Now Bolan lay on the back side of the peaked roof and watched two nervous soldiers come slowly out of the house, peer up and down the street, and cross over to the blue Chevrolet. They walked around it, stared through the windows, and walked around it again. Then the heavy one stood in the street and nervously scanned the neighborhood while the other one, a tall skinny guy raised the hood and peered at the engine. Bolan smiled. They were looking for a bomb. The skinny one slipped under the car on his back and emerged a couple of minutes later at the rear. He got up and brushed off his clothes, then sent a hand signal to someone watching from inside the house.

The chubby one stepped up to the vehicle and opened the door on the passenger's side. He leaned inside, jerked quickly back out, said something to the skinny soldier, and snatched open the rear door to scoop something off the seat.

They had found the wheelman's revolver. Now they stood in a tight huddle and the skinny one was jerking his head in some emphatic argument, then he took something from the other man — the pistol, Bolan supposed — and ran across to the house and went inside. A moment later he re-emerged with another guy in tow, a huge mart with shoulders like a lumberjack and overdeveloped pectoral muscles which caused his arms to swing like an ape as he walked.

The chubby one, meanwhile, had gone to the rear of the vehicle and was just standing there contemplating the trunk door. He said something to the other two as they approached. The musclebound newcomer leaned into the passenger compartment and the skinny guy went to the rear and fitted the key into the trunk door.

Bolan's angle of vision was from above and to the rear of the vehicle. He could not see the men's faces as that trunk lid raised, but he had no trouble seeing the overall reaction to their discovery there. Both of them stiffened and staggered back a step or two, with all the precision of carefully rehearsed choreography, and one of them let out a loud yelp.

The big guy leapt clear of the passenger compartment, hardware now visible in his hand, and moved with surprising agility to join the other two. He saw, and also reacted violently, lunging immediately forward to get both big paws inside there for a tactile verification of what his eyes were telling him. Then he straightened up and turned a frozen stare toward the Chianti residence. A door cracked open over there and a peevish voice called out, "Well what the hell is it?"

The heavyweight yelled back, "It's them three engineers from Brooklyn, or what's left of 'em."

The door at the house immediately clicked shut That decided Bolan's course of action. He grimaced and eased the Beretta up, clamping down on the peak of the roof with his armpit, letting his elbow find comfortable support on the opposite downslope. He had already calculated the firing range at roughly twenty yards. Ordinarily this would be an ideal range for the Beretta — he had worked it in with consistent two-inch groupings at twenty-five yards, pretty accurate for a handgun — but now he had to calculate the effect of the silencer on muzzle velocity and track deviation. And he definitely wanted that silencer in operation, especially now that Sam the Bomber was obviously not going to expose himself. Bolan had not really counted on getting Chianti this time, anyway. It would be enough, for now, to rattle his teeth a bit. And whispering death, Bolan had found, had a peculiar psychological effect on Mafia hardmen.

He was sighting down the short range now, allowing for gross error through the silencer, and knowing that he would have to get all three in rapid fire if he was to get them at all. They were still clumped at the rear of the vehicle, the heavyweight continuing to stare toward the house, the other two darting nervous glances into the bloody trunk.

Bolan fired once, twice, three times in quick succession — the 9mm Parabellums singing down to the street on slightly diverging paths and each finding solid-soft matter to stop their travel.

The heavyweight yelled something in a twangy falsetto and pitched forward with both hands scrabbling for the raised trunk door, then he fell away to the side and rolled onto his back. The other two had gone down without a sound, the skinny one crumpling onto the rear bumper and hanging there, his clothing apparently caught on something; the thick one folding down on rubber legs to sprawl face down in the street.

Bolan was not yet done with the Human Engineering Contractors. The Beretta angled toward the far side of the street and continued its abrupt little coughs. The big picture window fronting Chianti's office began sprouting a rash of round holes, then shattered with a loud crash. An instant later, the glass porthole of the massive door exploded inwardly.

And then Bolan was done. He released his grip on the peak and slid slowly down the far side of the roof, throwing in a fresh clip in a rapid re-load of the Beretta as he went and taking care to favor the bad shoulder. Thats twice, Sam, he was saying to himself. The third time around will be all for you.

Across the way, Sam the Bomber was lying face down on his office carpet in a sea of shattered glass and wondering if he was shot or just cut up. Numbly he realized that he had not even seen the bastard, had not even heard any gunshots. Where the hell had the guy been firing from? All Sam had seen was his boys toppling over like rubber toys deflating, then whamand Sam's whole damn world was exploding around him.

This was going to look bad, damned bad. The word would be all over town now that Bolan was doing a job of human engineering on the contractor's contractor, and that was going to look bad as hell. That, he knew, was going to be the big crack in the dam of Sam the Bomber's life's work. He was being engineered by one hell of an engineer.

Well… at least now he could call Freddie and tell him that he'd made that contact. Yeah, he sure had made that contact.

Bolan's withdrawal from the scene of combat was via the public transportation system. When he left the subway at 125th and Lenox, he hopped a bus to 110th and walked into East Harlem. According to his poop book, he would find an enterprising businessman there by the name of William Meyer who sold objects de la guerreat reasonable prices and without questions. He found Meyer in a little machine shop in an alley behind a bakery, and it took no more than a minute or two for the arms expert to decide that young Meyer knew his business. The guy was an ex-GI and an armorer like Bolan — but, unlike Bolan, completely warred-out and barely able to get around. He showed his visitor the stump where his right foreleg had once been and the synthetic marvel which had replaced his entire left leg from the hip down — and they talked briefly about land mines and the hells of warfare in a hostile land. Then Meyer took Bolan to the basement in an elevator he'd built himself and showed him some of the fine weapons he'd also built himself, and some he'd modified or rebuilt, and some he'd merely picked up from one place or another.

He sold a lot of stuff to the Panthers, he explained, also to various fascist and militant leftist groups, and even a couple of cops did business there from time to time.

Meyer's cynical smile told Bolan as much as his words did, and Bolan understood that smile. He had seen it on a lot of warriors who'd left parts of their bodies on the battlefields. This particular smile told Bolan that a munitions maker did not take sides… he was pure like Rachel Silver and just did his thing building destruction for whatever damn fools wanted to come along and set it loose upon the world. Yeah, and Bolan was one of those pure fools who came along. It seemed like a lousy way to run a world, but this was no time for Bolan to go into thatagain. He'd searched his soul so many times it was getting raw. Like God, Bolan did not propose — he merely disposed. He made his selections from Meyer's arsenal and paid the man from his rapidly dwindling war chest, adding an extra fifty for special delivery to a midtown parcel depot.