The 93-R tracked across the bedroom, locking into target acquisition. The trigger yielded to a steady, gentle pressure from the forefinger, and a 9mm parabellum closed the space between them.

Tommy stumbled, sat down hard, and he was spilling scarlet from a hole beside his Adam's apple. He was struggling fruitlessly to speak, the effort forming crimson bubbles on his lips and pumping bloody streamers down across his chest. The soldier put another round between the glassy eyes and blew his carcass backward, out of frame.

The girl was on her knees and gaping at the carnage. She finally tore her eyes away from what was left of Tommy Drake and focused on Mack Bolan. There was something in her eyes, behind the shock and fear, but Bolan did not have the time to study it.

"Get dressed and shag it out of here," he said. "The party's over."

And he left her to it, exiting the way he came. The Executioner was out of numbers. It was every man now — every person— for himself.

His business at the Drake estancia was finished, right, but he had not been wholly candid with the woman. Tommy Drake was gone, but the party in Miami was not over yet. Not by a damn sight.

In his gut the soldier knew that it was only just the beginning.

4

Miami is as much a Cuban metropolis as it is American. For more than twenty years the city's heart has been Hispanic, throbbing to a Latin rhythm, crowded with the refugees of Castro's revolution. More than eight hundred thousand of them have arrived since New Year's Day of 1959 — the date of Castro's final triumph in Havana.

Their arrival has transformed Miami irrevocably, for good or ill. Suburban Hialeah and Coral Gables were converted almost overnight to Spanish-speaking enclaves, but the living core of Cuban life is centered in Miami proper, in the district known as Little Havana.

Sandwiched between downtown Miami on the east and Coral Gables on the west, with Flagler Street its northern boundary and a southern demarcation line at Southwest 22nd Street, the district is a piece of Cuba physically transplanted stateside.