Bolan studied the Iranian’s ashen face

He wasn’t completely convinced that Vanaki was up to the job, and not sure he was justified in giving him such a dangerous task, even if he was.

“I’m giving you one more chance,” the Executioner said. “You don’t have to do this. No one could ever call you a coward if you decide not to.”

When Vanaki failed to answer, Bolan left him standing by the door with the Beretta in both hands. The expression on the young man’s face told Bolan all he needed to know.

Merzad Vanaki was ready to kill in the name of both his father and American freedom. Or die, if the dice rolled that way.

Other titles available in this series:

Death’s Head

Hellground

Inferno

Ambush

Blood Strike

Killpoint

Vendetta

Stalk Line

Omega Game

Shock Tactic

Showdown

Precision Kill

Jungle Law

Dead Center

Tooth and Claw

Thermal Strike

Day of the Vulture

Flames of Wrath

High Aggression

Code of Bushido

Terror Spin

Judgment in Stone

Rage for Justice

Rebels and Hostiles

Ultimate Game

Blood Feud

Renegade Force

Retribution

Initiation

Cloud of Death

Termination Point

Hellfire Strike

Code of Conflict

Vengeance

Executive Action

Killsport

Conflagration

Storm Front

War Season

Evil Alliance

Scorched Earth

Deception

Destiny’s Hour

Power of the Lance

A Dying Evil

Deep Treachery

War Load

Sworn Enemies

Dark Truth

Breakaway

Blood and Sand

Caged

Sleepers

Strike and Retrieve

Age of War

Line of Control

Breached

Retaliation

Pressure Point

Silent Running

Stolen Arrows

Zero Option

Predator Paradise

Circle of Deception

Devil’s Bargain

False Front

Lethal Tribute

Season of Slaughter

Point of Betrayal

Ballistic Force

Renegade

MACK BOLAN®

Don Pendleton

Freedom all solace to man gives;

He lives at ease that freely lives.

—John Barbour,

The Bruce, c.1375

I call upon all who love freedom to stand with us now. Together we shall achieve victory.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower,

Broadcast on D-Day

It’s not enough to say that we cherish freedom. It’s important in these trying times to put our words into action if we want to stay free.

—Mack Bolan

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Torture was unreliable. They had tried it in the past and found that the subject didn’t necessarily tell the truth.

He said whatever he thought would stop the pain.

CIA Agent Wes Donaldson watched the man at the table through the one-way mirror. Shuaib Marfazda sat passively on the other side of the glass, seated in a straight-backed wooden chair. He hadn’t been tied to the chair, or in any other way restrained. Yet he sat as if his arms and legs had been immobilized. The only parts of his body that moved were his fingers as they tapped out some unrecognizable drumroll on the tabletop. His eyes stared straight ahead as if they’d been welded into place.

Donaldson glanced at his wristwatch, then looked through the glass at the door leading from the interrogation room into the hall. Marfazda assumed it was locked. It wasn’t. They had long ago passed the point where it was necessary to lock him in. Or use any other physical bonds, for that matter. Marfazda’s mind had become its own restraint.

No, Donaldson thought, Shuaib Marfazda, now lived in a CIA-created reality that was no more real than a child’s bedtime story. They had, in many ways, convinced him that down was up and up was down, red stop lights meant go and green meant stop. And it had all been accomplished without ever once touching the Hamas terrorist.

The door to the observation room opened suddenly. Donaldson turned to his side to see Jed Coffman’s broad, six-five frame block the light from the hallway. Coffman closed the door behind him, then moved to Donaldson’s side at the mirror. The big CIA operative frowned. “He ready?”

“Probably.” Donaldson nodded. “He’s showing most of the signs. If you wanted to compare his brain to spaghetti, I’d say it’s been boiled to a point somewhere between medium and soft.”

“I think of them more as little men made out of modeling clay,” Coffman said seriously. “We take them, smash them flat, then rebuild them the way we want them.” The tall man’s hand rose to his chin where he scratched a week’s worth of stubble. “Of course we leave enough between their ears for them to tell us everything they know.” He turned toward Donaldson. “What say we give him another few more minutes? It can’t hurt, and I could use a cup. Want some?”

Donaldson shook his head as Coffman crossed the room to the coffee machine. In the reflection of the glass, he saw the tall man lift the carafe and pour coffee into a cup. Peering through the reflection he continued to watch the terrorist on the other side of the one-way mirror. Again, Marfazda’s fingers began to drum out some unknown rhythm on the table. The finger taps had begun a few hours before, but in the past ninety minutes they’d started coming at regular five-minute intervals. Now they occurred every few seconds.

Donaldson knew every subject reacted differently to the preinterrogation process, but it had been his experience that they each showed some outward sign when they neared the breaking point.

Marfazda’s just happened to be tapping. It meant he was on the verge of that point now.

The CIA man let his mind drift back over the past few months. Shuaib Marfazda had been captured during an attempt to blow up a Beirut café frequented by Americans. A U.S. Department of State representative—a retired army colonel—had spotted several wires of his “suicide bomb” sticking out of his shirt collar as he opened the café door. Thinking quickly, the colonel had smashed the brass handle of his walking stick into the back of the man’s head.

Coffman had happened to be in the café himself at the time. Trained as an explosives expert, he had dismantled the bomb before Marfazda had regained consciousness or the Israeli authorities could arrive. The terrorist was then quickly transported to a CIA safehouse in Beirut.

Marfazda’s first few weeks had been spent in solitary confinement, in a bedroom stripped of furniture, with barred windows whose panes were painted black. The only human contact he’d had was watching an unidentified hand slide a food tray through the slot in his door twice a day. Unknown to him, a tiny microcam had been hidden in the bare lightbulb at the top of his room, which put out the same dull, monotonous half-light twenty-four hours a day. The Hamas terrorist’s every movement and facial expression—practically every thought—had been monitored ’round the clock by CIA psychiatrists and psychologists. And while Marfazda was slowly being broken down—or “smashed like clay” to use Coffman’s metaphor—CIA investigators had conducted an extensive background check.

While the café was to have been his final act, Marfazda already had plenty of blood on his hands. Bits and pieces of information had linked him to other atrocities in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq.

When the time seemed right Marfazda had suddenly, and without explanation, been transferred to a larger, brighter cell with five beds and four cell mates. All four of them had been CIA operatives of Arabic descent. Some intelligence had been gained that way as Marfazda—starved for human contact—had let his guard down partially among these men who presented themselves as fellow political prisoners. Through them Donaldson and Coffman had learned of the Soviet mole.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, a man calling himself Russell James had held on to his job as an American biochemical weapons research scientist, waited for the dust to settle around the world, then found more lucrative work among the various terrorist organizations of the Middle East.

Marfazda had been taken back to solitary confinement when the intelligence information he’d unwittingly passed on finally dried up, and he had been there for nearly six months. He was now what the psychologists monitoring him called “ripe.” It was an expression they used to describe the dangerously short period between the time when he’d give up his last bits of information in return for a promise of freedom, and the time when his mind turned into the overcooked spaghetti to which Donaldson had compared it.

“Let’s go,” Donaldson said to Coffman, and the two men opened the door, stepped out into the hall, then entered the interrogation room next to it. “Marhaba,” he said to the confused man who stared at him from the other side of the table. He and Coffman sat across the table from the terrorist.

“We have a proposition for you,” Coffman said.

Marfazda didn’t answer. His mind had slowed, and was still processing the fact that he was no longer alone. Donaldson waited; he had seen it all many times before. The brain was like a muscle—use it, and it got stronger. But put it in a position where it deals only with simple things and it atrophies and drops to that pace.

“What is the proposition?” Marfazda finally asked in slurred Arabic.

Donaldson smiled in a fatherly way. There was an art to what he was about to do, and that art was staying only a half step ahead of the sluggish brain across the table from him. It was a fine line to walk. Go too fast and the subject became confused. But take things too slow and even a torpid mind like Marfazda’s might figure out what was going on.

“We have no further use for you,” Donaldson said, also in Arabic. He paused to let it sink in and saw a flicker of fear enter the broken terrorist’s eyes. It was obvious he thought that meant he was about to be killed.

“Please,” Donaldson said, the smile still on his face. “Forget your fears. We are Americans. We do not kill people such as you. Surely you know that.” Again he waited, knowing the terrorist’s own indoctrination was working against him now.

Relief entered Marfazda’s brain and Donaldson saw it on his face. Yes, Shuaib, the CIA man thought. Think back to what you have been taught. Americans aren’t only evil, we’re weak. We want only to use drugs, drink and fornicate, and we’re afraid to kill our enemies because we have no Allah behind us.

A few seconds after the terrorist’s face had changed from fear to relief, it took on an expression of superior smugness. Again, Donaldson knew what the man was thinking.

Had Marfazda been on the other side of the table, he wouldn’t have been so weak.

“We want only one thing from you,” Donaldson said in Arabic. “And it’s something we already know. We just need confirmation. Give it to us, and you go free.” He sat back away from the table, crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. Closing his eyes, he switched to English when he said, “That is another flaw in our system. We must have all intelligence confirmed by at least two sources before we send it back to Washington.” He kept his eyes closed as he continued to speak. “Even then the sons of bitches take ages to make a decision.”

Beneath the table, Donaldson felt the toe of Coffman’s shoe nudge his calf. It meant that while his eyes were closed, Marfazda had responded to Donaldson’s English. From the time of his capture, the terrorist had maintained a complete ignorance of the language. But the agents posing as prisoners had relayed back to them that he often seemed to understand them when they spoke among themselves in broken dialect.

Donaldson opened his eyes. It was time to go for the kill.

What he was about to ask would be said in an off-the-hand way. But getting the answer to this one question had been the actual goal of all the months of subtle psychological attack. A lot of time, effort and money had been spent setting the Hamas man up for this question, and if Marfazda refused to answer or lied to them now, it would have all been in vain.

Donaldson covered his mouth and yawned. “We know Russell James is somewhere in the Middle East,” he said, still speaking in English. “And we know he’s no longer using that name. What we need confirmation on is his exact whereabouts and the name he’s using now.” The CIA man yawned again as he waited for Marfazda’s dulled brain to respond. Watching the man out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the terrorist hadn’t picked up on the fact that the question was considerably different than the mere confirmation he had mentioned earlier. And all of the hints that the American bureaucracy moved with maddening slowness had told Marfazda that he could give Donaldson what he asked for, be released and still have time to get a warning to James before they closed in on him.

In Marfazda’s eyes, Wes Donaldson saw the exact moment the man decided to answer the question. A brightness flickered into the heretofore glazed eyes as the terrorist suddenly came to believe that he had both outlasted and outsmarted the weak Americans.

“Russell James is using his real name again,” Marfazda said, forgetting himself and answering in English. “It is Anton Sobor. I cannot tell you where he is now. But before I was captured, he was working out of Tehran. He had been there for almost a year.”

To his side, Donaldson saw Coffman make a show of taking a business card out of the inside pocket of his jacket. With a frown on his face, he studied the back of the card. A moment later he looked up at Donaldson, nodded, and said, “Checks out. So far, at least.”

Donaldson kept the smile off his face. He’d seen that same business card of Coffman’s earlier in the day when his fellow CIA agent had used it to write down the name and phone number of a beautiful Lebanese woman who had served them breakfast at a nearby café.

“I believe you are telling me the truth,” Donaldson said, turning his attention back to Marfazda. “One last bit of confirmation, and I will have a driver drop you off any place in Beirut you would like to go.” Again, giving the terrorist time to process the thought but not think beyond it, he said, “Confirm the address in Tehran and you will be free to go.”

Shuaib Marfazda recited a street address and smiled.

Donaldson smiled back as he drew a tiny, sound-suppressed .22-caliber Beretta pistol from under his coat. Without ceremony he leaned across the table, pressed the muzzle into Marfazda’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

Rays of crimson shot out of the terrorist’s forehead like red sun rays. But the small bore bullet didn’t exit the skull. Shuaib Marfazda sat back against the chair, his eyes still open, as Donaldson pulled the gun back to reveal the solitary star-shaped hole between the man’s eyes.

Donaldson stood. “Let’s get that information back to Langley,” he said as he and Coffman left the room. “According to them, the Man himself has been on their butts to get it.”

CHAPTER ONE

There was simply no way he could pass himself off as an Iranian.

First off, he was far too tall. He might claim to have come from one of the Elburz Mountain tribes; their men often grew to well over six feet. But he would still be noticed, and it would require explanation. And the fact that he didn’t speak the language pretty much put a damper on explanations of kind.

Besides, his size wasn’t the only discrepancy that would acquire justification. While he was dark-skinned, he wasn’t dark enough, and he had no other Arabic or Persian features to offset that fact. What it boiled down to was that he looked exactly like what he was—an American of mixed descent, primarily Eastern European. So if he intended to operate in Tehran, he would have to play on that theme, and the best cover story he could come up with was that he was one of the many Russians who had found their way to Iran after the iron curtain ceased to exist. His size and face would suggest such a background. And the long gray overcoat and black Russian rabbit hat he wore would aid him.

Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner, kept his eyes in front of him as he walked casually down the sidewalk of Iran’s capital city. No, he thought as he neared a stand where a bearded man was hawking pottery, trying to infiltrate Tehran, especially Tehran’s underground, as a native would have been a big mistake. As he passed the stand, the man called out to him.

The Executioner smiled, shrugged, pointed to his lips and shook his head. “Nyet Farsi,” he said in a Russian accent.

The thick odor of curried rice and boiled lamb drifted out from a doorway just past the pottery stand and Bolan glanced inside as he passed. Two men stood behind a counter spooning food into white cardboard containers. One had the dark hair and skin that was common to the natives. But the other looked as Caucasian as Bolan did.

The Executioner smiled as he moved away from the small restaurant. Up and down the street, in any direction he looked, he saw men and women of obvious Persian and Arabic descent. But scattered among the brown faces and raven hair were others of lighter skin. Some, Bolan knew, were Persians themselves—exhibiting the Aryan genes that had mixed with Turks and Arabs to create a new race long ago. He had considered trying to pass as one of these men, but the fact that he had no knowledge of the language had stopped him once again.

