The group of hostages made its way to the bus under the watchful eyes of Able Team, Phillips, Carlton and Hall.

"We've lost this one," Phillips murmured.

"The battle only, my friend," Blancanales soothed as the bus pulled away. "Those bastards haven't won this war by a long shot."

10

Leo Turrin had lost all track of time since the snatch. He knew only that he had been taken from the cement room and locked in a small bedroom. No furniture except the bed on which he lay. The window faced a row of other buildings and was barred.

He knew also that he hurt.

Angry red welts on his chest marked where the electrodes had been applied. His muscles ached from the spasms the charges had induced.

Shillelagh's electronic voice had droned on and on, the questions coming at him from all sides. Leo was interrogated by a master. He had been near breaking when two burly men came in through the door behind him, untied him, and dragged him to this room.

He did not know why the questioning had stopped, but he knew that if it started again, he was as good as dead.

He had to escape, and quickly.

The room was no more than twelve feet square, a Spartan cell. Ventilation was provided by a single duct above the door, its grating out of reach, the duct passage far too narrow for escape anyway. The door itself was sturdy, locked on the outside, guarded by a sentry in the corridor beyond.

Leo Turrin was not going anywhere.

The single piece of furniture, a metal cot on which he sat, was hard, unyielding. It reflected his pain, the crazy-quilt of throbs and aches that covered every fiber of his being. Sitting rigid on the cot, acutely conscious of the bare wire mesh beneath him, Leo held himself immobile, shunning any movement that might aggravate his injuries and amplify the pain.

Bastards could have given me a mattress, he groused. Even as the thought took shape he realized there was no time for sleeping or for licking wounds.

Survival was the top priority, and that meant getting out. But how? A rapid visual scan confirmed his first impression of the holding cell: it was a goddamned Mob-style warehouse, plain and simple, with no loopholes even for a man at full capacity. The single, caged bulb overhead illuminated every corner, leaving nothing to the prisoner's imagination, showing him remorselessly that his predicament was hopeless. There was nothing he could use to forge a weapon, an escape tool.

He still wore shoes and socks, slacks, but his torturers had relieved him of his belt and shoestrings — anything that might have served him in the cause of self-defense or suicide.

They wanted him alive and functioning — at least enough to understand and answer questions. Turrin knew they were not through with him by any means. They would be back, and he could not hold them off forever by the force of will alone. Eventually he would break, or he would die. Unless he could devise a method of escape.

Fat chance, the wounded warrior thought. They haven't even got a keyhole I can crawl through.

He changed positions gingerly, the effort costing him, and something clanked against his heel beneath the cot. It moved, retreating several inches, scraping over the linoleum with a familiar kind of sound.

Now, what the hell…

He doubled over, peering beneath the cot. It was an empty coffee can, the two-pound size, and Leo had a hunch he had found his makeshift toilet.

On command, his bladder started nagging for attention. Turrin grimaced at the thought of standing up, but Mother Nature had the con and she was calling all the shots. Right now the urge of his bladder was everything, its swift relief his sole objective.

Uncertain that his legs would hold him, Leo compromised by perching on a corner of the cot. With coffee can between his knees, he urinated painfully, relaxing by degrees until the throbbing in his bladder had receded, giving way to other, more persistent pains. About to tuck the can away beneath the bed, he glanced involuntarily inside — and saw the blood that mingled with his urine.

I'm dying here, he thought. Mack Bolan ain't around to help me this time....

He had never really thought of Bolan as a savior — though the gutsy blitz artist had saved his ass with frequency enough to qualify by any standard. Going on a lifetime now, Turrin had grown used to thinking of the hellfire warrior, Able Team's mentor, as his best friend, someone to fight and die for if the need arose.

They had not started out as friends, of course. Far from it. They had sworn to kill each other in those days, when Mack Bolan was a soldier freshly home from Nam and taking on another holy war — this time against the Mafia, which Leo Turrin served. It had been close, too frigging close for comfort, right; but after Bolan learned of Turrin's otherrole, his undercover status with a secret federal strike force targeting the Mob, the two men had reached a grim accommodation that had blossomed into spiritual kinship.

And Mack Bolan had been there when Leo needed him, damn right. In Philly, when a double-cross by Don Stefano Angeletti came within a hair of canceling the Turrin ticket — or in Pittsfield, when the war had come full circle with a vengeance! Augie Marinello's boys had stumbled onto Leo's deadly secret, and a life more precious to him than his own — sweet Angelina's — had been hanging in the balance until Bolan tipped the scales. If not for him…

Enough, goddammit.

This time out it was a solo hand for Leo, and he would have to play the cards as they were dealt to him. He could not raise the ante, but he could sure as hell refuse to fold. He had not joined the game to lose, and if it washed out that way in the end, it would not be because he opted for surrender.

Although Leo Turrin did not have the Man in Black to back his play this time, he was not precisely on his own. He had a righteous anger in him, now that he had seen his likely fate spelled out in blood, and there was always that something else — his unshakable belief in justice.

Sure, however outdated that might sound to certain sage philosophers or armchair liberals, for Leo Turrin, justice was the center of it all. He had done time in Vietnam, enlisted with the federal strike force, finally joined Mack Bolan's everlasting war — and all because he believed unswervingly that strong men armed could make a difference. You couldstrike a blow for what was right and fair, for what was just, by God.

And if you got your arms lopped off in the attempt, well then, you started kicking ass until the bastards took your legs away.

Leo Turrin smiled, aware that his condition and situation hardly made him a champion player.

"Oh, piss," he said wearily.

He glanced down at the can between his feet again, saw red and, in his mind's eye, something else. More softly now, almost with reverence, he spoke the oath again.

Oh, piss.

At first, the sentry thought he was imagining the sound. A muffled groaning, low, insistent, it demanded his attention like the still-small voice of conscience, long ignored. It came from somewhere close at hand, perhaps inside his skull.

But, no. The groaning was an actual sound, externalized. It issued from behind the door he was assigned to guard.

The sentry cocked his head, one ear almost against the door. No question, it was the prisoner. And he was suffering by the sound of it.

The sentry had observed the captive when they brought him in, and he recognized the signs. The guy was holding up but only just, and from his look, another session like the last would finish him. If the last one had not finished him already.

He was marked for death, this stranger, but the sentry could not let him die just yet. It was his job to keep the enemy confined, secure — to keep him breathing, if it came to that. And he could not afford to let the prisoner check out before his time. If the inquisitors were cheated of their game, they might go shopping for replacements — starting with the man who let the quarry slip away.