"I — I can do it."

"Not if your stomach's as weak as your head, you can't. Just close your eyes and lie back. Look, doll, I carried you on my shoulder for half a mile. My hands already know every inch of you. Now give me the damn legs."

She did so without further protest — and she did not close her eyes. They remained on him, searching without expression, watching without comment as he removed the shoes and began the scrubdown. They were lovely eyes, blue with deep purple glints, perfect ovals, wide-spaced, intelligent, and growing very curious upon the man as he went on with his delicate labors.

Presently he showed her a gruff smile and told her, "I need more leg and less dress — unless you'd like to take over at this point."

"You're doing fine," the girl replied in a very small voice. She sat up and slid to the edge of the bunk, lowered her eyes, removed the dress, then lay back down. "I haven't been scrubbed like this since I was three," she said, sighing.

The strip had caught Bolan a bit off guard, and now that glowing young body in nothing but skimpy bra and even skimpier panties was raising hell with his manly instincts. He'd only meant that she should raise the dress a bit, not whisk the damn thing off. But she'd done it so naturally — with a total lack of self-consciousness yet not brazenly, either — just natural, yeah, as though she were removing a glove.

Bolan shrugged the instincts away and growled, Turn over."

The dress had needed to come off, anyway. The machine gunner had obviously bled like hell. She looked as though she'd been lying in a pool of it.

He had to return twice to the shower to freshen the rub, and when he was finished the girl was glowing with more than cleanliness. The job had required some rather vigorous applications of the wet terrycloth — and that rosy flesh had sustained quite a bit of stimulation.

She rolled over then, unfastened the bra, and pointed out some splatters to the front.

When Bolan finally stood away from that task, there simply was no way to shrug away the masculine emotions chugging through him.

And the girl was not helping a damn bit.

She whispered, "This is the most erotic experience of my life."

"Some life," he growled. "How long has it been? Eighteen years? Nineteen?"

"Twenty," she replied in that same soft little whisper. "And there have been experiences to relate to. This isn't 1940, you know."

"You can hit the shower now," he muttered, turning away from that implied invitation with nothing but sheer power of will. "It's a small tank, though. So just wet down, turn it off, soap down, quick rinse. Got it?"

She lay very still, hardly breathing. "You'd better show me."

"You'd better quit while you're ahead."

"Who's ahead? I feel like I'm running down a steep hill, plunging out of control. Show me how to work the shower."

Bolan growled, "Hell."

"Please. I really do feel very weak. I don't think I can move, by myself."

He sighed a resigned sigh of the damned, lifted her off the bunk, and carried her to the small shower enclosure, opened the door, set her inside on her feet.

The arms clung to his neck.

She wouldn't let go.

Gruffly, he told her, "You're not that damn weak."

"Yes I am," she insisted. "I'm afraid to bend over. I'll — how will I get my panties off?"

Bolan was a goner, and he knew it. It was no time for this sort of thing — and especially with a kid like this — but what the hell was a guy supposed to do?

He removed her arms from his neck and dropped to one knee at her feet to gently skin the flimsies from that delectable bottom — so full and charged and, he guessed, hurting. He remained there for a brief moment, gazing up at her. "You're in a lot of trouble, young lady," he said quietly.

"Yes, I know. So are you."

"I don't mean this."

"I do." She turned on the water and quickly adjusted the temperature, then handed him the soap. "You started it," she reminded him.

Half of Bolan was outside, half inside the enclosure. He straightened up and turned off the water, took the soap and began working a lather onto her thighs and belly.

She melted against him with a happy little sigh and huskily informed him, "You do have the touch. Get the back."

She was clutching him in a frontal embrace. He used "the touch" the full length of her spine and began working back toward the soft little shoulders. She shivered and said, "Lower, lower."

Bolan said, "For God's sake," and staggered out of there, whipped off his own sudsy clothing, and quickly rejoined.

She gave a whispery giggle and turned the water on again. "Your turn," she declared, seizing the soap.

And that was not all she seized.

Some time later they met the first penetrating rays of the sun curled limply together on the floor of the war room and gazing up through the one-way glass into the murky skies — and Bolan spoke the first rational words since the shower stall.

"You're different," he told her.

"I am? How?"

He sighed. "I don't know how. Just different."

"You'll have to be more explicit than that," she said, teasing. "I have two legs, two arms, two boobs, and all the other usual equipment. What's different?"

"You," he said.

"Oh. Not my parts."

"Well they're okay, too. But there's something very... very natural about you. You know?"

She sighed. "Well that's no compliment. I belong to the natural generation."

He had no comment to that.

She went on, "We haven't even been introduced. No names. That's natural too, you know. For the now people, I mean."

"You're a now person?"

"Uh huh. Freedom, equality, all that."

"You're Ms. Webb, huh?"

"Oh! You do know my name!"

"Just that part. What's the rest?"

"Dianna."

"Goddess of love. It fits."

"Thanks. What are you? Thor, the god of war?"

He said, "You mean now or otherwise?"

She giggled. "You're very commanding. With a gun or ... whatever."

"You remember that part, then."

"Oh sure. And by the way... thanks. I believe Tommy would really have used that gun on me. I mean, he's insane!"

A cold sensation floated along Bolan's nude frame.

He asked, quietly, "You know that kid?"

"Oh sure. Tommy Rotten."

"Tommy what?"

"That's what the other men call him. I believe his real name is Rottino or something very Italian like that."

"Let's try something non-Italian," Bolan said. "How about Allan Nyeburg?"

"That's easy," she said with a sniff.

"How easy?"

"Very easy. Allan Nyeburg is my stepfather."

Oh sure. Natural, yeah.

If life was a game of craps, Bolan had just rolled a natural.

7

Prisoners

Dianna Webb's mother had married Allan Nye-burg when the girl was fourteen. It was a marriage of desperation for Mrs. Webb — a suicide widow with plenty of social connections but little else, not even an insurance policy that would pay off. Nyeburg had seemed "nice," respectable, considerate — a young man "on his way" with plenty of financial stability already.

Dianna utterly despised him, always had.

"Inside that charming mask, he's a maniac," she told Bolan over breakfast, in that cool matter-of-fact tone which characterized her speech. "Ill tell you what sort of man Allan is. He's a compulsive skirt-chaser, and I mean any skirt. Always has a dozen women on the string. Every day without exception he has sex for lunch. I'm serious. A prostitute comes to the office at twelve sharp every day. Allan locks the door and they romp for an hour. Different girl every time. I guess it's some sort of compulsion. I know it is. In the evenings he sometimes sees two or three different women."

"Where's your mother through all this?"