Dedicated with admiration to all those who patrol the jungle yet remain immune to the dehumanizing influences there. Stay hard.

Mack Bolan had never thought that he would live forever. He had not really expected to survive even the first pitched battle of his war against the Mafia.

A military realist, Bolan had been strongly aware from the very beginning that he was waging a war of hopeless dimensions. Even so, he was not a banzai soldier. Suicide had no part in this soldier's thinking. He was a cool strategist and a masterful tactician. His war was planned and fought with military precision, directed toward specific goals and calculated effects. One overriding consideration was, of course, to remain alive and, by extension, to keep his war alive. Not a cold war but a very hot one — blitzkrieg, thunder and lightning, death and destruction, shattered flesh and flowing blood, fear, panic, hysteria — all were Bolan's stock in trade, and he meant to keep that stock active for as long as possible.

Not, however, In the name of vengeance. Revenge could move a man just so far — and Bolan had long ago passed that limitation of vengeful motivation. Granted, his first reflexive action against the mob had been primarily motivated by a need to strike back, to achieve justice in the only clear manner available. The mob had been responsible for the violent deaths of Mom and Pop Bolan and kid sister Cindy. Police officials in the home town of Pittsfield had admitted their own helplessness in the matter. This professional soldier had not felt helpless. He was a trained death machine, an expert in one-man warfare. He had earned his code name, the "Executioner," through repeated successful penetrations into enemy enclaves in Vietnam and had been credited with 95 official "kills" of enemy VIPs. He had been described by superiors as "nerveless"; by army psychologists as "self-commanding"; and by the enemy command as "that devil." Sergeant Bolan was perhaps the first noncom in American history to carry an enemy pricetag on his head.

So, no, Bolan had not felt helpless in dealing with those responsible for his personal family tragedy. He quickly "executed" five of those most directly responsible and immediately set out to track down the sixth. It was not until this point that he learned the identity of this "new enemy" — "the Mafia, for God's sake!" — the fabled crime organization that a Senate investigator had labeled "the invisible second government of the nation."

Bolan did not dig that kind of "government." It quickly became apparent to this professional soldier that the Mafia posed the gravest threat ever encountered by his country. His feeling in this regard is revealed by an entry in his personal journal, penned in the early days of his Mafia war: "Why defend a front line 8,000 miles away when the real enemy is chewing up everything you love back home?"

Being human, Bolan was not immune to the scare stories concerning the Mafia's power and ruthlessness — and, yes, he was decidedly uneasy about "taking on the whole damn Mafia." He knew that an organization that had built its success upon fear and intimidation could not turn its back on this counterattack, even by a single individual. An act of violence upon any mafioso would be regarded as an attack upon the entire organization — a debt of honor to be expunged quickly and decisively — and, in the beginning, Bolan knew that he was little more than a flea upon the back of the giant Mafia dog. He resolved, however, to be as pesky as possible for as much time as he had left — to "bring thunder and lightning to their house!" In such terms did Bolan declare the one-man war to the death against an almost omnipotent enemy — and thus began the most stirring and heroic human commitment in modern history.

With that first unexpected victory at Pittsfield came a closer understanding of the enemy and a deepening of the commitment. Bolan sallied forth then to slay the Mafia dragon wherever contact could be made — and those contacts became legion.

The personal hazards were compounded, also. He was operating outside the law and counter to every moral precept of his society. His name became prominent on the wanted lists of police establishments throughout the country and eventually around the world. Besides quickening police interest, Bolan had to contend also with hordes of free-lance gunmen, bounty hunters who hoped to cash in on the $100,000 "open contract" set by the Mafia ganglords.

As the impossible odds against survival thus pyramided, the man himself "grew into" the situation — sharpened by the challenges, refined by constant peril, enlarged by each confrontation with almost certain death, strengthened by each piecemeal victory.

Bolan, the man, was not, however, all guts and gore. There existed a sensitive human dimension to the warrior that was evident as far back as the researcher cares to delve. While he was being lauded as the "Executioner" in the hellgrounds of Vietnam, other contemporaries quietly referred to the man as "Sergeant Mercy," in recognition of his selfless services to the civilian victims of that war. Friends and associates of earlier times characterized the youthful Bolan as kind and sincerely idealistic, a thoughtful young man who seemed to be guided by a deep sense of human ethics and compassion.

That these same attributes accompanied the man into his impossible war seems borne out by the attitude of many lawmen and other close observers who secretly cheered him on and sometimes openly offered him aid and comfort. A comrade summed up the Bolan paradox with the words: "It's a weird combination of tough guts and warm heart. Most men wouldn't know how to carry both together. The sarge does."

Bolan's closest friend and only continuing ally was an undercover federal agent who had attained high rank in one of the Mafia families. No matter how desperate his situation, Bolan had never been known to fire upon a lawman, and many times he had risked his own capture or death to protect these "soldiers of the same side."

In many quarters of his society, Bolan had become a folk hero. The press was generally sympathetic to the man and his mission, though there were those who frequently denounced his methods and editorialized for his early capture. There were some in government who thought that Mack Bolan should be regarded as a national hero, and indeed there had been aborted attempts to extend an offer of amnesty plus official status in the government's own war against organized crime.

Through it all, the man walked his own path, mostly alone, a "free agent" in his own mind. Autonomous, self-propelled, selecting his own missions and carrying them through to his own idea of a proper conclusion, marked for death and accepting this as a proper judgment, he gave his every energy to a delay of that sentence, realizing that in this war of attrition, his side was allowed but one casualty.

He could not, of course, live forever. No one knew this better than the man himself. He had learned to take life by the heartbeat, one at a time. This was, in his own understanding, "living large."

Survival itself, however, held no meaning except in the sense that it was advancing his cause, his war. In this understanding, Bolan lived only to kill. But to kill in such a manner that he himself might live on to kill again and again. To paraphrase a childhood epigram, he lived to kill and killed to live. This would seem a shabby pretext for life if viewed entirely upon the surface of the man's war. The man himself had deeper dimensions, however, and he took very seriously this violent destiny that had made of his entire life a jungle. He knew the rules here. He accepted the penalties. And he played the game to win.