Bolan could find no reason for his uneasiness. His own position had been carefully selected and was as good a drop as he could reasonably expect to find. He was comfortably situated in the garage apartment of an adjoining estate which had been closed for the winter. He had the wind at his back and a bird's-eye, unrestricted view of the target area. His line of withdrawal provided several acceptable alternate routes of retreat, and he would be firing along a three hundred-meter range — well beyond any effective retort from handguns.

So why the uneasiness? Simple fear, maybe. Or an instinctive recognition of... what? Bolan shook away the feeling. The flash review had crowded his mind for only an instant and the long-awaited image of evil was still crowding the vision field of the sniperscope. The target was standing beside the vehicle from which he had just emerged, his face thrust aggressively into the raw wind slanting in from the lake, and he was evidently giving some instructions to his driver. His woman had already gone inside — a luscious blonde in a fur coat who displayed a wiggle that promised everything.

The intense magnification of these big scopes created a distortion of reality; Aurielli's face seemed to be just hanging there — discarnate, a blob of humanity that had somehow managed to insinuate itself in the lens. And, yeah, a war was waiting. Last minute fears or not, the moment had arrived.

Bolan sighed, and his finger knew no compunction as it caressed the trigger of the big Weatherby. The high-powered rifle thundered into the recoil as the .460 Magnum missile tore along the one-second course. Bolan grimaced and rode the recoil, his eye flaring into the scope in the effort to maintain target continuity as the image disintegrated in a frothy implosion of blood and bone and tissue — and Louis Aurielli, Mafia underboss, suddenly ceased to exist in the space-time world.

The bolt-action moved swiftly and smoothly as the Weatherby immediately swung a few degrees left and the long barrel elevated an inch or two to acquire the next target. The dumbly-dismayed visage of Aurielli's pretty-boy bodyguard, one Adonis Sallavecci, hung there for a frozen instant in the framework of doom as it contemplated the inexplicable behavior of a disintegrating boss. The sound-wave bearing the rustling report of that first round reached the target area at about the same instant that the second Magnum mushroomed into Sallavecci's once-pretty face, and another target was fragmented and flung beyond the vision field of the sniperscope.

Again the bolt-action ejected searing metal and the trained eye of the marksman rode the jolting weapon to the next preselected step of the rapid-fire triple punch, and again the tightening finger of death dispatched an emissary of war. As swiftly as three ticks of a clock, three victims of sudden death lay crumpled in the drive of the lakeshore estate that corruption had built.

Aurielli's Cadillac lurched forward, moving head-on toward Bolan's distant position — a purely instinctive reaction of flight. The Weatherby sent it careening out of control on an instantly deflated front tire, then Bolan swung the scope aside for a broader view of the developments down there. His unencumbered eye caught a glint of something in motion at a dormer window atop the joint — the window raised and a figure leaned out to shout something at the hardman at the door, and the upstairs man was pointing in Bolan's general direction. At that same moment he saw a flash from another gable window and instinctively dropped to the floor a split-second before a projectile tore away his own window-facing. Two others came in quick sucession, heavy sizzlers that sent showers of rotting wood Hying through the garage apartment.

And Bolan knew now why the uneasy feeling. His recon had not been good enough. The joint way a hardsite; they had defenses there that not even a two-day watch had revealed... and these Chicago clowns were no clowns — their response had been instantaneous and effective. The reports of several high-powered rifles were blending in a concerted and rapid return fire; they were concentrating on the window areas, keeping Bolan down and ducking while their comrades on the ground below found cover. Heavy calibre slugs were tearing into the building with ominous thumps and the sounds of splintering wood.

Okay, so Bolan knew that game too. They were working a bracketing pattern, intent on keeping him down and clear of those windows. He grimaced and snaked along the floor toward the door, the opening of which was set at a right angle to the line of fire. He lay in the doorway and sent three quick rounds into the grounded Cadillac, then immediately rolled back to his original gunport at the window, smiling with grim satisfaction as the doorjamb began to splinter under the same ferocious counterattack previously accorded the window areas. Three seconds was all Bolan desired... three seconds of diverted fire. He could see the flashes from two weapons on the roof across the way and just below these, a weapon at each of the dormer windows. Make it fourseconds.

The sniperscope was back in place and he was scanning the ridges of the roof. A target came into sharp focus, a face in dark concentration as it fought the rapid recoils of a semi-automatic rifle. Bolan squeezed off a shot and moved the scan onward, allowing no time to verify the hit, smoothly working the bolt-action and immediately acquiring another target, squeezing-off and moving on to the dormers.

The desired four seconds were not forthcoming; his opponents at the windows had already become aware of the maneuver and were retargeting. The shadow of a man in a face-on confrontation appeared in the vision-field, a scope-mounted semi-automatic foregrounded and spitting flame. Something thwacked into the wood beside Bolan's head as he cooly squeezed off, then rode the recoil into the next target and again sighed into the pull; this target he hung into and watched as it was punched backwards into the distant room. Then he backtracked in a verification of the first three hits, realizing already that this phase of the firefight had ended. A warm trickle of blood was oozing down his cheek. He wiped it away and withdrew the splinter of wood that was producing it, realizing also that he had been thatclose to death.

In a delayed reaction to the doorway fusillade, the Cadillac suddenly erupted into flames with a whooshing explosion that lifted the rear end and resettled the heavy vehicle at an angle to the drive.

People were running about down there, amongst the trees, and someone was shouting instructions. A moment later a lone figure appeared through the hedgerow separating the two properties. He was a dark, thickset man with a Thompson chopper, and Bolan did not need the scope to read the ferocity on that scowling face. Their gazes met in simultaneous discovery and the Thompson began its upward swing. Bolan had to rise to his feet to get the proper depression for the Weatherby; he did so, firing from the hip in the same smooth motion, and the beginning gutteral chop of the Thompson was instantly eclipsed by the rolling cra-ackof the Weatherby.

The guy staggered backwards into the hedgerow and was momentarily supported there by the thick bushes, the now silent weapon hugged to his chest and turning crimson, then he toppled forward in a crumbling fall. The excited voice of a man somewhere in the background of action cried, "Christ, he got Blackie!"

Bolan placed a marksman's medal on the shattered windowsill, then whirled and ran for the door. No... these were definitely not clowns. The Executioner was beginning to feel like the largest clown of all for walking into a hardset like this one. The enemy was present in force and knew how to respond to a hit. The question now uppermost in Bolan's mind concerned his ability to successfully withdraw. He slung the Weatherby from his shoulder and hit the doorway at full gallop, flinging himself through and over the metal railing of the small porch to drop in a plummeting arc to the frozen ground below, a descent of some fifteen feet. He landed in a shock-absorbing crouch and continued the motion with a rebound toward the protection of the building.