The Executioner walked on. Far more often than the last time he’d been in Iran, he saw men and women in more Western dresses. The women wore no veils, and here and there even a baseball cap and T-shirt could be seen. While the country had hardly returned to the openness of free trade and travel it had enjoyed before the Islamic revolution of the late 1970s, the country was beginning to emerge from the shroud of oppression.

As long as he kept pretending to be Russian, a part he had played many times over the years—he should have no problem locating the address circled on the map of the city in his overcoat pocket.

As Bolan stepped around several children playing on the sidewalk a light snow began to fall. Ahead of him, above the buildings, he could see the white-capped mountains that seemed to stand guard over the city. At their peak was the cone—shaped Mount Demavend, a mysterious sight that seemed to appear in the distant corner of his vision no matter where he looked.

Stopping at the next corner, the Executioner pulled the map from inside his coat. He glanced down at it, then up at the street signs. The apartment he was looking for should be in the next block. Returning the map to his coat, he stuck his left hand into the hand-warmer pocket at his side. His right slipped into the other coat pocket, the fingers curling around the grip of a Smith & Wesson 625-10.

Bolan walked on, his index finger slipping inside the guard but staying away from the trigger for the moment. He had chosen the Scandium .45 ACP revolver to accompany his usual pistols for two reasons. First, it was so light it could be carried in a pocket without creating a telltale sag. But the other reason was just as important. Half of the two-inch barrel was inside the frame, leaving only one inch sticking out of the front. Not just a snub nose, the 625-10 was almost a no-nose. It fit neatly in the pocket and could be gripped, aimed and even shot through the coat if necessary without an adversary even knowing it was there.

The Executioner’s thumb ran along the smooth back of the hammer where the spur had been ground off. The 625-10 had been altered to double-action only. There would be no cocking it to single action for precise shooting. But precise shooting wasn’t why the big-bore wheelgun had accompanied the Executioner to Iran. He was far more concerned with the weapon snagging on the draw or the hammer getting caught in the lining if he had to fire with the gun still in his coat.

Bolan crossed the street and walked on, passing another sidewalk stand selling miniature paintings. Yet another peddled intricately inlaid wood crafts. Like so many other housing areas in Iran’s capital city, a brownstone wall ran along the sidewalks. Behind the wall, villas and apartment houses were jammed together so tightly that they practically became one giant, sprawling building.

Periodically he passed a numbered entryway through the wall. Most of the well-worn wooden doors were closed. A few stood open and through them he saw large flat areas of muddy earth. Come spring these mud patches would turn into flower gardens, sprouting a wide variety of exotic plants in a multitude of colors. But at the moment, only a few dead stalks from last summer’s crops remained, and here and there a thin tree sapling that had shed its leaves weeks earlier.

The Executioner came to the number 11637 and stopped. The door was closed, which didn’t surprise him. Set into the wall was an intercom. Keeping his right hand on the revolver in his pocket, he lifted his left and pushed the button next to the speaker.

A moment later a voice answered with words he didn’t recognize.

“Please accept my apologies,” Bolan said in Russian. “I do not speak your language.”

The man on the other end of the intercom evidently spoke no Russian, and had to guess at Bolan’s words as the Executioner had guessed at his. “Do you speak French?” he asked in French.

“Oui.” Bolan answered in that language. But he made sure to do so with a thick Russian accent.

“What do you want?” asked the voice, now that they had found a common means of communication. “Identify yourself.”

“Rotislavsky,” said the Executioner. “Leon Rotislavsky.” He paused, waiting, remembering the lightning-like events of the past few hours. Two CIA agents had finally learned the identity and last known address of Anton Sobor—a.k.a. Russell James—the former Soviet mole who had left the United States and begun selling his expertise in biochemical warfare to terrorist groups in the Mideast. Further investigation through an informant in Tehran had confirmed the address as a safehouse for the Muslim extremist group, Hezbollah. The snitch had also insinuated that Sobor would know where various weapons of mass destruction—WMDs—were hidden. These weapons were biological and chemical agents Sobor himself had developed for various countries. As far as the CIA knew, no nuclear or “dirty bombs” were involved.

But that didn’t make the situation any less urgent. Sarin, Tabun, VX, or even the older mustard gas of World War I fame could be sprayed from crop-dusting planes and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Biological cultures such as anthrax, small pox or even bubonic plague were even more deadly, and easily spread if released in large metropolitan areas. Another problem was the size of the weapons, particularly those of the biological nature. The cultures could be transported in small, airtight containers that could be hidden almost anywhere.

The CIA informant had also informed his interrogators that there was a rumor going around that many of the hidden WMDs had come from Saddam Hussein himself just before the U.S. and Great Britain took over Iraq. But now, the surrounding countries had grown fearful that they might be invaded next. And they were adding their own mass-murder mediums to the mix.

The CIA agents had reported to their superiors at Langley, who in turn had told the President, as the Man had ordered them to do. But the President had then surprised the Central Intelligence Agency by ordering them to hold off acting on the tip.

Then the Man had called on America’s top-secret counter-terrorist organization, the sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm.

The Farm, in turn, had called in the Executioner.

After a long pause, the voice somewhere inside the wall said, “We know no Rotislavsky.”

“Perhaps you do not,” Bolan replied, again in heavily accented French. “But Anton Sobor does.” His hand tightened slightly around the grip of the .45.

“One moment,” came back over the speaker.

Again, Bolan waited. The real Leon Rotislavsky had been another Soviet mole implanted in the U.S. banking industry to assist in sabotaging the economy. He had recently come forward one step ahead of being discovered, and in return for total amnesty spilled all he knew. Rotislavsky hadn’t mentioned Sobor, but he had had little time to do so. Before the name Russell James even came up the Russian had suffered a massive coronary and died.

Until yesterday, there had been no reason to link him to James. And there was still no proof that the two men knew each other. But a hurried background investigation of the Sobor identity had suggested that Sobor and Rotislavsky had graduated together from the university in Moscow. Russian Intelligence—only slightly more cooperative than the KGB had once been—had confirmed that the two men had gone to school together. But they would admit to no more.

So, the Executioner realized as he continued to wait, maybe Anton Sobor knew Leon Rotislavsky and maybe he didn’t. For that matter, the man who had masqueraded as Russell James might not even still be in Tehran. But if he was, and if he had known Rotislavsky, maybe he would open the door to his old friend. If he didn’t, the Executioner would have to hope the name would at least arouse his curiosity enough to open the door anyway. If the latter was the case, however, the Hezbollah men he was hiding out with here in Tehran were likely to greet him with guns blazing.

Bolan took a deep breath and began unbuttoning his overcoat. No one had ever promised him this mission would be easy. In fact if it had been easy, it would have been given to somebody else.

A few minutes later the voice came back. “Tell us more about yourself,” it said. “Tell us how you know Anton.”

Keeping the Russian accent, Bolan said, “Look, it is cold out here.” Then, with an audible sigh of exasperation, he went on. “We went to school together in Moscow. I graduated in business. He studied the sciences. Then we both moved to America.” He paused again, then finally added, “Do I have to spell out the rest for you? Can you not figure it out for yourself?” He looked nervously over both shoulders in case surveillance cameras were trained on him, then finished with, “Who knows who may be listening to us at this very moment?”

After another long pause, a new voice came on. And this one spoke flawless Russian. “Leon, is that really you?” it asked.

Bolan felt the adrenaline start to build in his chest. The voice had the timbre of a native-born Russian. But was it Sobor? Maybe, maybe not. There were hundreds of former Soviets in Iran—ex-KGB officers, Spetsnaz and others. The man on the other end of the intercom could be anyone. Or it could be Sobor. And the former American mole might not know Leon Rotislavsky, and be setting a trap for him by pretending he did.

The Executioner stood where he was, still aware that a hidden surveillance camera could be aimed at him even now. He knew only one thing for sure: whoever the new voice belonged to, the man was interested, which meant Bolan already had one foot in the door.

“Yes, Anton,” Bolan said. “It is me. Now let me in, please, before I freeze my ass off out here!”

The door buzzed and the Executioner pushed it open. Stepping across the threshold, he found himself in another of the dead-winter flower gardens. A cracked concrete sidewalk led through the mud to the front door of a two-story dwelling, and as he started along it a burly man stepped out and walked toward him. A Soviet-made AK-47 hung from a sling over the man’s shoulder, the muzzle aimed at the Executioner’s midsection.

The man looked Iranian, with dark skin and curly black hair. He wore green BDU pants and black combat boots, but above the trousers legs he was all Persian. A multicolored woven caftan fell past his waistline and was cinched with a wide leather belt. Hanging from the belt was a well-worn and cracked military flap holster, the grip of what appeared to be a 9 mm Tokarev pistol clearly visible.

The Hezbollah hardman walked with a strange sort of “side step” as he approached the Executioner, his right side moving forward ahead of his left. Bolan wondered if the strange gait might not be the result of some past injury as he shifted the .45-caliber wheelgun in his pocket, aiming the stumpy barrel up at the man’s chest. The two continued to walk toward each other.

“Halt there!” the Iranian ordered.

Bolan froze in his tracks, his hands still in his pockets.

“Do you have identification papers?” the man with the Kalashnikov asked in broken French.

Slowly, the Executioner pulled his left hand from the hand-warmer pocket of his overcoat and reached inside the coat. Forgery experts at Stony Man Farm had provided him with an old Soviet passport that had been altered to include his picture and Rotislavsky’s name. He handed it to the man with the rifle.

The terrorist kept the barrel of the AK-47 aimed his way, clutching the pistol grip with his right hand as he took the passport with his left. He thumbed it open to the picture and looked down, studying the face. Then, frowning, he looked up. “This passport expired many years ago,” he said.

Bolan laughed out loud. “Who are you, my friend?” he asked. “An Iranian immigration officer? The Soviet Union itself expired many years ago—what did you expect?” From the corner of his eye, the Executioner saw a head and shoulders appear in a window next to the door. Peering out at him to the side of a parted curtain was a light-skinned face with high cheekbones.

Blue eyes, sandy-blond hair—Anton Sobor.

Bolan waited as the burly man continued to look through his passport. With Sobor’s long years of deep cover in the U.S. there had been plenty of pictures of the man in his Stony Man file. The Executioner had studied them during the flight to Iran. As he watched the window now, in his peripheral vision, he saw the former mole raise a handheld walkie-talkie to his lips and speak.

The man with the rifle was in the process of handing the passport back to the Executioner when he suddenly stopped. His eyes rolled up slightly in their sockets and his face became a mask of deep concentration. It was only then that Bolan understood the reason the man had walked so strangely, and it had nothing to do with injury. The Hezbollah hardman had kept the right side of his body forward in order to hide his left ear.

Because his left ear contained a radio receiver.

The AK-47’s barrel rose slightly and the man’s knuckles turned white as his hand tightened around the pistol grip.

The Executioner didn’t hesitate. Stroking the smooth double-action trigger of the 625-10, he sent an RBCD Performance Plus .45 ACP round exploding from his pocket. The superlight 115-grain bullet left the snubby pistol at slightly under the 1650 feet per second it would have traveled from a longer barrel. But it still struck the terrorist’s chest with nearly 700 pounds of pressure, fragmented three inches beneath the skin and sent a thousand tiny scraps of shrapnel through the man’s torso.

A cloudy mist of pink shot out from the hole in the caftan.

The man with the AK-47 dropped to the sidewalk like a felled redwood tree. For a moment, time seemed to stand still as the blood cloud hung in the air, then began to dissipate.

Bolan released the grip of the revolver inside his pocket. He had unbuttoned his overcoat outside the wall, and now his hands shot beneath the wool. When they appeared again, the right hand held a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. In his left was his Beretta 93-R.

The Executioner turned both weapons toward the window where he had just seen Sobor. But the man’s face had disappeared and the curtain had fallen back into place.

Bolan had no time to contemplate the situation. A second after he had drawn his weapons a fusillade of gunfire erupted from the house. Bullets struck the sidewalk at his feet. Other rounds ripped past his ears, striking the wall behind him. One caught the shoulder of his long overcoat, slicing the wool as cleanly as if it had been a flying razor blade.

The Executioner looked to both sides and saw that there was no cover available in the garden. So with the resolve of a man who had nothing to lose, he dived forward toward the gunners trying to kill him.

CHAPTER TWO

Bolan knew his only chance was to get close enough to the house, to take cover below the line of fire from the doors and windows. He soared over the body in front of him, hit the sidewalk on his shoulder and rolled back to his feet. The storm of bullets followed him and another round struck the tail of his coat, whipping it around into his face. Temporarily blinded, he lifted both the Beretta and Desert Eagle and cut loose.

By the time he had reached the door, his coattail had fallen back away from his face. But the men inside the house had seen where he was headed and now round after round poured through the hollow-core door. The Executioner stepped to the side, letting the onslaught pass by. As he waited, movement above caught his attention and he spotted a man with a pistol leaning out of a second-story window.

The man had long unkempt hair and a black beard beginning to turn gray. Bolan’s right hand shot up over his head. The terrorist was a split second late in his attempt to aim his weapon, and a massive 240-grain hollowpoint from the Desert Eagle blew the top of his head from his body.

The pistol fell from the overhead window, landing on the concrete next to the Executioner and bouncing. A moment later a shower of bone fragments, blood and brain fluid followed. The man—what was left of him—slumped over the windowsill. He looked like something out of a carnival spook house as he came to rest half in, half out, of the opening.

As the assault through the door continued, Bolan leaned as close to the splintering plywood as he dared, then screamed as if in pain. Then, certain that the men inside the house had to have heard him even amid the explosions, he crouched and moved stealthily toward a window directly below the half-headed terrorist above him. Dropping beneath the windowsill, he kept one eye on the door, the other on the second story windows as he waited for the rounds still coming through the door to die down.

A few seconds later, the rifle cracks and pistol pops disappeared. Bolan heard tentative footsteps approach the front of the house from inside. From where he squatted, he could see the gaping holes in the door and knew what was about to happen. One of the men inside the house had been sent to check out the scream. He would look through the holes in the door first. But then, seeing no dead or injured body on the ground, he would conclude that the Executioner had to have fallen to one side.

Which would force him to open the door to make sure.

Five feet from the doorway, Bolan waited, his ears finely tuned. He heard the footsteps halt just behind the door and the sound of heavy breathing replace them. A moment later, a faint but familiar odor came wafting through the holes in the hollow-core door. It was a scent the Executioner had smelled all of his adult life and he recognized it immediately.

