The Bone Yard by Don Pendleton

in providing sanctuary, more or less official."
    There were tears glistening in her eyes, but the voice was tough, unyielding.
    "Wait up there, mister. I'm a big girl now. I've got a job, responsibilities..."
    A big girl, right, and Bolan did not need to be reminded of the fact.
    "You're marked," he told her coldly. "Show up for work with Bob Minotte's family on the hunt, and your next deadline will be just that."
    She winced at the play on words and seemed about to answer, but she kept it to herself.
    "Get dressed," he said again. "We're out of time."
    The clock was running, and Bolan felt the fourthdown pressure without knowing yet exactly what or where his goal might be. The puzzle was expanding and he had more jumbled jigsaw pieces in his hand.
    Lucy Bernstein had a puzzle of her own to deal with now — her own dilemma of the heart and soul. She had some private problems to resolve. There would not be an easy answer for her, Bolan knew. But then, a big girl had to live with that reality. The Executioner had long ago adjusted to the grim reality of living in the hellgrounds. He knew there were no easy answers in the trenches, ever — and no respite from the pressure, either.
    He would drop the lady off with Tommy Anders, trust the comic and his people to secure Lucy Bernstein for the duration of his Vegas strike. Whichever way it went, the campaign would be short and decisive. But the intervening time would give Anders a chance to pick her brain a little. Anything he might be able to extract would be a bonus. As for Bolan, he was already thinking toward the next engagement with an enemy who kept on changing shapes and faces, multiplying. Somewhere soon the answer would walk up to him and tap him on the shoulder. Now, the only problem was that when it came it might be carrying a knife to plant between the Executioner's shoulder blades.
    Las Vegas is a city of illusion, and Bolan was not sure that anything he had seen so far was real.
    No, scratch that.
    He had seen real death, for damn sure. No way to mistake it for show biz make-believe.
    He lived in a universe where stark reality was everything. The only avenue of escape from grim relentless truth was a parabellum mangler through the brain.
    And he resided in the charnel universe by choice, damn right. Along with others like Brognola and Tommy Anders — the combatants who elected to spend their season in hell here on earth.
    No one had drafted warrior Bolan for this holy war. He had elected to provide his body and his soul, a living sacrifice. But Lucy Bernstein.
    She was something else again.
    A big girl, right, who might not get much older if allowed to wander pell-mell through the battlefields of Bolan's war. Accustomed to the newsroom she was unfamiliar with the no-rules rules of war, and there was no damned time to train her in the martial arts that she would need to eke out a survival in the trenches.
    Let the woman find her peace or purgatory in her own way, her own time. Mack Bolan had already found his course of action and he was proceeding with it, undeterred and undetoured by any of Glitter City's myriad distractions.
    There were lots of big girls out there, right. And there were lots of big guns, too.
    Right now most of them were not aimed at Bolan, but the coming hours would change all that. The Executioner was counting on it.

11
    Frank Spinoza finished loading the clip for his Browning Hi-Power automatic pistol and snapped it into the pistol grip, working the weapon's slide to chamber up a live one. He eased down the hammer and set the safety, enjoying the weight of the loaded gun in his hand. Reluctantly he reached out to stow it in the top desk drawer, then reconsidered, slipping it inside the waistband of his slacks, on the left, where it was hidden underneath his jacket. The solid weight of it felt good there against his ribs.
    For the first time since that afternoon Spinoza felt secure, sitting there behind his massive desk inside the private office.