Bolan seized the opportunity and gunned it, pulling away from his enemies before they could recover from their near catastrophe. He used the extra numbers he had gained to put some ground between himself and his pursuers, momentarily losing sight of them as he rounded a curve in the highway.

It was merely a respite, but he had carved himself some breathing room. The enemy would be cautious now, and it could all work in his favor if he played it skillfully enough.

If he was not already leaking gas from bullet ruptures in the fuel tank. If he did not allow himself the sin of overconfidence that marked a destined loser.

He followed the highway through a series of S-curves, pushing the captured Continental to the limit, feeling her drift on the outer curves as he approached the boundaries of her tolerance. The speed was essential, but he could not risk their lives on unfamiliar highway with a wounded vehicle.

A morning recon had revealed the winding stretch of highway to him. He knew there were five or six more of the looping S-curves dead ahead, but darkness strained perception, played myriad tricks with the mind.

Even a conditioned warrior might misjudge, miscalculate, and when it happened.... Bolan dismissed the thought and concentrated on his driving. Two more curves and he would be back on the open straightaway with nowhere in the world to hide or make his stand.

It would have to be soon. He did not intend to let the chase cars tail him back to downtown Vegas.

He was not prepared to put his battle on the streets.

Not yet.

The woman stirred again, and Bolan saw that she was awake and watching him. Her eyes were wide with fear, reflecting pinpoints of the dash light as she huddled against the floorboards. There was no time for words of consolation as Bolan saw his chance and acted on an impulse, going for it on his instincts, without preparation or planning. He stood on the brakes and cranked the wheel hard to starboard as he brought the Lincoln around, rocking to a halt diagonally across the two-lane blacktop. He set the brake and left the engine running, reaching for the woman in the same fluid motion as he sprang his door and shoved it open.

She recoiled briefly, but their eyes met in the semidarkness and something flashed between them. She let Bolan pull her out of there with moments left to spare and followed him on shaky legs as they put the Lincoln behind them in the darkness.

They had barely reached cover — the woman lying prone and Bolan crouching with the AutoMag in hand, when the chase car came into view around the curve. The vehicles were running single file now, but with no loss of speed. If anything, the hunters anger and frustration seemed to milk some extra RPM out of the straining engines in carbon-copy Cadillacs.

The leader saw his peril much too late, and there was barely time for him to tap his brakes before the stunning impact of collision. Heavy-metal thunder filled the desert night, and Bolan watched an oily ball of flame devour both vehicles along with everyone inside. The second car was screaming in toward the roaring funeral pyre, but the driver somehow gained control, hit his brakes and leaned on the wheel to put his gunboat in a sidelong skid.

The Caddy drifted with its four tires smoking, but the wheelman missed the pileup by a yard or two and came to rest upon the shoulder of the road, his engine stalling. A single figure staggered from the raging bonfire in the middle of the highway. He was wrapped in flames, a lurching, screaming scarecrow. The Executioner was sighting for a mercy round when a secondary blast rolled out and knocked the figure sprawling, snuffing out the final spark of life.

Doors were springing open on the second Caddy, shaken gunners piling out with weapons in hand but aiming nowhere as they took in the holocaust at center stage. One or two of them were shielding their eyes from the heat, none looking out for Bolan as he drew down on them, with the silver AutoMag from less than thirty yards away.

His first round took a shotgun rider in the chest, 240 grains of pitiless extinction ripping through his heart and lungs and blowing him away. His flaccid form rebounded off the fender of the Caddy, touching down beside a startled comrade.

Number two had heard the shot, had long enough to gauge its source and pivot on his heels in that direction before Bolan stroked the hand cannon's trigger once again, dispatching death across the intervening no-man's-land. The gunner's head snapped back and kept on going, portions of it outward bound and lost in darkness. The guy was dead before he knew it, and the Executioner was tracking on to other targets long before the gunner hit the ground. Three.

Four.

Five.

They toppled like silhouettes in an amusement arcade's shooting gallery, the last one getting off a single shot that never came within a hundred yards of Bolan. The Executioner took a moment to recon the vehicle, making sure that there was no one left alive inside or crouching behind it. Then he slipped Big Thunder back into its military holster. The probe had gone to hell, and he was nowhere near the battlefield intelligence that he had hoped to gather from Minotte. For a fleeting instant, Bolan wondered if the Dixie capo had survived the hit on his estate. No matter. There would be other sources of information available in Vegas.

The big warrior knew that he would need that information now more than ever. There were wild cards in the game — for all he knew the whole damned deck was wild — and he could not proceed another step along the campaign trail without some hard intel.

The Vegas warning signs were badly out of synch, and he had to get some stretch, some cool perspective to prevent himself from making lethal errors along the way.

One means of gaining that intelligence, perhaps, was already within his grasp. The woman, right. Someone had thought she was important enough to steal her from Minotte and to lose lives in the process. Bolan meant to know what made her worth the trouble.

It was deathly still beneath the velvet midnight sky, except for the hungry crackling of the flames. The warrior made a final fleeting survey of the dead, then turned back toward the living.

"I haven't thanked you properly... for everything."

Bolan glanced over at the lady, noting that she had fixed up her hair a little while they drove.

She did not look so battle weary now in the reflected dash light and the glaring neon from outside.

"You're welcome," he said simply.

They were driving north along the Strip in Bolan's rental car. Some fifteen minutes earlier they had ditched the captured crew wagon, swapping it for a nondescript sedan, which he had leased for the duration under a cold alias.

"Just like that? You saved my life."

He shrugged it off.

"We both got lucky."

She gave him a quizzical look.

"Well... I guess we ought to introduce ourselves. I'm Lucy Bernstein."

"Blanski. Mike." He paused briefly, considering an angle of attack, then forged ahead by the direct route. "What are you to Minotte?"

She made a sour face and tossed a strand of hair back from her forehead.

"A minor headache," she responded. "I work for the Beacon."

"Reporter?"

"Don't look so surprised," she said. "I've been assigned to do an in-depth series on the local Mob, their infiltration into gaming."

The lady read his face and when she spoke again her tone had gone defensive.

"We're not all in their pockets, if that's what you've heard.""

"It never crossed my mind," he told her sincerely. "I'm just surprised Minotte would agree to interviews." Despite the semidarkness he could see the blush that crept across her cheeks.

"He didn't. Actually, I guess you'd say I broke into his house."