It was the smell of fear.

A second later the creak of a doorknob turning sounded softly above the heavy breathing. The Executioner duck-walked closer to the doorway. Then the shattered door began to swing back on rusty hinges and at last a bearded face peered tentatively out of the opening and turned toward him.

Bolan pressed the Beretta’s sound suppressor into the Hezbollah hardman’s forehead. During the split second it took the terrorist to realize what had happened, the Executioner pulled the trigger. A 9 mm hollowpoint round whispered, through the sound suppressor and drilled through the man’s brain.

The Executioner wasted no time, rising to his feet and elbowing the man away from the door and out of his way. Crouching once more, he rounded the corner of the doorway and stepped into what appeared to be a living room. A cheap chandelier hung from the ceiling but expensive Persian carpets covered the wooden floor. An ornately carved couch, a table and several overstuffed chairs made up the furniture.

None of which mattered to Bolan at the moment. What did matter were the three Hezbollah men aiming two rifles and one submachine gun his way.

Bolan’s sudden appearance after they’d suspected him dead caused a moment of shock in the three men. The Executioner took advantage of it, diving forward. He rolled behind a puffy white reclining chair, leveled the Desert Eagle over the headrest and dropped the front sight on the forehead of a man wearing a white turban. A massive .44 Magnum round spit from the Desert Eagle’s beak and the terrorist’s face disintegrated. The AK-47s fell from his hands, and the gunner toppled forward on top of it.

A Hezbollah hardman holding an Uzi had stood next to the falling terrorist, and now he raised his subgun toward the Executioner. But blood from his partner’s fragmenting face had flown into his eyes, temporarily blinding him. He cut loose with a wild stream of 9 mm rounds that sailed high over Bolan’s head.

The Eagle screamed again, sending another Magnum round into the fanatic’s chest. He fell on top of his friend.

The third man in the living room was dressed in Western wear. Clean shaved, and wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots and a hat, the Executioner wondered exactly what dastardly role he was about to play—or had already played—in the outfit. But he had no time to find out.

The “cowboy” came out of shock and turned the barrel of his rifle toward the reclining chair as an expression worthy of Satan himself twisted his features.

Bolan double-tapped the big .44. One round drilled through a white-pearl snap-closure in the middle of the bright orange cowboy shirt the man wore. A dark stain had already begun to spread across his chest as the Executioner’s second round caught him in the throat. A fire-hose spray of crimson shot forth as the terrorist dropped his rifle. He fell to the floor in death, the scowl on his face in place for all eternity.

Suddenly the house was as quiet as the tomb it had become.

The Executioner stayed where he was, both guns resting over the arm of the reclining chair as he took in the situation. He had taken out five of the terrorists—the man in the garden, the three here in front of him and the one in the upstairs window. But none of them had been Anton Sobor. And unless he missed his guess, the gunfire that had showered him while he was still in the garden had come from far more than three AK-47s and one Uzi. In the bedlam surrounding him, it had been difficult to pick out the distinctive sounds of specific weapons, but in addition to the rifles and submachine gun he was almost certain he had heard at least one pistol.

There were more Hezbollah gunmen in the house. Bolan didn’t just think so, he knew it; he could sense it.

Slowly, the Executioner rose from behind the chair. Somewhere in the two-story house, more men waited to murder him. One of them was Anton Sobor. The trap had been set. But if he wanted Sobor, he had no alternative but to step directly into it.

With the Desert Eagle and Beretta 93-R leading the way, the Executioner moved silently across the blood-stained Persian carpets toward an archway leading into a deserted dining room. A long dining table with matching chairs—each as elaborately carved as the couch in the living room—stood in the center of the room. An equally intricate china closet and buffet had been placed along one wall. A silver service set shone brightly atop the buffet.

Perhaps, like all terrorists claimed, these men hiding Anton Sobor were fighting for God and the “common man.” But while they did, they were living like kings and had brought as much Paradise as they could right here to Earth.

Moving cautiously, the Executioner stepped under the archway into the dining room and saw two doors leading into different parts of the house. The Beretta rose almost of its own accord to cover the door to his left. The Desert Eagle did the same on his right. Which way first? One path had to lead to a staircase that, in turn, would lead to the second story. And the second story was where he suspected Sobor, and whatever men still remained, had taken refuge.

But the floor plan was unknown to him, and from where he stood there was no indication as to where the steps might be found.

So which way first?

One of the terrorists answered the question for the Executioner, suddenly appearing in the doorway to his right and cutting loose with a hurried, and inaccurate, burst of fire from a Czech Skorpion machine pistol. As the 9 mm rounds flew wide to Bolan’s side, he triggered the Desert Eagle and sent two more rounds into the muslin overgarment the man wore beneath his long thin beard. Stepping toward the falling body, he almost missed the man who suddenly stepped out of the other doorway.

Bolan whirled, dropping low, as a double tap of .45 ACPs barely missed his head. He flipped the Beretta’s selector switch to 3-round-burst mode, then sent a trio of 9 mm slugs blazing into the man in the other doorway. He, too, fell to the ground.

With one eye still watching the doorway to his left, the other to his right, Bolan stepped over the first terrorist he had shot and took the hallway to his right. It became almost immediately apparent that no staircase stood in this direction. But two doors led off the hall. Bedrooms, probably. And since he was already there, it only made sense to check them. If he didn’t, and they were occupied, the men hiding there could sneak up behind him and blindside him after he’d found the steps to the second floor.

Besides, his guess that Sobor had moved upstairs was just that—a guess. The Russian might well be just a few feet ahead of him even now.

Slowly, his back against the wall, the Executioner slid down the hallway to the first door. Dropping to a knee, he edged an eye around the corner and saw a sleeping mat on the floor, a wicker chest covered with dirty clothes, and other typical Middle Eastern bedroom furnishings. A closet set in the wall directly across from him. He rose quietly back to his feet and slid noiselessly across the room. Staying to the side, he pressed his ear against the edge of the door.

The heavy breathing coming from the closet was reminiscent of what he’d heard earlier just before entering the house.

Jamming the Desert Eagle into his belt, Bolan transferred the Beretta to his right hand, curled his wrist around the door and grasped the knob with his other hand. He tapped the trigger twice, sending two 3-round bursts of fire up and down through the door, then threw it open and aimed inside the closet.

There was no need. At least one of the rounds had caught the terrorist hiding inside in the top of the head and drilled on down through his brain. He had been squatting inside the closet, and now he fell forward onto his face.

The Executioner heard a faint sound behind him and twirled in time to tap the Beretta’s trigger again. A man clad in flowing white robes, armed with another of the Uzis, fell a second before he could pull the trigger and shoot Bolan in the back. Rising to his feet, the Executioner moved out of the room and on down the hall.

The second bedroom, and the closet inside, were deserted. With the same caution he had used before, the Executioner stepped over the bodies he had left in his wake, retracing his steps to the dining room. Again, the house had grown quiet.

Too quiet.

The body of the man who had appeared in the doorway still lay where it had fallen, just inside the dining room. Bolan moved swiftly that way, dropping the partially spent magazines from both the Beretta and Desert Eagle as he went. The big .44 returned to the hip holster under his coat. When he reached the body, he set the Beretta’s safety, then let it fall out of his hand, holding it by the guard with his index finger. With both hands he lifted the dead man from the floor, turned him to face the hallway, then pushed him through the door.

A half-dozen rounds of fire exploded from somewhere down the hall, and the dead man jerked in his second dance of death before falling to the ground once more.

Excited voices erupted from down the hall. The Executioner moved swiftly now, acting before the confusion he had created in the minds of his enemies disappeared. Stepping forward just enough to get both pistols inside the hall, he stared straight ahead as guns rose to both of his sides.

In his peripheral vision, Bolan saw terrorists at both ends of the hall. The Hezbollah man to his left wore green BDUs like the man in the garden, and aimed a short, double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun his way. From the corner of his right eye, the Executioner saw a sight almost as strange as the “Iranian cowboy” he’d encountered earlier. The man crouching at the foot of the staircase wore a navy-blue, thousand-dollar Brooks Brothers suit, and a carefully knotted red silk tie. He was clean-shaved with carefully coiffured hair. A briefcase stood next to him on the floor where he had set it, and he looked more like an American bank president than a terrorist.

Except for the Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun that now stuttered in his hands.

Bolan stepped back into the dining room, out of the line of fire, as 9 mm slugs sailed toward him from one direction, 12-gauge buckshot from the other. He heard a scream at one end of the hall, a groan at the other. Dropping to one knee again, he peered out into the hall and that the buckshot had hit the man in the suit squarely in the chest.

At the other end of the hall, the man wielding the shotgun had taken a 9 mm round in the knee and fallen to a sitting position. But the cross fire hadn’t finished him as it had the man in the suit, and even now he was attempting to aim the shotgun’s second barrel at the Executioner.

A lone .44 Magnum round through the nose ended the attempt.

Moving swiftly now, the Executioner hurried to the bottom of the steps, leaping over the briefcase and the man next to it. He wondered again exactly what deadly plans this terrorist cell was about to put into motion. It was somewhat odd to run into a rodeo cowboy and a stockbroker in the same Tehran terrorists’ safehouse.

But Bolan knew he would probably never get the answer to that question as he began to mount the steps toward the second floor. Even now, he could hear the distinctive sound of Iranian police sirens in the distance. The houses behind the brownstone wall were built directly up against one another, and dozens of neighbors would have heard every gunshot that had exploded since his arrival.

One of them—probably several—had phoned that information in to the cops. There would be no time to search the house for clues as to what the terrorists were up to. He’d be lucky just to find Anton Sobor before the police arrived. If possible, he wanted to capture and interrogate the man in regard to the cached WMDs. But barring that possibility, he would kill him and hope he still had time to escape the Iranian authorities.

With the Desert Eagle leading the way, the Executioner started up the steps. He caught a flash of white at the top of the railing above his head, but by the time he had swung the big .44 that way it had disappeared.

Bolan had nearly reached the top of the steps when he saw the white flash again. This time, the man had moved to the other end of the railing and didn’t retreat. The Executioner’s eyes took in the fact that the “white” was a T-shirt, and that it provided not only a clear background for the blackened submachine gun in front of it, but a clear target.

Leaning slightly backward, Bolan fired behind him and over his head. His first round struck the subgun and the weapon went spinning out of the terrorist’s hand. The man shrieked in both surprise and pain, and grabbed one hand with the other.

The Executioner’s second .44 Magnum round perforated the clasped hands before traveling on to explode the terrorist’s heart.

Bolan crouched again as he reached the top of the staircase. Three doorways led off the large stairwell landing, and he stopped, cocking an ear for sounds of movement in any of the directions. He heard nothing.

The Executioner slid silently across yet another of the expensive woven carpets, concentrating on the doorway to the far left. Stopping at the entryway, he glanced inside. Another bed mat. But this room was larger than the ones below. The master bedroom. Two closet doors stood wide open.

Bolan moved on to the middle doorway, looking in to see yet another sleeping mat on the floor. This closet door was closed. He hurried up to it and listened. No breathing. No sounds at all. There was no sense of human presence at all emanating from the closet so, without bothering to shoot through the wood this time, he swung the door open.

A variety of clothes hung from the hangers on the bar suspended at eye level. More clothing was folded and stacked on the shelf. A quick jab of the Desert Eagle through the hangers proved that no one was hidden behind the garments, and he stepped back out of the closet.

Just in time to hear a soft scraping sound drift down the hall from another part of the house.

The Executioner pivoted back toward the door, the big .44 at arm’s length in front of him. He couldn’t identify the sound, but it could only have come from the final upstairs room—the only one he hadn’t yet checked. Sprinting back to the hallway, he hurried toward the final bedroom. This time, he was close enough to hear the sound of a window sliding open.

Bolan dropped low as he neared the doorway. Speed had taken precedence over silence now, and he knew whoever was in the room would have heard him as well as he’d heard the window rising. He came to halt just to the side of the opening, the Desert Eagle gripped in both hands and pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle in front of him.

The Executioner edged an eye around the corner. The window in the back wall of the house had been opened, and a man wearing a bright red shirt had already stuck one leg through the opening. Bolan could see his face as he bent over and began to pull his chest and shoulders through the opening. The face had light skin, green eyes and was topped by a shock of sandy-blond hair.

Sobor.

Bolan turned slightly, lifting the Desert Eagle and dropping the sights on the back of the man’s left thigh. A bullet here would “hamstring” the former Soviet, and perhaps there would still be time to whisk him away for questioning before the cops hit the house. The Executioner had already started to squeeze the trigger when the sound of footsteps pounding up the staircase behind him forced him to whirl.

The head and shoulders of another terrorist in green BDUs and a long wispy beard suddenly appeared on the steps. A split second later the AK-47 in his hands followed. Then the man’s dark brown eyes caught sight of the Executioner and opened wide in both shock and horror.

Bolan pumped two rounds into the terrorist’s chest and saw the body fly back against the side wall before tumbling out of sight down the steps. When he turned back to the bedroom, the window was still open.

But Anton Sobor was nowhere to be seen.

THE SIRENS THAT HAD SOUNDED in the distance now screamed from the front of the house. As the Executioner sprinted into the bedroom to the window, he saw that it led out onto the flat, tar roof over the single-story rooms at the rear of the house. Ducking beneath the glass, he looked out to see Anton Sobor sprinting toward the edge of the roof. With the cops outside now, there was no way he was going to get Sobor away for questioning. So, gripping the Desert Eagle with both hands, he extended it through the opening. But before he could fire, Sobor whirled as if he’d felt eyes on his back and sent two rounds from a Russian Makarov pistol toward the window.

Bolan was forced to scramble to the side as both 9 mm rounds flew through the opening and slammed into the wall behind him.

In the house below, excited voices shouted in Farsi. The cops were definitely here now, and Bolan knew if he stayed where he was he’d soon be in handcuffs.

The soldier moved back in front of the window in time to see Sobor drop over the edge of the roof, out of sight. Climbing quickly through the opening, he heard more shouts as the cops raced up the stairs. He looked out to see rooftops at every level imaginable from one story to four. And the houses extended as far as the eye could see in every direction. He had noted how close together they were built earlier, but now he saw that Sobor could easily run for miles, zigzagging up and down the various levels and hopping from one roof to the next. He wouldn’t have to drop to the ground until he came to a major cross street. Or he could leave the roofs and disappear into the ground-level maze between the dwellings at any time he chose.

The bottom line was that if the Executioner didn’t catch sight of him soon, and keep him in sight, he’d lose him for good.

Sprinting to the spot where Sobor had disappeared, Bolan looked down to see that the adjacent roof was only a few feet lower than the one on which he stood. The Russian had been forced to hunch down as he ran to avoid being seen, and that had slowed his progress. Still, he had already crossed the tops of two more houses and was now roughly thirty yards away.

Bolan raised the Desert Eagle and lined up the sights on the running man’s back. He was again squeezing the trigger when the crack of a gunshot roared behind him. He felt the roof tremor slightly as a bullet bore itself into the tar at his feet, and twisted to see a uniformed police officer at the window he’d just climbed through.

Bolan had never killed an honest cop doing his job, and he wasn’t about to start now. On the other hand, letting the Iranian police kill him didn’t do much for him, either. Raising the huge Desert Eagle to shoulder level, he aimed to the side of the window and sent two 44 Magnum rounds into the shingles to the side. The cop shrieked in terror and fell backward, frightened but unhurt.

As he dropped over the same edge where Sobor had disappeared, Bolan saw more blue uniforms enter the bedroom behind him.

He sprinted across the roof directly behind the terrorist house, then leaped over a ledge and landed on another roof roughly the same height. In the distance, he saw the bright red shirt. Sobor had increased his lead to forty yards. But as the Executioner continued pursuit, he saw that the Russian was now limping with each step. He had no idea what had happened—a pulled muscle, a twisted ankle, maybe an old knee injury popping back up at an inopportune time—but whatever it was had slowed Sobor’s pace. By the time Bolan reached the next house, the Russian’s lead had dropped back to thirty yards again.

The Executioner came to another house whose roof rose two feet higher than the one he was on. Without breaking stride, he stepped up onto the retaining wall and sailed high into the air. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the Tehran roof levels, with houses rising to whatever height the builder’s whimsy called for. Perhaps that very irregularity had been the cause behind Sobor’s limp. Each leap from house to house, while not far, was deceptive, and could easily be misjudged.

Behind him, several gunshots popped. Bolan turned as he continued to run and saw a half dozen blue-clad men jogging his way. But their efforts were halfhearted, at best. None of them showed much enthusiasm for confronting the man whose big-bore pistol had blown holes in the wall next to the safehouse window.

By the time he had crossed the fourth roof behind the Hezbollah house Bolan had closed to within fifteen yards of the Russian. As the man limped toward the edge of another roof, Bolan dropped to one knee and raised the Desert Eagle. The big .44 rose and fell with each limping stride of the bright red shirt as the Executioner fell into the rhythm of the Russian’s pace. Then he aimed the weapon a few yards ahead of the running man, centering it slightly higher than waist level, and waited for the red shirt to enter his sight pattern.

He would shoot a split second before Sobor left his feet to leap onto the next roof. His finger took up the creep on the trigger and he held his breath.

Just as the Russian reached the edge of the roof an alley cat seemed to spring from nowhere. Bolan heard it screech as it struck Sobor in the side, paws flailing the air. The Russian’s jump to the next roof thrown off, Sobor tumbled over the edge and fell out of sight between the houses.

Bolan rose and raced forward, making a final leap to the last rooftop on which he’d seen the Russian. The cat scampered away, hissing, as the Executioner slowed, nearing the edge. This was hardly Bolan’s first gunfight and he didn’t intend to burst into view only to find Sobor waiting there to kill him. Slowly, carefully, the Desert Eagle still leading the way, Bolan peered over the edge of the roof and down between the houses.

Sobor wasn’t laying at the bottom as he’d hoped. But the deep impression the man had left in the mud where he landed was still there.

The Executioner was about to drop down between the houses and follow the footprints the Russian had left when he heard a crash on the other side of the house to his right. Knowing he’d make better time on the roofs, he turned and leaped across yet another small gap between the houses. Running along the edge of the building, he could see the muddy footprints Sobor had left behind. They were leading directly toward the sound he had heard.

When he reached the other side of the house, the Executioner looked down to see that a trash receptacle had been turned over. And while grass covered much of the area below, it was still sparse enough to show footprints. Bolan followed them with his eyes, seeing that they doubled back in the direction from which they’d come. He looked behind him and saw the Iranian cops advancing. But slowly.

They didn’t want to find him any more than he wanted to be found.

A flock of pigeons took flight as the Executioner leaped to the next roof, still keeping his eyes on the tracks below. When the footprints finally led to a narrow sidewalk between the houses, he dropped to the ground and followed the muddy clods that had fallen from the Russian’s shoes. But each of Sobor’s steps helped clean the shoes, and when the sidewalk broadened and intersected with another walk, the trail disappeared altogether.

On a hunch, the Executioner followed the sidewalk, ignoring the turns as he made his way back toward the Hezbollah house. He stopped, his back against the wall of one of the dwellings, as the police crossed his path above. He could hear the blue-clad men whispering to one another as they walked slowly across the rooftops, doing their best to appear to be searching for him while at the same time making sure they didn’t find the man with the big .44 Magnum pistol.

Moving on, the Executioner finally saw the same street he had walked down in front of the terrorist’s house. Sliding the Desert Eagle back into his hip holster, he covered it with the tail of his overcoat, then exited through an open doorway in the brownstone wall. On the sidewalk two houses to his right, he saw the flashing lights of the police vehicles that had parked just outside the wall. At least a dozen officers stood behind the cars, their guns drawn and aimed at the entrance to the house behind the wall. One of the cops—a slender man with a receding hairline—turned to stare at him.

Bolan turned casually and began to walk the other way. It had been several minutes since the cops had first arrived, and assuming they were efficient they would have already searched the immediate area. At this point, even looking as he did, he hoped he wouldn’t attract much more than the second glance the balding officer had thrown his way.

The Executioner stared ahead of him as he walked, and a block farther down the street he caught a flash of red. Squinting into the distance, he saw that the color was that of a shirt, and that the shirt was bobbing slightly up and down as it moved away from him.

Sobor. And the Russian was still limping.

The Executioner was about to break into a run when a rough hand grabbed his shoulder from behind. Turning, he felt the cold steel of a pistol barrel jam into his face. He looked down to see the Iranian cop with the receding hairline staring up at him. The hand holding the gun was shaking as the officer began screaming at him in Farsi.

“I am sorry,” Bolan said in Russian, raising his hands over his head. “I do not speak the language.”

By now three more blue-uniformed Iranians had left their posts behind the flashing red lights and joined the balding officer. All began shouting, as if they believed a deafening volume would suddenly teach Bolan their language.

The Executioner glanced over his shoulder and saw his prey limping toward a taxicab parked on the curb. If he lost the man now, he knew he might never find the Russian again. He could escape into the underground of any of a dozen terrorist-hosting countries and be lost forever.

As he was so often forced to do, Bolan made his decision in a microsecond. Bringing both hands suddenly down from over his head, he turned his body away from the muzzle of the cop’s pistol and grabbed the wrist holding the gun with his left hand. His right came across his body and clasped onto the barrel of the pistol. Pushing one way with his left hand, the other with his right, he snapped the weapon away from the officer, turned and sprinted away.

Though he hadn’t thought it possible for the Iranians to shout louder, he now heard them do so.

Bolan dropped the gun as he ran, hoping the cops behind him would see it and resist firing. On the other hand, Iran was hardly a country where police were famous for respecting human rights, and he knew there was at least an even chance that he would be shot in the back. But as he ran on, no one fired.

Ahead, the Executioner saw Sobor get into the back seat of the cab and close the door. As the vehicle pulled away, Bolan had time to squint at the number stenciled in black just above the rear bumper: 2348796.

The Executioner stopped and turned around.

A second later he was tackled by a half-dozen Iranian police officers.

CHAPTER THREE

It was a miracle he hadn’t been shot already.

As the Iranian police officers dragged him to the ground, Bolan let himself go limp. But as he fell, he counted the men around him. Six.

Landing on his back, he felt hands roll him to his stomach as the men continued to yell at him. Turning his head, Bolan could see the parked police cars in front of the Hezbollah house. The cops around the vehicles still had their attention focused on the entrance in the brownstone wall. They were paying no attention to what was happening to him a half block away. Evidently, if they had even noticed his capture, they felt that six officers should be more than enough to handle one man.

Bolan felt his arms being pulled behind his back. He wondered what would happen next. Some police procedures dictated that the handcuffs go on first. If that happened, he would have trouble. But other departments taught their officers to pat down a suspect for weapons before cuffing him, especially when the man taken into custody was as vastly outnumbered as Bolan was now. But whichever way it went, the police were about to find a .44 Magnum pistol, a 9 mm machine pistol, a .45 ACP revolver and a knife.

More than enough to lock him away in an Iranian prison for the rest of eternity. Unless he acted fast.

Luckily, the Iranians had been trained to frisk first. While two of the excited men continued to hold his arms behind his back, a third started at his shoulders and began patting him down. Bolan waited, anticipating the split second of shock he knew would come when the searcher felt the shoulder rig beneath his overcoat. It would be slight and short-lived.

But it would be the only chance he’d have to turn the tables on his captors.

A second later, the searcher’s hand hit the holster under his left arm and froze. A shoulder rig was more than he had expected to find, and it took a second for the man to process the information. A quick gasp escaped the lips above the Executioner’s head, and as it did he felt the hands holding his arms lighten their grip slightly in their own surprise.

Bolan didn’t hesitate. With all the power in his shoulders and arms, he snapped his hands down and away from the cops holding him. As he rolled to his back, his right hand shot into the pocket of his overcoat and the Scandium .45 ACP revolver suddenly appeared in his fist. Still lying flat, he aimed the stubby revolver at the Iranian cops standing over him.

The men froze like statues.

“Somebody here understands Russian,” Bolan whispered in a menacing voice. “And they’d better speak up fast if you want to get home to your families tonight.”

Several frightened phrases in Farsi escaped the faces above the Executioner. All mentioned Allah. But they sounded more like prayers than curses.

“This is a 6-shot revolver,” the Executioner added, still in Russian. “And there are six of you. You do the math.” He had already fired one round into the Hezbollah man who’d met him on the garden sidewalk, but the cops looking down at him now had no way of knowing that. The empty brass casing was hidden behind the stubby barrel of the .45 and, even looking straight down at the exposed cylinder holes to the sides of the frame, the gun looked fully loaded. Bolan could see the frightened faces above him as their eyes froze on the round lead noses of the RBCD Performance Plus fragmenting bullets.

“I’m waiting,” the Executioner said. “But my patience is growing thin.”

The balding man who had originally spotted him finally spoke. “Russian,” he said. “I…speak a little…”

“You better hope it’s enough,” Bolan said. “Now, listen closely, then translate what I say to the others.”

“I w-will try,” stammered the cop with the receding hairline.

“Try hard. Your lives depend on it.” The Executioner gave his words time to sink in, then went on. “I want you to tell three of your men to stand directly between me and the other officers still back at the cars. Tell them to stand close together and block the view. If any of the other cops see what’s going on, I’ll kill every one of you. And I’ll start with you.” He paused again, then said, “Tell them. Tell them now.”

Bolan waited for the words to be translated, then watched the men nod as three of the six moved in behind him. Keeping the .45 aimed at the balding head, he said, “Now, you reach down and lift me to my feet by the left arm. Make a play for the gun and you’re dead. Got it?”

The cop with the thinning hair nodded nervously and bent slowly, tugging Bolan back to his feet with both hands. The Executioner kept the S&W tight against his coat, out of reach but still aimed at the man helping him. “Very good so far,” he said. “Now, instruct one of your men to go get a car and bring it back here.”

“Which man?” the slender cop asked, licking his lips.

“I don’t care,” the Executioner said. “Either of the ones not blocking the view.”

“Which car?” the cop asked, obviously stalling for time.

Bolan transferred the .45 to his left hand and in one smooth motion drew the mammoth Desert Eagle from under his coat. “I already warned you that you were trying my patience,” he growled through clenched teeth. “Keep asking stupid questions and I’ll shoot you just for that.” He had no intention of killing any of the cops. He was counting on bluff, and so far it had been working. “And be sure whoever you pick understands that if I get even the slightest impression that he’s tipping off the other cops, I’ll kill you and everybody else here.”

The balding cop licked his lips again and turned to the nearer man. He whispered several sentences in his native tongue. The man to whom he spoke—a short, stocky cop with a thick, bushy mustache—nodded and walked away.

Bolan holstered the Desert Eagle again, switched the wheel gun back to his right hand and held it up briefly so the men around him could see it. Then he jammed the revolver back into his overcoat pocket but kept his hand in the pocket, as well.

There was no need to explain, in Russian or Farsi, that he could still shoot any of them he chose with the mere pull of an index finger.

The Executioner instructed the balding cop to keep holding on to his left arm as the stocky man walked down the block, slid behind the wheel of one of the patrol cars and backed it away from the wall. None of the other uniformed men paid attention as he threw it into drive, then rolled it slowly up to where the Executioner and the other five men stood.

“Tell him to stay behind the wheel,” Bolan ordered the balding man. The man did as ordered. “Now, keep holding on to my arm and escort me to the back seat as if you’ve just arrested me.”

The man who spoke Russian saw another chance to stall for time and took it. Shaking his head, he said, “If the others see it, they will not believe it.” He nodded toward the cops still stationed around the whirling lights outside the wall. “You are not in handcuffs.”

“Just tell your men to move. We’re all going to pack ourselves into the car and go for a little ride.”

“But there are six of us,” the balding cop protested. “With you we are seven. The car cannot hold—”

Bolan slapped him again, this time on the other side of he face to make the red marks match. “Tell them and do it,” he repeated.

The cop whispered out another long stream of Farsi. The other five uniformed men nodded.

The man with the thinning hair took the Executioner’s arm again and they all started to walk toward the vehicle. Bolan kept one eye on the men around him, the other on the cops still back at the cars. So far, they still had taken no notice of what was happening. To them it appeared that the big “Russian” was being taken back to the station for questioning. Handcuffs or no handcuffs.

