A muscle twitched in his jaw and he muttered, "Pure war, Rachel, is pure hell. How are youmaking out?"

Then he closed the trunk and returned the dress cart to the apartment. Moments later he was behind the wheel of the blue Chevrolet and tooling out of the garage. The attendant looked up and nodded at him as he passed, and Bolan waved.

He pulled out into the street. He took out Chianti's business card for another look at the address engraved thereon, then he grunted and swung north toward the Triborough Bridge. He did not know the Bronx too well, but he would find Sam the Bomber Chianti, and he would deliver this hot shipment of rapidly cooling cargo.

Corpses were something that Sam the Bomber would understand. He had trafficked in them for almost as long as Mack Bolan had been alive.

Sam was going to discover, though, that the supply was beginning to greatly exceed the demand.

And he was going to discover that damned quick.

Chapter Four

Engineers

Sam the Bomber began his climb to underworld prominence in the early 1940's, in a nation at war and suffering the inconvenience of a rationing of vital commodities — things such as butter, meat, gasoline, tires, sugar, coffee, and many luxury items. Commodity rationing was one of the minor hardships of a world at war, to be sure, but many Americans could not accept even this small sacrifice to national survival. Instead, they made rich men out of petty crooks by satisfying their selfish appetites with black market purchases of stolen commodities and/or stolen or counterfeit ration coupons. So proliferate were these black markets in wartime scarcities that rival marketeers in some areas of the nation engaged one another in territorial contests and gang wars to equal the bloody battles of the prohibition era. The American Mafia, ever alert to the smell of quick money, lost no time in dominating this lucrative side-effect of the war, and neighborhood punks like Sam Chianti found readymade careers awaiting them in this "little world war" of black market racketeering.

Chianti pulled his first muscle job at the age of sixteen, when he threw a fire bomb into an automobile repair garage belonging to one Adolph Bruhman, a small time Bronx businessman who refused to honor black market gasoline coupons for unlimited sales to customers of Freddie Gambella, then an obscure underling in the Mavnarola Family. That fire bomb killed Bruhman, three employees, and two customers — and endeared the precocious hoodlum to Gambella, who was already busily establishing himself in the line of succession to Mavnarola's crown. Little Sammy Chianti, seventh grade dropout and neighborhood terrorist, became known as Sam the Bomber and participated in another fifty-six slayings before attaining legal age. He was adjudged sub-intelligent and unfit for military service by his local draft board in 1944 and again in 1946, but he was intelligent enough to repeatedly break virtually every law of his society over a period of some thirty years without once being convicted of a major crime. And he possessed intelligence enough to remain alive and viable in the ever-shifting structure and fortunes of the New York underworld and, moreover, to establish himself as a respected and honored member of that structure. Perhaps the patronage of Freddie Gambella contributed to this "success" story — but the fact remains that Sam the Bomber had been a professional killer for thirty years and had never spent a night in jail.

Now forty-six years of age, Chianti had long ago come to the realization that he "had it made." No longer required to directly participate in the mob's muscle departments, Sam the Bomber sat in a swank office in the front of his Bronx home, a restored two-story brownstone in a modest neighborhood of identical restorations, pushing buttons that sent extortion, hard persuasion, and frequently death into the midst of his community. Sam was "a contractor's contractor," a muscle>-and-gun business built and preserved by rockbed reliability and guaranteed results. Though without official rank in the organization, he enjoyed the friendship and camaraderie of various chieftains, lieutenants, and enforcers of all the five families of New York — plus a reputation which was respected throughout the sprawling syndicate. Freddie Gambella was the godfather of Sam's two kids, and their wives had been close pals since Sam's marriage in 1951. So who needed formal rank when self-evident rank was draped all over him? Sam had no ambitions to ever become a Capo;it was more than enough that Capossought his advice and accepted his hospitality and kept making him richer and richer.

Sure, Sam the Bomber had it made. So why, he was wondering on that cold December day in the Bronx, had he felt compelled to get out there on the streets again, after all these years of "softing it," and make a total ass of himself? Overanxiety, he supposed. Bolan was a big fish. A hundred grand worth of fish, not to mention the immeasurable value in prestige for the contractor who landed him. It had been a natural thing, Sam decided, for him to go out personally on a job like that one. After all, the biggest guns in the syndicate had been blasting at that guy for months now. Boys like the Talifero brothers, Quick Tony Lavagni, Sam's old buddy Danno Giliamo, Nick Trigger, and a host of others — most of them dead now.

Sam was certain that he was the luckiest man alive to even bealive. Not many had stood eye to eye with that Bolan bastard, and fumbled, and came away to tell about it — or try to live it down — no, not many. The guy was no punk, he was no ordinary street pigeon, hell no. Sam had gone up against some pretty tough numbers in his time, some pretty damn deadlynumbers — but he had never faced such cold and awful deadliness in his whole life as he faced that terrible Saturday out at Kennedy. Hell no. That son of a bitch could stare down a pissed-off rattler, Jesus he had never seen such eyes in his whole lif e. No wonder Sam got rattled.

But Sam was more than just rattled, and he recognized that. He'd been a long time off the streets, his kids were in the fanciest boarding schools in the East, and his old lady hadn't touched a duty dish or a Monday wash in all the years they'd been married. Everybody had known that Sam Chianti had it made. Sam had known it too. Until Saturday. Yeah, Sam had gotten more than a rattling. Everything he had was a result of his reputation with a contract, and Sam had suddenly been made to feel very insecure. Word was out an hour after it happened, all over town, Sam the Bomber had personally muffed a contract. It might seem like a small thing to some people, but when a guy lived off a reputation, then the first tiny crack in that reputation could be like the crack in a dam, the whole thing could fall to hell in an awful hurry.

It was funny, he was thinking, he hadn't been a damn bit afraid of Bolan, not a damn bit, even knowing what the bastard had been doing all this time to the biggest guns hi the business. Sam the Bomber had been bigger than Mack the bastard Bolan, he'd been ten feet bigger and he hadn't been afraid of that jerk. Now he was. He had to face it. He was afraid.

He stared at his reflection in the glossy surface of the huge mahogany desk and admitted it to himself, straight out. If something didn't happen pretty fast, if his crews couldn't get a line on the bastard pretty soon… Well, Sam hated to face such an eventuality. He didn't have to face it. He'd built a business and a gilt-edge reputation on finding people and doing things for them. He had his contacts, Sam had thirty damn years of contacts, know-how and people spread everywhere in this town, every borough, every precinct — sooner or later he would find this bastard Bolan. Sooner, he fervently hoped.