Renegade Agent by Don Pendleton Page A

funds? But as so often happened, the relatively simple mission quickly turned complex. The original strike, on a Mafia mountain hardsite above Lake Mead, turned up an unexpected dividend: the rescue of Carl Lyons, then an undercover cop on loan to the Justice Department.
    Lyons in turn led Bolan to Tommy Anders, not yet a federal agent, then playing his comedy act in a Vegas clubroom. Anders had refused to toe the mark for syndicate promoters and booking agents, and had paid for it with a beating and the promise of treatment far worse-until Mack Bolan took a hand.
    Anders's back-up act was the Ranger Girls, a quartet of lovelies who took their name from their leader. The first time Bolan laid eyes on Toby Ranger he found it hard to pull them away. She was tall and blond and wide-eyed, and built like something out of a centerfold-the last part was apparent, since she wore peekaboo hot pants and a plunging see-through top that left little doubt about her vital statistics.
    With her three partners-Georgette Chebleu, Smiley Dublin, and Sally Palmer, Toby and the Ranger Girls sang, danced, snapped out one-liners, and played fifteen different instruments. Toby Ranger was the kind of dazzling combination of looks and talent that made any man, Mack Bolan included, sit up and take notice. The Ranger Girls were good, damned good, and not only as show-biz performers.
    Only at the tag end of his Vegas vendetta, when Toby risked her cover and her life to help him out of what would have otherwise been an impossible situation, did Bolan get an inkling of the truth about the four women: they were soldiers of the same side as he. Under the showgirl cover, each was a federal agent. In fact, the gorgeous brunette French Canadian, Georgette, was fated to give up her life to her adopted country, reduced to something less than human through the insane torture of Fat Sal, the Mafia turkey doctor.
    Toby Ranger remained a special memory to Mack Bolan. In those days the blitzer was doubly a wanted man, with a Mafia price on his head, and a federal warrant sworn against him. From this isolation, Toby became someone to whom he could turn, with whom he could even merge, however briefly. She was an agent of reaffirmation, that his fight and his survival were worthwhile. She enabled him to see beyond himself into that cosmic sprawl of uncommon magic.
    When the theater of operations moved on to Detroit, Toby reentered the nightfighter's life. At first wary adversary, then reluctant ally, she became ardent, passionate lover. The life Bolan had created for himself, a life of war everlasting, contained little space for R and R. But he did relent to the extent of allowing the lady Fed to share his life for the few all too short days it took to travel to New Orleans, the next hellground. And for those days, Mack Bolan — the complex man within the soldier — was entire and complete and, yeah, human once again.
    They were not destined to come together again, not in that way.
    Yet Toby Ranger would always be a special leaf in Mack Bolan's epic book of life. He had known the woman in various roles, had appreciated and respected her in each. Perhaps he had even been a bit in love with her. But Bolan knew with perfect clarity that there was no room for love in the knife— edge world of a living dead man.
    To ignore that reality would be to deceive her-and himself as well.
    They worked together again when the Executioner paid a visit to Hawaii, teaming with Lyons, Anders, and Smiley Dublin, all by that time SOG-ERS, agents of the Sensitive Operations Group. When they were done, a proposed Mafia-Red Chinese link had died aborning. The five of them again combined talents in Nashville to bust up the music city drug operation of one Nick Copa. Finally, Toby's deep-cover penetration of Mafioso Tom Santelli's Maryland headquarters played a crucial role in Bolan's blitz on Baltimore, on the penultimate day of his one-week mop-up campaign that had ended the war on the