When they reached the vehicle, Bolan used his translator to assign seats. The beefy cop with the mustache stayed behind the wheel. The bald man took a seat up front next to him, and the Executioner slid in on his other side.

The other four cops packed themselves into the back seat like two cans of sardines pressed into one can, and it was that tiny detail that finally caught the attention of the dozen or so Iranian cops still standing behind the other vehicles.

Bolan saw it begin as he slid into the car and closed the door. An older, overweight officer glanced their way. He frowned with bushy eyebrows as the men crammed themselves into the back seat.

Through the window, the Executioner could almost see the man’s brain working behind his wrinkled forehead. Why were so many officers riding in one car when other vehicles were available? And why had the prisoner been the last to enter the vehicle instead of being tossed in first by the officers? For that matter, why was the man in the long overcoat in the front seat instead of the back?

His eyes still glued to the beefy officer, Bolan said, “Drive.” The bald man translated and the patrol car took off. The Executioner pulled the .45 from his pocket and jammed it into the neck of the balding officer so all of the men in the back seat could see it.

The overweight cop was still frowning as they drove away.

Six blocks from the Hezbollah safehouse Bolan ordered the driver to pull in to the curb. He got out, jerked one of the officers from the back seat and pulled the Tokarev 9 mm pistol from the man’s holster. Holding the man’s own gun on him, Bolan returned to the shotgun seat. Just before he closed the door, the cop on the sidewalk spoke out in Farsi.

“He asks what he’s supposed to do now?” The balding officer translated for the Executioner.

“Tell him to find a way home and come up with some story about how he lost his gun,” Bolan said. “Of course it’s going to seem a little strange to your superiors that all six of you lost your guns at the same time.” He nodded toward the windshield and the driver took off again.

Bolan repeated the process, ordering the car to the curb every six blocks or so and leaving one weaponless officer at each stop. Some began working on their stories in business districts, others in residential areas similar to the one where the Hezbollah safehouse had been located. They all had one thing in common, however.

They were going to have a hard time convincing their supervisors that they shouldn’t be suspended. Or worse.

When the balding cop’s turn came, Bolan ordered the driver out of the vehicle and shoved the translator behind the wheel. A mile later, the Executioner saw the glittering mirror-mosaic front of Tehran’s famed Gullistan Palace. He ordered his chauffeur to pull into the parking lot. By now he had five Tokarev pistols tucked into his belt and in the pockets of his overcoat, and he used one of them to nudge the driver out of the vehicle before sliding behind the wheel himself.

The balding man had ascertained by now that Bolan had no intention of killing any of the cops unless forced to do so. And that knowledge had brought with it a new confidence that bordered on arrogance. Turning back toward the car, his eyes rose to the emergency lights fixed atop the marked unit, then fell back to Bolan’s. “You will never get away with this,” he said with his newly found haughtiness. “How far do you think you will get in this car?”

“Far enough,” the Executioner said as he drove away.

In the rearview mirror, he watched the man with the receding hairline enter the museum, heading for the nearest phone.

The Executioner drove away from Tehran’s brightly lit downtown area as quickly as he could, ditching the patrol car in the first dark alley he came to, and tossing the keys over a fence into a coop full of clucking chickens. Walking casually to the intersecting street, a number rolled over and over in his head: 2348796.

He had seen Anton Sobor get into cab number 2348796. And at the moment, those numerals were the only chance he had of picking up the Russian’s trail again.

On the street now in a low-income residential area, the Executioner knew his appearance would stand out even more than he had back at the safehouse. And the police would have put his description out over the airwaves as soon as the first cop he’d freed had called in. Few people were outside their houses in the near-freezing temperature as he strolled past. But that didn’t mean they weren’t watching through their windows. And if they were inside, at least some of them would have televisions and radios. And telephones.

His situation was clear. He needed to get away from the curious eyes of Tehran long enough to do two things: change his appearance and check into the number 2348796.

Spotting an ancient Ford Mustang that had probably entered the country during the days of the Shah, the Executioner hurried down the street. All around him he saw poverty, and guessed that the rusting vehicle was some innocent Iranian’s most prized possession.

Which made him hate doing what he knew he had to do next.

Cutting into the driveway where the Mustang was parked, the Executioner tried the driver’s door and found it unlocked. The car looked to be a midsixties model, which meant it would have to be hot-wired under the dash rather than by cracking the steering column. Sliding inside, Bolan was about to begin feeling for the wires when he heard a door open in the house next to the driveway.

A stout man, wearing soiled khaki work pants and an equally dirty ribbed undershirt, came barreling out of the house screaming. Thick black hair covered the man’s arms and chest, growing so high up on his neck that it merged with his beard. Bolan sat up in the seat as the man ran toward him.

In the Iranian’s hand, the Executioner saw a huge butcher knife.

Bolan had no desire to hurt the man—he could hardly blame him for protecting what was his. On the other hand, he needed the vehicle. Stepping out of the Mustang, he threw back the tail of his overcoat and drew the Desert Eagle.

The hirsute Iranian ground to a halt at the sight of the big handgun. His eyes widened and he didn’t have to be told to drop the knife—he figured it out all on his own, and began mumbling what even one unversed in Farsi could recognize as pleas for his life.

Bolan nodded, then held out a hand, palm down, which quieted the hairy Iranian. His face relaxed. But when the Executioner holstered the Desert Eagle, a frown of confusion came over his face once more. Quickly, Bolan reached inside his coat and produced a leather billfold. He had stocked up on Iranian cash before coming to the country, and now he pulled out enough money to pay for the Mustang three times over.

The hairy Iranian’s eyes grew large again.

Bolan extended his hand.

Fearfully, still wondering if what was happening was real, the shivering man accepted the money.

“I need the keys,” the Executioner said.

The man frowned again.

Bolan stuck his empty hand out in front of him, twisting his wrist to pantomime starting a car engine. The Iranian caught on and reached into his pocket. He was still looking at the money in his hand when the Executioner drove away.

Bolan was surprised to find that the Mustang’s engine purred as if it had just come off a Detroit assembly line. Whoever the man was, he had been proud of the vehicle and kept it maintained. Well, the Executioner thought, as he found his way to the thoroughfare heading south toward the ancient city of Rey, the Mustang’s owner now had enough money to replace it, and then some. And with any luck, he’d be able to ditch the vehicle in a place where it would be found by police and returned to him, to boot.

Traffic in Tehran was always insane, with horns honking, drivers shaking their fists at one another and traffic signs perceived more as suggestions than law. Nevertheless, a half hour later Bolan was passing the site where the Reza Shah Mausoleum had once stood, and a few minutes after that he had reached Rey. The sun was beginning to fade behind the mountains as he turned off the main road and began urging the Mustang up and down a hilly path through the foothills. He passed a small pool of water where dozens of women washed the carpets for which Persia had been famous for hundreds of years. On the rocky slopes around the water hundreds of other rugs lay drying. Red, blue, yellow, green and every other hue of the color spectrum made the hills appear to be rainbows fallen to earth.

The Executioner continued to navigate the back roads. He had memorized the location where his pilot—Jack Grimaldi—had hidden the unmarked Bell OH-58D helicopter when they had arrived early that morning. Taking off from an American-held air base in Kirkuk, Iraq, Grimaldi had kept the chopper beneath radar for the full four-hundred-mile trip. Few pilots in the world could have pulled off such a flight and, at the same time, avoided being spotted from the ground. But Stony Man Farm’s number-one flyboy was an ace strategist as well as pilot, and he had done it. Now, Bolan knew, his old and loyal friend would still be sitting in the helicopter, awaiting his return.

Dusk was upon him when Bolan made the final turn, following a path until it ended against the side of a foothill. He killed the engine, pocketed the keys and took off on foot, walking up and down hills for another five hundred yards before he came to the valley.

The Bell was barely visible, wedged in as it was between two narrow hills. Bolan grinned as he walked the last few steps. He and Grimaldi had worked more missions together than he could remember, and while there might be another jet jockey or two who could have crossed Iran unnoticed, he knew of no one else in the world who could have landed the craft as expertly as his old friend. Bolan doubted that it would be seen from the air even if an Iranian surveillance plane flew directly over it.

Bolan reached the helicopter and opened the door to see the two-and-one-half-inch barrel of a Smith & Wesson Model 66 staring him in the face. In his other hand, the pilot held a thick paperback book.

Grimaldi grinned. “Sorry, Sarge,” he said, returning the .357 Magnum pistol to his waistband beneath his brown leather flight jacket. “Couldn’t tell who it was in the dark.”

Bolan climbed aboard before speaking. “You think it was the bogeyman, Jack?” he asked.

“No, but I thought it might be some curious tribesman.” Grimaldi had left the control seat and was sitting in a chair bolted to the deck in the chopper’s cargo area. Now he placed the paperback book on top of a map on the small table in front of him.

Grimaldi tapped the map with an index finger. “According to this,” he said, “we’re several miles away from the nearest village. But these guys have been known to travel like everybody else.”

Bolan nodded as he passed the man, moving up to the front of the helicopter and retrieving a briefcase next to the pilot’s seat. He returned to the cargo area, took the chair across from Grimaldi and pulled out a cellular phone.

A moment later Barbara Price was picking up the phone at Stony Man Farm. “Good morning, Striker,” the beautiful honey-blonde said on the other end of the line. “Or, considering where you are, I guess good evening would be more in order.”

“Is the Bear awake yet, Barb?” Bolan asked, referring to Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman, the Farm’s chief computer genius.

“That’s one Bear who never hibernates,” Price said in return, and a moment later Kurtzman was on the line. Bolan pictured the man who had given his legs in defense of freedom, but who still fought evil from the wheelchair. He was another old friend of the Executioner’s. And another man who, like Grimaldi and Price, was at the top of the ladder in his field.

“Bear,” Bolan said, “I need you to run something down for me.” He went on to explain about Sobor, the taxi and the number stenciled on the back of the vehicle. “Can you hack into the Iranian’s computer base and find out what that specific cab did today?”

“Hack into an Iranian government computer system?” he said. “Like taking candy from a baby.”

“I need to know where the cab took Sobor,” the Executioner said.

“Getting in won’t be a problem, Striker,” the computer wizard said. “The tough part will be trying to make sense of things once I’m there.”

Bolan frowned. His mind had been preoccupied and he hadn’t considered the language barrier. “The Farm has access to translations right.

“Yeah,” Kurtzman came back, “but that’s not what I meant by making sense of things. What I meant was that the Iranians are notorious for sloppy record keeping, even in government. There’s no telling what gets loaded in regard to taxicab records.” He paused for a second, then added, “For all I know, they don’t even keep records. Computer or otherwise.”

“Well, let’s hope they do because it’s all I’ve got at the moment.”

“When do you need this?” Kurtzman asked. Bolan had opened his mouth to answer when Kurtzman spoke again. “Never mind—I know you. You need it yesterday.”

The Executioner grinned again. “The day before yesterday would have been better, Bear.”

“Well, the longer I talk to you, the longer it takes,” Kurtzman said in a phony gruff voice. Bolan heard a click in his ear, felt himself smile, and tapped the button to hang up on his end, as well.

While he had talked to Price and Kurtzman, Grimaldi had pulled a set of earphones over his brown suede bush pilot cap and plugged the wire into a radio mounted to the side of the cargo area. When Bolan started to speak, the pilot held up a hand for silence. Closing his eyes, the pilot listened for another thirty seconds, then unwrapped the headset from his head. “English language radio station,” he told the Executioner. “Seems like the Tehran cops kicked in the door at a Hezbollah safehouse and killed all the terrorists.”

The Executioner couldn’t help but chuckle. The Iranian government was no different than any other around the world, experts at spinning the news to their own advantage. The truth was that the Iranian police hadn’t killed any of the terrorists themselves. There had been none left to kill by the time Bolan had crawled through the window and taken off across the rooftops after Sobor.

“Now they’re advising the public that one of the bad guys—a man wearing a black rabbit hat and a long gray overcoat—got away. They think he was some kind of Russian adviser.”

Bolan nodded.

“In any case, Mr. Mackinov Bolanski, or whoever you are,” Grimaldi said, “I wouldn’t head back into Tehran for a while if I were you.”

The Executioner shrugged. “I may have to, Jack,” he said. “It all depends on what Bear finds out.”

Now it was Grimaldi’s turn to shrug. He had learned long ago that arguing about the risks the Executioner took was a no-win battle. So he didn’t waste his time.

While they waited on Kurtzman to try to run down the taxicab number, Bolan got up and moved to one of the lockers bolted to the wall. Opening it, he found a pair of barber’s shears, a bottle of spirit gum and a plastic bag containing several hanks of human hair in varying colors and shades. The hair came primarily from European women who let their locks grow long with the specific purpose of selling it. The brokers who purchased it marketed the hair primarily to theatrical groups and moviemakers.

Opening the bag, the Executioner pulled out a hank similar to the color of his own hair, then moved to the mirror at the back of the cargo area. Five minutes later he had a wild, curling handlebar mustache fit for any Old West gunfighter.

Grimaldi had been watching from his seat said, “That’s nice, Wyatt. You want me to dig around in the lockers and see if I can’t come up with a Buntline Special and a Winchester lever-action to go with it?”

“I’m not finished yet,” he said, lifting the shears. He carefully trimmed the mustache until he had achieved a more conservative, less-attention-drawing look. He had shed the overcoat and Russian rabbit hat when he entered the chopper, and now he walked to another locker and pulled out a pair of dark slacks, and a brown leather jacket similar to the one Grimaldi wore.

He was slipping into the jacket when the phone at the front of the cabin suddenly rang. The Executioner lifted it to his ear. “Yeah, Bear?” he said.

Kurtzman cleared his throat on the other end of the line. “Like the old joke goes,” he said. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

“Give it to me either way you want,” Bolan said.

“The good news is that I’ve tracked down the number and found out the name and home address of the cabbie who was driving it,” he said, reading off the information.

The Executioner grabbed a pen and piece of notepaper and jotted it down. “Go on,” he said.

“The bad news is they don’t keep any records of specific fares,” Kurtzman stated. “In other words, there’s no way of finding out where Sobor was dropped off.”

“Yeah, there is, Bear,” the Executioner said. “And you just gave it to me.” Not waiting for an answer, he cleared the line.

“You’re taking one heck of a chance going back to the city this soon,” Grimaldi said. “But I suppose I should add ‘what else is new’ to that comment.”

