Steeling himself to wait, Bolan examined the possible avenues of escape. The direct route over the wall didn't seem very promising. Eight towers perched atop a thirty-foot wall, each manned with two alert guards with machine guns.

Razor wire ran along the wall between the towers.

At night, spotlights traversed the yard, while lights illuminated the walls. It would require a full-scale assault to break out against heavy opposition. For one man alone, an attempt to go over the wall would probably be suicidal.

A second possibility would be to get out the main-door. As a start, that would mean getting into the administrative area from the prison compound. There was only one way in, down a long corridor heavily guarded at both ends. Except for unusual circumstances, only the older and more trusted prisoners went in there to work as servants to the guards and in areas such as the laundry. It would be a long time, if ever, before Bolan received that "privilege." An honor that Bolan would gladly do without.

There were variations on the plans that involved more subtle approaches a little sleight of hand, a few heavily greased palms, a sudden break under lucky circumstances. All of those possibilities involved more time, luck and money than he had available.

The heat of midday had ended the soccer game temporarily as prisoners scrambled to find a small patch of cool earth. Bolan and Stone had taken a choice spot in a corner of the prison yard. Other prisoners moved away at the big man's advance. As the two prisoners discussed methods of escape, Stone was pessimistic about the outcome. Bribery was out. One prisoner had escaped seven years ago by paying off several of the guards. In the aftermath, those who had been directly involved found themselves prisoners in other jails.

Many of the remaining guards had been fired.

No one at Lurigancho was anxious for a repeat performance.

"What about feigning death and being smuggled out as a corpse?" Bolan was willing to consider any option at this point.

"Impossible." Stone shook his head in discouragement. "Some clever prisoner tried that years ago. Now they make sure that a corpse is really dead by cutting off its head before they bury it outside the prison. No one tries to escape that way any longer."

Bolan was beginning to regret not trying a break earlier, before he arrived at the prison. It looked as if he was in for a longer stay than he had anticipated. The whole Peruvian mission was turning into a disaster. Someone had been a step ahead of him every inch of the way.

The warrior was going to find out who the mystery person was. As soon as he got out of this hole.

Raimondo held court on the opposite side of the compound. The kingpin had avoided Bolan for the past two days, carefully placing as much distance as possible between them. The occasional hate-filled glares Bolan intercepted told him that Raimondo certainly held a grudge.

The dealer's pride couldn't stomach being defeated, and Bolan guessed that he burned with anger when the other prisoners snickered at his bruised enforcers.

The soldier was way ahead of Raimondo on points, and everyone in the prison knew it. But Bolan read the guy as the kind who would always use a pawn to make the dangerous moves. The big man kept an eye on every move the other prisoners made, watched his back at all times. Except for Stone, Bolan distrusted the other inmates.

The warrior suspected there would be another confrontation soon, but in the meantime he was willing to lie low and not attract attention from the guards.

He didn't want to be particularly noticeable as he tried to figure a way out of the pen.

Stone was an enigma still. The old prisoner had refused to share his background. But Bolan noticed that in spite of his seeming weakness, the other prisoners treated the aging con with a courtesy that bordered on fear. This reaction was particularly noticeable in the Indians, who often refused even to look him in the eye.

Just then a man approached, giving the news that Libertad would see Bolan in an hour.

Bolan sat back to review his plans for the meeting, just as he would have checked his firepower before a hit. This might be his only chance to score some information from the Shining Path, and the only weapon he could use was his brain.

He had better make sure it was loaded.

Bolan strode between two brawny Indians, who stood, arms crossed, at the head of the corridor that led deep into the prison, into the pavilion controlled by the Shining Path. They pretended not to notice his passage. He marched down a corridor similar to those in the main section of the prison. However, here each of the cells held only a bare cot, a small chest, a desk and a lamp. None was screened, and all were empty. Several were scored with bullet holes.

The residents were gathered in an inner courtyard, facing toward a massive thirty-foot banner, which showed a bespectacled, round-faced man in a jacket and open shirt towering above a vast army of peasants carrying rifles and pitchforks. In his left hand he grasped a book written by Marx, while the right held a red banner inscribed with the Communist crossed hammer and sickle.

Below the banner a tall man with a hatchet nose conducted the other captured guerrillas in revolutionary songs.

"The masses roar, the Andes shake," burst from three dozen throats. "We will transform the dingy dungeons into shining trenches of combat."

Bolan noticed that there were no guards in sight.

Blackened walls pockmarked with hundreds of large and small craters in the stone confirmed that this area had seen some heavy combat.

He waited, watching the crowd as they shouted their slogans. There was no lack of fanaticism among these terrorists. Their eyes glowed with the burning light of true believers. In the name of twisted principles, these men justified every crime conceivable. For every objection, there was a ready answer to be found in the writings of their leader, Gonzalo.

These men no longer needed a conscience, no longer had room for one. Killing and dying had been reduced to a simple rule: follow orders for the greater good of the cause.

This fanaticism made them extremely dangerous. Killers hired for a paycheck would run if there was a way out. The Shining Path would embrace the chance to die as a noble sacrifice.

Bolan planned to give a lot of them that chance.

He had never understood this willingness to suspend thinking and judgment, to live by a formula. He lived large, and if he broke some of society's rules, well so be it. Bolan answered to no other man, and he had no need to be forgiven. He lived by a stiff moral code, but it was his own, not something that he had read in a book, or that someone else had told him to believe in.

The Executioner was prepared to kill or to die.

For his own reasons.

The chanting ended, and the leader hopped off the platform and walked across the hard-packed earth to Bolan. The followers dispersed in silence.

"I am Libertad. Why did you wish to see me?"

A hard man, Bolan judged, as he scrutinized the Peruvian. Libertad seemed accustomed to giving orders and not wasting time on small talk.

"I have something for the Shining Path. Weapons. Cases and cases of American arms."

"What concern are weapons to us here, inside this prison? I can do nothing about anything you might have for sale." Bolan recognised interest in the tall Indian by the way in which the other man stiffened slightly at the mention of the arms.

Bolan continued, adopting the manner he thought would be appropriate to a tough death dealer interested in profit alone. "I'm sure you have some means of communicating back and forth with your superiors outside. You can tell them that I can supply all their needs in future. The down payment is a load that another merchant called Carrillo was going to deliver. His plans have changed, and he won't be doing any further business with you. So I'll deliver in his place, and as a special introductory offer, it will only be half the normal price."