Yeah. Yeah, it could be, and it was.

It was a marksman's medal, done up real fancy in a jewelry box with a velvet cushion under it.

The nerve! The nerve of that cocky bastard to send it to him to give to... The coldness pressed harder upon the Tiger's heart as he realized that no, no, it wasn't addressed to the old man at all, it was addressed in care of the old man... the goddam thing was meant for Tony Rivoli himself!

Where did the wise bastard get his name? Where was everybody suddenly coming up with the Tiger's name, Christ's sake!

Rivoli whirled about to shout an instruction to the two gatemen, but the words stuck in his throat. Heavy black smoke was billowing up over there, totally obscuring that area of the yard, and he could not even see the damned gate or Jerry the Lover or the other boy or anything but the damned smoke.

In just one fucking second?

Shit, he was hitting! In broad daylight and with cops prowling all around, the nervy bastard was hitting.

Rivoli raced into the yard to give the signal to the upstairs boy, the signal which would be relayed to all the outside boys, to bring them in quietly into a ring of steel around that house, around the whole neighborhood, to seal the smart bastard inside, to cut away all of his running room and even his walking room, to grind him surely and securely within the confines of that house on the hill, and to begin his education into the fantasies of mercy.

And then the Tiger ran on into the smokescreen, to see what the hell had become of the boys at the gate, and to continue wondering why the bastard had sent the mark of death to him — why him? — why the Tiger instead of the Capo?

Despite smarting eyes and bursting lungs, Rivoli found the smoke bomb and hurled it across the street. He also found the two boys lying in their own blood, great gaping holes between their eyes, and he found the electric gate standing wide open.

The Tiger staggered clear of the suffocating chemicals and made a run for the front porch. Then he saw the same crap coming up all along that fence, saw it billowing and drifting in a solid cover toward the house itself, saw the new bombs erupting in close sequence and in the exact pattern the goddam Bay Messengers van had taken — and Tony Rivoli began right then and there to re-examine his own fantasies.

The mark of death had come to him.

The guy had delivered it personally, and had stood there smiling at him, laughing at him inside — that guy with the paisano mustache in the Levi's was Mack Bolan!

That heavy coldness at the top of Tony Rivoli's heart was the hand of death. He knew it. The guy was there, and he'd come to kill the defender, not the lord of the manse, and the Tiger of the Hill was not at all certain now that he'd set the proper defenses for a hit like that.

Hell no, he wasn't sure at all.

"Shoot to kill!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "Forget the other stuff! God damn you, all of you, shoot to kill!"

It was to be a sad lesson in fantasies for Tony the Tiger Rivoli.

Bolan left the van and the excess clothing at the south corner, and he came in with the smoke, over the fence and onto the grounds — a gas-masked, black-clad, striding apparition of doom with a single idea in mind.

It was another numbers game, and he would have to hit and git with no unnecessary messing around, or else he would have the law breathing down his withdrawal route.

He crossed the garden-patio and lobbed a fragmentation grenade into a choked and gasping babble of confused voices near the corner of the building; under the cover of that explosion he kicked the French doors open and moved inside with the Auto Mag at the ready. He left the doors open and the smoke came in with him, moving quickly ahead of him and spreading rapidly in an ever-extending blanket of cover.

Thudding feet and an almost hysterical panting signalled the approach of at least two defenders from the front reaches of the house. Someone nearby gasped, "Jeez, get over there and see if those doors are open! The fuckin' place is filling up with smoke!"

Another voice cried, "Bullshit, what was that explosion? I ain't going out there until I know what..."

Then Bolan loomed up from within the swirling smoke, and the two gawked at him in frozen immobility while the Auto Mag roared its throaty message of massive destruction. The two gunners died on their feet while considerable areas of their assaulted anatomy sought a place to settle from the explosively expanding push of the big 240 bullets.

Bolan stepped over the bodies and went on toward the grand stairway, a curving nineteenth century masterpiece of mahogany and marble.

Several someones up-above pumped a wild volley of shots along his path. Again he gave voice to the impressive Auto Mag, in rapid fire, splintering the vertical rungs of a railing up there and sending a fine cloud of powdered plaster drifting along that upstairs hallway.

Someone up there groaned, "Gee-Zus Christ!" and the sound of scurrying feet told Bolan that he had them on the run.

He was well along the stairs and feeding a new clip into the Auto Mag when another guy came running in from the foyer.

The guy yelled, "Hey what?.." And then he saw the thing in black on the stairway.

This one's reflexes were working better than the others Bolan had encountered thus far, and a long-barreled .38 revolver was tracking up the stairs and suddenly making a mess of the polished mahagony.

At that distance the guy should not have been missing, but Bolan made allowances for an excited overeagerness, and he covered the guy's embarrassment with 240 grains in the teeth. The gunner's whole head seemed to cave in and fly away. Bolan continued his rush up the stairway.

Another revolver roared and a bullet buried itself into the wall behind his head as he reached the top. He saw a door rapidly open and close at the far end of the hall and — just beyond that — he spotted the window he was looking for.

The lower edge of a brooding layer of cloud strata — the condition they called fog in the bay city — was lying just above that window. Below it and trapped, there was a densely churning atmosphere of chemical smoke — a condition called personnel cover in the war zones — and Bolan meant to invite it in.

He sent a single shot crashing into the windowglass. It shattered. The Executioner held his position commanding the stairway and patiently waited for the friendly atmosphere to come inside.

An agitated voice down below was announcing to other cautious presences, "He's upstairs I guess, yeah, with a fuckin' cannon or something, I don't know what. Lookit Joey there, just lookit 'im."

"Well where's Mr. Rivoli?" asked another quivering voice.

"I think he's upstairs covering Don DeMarco," the other one obligingly revealed.

The Executioner smiled grimly behind his mask, and a two hundred pound package of sudden death merged with the atmosphere of doom and moved unhurriedly into the choking no-man's-land of that upper hallway.

It would have been much simpler, sure, if he'd just taken the guy while he was down there at the gate. But simplicity was not the name of the game.

The idea was to show Big Daddy DeMarco how vulnerable, how utterly defenseless, how hollow he really was.

And once the idea had sunk in that he had no one else to lean against, then maybe. . .

Yeah, Bolan was betting his very blood on it. Don DeMarco would want to lean with Mr. King.

And the Executioner would be content with nothing less.

It was not his idea of fun to terrorize a tired old man of seventy-two. But Roman DeMarco, of course, was not any ordinary old man. With an iron hand he still commanded an empire built of terror and intimidation, savagery and murder — and he could yet turn out to be a formidable foe.