Bolan didn’t answer as he left the aircraft.

DUSK HAD TURNED to full night by the time Bolan had retraced his route from Rey to Tehran. The lights of the city were aglow. Traffic was even more congested than it had been earlier, with the same honks, obscene gestures and screaming threats issuing from the packed vehicles along the highway.

Navigating through the flashing headlights, the Executioner spotted a small mosque a block down from Tehran’s Fine Arts Museum. He pulled into the parking lot, stopped and left the keys under the cracked rubber floor mat, hoping that the man who had cared for the ancient American automobile would eventually get it back. His war on evil, which had included many oppressive governments of the world, had never been directed at the individual citizens who had the misfortune to live under those regimes. The fact was, the man who had come after him with the butcher knife when he’d taken the Mustang was a victim; every bit as much a victim of the current venomous Iranian government as an innocent foreigner killed by the bomb of one of the terrorist organizations that nation sponsored.

Bolan exited the Mustang and walked swiftly back to the street. A taxicab had just pulled up in front of the mosque, delivering a family of two adults and three children for evening prayers, and the bearded driver nodded when Bolan looked his way. On a long shot, the Executioner checked the number stenciled on the back of the cab as he walked around the trunk to get in. It wasn’t the same vehicle that Sobor had gotten into earlier in the day. But he hadn’t expected it to be.

Lady Luck rarely followed the Executioner that closely.

Sliding onto the back seat, Bolan pulled the folded city map from the side pocket of his leather jacket and glanced down to the area he had circled in red ink. He was now posing more as a tourist of indecipherable origin, hoping to appear to have come from nearly anywhere.

The Executioner gave the cabdriver the address to the Archaeological Museum, which looked to be roughly a half mile from where he was really headed.

The driver turned halfway around and rested an arm over the back of his seat. Frowning, he spoke in Farsi.

Bolan forced an embarrassed smile, pointed to his mouth and shook his head.

“The museum will be closed this time of night,” the driver said, switching to French.

The Executioner nodded. “Yes,” he said in the same language, “I know. But there is a certain café near there where I want to go.”

“Then tell me the name of the café and I will take you directly to it,” the driver offered. “I know that area well.”

Bolan forced another embarrassed grin. “I don’t know the name,” he said. “Or exactly where it is located. Only that it is near the museum. If I can go there, I think I can I find it.”

The cabbie shrugged disinterestedly, turned and took off. He paid no further attention to the Executioner as he drove.

Bolan took advantage of the time to conduct a mental inventory of his weaponry. Beneath the leather jacket, in the same ballistic nylon and Concealex shoulder rig he’d worn under the gray overcoat, the sound suppressed Beretta 93-R machine pistol rode under his left arm. With a 20-round magazine and a sixteenth subsonic hollowpoint round already chambered, the Beretta was capable of either semiauto fire or 3-round bursts.

Opposite the 93-R, helping to balance the weight at the other end of the shoulder rig, were three extra 9 mm magazines in Concealex carriers. Like the one already stuffed up the Beretta’s grip, each held twenty rounds, two containing the same subsonic cartridges that, along with the sound suppressor, kept the noise down to a mere whisper. The third extra magazine had been loaded with high-velocity, pointed, armor-piercing bullets. They would break the sound barrier after leaving the barrel, so the sound suppressor wouldn’t be nearly as effective with them. But Bolan wouldn’t use them unless he encountered an enemy wearing a ballistic nylon vest, or found himself forced to shoot through metal or some other equally bullet-resistant material. And then, he would only have to resort to them if his Desert Eagle had run dry.

The .44 Magnum Desert Eagle was the heart of the Executioner’s weaponry. There was no way to effectively quiet a pistol with that level of authority, nor would he have done so if he could. When the “Eagle screamed” it screamed louder than any other firearm in the gunfight and, to an enemy not accustomed to such stentorian roars, it could be psychologically devastating. The Desert Eagle was secured in another Concealex holster, this one worn in the traditional strong-side hip position on Bolan’s belt. More of the space age, carefully molded plastic had been slid onto the Executioner’s belt just behind the huge pistol, and the butts of two extra .44 Magnum magazines extended from the tops. There was no need for retaining straps or any other methods of closure when using Concealex—the form fit around each item and held it in place on its own.

The Executioner had reloaded the S&W .45 ACP wheelgun and it rode inside the hand-warmer pocket of the leather jacket much as it had in the gray overcoat he’d worn earlier. The revolver, using automatic pistol ammunition, required that either a half or full-moon clip be used to eject the spent casings. But those same clips made for the fastest possible reload with a wheelgun. The shooter just dumped the empties and dropped a fresh clip into the cylinder. It didn’t even require clearing a speed-loader out of the way before slamming the wheel back into the frame, and Bolan carried a pair of the full moons in his other hand-warmer pocket, opposite the S&W.

The last weapon the Executioner carried was a knife known as the “Baghdad Bullet.” A relatively new design by the Tactical Operations company, the blade had the basic shape of a pistol cartridge, which made it look much like a short, wide dagger. Only one edge was ground, however. One of the Baghdad Bullet’s advantage was in its size, which could be easily hidden almost anywhere on the body. The other was that the grip was short enough to palm, and the end was rounded to fit the contours of the center of the hand. This meant that once a thrust had been made, the palm could be rolled to the butt and pushed in further. The Baghdad Bullet could then be shoved all the way into the body, from tip to the end of the Micarta slab grips.

Once that was accomplished, it would take a surgeon to get it out again.

The cab arrived at the Archaeological Museum. Bolan handed several bills over the seat to the driver and got out. He forced himself to frown, looking up and down the street as if he couldn’t decide which way to go first. But as soon as the cab had driven away, he pulled the map out of his pocket again and took off down the sidewalk.

According to Kurtzman’s computer probe, Mani Bartovi, the driver who had manned the cab in which Sobor had escaped, lived less than a half mile away.

Bolan walked swiftly but casually, stepping around the many Tehranians who still crowded the bazaars. At the stands he passed he saw everything from foot-high cones of sugar to donkey saddlebags, camel saddles and intricately embroidered women’s purses.

The Executioner had left the map in his hand as he walked, using it not only for reference but to further his guise as a foreign sightseer. Three blocks from the museum, he turned onto a side street and followed it two more blocks to another residential area with a brownstone wall separating the houses from the street. The only difference he could see between this neighborhood and the one where the Hezbollah house had been located was that this area of town was in a sadder state of disrepair. Chunks of the brownstone had fallen, or been knocked out, and the sidewalk was cracked and pitted. Here and there on the wall, spray paint announced the feelings of the younger Iranians. Many of the slogans ranted against the “Great Satan America.” But others railed out against Iran’s own oppressive Islamic fundamentalist leaders, and called for freedom and reform.

Bolan came to the number on the wall he’d been looking for, and found that the gate leading through it was not only open but had broken off its hinges. It stood just inside the opening, leaning against the wall. After a quick glance up and down the street, he ducked inside and began making his way through the shadows toward the rundown house.

Like most of the dwellings in the other Tehran neighborhood, Mani Bartovi’s house had a garden. But the muddy area in this region of Tehran was far smaller and looked as if had been abandoned as a futile effort long ago. As he crept forward, Bolan looked through the front window and saw three small children playing on the floor of a living area. A woman—apparently their mother—lay back against several large pillows on the floor, breast-feeding an infant. Not far to her side the Executioner saw a man who had to be the cabdriver.

Mani Bartovi lay back against his own pillow, staring across the room at a wall Bolan couldn’t see.

Changing his angle slightly, the Executioner looked through the glass and saw the white glow of a television screen. The picture was all but unrecognizable, and looking up to the roof of the house he saw a bent and weathered TV antenna.

Bolan moved back away from the window, deeper into the shadows. He needed desperately to question Mani Bartovi and to learn where he had taken Anton Sobor. But there was no guarantee that Bartovi would talk willingly. And if he wouldn’t, Bolan would have to resort to a more forceful interrogation.

But not in front of the cabdriver’s wife and children.

Quietly circling the house, Bolan spotted a walk-in toolshed of corrugated steel at the rear of the dwelling. Moving silently forward, he drew a small laser flashlight from the inside pocket of his jacket and tapped the button on the end. The bright glow illuminated the shed just long enough to show him that no padlock was in place. Tapping the button again, the Executioner reached through the darkness and opened the doors.

With the aid of the flashlight once he was inside, Bolan saw rusting lawn and garden tools piled in the corners. In the middle of the shed was an old hand-mower. It wasn’t an ideal interrogation room by any means. But it would do. The question now was, how to get Bartovi out of the house and into the shed without alarming the rest of his family.

Closing the doors behind him, Bolan pulled the cell phone out of his jacket and tapped in the number to Stony Man Farm. Like all of the calls sent to, or from, the Farm, this one was scrambled and routed through dummy numbers on several different continents before it finally connected and rang.

Barbara Price answered on the first ring. “Hello again, Striker,” she said.

“I need some help,” the Executioner told her.

“Want Bear again?”

“No. Let me talk to the translator the Farm uses for Farsi.”

Price didn’t question the request—just tapped the transfer button. Bolan heard a click, then the sound of the line ringing again. A moment later a young voice answered. “Yes? This is Ron Touchie. How may I help you?”

“I need you to make a phone call in Farsi.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Executioner was watching through the window again when he saw the woman inside the house get up, hand the baby to her husband and answer the phone on the table against the wall. Her lips opened slightly as she said, “Shalom.” A few seconds went by, then she dropped the phone to her side, said something to her husband, then traded the phone receiver for the baby again.

Mani Bartovi looked angry as he rose from the floor and spoke into the phone. He nodded and his lips moved several times. Then he dropped the phone back into its cradle and disappeared from view into another room.

Bolan moved back into the shadows and called Stony Man Farm again. Price was expecting his call and routed it on to Touchie without speaking. “How’d it go?” the Executioner asked.

“Very well,” Touchie replied. “He’s not happy about going out again tonight but, what can you do when half the cab company has come down with the flu?”

“Thanks,” Bolan said. “Stay on the line. I’ll need you to interpret once I grab him.”

“I’ll stay on if you like,” said Tokaido. “But I don’t think you’ll need me. The guy speaks English quite well.”

Bolan frowned. “How’d you determine that?”

“I asked him,” Touchie said offhandedly. “I told him there was an important New Zealand businessman arriving at the airport and expecting to be picked up.”

“Thanks,” Bolan said into the phone. “I’ll call again if I need you.”

“Okay. Goodbye.”

Bolan hung up and looked back toward the house. He had passed a front door just beyond the wall before moving to the shed. But his instincts told him Mani Bartovi was more likely to leave the house from the rear. He had already started that way when the sound of a back door opening confirmed his suspicion. He stayed out of sight around the corner of the house as he heard the man and woman speaking softly. Then the voices stopped and the sound of a door snapping closed met his ears.

Soft footsteps started toward him.

Bolan flattened harder against the side of the house and drew the Desert Eagle.

A moment later Bartovi had rounded the corner toward the street. A second after that he had the muzzle of a Desert Eagle stuck in one ear.

“This is to get your attention,” the Executioner whispered. “I don’t want to kill you unless you force me to.”

“No English,” Bartovi said. “No—”

Bolan jammed the gun tighter into the man’s ear and grabbed him by the arm. “I happen to know better,” he said softly but sternly. “You just spoke fluent English over the phone.” He paused long enough to let the fact that he knew about the phone call sink in. But not long enough for the man to question how he knew. “You’re coming with me into your toolshed,” the Executioner went on. “I’ve got a few questions for you. You answer them honestly, in English, and you’ll not only live through the night but you’ll go back inside with more money than you make in a month driving that cab.”

The cabdriver was breathing hard now, as if he’d just finished a footrace. “And what,” he said. “If I refuse?”

Bolan cocked the hammer on the Desert Eagle as an answer.

Together, the two men made their way across the darkened courtyard to the shed. Bolan kept the gun in the man’s ear as he opened the door and a moment later they were both inside. The Executioner closed the door behind him before switching on the flashlight. He shone the bright laser beam up into Bartovi’s eyes as he said, “You picked up a man just down the street from where the Hezbollah bust went down today,” he said. “The man had on a red shirt and was limping. You remember him?”

Bartovi was frightened beyond the point where he could even concentrate. “No!” he said in a loud voice, his eyes clenched shut against the light. “No! I am not Hezbollah! I am not a terrorist! I am—”

There were men who wouldn’t talk unless you threatened them and other men who turned incoherent when frightened for their lives. Bartovi fell into the second category, and Bolan brought him back to reality with a light slap across the face. At the same time he dropped the beam to the ground. The light, reflecting off the steel inner walls of the shed, was still bright enough to illuminate the entire area.

Bolan holstered the Desert Eagle. “Relax, Mani,” he said. “I know you aren’t a terrorist—you’re a hardworking cabdriver trying to support a family. Now, let me tell you what I am. I’m a man of my word. You tell me what I need to know and you’ll be fine.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of large denomination bills. “And I told you I’d pay you. I will.”

Bartovi slowly opened his eyes. The expression on his face was one of relief that the huge Desert Eagle was no longer in sight. Then it changed to nothing short of lust when he saw the money that had replaced it in Bolan’s hand.

“The man with the limp,” the Executioner repeated. “He may have spoken Farsi. But he would have done it with either an American or Russian accent.”

For the first time, Bartovi looked up at Bolan. “I remember him, yes,” the cabdriver said. “The accent was…very odd. Not really Russian. Not really American. More a little of both.”

The Executioner nodded. That made perfect sense for a man who had been raised in the Soviet Union but had spent the majority of his adult life in the U.S. “Where did you take him?” he asked.

Bartovi closed his eyes again but this time it was in concentration. “To the airport,” he said.

Bolan frowned. “Which terminal?”

“I am sorry,” Bartovi said, frowning. “I do not know that English word.”

“What airline?” the Executioner asked. “At what airline company’s area did you let him out?”

“Ah,” Bartovi said. “Yes. Iran Aseman Airlines.”

Bolan handed him roughly half of the bills.

Bartovi took them and stared down at his hand in shock, as if he had never truly believed that the big American with the big gun would really keep his word.

With the rest of the money still in his hand, Bolan said, “Did the man say anything about where he was going?”

