"All right, gentlemen, what do you think of this? Our brother Don Cafu does not want our help. He has, indeed, refused our offers of aid. He has likewise refused to come and reason with us. And our only purpose was to offer aid and assistance, correct, gentlemen?"

They nodded, grunted, and most of them began slowly Smiling.

"Then I suggest we let the don have his way. Obviously, he considers himself in no danger. A hundred trained and well-armed soldiers, correct? So what can one man hope to do, even this Bolan?"

Brinato puffed his cigar in the silence, while the others watched him, grinning like sharks. "Of course, there are always the pieces to pick up afterwards." Brinato smiled, a brief lifting of the left corner of his thick lips. "I suggest we adjourn and see what the morrow brings."

Still grinning, the others got to their feet as Brinato rose from his chair. "Now, let's see if we can't find a way to divert ourselves, eh?"

As they filed out of the table room, Brinato signaled to his houseman. The hardguy grinned and nodded and went away. As the dons went into the lavishly furnished private parlor, soft music began issuing from hidden speakers, the lights softened, and the girls came in.

Mack Bolan, The Executioner, was not only a highly efficient practitioner but also a student of military tactics and strategy.

The oldest rule in the book had never changed:

"You must take the high ground,

or you will die in the valleys."

And wars had been lost because of laziness.

Occupying the high ground took men of stamina, willpower, and commitment. Bolan had discovered in his first day's recon that Cafu's trainees had little else on their minds but $1000 a day and easy living Stateside. They did not like to climb mountains, so they faked it. They did not like roughing it, so they lugged along ten pounds of crap in their rucksacks — liquor, canned foods, reading material, and a few even managed to inveigle some of the local gkls to come along and spend the watch with them.

In that first day, Bolan could have killed nineteen of Cafu's soldier trainees.

But that would only have set the hounds upon him. When the relief men came up to take their positions on the outer rim of the defense perimeter, and found deads, Cafu would have been alerted and doubly defensive.

Bolan kept scouting, and just before noon he located at last what he sought: a soldier trainee who looked like Mack Bolan. Not really, but perhaps enough. Enough so Mack could take the guy down, replace him, hopefully pass himself off as the soldier long enough to get inside.

If his estimate of the reliefs was correct, he would arrive at the base camp near dusk, and in the gloom possibly pass himself off as the trainee.

First, the trainee.

Mack simply circled down through a deadspace where the soldier could not see him, hit the too-well-worn path leading to the observation post, and walked right up to the soldier. The soldier was asleep, a skin-magazine lying across his chest. Bolan kneeled beside the man, chopped him across the throat, drove the larnyx into the man's throat, then held the man down while he suffocated.

Bolan lifted the man up and threw him over his shoulder, carried him a mile farther back up into the mountains, stripped off the "uniform" Don Cafu's trainees wore, then dropped the body down the shaft of an abandoned sulphur mine. Hundreds of such shafts were in view all through the terrain. At one tune, sulphur export had made Agrigento one of the most important cities on the island, with a population of half a million people in over forty villages and the capital city bearing the same name as the province, Agrigento.

The uniform did not fit, but it would do; it had not fit the other guy either, being to large for him, and too small for Bolan. But their coloring, general build, enough the same in general so Bolan believed he could pull it off.

Mentally, he shrugged. If he failed, he would have to shoot his way clear, then outrun them. He went back to the OP and waited, lunching sumptuously on chow the now-dead man had carried on Ms back up the mountainside. A hunk of fresh bread, even fresher cheese, a big cut of roast highly seasoned, a water bottle full of excellent white wine. The guy even had American cigarettes, two packs of Camels. Mack lit up and settled back to watch the trail after he'd eaten.

He wondered what the man's name was. There had been no papers on him. Probably Cafu and his organization were taking care of manufacturing/counterfeiting a new identity.

Meantime, though, the dead man had answered to some name, had some identity to his fellow trainees. Then Bolan remembered the sign on a wall in Philadelphia:

SPEAK AMERICAN

THINK AMERICAN

BE AMERICAN

That could be his passport into the alien land.

His relief came an hour before dusk. Bolan heard the man thirty minutes before he saw the malacarni come into view down the trail. If they were all as clumsy and club-footed as this dude, then malacarni was a misnomer — a real badass does not fall and flounder and puff'n huff so a potential enemy can hear him coming a half-hour before he arrives.

Yet Bolan did not lower his guard.

Overconfidence had killed more men than caution ever would.

Standing fifty yards down the trail, the soldier paused. Bolan saw the sweat-soaked uniform, the heaving chest, the sagging shoulders, and Bolan shook his head. Cafu was selling shit for steel if this dude represented what he hired out for a grand a day.

The man down the trail, standing in plain view, called out hoarsely. Bolan did not understand the word. He had anticipated this. In thickly accented English, Bolan replied, shouting, "We have orders! Spik Eenglish! Training!"

Bolan got to his feet, but remained crouched, waved his left arm, "Come on up!"

Without a pause, the man resumed his climb. Bolan had long been ready to move, and once the man began climbing, Bolan went down the trail fast, and passed his relief before the man knew what had happened, calling out, "Hey, Gino — "

Bolan kept moving until he rounded the first bend in the trail, then he ducked for cover and stripped off his gear, wormed back around to a place of observation and looked up at the OP through his powerful Navy binoculars.

The exhausted, malacarni lay on his back, shirt unbuttoned, belts and packstraps unfastened, heaving. Bolan got back into his gear and went on down the trail.

Dusk settled quickly in these mountains.

As in every battlefield Mack Bolan had ever seen, known or read of, there was a central dispersal point between homeplate and outposts. In the dusk, with his phenomenal night vision, Bolan spotted the bare spot on a knoll about 700 yards down his trail before he got there. He faded off into brush and knelt behind a huge boulder, pulled out the night binoculars and glassed the meeting spot.

He felt all his combat senses warn him when he saw the big man with a clipboard awaiting the incoming watches from the outposts. The man had too many familiar moves, too self-assured, too much command presence. At one time or another, somewhere, the man with the clipboard had fought with United States military forces. Bolan knew he had as much chance getting past that dude while impersonating the malacarni he'd killed as he had shoveling snow in hell.

All right, Bolan thought, it did not work.

So what next?

Let's wait and see.

One by one, the big stud down there checked the men off as they came in, spoke briefly to each one, then sent them on down the mountain.

From his scout, Bolan knew there were eleven high outposts. Six men had been checking in when Bolan came down and began watching. Seven and eight came in almost simultaneously. Nine right behind them. Ten was very late, and it was so dark by then Bolan had to use the Navy glasses' maximum power to watch. Ten was drunk, and the big man awaiting him simply drew a trenchknife also equipped with studded brass knucks and broke the drunken malacarru's face to pieces, fast, rapid-fire, professional punches, six of them before the soldier could fall.