The young officer then nodded his head in exasperation and said, "Please, keep moving. We gotta keep this road open for the ambulance."

"Still alive, then?"

"I think so. Move along, will you? I can't let this road get jammed up!"

"There was some shooting about a mile back," Bolan said, his tone chatty. "Might be some connection to this."

"We'll check it out," the officer assured him. "Will you please move . . ."

Bolan applied pressure to the accelerator and left the scene quickly behind. His fingers were white on the steering wheel, the only outward sign of his inner raging. His anger was directed mostly toward himself; he'd had no right to involve the old man in his war. Sorrow was a luxury Mack Bolan could not afford. He cleared his mind of the old man, directed the car on to the business district, and abandoned it in a darkened public parking lot. Setting off on foot for the eastern edge of the city, he frequently shifted the suitcase from one hand to the other and halted occasionally to rub his swollen ankle.

It was well past midnight when he found the neat collection of modest buildings and the flower-bordered grounds of New Horizons Sanitarium. He inspected the inconspicuous sign with interest, hoping that the name would prove symbolic for him. The phrase "new horizons" was a familiar one to Bolan: Jim Brantzen had used it often enough in speaking of his surgical specialty. Brantzen himself, however, was not an easy man to read. Although he had cut through Army custom and formalities to establish a strong friendship between a comissioned officer and a non-com, there had always existed that silent barrier between the two minds, Bolan had saved Brantzen's life — not once, but twice — and there existed also that quiet bond of unspoken indebtedness. Still . . . Bolan was not certain that he would be greeted here with open arms. He would be requesting an illegal operation — surgery, that is, to escape apprehension and prosecution under law — and it would be asking quite a lot of any member of a respected profession, friendships and debts notwithstanding. There was also the matter of personal hazard via the Mafia. Bolan had just been given a jolting reminder of the danger he brought into each life he touched, no matter how casually. What right had he to . . . ?

He stared at the neat signboard and pondered the agonizing question. Could he construct a horizon for himself upon the graves of his friends? Already seven graves lay at Bolan's feet, perhaps eight now. A distant siren sounded across the night stillness. Bolan shivered and stepped away from the New Horizon sign. Then a light flashed on outside the central building and a screen door was opened. A familiar voice said, "Well . . . are you going to stand out there all night, or are you going to come in?"

Captain Tim Braddock, LAPD, stepped out of his car and kicked absently into the fine gravel of the parking lot as he surveyed the sprawling beach house. Carl Lyons, the young sergeant of detectives who had been with Braddock since the beginning of the Bolan Case, code-named Hardcase, walked around the corner of the building and approached the captain's vehicle.

"It's a sure score, Cap'n," Lyons intoned softly.

Braddock grunted and walked to the edge of the gravelled area, kneeling to inspect a deep impression left in the sand by a heavy wheel. "Would you say a semi-trailer?" he asked Lyons.

The young man knelt beside his boss and spread his hands over the wide track. "Uh huh. There's more of the same around at the side. Camouflage netting back there, that's how they concealed it."

"What else have you found?" Braddock asked, grunting as he pushed himself upright.

Lyons came up with him, smiling tightly. "Enough to convince me this was their headquarters," he said. "Two bazookas and about 20 rounds of AP. Explosives, grenades, smoke pots, every type of weapon you can imagine. Target range and armorer's shop set up back there under the cliffs, along the beach. Oh . . . and these." He reached into his pocket and produced an envelope which he handed to Braddock.

The Captain opened the envelope, and quickly glanced through the snapshots.

"The DiGeorge place, Beverly Hills," Lyons explained. "And from every conceivable angle. Bolan obviously plans these things with the thoroughness of a military field commander. It looks as though they did a thorough study of the terrain before they made their hit."

Braddock nodded his head in mute agreement. He started walking slowly toward the house as he placed the snapshots in the envelope and returned the packet to Lyons. "Get those marked and into the lab as soon as you report in," he instructed. "Should be some good latents there. We'll need hard evidence for a conviction . . . all we can get."

"How'd the arraignment go?" Lyons inquired.

They had rounded the corner of the building. Braddock was inspecting a large lean-to of camouflage netting. "Blancanales and Schwartz?" He grunted unhappily. "Got 'em bound over on a couple of misdemeanors. Possession of illegal weapons, illegal use of a radio transmitter. They're already out on bail."

Lyons had raised his eyebrows in surprise. "We had a list of charges a mile..."

"Charges are not convictions, Carl. You should certainly know that much. The fact is, they got old John Grant in their corner and . . . well, you know how it goes."

"Grant comes damn expensive," Lyons observed. He followed the captain onto the patio. Braddock picked up a set of punctured targets and studied them with interest.

"I'd say, the way these are marked, someone has been sighting-in a couple of rifles."

"Where'd they get the money to retain a lawyer like John Grant?" Lyons persisted.

Braddock sighed. "Hell, from their fairy godmothers, I guess. Don't ask me a dumb-ass question like that, Carl. We all know that Bolan's been taking the Mafia's money away from them."

"I was just wondering out loud," Lyons mildly replied.

"Well, wonder about this one, then," Braddock said. "We got it on the wire from Jersey that a large trust fund had been set up for the Fontenelli children. Fontenelli, in case you've forgotten, was the first member of the Bolan team to die . . . during that Beverly Hills hit."

"I hadn't forgotten," Lyons murmured. He was remembering a tall man, standing in the living room of the Lyons home, soberly passing the time of day with a tow-headed youngster. "Sounds like Bolan is keeping faith with the dead . . . and with the young."

"Yeah," Braddock growled. "And I'm not missing any bets. I've got inquiries out on the families of the other dead men . . . Bolan's dead, that is. I doubt that his tender sympathies would extend to the families of his victims. Anyway, if Bolan is spreading the money around, chances are he's doing it cute enough so that the beneficiaries have legal title to it. That means that he is going through certain legal formalities, and those formalities just might point the way right back to Bolan's present whereabouts."

Lyons nodded his understanding, but added, "After last night, I'd say his tracks are going to get fainter and fainter."

Braddock frowned and turned to stare along the winding drive which connected the house to the road. "How do you reconstruct the thing, Carl?" he quietly asked.

"Well . . ." Lyons hitched up his pants and stepped alongside the captain, one arm raised to point out various geographical features as he mentioned them. "We found electronic gadgets monitoring every possible entrance to the property. Schwartz's work, I'd guess. Anyway, the place is wired for sound, and I'd say that their security was top-drawer. I still have no idea how DiGeorge's people located Bolan here, but obviously they did. They tripped the alarms, though, and Bolan was ready for them. We found two burned-out parachute-type flares out there near the road. The lab men are still going over the wrecked vehicles. Preliminary findings indicate that he cut down on them with a high-powered rifle, undoubtedly that Mauser over there." Lyons led his captain to the end of the patio wall and showed him the machine gun. "But now, here's the kicker. Look at the way he has that baby wired up. He provided his own covering fire, see. Juiced this baby up, left it running, jumped into his car, and charged right through their middle to make his getaway. We found deep skid ruts where he tore up the ground getting around the burning vehicles."