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  The Executioner resolved it for him, opting for the truth.

  "The name is Bolan," he informed her. "You can call me Mack."

  Astonished recognition flickered behind the red-rimmed eyes, and he could almost hear the silent questions jostling around inside the lady's mind.

  She was a beauty despite the tears, the harried look, and he could see why she had cherished hope in younger days of a career on stage and screen. He understood how looks and youthful innocence had gotten her in trouble, led her through the back door of the movie business into sleazy porno features touted by producers as a "stepping-stone" to Hollywood, the Big Time. It had been a stepping-stone to nowhere, and Bolan knew how that worked, too.

  The soldier put old business out of mind and took the chair Chuck Newman indicated with a nod. The state's attorney found a place beside his lady on the couch. A springsteel silence hung between them momentarily, and Bolan gave them time to find their way around it gingerly. Chuck Newman was the first to break the ice.

  "We were expecting someone else just now," he said. "That is, I thought..." He hesitated, swallowed hard and tried again. "We got a call this morning, early. I was on my way to work... I almost didn't answer it. My God..."

  The prosecutor brought his hands up, covering his face, and Bolan waited. When the moment passed Chuck Newman seemed determined to proceed.

  "Our daughter, Bonnie," Newman said, and Bolan felt the hackles rising on his neck. "They have her. She's been kidnapped."

  "Who are they?"

  "No names, of course," the prosecutor told him bitterly. "But it's Scarpato. I'm convinced of it."

  "Why so?"

  "The caller made certain demands. Oh, he left all the details to me, but the gist of it was open season on Artie Giamba, Bobby Pattricia... every goddamned hood in town, except Scarpato's crew."

  "That's tidy."

  "Sure. My office does the mop-up for him, clears the way, and Vince steps in to fill the vacuum. We get Bonnie back when it's done... signed, sealed and delivered."

  "You don't believe that," Bolan told him. It was not a question.

  "No. I don't."

  Beside him on the sofa, Newman's wife was wrestling with panic, barely holding on. This new exchange between the men appeared to galvanize her, and she clutched her husband's arm now, taloned fingers digging deep into his jacket sleeve.

  "What do you mean? What are you saying?"

  Bolan took the question, fielded it while Newman disengaged himself and slid an arm around the lady's shoulders, trying desperately to comfort her.

  "Vince Scarpato has a hole card now," he said. "If it pays off, he'll raise the stakes until he has it all. He can't afford to lose his new advantage right away. He can't afford a witness who could tie him to a federal charge."

  "I understand," the lady told him, and there was a trace of steel beneath the tremulous voice. "You're saying that he has to kill our daughter now, whichever way it goes."

  "Eventually," the soldier answered, "yes. That doesn't mean we're helpless, though. There may be time to turn this thing around." He faced Newman squarely. "What's your deadline?"

  Newman drew a ragged breath, released it slowly through clenched teeth. His eyes were hollow, windows on a soul grown numb from too much pain.

  "The caller said twelve hours. If I haven't moved against Giamba or Pattricia by tonight..."

  He left it hanging there, unfinished, and the soldier knew the rest of it, damn right. The threats and implications of the penalty for failure to cooperate, perhaps with certain grisly details added from the caller's own imagination. For kicks.

  It turned the soldier's stomach, but he was accustomed to a war devoid of rules. The savages were acting predictably, and if ferocity comprised their strength, predictability might prove to be their fatal weakness, damn right.

  "Twelve hours then," he told the grieving parents. "Give me ten of them, and let me see what I can do. If I don't have your daughter back by... let's say five o'clock... you'll still have time to start a sweep, take some of Artie's people off the street for openers."

  The lady's eyes were darting back and forth from Bolan to her husband now, but Newman's gaze was riveted upon the Executioner.

  "What can you do?" he asked.

  The soldier frowned.

  "You've seen me work before."

  "This is my daughter, guy. Not some scandal. Not my goddamned fly-by-night career. This is her life."

