Underpowered to avoid the crack of the bullets breaking the speed of sound, the slugs had failed to knock down the enraged, adrenaline charged men that Lyons had faced. As if trapped within a nightmare, he had shot men again and again, spraying bursts of lightweight subsonic slugs into their chests and faces only to see the men continue toward him. It had been the fifteen-round magazine of a Beretta 93-R that had saved Lyons from death.

The weapon represented long hours of meticulous, frustrating work for Konzaki. How could Lyons politely refuse the weaponsmith's latest modification?

Never mind the polite words. He could talk straight with the ex-marine. Konzaki knew more than Lyons about combat.

"Forget it, Andrzej. No more Berettas. Not for me. They're great for special occasions, but my personal experience tells me that when the going gets rough, the Berettas aren't enough."

"So I put together a hybrid..."

"Forget it!" Lyons snapped. "No diamond points, no steel cores, no high-tech modifications. I've had it with 9mm. From now on, I'm carrying a silenced MAC-10."

"How about a .45-caliber ACP? Suppressed Colt Government Model? Semiauto and three-shot burst? Full-powered loads? Subsonic but full powered? Want to see it?"

Lyons laughed. "Yeah. Sure do."

Hard rubber squeaked on the concrete. Konzaki wheeled back to Lyons with a plastic tray on his lap. "There's one and only one policy in this workshop: Mack Bolan and his soldiers get the weapons they want. They get research and quality, but first they get what they want. Here it is."

He lifted away the tray's lid. Lyons saw a Parkerized-black Colt automatic fitted with a blunt suppressor. He took the weapon from its bed of silicon cloth, pressed the release to drop the empty magazine, slipped back the slide, locked it.

The slide had been modified and shortened, the barrel machined to accept the oval cylinder of the suppressor. A fold-down lever and enlarged trigger guard provided a two-handed hold. The arc of the safety continued into the grip, became a fire selector. Like the markings on the Beretta, a single white dot and three dots indicated semiauto and three-shot full-auto bursts.