He reached the darkness alongside the road where the Volvo had been parked just as the headlights of the limo pierced the night, Strakhov's driver making good speed despite the road's poor condition.

Bolan crouched.

The headlights missed him as the limo roared past.

The nightfighter glanced around.

Zoraya, the child and the Volvo were gone.

The staff car that raced by Bolan's hidden position had company: a camou-painted, tarp-covered two-and-a-half-ton truck with Syrian army markings rumbled along to catch up. Protection.

The troop carrier could not take the battle-rutted road as fast as the limo. Strakhov must be impatient to get Masudi to their destination.

All right.

Another chance.

The staff car disappeared again around another bend of the mountain road.

Bolan approached one of the trees, the shadows of which had hidden the Volvo from view of the road. He willed himself not to worry about Zoraya and Selim. Emotion dulled the combat edge. He reached up on the run and grabbed a sturdy branch well off the ground and hoisted himself up.

The truck upshifted as the road straightened itself out until the next bend. Good, thought Bolan, who was perched on the branch well above the line of headlights or vision from those in the cab of the truck. The noise of the acceleration would cover any noise resulting from what Bolan had in mind.

As the vehicle lumbered by beneath him, he swung gracefully from the branch to gain a footing on the step under the passenger-side door.

The nightscorcher opened the door so swiftly that the first thing the Syrian soldier riding shotgun knew of it was when Bolan used his left hand to snap him back hard while his combat knife sliced down. A fountain of blood sprayed the interior of the cab and dotted the windshield. Bolan heaved the body into the gloom.

The driver, who broke his concentration from the tortuous mountain road, reacted too late. Bolan killed him and also tossed the body into the darkness.

The slight jar when the steering wheel changed hands went unnoticed by the soldiers jouncing around in the back of the truck.

The tumbling bodies were swallowed from view in the vegetation to either side of the road before Bolan's passengers could see them.

He coaxed more power from the heap and that did get curses and shouts from the back, but nothing more. He rounded another turn in the road into a valley, and the taillights of the limo popped into view. And Bolan knew he still had a hold on this tiger of a night.

General Abdel tried not to let his fear show. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander felt himself shaking, felt shriveled in his uniform. They had not removed his handcuffs.

Masudi rode in one of the pull-down seats in the spacious tonneau of the Syrian staff car.

Three men sat across from him: a broad, bearlike man whom Masudi did not know and who was flanked by two others he recognized: the Syrian officer, General Abdel, and the GRU pig farmer, Major Kleb, who both had reputations for ambitious brutality.

Masudi eyed the stranger in the middle.

Russian, thought the IRG warlord, probably KGB.

Masudi made his appeal in his own language to the Syrian, inwardly cursing the telltale tremor he heard in his own voice.

"Am I to receive no explanation of what has happened, General Abdel? Why were my men attacked? What..." Abdel leaned forward and punched Masudi in the mouth with enough force to knock the Iranian to the floor of the jouncing car.

Masudi felt shattered teeth gouge flesh from the inside of his mouth.

"You will speak English," the Syrian snarled, "the only language known to all of us." Masudi spat chips of tooth and struggled with the language he had learned in Iran before the revolution.

"Yes, yes, of course... of course... I only wish to know..." Masudi saw Kleb glance to the man in the middle. The stranger barely nodded, and the GRU officer glared back at the bleeding Iranian.

"We are the ones to be informed, desertjackal"

"But... I do not understand..."

"Then it will all be made clear to you in Zahle," Kleb intoned with a trace of smugness. He nodded to the Syrian.

"Abdel."

"Wait!" screamed Masudi, not believing how terrifled he sounded. He had the briefest glimmer of what countless lost souls he had tortured over the years must have felt. He cowered in the corner of the tonneau.

With a snicker, General Abdel pounced, pistol drawn. The Syrian commenced pummeling the handcuffed man about the head, hitting him over and over again until Masudi lost consciousness.

Kleb watched, wishing he could see more in the dark.

Major General Strakhov appeared not to notice the beating. The KGB officer closed his eyes and leaned back against the staff car's plush upholstery. Sighing, he considered the report he must now make to the Kremlin regarding tonight's action.

Moscow would be pleased.

The thirty-minute journey to Zahle cut ever deeper into the Druse-held Shouf highlands. The terrain grew bleak, uninhabitable for miles at a time.

Bolan saw no activity amid the occasional clusters of houses they passed as he steered the Syrian deuce-and-a-half behind the taillights of the staff car. The country people had taken cover to await the dawn.

Zahle was cut from an identical mold to Biskinta, perched on the side of another mountain. But the Syrian base on the outskirts of this village showed a marked superiority to what had passed for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' security.

The Syrians had been in the country considerably longer than the Iranians and it showed in the three layers of concertina-wired perimeter and the heavily sandbagged defenses, permanent barracks and HQ buildings Bolan saw from the high ground as they approached the compound. The base was about four times the size of the one at Biskinta.

Dawn.

An hour away, maybe less.

Not much time, Bolan thought, looking at his watch.

The fighting would resume at dawn. He could feel it. The air crackled with it.

The gates in the fence opened. The captain of the guards saluted as the staff car sailed through without stopping.

Guard patrols and permanent machine-gun nests along the perimeter made the place five times tighter and harder than the one held by those Revolutionary Guard stumblebums, but the gate officer had already turned to step back into the guardhouse when the troop truck followed the limo into the base from fifty yards behind.

No one paid any attention to the indiscernible features of the driver high up in the cab.

Bolan eyeballed as much as he could from behind the wheel as he steered the troop carrier into the center of the compound past a cluster of parked Russianmade T-34 and T-55 tanks and orderly rows of Russian-made Katyusha rockets.

The limo stopped in front of the long, two-story headquarters building.

Bolan braked the vehicle to a halt some distance behind the staff car, directly in front of the end barrack of a row of similar squat structures twenty yards south of the HQ.

He reasoned that the Syrian command would have its own security in the head shed where Strakhov appeared to be taking Masudi. The men in the back of the truck would be weary from the fighting in Biskinta and, Bolan hoped, anxious to grab sack time on their return here. Their presence had only been required on the drive from Biskinta.

The blacksuit hustled away from the truck when it stopped, well before any of the Syrian troops debarked from beneath the tarp. Let them sort out the puzzle of the missing driver and his shotgun rider.