  And Bolan felt their pain, in spades. The Sergeant Mercy part of him was deeply touched. The Executioner inside him wanted action, swift revenge against the animals who had produced this sick assault on a decent family.

  "Your daughter is at risk right now," he told them both. "I won't do anything to stretch her odds. Scarpato knows I'm here... or will, before the morning's out. He won't connect the two in time to save himself."

  "But now..." Mrs. Newman began.

  Chuck Newman interrupted, edging out the query from his wife.

  "We would be gambling with our only child," he said.

  "You've lost her as it is," the warrior told him bluntly. "If you play it by Scarpato's rules, she's gone for good. You know that."

  Newman nodded slowly, woodenly. "Ten hours."

  "Maybe less. And I'll need to see a photo."

  "Okay."

  Beside him on the sofa, Newman's wife was silent, huddled within the yielding cushions like a child intent on blocking out reality. Then the distraught woman reached for a framed eight-by-ten that was sitting on an end table next to the couch. She reluctantly extended the picture to Bolan, as if releasing it would somehow shatter any hope of seeing her daughter again.

  Bolan saw the tears that glistened on the lady's pallid cheeks, and they were real. As real as heartbreak, agony and death.

  He committed the photographic image to memory, then stood, and the prosecutor rose to show him out. They remained above the woman for an instant, watching her, the husband's heart in tatters and the soldier's going stony cold.

  Someone was going to pay for all this needless pain, and warrior Bolan was already totting up the tab.

  It bore Scarpato's name, and Stone's, together with a crew of bad John Does he had already marked for execution in his mind. It was a start.

  Chuck Newman saw him to the door and stepped outside ahead of Bolan, scanning, finally satisfied the street held no surprises for his guest. They stood together on the threshold for a moment, and the prosecutor held Bolan with his probing gaze.

  "Do you believe she has a chance?" he asked.

  "I do. If I can get to her in time."

  "I started this." Chuck Newman's tone was ripe with self-reproach. "If I had done my job... if I had never called..."

  "You're wrong," the soldier told him flatly. "Vince Scarpato is a cannibal. He would have come around to this eventually. If not today, next week. If not your daughter, someone else's."

  Newman wasn't buying it, but he was able to approximate a weary smile.

  "Okay. And thanks... for everything."

  "Hang on to that. I haven't finished yet."

  He left the prosecutor standing there and put that house of pain behind him, moving briskly toward the rental car. His mind was racing into confrontation with the new and unexpected problem that had fallen in his lap.

  The Executioner had come to Newman's home in search of answers, and he was coming out again with brand-new questions, brand-new risks to complicate his private war. Except that it was no longer private, damn right. The enemy had added innocent civilians to the pot, and it would be his task to sift them out again before the mixture reached a rolling boil.

  He felt a certain regret for lying to the Newmans, telling them Scarpato was incapable of adding two and two. Whatever Bolan did from here on out, he would be risking Bonnie Newman's life at every step. At the first mistake, he would have her blood on his soul.

  It was already crowded there, and Bolan needed no reminder of the missing allies, of the screaming "turkeys"
scattered back along his hellfire trail. So many wasted souls. So many lives snuffed out on his account.

  And this one, sure, would be all his, as well. The soldier knew his intervention in St. Louis had provoked Scarpato to this desperate action, forced his hand by leveling the shaky odds between Giamba and New York. If he had stayed away, gone about his business somewhere else, they might have killed each other off without involving innocents along the way.

  Except, he knew, it didn't work like that in grim reality.

  Giamba had been losing when the Executioner stepped in, and when he fell, when Bob Pattricia's die-hard troops had been exhausted in the field, Scarpato and his crony, Stone, would be the reigning bosses of St. Louis and environs. It would be a new day for the river-city syndicate, and life would never be the same again.

