Tatum gave an eye signal to the other detective. The man nodded and hurried back toward the house, then Tatum asked Lyons, "Are you saying that Bolan ... ?"

Lyons answered the uncompleted question with, "You better believe it."

"I didn't know the guy was that sophisticated," the homicide chief growled.

"He can be as sophisticated as he wants to get. You asked me about Bolan's smell. I can tell you now, it's getting stronger by the minute. I couldn't...."

"You couldn't what," Tatum asked, glancing at Gonzales with a worried frown.

"Well I just couldn't read this hit into Bolan's M.O. First off, he's worked alone ever since the L.A. hit. Secondly, I couldn't see the guy setting up a hit like this. Too risky, too many possible innocent bystanders on the sidelines. But an intelligence probe, now ... yeah, it reads Bolan all the way. He sends someone in close to work the eavesdropping gear — and I'll bet I know the guy he sent, incidentally — while covering him with precision fire capability from way the hell up there in a non-residential area. It would be — "

Tatum interrupted irritably with: "You're saying the guy didn't come out here looking for blood?"

"That's what I'm saying," Lyons replied, coolly meeting the hot gaze being directed at him. "He's just probing now, looking for targets. Once he gets set and locked onto the people he really wants, then your war will suddenly get very hot."

"What the hell do you call this?" Tatum flared, spreading his arms in a dramatic compass of the battle zone.

"It's a probe, Cap'n," Lyons replied evenly. "Just a light probe."

"Jesus Christ!" the Captain yelled, and stomped off toward the house.

Gonzales turned a grin to the young cop from L.A. "I think you said the wrong thing," he told him. "I don't know what it is in your town but, in San Diego, seven dead and six wounded is Friday Night Gangbusters. The Captain gets uptight over just one homicide."

"He'd better get loose," Lyons muttered. "He hasn't seen anything yet."

Bolan had learned early in his wars that there was no such thing as a casual connection between the mob and the so-called "straight" community. Whether that connection be social, business, political, or simply a chance pairing of golf or tennis partners — Bolan knew enough of Mafia methods to look penetratingly at any contact between the two levels of American society.

There were no off-duty hours for the mob. Its members were always in there pitching, in business and in pleasure, and they lost no opportunity to extend their area of influence in whatever direction opened to them.

The Mafia was a cancer. It grew and acquired dominance in the same manner as any cancerous growth — by extension — by moving into weakened adjacent matter and absorbing the resources there into its own spreading designs.

A wise man did not provide hospitable accommodations for a cancerous growth within his own body.

But many supposedly wise businessmen had played around with accommodations for the Mafia cancer. Almost without exception, these men were eaten quickly and easily and were either passed on through as excrement or absorbed into the growing body of the cannibal.

The same thing happened to bored socialites who seemed to think that a hoodlum in the drawing room or even in the bedroom, was "chic" — or at least an interesting conversation-piece.

There were also those straight citizens who unwittingly found themselves in a social or business contact with one of "the boys" and then found it too painful or too dangerous to withdraw from that association. Violent intimidation and blackmail were favorite tools of the cannibals; they never hesitated to apply them unsparingly. The end result for these victims was about the same as for all the others — they were used and abused until every resource had been plundered, then absorbed or eliminated.

Much has been said and written to romanticize the American mobster. Bolan had heard the stories concerning their high moral values, their gallantry to women, their concern for the underdog, their patriotism and love of country, their support of charities, their exalted sense of brotherhood and personal ethics within their own organizations, their high ideals regarding family and community.

And it was all sheer hogwash.

Bolan knew them for what they were. They were rapists, thieves, sadists, terrorists, murderers. The American mobster was a bloated and self-seeking cannibal who answered to no morality which did not serve to feed his savage lusts and voracious appetites.

None of this had anything to do with being Italian. Often it was their Italian relatives and neighbors who suffered the most at the hands of these unconscionable despots.

Bolan was no psychologist or sociologist. He was not even interested in determining the environmental factors which produced priests, artists and mobsters from the same neighborhood or even from the same family.

He would leave those complicated considerations to those who were trained to study such phenomena.

Mack Bolan's mission was to identify the gangsters, to isolate them and to eliminate them. He was not hampered by intellectual moralizing or agonizing over the questions of force and violence, right and wrong, the constitutional rights of wrongdoers or the legal trickery of the American justice system — all of which had been manipulated by the mob into a protective bubble which insulated them from any effective counterattack by the law-enforcement community.

They owned policemen, in high positions and low. They had their own judges, prosecutors, councilmen, assemblymen, congressmen, bureaucrats — the mob had their own "second invisible government" which saw to their protection at every level of American life. Except for one.

They had no immunity from the Executioner.

Mack Bolan was no zealot — nor was he a romantic idealist. He was a military realist. He had pledged to defend his country against all enemies, external and internal.

The mob was an internal enemy.

He could draw no realistic line of distinction between this enemy and that one.

The Mafia stood as the most visible and dangerous enemy in his area of perception. He would, until he drowned in his own blood or theirs, fight that enemy with every resource at his command.

The threat at San Diego was shaping into one of those confrontations which Bolan had hoped to avoid.

The problem was similar to the routine dilemma of the war in Vietnam: in order to get at the enemy, you often had to destroy an entire friendly town.

Bolan had managed to keep the major thrust of his homefront wars directed into the hardcore operations of the enemy — into their clout routes, the overtly criminal activities, into pitched battles with their armed forces and execution missions against their leaders.

At San Diego, it was beginning to look like the civilian community might be unavoidably involved in the resolution of the problem.

The intelligence probes had paid off handsomely, but the yield was also very troubling to this dedicated warrior.

Tendrils of the Mafia cancer were woven throughout the fabric of this great little city's business and social communities. The in-growth was still tenuous, however, and the encroachment had not yet reached the cannibalistic stage. But Mack Bolan knew his enemy. And he had learned quite a bit, in a relatively short time, about the city of San Diego.

And, yeah, this was one city he could not avoid. Some of the area's most solid citizens had been trekking to the tar pits of licensed greed — in many cases, perhaps, unaware that a band of cannibals were lurking there in the shadows, patiently awaiting the opportunity to ensnare them there and devour them — that some were already being eaten.