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military uniform; he wore the insignia of a Colonel in the Red Army.
    His name, Bolan knew, was Dimitri Aleksandrevitch Antonin. And the last time they had met, Bolan had shot him in the shoulder and left him for dead. So, the liaison between the KGB and the Soviet military intelligence agency, the GRU, was still alive.

4
    Bolan didn’t get it. On one of his daring one-man raids into Soviet Russia, Colonel Antonin had been in charge of the manhunt ordered at all costs to stop him from leaving the country with a defecting scientist.
    At that time, Antonin had been assistant to Major General Greb Strakhov, the evil genius of the KGB responsible for the frame that had outlawed Bolan. He wondered now if Antonin had taken Strakhov’s place as head of the KGB’s “wet affairs” death squad. Or if he had returned to his original post as KGB-GRU liaison under the department’s Third Chief Directorate.
    Moscow was a hell of a long way from Southern France. And what was he doing here chairing a meeting of international racketeers?
    Whatever it was, the Executioner knew, it would be something as corrupt as it was illegal.
    He craned his neck trying to hear every word exchanged around the long table below. The conversation, which had been in French, had now lapsed into an English with more varieties of accent than Bolan had ever heard in one place.
    “You know why I am here,” Antonin said curtly. “It is a matter for you to decide among yourselves — here, now, and I want a decision before I leave — whether you are prepared to accept my offer.”
    Bolan’s eyes opened wide. He was eavesdropping on some evil scheme that the KGB was anxious to promote, that was clearly going to link crime with sedition.
    “Very well, Colonel,” Jean-Paul was saying, “we are aware of the general strategy. Now let us hear the details.”
    “They are not complicated,” Antonin replied. “You and the elements you represent are locked in permanent combat with the law, both nationally and internationally. Is it not so?”
    He paused. “I am not,” he continued, “concerned here with questions of so-called morality, with the bourgeois-imperialist concepts of good and evil, right or wrong. In my country we subscribe to the doctrine that victory goes to the strongest, that might, as you Westerners have it, is right. I make, therefore, no value judgments in assessing your particular role in your society. I view it objectively.” Another, longer, pause. “And objectively speaking, you are weak.”
    Several of the mafiosi shifted uneasily at Antonin’s words. Weak? That was the last term they would apply to themselves. They were the emperors of crime, and people lived or died according to their orders.
    Scalese, the Camorra boss, muttered something under his breath to Renato Ancarani. The New York capo, Borrone, scowled and only just managed to check a heated reply that sprang to his lips.
    “You are weak,” Antonin repeated, thumping the table, “because you are always in an inferior position relative to your lawmakers. However important the scale of your operations, you are scared of the law.”
    He held up his hand as the murmurs of dissent around the table rose to an angry climax.
    “I am not questioning your personal courage. My criticism is aimed at the position from which you mount those operations. And no reasoned analysis of the current situation could characterize your position as anything but weak.”
    In the gloom of the gallery above, Mack Bolan grinned. The hoods were being fed home truths... and they didn’t like it.
    Antonin pressed on relentlessly. “What I am offering is the means to reverse this situation. If you accept the offer, soon
you
will be in the driving seat; the law and its enforcement officers will be scared of
you.”
    “And just how,” Toulon’s Pasquale Lombardo rasped, “do we get to be that way?”
    “Your present inferior position,” Antonin said, “is largely a matter of logistics. That plus