"Damn it, Mack..."

He saw the scout car coming, recognized it immediately for what it was, and cradled the receiver instantly, cutting off Johnny's protest. Still too far to count the gunners, but it didn't matter. The driver was cruising slowly, taking his time while his passengers rubbernecked, scanning the storefronts and side streets for any sign of life. Two blocks away and closing. Bolan knew that it was time to move.

He ducked behind the service station, moving out as rapidly as possible. He knew they hadn't seen him yet, but they were almost to the end of Main Street, and soon they would begin to section off the side streets, poking into alleyways and yards. He could elude them for a time, but Bolan did not have the strength for a protracted game of cat and mouse. If he was forced to hide for any length of time, he might as well confront them now and get it over with. The end result would be the same.

He paralleled the main drag, pausing frequently to check his backtrack and apply more pressure to his bleeding wounds. It didn't help. No sooner had he staunched the crimson flow than he was forced to move, renewing it again. He was not bleeding quite as much, but it was steady now, his skinsuit saturated to the knee. Another hour would finish him.

There was no time to find the doctor, even if there was one in town, no way to reach the pharmacy without encountering Rivera's gunners on the street. They would be looking for him in the alleys, and Bolan wondered if he should let them find him. He could choose his ground, prepare an ambush, maybe even take them if his head was clear enough, his gun hand steady. But if he missed them with his first rounds...

The sign was blurry, but it still attracted his attention, drawing Bolan toward the back porch of an old, renovated house. He climbed the concrete steps, sat back against the railing as he tried to focus on the swimming letters:

SANTA ROSA CLINIC

R. KENT, M.D.

Beneath the doctor's name, there was a number to be called in case of emergency. Without a phone, it did the Executioner no good, and he lurched forward, peering through the curtains that covered a window set into the door. No lights, no sign of movement from the dark interior.

He knocked again, then gave up and drew the slim stiletto from a pocket of his skinsuit, stooping painfully to scrutinize the lock. It was an easy one, pot metal and aluminum. He had it open in a moment, took another look along the alley, left and right, then slipped inside.

The former kitchen had been turned into a lab of sorts. He noted microscopes, a centrifuge and sterilizer, stainless-steel sinks and instruments, a cabinet for drugs, an X-ray machine standing in the corner. Bolan did a recon: four examination rooms, a waiting area, a single rest room, all deserted now. There would be hours posted somewhere, but he had no time left. Already fading in and out, the soldier knew that he would have to act now or it would be too late.

He backtracked to the lab and rifled drawers until he found the necessary implements for suturing a wound. The exit hole, in back, would be a bitch, but once he stitched the entry wound, a butterfly bandage might do the trick until he found some wheels and made it to another town, one with a doctor. He couldn't chance an anesthetic — it would knock him out immediately, but the drug stash might contain a stimulant that would help him stay alert while he was on the road.

The light-headedness returned as Bolan struggled to thread the long, curved needle, and he felt the room begin to spin. He reached out for the counter, missed it, tried again, and then his knees were folding. He was losing it, and there was not a damned thing he could do to save himself.

The floor rushed up to meet him like a runaway express train, and the darkness claimed him.

"Hello? Hello?"

The line was open, humming for an instant, then the dial tone came back loud and harsh in Johnny Bolan's ear. He didn't bother jiggling the plungers on his telephone. It only worked in movies, anyway, and if he could have raised the operator, what in hell would he have said?

He cradled the receiver, conscious of a sudden chill that raised the short hairs on his neck. Mack's message had been loud and clear: he was on foot and wounded in a town called Santa Rosa near the Mexico-Arizona border. Something had gone wrong with the Rivera strike, and Mack had lost his wheels, had suffered injuries of unknown severity. The very fact that he had mentioned being "winded" was an indicator of his serious condition, but the nature of his wounds, his access to emergency assistance, was a mystery.

Johnny fetched a highway atlas from the bookshelf, paging through the maps until he found a spread for southern Arizona. Santa Rosa was in Pima County, near the border, less than fifty miles from the Rivera stronghold in Sonora. It was 230 miles from San Diego into Gila Bend, if Johnny took the interstate, and after that he would be running two-lane blacktop all the way, through Ajo, Gu Vo, Pisnemo. Extra time, perhaps, but he could push it on the smaller county roads and cut off sixty miles that he would have to cover if he doubled back to Santa Rosa out of Tucson.

Mack had asked him not to come. Correction: Mack had told him not to come. But he was always trying to protect "the kid," a designation that he hadn't used to Johnny's face for some time now, but which was always on his mind. The older brother's natural concern was touching, even heartwarming, but it had no place in combat, when his life was on the line.

Some things you did because you had to, no matter what the private risk. When Johnny thought about the times that Mack had laid it on the line for him, the weight that he had carried for the family all these years, the young man knew he could do no less.

He had been just a kid when Mack came home from Vietnam to see their parents and their sister buried in the family plot outside of Pittsfield. Johnny was the sole survivor of Sam Bolan's final, desperate act, a murder-suicide that had left the family decimated, brothers stripped of everything and everyone they had loved in life. When Mack had taken up the war against their father's enemies, becoming the most-wanted fugitive in Massachusetts, then in the United States, John Bolan watched the final vestiges of family slip through his fingers, gone, as he had supposed, forever.

Val Querente had been everything a foster mother could ever hope to be. Jack Gray, her future husband and an agent for the FBI, adopted Johnny as his own, but there was no attempt to denigrate his past, the sacrifices his older brother made from day to day. Both Jack and Val had understood — Val most of all, since she had shared the Executioner's original campaign, had seen the man in action, on and off the battle line.

As Johnny Gray, the younger Bolan had enlisted in the military, serving with distinction in Grenada and Beirut. He had been blooded in those killing grounds, returning home to become a paralegal, never dreaming that his life would somehow intersect his brother's everlasting war. But intersect they had, and in the merger of their spirits, the indomitable Bolan will, a new and powerful alliance had been born.

Johnny did not delude himself that he would ever be his brother's equal. He was competent with weapons, trained for combat, seasoned in the fire, but if he lived to be a thousand he would never share the same experience, the seasoning, that made his brother something special. Double tours in Vietnam, backed up by forty-odd campaigns against the Mafia, innumerable clashes with the terrorist elite of Europe, Africa and Asia: all of that combined to make the Executioner a man apart, unique in his commitment and ability to accomplish what he set out to do.

But now he was wounded and on foot in hostile territory with the jackals on his heels. The younger Bolan could no more sit back and let his brother die than he could voluntarily stop breathing. If there was a chance, however slim, he had to make the effort, and he had no time to waste.