It was no private damned war.

It had started that way, of course ... private ... but not a war, not in the real sense. It had begun as a simple quest for personal justice. Sergeant Mack Bolan, much decorated hero of a seeming endless war in Southeast Asia, had come home from that combat theatre solely to bury his parents and teenage sister — victims of another sort of ferocity — and to arrange for the care of his kid brother, the lone survivor of that tragedy at home.

But then Sgt. Bolan learned that there was more to the story than was mentioned in the official police report. Ailing steelworker Sam Bolan, Mack's father, had been in a financial squeeze. He had borrowed money at appallingly usurious rates from a local loan company, one which turned out to be operating on the borderline of legality. With continued illness and a partial disability, the elder Bolan fell behind in his payments ... and the terror began for the Bolan family. Sam was physically attacked; repeatedly. Young Johnny Bolan was approached by a theft ring, his seventeen-year-old sister by a prostitution ring — with suggestions as to how they could "bail your old man outta trouble."

Johnny Bolan demurred.

Cindy Bolan did not. Her father was suffering a serious heart condition. Continued pressures and violent intimidation would kill him, she felt. Cindy became a "sponsored" prostitute, turning over her earnings toward the discharge of Sam Bolan's indebtedness.

Upon learning of this, the elder Bolan "went berserk." In a frenzy of soul-torment, Sam Bolan shot his daughter, his son, his wife, then turned the gun on himself. Only young Johnny survived to tell the tale, and it was a story to clamp the jaw and ice the eyes of big brother Mack, a combat specialist who had earned the tag "The Executioner" in the jungles and hamlets of Southeast Asia.

"Cindy did only what she thought had to be done. In his own mixed-up way, I guess Pop did the same. Can I do any less?" By this simple declaration was Mack Bolan's "war against the Mafia" enjoined. In the beginning, however, he did not think of it as a war, nor did he even know that the culprits were Mafiosi. He knew only that he was performing an act of justice in an area in which the police had already professed helplessness. He "executed" all five officials of the "loan company" — and, hours later, he knew that he had started another "war without end."

"The Mafia, for God's sake. So what? They can't be any more dangerous or any smarter than the Cong. Scratch five, and how many are left? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? So — I've got another unwinnable war on my hands."

In a modern army heavy on specialties, Sergeant Bolan had practiced the oldest specialty of all. He was a death specialist. He was an expert marksman in virtually every personal-weapon category. He was a trained sniper, a skilled armorer and an experienced and wily jungle fighter. He was a man who could operate alone and in enemy territory, for long periods, living entirely off the land and by his own wits.

Few men could have been better equipped for the new job which Mack Bolan had taken upon himself. Still, the outcome of his impossible home-front war could have been foretold from the first shot fired. There was no way that a lone man, any lone man, could successfully challenge the might and the reach of the most formidable criminal organization ever to arise upon this planet. U.S. government officials called it "the invisible second-government of the nation." Crusading journalists, racket-busting prosecutors and congressional prob-ers alike had repeatedly warned of the enormous tentacles of "this underground monster" which were spreading like cancerous growths throughout the fibre of American life — and yet all had agreed that little could be done within the existing framework of the American system of jurisprudence to effectively combat the power of highly organized crime.

So yes, Bolan soon learned what he was going against. He came to know, also, that his enemies could never forgive or forget the challenge to their omnipotence. They quickly felt a necessity to squash him — as an object lesson, if nothing else. An empire built upon terror and violence must sustain itself by those same methods. And even if the Mafia did not get him, the police eventually would. Bolan came to be as guilty of murder and other high crimes as were his opponents, in the eyes of the law. From the moment when that first shot of his home front war was fired, Bolan was a living dead-man and he knew it.

He declared, nevertheless, "I will not roll over and die for them."

What did a condemned man have to lose?

The combat specialist from Vietnam resolved to give meaning to his death. He had lived as a professional soldier; he would die like one. His "last mile" would be a bloody one, and not all of the blood would be his own. He would hit their house with thunder and lightning, he would shake and rattle them while he died, and they would know that there was a price to be paid for their way of life.

So Mack Bolan transplanted his jungle warfare techniques to the city streets of America, where he took the offensive against "this greater enemy."

Much to his own surprise, that initial campaign in his home town, Pittsfield, was a resounding success … and surprisingly Bolan lived on while the local house of Mafia virtually disintegrated.

It was a hollow victory, of course. Bolan was now "deader" than ever… with a $100,000 bounty on his head, swarms of Mafiosi and ambitious freelancers on his trail, and law enforcement agencies around the nation gearing for his apprehension.

Operating as much on instinct as by the intellect, the young warrior's survival mechanisms directed him into a guerrilla lifestyle. The entire world became his personal jungle of survival, and every chance encounter with another human being became a possible do-or-die situation. To the threatened and the condemned, "aloneness" becomes the heaviest cross to bear. Bolan was not that much different from other men — he sought the comfort and protection of loyal friends — and, shortly after the opening battle in Pittsfield, he turned up on the far side of the country, in Los Angeles, where he hastily recruited his Death Squad of combat buddies from Vietnam.

This maneuver was swiftly revealed as an error in judgment, from Bolan's point of view. The squad was dramatically successful, in that they shattered the powerful DiGeorge family of Southern California — but it was another hollow victory for the Executioner, with seven dead friends on his conscience and the others in police custody. He went on to single-handedly finish off the DiGeorge family, thereafter shunning even the most casual contact with those who might feel inclined to aid him.

A man with Bolan's dedication commanded respect and loyalty, though, whether or not he sought it, and he found many helping hands as his wipe-out trail lengthened and broadened into a seemingly infinite theatre of operations: fron the American Southwest to Miami, international forays into France and England, and back through New York, Chicago, Las Vegas as the ocean of blood around him grew, then a quick dip into the Caribbean area, westward again to San Francisco followed by a searingly urgent call on Boston and a spine-tingling probe of the subgovernment scene in Washington.

None knew better than Bolan himself that his survival thus far was due in large part to the efforts of many unsolicited friends in the police establishment, in the general community, and even — here and there — in the Mafia families themselves. He did not discount the value of this assistance; he did wish to keep his personal involvements to an absolute minimum, however, for various reasons.

Howlin' Harlan presented a personal involvement.

San Diego itself would mean a personal involvement, via the personages of Pol Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz.