It was a time for war.

And Mack Bolan was not a negative warrior. His game was blitzkrieg — thunder and lightning, death and destruction, shock and panic and crawling fear — and once again his time for war had come.

For three nights he had held his peace and his patience, carefully reconnoitering and gathering intelligence, reading faces and comparing them with the indelible etchings of his mental mugfile, classifying them by family, function, and rank — and marking them for death.

On this third night, the tall man in night combat garb had been at his post for more than three hours in the late evening chill, quietly watching and biding his time outside the would-be swank nightclub at the edge of San Francisco's North Beach district. He was dressed all in black. From his right shoulder was suspended a "greasegun" machine pistol, riding muzzle-down at the hip. Clamped into the snap-away leather beneath his left arm was the black Beretta Brigadier — a nine millimeter autoloader with a muzzle silencer, his most trusted weapon. A number of extra clips for both weapons were carried in a web belt at his waist — also a light assortment of personal munitions, including a small fragmentation grenade and an incendiary flare. On the ground at his feet rested a flat canvas bag — a "satchel charge" of high explosives.

The place he watched occupied a chunk of high-rent ground completely isolated from the rest of the neighborhood by a couple of acres of asphalt parking area. At dead center was the joint itself, with access along a cozy little pathway winding through artificial shrubbery and plastic flowers. A man-made brook encircled the building, flowing beneath quaint footbridges and jogging around rustic benches emplaced in synthetic arbors.

The China Gardens, they called it, but most of it was bastard-American-Oriental with two wings of weathered stucco, painted-on dragons, and false eaves for the flat roofs. One of those wings housed a dining room, which featured a Chinese menu native only to America. The other provided a ballroom-lounge with pretty Chinese hostesses and cocktail waitresses — the only genuine Oriental touch to the entire place.

At front and center was a two-story structure that was supposed to look like a pagoda; apparently nobody had ever told the owners that a pagoda is a sacred place — a temple, not a saloon. No one seemed to mind but Bolan. Business had been good and the trade lively throughout its surveillance.

But Bolan had seen the joint in the daytime, and it had looked as seamy as most of these places are in honest sunlight. At night it was swankly glamorous and sure to catch the eye of the unwary tourists who couldn't spot a clip-joint until confronted with the bill. The China Gardens was more than a clip-joint, though. It was a bag-drop and a crossroads of many diverging trails in San Francisco's underworld, a favored meeting place and watering hole of the area's most secretive citizens. During the three long nights of patient stakeout, Bolan had identified several California mob captains — including a Peninsula gambling czar and the narcotics boss of Berkeley. He had also recognized a miscellany of muscle men and runners, plus a couple of black bagmen who were probably from the city's Fillmore District, the black neighborhood.

So, yeah, it seemed the perfect place to start a war.

The timing was about right. They'd closed the door an hour ago. All of the legitimate customers and employees were long gone — and everyone left in the joint now would be a valid target. There were plenty of those left.

Johnny Liano was in there. He'd made it big in Berkeley when the kids began turning on with drugs instead of politics. Pete Trazini was also present, the shylocker and numbers king of depressed Richmond who'd lately been boasting that he was getting bigger than Bank of America.

About a dozen lesser Mafiosi were inside, too, some of them with Liano and Trazini — hardmen; personal bodyguards who probably followed their bosses even to the bathroom.

The parking lot was deserted except for a cluster of vehicles parked near the rear entrance. The neon marquee out front was extinguished and both wings of the building were darkened; only the pagoda was showing lights, and these were all on the upper level. Wisps of fog drifted sullenly past the lone lamp which now tried to illuminate the parking area, a dull yellow blob of light which would have been worthless even without the dense atmosphere. This part of the city was eerily quiet and almost muffled in the characteristic black-gray wetness of early-morning San Francisco, the fog and the silence blending into an entirely new dimension of time and space. The world seemed to be wrapped tightly around this tiny oasis of sight and sound, the lighted coffee house in the next block and the occasional passing vehicle along the street belonging to an entirely different reality.

But the China Gardens was the only reality Bolan needed, for the moment.

It was to be a very direct tactic, sure — but it was the only one available. Bolan had to take what he could get, pull whatever handle happened to fit his hand, walk through the doors that opened to him.

And a war needed an opener.

The Executioner moved out of his surveillance position and crossed over to the combat zone, a gliding shadow upon the night, and came into no-man's-land via the parking lot, halting slightly uprange from the darkened rear entrance to the central building and directly opposite a lighted upstairs window.

Shadowy images were playing upon that rectangle of light. The "boys" were no doubt having a business meeting — posting records and splitting profits and laying plans for the next day's cannibalistic activities.

Bolan muttered into the night, "Well, for openers..." and swung the satchel charge one full revolution in a softball windup, then let it go in a high, arcing pitch.

The game plan was simple... hit and fade... and he was back-pedalling rapidly in the follow-through when he saw her in his corner vision.

She was a real live China doll, hurrying out of the darkness from the back side of the pagoda and heading directly across his path, and apparently she had not even seen him yet.

Consciousness froze for an agonizing instant — with that shipment of high explosives poised midway between Bolan's hand and the impact point — the girl rushing blindly into the blast zone.

She was a beauty, petite but fully proportioned, the Dragon Lady in the flesh, wearing a tight Mandarin style dress with a slit to the hip.

There was time for only a flashing glimpse of her — and then Bolan was reacting instinctively, like a killer linebacker hurling himself into a busted play-whirling and lunging to grab the girl and throw her to the pavement, falling with her and shielding her body with his own. She was struggling and grunting in alarm, her breath hot on his face, when all the sounds of the night became telescoped into the smashing of that upstairs window and the closely following explosion of the satchel charge.

The entire area received instant light, flying debris and whizzing chunks of deadly glass and mortar — and Bolan had another flashing glimpse of frightened eyes as the girl ceased struggling and suddenly lay very still, her head turned to the sound and sight of hell unleashed.

Flames were whooshing through a hole in the upper wall and unseen men were shrieking in panic. Then the wall bulged out and leaned forward, and Bolan was dragging the girl into deeper safety when the whole thing collapsed, spilling bricks, timber, flaming furniture and human bodies in an avalanche onto the parking lot.

He pulled the China doll to her feet and roughly shoved her toward the darkness — and his first words to her were an urgent command. "Run!" he growled. "Run like hell!"