"I know the routine," Toby reported, tight-lipped. "What's that chamber?"

Bolan replied, "Only my gut knows for sure. I believe I can tell you this much. Georgette has been held up as some sort of object lesson to new recruits. They parade the new souls through this 'chamber' to show what could happen to them if they ever develop cute ideas about not playing ball with their new masters."

Toby shuddered. She whispered, "Oh, my God."

Bolan said, "Yeah. A chamber of horrors. Have you ever seen a turkey, Toby?"

"I've heard of them," she replied shakily. "Are you saying that Georgette... ?"

"You said no colors," Bolan muttered. "And that's what my gut is telling me about Georgette."

"Oh, my God."

"Yeah." He buckled on the automag and tested the action.

"Did you say for fifty days?"

"That's the story."

"But how could they ... ?" Toby shuddered again. "How could anyone take it that long?"

"Let's hope she couldn't, Toby. Pray that she's long dead."

"My God, my God."

He slithered into the Beretta rig, sprung her twice, checked the clip, secured Whispering Death.

"Where are we going?"

"You know the place."

"I do?"

He raised the lid of a munitions chest and began selecting weapons for the hunt.

"Do I?" she repeated.

"You said it held some secrets. I believe it does."

"You can't hit that place again so soon!" Toby cried. "It would be crazy suicide!"

"Maybe so. But there's more than one route to suicide, Toby. I can't walk away from this one."

"But not if she's dead already! It would be senseless, wasteful!"

Bolan closed the chest and drummed his fingers on the lid.

Toby pulled the war wagon to the curb and turned to him with a tortured gaze.

He asked her quietly, "Are you ready to write her off, Toby?"

She just stared at him.

He said, "There are ways of keeping people alive … through almost anything. These people have turkey doctors who — "

"Oh, shut up!" Toby screamed.

"Did you ever read the Nuremberg reports on the surgical techniques used by the Nazi lunatics? Do you know what a skilled surgeon without a soul can do to a living body — and keep it living? Have you ever — ?"

"Shut up! Just shut up!"

"Let's roll, partner."

She mauled her lower lip between grinding teeth, realizing the pain only when she tasted blood, then told the man, "Not for my sake, Captain Gallant. This one is not for me. She's dead and I know it. You know it, too. So this one is not for Toby."

"Call it for me, then," Bolan muttered. "And roll this goddamned hearse. Now!"

She rolled it, reluctantly, and Bolan resumed his preparations for war.

A moment later she told him, "Okay. But I'm going in with you."

"The hell you are."

Tears were streaming down her face, diluting the blood at her lips. She said, "And just when I was getting to really like you."

"Stop thinking, Toby. Just drive."

"I've felt more alive today than I ever have. I don't want it to end, Captain Honey. I just can't stand to lose it now. Not now"

He told her, "You can't lose something you've never owned, Toby."

"Thanks; that hurt like hell. I don't want to own you."

"I didn't mean me."

"Oh hell, Mack! What are we doing? What's the sense of all this? God, tell me God, what are we doing?"

"Living, Toby. We're just living. Largely."

"I'll settle for small"

"No, you wouldn't. Tell you what, though. I'll share an R&R with you. After this. We'll take a few days off from living, and we'll just graze in green pastures until we've both had a bellyful. Okay?"

She smiled through tears and told him, "That's a cheap promise. From a dead man."

He said, "I'm not dead yet."

"Green pastures, eh? Okay. Okay."

But the green, green hills of home seemed terribly remote, at that moment, to the somber man in black.

It was a cheap promise, sure.

Toby called back to him, "We're getting close. What's the plan? Quiet entry?"

He glanced outside to orient himself, then replied, "No. Not for this one, Toby. Pull into the next street west, and stop."

For this one, no. No quiet entry.

Charley Fever would be expecting it, and all the quiet ways would be under heavy patrol.

This one would be a hit — a hard swing to the solar plexus — thunder and lightning and hell on the hoof.

And let Death pick up her pieces where she would.

24

Dead

A smoke cannister whizzed over the wall directly between the twin gatehouses at SCYC and fell to the lawn, spewing a dense black cloud, followed immediately by another and then another — each spaced about a hundred feet apart.

The gate captain bellowed an anguished alarm and hit the double-lock, while another guard fumbled with a walky-talky radio.

Then a gray van with a canvas satchel draped across the grill leapt out of the shadows of the access road and charged along the fifty-foot approach to the chute, steadily gaining speed.

A panicky guard on the catwalk connecting the two gates opened fire on the vehicle with a chatter gun. The windshield shattered, but the truck bore on.

Someone screamed, "Look out!"

Then it hit, dead center on the outer gate, blowing through with a fanastic explosion that shook the night all over those grounds.

A wall of the main gatehouse promptly disintegrated. The catwalk tilted, cracked, then collapsed into the chute.

And that was not all.

The demolished van skittered on, wedging itself into the narrow chute halfway between the two gates. A second explosion triggered itself seconds after the catwalk fell in, and this one outdid the first by several points on the Richter scale. Debris from both gatehouses flew in an almost horizontal movement in a farflung pattern across those bedeviled grounds as desperate voices screamed into the night.

While the displaced pieces were settling, a solitary figure in combat black stalked across the no-man's-land and calmly walked into hell.

As he moved through the shattered area, he pulled a gas mask into place and heaved another smoke cannister far ahead.

He bore a military pack on both chest and back. The massive head weapon, a .44 magnum autoloader, occupied prime position in the right hand. The left held a hand grenade — dead-man-armed with five seconds of fuse.

A pistol yapped at him from the left flank. Without breaking stride he squeezed off two thunderous retorts from the automag — and the yapping abruptly ceased.

He stepped into the smoke and guided his progress with one foot moving along turf, the other scraping paved drive. He was a pack mule, and it was necessary that he move like one. The weight upon those feet was nearly double the usual.

The night was dead, breezeless, unreal, as viewed through the visor of the mask and choked with the heavy atmosphere of chemically produced smoke.

Shadowy figures were running blindly and wheezing in all directions around him.

The guy had found his bullhorn again and was exhorting the troops from some place safely removed.

Bolan the Mule plodded on, pausing only to grip the mag between firm teeth now and then while he heaved another ration of smoke — and he continued thusly, unmolested, all the way to the parking area beside the house.

A fire team with wet towels at their faces occupied the small porch at the side entrance, five of them jammed onto that small oasis of relatively unpolluted atomosphere.

The sighting was instantaneous on both sides.

A volley of reactively hasty fire crackled into the charged environment of doom as Bolan merged back with the smoke. His left arm executed a half-circle in a softball pitch.