He pulled up.

No man on the island was half as physically well conditioned as Bolan. Not even the malacarni. They hadn't done their training properly. The outposts he'd scouted out, all of them, had been a mile, sometimes more, farther down the mountain than originally planned and laid out. They had doped off, and now they paid the penalty. They could not overtake Bolan, even when The Executioner was shot to pieces and leaking life from his wounds every step.

He sat down, dragging deep, shuddering painful breaths, getting his wind. He could hear them, far below now, using lanterns and lights, calling back and forth. Once, two groups got into a firefight between themselves. Bolan looked up, got his bearings from the stars, then moved out again, slowly and carefully, conserving himself, and searching.

If the malacarni stuck with it, they could still stalk him down, just by following Bolan's spoor — the dripping trail of blood.

Then he found what he sought.

At the base of a bush, he saw a hole, kicked it apart, found the thick spider webs, plastered them over his chest wound. In a few minutes the bleeding stopped. Bolan went on. In an hour he came to the abandoned sulphur mine, his cache. Once inside, he forced open the case of medical supplies and went to work on himself. First a transfusion of albumin to replace lost blood. He bound himself up in tight and proper fashion. He found the bottles and took a handful of vitamin B-12 and almost as many vitamin E pills. He shot a half-rnillion units of penicillin into his butt. He crammed his mouth full of high energy chocolate bar rations, munching as he worked. He went to the mouth of the mine shaft and looked at the sky. He had another four hours till first light. It might be just enough, if he didn't cave in.

Because what he had been through was nothing to what now faced him, Bolan set to it with the professional soldier's understanding and frame of mind.

In combat, more than in garrison, an infantryman is more packmule than fighting man, until the fighting starts. An infantryman carries all he owns, all he needs, on his own back — his chow, his water, his ammo, his weapon, his dry socks and sleeping bag; he is, and he is supposed to be, a self-contained unit with his own life-support system. If he happens also to be a gun crewman, he has the additional load of mortar or bazooka or machinegun ammunition added to his personal load.

Bolan was all of these and more.

With the albumin blood replacement, the antibiotics, the high-energy vitamins and concentrated chocolate steadily revitalizing him, Bolan set to work.

He took the mortars out of the mine shaft first, set the baseplates, sunk the spike-ended bipods in place, laid the tubes. He made another round trip and came back with the ammo and aiming stakes. He unpacked the ammo, laid out all the bomb-shaped, finned shells, and put maximum propellant charges on each shell. These were small bags of gunpowder that fit at the base of the fins and were ignited by the primer, the primer fired by the weight of the shell when dropped down the mortar tube, striking the fixed firing pin. Besides the flesh-shredding HE — high explosive — shells, Bolan had flare shells and one William Peter, a WP, white phosphorous, for marking. The William Peter not only caused casualties, burning fiercely, but it marked targets with a dense white cloud of smoke.

Bolan went back to his cache and brought the M79 grenade launcher up with a case of grenades. He rested then, and listened.

Some of the soldiers had not yet given up; they still stalked him in the night. But their training had been either inadequate or their discipline lousy. They sounded like cattle moving around, and what they thought were low-voiced commands or questions came to Bolan atop the hill as shouts. Had he been capable, Bolan might have felt some pity for them.

He went down and got the Browning, and the ammo.

During his years as a professional soldier, more than ten years including two extended tours in Vietnam where he first became known as The Executioner, Mack Bolan had seen, fired, experimented with, learned to field strip and reassemble, virtually every type of small-arm known to man. As a pro, it was his business to know weapons.

He had seen them all, from the most primitive copies made in China and North Vietnam, which were as likely to explode in the gunner's face as kill an enemy, to the most highly sophisticated, particularly including the vastly overrated Swedish weapons. After years of experimentation, and thousands of rounds of ammo fired in practice and combat, Sergeant Mack Bolan arrived at the same conclusion that most combat men eventually did....

Nothing, nothing, could beat the BAR.

Range, accuracy, dependability, mobility, every way from dawn till dark and all night long.

Yeah, the BAR had its limitations.

Call them faults, if you're of a mind. So?

The son of a bitch is heavy, sixteen pounds, empty.

Put in a twenty-round magazine and you've got close to twenty pounds, including a stout leather sling. It's long, just an inch short of four feet — forty-seven-inches!

And it shoots .30 caliber ammo, the damned brass big around as your ring finger, and the steel, springload magazines aren't exactly weightless.

But the only thing about it is, Jack, when your ass is in a jam, whether in desert grit and grime, or jungle mud and slime, all you have to do is pull the trigger on a BAR and it will shoot exactly where it's aimed. On full-auto, high-cyclic rate of fire it cranks off 550 rounds per minute. On slow rate, 350 rpm. A man with the touch can shoot it one, two, three, rounds at a time.

The goddam weapon was invented in 1917 and used in World War One!

But nothing yet had ever beat it. Any dogass soldier could pick up a BAR and knock down men at 500 yards. Mack Bolan could bullseye men through the torso at 1500 yards. The BAR's maximum range was 3500 yards, roughly two miles.

Long ago, when Mack Bolan set out on his war against the Mafia and "burglarized" a weapons dealer's warehouse (leaving money to pay for his "purchases") it had not been by accident, but by deliberate design that Sergeant Mac Bolan, late of the U.S. Army, chose Browning Automatic Rifles and several thousand rounds of .30 caliber ball and tracer ammo, and a whole sack full of extra magazines, among his primary arsenal.

Bolan could hear the more persistent stalkers now, clearly in the vast, quiet stillness of night atop the Sicilian mountaintop.

It was tune to give them something new to think about.

He picked up a heavy HE mortar shell, pulled the arming pin, placed the fins down inside the tube, then let it drop, covering his ears tightly so the firing would not deafen him.

When it hit bottom, the shell primer fired, ignited the increment charges, and with a solid chuonk! the round went.

A voice called out. "Hey! Franco, what the hell wasa that!"

"I don't know. I think I saw a flash, up above a little."

Bolan squatted on his heels and waited, counting.

He didn't care where the first round hit, all he wanted was the effect, the mental, emotional, personal effect.

He counted down, and when his lips silently mouthed zero, he saw far below him the bright orange blossom, a gush of smoke, but no sound. He dropped in another round just as the noise of the first explosion washed up the mountainside.

"What the hell was that," the same voice shouted again.

"Some kinda explosion. Christ in all His mercy! Look!"

The second round hit and blossomed, like hell rupturing through a fissure in the earth.

"Son of a bitch, he slipped past us and got back inside!"

"No, no, wait. I know that sound. It's a mortar. He's up here, firing a mortar."

"You know shit!" Franco answered. "He's back down there. Come on!"