Angrily: "I don't know what the hell you're talking about!"

Coldly: "Sure you do. You can have your little games on the home turf. If the people of Arizona don't care, why should I? But your Washington connections are a bit much — even for a provincial like you. For a cannibal like Bonelli, it's unthinkable. I can't allow it."

The guy was all but frothing at the mouth. "You can't allow it!? Who the hell-you wise shit!-where the hell do you get off-how the hell do I even know who's talking!?"

"Sever the connection, Kaufman. That's the only way you can save it, anyway. I'll take care of Bonelli. You take care of that Washington connection. I'll call it a successful mission and take my games elsewhere."

There was silence on the line for a long moment as the focal field of the glasses registered a full parade of conflicting emotions. Presently the guy sighed and calmly replied, "I still don't know you're who you say. And if you are, it makes no sense to me. Exactly what are you saying?"

"I'm saying I'll enforce the status quo ... almost. Bonelli keeps Tucson. Kaufman keeps Phoenix but severs the national link."

Suspiciously: "And what does Bolan keep?"

Lightly: "Bolan keeps the peace ... elsewhere. But you'll have to cut your national link."

"That's the game, eh?"

"That's about it. And it has to be quick. Before the sun sets again."

"What's the alternative?"

"You already said it. Scorched earth."

"How do I know this isn't-why should I believe a damn thing you say?"

"You need a convincer, eh?"

"Damn right. Another thing, why should ..."

Bolan set the phone aside and hoisted the big sniper to his shoulder. Eight thousand foot-pounds of bone-shattering energy would propel a heavy 500-grain messenger across that thousand-yard course in about one second flat. But the object, this time, was not to shatter flesh and bone. The object was to convince.

The pudgy racketeer sprang into sharp relief in the highly localized vision field of the big scope, fat lips still working in time with the crackling sounds emanating from the telephone receiver.

Bolan centered the cross-hairs momentarily on that agitated mouth before tracking on. One caress of the finger at that moment would have stilled that forked tongue forever. But the pained face of a pretty girl streaked across the memory field, influencing an already reluctant trigger finger, pushing the scan onward. To take Kaufman at this point would be to play directly into Bonelli's designs on Arizona. Kaufman would keep.

The hairs were already calibrated to the range. A quick mental adjustment for windage moved them two clicks left of the portable telephone at Kaufman's side. No flesh stood in the path.

He squeezed into the pull and rode the recoil for instant target evaluation, smiling with grim satisfaction as that phone took sail in a flurry of flying fragments. The bullet got there faster than sound, and Bolan was already squeezing into the next pull before that startled flesh down there understood what was happening. The hollow thunderclaps rolled away from his knoll across the flats to reverberate from the sounding board of the ranch house as puffs of cement dust and exploding glass marked the progress of the rapid-fire barrage, each round targeting harmlessly from the human point of view but wreaking considerable destruction upon inanimate objects.

No human flesh was in view down there, now. A couple of heads bobbed cautiously just above the surface of the pool. The sunning board was overturned; folding chairs scattered in hasty patterns of retreat. A jeep was tearing along a dusty road from the north forty, but there was no other obvious movement anywhere down there. Bolan gathered his gear and withdrew. Paradise Ranch had recognized a truth.

The true scope of the Phoenix game was beginning to gel, imposing itself on Bolan's consciousness as a sinister silhouette, still devoid of detail, but already looming above anything he had been prepared to find in the Grand Canyon State. The Executioner had come to Arizona seeking heroin and dealers in the poison, but he had found instead that "something else," fragmentary, veiled, still incomplete, but something, something big, overshadowing the routine importation of Mexican drugs just as the Mafia itself overshadowed ordinary street crime. As that silhouette grew, expanding into a looming shadow of doom, Bolan realized the full urgency of his situation, his need to identify the game plan and the highly lethal players.

For once, the problem was compounded not by the usual shortage of leads, but by too many. Too many game trails to follow and too many players to identify without a comprehensive score card. There were simply too damn many fingers in the Arizona pie.

It had begun with Nick Bonelli, the Tucson Mafia, and heroin. Then came the startling realization of a secret paramilitary force drilling in the Tucson desert and striking northward toward the Phoenix preserves of Moe Kaufman and company. Complications aplenty, yeah. More than enough even before the addition of a kinky senator who was maybe being groomed as White House material.

Too many leads, sure. Bolan always sought the overall view, the big picture, but the picture in Arizona was just too big. The stage was so crowded with actors that the plot was all but lost in their entrances and exits. And the most recent addition to the cast was a face from the Executioner's own memory, an identity which eluded him with frustrating adeptness. Bolan had wracked his brain seeking a name to match that face, an identity to pair with that vague remembrance and the evil tremors it inspired. He had managed to eliminate known mafiosi and their hangers-on by scanning his mental mug file, which left him where? Vietnam? Before?

He brushed the phantom aside to concentrate once more upon the game itself, a mystery whose significance overshadowed the importance of any one man. Arizona offered so many opportunities for an industrious tribe of cannibals that Bolan scarcely knew where to begin looking. Heroin, sure, and all the associated border rackets which could rake in millions every year for the mob coffers. But Nick Bonelli had all that already, and he needed to prove nothing by declaring unnecessary war upon Kaufman and the Phoenix mob. The same argument negated consideration of the other routine rackets, which had been shared more or less peacefully by the competing mobs for over three decades. None of those rackets nor even all of them together could justify the expense and risk incurred by Bonelli in outfitting, training, and unleashing his private army.

And that left, yeah, something else.

Always the trail led back to Abraham Weiss, and politics, and ... what?

Real estate was booming in Arizona, and Bolan knew very well how deeply Kaufman and Weiss had mined the illicit goldfields of fraud and foreclosure. A land grab? Bolan put it down as a "possible" and continued his mental search.

Mining was important In Arizona, with the state supplying 54 percent of all American copper and one-eighth of the world supply. Silver and gold were big, too, and with them came the whole range of associated industries and manufacturing — electronics, aircraft, steel, aluminum, transportation equipment — the list went on forever. And much of that industrial wealth was centered around Phoenix. Of late, there had been rumbles UP to the federal level about finding a suitable climate and industrial atmosphere for serious development of solar energy plants as an alternate fuel source for the entire nation. The Arizona desert had been suggested by Senator Abraham Weiss among others.

And yeah, it might play. The Executioner's mind began to pick significant details from among the mass of useless ones, slowly shaping order out of chaos. Phoenix was already big in the Arizona economy, and by all indications it was slated to be bigger still, and very soon. And Phoenix belonged to Moe Kaufman in all the ways that mattered.