Again, the eyes closed in concentration. When they opened again, the cabdriver said, “No.”

Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?” he said, the hand with the money in it moving a little closer to the Desert Eagle again. He wanted to make sure Bartovi understood he would be rewarded for telling the truth. But the Iranian cabbie also needed believe that punishment awaited any lies.

“Yes, yes, I am sure,” Bartovi said quickly. “I only hesitated because I was trying to remember.”

Bolan nodded and divided the money in his hand in half again. “Do you have a car?” he asked. “I’ll pay you to use it if you do.”

Bartovi shook his head, glancing regretfully at the bills remaining in the Executioner’s fist.

Bolan shoved the rest of the money into his hand. “Take this anyway,” he said. “You’ve cooperated.” Bartovi was trembling slightly again. It was evident that he still couldn’t believe the big stranger wasn’t going to kill him, then take the money back. “I doubt anyone will know I was here,” he finished. “But if they ask, you never saw me. Right?”

Bartovi nodded. “I never saw you,” he repeated.

The Executioner left the cabdriver in his toolshed and hurried back along the side of the house, exiting the courtyard through the same gate by which he’d entered. Turning, he started down the sidewalk. He had dumped the Mustang because, even though he’d paid the owner three times its worth, the man had probably reported it stolen. By now every cop in Tehran would have the license tag. He needed new wheels.

Less than half of the streetlights were working and Bolan stayed in the shadows as he jogged back to the Archaeological Museum. There was a mechanic’s shop across the street with two cars in the parking lot: a Pontiac Bonneville and a Dodge Dart GT that dated back to the mid-1960s. As he got closer, Bolan saw that the Bonneville’s front wheels were gone and it rested atop concrete blocks.

The Dodge Dart was old and required hot-wiring beneath the dash. But its 273-cubic-inch engine purred easily. With “four on the floor” and a silver T-handled gearshift knob, it was obvious that it was the pride and joy of some wannabe racer.

Bolan pushed in the clutch, threw the car in reverse and backed it away from the building. Pushing the T-handle forward into first gear, he slowly let the clutch out and eased back toward the street.

TRAFFIC THINNED as he left Tehran and headed for Rey again. Bolan manipulated the vehicle deftly up and down through the gears, staying just below the speed limit and keeping a low profile. When he hit a stretch where he could glide in fourth, he reached into the leather jacket to his side and pulled out his cell phone.

A few moments later Price answered. “Hello again, Striker.”

“I need Bear again, Barbara,” Bolan said as Tehran proper faded in his rearview mirror.

“Then you’ve got him.” The line clicked.

A second later Kurtzman lifted the phone. Bolan quickly summed up what he’d learned about Sobor going to the airport. “There’s no sense my going out there,” he told Stony Man Farm’s computer ace. “I don’t know who to ask for and don’t even speak the language.” He stopped talking, knowing there was no need to verbalize his next request; Kurtzman would know what he wanted.

“I think I might be able to help,” the computer man said. “I’ve been doing a little playing around since we talked. But first, you might want to know that you’re big news all over right now.”

Bolan frowned. “How’s that?”

“Iran’s riding the bust at the safehouse for all it’s worth, trying to use it to show the world how tough they’re getting on terrorism.”

“I’m not surprised. Since their terrorist buddies are already dead, they might as well get some use out of them.”

“Exactly,” Kurtzman said. “There are pictures of dead terrorists all over Al-Jazera and the other networks over there. Not to mention CNN, MSNBC, FOX—you name it.” Half a world away, the man in the wheelchair chuckled. “The holes in the dead men’s bodies look strangely .44 caliber to me, but then, what do I know?”

Bolan guided the Dodge on through the night, nearing Rey. “You said you’d been playing around,” he said. “I assume your magic machines have told you something?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kurtzman said. “Just thought I’d let you in on what the whole world knows first. Now, for your ears only, as the saying goes, I tapped into the Iranian secret police radio frequency and our translator’s been listening and jotting down everything that might be pertinent.

VEVAK, Bolan thought silently. The Islamic Iranian government’s secret police which had replaced the Shah’s ruthless SAVAK assassins and torturers. And become twice as ruthless as its predecessor. “What have you learned?” he asked.

“Well, for one thing, it appears they’ve got you and Sobor confused. Maybe that’s on purpose, but I don’t get that feeling. VEVAK’s radio frequency isn’t even open to the regular cops, and they’re pretty straightforward most of the time.” He stopped, cleared his throat, then went on. “They know there was a Russian there at the house, and a guy they think was Russian got away across the rooftops.”

“That was me,” said Bolan. “I’m the one they saw. Sobor was already gone when they got there.”

“Well, at this point, they seem to think it’s all one and the same man. They’ve found close to a dozen passports and supporting identification with the same picture on them, and the guy’s Caucasian.”

Bolan’s eyebrows lowered in concentration.

“You still there?” Kurtzman asked several seconds later.

“Yeah, just thinking, Bear.” He paused again. All he could learn from the passports and other ID Kurtzman had just mentioned would be names Anton Sobor wasn’t using. “Any way you can find out if there were any passports missing?” he asked. “Like, maybe they found just part of an identity?”

“I get your drift,” Kurtzman said. “But that’s gonna be tough. Give me a little while to come up with a plan, okay?”

“I’ve got another hour’s drive before I get back to the helicopter,” the Executioner said. “If you can find a name, great. If not, hack into the Iranian Aseman Airlines files and check the rosters for every flight out of Tehran since the bust, okay?”

“Okay. I’d better get on it.” Kurtzman hung up.

Bolan drove on. Rey appeared, and then the Dodge Dart GT’s headlights flickered across the deserted water hole where the women had washed the carpets earlier in the day. Lifting the phone again, he dialed another number.

“Get that bird revved up,” he said when Grimaldi answered. “I’m ten minutes away. I don’t know where we’re going yet, but we’re going somewhere.”

BOLAN PULLED to the end of the road and parked the Dodge Dart GT in the same spot where he’d left the Mustang hours earlier. Reaching beneath the dashboard, he killed the engine and got out. Below, in the valley where the Bell was hidden, he heard the soft purr of the chopper warming up. The OH-58D advanced scout helicopter had a mast-mounted sight and two Stinger missile pods. It had been designed with its main mission being to locate and designate targets for the Apache AH-64’s Hellfire missiles. This one was unmarked, and had been painted an unintimidating light tan that helped it blend in with the surroundings without screaming out “Camouflage!” in case it did happen to be seen. Stony Man Farm’s chief armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, had disguised the Stingers and also rigged up a hidden 60 mm machine gun.

Bolan’s hope was that the machine gun and Stingers would still be unfired when the mission was over. The situation would develop much more smoothly if the Bell could simply be used as a means of transportation and not be forced to fight. But the weapons were there in case they were needed.

The half moon was high overhead, casting an eerie luminescence down over the rocky hills around the ancient city of Rey. Remembering the path he had taken earlier down into the valley, Bolan retraced his steps in half the time. When he reached the bottom, he ducked low beneath the twirling helicopter blades and climbed on board.

Jack Grimaldi was already strapped into the pilot’s seat behind the controls. Bolan saw him checking the various gauges in front of him as he buckled his own seat belt. He remained silent while the pilot finished his last-minute checklist. Seemingly satisfied, Grimaldi finally looked up and said, “You heard anything back from Stony Man?”

Bolan shook his head. “Not since we talked last.”

“Barb tried getting you,” Grimaldi said. “You were probably in a dead zone.” He glanced down at the cell phone that Bolan had just pulled from the pocket of his leather jacket. “Lot of them around in a place like this.”

The Executioner nodded. Stony Man Farm’s cell phones—like all of their other equipment—was top of the line, state of the art. But even though they had access to every satellite circling the planet, they were pushing contemporary technology too far expecting to be able to make phone calls around the world as if they were talking to the neighbors next door. At least each, and every, time. “I need to call in?” Bolan asked.

“Wouldn’t hurt,” Grimaldi said. “But I’m gonna take her on up while you do. I suspect I know where we’re headed, and if you decide different, I can always change course once we’re in the air.”

Bolan tapped the number to the Farm and got Price again. “Sorry your call didn’t come through earlier,” he said.

“Hardly your fault. Besides, I relayed the intel to Jack. He tell you?”

“Yeah,” the Executioner said. “But not the details. He’s leaving that to you.”

“And I’ll leave it to Bear,” Price said, and Bolan heard the familiar click of the call being transferred.

“I think I’ve got something for you, Striker,” the wheelchair-bound computer man said without bothering a “hello.” “I was able to tap into the VEVAK frequency again, and figured out a way to transmit as well as receive. It took a little doing, but Ron Touchie and I finally caught on to the passwords and code names and numbers, came up with one that sounded real.

“The passports and supporting IDs—everything from a couple of German driver’s licences to a Swiss voter’s registration card—were dumped in a cardboard box on the top shelf of an upstairs closet.”

Bolan frowned. He had checked all of the closets during his search of the house, and remembered several boxes. But he had been looking for men, not documents, and there had been no time to sift through the contents. “Go on,” he said.

To his side, Grimaldi said, “Ready?”

The Executioner nodded.

As the chopper began to rise, Kurtzman went on. “VEVAK assigned one of their men to put the IDs together, and they came up with thirteen different names. Eleven had passports with them. But they found a couple of supporting credentials for two other names—actually, the German and Swiss stuff I just mentioned—but no passports.”

The Executioner nodded. “Meaning that as soon as the shooting started, Sobor reached up into the box, grabbed a couple of passports and probably a few other things to back them up, and hightailed it out of there.”

“That would be my guess,” Kurtzman agreed.

The Bell had risen into the air and was now flying low over the rocky hills. Grimaldi left the lights off, using nothing more than the light from the half moon to guide him.

“What were the two names, Bear?” Bolan asked.

“Dieter Schneider’s the German,” the computer man said. “The Swiss voter’s card and a couple of credit cards were in the name of Jean-Marc Bernhardt.”

“I take it you followed up on them?” the Executioner said.

“Yes indeed,” Kurtzman responded. “No idea where Bernhardt is, but I suspect he’s in Dieter Schneider’s suitcase, and Schneider took the early evening junket out of Tehran to Isfahan.”

Bolan smiled. “Good work, Bear,” he said. He looked out into the darkened sky as a light snow began to fall over the rocky hills. “Jack’s got us headed toward Isfahan now. Anything else?”

“Uh-huh,” Kurtzman said. “But it’s only a ninety-minute flight so he’s already been on the ground in Isfahan for a couple of hours.”

“He didn’t take any connecting flights?”

“No. At least not under Dieter Schneider or Jean-Marc Bernhardt.” The computer man paused. “And he hasn’t checked into any of the major hotels yet, either. I tapped into them, too. Of course, all that could mean anything. Or nothing. The name Dieter Schneider’s sort of the German equivalent of John Smith—there could have been a real Dieter Schneider on the Tehran to Isfahan flight. And even if it was Sobor, he may have checked into one of the dozens of unregistered inns and boarding houses in Isfahan. Or some of his cronies may have picked him up and taken him straight to another safehouse. Actually, that’s where I’d put my money if I was betting. He’s probably hooked up with more of his terrorist buddies.”

“Thanks, Bear,” Bolan said. “Stay close.”

Grimaldi continued south, hugging the hilly terrain below radar. The flight from Tehran to Isfahan was almost directly south. It would be primarily flat land they covered until they reached the mountains near Oom, but even so there were enough dips and rises to slow them down if they stayed low. What was a ninety-minute flight by plane, as Kurtzman had said, could turn into a trip of several hours in the Bell.

And each minute’s delay gave Anton Sobor more time to disappear.

“Any way we can speed things up, Jack?” Bolan asked.

Grimaldi nodded. “Sure. But not without rising up into the radar zone and taking the chance of getting shot down.”

“I think we may have to take that chance,” Bolan said. “We’re racing the clock. We don’t know what Sobor might do now that he’s on the ground. He could even pick up another new passport from a contact in Isfahan and be on the next flight to Timbuktu. Or he could fade into the woodwork there. For that matter, he might take off over land—maybe even double back to Tehran. What I’m getting at is, we don’t know where he’ll go from Isfahan. But if we don’t pick up his trail somewhere near the airport, we’re likely to lose him for good.”

“You’ve got a point,” the pilot said. “Okay, if you say so, let’s chance it. At least we’re not marked and the guns aren’t showing.” He chuckled under his breath. “Which at least means we might be able to stall them a little before they blow us to kingdom come.”

“If they pick us up, they’ll try to make radio contact first,” Bolan said.

“Well, we can hope so.” Grimaldi didn’t sound as sure as the Executioner.

“They will,” Bolan said. “They won’t be certain it’s not one of their own craft until we don’t answer their calls.”

Grimaldi nodded and began raising the helicopter higher into the air. Farther from the ragged and unpredictable terrain now, he was able to increase the speed. “Maybe I can answer their calls,” he said. “At least enough to keep them confused for a while.”

Bolan turned to look at his old friend. “They’ll be speaking Farsi, Jack,” he said. “When you don’t respond, they’ll probably switch to Arabic, which you don’t speak, either. You’ll be ordered to land—in both languages—and neither of us will even know it.” He glanced at the interior controls which operated the Stinger missile pods and the 60 mm machine gun, and saw Grimaldi looking the same way.

The Bell continued to rise, then finally darted forward, tripling its former speed. Grimaldi was still chuckling to himself, as if he knew some secret to which Bolan wasn’t privy. “We’ve still got the guns,” he said.

“And we’ll use them if it comes to that,” Bolan replied. “But they’re our last resort. Now, tell me what you aren’t telling me—whatever it is that’s got you looking like the cat that swallowed the canary.”

“Oh,” Grimaldi said. “Nothing much. Just that I actually know a few phrases in Farsi. Not a lot, but like I said, maybe enough to keep them confused long enough to buy us a little wiggle room if we need it.”

The Executioner frowned. “Where’d you pick up these ‘few phrases of Farsi’?” he asked.

Grimaldi continued to grin as the Bell flew on into the night. “I dated a Persian girl for a while a few years ago.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Grimaldi’s chest moved up and down in a chuckle. “I don’t share all of my sordid love life with you, Striker,” he said.

