"Get him away from there," Bolan told the technicians. The guy on the floor got shakily to his feet. The front of his lab coat was stained with his own vomit.

It took only seconds for Bolan to dig the goop from the hip pack, mold it to the console in a few strategic spots, and set sixty-second fuses. The two technicians recognized plastique, all right; Bolan had no trouble getting them to hoist James and drag him up the stairs and out of the chalet.

There were five-gallon jerricans of gasoline strapped to the backs of each of the 4WOULD rigs parked out front, which made things easier. Bolan uncapped them, splashed their contents over the inside of the three vehicles as well as the cab of the Toyota pickup.

From the bowels of the chalet there was a dull boom.

By the time Bolan had finished emptying the gas cans, he could see flames licking up the stairway into the chalet's lobby.

James and the two technicians backed away down the slope. But Bolan had lost interest in them.

He selected an HE grenade from a belt pouch, pulled the pin, and rolled it into the back of the nearest 4WOULD, then dogtrotted down the slope.

Behind him the grenade's explosion shattered the night.

A moment later the vehicles gas tanks began to blow, like a string of gigantic firecrackers.

Bolan paused at the tree-line perimeter. A huge ball of gasoline-fed fire was eating into the canopy, moving to meet the flame now consuming the chalet's first floor. Windows began to implode.

As Bolan watched, the canopy creaked and collapsed, tearing framing from the building's facade. James and the technicians stood halfway down the slope, looking small and helpless in the fire's hellish glow.

One small part of Frank Edwards's "black" CIA was destroyed, but the guy himself was still at large, somewhere.

And somewhere a woman's life hung by a thread a thread tied to that same Frank Edwards.

It had been on the heartbeat. Now it was in the hands of fate.

The street was called the Via del Gladiatori, the Way of the Gladiator. It was an appropriate reminder to Mack Bolan of the cosmic scheme, and his own small role in it.

Today, most people saw the ancient gladiator of this city of Rome as a figure of courage and romance.

In fact, he was neither. True, a few did choose to step into the bloody arena of the Roman Colosseum of their own free will; one was the second-century Roman emperor, Commodus. But most gladiators were slaves or criminals, forced to fight on threat of death. There was no romance to it at all, and whatever courage the gladiator brought to his combat was generated through the will to survive. Few did. In victory, the gladiator won only the right to fight again. Defeat was usually synonymous with death. In the rare case in which the losing gladiator survived the combat, his fate was given over to the paying spectators. If they waved their handkerchiefs, he was given clemency; if they turned down their thumbs, he was executed.

In the long sordid history of mankind, few spectacles rivaled the gladiatorial combat before tens of thousands of bloodthirsty citizens for the sheer savagery of which Animal Man was capable.

Now Mack Bolan stood against another manifestation of that savagery, the bestiality of international terrorism. Its perpetrators existed outside of law, society, or civilization.

Though they sometimes carried on about "liberation, power to the people," and "democratic revolution," their creed was control, suffocation, and the eradication of anyone standing in their way.

The Red Brigades, the "housekeepers" of Frank Edwards's Rome safe-apartment, were a prime example. The best known of the groups that made up the loose-knit Italian terrorist coalition known as The Organization, the Brigades depicted themselves as noble crusaders for freedom and human rights. However, one way they chose to demonstrate this high-minded commitment was with the kidnapping of statesman Aldo Moro, leader of the Italian Christian Democratic Party, in 1978. Five of Moro's bodyguards were ruthlessly cut down in a barrage of gunfire.

Fifty-five days later, Moro was found in the trunk of a car, his body riddled with bullets.

If undeterred, the terrorists would replace freedom with repression, tolerance with persecution, initiative with intimidation, independence with enslavement. Their principal weapon was mindless violence. They recognized no order except anarchy and chaos. The world they wanted to build would be created for them alone.

That was why Mack Bolan had chosen to stand between them and that damnable goal.

The tireless warrior was no gladiator. He had not been forced into this fight but had chosen it of his own free will. Nor was he kin to those ancient Romans who had crowded the stadiums to see the sands flow red; he took no pleasure in battle for its own sake, had no deranged need to wash his hands in his enemies gore.

It was far more simple than that. Mack Bolan knew that passive lip service to the desirability of a better world would never be enough. As the statesman Edmund Burke had written, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." It was as elemental as that. And Mack Bolan could no more do nothing than stop breathing.

He did not know how the long war would end, but of one thing he was certain: it would not end in surrender.

The only ultimate failure was the failure to act.

Sometimes a man had to be willing to die for what was right. And sometimes a man had to be willing to kill.

When Bolan had removed the dressing that Dr. Goldstein had applied to the bullet wound, it was spotted with fresh blood. Now the pain was a constant presence. He pushed it to the back of his mind and concentrated on the building across the Via del Gladiatori.

It was a modern nondescript cube, a six-story apartment building, not fancy but probably far from cheap, especially in this city where housing was perpetually at a premium.

Balconies hung from the front and the right side; their arrangement indicated there were four apartments to a floor.

It was around midnight, and traffic was light. The Via del Gladiatori was part of the belt highway that ringed Rome about six miles out from its center; this district was called the Esposizione Universale di Roma. A block north, the glass face of a slab like skyscraper rose to dominate the area; it was the headquarters of an international corporation.

Behind it flowed the Tiber River, and on the other side Bolan could make out the dome of the covered stadium that had been built for the 1960 Olympic Games.

Movement caught Bolan's eye.

The apartment he had been watching was on the fourth floor, toward the back. Light shone faintly beyond drawn curtains faced by a sliding glass door and opening on the balcony. Someone was moving through it.

Bolan set the zoom lens of the Litton Night Vision Pocket Scope to full 4It, and the upper half of a woman's figure swam into view. For a moment he felt a tightness across his chest that had nothing to do with the bullet wound, but then he saw that the woman looked nothing like Toby Ranger, even if the female Fed had taken on a disguise.

The woman framed in the NVD'S lens was short and very slim, almost scrawny; she looked like a good gust of wind would sweep her off the balcony. She had straight dark hair that fell over her shoulders, and a bored expression on her face. She wore a blousy khaki shirt and matching trousers. The woman took a last drag from a cigarette and flipped the butt over the balcony railing, leaning out to watch it wink down to the lawn below. Then she turned back to the sliding door. Before she went through it, Bolan got a good look at the little automatic pistol in the belt holster at the small of her back. It was a partial confirmation, and for now it would have to do.