"What?"

"No, darlin', that's my question. What?"

For a moment Annabelle stood there on her knees, totally defiant. Without a word uttered she told Mack Bolan:

"I am one of them. I obey the rule. Total silence."

Bolan whipped the pistol from under his left arm, aimed past Annabelle, fired three shots so fast the sounds came as a single blend of noise.

The window behind her naked body vanished, explosively.

Bolan dived sideways to his right, landing on his knees, wrapping his strong long arms around the back of the seat, feeling the decompression whistle past him, carrying with it papers, dust, noise, seat cushions, pillows, seat covers, a candy wrapper, smoke and ashes and cigarette butts, and sucking Annabelle directly into the small window.

Bolan heard her screams.

Maybe if she had been standing upright instead of on her knees it would have made a difference.

As it was, the window lay directly behind her and she went out head first, screeching, stuck for a fraction of an instant, then the window sucked her through — the vast bosom and wide back, then her wide hips slowing movement for another fraction, and then she was gone. The silken blue sheets had vanished. Her clothing, underwear, stockings, shoes.

She might never have existed, ever.

Bolan clamped an emergency oxygen bottle on his face and walked into the cockpit, slipping the pistol out of sight. He sat down in the right seat and held out his open palm.

Teaf pulled his ox-mask from his face long enough to shout, "What the hell, Borzi?"

"You owe me a dollar. Pay up!"

I am a man, Eddie Campanaro thought, without doing a thing to prove his manhood.

Stolidly, he stood, thick and wide, swarthy, a onetime United States Marine who'd earned a Bronze Star in Korea.

So, okay, he was getting along, close to forty. No matter. House captain, that was his job. He ran the whole friggin' show. No sumbitch got past the door of Don Cafu's pad without Eddie The Champ's okay, the old Mark I eyeball inspection. Day, night, frig it. Four o'clock in the morning, zero four hundred hours, they used to call it in the Crotch.

That's one of the things Eddie The Champ remembered most vividly about the Marine Corps. Salty bunch of dudes, men, but with a capacity to laugh at themselves: USMC, Uncle Sam's Moldy Crotch. The outcasts. Hadn't Cinch himself said so, Truman. Commander In Chief.

That's what Eddie The Champ remembered, after twenty years. Champ of what? Okay, he had hands. Golden Gloves. A winner. Then the dough. Seventeen pro fights, then six main events. He won two. He drew two, both fixed. He got the crap kicked out of himself running in against a rawboned awkward redhead with freckled shoulders from some busher dump. Omaha? Where the hell was Omaha? Dumbass kid didn't have half Eddie's class, smoothness, style, moves. All he could do was hit like a mule kicking, even his awkward left jab, and Jeez-ussss … those right-hand shots to the body. Eddie caved in during the third, and the hick from Omaha splattered Eddie's fine, beaked Roman nose all over Eddie's face, and he woke up on the table with an ammonia inhaler under his nose.

Sure, lucky punch, everyone said so, crumbum from Hicksville. But, god, what a whanging right hand. Eddie felt sore and as though he breathed glass for three weeks afterwards.

The second Main he went against some long-limbed spade with a fancy monicker like Johno Bantuli, some such shit, a cause type. Eddie fancied him around a half-dozen rounds, flicking left, rocking the spade's head doubling, sometimes tripling combinations, so far ahead on points the judges got restless, yawning. Christ, Eddie The Champ thought, where's it been all my life, this kind of easy dough? Main event. He snapped three fast lefts into the spade's blunt nose, crossed with a right, dropped his shoulder and shoveled two fast left hooks, just a fraction low, into the black hide. Then Johno came up with that dynamite right cross and he went blind.

One punch.

Eddie The Champ almost died right in the ring. His jaw was broken in five places and unhinged below his left ear. He had a severe concussion where the back of his head smashed into the canvas. He lay in hospital nine weeks, soup through a glass straw, then finely strained baby food. He had a lot of time to think. The main thing he thought was fuck fighting. He wanted no more dumbutt hicks from Omaha, or funny-named blacks from Kenya. He wanted good, uncomplicated, steady work requiring no great physical effort and a good payday, preferably tax free.

In those days just after the Korean War, the early to late fifties, all fighting on the East Coast was totally "mobbed up." Sometimes a guy won, other times he took a fall, and occasionally the bout was completely square. So long as the bout went at least five rounds, so the TV guys got in all their commercials and ad-agency people kept happy, what the hell?

Okay, sure, they sent the mob guy to the joint, finally. He rigged too many fights, kept the ad-agency boys too happy.

Eddie The Champ could care less. He was out of it then, back home upriver, taking on a little weight, moving from a natural welter to light-heavy, then heavy. He could put a hell of a shot behind 200 pounds holding a short length of lead pipe convincing some factory dumbutt the vigorish had to be paid, never mind the principal.

Eddie never remembered quite how or why.

He got a little too eager, had a trifle more enthusiasm than necessary, or had perhaps just gamed too much weight. He leaned into the muscle too hard, and "the arm" as the Mafia was called in his part of New York State, was out one customer and had a killer on its hands.

The commission met. Eddie expected death, unless the contingency plan he worked out did work out. And then he found himself alive, forgiven, pockets stuffed full of cash, passport, documentation, and a singular assignment.

Go "home."

Recruit an army.

Train them. Make soldiers of them.

Then turn them over to Don Cafu. He knows the rest.

And one hell of a job it was, too! Beautiful. He had guys beating down his door to join up. He had booze, babes, a bunk five feet wide, and never enjoyed any of them! He found himself not only recruiter, screening officer, training officer, and troop commander, but Don Cafu's house captain. Only by luck did he escape the yardboss job. Fortunately, Don Cafu had a long-time totally trusted retainer who watched the estate grounds, with a crew of locals and several studs who'd finally lost the last-ditch battle with the U. S. Immigration Service and gotten shipped "home."

During his easy life in the Sicilian province of Agrigento, Eddie The Champ had lost forty-three pounds. None of his expensive New York tailoring fit. He felt strong as a bull and horny as a billygoat. When he got time to lie awake and think about women, it lasted perhaps three minutes after he awoke at dawn, until Don Cafu pressed the buzzer that rasped like an angry wasp in Eddie The Champ Campanaro's ear.

Eddie bounded from his old-fashioned bed with the five-foot-high hand-carved headboard and mashed the button on the intercom, this particular dawn in late spring. "Yeah, Chief, I'm awake."

"Get down here, now!"

"Okay, Chief, soon as I finish washing my face, and I gotta shave."

The old man spoke English quite well. He was another of the deportees, years past; but when anger and passion overtook him, he fell back into his mother tongue, and Campanaro could hardly follow the cursing, shouting, absolute commands, so much slang, some of it omerta stuff, the forbidden language. Except to those inside.