  The innocents, Bolan knew, had been involved from the beginning of his war, and they would be involved until the final shot was fired and died away. They were his war, his purpose, sure, and he could not have served them here by stepping out and letting Scarpato have his way. He might be risking Bonnie Newman's life by any move he made against the Eastern strike force now, but there was no alternative in Bolan's view. It would be worse if he did nothing, let her waste away and die a prisoner in the Scarpato camp, because he feared to take a chance.

  And if she died because of him, because of Scarpato's hunger for territory, there would be hell to pay. Scorched earth for all concerned, and never mind the private cost to Bolan's body, to his soul.

  He was prepared to bring the city down if Bonnie Newman was harmed in any way, and if he had to spend his own life in the process... well, the Executioner had been prepared for that from the beginning of his war.

  It was a risk he lived with every waking hour of every day.

  It was a grim, recurring dream that dogged his sleep and brought him to each dawn with knowledge that it might well be his last.

  The Executioner could not undo the pain Scarpato had inflicted here, but there was something he could do to stop it in its tracks. If sacrifices were required he had a list in mind, and Bolan's name was up there with the rest.

  The deathwatch in St. Louis was beginning.

  There was no way in hell of knowing who would live to see another dawn, and Bolan realized it didn't matter anymore.

  This day was all that mattered, here and now.

  This day would make or break Scarpato's fortunes... and the Executioner's... in old St. Louis.

  Bolan had ten hours to kill, and the irony of that thought did not escape him as the numbers ran down inside his head. Already precious moments were slipping through his fingers like so many grains of sand.

  The sand — and time — ran out.

  For Bolan.

  For Scarpato.

  For St. Louis.

  It was Zero Hour, minus ten and counting. Beyond that deadline, Bolan could not see a thing.

  He kissed tomorrow off and put the war machine in motion, drawing energy, assurance, from the rhythm of its meshing gears. The Executioner was home again, in hell, and he was going to make it hot for all concerned.

  11

  Tom Postum pushed back his swivel chair, raised his feet and rested them across the corner of his desk. Through heavy-lidded eyes he watched distractedly as the smoke from his cigar collected near the ceiling fixture.

  But his mind was on the streets, and on the war that was becoming grim reality around his city. Doctors at the county morgue were working overtime with better than a dozen corpses piled up. There would be other customers before the day was out, he knew, and knowing it produced a sour taste in Postum's mouth.

  He didn't like the waiting while others did the legwork, but there was nothing more that he could do himself. As he was leader of the city's strike force, it was his job to lead, and that meant Postum had to make himself accessible to his detectives in the field. He could not always lead the charge himself. He had to delegate responsibility and dabble grudgingly in all the office politics that kept a modern law-enforcement agency in motion.

  Slow motion, Postum thought disgustedly, his hooded eyes pursuing yet another smoky plume in the direction of the ceiling. He was primed for action and at the same time, he was dreading it. For action meant more blood, more bodies in the streets, and he had seen enough of that in more than twenty years behind the badge to last a dozen lifetimes.

  This new explosion was the worst that he had seen since, well, since Bolan. His mind kept coming back to that, the hellfire hours — had it really only been a single day — when a single dedicated man had run a breakneck race with death. And won.

  Tom Postum didn't like to think about those days. They brought back other memories, of Postum's closest brush with death in more than twenty years of facing off against the savages. And whenever he remembered, he fell claustrophobic closeness of the capsized black-and-white. He smelled the leaking gasoline, heard the crackle of a hot wire sparking into life and knew that it was over.

  And then he heard the voice.

  From somewhere overhead, reaching through the fog of pain and fear to snap him out of it and make him lift his head, his hand.

  He heard Mack Bolan's voice, and saw those graveyard eyes above the soot-smudged cheeks, a flash of ivory in the heartbeat smile.

  Tom Postum owed the guy his life, and knowing it diminished him somehow. Perhaps because Bolan had been — dammit, was — the nation's number-one most wanted fugitive. Perhaps because the captain had not collared Bolan when he had the chance.

