"Already done."

"Thanks. Put it upon video."

"Give me a minute, Mack." Kurtzman went back to his keyboard. There was more to Bolan's mood than the restlessness of inactivity, plus the anger at a man's betrayal of the country that had given him every opportunity The brief visit to Massachusetts had awakened other memories as well, memories that Mack Bolan the man could never banish, would never wish to banish.

They were of a time when the wrong people were winning.

Strategists used to refer to a "domino theory" in discussing the Asian war in which Bolan had fought.

But in a town in the shadows of the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, other dominoes had fallen.

Bolan had seen his personal domino theory quite clearly: there was still, back then, one domino left to fall. And it was he who tipped it over, single-handedly wiping out the gluttonous criminal vipers who had been directly responsible for his personal tragedy.

Earlier in the siege against the bloody Cosa Nostra, Bolan had become aware that, like Vietnam, this would be a war of attrition. The strategy was to annihilate the enemy, first as a means of neutralization, ultimately as a means of destruction of the criminal edifice.

Bolan understood that the war of attrition was now, for John Phoenix, a war of containment. He had no delusions about his own capabilities; Mack Bolan, a.k.a. John Phoenix, was one man, and no one man was going to save a vast impersonal world. But one man, sure, could aspire to fight to keep corners of that world free and green, could push back the corrosive advance of those who would replace freedom with fear, democracy with domination. The Mafia was a clear and present evil, an entity motivated solely by greed, by the dark side of the herding instinct, in which men mobbed up to commit evil far beyond the capacities of themselves as individuals.