A few months after his retirement from active duty, the general had popped up as president of a newly-formed California corporation which was geared entirely to the needs of the military. "Winco" was actually a mini-conglomerate, a merger of a half-dozen or so previously obscure companies which had never been directly engaged in government-contract work. Winco, however, came to life with several sizeable contracts already in its corporate pocket.

The meteoric rise of the new organization, together with a variety of suspicious circumstances, brought it under the scrutiny of several governmental investigative bodies.

Each of the several investigations had been quickly and quietly halted, at the Washington level, mainly through the efforts of a syndicate honcho Bolan had left dead in Washington.

So, sure, Bolan had known a thing or two about his ex-C.O.'s civilian activities, even before San Diego. He had known, also, that one day he might be faced with the unavoidable task of descending as the Executioner upon the man who had created the Executioner.

Howlin' Harlan had been Bolan's mentor, several life-times ago. The then-lieutenant colonel had been in Vietnam since before the Gulf of Tonkin escalation — first as a military advisor and later as a Green Beret specialist in counter-guerilla warfare.

Bolan had come into the combat theatre as an armor specialist and volunteer advisor in the effort to equip and train the fierce Montagnard tribesmen. Eventually he found himself with a small team of American advisors under the direct command of the already legendary Howlin' Harlan.

In such an operation there was no room for the military formalities which customarily serve as a wall between an officer and his men. Bolan and Winters became a pair, each hugely respecting the professional abilities of the other. The colonel was particularly impressed with Bolan's cool marksmanship and his steely self-command under combat stress.

Under the tutelage and direction of Howlie Winters, Sgt. Bolan became the original "execution specialist" in that theatre of operations. The first Penetration Team was formed around his particular abilities, designed to penetrate and operate deep within enemy-held territory for long periods without direct support of any nature — and Howlin' Harlan himself had gone along on the first few "shakedown cruises" of this potent idea in psychological counterwar. Those early excursions, in fact, had teamed only Winters and Bolan with a five-man support group of specially selected Montagnards.

These were the "proof" runs.

Later, the penetration teams were almost wholly American and they operated wherever enemy occupation and terrorism was present; later still, they were given missions to pursue enemy terrorists into sanctuary areas, though these assignments rarely found their way into the official record.

Howlin' Harlan had not been the sort of man to be bound by legalities. "There are no rules of warfare," he'd often told Bolan. "The only rule of warfare is to win."

Harlan Winters had grown accustomed to winning, and his "death specialist" teams became known and feared in every enemy camp in Southeast Asia.

PenTeam Able had been the first, though — and that one was Bolan's team.

He had continued to receive the rougher missions. And Howlin' Harlan, now a full chicken colonel in charge of all the teams, often accompanied Able Team on some of the briefer penetrations.

Yes, they'd been a pair.

Together they'd subsisted on jungle roots and swamp grass, insects and wild animals, lying half-submerged in rice paddies or squatting semiup-right in canals and enemy-infested junglelands. Together they'd scouted the Ho Chi Minh trail and mini-blitzed it at carefully selected points from one end to the other; together they'd invaded the terrorist sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia; together they had many times fought their way back across miles of hostile and aroused territory in hair-raising withdrawals to safe country.

Yeah. Bolan knew the inside of Howlin' Harlan Winters like he knew himself.

And no, hell no, he could not accept this man's death as a weakling's act of self-destruction.

As for the other — the mob involvement — that idea had not been so irreconcilable with the image of the man. Winters had been the type of guy who made his own rules and constructed his own vision of morality. He had continually bucked the "political system" which he blamed for prolonging the war. Often he had ignored official directives and policy decisions from Saigon and Washington. On more than one occasion Bolan had suspected that his C.O. was falsifying reports on the PenTeam strikes.

Eventually "the system" had caught up with the maverick colonel. Quietly and with notable absence of ceremonial honors he'd been relieved of his combat command and rotated to a desk job in the Saigon headshed. All his troopers had known, though, that his rotation orders had come from the highest Pentagon sources. "Howlie" had become too much of a colorful personality; war correspondents had latched onto the guy and had, in effect, written him out of the war. The Vietnam thing had become a hot issue in the American press, and Howlin' Harlan Winters represented too much of a potential embarrassment to the men in Washington.

Several months later, Bolan himself had come up for routine rotation. He took a month's leave in the states, then requested reassignment to his old outfit. The request was promptly granted and Bolan returned to the war zone for another full combat tour with the PenTeams. He had never again seen Harlan Winters, however, until that confrontation with sudden and complete retirement in the general's study in Del Mar.

Bolan had not always agreed with everything Harlan Winters stood for. He had not always approved of his C.O.'s official conduct. But he had loved and respected the man for the soldier that he was and now, in San Diego, resolved to give the memory of a valiant warrior a decent burial.

He was fully prepared to acknowledge the almost certain truth that his old commander had been knowingly involved with the Mafia.

There were indications, even, that this involvement extended back into the general's GHQ stint at Saigon, during the post-combative period.

But he was not ready yet to bury Harlan Winters without military honors.

"So where do we go from here?" Blancanales wanted to know.

Bolan quietly replied, "We go into enemy territory, Pol. Into the sanctuaries. We go in there and drag the colonel out. Okay?"

The other two veterans of Able Team exchanged glances, then Gadgets Schwarz cleared his throat and said, "Right. It's a rescue mission."

"For a dead man," Blancanales sighed.

"For the memory of a good soldier," Bolan corrected him. "Howlin' Harlan deserves an Able Team effort. Right?"

"Right," Schwarz echoed.

"But no false reports," Blancanales said quietly.

"We just bring him out," Bolan agreed. "The man that was there can speak for himself."

"Agreed," Blancanales replied. "We'll give it one good rattle for the man."

The tentative siege of San Diego had not been lifted.

On the contrary, it had suddenly undergone massive intensification.

Able Team was on the job.