"I ain't going to kill you, man ..." Bolan breathed deeply again. "Unless by accident, when you scare the living crap out of me!"

"Pleese-a-no, I got-a wife three bambin."

"Forget it, man. This your car?"

"Is your car, you want Take, take all. Here, you wanna some mon." The cop dropped his fat moneyclip on the road and pushed it toward Bolan.

"Where's the helicopter?"

"In-a see-tee. You wan?"

Bolan could hardly hear the cop. That Brinato certainly could scream, gutshot as he was.

"Put it away, copper. I don't want your bread." Bolan went to him. "Come on, get up, get-up!" He jerked and the cop leaped at the same time and Bolan shoved him under the wheel. As they turned and drove down the road toward town, Bolan could still hear Brinato. He certainly could scream. Just went on and on and on, and loud, too. Best screamer I ever heard, Bolan decided.

Epilogue

Handling the pilot had been no problem at all. Once airborne, Donato freely admitted that if he'd known Brinato was lying gutshot and dying up at the big house, he'd have taken off on his own. He wanted no friggin' part of that war he could hear going on up there.

"You're Bolan, aren't you?" Donato asked, shooting a look at the blacksuited Executioner while the man strapped a bandage on a flesh wound below his right knee.

Bolan didn't answer.

"You did a hell of a job, guy, I'll say that. For one man, key-rist, you brought it down."

"Not quite." Bolan jerked his chin.

Donato looked past Bolan, and all he saw was devastation. "I don't get you."

"That goddam house is still standing. I shot the damned foundation from under it, but it's still there."

"And it bugs you, huh, bad."

"Real bad... but I'll get over it."

Donato tapped Bolan's arm. "Look, what are your plans? I mean, what do I have to look forward to? A hole in my guts, too?"

Bolan shook his head: no.

"Okay, then what are your plans. I mean, like, you know, where we going, man?"

"How much fuel do we have?"

Donato didn't answer. He looked at Bolan. After a long moment, Donato said, "You want to deal? I got something you just might go for."

"If it's a trick, let me tell you, the last guy used those words to me was Brinato."

"No way, man." Donato grinned widely. "You want that house down. Okay, dig this, Mack Bolan."

Donato banked the chopper around sharply. He reached up to an overhead panel with a key, unlocked a small door that revealed four switches, the two in the center with red metal safety shields over them. Donato flipped the two unsafetied switches and from the corner of his eye, Bolan saw the front of the landing gear skid peel off and fall away.

When he looked back, Donato had flipped up a plastic plate with gunsight markings on it. He jockeyed the chopper, lowered the nose, increased power, jockeyed again, seemed to settle into a groove, then he said, "Lift the safeties and flip those two switches."

Bolan had caught on by then. He fired the rockets. The house went down like a dynamited smoke stack, flying apart and caving in all at once.

There would be no "monument" to Don Cafu, no Mafia shrine, no basilica for this thing of ours in Agrigento.

"Okay, your deal," Bolan said.

"We've got enough fuel for Algiers." Donato grinned. "They let every other kind of asshole in there, airline hijackers, dope peddlers, Black Panthers, so it's worth a try."

"It sure as hell is."

"And I keep the chopper, right?"

"She's all yours, ace. Wake me when we get there, huh?" Bolan crawled into the back seat and stretched out as best he could, bone-ache tired, wounds washing firelike pain across his chest and down his side, along his leg. Yet, Mack Bolan smiled.

God, that was a beautiful sight, watching that house go down. A man didn't get to see one go like that every day.

Beautiful, just beautiful.

Unknown to Bolan, he was spotted in Algiers less than an hour after he arrived. But instead of a battle resulting, the man who spotted him followed new orders, arrived in his office at midday. After locking his office and pulling the shades, he opened his safe. He took out a locked, steel-covered book that was itself a small safe. Laboriously, because he was unaccustomed to such work, the man encoded a message. He locked the book, returned it to his safe and locked the big box, then slipped out the back door of his office and went immediately to the international wireless office. After the message was sent, the man bribed the operator to recover the company copy of the message, then went outside and burned both his handwritten copy and the one he bought.

Less than an hour later a rasping buzzer woke a superbly fit husky man in a lavish home at the foot of the Rocky Mountains outside Denver, Colorado. He came awake fast but unmoving, like a vastly experienced combat infantryman — totally awake, alert, and wary, knowing where his weapons were and which way to go. He reached over and lifted the receiver of the special telephone. "Yes."

"We have an urgent most secret coming in, Mr. Molto."

"Algiers?"

"Yes, Mr. Molto."

"I'll be right down."

Mr. Molto got out of bed. He stood naked in a shaft of moonlight and looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door. He stood just over six feet tall and weighed two hundred twelve pounds, every ounce of it bone, gristle, muscle, and jungle instinct. It was the body of a pro football running back in his prime, yet the man's hair was completely gray, close-cropped, and he was past forty years of age. Looking at himself dispassionately, Molto hoped for a moment that he personally had the chance to face Bolan. Man-to-man, he could take Bolan. He could take anyone he'd ever seen. Then Molto dismissed the thought. That wasn't the plan. That was the kind of crap thinking that had allowed Bolan to survive as long as he had.

Molto slipped into socks, loafers, slacks and a golf shirt, brushed his teeth quickly and brushed his hair, then went to the elevator, down, into the new CIC … Combat Intelligence Center.

The two men on duty rose to their feet, almost assuming the position of attention. Molto shot a look at them, heads to feet and back again. "You need a haircut, Contabile."

"Yes, sir."

"All in?"

"Yes, sir," the young man needing a haircut said, and he handed a slip of paper to Mr. Molto. Molto nodded and went to a wall safe, shielded the combination lock with his body and when the door clicked open he took out a duplicate of the steel-bound book used by the man in Algiers. Molto also took out a machine that looked somewhat like a combination typewriter-calculator-keypunch machine. He put the machine down on a desk, unlocked the codebook, found the key for the day, jerked his chin, and the young man plugged the machine into an electric outlet.

The message in Ms hand was in a series of capital letters, all in blocks of four:

ANDE KNBC RORP WMEC USSU AWYC LKER WJSO

GUYM OZWW NMMB DZPB DALW LECM JTDW JOLD

ENDS YMIA

With a dexterous speed that made the two youngsters look at one another and grin sickly, Mr. Molto's fingers flew over the keyboard, feeding input. The machine whirred and clacked, and a few seconds later a strip of paper began emerging from the left bottom side of the decoder. When Mr. Molto finished the serials, he pulled the tape out a few extra inches and tore it off. The young man who needed a haircut unplugged the machine, coiled the cord and put the machine back into the safe, and at a nod he closed the automatically locking codebook and returned it to the safe, then shut the safe and spun the dial.

Molto looked at the message and grunted after reading it through. Without looking up, he said, "Activate the B Team, Red Alert."