The man in the door stood over six feet tall and wore a black commando uniform. The man's left hand moved and a small piece of metal sailed across the room, landing at Carlo Maligno's feet. Entranced, Carlo looked down, and in the dim light he saw what he recognized as a marksmanship badge from the days when the Yanks came through during the Big War. Then Carlo went blind, because The Executioner shot him through the top of the head.

Twenty minutes later, as Vassallo Flaccido sat in his tilted-back chair outside the garbage collectors' union hall, guarding the door because the bosses had a meeting going, so they could raise the rates again, Vassallo suddenly found himself sitting in mid-air. He landed hard on his fat rump, shook his head and stared up, felt his overworked heart pump too hard and a ripping pain shoot across his chest and down his left arm when his eyes saw the huge man in black with the gun in his hand.

Bolan stepped over the coronary case, opened the door, went catlike up the union-hall steps, opened the door and stepped inside. Only one light in the room, bright, a chipped green shade over it. The garbage union bosses conducted their meetings with considerable style and minimum formality. Six men sat around a poker table covered with green velvet. On side trays stood bottles and glasses, coldcuts, sliced fresh vegetables. Vivace Lena briskly riffled the cards, shuffled them, offered them for a cut, began dealing a hand of five-card draw poker. When the cards were out, Lena put the deck down and placed a coin atop it. "Okay, who opens?"

A metallic object came out of the gloom beyond the hanging light and landed with a smack, dead-center in the table. Then a flat, toneless voice said, "I open, and play the hand I've got."

Bolan got Lena through the forehead first shot, then ticked off three more as they froze for a moment before bursting into frantic action. Bolan opened the door and backed out, flipped a grenade, then leaped down the stairs. He was almost a half-block away when the delay-fuse set the grenade off and blew out every window in the upstairs room, killing the last two bosses.

One man survived the attack long enough to make a telephone call, but the man he called did not believe him. He laughed, said, "You're drunk again, Immondo," and hung up. He rolled back over and placed his dark, black-furred paw on the blonde's vast bosom. Jeeez-usss, thought Vistoso Mezzano, there's nothing like these Kraut and Dane and Swede babes, once our Corsican pals get them tamed down and broken in!

The girl's milk-white skin still showed faint bruise marks, and high inside one thigh the cigarette burn scars had healed but still showed plainly. This one said her name was Hilde and she had gone to Paris with her sister on vacation, the both of them school teachers in Bavaria, and one night a truly distinguished looking but slightly threadbare man offered to guide them on a tour: those parts of Paris the ordinary visitor never saw. Of course it wasn't dangerous, what a thought! And they could take pictures, too — eh? Eh? They went first to a dingy place full of hashish smoke, stinking of sweat and vomit, and watched a pair of Apache dancers abuse one another, then to another place where other women and some men sat around a large glass. Some of them had cameras. When Hilde sat down she could see that under the glass was a room. In the room was a bed. On the bed lay a man and two women. Hilde watched in astonished fascination for a moment, then got to her feet, held onto the back of her chair, and asked her guide, please, for a glass of water, she felt so faint. She awoke with a crushing sick headache, and cottony mouth turned wrong-side out. She lay sick, thirsty, hungry, cold, and terrified for what seemed days, until an incredibly cruel little man, hardly five feet tall, came for her. She had not believed such pain as the little man could inflict truly existed. She had been brought up on the myth that God provided His children with an automatic cutout device, so that when pain became unendurable, you became unconscious. Once she learned this an absolute falsehood, her training began … and now here she was, hoping Signor Mezzano would be good to her because she had graduated with honors and could make the signor very, very happy. No, she had never seen her sister again, since that night in Paris, why?

Mezzano giggled and buried his face between the vast pillowy milk-white bosoms, and he suddenly felt Hilde's entire body grow tense, then stiff as a corpse.

Mezzano raised up. "Hey, that's no way to be nice."

He saw her face. The total terror in her unblinking green eyes. Mezzano whirled around and looked up at the man in black. The man in black thrust out his hand, and Mezzano automatically accepted the preferred object. He stared at it. What the hell? It had the shape of a Formee Cross. A bar across the bottom read marksman.

Recognition came in an instant to Mezzano and he lunged back, trying to squirm beneath the girl, and death forever darkened the light. He heard a faint phutt and felt a millisecond of pain, then nothing.

By the time he left Mezzano's establishment, The Executioner left a total of ten deads.

Before midnight Bolan hit another union boss and his underbosses, leaving six dead in a central-city private dining room, and leaving the Neapolitan teamsters leaderless. He struck the waterfront numbers bank, doubled back, destroyed all the betting slips and set fire to the lira. He destroyed every last vehicle of a car rental agency which had been taken over by Mafia through extortion and terror. On the outskirts of the city he blew up a Mafia-owned bank which the feds had learned did most of the financing of international smuggling operations between Italy and the U.S.

At midnight, The Executioner made a telephone call: "Get your women out of the house."

In panic, the Naples Capo di tutti Capi, Boss of Bosses, fled with his women and most of his retinue, and Bolan virtually destroyed the Frode estate with his most recent acquisition, an M79 grenade launcher. Much lighter and more portable than a bazooka, it also had the advantage of not gushing out a huge black-blast of flame and dust when fired. True, it did not have the knock-down penetration power of a rocket launcher, but with practice, and The Executioner had gotten plenty in Nam, he could put one frag after another through doors and windows from maximum range.

Shortly after eight o'clock the following morning, two events occurred almost simultaneously. First, a non-union truck driver/owner who had barely managed to feed his large family for the past six years, carried a lighted lamp into a closet, pulled the door shut and locked it, and then counted the money again, just to be sure. It had not been a dream. The peculiar big man with the eyes that ran shivers up Fretta's back really had bought Fretta's ancient truck, for cash, in U.S. dollars, and paid more than a new Italian model would cost. He knew dealing with that customs man would pay off some day, and it had!

At the same time, on a dusty road a hundred miles down the peninsula, in Calabria not far south of Castrovallari, a big man in worn clothing, face grimy, cap pulled low over his ice-blue eyes, drove an old rattling truck with a crate lashed down behind the cab. The Executioner took a bite of the moldy cheese he'd bought just after dawn from a farmer's wife on the road. He washed the cheese down with some bitter-tasting native wine. Perhaps when he reached Reggio, at the toe of the boot, just across the Strait of Messina from his objective, Bolan would feel safe. Yeah, safe.

But so far his deaf-mute act had worked, buying gasoline, the food and wine, never dismounting from the truck except, on deserted stretches of road, to check the oil and water levels of the truck's engine. The last thing he could afford to do in the vast, sparsely populated, desert-like regions of Calabria was put himself afoot so he had to depend upon other people, other transport.