who meant everything to him, he could at least, by God, wreak havoc on his enemies.

And God help anyone who tried to stop him.

4

It was a seven-minute drive from home to clinic for Rebecca Kent, M.D. She could have made it faster — had in several cases of emergency — but on a normal morning she preferred to take her time, enjoy the town that had been home, more or less continuously, from her birth. The decade she had spent in Southern California scarcely counted, and she hardly thought about it anymore, except in dreams. Or nightmares.

She had not been born in Santa Rosa, technically. In 1954, the town possessed no clinic, and her father, while a doctor of the highest caliber, would never have countenanced delivering a child — much less his own — in a physician's office. They had barely made it into Tucson, and she had been delivered there, but she would always call herself a child of Santa Rosa.

It was peculiar, when she thought of it, how many times she had been forced to leave the tiny town she loved. In 1960, Santa Rosa's two-room school had somehow covered all the elementary grades, but high school meant a forty-mile commute, to Ajo. She had gotten used to buses in those years, as she had gotten used to turning down prospective dates on grounds of inaccessibility. Her high school years had not been sad, exactly, nor had they been lonely, in the strictest sense. Instead, they had been... dull. In retrospect, Rebecca Kent supposed she must have missed a lot, but she had not been conscious of it at the time, and so she had not suffered terribly.

There had simply been no question of a local college. She was set on medical school, and despite her mother's cautionary words, the very mention of a surgical career had brought a gleam into her father's eyes. He had connections on the staff at UCLA, but in the end she did not need his help. Her grades were more than adequate — a 4.0 in her senior year of high school — and her father's income, while exorbitant by Santa Rosa standards, had been low enough to rate a four-year scholarship. Rebecca Kent had graduated second in her Class, and she had taken up her internship at Rampart General Hospital, an institution handling the "county cases": welfare recipients; the indigent; fire fighters and policemen — often with their battered prisoners in tow; drunk drivers and their victims; casualties of war among the countless street gangs; children overdosed on drugs. Before she graduated to the status of a resident at Rampart General, Rebecca Kent had seen more blood and violence than the average beat cop, and she had been learning how to cope with it.

A single night had changed all that and brought her running home to Santa Rosa in despair. Her mother had been gone by then, the victim of a coronary failure in Rebecca's junior year at college. She had never told her father why she had returned, and he had been happy to have his daughter back home, proud to see his daughter taking on the patients that his age and failing health prevented him from serving in the old, accustomed style. When he had finally died, she had kept on with the practice and continued living in the family home, at peace with any ghosts that lingered there. Some things were never meant to change.

She passed the Schultzes' hardware store, saw Vi outside, already sweeping the sidewalk. Rain or shine, she cleaned the sidewalk every day, preparing for the stream of customers that had become a trickle during recent years. The Papagos still dealt with Gib and Vi for tools and seed, a few accounts from local ranches kept them open, but Rebecca wondered how much longer they could keep their heads above the shifting tide.

Santa Rosa was dying. The signs were everywhere for those who took the time to see them. It would not come tomorrow, nor perhaps next year, but it was coming, and Rebecca knew that she would have to make provisions for herself, prepare for the inevitable. She would never be described as wealthy, but she had accumulated cash enough to afford a move, establish her small practice in another town. No cities, mind you; nothing on the scale of San Francisco or Los Angeles, where human beings were reduced, somehow, to predatory creatures of the night. A small town, rather, where the people knew and trusted one another. Where they cared.

But she would never find another Santa Rosa. Never in a million years.

The town itself was nothing special, she supposed. It baked in the summer, and in the winter it was merely warm. The people were a solemn lot, unsmiling when it came to strangers, but if you were local they could spare the time to sit a spell and share the latest gossip, reaffirming ties that held the tiny town together. Most of all, the town had been Rebecca's sanctuary when she needed it the most. It had allowed her to conceal her hurt, her shame, from everyone except herself.

Past Croson's Pharmacy and Stancell's independent service station. OPEC and the larger companies had almost put Bud Stancell under once or twice, but he had stubbornly refused to sell, and anyone who wanted brand-name gasoline at higher prices would just have to drive the extra thirty miles to find it. Bud was opening for business as she passed, and he had time to flash a smile before she turned the corner, nosing down the alley that would bring her in behind the clinic to her "private" entrance.

Rebecca liked Bud Stancell and felt sorry for him, all at once. There had been nothing she could do to help his wife in '81; the burns from a propane explosion had been too extensive, too severe, and she had died before the ambulance was twenty miles from town. Two years later, though, when Bud's son Rick was choking on a piece of chili dog and Bud had run him to the clinic, literally, with the angry, helpless tears still streaming down his face, a tracheotomy had done the trick and saved Rick's life. He was starting quarterback for Ajo's varsity team, and every time Bud spoke his name or saw the boy, pride lit his face up like a neon sign.