"I counted two,'' the soldier said. "They're out of it."

The Executioner saw the man's Adam's apple bobbing as he tried to swallow.

"It's twenty questions, Tommy. Play it right, you live. If not..."

The dealer stiffened in his grasp.

"I ain't no stool."

"Okay."

Bolan drew back the hammer on the Beretta, letting Tommy hear it, balancing the silenced muzzle of his weapon on the mobster's nose. The Executioner heard a frightened little gasp from Tommy's woman and ignored it.

And his finger was already tightening on the trigger when his quarry buckled, caving in.

"Hey, now, wait a sec!" The dealer tossed a glance in the direction of his bedmate. "Can she take a walk?"

"I like her where she is."

"Okay, you call the shots."

And Tommy winced, as if his choice of words might give ideas to the man in black.

"You sent the Stomper and his bat boy after Hannon. Why?"

A heartbeat hesitation, ended by a prod from the Beretta.

"It's a private deal," the mobster said. "An outside contract."

"Who's the buyer?"

"I don't know."

The soldier frowned, released a weary sigh.

"Goodbye, Tommy."

"No, wait!"

Bolan let the automatic's muzzle dip a fraction of an inch.

"Why should I?"

"All I've got's a code name. Something for the phone, ya'know?"

"You taking bids from strangers, Tommy?" Bolan did not try to hide his skepticism.

"Well, we've done some other business... this and that."

No need to press the mobster for specifics. This and that would be narcotics, Tommy's stock in trade.

"The code name," Bolan prodded.

"Huh? Oh, yeah... he goes by Jose 99." A weak attempt at laughter. "Swear to you, that's all the name I know. Those Hispanics..."

"How do you get in touch with him?''

"He gets in touch with me. Like this time... says some private dick is stepping on his action. Wants to know if I can fix it."

The Executioner said nothing. His icy gaze, the vacant stare of the Beretta, loosened the mobster's tongue.

"I told him I'd take care of it, okay? We help each other out ... one hand washes the other.''

Right. But no amount of scrubbing could erase the stain of blood.

"The contract's canceled," Bolan told his naked captive. "Stomper won't be coming home."

"Okay, man. Anything you say.''

Too quick. Too easy.

Tommy Drake had caught a glimpse of daylight. He was running for it. Bolan kept a firm hand on the reins.

"You've got a white flag, Tommy. A reprieve. If I find out you've lied to me..."

"Hey, man, I wouldn't shine you on."

The man in black released his captive and backed away, the sleek Beretta autoloader leveled from the waist.

"Be smart," he cautioned. "You've got everything to lose."

And he was halfway to the balcony when Tommy lost it all.

The mafioso found his nerve, his legs, and bolted from the bed. He leaped across the prostrate woman, bounding off the mattress, breaking for a nearby nightstand. Bolan let him get there, watched him wrestle with the ornate drawer and fish around inside; he saw the flash of chrome as Tommy found his weapon.

Far enough.

The 93-R tracked across the bedroom, locking into target acquisition. The trigger yielded to a steady, gentle pressure from the forefinger, and a 9mm parabellum closed the space between them.

Tommy stumbled, sat down hard, and he was spilling scarlet from a hole beside his Adam's apple. He was struggling fruitlessly to speak, the effort forming crimson bubbles on his lips and pumping bloody streamers down across his chest. The soldier put another round between the glassy eyes and blew his carcass backward, out of frame.

The girl was on her knees and gaping at the carnage. She finally tore her eyes away from what was left of Tommy Drake and focused on Mack Bolan. There was something in her eyes, behind the shock and fear, but Bolan did not have the time to study it.

"Get dressed and shag it out of here," he said. "The party's over."

And he left her to it, exiting the way he came. The Executioner was out of numbers. It was every man now — every person— for himself.

His business at the Drake estancia was finished, right, but he had not been wholly candid with the woman. Tommy Drake was gone, but the party in Miami was not over yet. Not by a damn sight.

In his gut the soldier knew that it was only just the beginning.

Miami is as much a Cuban metropolis as it is American. For more than twenty years the city's heart has been Hispanic, throbbing to a Latin rhythm, crowded with the refugees of Castro's revolution. More than eight hundred thousand of them have arrived since New Year's Day of 1959 — the date of Castro's final triumph in Havana.

Their arrival has transformed Miami irrevocably, for good or ill. Suburban Hialeah and Coral Gables were converted almost overnight to Spanish-speaking enclaves, but the living core of Cuban life is centered in Miami proper, in the district known as Little Havana.

Sandwiched between downtown Miami on the east and Coral Gables on the west, with Flagler Street its northern boundary and a southern demarcation line at Southwest 22nd Street, the district is a piece of Cuba physically transplanted stateside.

Billboards there are generally in Spanish, but shops with English Spoken signs dot the boulevards. The district's central artery is Southwest 8th Street, flowing one way, eastbound, over thirty blocks of shops and sidewalk coffee counters, pushcarts and corner fruit stands. Locals call the main drag Street of Gold, but the gold is long since tarnished; there is grime amid the glitter.

Frigid winds of change had battered Cuban Florida since Bolan's visit early in his Mafia war and again some years later, and much of what was decent, warm, romantic, had been withered by the blast. Ironically, the blight had sprung from the same love of freedom that brought Cubans to Miami in the first place.

During April, 1980, half a dozen dissidents sought sanctuary at the Peruvian embassy in Havana. When the embassy officials would not give them up, Castro retaliated by withdrawing all his sentries from the compound. Within two days some seven thousand Cubans jammed the embassy, attempting to escape communism's iron-fisted rule.

Converting the embarrassment into a propaganda weapon, Castro publicly announced that anyone dissatisfied with Cuba was at liberty to leave. He opened up the port of Mariel to a rag-tag "freedom flotilla" based in South Florida. Miami exiles flocked to Mariel, attempting to collect their relatives and friends, but as they jammed the port, the Cuban leader was waiting to reveal his hole card.

Every vessel leaving Mariel with refugees aboard was forced to carry several passengers selected by the Cuban government for deportation to America. With new arrivals pouring into Florida at a rate of four thousand per day — more than one hundred twenty thousand of them by mid-June of that year — it soon became apparent that Castro was cleaning out his prisons and asylums, ridding Cuba of its undesirables by shipping them direct to the United States. If proof was needed, the statistics made it plain: within a few months of the boatlift, major crime inside Havana dropped by thirty-three percent, while metropolitan Miami showed a corresponding leap in violent felonies.

Narcotics was the booming modern industry in southern Florida, and with the cocaine cowboys came a radical increase in urban violence. A 1980 FBI report ranked six Florida cities among the nation's ten most lethal, with Miami rated first. At least a third of all the slayings in Miami's murder boom were drug related, and recent Cuban immigrants — the outcast marielistas— filled the local jails in mounting numbers. Soon, their names and faces were in law-enforcement record books as far away as New York, Chicago, Seattle and Las Vegas.