  Perhaps — and he had to admit it — because there had not been a chance to pay back the soldier.

  The telephone beside Postum jangled shrilly and he picked it up on the second ring. His eyes were on the ceiling and his mind a thousand miles away as he wedged the instrument against his shoulder, answered absentmindedly.

  "Intelligence — Captain Postum."

  "I thought you'd be commissioner by now."

  His daydream and reality collided with a grinding, grating sound that brought the strike-force chief erect, his heels impacting on linoleum with jarring force.

  "Too damned much politics," he said, amazed that he could speak at all.

  "Good choice."

  He recognized the voice at once, beyond the whisper of a doubt. His memory was better than a voice-print analyzer when it came to this one, and he would have staked his reputation — hell, his pension — on his first impression.

  Bolan.

  Speaking to him on the phone. From where?

  The captain knew before he spoke, and still he had to test the certainty. He had to prove it to himself.

  "Is this long distance?"

  "Strictly local/' Bolan answered, and the captain felt his stomach going over in a sluggish barrel roil.

  "Okay."

  "You've got a problem in your city, Captain."

  "Yeah. I think I'm talking to it now."

  "So think again. The New York delegation's getting hungry. Someone needs to bring them into line."

  "I'm working on it," Postum told him gruffly.

  "You could use some help."

  "No thanks. It's covered," Postum lied.

  "I didn't spot your men this morning," Bolan said. "They must be good."

  "So that was you?"

  "I had a piece of it. Scarpato called the tune."

  "Uh-huh. You wouldn't know where I could find a certain capo, would you?"

  "Artie's safe and sound, for now. You've got a more important problem on your hands."

  "Oh, yeah? What's that?"

  And Postum listened as the Executioner explained about the Newman girl and Vince Scarpato. As Bolan spoke, the strike-force captain felt his insides churning slowly and alarms were going off inside his head.

  "He should have come to me," Postum said when Bolan finished speaking.

  "Right. And have Scarpato waste the girl as soon as he finds out police are on the case."

  "You think you've got a better chance of springing her?"


  "Damn right. I won't be going in with one hand tied behind my back."

  The captain ground out his stogie with vicious, stabbing thrusts against the plastic ashtray, knuckles white and bony where he gripped the telephone with grim intensity. He knew the goddamned guy was right, but he could not admit it to himself, not openly.

  "We don't need any vigilantes in this town," he said, and knew it sounded lame before the echo of the words had died away.

  "You don't need any murdered women, either, Captain."

  "Yeah. Okay. So why tell me your plans?"

  "I haven't told you anything," the soldier countered smoothly. "That would make you an accessory."

  "Ail right." The weariness was evident in Postum's voice.

  "Scarpato's cut himself a slice of hell on earth," Bolan said, the deep voice suddenly intense. "I don't want any blue suits getting burned."

  "I don't want anybody getting burned," the captain retorted, but he knew it was a lie before he spoke.

  He wouldn't mind Scarpato getting toasted in the least, and that went for his gunners, too. If Art Giamba's crowd should get smoked out along the way, so much the better in Postum's eyes.

  But it was wrong, and he could not allow himself to sanction Bolan's extralegal plans through silence any more than he could actively assist the man in black.

  "The town's on fire already," Bolan told him. "Maybe you should let it run its course."

  "You think so?"

  "Fire gets rid of vermin, Tom. It clears the air."

  A part of Postum wanted to agree with Bolan, but he shrugged it off, rocked forward in his swivel chair, both elbows resting on his desk.

  "I can't help thinking someone might object if I sat back and let you stoke the furnace by yourself."

  "I didn't start your brushfire, Captain," Bolan told him. "But I'm smart enough to know it can be channeled, used."

  "I'm not a forest ranger," Postum told him sourly. "I've got a job to do, and if you hang around St. Louis you're a part of it."