Bolan figured that since there were few blacks in the Mafia, the man was hired help, sleeping on the job. The Executioner removed a pair of plastic riot cuffs from his shoulder bag and looped and tightened one around the young man's hand before he awoke. Bolan's hand, and then a wide piece of tape went over the struggling youth's mouth.

Another cuff went around an ankle, and Bolan put him behind the counter on the floor.

In the first room on the ground floor was a torture chamber, containing whips, ropes, high-watt floodfights, chairs nailed to the floor, a motorcycle chain and numerous brass knuckles. Bolan took two steps into the room and the floor gave way beneath him.

With a desperate lunge he made it back to safety and watched as a trapdoor swung down, revealing a pit below.

The bottom was filled with Nam-type sharpened punji stakes pointing upward.

He went along a hall to another room. Soft noises came from behind the door. It was locked. He quickly picked the lock and swung the door open.

In the dim light he saw six wooden cages made of two-by-fours, each four feet square and each containing a naked girl.

Four were white, two black.

All but one was asleep. She curled up and glared at him.

"No, not again!" she cried. "I'll do it! I'll do anything now!"

He tested the floor, then stepped to the cages and wrenched the wooden and wire doors off their hinges. He told the captives to find their clothes and get away if they could.

The next room could have been a drug-cutting room. There was no trace of illegal substances in the room, but on a long table was a set of sensitive scales.

Hearing something behind him, he turned as a large black man hurtled toward him. Bolan sidestepped the diving man and drove his knee upward into his side. The man hit the floor, rolled and returned to his feet, arms held wide like a wrestler's. He started to reach for a revolver at his belt, but Bolan's 93-R came up first and chugged once, drilling a small neat hole through the attacker's heart, dropping him to the wooden floor.

Bolan spun as the door opened. A tall black girl entered, wearing only a short see-through nightie. She saw the girls getting out of the cages and smiled.

"Hey, honkie, if you really want to help us, come this way. That white trash lives on the third floor, and almost nobody gets up there to see him after he sets the switches. Come take a look." She was about five-ten, with a centerfold body, and seemed totally at ease.

She motioned, and he followed her out of the room and along the hall to a door at the end. It opened into a room in which a circular stairway wound upward.

The black girl led the way. At the second story Bolan saw the thick metal plate that, when in position, sealed the upper floors from below, and saw how it could be reinforced with two-inch bars of steel.

Fortunately the metal door was open; unfortunately there was no ladder continuing to the top floor.

The black girl stepped off the stairway and pointed down a dimly lit hall.

"He calls it the Hallway of Terrors. See how shiny that part of the hall floor is? It's usually electrically charged with enough juice to kill the giant rats that run round this place."

"What's in the rooms?"

"I don't know. I've never been farther than this. In one of them is another circular staircase to the bastard's private lair. He's got one or two ladies up there who we never see. He gets his supplies from a small dumbwaiter, too small for any of us to get inside." They entered a room containing a cot, a dresser and two wooden chairs.

"A good short on that electrical field should blow out all the power in the place," Bolan said.

The black girl shook her head. "He built it with that in mind, at first for the rats. Then he surged the power and put in a whole box of circuit breakers and automatic resets. The controls are in that room." She pointed to the opposite end of the hall.

Bolan picked up a wooden chair and threw it onto the electrified part of the floor.

Blue flames shot outward. The chair's legs smoldered where they touched the floor. Then the zapping electrical fire died.

The Executioner counted how long it took for the circuit-breaker resets to activate the power again.

After twenty seconds the power returned, sending smoking, crackling, blue flames along the hall. After thirty seconds it went off again. As soon as the smoking stopped he charged across the electrified part of the floor, kicked open the door to the control room, then raced inside and turned off the electrical skillet just before the power was due to return.

The room was about ten feet square, with a second door, open two inches, on the opposite wall. Bolan stepped into the small sunken space where the door swung open, the only unused space in the room. The rest was filled with snakes, enclosed by a three-foot Plexiglas wall that was concave to prevent their escape.

A nest of diamondback rattlesnakes owned one part of the floor, which had been covered with sand, rocks and soil. A pair of king cobras were coiled near the center. A few sections of logs were scattered around. All anyone had to do to get across the room was jump over the wall, travel ten feet through the snake den, and jump over the other three-foot barrier to the far door.

Bolan watched. Dozens of small snakes writhed on the sand, matching the color so well they were easy to miss. About fifty black two-foot snakes slithered throughout the enclosure. Bolan figured every snake in the pit was poisonous.

Where did the other doors in the hall lead? He looked down the hall as the power returned and the chair again smoldered. One door had been nailed to its frame — the bright silver heads of twenty penny-nails showed. The black girl stood at the edge of the electrified floor.

Bolan asked, "You have any hair spray?"

"Sure. Two new cans. Why?"

"Get both for me as fast as you can."

She vanished. Bolan turned back to the snakes. He could see no pattern in their movement, no safe route through their midst.

He would have to risk it. There was one element that all wild animals feared and gave way to. He hoped that the snakes obeyed this universal law of nature.

The, black girl returned.

"I found three," she said. She tossed them one at a time across the electrified floor, and he caught them, put one in each side pocket, took the last and hit the pressure button. A fine chemical spray jetted out. Good, lots of pressure.

He used his cigarette lighter to ignite the hair spray. A second later he had a small blowtorch, blasting a column of fire a foot long. He leaned over the plastic barrier and aimed the fire at a nest of small black snakes, and they slithered away. The sand-colored ones were next, and they retreated also, leaving two square feet free of snakes.

When the area was cleared as far as he could reach, Bolan jumped over the wall and swept the torch from side to side in a two-foot arc as he moved across the room.

Halfway across the flame sputtered. He lit the second can and continued.

When he saw the slowly weaving head in front of him he stopped. One of the king cobras did not retreat from the fire.

Bolan let it sense the heat. He thrust the flame upward and singed its eyes and skin, and it moved away.

Behind him, the snakes were closing in almost as fast as he moved forward. A big diamondback rattlesnake slithered forward, curiously watched his boots, then coiled and rattled. That brought a dozen more rattles as other snakes sensed the danger. Bolan sensed danger, too, but continued, even as the second cobra approached him. The flame flickered, and he removed the third can from his pocket. It refused to light. He tossed it at the deadly snake. In the split second that its head darted sideways to hit the can, Bolan's boot caught the cobra on the side of the head. The force of his kick lifted it off the floor and flung it to the far. In the same movement The Executioner reached the far wall and vaulted out of the pit. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and glanced back. His path was again covered by the killer snakes.