Bolan's first impulse was to unleather Big Thunder and go in shooting, but a cooler part of his mind, the part that belonged to the savvy combat specialist, told him firmly to wait.

Charging in like that would not accomplish anything except to get some or all of those kids killed in a cross fire.

He needed a distraction.

He faded away from the corner of the warehouse.

Three minutes later, there was movement in the shadows to the rear of the truck yard.

Several mercury vapor lamps cast a high-intensity glow over the front part of the compound, but the spill of light did not reach to every corner here in the back, where Bolan found a small gate in the rear fence.

Two sentries with Uzis had been positioned nearby.

Bolan was not interested in that gate. He would go in another way. The sentries had to be neutralized, though, and the way the two guys were standing under that light, he could not take them down with the Beretta. Someone else was liable to see them fall.

He moved to the fence in a patch of almost total darkness and reached out to rattle the chain link.

One of the guards stiffened and looked around as he heard the sound.

"You hear that?" the guy grumbled to his companion, his words barely audible to Bolan.

The other guard shook his head.

"I didn't hear anything."

"Yeah, well, I did. I'm gonna go check it out."

Carrying the subgun ready in his fists, the punk started walking slowly down the fence line while the other guy shook his head and muttered to himself.

Bolan stood stock-still until the man was about five feet away, then shot him in the throat with the Beretta.

The guy dropped his Uzi and grabbed for his neck, trying futilely to stop the sudden spurting with his hands, his knees buckling underneath him. He slumped to the ground, twitching once or twice before lying still.

The other sentry heard the clatter of the falling subgun and the silenced whisper of the Beretta that was not loud enough to be identifiable at that distance in the open air. He tensed, pointing the muzzle of his own weapon at the shadows into which his partner had disappeared.

"Jerry!" he called softly. "Jerry, what are you doing down there?"

Jerry didn't answer.

The guard waited another moment, then nervously started toward Bolan.

Bolan watched him come but did not move or make a sound.

The guard spotted the body of his buddy then and froze in place, sweeping the Uzi from side to side as he looked for something to shoot at. Seeing nothing, he knelt beside Jerry's sprawled form.

The guard hardly felt the bullet that smacked into the top of his head, splintering his skull and ripping through his brain. His body hit the fence and bounced off.

Bolan looked around.

No one seemed to have heard the commotion in this back corner of the lot, or at least no one was sounding the alarm or rushing to investigate, and that would have to do.

Most of the activity on the trucking company property remained centered at the loading dock on the far side of the center warehouse.

Bolan turned back to the body of the first guard, the one called Jerry.

The corpse was wearing an overcoat and had a cap perched on his head, the kind with fur flaps that folded down over the ears and fastened under the neck.

Bolan had the coat and the headgear off the dead body in a matter of seconds. He shrugged into the coat and settled the cap on his head.

He strode out of the shadows, heading for the trucks across the open space like a man who did not have a care in the world.

He was three-fourths of the way there when another sentry broke away from the building and trotted toward him.

"Hey, Jerry," the guy called. "What's wrong? Where's Ted?"

Bolan jerked a thumb over his shoulder back toward the fence and kept walking.

"Back there. He got sick."

The other guard fell into step beside him.

"Sick? What the hell's wrong with him?"

Bolan shrugged and kept walking.

The shadows cast by the huge trucks were only a few feet away now.

The guard caught at his arm.

"Don't you think we'd better go see what's wrong with him?"

"Suit yourself."

Bolan stepped into the shadows, the other guy still beside him.

The concealment was all Bolan had been waiting for. It could only have been a matter of seconds before this guy tumbled to his impersonation anyway.

He spun, his right fist flashing out in a sidearm slash, the hard edge of his hand crashing into the guard's throat, crushing his larynx.

The man staggered, sputtered, tried to bring his own subgun up into firing position.

Bolan did not give him a chance to do that. He lifted the MAC-10 and raked the barrel across the punk's face, opening a ragged slash. Then he drove the weapon in a fierce blow up into the guy's jaw, snapped his head back.

There was a sharp crack as the man's neck broke. The sentry slipped to the ground.

Bolan waited, the MAC-10 ready to spray death from his hands, until he was satisfied that no one else was coming to check on him, at least not right at this moment.

He doffed the cap and overcoat, slung the Ingram back to its place beneath his right shoulder. He crouched so that he could slip underneath one of the massive eighteen-wheelers.

He opened the small plastic bag containers attached to his belt and went to work, molding a plastique charge against the gas tank of the truck, setting the timer for four minutes.

With the children already being loaded up on one of those other trucks across the property, he could not allow himself any longer than that.

Staying beneath the trucks, he moved on, skipping the next two trucks but rigging a charge on the one after that, setting the timer to go off at the same time as the first one.

By the time he was finished, he had the gas tanks of four of the trucks rigged to blow in two and a half minutes.

Now to save the children.

So far he had seen no sign of the Parellis or Lana Garner.

He felt sure that they were all here somewhere, but finding them might have to wait until after his diversion commenced.

He knelt next to a wheel of the last truck and got ready to sprint toward cover of the warehouse wall.

What he saw in the next few seconds changed his plan.

A smaller door next to the big loading dock entrance opened.

Four people emerged, going down the short flight of concrete steps to the ground, starting across toward the low office building.

David Parelli was in the lead.

His mother, looking as elegantly dressed as she had been half naked the last time Bolan saw her, kept pace at her son's side.

Bringing up the rear were Lana Garner and a Mafia street soldier who held her arm. He was dragging her along roughly, just as Bolan had seen the little child dragged to the truck minutes ago.

Bolan waited, the numbers ticking away in his head, until the four of them disappeared into the office building, then he headed for the office at a dead run, not caring anymore if his presence was detected now.

A light burned behind a shade-covered window in the office building, but whoever had pulled down the shade had left a small gap at the bottom.

Bolan paused long enough to steal a glance through the tiny opening.

He saw Mrs. Parelli sitting behind a metal desk.

Her son stood in front of the desk and they both looked on as the gunman slammed Lana Garner down in a straight-backed kitchen chair placed in front of the desk.

Bolan left the window, covered the distance to the door in two long, pumping strides, slinging the Ingram MAC-10 around into his right fist while he cross-drew Big Thunder into his left hand.

He hit the door with his shoulder, slamming on through into the room, the AutoMag and the MAC-10 coming up in automatic target acquisition as the door flew off its hinges.