He clutched at his throat with one hand, rasping while his other hand swung his knife at Bolan like a scythe. He moved toward Bolan on unsteady legs, his knife arcing back and forth, sizzling through the humid air. Bolan was backing up again. The shank nipped closer and closer to his stomach. Behind him, the door was only two feet away, the guard grinning through the glass. Bolan looked up from the probing knife into Bradley's savaged face. The scab tracks made him look even wilder, almost deranged. C'mon, Bolan thought, this isn't where it all ends. Not yet. Not here. Too much to do. For Hal, for April. For himself. The Executioner shrugged off the defeatist thoughts. He parried a quick thrust from Bradley and decided he'd played the guy's game long enough.

With no weapon and no place to run, he took a giant step back, his shoulders bumping into the door, then slid under the chopping blade, knocking Bradley's thick legs out from under him. The knifer toppled over and Bolan was on him like flames on gasoline. He twisted the shank out of the dazed man's hand, lifted the blade over his head with both hands and plunged it into Bradley's chest, puncturing the heart. Blood sprayed up over his hands and along his forearms. The struggling body went flaccid beneath him and he yanked the bloody knife out and faced Rodeo and his two men.

They stood unmoving.

Bolan glanced over his shoulder and saw the guard was no longer peering in the window. Had he gone to get help? No time to worry about that now. Bolan still had three armed men to face, and they weren't going to make the mistake of coming at him one at a time.

The door behind him burst open and Lyle Carrew sat there in his wheelchair, shaking his head at what he saw. "A party and no one invited me?" He rolled through the door, his wheels running over the hands of the unconscious guard.

"Stay out of this, Carrew," Rodeo said. "Ain't none of your business."

"I don't know about that, man. This fella stole my shank, then lets your bozo guard take it away from him. Guy like that needs a lesson."

Rodeo smiled, fingered his braided hair. "Just what he's about to get. You welcome to join in, get a piece."

Carrew tapped his shank against his palm, thinking.

"Nah, I guess not. Guess I'll just take him back to the cell and handle it my way."

"No way," the toothless henchman growled.

"Boone's right, Carrew. You best get your ass the hell out of here. Otherwise you're buying his trouble. That what you want?"

"Nope. It surely isn't." He backed up into the doorway, his wheelchair holding the door open, but blocking any exit. He dropped his shank into his lap, then began tugging at the armrest of his chair. It popped free. "I told this big dumb guy that he was on his own. That you'd be eating his liver for dinner."

"What're you doing?" Rodeo asked, stepping closer.

"I warned him. Didn't I warn you, Blue?"

"You warned me," Bolan said.

Carrew nodded. "See? I warned him." He pulled a piece of the aluminum tubing free from the chair. It was about a foot long. Then he began dismantling some of the spokes from the large wheel of his chair. They popped right out. "Me, I'm only in for a few days, maybe a few weeks, depending on how pissed that judge is that I yelled at. Contempt of court, no big deal. Am I right?"

"He's right," Bolan said to Rodeo.

Carrew twisted the spokes into six-inch lengths.

They looked to Bolan as if they'd been specially made that way, to break into those sections. Carrew leaned over the side of his chair and pried the unconscious guard's mouth open, probing inside with his fingers, then smiled when he found what he was looking for. The wad of chewing gum.

"What the hell you doing?" Rodeo snarled.

"Minding my own business, man. The only difference is...." He tore a hunk of gum from the wad, rolled it into a ball between his thumb and fingers, then stuck it on the end of one of the wire spokes. He inserted the spoke into the cylinder, put the tube to his mouth and pointed it at toothless Boone.

Carrew sucked in his breath, and puffed his cheeks out as he blew into the tubing. The makeshift dart whooshed down the corridor and pierced Boone's throat just below the Adam's apple.

Boone's eyes widened with surprise as his hands flew to the spike and plucked it out. He started to speak, but the words came out in a croak.

Blood was seeping from the little hole in his neck, leaking air, puffing pink foam around the hole.

"As I said," Carrew continued, "the only difference is that I'm shaving the odds a bit. Little trick I learned from an Indian tribe in South America."

Boone dropped his shank, clutching his hand around the hole in his throat, gasping for air. He started for the door, his interest in this fight over.

"Where you going, Boone?" Rodeo demanded.

"Doc... tor," Boone croaked.

"No one leaves I..." But Boone stumbled ahead. Suddenly Rodeo leaped at him, grabbed the back of Boone's shirt and smacked him in the back of the head. The tiny brass studs punched through the skin and hair, drilling through the bone. The momentum of the blow caved in the whole base of the weakened skull. Boone's knees buckled and he fell face first onto the floor.

Blood bubbled out the back of his head and sieved through his oily hair. "You wanted fair," Rodeo rasped, "you got fair. Two against two. Me and Sanders against you and Blue."

"Not exactly what I had in mind," Carrew said, loading another spoke into his tube and puffing it into the face of Rodeo's lone remaining henchman, Sanders.

The dart drilled through the cheek, enough to scare him but not enough to do him serious damage. But while Sanders was plucking it out, Bolan let fly his shank down the eight-foot-long corridor. It flipped end over end like a propeller until it finally thudded solidly into Sanders's chest. Sanders looked down at the protruding shank for a second, more annoyed than anything else, then suddenly his legs melted out from under him and he was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. He tried to speak, but his tongue flopped inside his mouth like a beached dolphin. He died trying to pull the knife out of his chest.

"Now this is what I call fair," Carrew said. "One on one. And I'm out of it. Go ahead."

Rodeo looked suspicious. "You ain't gonna help him?"

"No." Carrew looked into Bolan's eyes. "I've got a feeling he wouldn't have it any other way."

Bolan smiled. "You read people pretty well."

"Okay, okay. Then let's get on with it," Rodeo said. "You giving him your shank?"

Carrew shook his head. "No." Then he turned to Bolan. "I told you you were on your own."

The two gladiators squared off in the concrete arena, circling each other. The Executioner's heart was pounding and his fists were clenched. Not out of fear, but determination. The crazy thing was that, yeah, he really did want to fight it out now. Even his short stay in the prison had gotten to him. Despite his planning and information gathering for the escape, the inactivity of the place, the damned boredom, combined with the constant tension, had taken something out of him. Sapped his energy, his fierce drive. Now he was getting it back.

Somewhere out there, maybe even inside the prison, getting closer every minute, was Zavlin, the master assassin out to exterminate some poor kid who was sitting shivering in his cell. Inside that kid's head was something that was a threat to the KGB and Bolan had to know what that was. And soon. The only thing in his way was this bald, six-foot-six maniac with the studded knuckle-dusters.

Bolan wanted him.

Bad.

Lying on the floor between Bolan and Rodeo were the three bodies of Rodeo's dear friends. Two of their shanks were on the floor, the third buried deep in Sanders's chest.

Bolan was about to make a dive for Boone's shank, when Rodeo attacked, hurdling his fallen buddies as if they were piles of dirt. He screamed through clenched teeth, stampeding at Bolan like a madman, his braided tail trailing like a flag.