Bolan put a slug into the lens.

Beyond the corner the featureless hallway ended ten feet farther on in a windowless door. The door swung open and an M-16-armed gunman came charging out.

He charged into a three-round swarm of 9mm stingers that stopped him cold. Behind the fresh corpse the door started to swing shut. Bolan's right shoulder hit it before the motion could be completed, and the door swung wide again. Someone grunted with pain and crashed into something.

Corey James turned and looked at the black-clad intruder without expression. Over shirtsleeves he wore an automatic in a shoulder holster, but he made no move toward it.

The efforts toward maintaining the chalet's original Old World elegance had been foregone down here in favor of modern expediency. The basement consisted of a single large windowless room, and it was obviously the nerve center of Edwards's Alpine base. One wall was lined with a control panel fronted by swivel chairs. There were keyboard terminals, video display tubes, two computer-tape transports, several radio transceivers and a couple of telephones.

And it looked like the guy was still in the process of outfitting the place. Along the adjacent wall were stacked a couple dozen crates of various sizes, most of them stenciled, "Fragile-Electronic Components-Avoid Extreme Heat or Cold." Corey James was standing at the console, next to a man who was seated in one of the swivel chairs.

Another technician lay behind the door that Bolan had slammed into him; a goulash of electronic parts was scattered on the floor around him. The guy was trying to shake off his daze, but he didn't look hurt.

Bolan wished he could say the same. The body blow he had taken coming in, even though he had tried to absorb it on his good side, had cost him more than pain. He thought he had felt the traumatized muscle tear a bit, and there was a warm wetness under the dressing on the left side of his chest. As he straightened, a sharp pinch of hurt darted across it.

The traitorous ex-CIA agent across the room coolly regarding him would have been enough to arouse Bolan's righteous anger. The wound enhanced it.

"They're dead, James," he snapped. "Your amateur bodyguards weren't good enough. You ought to do something about security."

James nodded toward the crates. "You were a week early."

"Too bad." Bolan holstered the Beretta; the necessity for silence was past. He held the Uzi by the pistol grip, letting the lanyard support its weight.

Yeah, one more week. One week, and this base would have been in full operation, with capacity as a safe house, communications center, data-retrieval facility. Not even a headquarters, but only one of many bases just like it, the foundation of a scheme unlike any Bolan had encountered in all the days of the New Terrorist Wars. Bolan had long been aware that most of the terrorist organizations were loosely linked in an informal network. But for the most part the ideological hate-mongers were poorly trained at best, underfinanced and unarmed, and too suspicious and jealous to fully trust their so-called allies.

But Frank Edwards, and the people like Corey James to whom he had chosen to delegate responsibility, were experts, trained in the black arts by the finest intelligence outfits on the globe, the training backed by years of experience. Their contacts in the shadow world of international intrigue were vast, and by dint of their one-time official sanction, they had access to the most advanced technology in the free world. Not only that, but Edwards apparently had the money to pay for it. But that was no surprise; illicit arms smuggling could be immensely profitable, with terrorists desperate for firepower willing to pay markups of several hundred percent. As a business, it was hard to beat. If you didn't mind trading in death.

Now Edwards, along with other renegade agents of his ilk, were consolidating their resources to form a private intelligence agency. International in scope, wide-reaching in capacity, staffed by experienced men who still retained entree into most corners of the worldwide underground, it would rival the official bureaus of many free nations. And it would service those sworn to turn free nations into slave states. Mack Bolan was determined to see that would not happen. He owed it to the world and to one brave woman named Toby Ranger.

"Where's Edwards?" Bolan asked, his voice steel cold.

"I don't know," James said calmly.

The guy knew all the tricks, and he tried one now. With his right hand he adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, let the hand linger there. He held out his left, gestured with it vacantly, a protestation of innocence and a polished piece of misdirection of attention.

The hand at the glasses shot across the twelve inches that separated it from the shoulder holster, got fingers around gun butt. It was a good trick, sure. But Bolan had seen it before. The Uzi stuttered a four-shot burst into the smart guy's outstretched left hand.

The report was an eardrum-straining crack in the enclosed room, and it brought a ragged croak of pain from Corey James. The hollow-point 9mm fleshshredders had left nothing at the end of his left arm but a mangled stump of bone and gore.

The dazed technician on the floor turned deathly pale and lurched onto his hands and knees, whatever he'd had for supper spewing out of his mouth and nostrils. As Bolan had figured, before putting in with the turncoat network, the guy had been a desk jockey; the "wet" side of intelligence work was new to him. The other technician was a little cooler.

He shucked his lab coat and went to James.

The ex-agent was ghostly white himself, halfway into shock already. He sunk into one of the swivel chairs. The technician tore a long strip from his coat, wrapped the rest around the shreds of blood-soaked flesh that had been James's hand.

With the reserved strip he began to fashion a tourniquet around James's forearm. There was fear in the glance he gave the Uzi when Bolan poked James with its snout, but he continued his work.

"Where is Frank Edwards?" Bolan said, each word deliberate as a death knell.

The guy looked up at him, and Bolan could read the knowledge in his eyes. James was seeing a vision of his own death, and he knew that vision was a heartbeat from becoming reality.

"I'm not sure," James muttered, teeth clenched against the pain.

Bolan prodded him with the submachine gun.

"When you stop talking, you stop living."

"Edwards left yesterday evening. A while back, he took an apartment in Rome, rigged it up as a safehouse, a place where he could go to ground if he had to. He'd done some work for the Red Brigades — the Italian terrorist group — and some of their people housekeep, in exchange for using the place. That's where Frank said he was going." James's face was drawn with pain. "I don't know if he was leveling with me, and if he was, why he was going there. My guess is he was just trying to leave a hard-to-follow trail. He might be there. He might not. But that's all I can tell you." James's longish hair was damp with the sweat of hurt and fear. "That's the truth. Your killing me won't make it less true."

"What about the woman?"

"Ranger? She left with him."

"Was she all right?"

"Sure. Why wouldn't she...." Faint light cut the pain in James's eyes. He tried for a smile that came out a grimace instead. "So she was one of yours. Frank had an idea about that. Maybe that's why he headed for Rome. Those Red Brigades people specialize in kidnapping for ransom. They know a little about coercion."

"Where is the Rome place?" James's skin was the color of chalk, and his eyes were starting to glaze. Bolan jabbed the barrel of the Uzi into his chest, hard enough to hurt.

"Okay, okay." James's voice was weak and reedy, but he managed to mutter an address. He just got it out before his chin fell forward to his chest, and his eyes turned glassy.