into the smart guy's outstretched left hand.
The report was an eardrum-straining crack in the enclosed room, and it brought a ragged croak of pain from Corey James. The hollow-point 9mm fleshshredders had left nothing at the end of his left arm but a mangled stump of bone and gore.
The dazed technician on the floor turned deathly pale and lurched onto his hands and knees, whatever he'd had for supper spewing out of his mouth and nostrils. As Bolan had figured, before putting in with the turncoat network, the guy had been a desk jockey; the 'wet' side of intelligence work was new to him. The other technician was a little cooler.
He shucked his lab coat and went to James.
The ex-agent was ghostly white himself, halfway into shock already. He sunk into one of the swivel chairs. The technician tore a long strip from his coat, wrapped the rest around the shreds of blood-soaked flesh that had been James's hand.
With the reserved strip he began to fashion a tourniquet around James's forearm. There was fear in the glance he gave the Uzi when Bolan poked James with its snout, but he continued his work.
'Where is Frank Edwards?' Bolan said, each word deliberate as a death knell.
The guy looked up at him, and Bolan could read the knowledge in his eyes. James was seeing a vision of his own death, and he knew that vision was a heartbeat from becoming reality.
'I'm not sure,' James muttered, teeth clenched against the pain.
Bolan prodded him with the submachine gun.
'When you stop talking, you stop living.'
'Edwards left yesterday evening. A while back, he took an apartment in Rome, rigged it up as a safehouse, a place where he could go to ground if he had to. He'd done some work for the Red Brigades — the Italian terrorist group — and some of their people housekeep, in exchange for using the place. That's where Frank said he was going.' James's face was drawn with pain. 'I don't know if he was leveling with me, and if he was, why he was going there. My guess is he was just trying to leave a hard-to-follow trail. He might be there. He might not. But that's all I can tell you.' James's longish hair was damp with the sweat of hurt and fear. 'That's the truth. Your killing me won't make it less true.'
'What about the woman?'
'Ranger? She left with him.'
'Was she all right?'
'Sure. Why wouldn't she....' Faint light cut the pain in James's eyes. He tried for a smile that came out a grimace instead. 'So she was one of yours. Frank had an idea about that. Maybe that's why he headed for Rome. Those Red Brigades people specialize in kidnapping for ransom. They know a little about coercion.'
'Where is the Rome place?' James's skin was the color of chalk, and his eyes were starting to glaze. Bolan jabbed the barrel of the Uzi into his chest, hard enough to hurt.
'Okay, okay.' James's voice was weak and reedy, but he managed to mutter an address. He just got it out before his chin fell forward to his chest, and his eyes turned glassy.
'Get him away from there,' Bolan told the technicians. The guy on the floor got shakily to his feet. The front of his lab coat was stained with his own vomit.
It took only seconds for Bolan to dig the goop from the hip pack, mold it to the console in a few strategic spots, and set sixty-second fuses. The two technicians recognized plastique, all right; Bolan had no trouble getting them to hoist James and drag him up the stairs and out of the chalet.
There were five-gallon jerricans of gasoline strapped to the backs of each of the 4WOULD rigs parked out front, which made things easier. Bolan uncapped them, splashed their contents over the inside of the three vehicles as well as the cab of the Toyota pickup.
From the bowels of the chalet there was a dull boom.
By the time Bolan had finished emptying the gas cans, he could see flames licking up the stairway into the chalet's lobby.
James and the two technicians backed away down the slope. But Bolan had lost interest in them.
He selected an HE grenade from a belt pouch, pulled the pin, and rolled it into the back of the nearest 4WOULD, then dogtrotted down the slope.
Behind him the grenade's explosion shattered the night.
A moment later the vehicles gas tanks began to blow, like a string of gigantic firecrackers.
Bolan paused at the tree-line perimeter. A huge ball of gasoline-fed fire was eating into the canopy, moving to meet the flame now consuming the chalet's first floor. Windows began to implode.
As Bolan watched, the canopy creaked and collapsed, tearing framing from the building's facade. James and the technicians stood halfway down the slope, looking small and helpless in the fire's hellish glow.
One small part of Frank Edwards's 'black' CIA was destroyed, but the guy himself was still at large, somewhere.
And somewhere a woman's life hung by a thread a thread tied to that same Frank Edwards.
It had been on the heartbeat. Now it was in the hands of fate.
7
The street was called the Via del Gladiatori, the Way of the Gladiator. It was an appropriate reminder to Mack Bolan of the cosmic scheme, and his own small role in it.
Today, most people saw the ancient gladiator of this city of Rome as a figure of courage and romance.
In fact, he was neither. True, a few did choose to step into the bloody arena of the Roman Colosseum of their own free will; one was the second-century Roman emperor, Commodus. But most gladiators were slaves or criminals, forced to fight on threat of death. There was no romance to it at all, and whatever courage the gladiator brought to his combat was generated through the will to survive. Few did. In victory, the gladiator won only the right to fight again. Defeat was usually synonymous with death. In the rare case in which the losing gladiator survived the combat, his fate was given over to the paying spectators. If they waved their handkerchiefs, he was given clemency; if they turned down their thumbs, he was executed.
In the long sordid history of mankind, few spectacles rivaled the gladiatorial combat before tens of thousands of bloodthirsty citizens for the sheer savagery of which Animal Man was capable.
Now Mack Bolan stood against another manifestation of that savagery, the bestiality of international terrorism. Its perpetrators existed outside of law, society, or civilization.
Though they sometimes carried on about 'liberation, power to the people,' and 'democratic revolution,' their creed was control, suffocation, and the eradication of anyone standing in their way.
The Red Brigades, the 'housekeepers' of Frank Edwards's Rome safe-apartment, were a prime example. The best known of the groups that made up the loose-knit Italian terrorist coalition known as The Organization, the Brigades depicted themselves as noble crusaders for freedom and human rights. However, one way they chose to demonstrate this high-minded commitment was with the kidnapping of statesman Aldo Moro, leader of the Italian Christian Democratic Party, in 1978. Five of Moro's bodyguards were ruthlessly cut down in a barrage of gunfire.
Fifty-five days later, Moro was found in the trunk of a car, his body riddled with bullets.
If undeterred, the terrorists would replace freedom with repression, tolerance with persecution, initiative with intimidation, independence with enslavement. Their principal weapon was mindless violence. They recognized no order except anarchy and chaos. The world they wanted to build would be created for them alone.
That was why Mack Bolan had chosen to stand between them and that damnable goal.
The tireless warrior was no gladiator. He had not been forced into this fight but had chosen it of his own free will. Nor was he kin to those ancient Romans who had crowded the stadiums to see the sands flow red; he took no pleasure in battle for its own sake, had no deranged need to wash his hands in his enemies gore.
It was far more simple than that. Mack Bolan knew that passive lip service to the desirability of a better world would never be enough. As the statesman Edmund Burke had written, 'The only thing necessary for the