The Executioner smiled. No, Grimaldi didn’t kiss and tell like some high school jock in a locker room, and Bolan wasn’t the type to pry into his friends’ personal lives. So he asked no more questions. Instead he settled back into his seat. It was a relatively short flight, and they were dealing with a Third World country here. Iran didn’t have the sophisticated radar and other detection devices a country like the U.S., Russia or Great Britain employed, nor did their personnel have the same professionalism. There was every chance in the world that they’d lay the chopper skids down somewhere near Isfahan with no one the wiser.

On the other hand, Bolan reminded himself as they flew through the dark night beneath the half moon, the smart warrior never underestimated his enemy. Technology never had, and never would, replace human beings, and while they might be behind in the science department, the Iranians had proved that they were willing to fight during their eight-year war with Iraq.

There was one more aspect to the whole equation, and the Executioner was aware of it, too. New, and better, technology didn’t mean that older technology quit working. There were still people getting killed with single-action revolvers in this day of high-capacity automatic pistols, and an aircraft like the Bell could still be picked up on World War II–era radar.

The Executioner hadn’t slept since the mission began and now he closed his weary eyes. Long years, and many battles in many missions, had taught him that the wise warrior took whatever rest he could get when he could get it. It wasn’t just the ability to fight that kept a man alive during the heat of battle—it was also the ability to think sharply. And no one, no matter how tough, how smart or how well trained, thought as well when they were exhausted as they did rested.

But Bolan’s mind didn’t close as quickly as his eyelids and he found himself reasoning out the decision he had just made. He had ordered Grimaldi into the radar zone to save time, and there was no use in second guessing himself now. They’d either be spotted or they wouldn’t, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had all the faith in the world in Grimaldi’s ability to elude attack if it came to that, and knew that it made far more sense for him to try to catch a nap than to worry about it.

Besides, the real danger wasn’t being shot down—Stony Man’s ace flyboy would see to that. What worried the Executioner was the fact that, if their presence was discovered, word of it would travel fast. Which would put the cops and military in Isfahan on high alert before they even reached the city.

As if to emphasize Bolan’s concern, Grimaldi broke the silence that had fallen over the helicopter. “Isfahan isn’t quite like Tehran, you know,” he said. “The city sits on top of a high plateau in the Kuhha-Zagros. I can probably find a place to hide this baby but it may not be as easy as Rey was.”

Bolan opened one eye and saw the pilot hook a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” he said. “I’m going to sleep. Wake me when we get there. Or if anything interesting happens on the way.”

“Like, if we’re about to be blown out of the air?” Grimaldi asked with a deadpan expression.

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “That would qualify.” He drifted off, wondering what he’d do first in Isfahan if he was in Anton Sobor’s shoes.

It had been close to an hour, but seemed like seconds, when the Executioner felt Grimaldi’s hand on his shoulder, awakening him.

“Up and at ’em, Sarge,” the pilot said. “We have company.”

Bolan sat up and saw the lights of an Iranian fighter jet to the side of the Bell. Looking past Grimaldi, he saw another identical aircraft. An angry voice was shouting in a language he couldn’t understand over the radio.

Grimaldi reached out and unclipped the radio microphone from the control panel in front of him.

And Mack Bolan hoped his old friend had been serious about knowing a few phrases in Farsi.

Because if he didn’t, the helicopter stood a good chance of going down in an exploding ball of fire in the next few minutes.

CHAPTER FIVE

“The fighters picked us up about a minute ago,” Grimaldi said as Bolan sat up in his seat. “Right after the radio contact started.” He nodded toward the speaker in the control panel. “At first, the guy sounded calm. But now I’m getting the definite impression he’s running out of patience.”

The Executioner stared out the window at the airplane lights roughly a quarter mile away. In the darkness, it was impossible to tell exactly what kind of craft it was. Probably one of the old Soviet MiGs the Iranians had used for years. “You picking up anything he has to say, Jack?” he asked.

“Uh-uh,” Grimaldi said, shaking his head. “I said I could spout a few phrases in Farsi. But I can’t understand a word.”

Bolan leaned forward slightly, looking past the pilot again. Another plane flew to their left flank, and appeared to be slightly closer. But it was still impossible to make a positive ID on its type. All Bolan knew for sure was that they were being escorted by a pair of Iranian air force jets of some kind. And whatever they were, they would be armed with missiles or at least machine guns, either of which could blow the Bell right out of the sky.

“We’d better head for the mountains,” the Executioner said. “Maybe get over the border into Iraq.”

“If we can reach the mountains we won’t have to cross into Iraq,” Grimaldi said. “Once we hit the hills, I can lose them. The trick is going to be getting there in the first place if they decide they don’t want us to.”

The voice on the radio was still speaking and it had taken on a definite threatening tone. “Now might be a good time to test out whatever Farsi it is you know, Jack,” the Executioner said.

Grimaldi nodded and lifted the microphone to his lips. He began to speak, and it was obvious that he was mumbling, hoping to stall for even more time by making whoever it was on the other end think there was air interference. When he finally quit talking, the radio went suddenly silent for several seconds. Then the voice came back on with a strange, questioning tone.

Bolan silently nodded his approval of the pilot’s charade. He couldn’t understand the words the man on the other end of the radio was speaking, but his inflection made it clear that Grimaldi had, at least temporarily, stumped him. It sounded as if he was requesting that the transmission be repeated.

Grimaldi began to mutter into the mike again, making the same unintelligible sounds he’d made just a moment ago. Again, there was a long pause. Then confused voices could be heard on the other end talking among themselves. Whoever was in charge of the radio had keyed the mike open while he, and those around him, were still trying to figure out what was going on.

“What did you tell him, Jack?” Bolan asked.

Grimaldi shrugged. “I said ‘You look very pretty tonight.’ At least I think that’s what I said. It’s been a while since we dated.”

Even under the circumstances, the Executioner couldn’t help but chuckle.

A second later the voice on the other end of the airwaves spoke to them again. This time, it sounded angry rather than confused.

“Don’t know what that meant,” the Stony Man pilot said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s not the same thing she used to say when I told her that.”

“Cut the lights,” Bolan said, “then drop below them, and let’s head for the mountains.” He turned and glanced out at the plane still paralleling them on the left. “It’ll take the jets a little while to get turned around. Maybe we can make a break for it and get there before they catch up.” Beyond the wings of the Iranian jet, he could just make out the rising slopes of the Kuhha-Zagros Mountains silhouetted against the dark blue sky. They looked a long way away from where he sat. On the other hand, reaching the rugged terrain and finding a place to hide was their only hope.

Grimaldi cut the lights and suddenly they were falling through the sky. For several seconds Bolan felt the seat belt tug hard across his abdomen as his body tried to rise. Then, just as suddenly, they leveled off and made a forty-five-degree turn.

Bolan caught a flash of the lights on both sides of the Bell as they seemed to rise in the sky and fly past them. The radio man came back on the air, yelling now.

Grimaldi grabbed the microphone and spoke again. Bolan didn’t recognize these new words any more than he had the ones before. But the dispatcher evidently did, and he went absolutely berserk, screaming, yelling and making a thudding noise the Executioner suspected came from him banging the microphone up and down on the control table in front of him.

“Do I even want to know what you just said?” the Executioner wondered.

“I don’t think so,” Grimaldi answered. “I just requested that he perform a certain act on me which is still illegal in a few U.S. states and undoubtedly against the law here.” He shrugged.

The only lights on the Bell were the ones on the control panel now, and Bolan glanced at the screen as Grimaldi coaxed every ounce of power out of the little chopper, racing through the sky toward the mountains. Twisting slightly, the Executioner could see both of the Iranian aircraft circling back toward them in the sky.

The man on the other end of the radio had calmed down but hadn’t stopped speaking. Again, Bolan couldn’t understand what he said. But you didn’t need to be fluent in the language to realize that it amounted to something along the lines of “This is your last chance.”

“The plane on the left,” Grimaldi said, staring at the mirror on the side of the chopper. “You see it?”

“I see it,” Bolan said.

“Tell me when it’s directly behind us. My guess is he’s about to drop down to our level and fire.”

The Executioner glanced quickly at the pilot. “How do you know that’s what he’s going to do?”

Grimaldi shrugged again. “Because it’s what I’d do under the circumstances,” he said.

“Were you able to get a make on the two planes?” Bolan asked.

Grimaldi shook his head. “Not completely. But they’re some kind of MiGs. Specifics aren’t too important at the moment. No matter what they are, they’ll be toting enough firepower to blow us up several times over.”

The Executioner kept his eyes glued to the sky as the plane on the left finished its circle and began lining up directly behind them. The other aircraft had made the turn, too. But it stayed several hundred feet above them as all three planes flew on toward the darkened hills ahead.

“Okay, Jack,” Bolan said. “He’s on us.”

Grimaldi looked down at the radar screen just as it began to beep. “He’s firing,” the pilot said, suddenly cutting to the right. Bolan was thrown over toward the pilot, his seat belt and shoulder harness all that kept him in place. Grimaldi himself smashed into the window to his side.

A split second later something whizzed by in the night, then exploded in a shower of sparks against the side of a mountain a mile or two in the distance.

“Radar warning receiver,” Grimaldi said as he leveled the chopper off and headed for the mountains again. “I think we can safely say we’re facing something in the MiG-23 family.” He paused for a second, then added, “So hold on to your chewin’ gum. RWRs come in pairs.”

A second later another beep sounded from the screen. This time, Grimaldi threw the Bell to the left and it was Bolan whose face nearly smashed into the glass. Another missile streaked by, barely missing them, and lighting up the terrain ahead like a Fourth of July celebration.

Bolan returned his eyes to the rear and saw the Iranian MiG pull up and away. But the other craft quickly dropped through the sky and took its place.

“Two down, two to go,” Grimaldi said. He turned in his seat to face the Executioner. “This new guy, the one who’s falling in behind us now, will have literally had a bird’s-eye view of my maneuvers. Which means he’ll compensate for them.”

Bolan nodded. The Bell had scampered out of the way left, then right to avoid the first two missiles. So the pilot would pick one way or the other and lead them. He had a fifty-fifty chance each time he fired, and he had two shots.

The Executioner stared into the night. In the distance, he could just make out the lights of a city. According to the map of the area, it had to be Oom.

The beep sounded on the screen again. Grimaldi twisted them to the right, and this time the little Bell actually shimmied in the air as the missile flew past. Another giant sparkler show lit up the mountains, which were growing closer with every second.

“Okay, that one I could feel,” Grimaldi said. “We’ve been lucky so far.” He stared ahead into the night at the mountains. “We’re getting close. But this ain’t horseshoes, and close isn’t good enough.” He glanced into the mirror at the plane he knew would fire again in a matter of seconds, then squinted into the distance once more.

“The bottom line,” the pilot said, “is that we’re not going to make it. Even if we’re lucky enough to miss getting hit this fourth time, they’ll both come in on us with their machine guns.”

Before Bolan could speak, the screen beeped again. Grimaldi pulled back on the control and the Bell shot upward instead of to the side this time as another missile streaked beneath them. The temperature in the helicopter seemed to rise as a hot projectile went past. Then it raced on through the night, finally exploding on the edge of the city in the distance, and proving to the Executioner that the Iranian air force couldn’t care less about accidentally killing their own people.

Grimaldi turned to face the Executioner. “That’s the last of their missiles,” he said. “But they’ve still got their machine guns, and the closer we get to Oom, the more likely they are of missing us and killing innocents. Or hitting us and killing us, of course.”

It had been a statement rather than a question, but Bolan knew it was also a request to take action. “Do what you’ve got to do, Jack,” he said.

Stony Man Farm’s number-one flyboy didn’t have to be told twice. Suddenly and without warning, the Bell made a 180-degree turn and began flying backward through the air. The mountains and the lights of Oom had disappeared. But the lights on both MiGs could be seen as the Iranian jets raced toward them.

Reaching forward, Grimaldi pushed a button. Bolan felt the chopper vibrate slightly as the missile pod fell into firing position. A second later the little Bell shook even more as the Stinger missile took off.

“I activated a four-second detonator,” Grimaldi said. “It should blow up a few hundred feet in front of him.” He swung the Bell back around as the night sky lit up behind them. “Just wanted to show him we had some teeth of our own. Maybe that’ll drain a little of their enthusiasm.”

Bolan smiled as he watched the mirror next to him. The Stinger had indeed taken a lot of the fun out of the chase for the MiG pilots behind them. In fact, one of the planes had changed course completely and was heading back the way it had come. The other MiG was already gone.

Even the radio had finally gone silent.

Two minutes later they reached the Kuhha-Zagros Mountains. Although the MiGs were gone and no other planes had taken their place, Bolan directed Grimaldi to play it safe, staying close to the peaks where they could drop down at the first sign of further pursuit.

“I can just follow the mountains on in if you want me to,” the pilot said. “Isfahan’s sort of on the edge.”

Bolan looked at his watch. Sobor had been on the ground for at least two hours now. There was no telling where the man might be. So there was no sense in risking further exposure for nothing. “Okay, Jack,” he said. “Take the mountains past Isfahan, then come back up from the south.”

The pilot nodded.

The Executioner suddenly remembered the mustache he had applied to his upper lip earlier in the evening. With a little time on his hands before they reached Isfahan, he unfastened his seat belt, went back to the cargo area and removed it with rubbing alcohol and a towel. By the time he got back to his seat, Grimaldi was banking the helicopter back around. A small village could be seen below them. “Yazd,” the pilot said.

“That more of your dirty Farsi, Jack?” Bolan asked.

“Nope. Just the name of the town.”

Bolan reached into his jacket and pulled out the cell phone again. When he got no dial tone, he directed Grimaldi higher above the mountains. Finally the call to Stony Man went through. “We ran into a little trouble, Barb,” he told Price. “Slowed us down. There’s no telling where Sobor is now. Did Bear check again to see if Dieter Schneider might have booked another flight after he got to Isfahan?”

“He did,” Price said. “No such luck. Dieter Schneider appears to have vanished into thin air. But you might be interested in knowing that a Jean-Marc Bernhardt just checked into the Shah Abbas Hotel in downtown Isfahan.”

KITWANA ASAB STOOD on the peer, staring out at the white-capped waters of the incoming tide. It was beautiful, the way the waves rolled in toward land. They hit the side of the ship, parted and metamorphosed into thousands of tiny ripples as they moved gently on into shore.

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