"As you wish, comrade Major General." Kleb saluted smartly and fled the room.

Leaving Strakhov alone with the dead.

And the new dawn beginning to stretch beyond the mountains to the east.

The Executioner had been about to storm through that window into Abdel's office in an attempt to save Masudi's life. At least until the Iranian spilled what he knew about a plot to assassinate the Lebanese president.

Then Bolan would deal with Strakhov.

He checked his move, though, when the door of the office flew inward and Strakhov barged in.

The penetrator on the ledge paused.

He could continue to maintain this low profile and eavesdrop. Strakhov would want Masudi alive for the same reasons as Bolan.

When Kleb killed Masudi, too fast for anyone to stop him, Bolan winced at the Russian major's miscalculation, but like Strakhov the Executioner understood that what had happened could not be undone.

He remained listening on that ledge, the Beretta poised.

The first light of dawn began to half illuminate the Syrian base. Birds chirped. The barracks beyond Bolan's line of vision started waking up.

Bolan had better than working knowledge of Russian both written and spoken, and continued to work to master it during any available moment.

He knew enough, however, to decipher the main ideas of most conversations he heard in the language and that included enough of the exchange between the two Russians in the late General Abdel's office.

Bolan now knew he could not kill the man he had come all this way to find and terminate.

The Executioner had traveled halfway around the world to this hellground and had his target under the gun, only to discover at that precise moment that The Executioner and the top savage of them all were allies with the same objective: to halt the assassination of the president of this undersized powder keg on the Mediterranean.

Bolan appreciated that ultimate stabilization of the region could only result in diplomacy. Events were overtaking themselves. There was nothing for the powder keg to do now but blow sky high. Then the diplomats could come in.

America would have to exert her influence in other ways, but it could be done. That's what diplomats did. Bolan's mission to terminate Strakhov had become Bolan's bid at making this part of the world safe for diplomacy.

As the exchange in the office ended, with Strakhov seated at the desk while Kleb scurried off, Bolan pulled back from the window and prepared to withdraw, formulating strategy on the move. He pulled back to the open window along the ledge.

He knew where he would be at noon today, if he lived that long.

Right here.

Strakhov had called an emergency summit of all the terrorist factions. The Syrian base at Zahle would be crawling with more of these vermin than Bolan could ever hope or expect to find in one place at one time.

High noon in Zahle?

Yeah, Bolan would be there.

Bet on it.

In the meantime, he intended to devote his energies to what had suddenly made him an ally of the cannibal chief he had come here to kill.

He had those blueprints snatched from Biskinta and the lead from Strakhov of an unmarked government car tonight where it had no business being at an Iranian camp in the Shouf, well behind Syrian and Druse lines.

Strakhov's presence in Lebanon indicated how important the Kremlin considered his mission to consolidate these terrorist factions. It would be in the Soviets interest to eradicate the more volatile, unpredictable element like the Disciples of Allah, giving Syria carte blanche to escalate hostilities against Israel, paving the way for an expansion of control into the Persian Gulf. Some thirty thousand Israeli troops had already been massed along the Israel-Lebanon border.

In those terms Bolan recognized the magnitude of his own mission in blocking this power play, yet he also appreciated that even when he hit Strakhov and, damn right, Bolan intended to live that long and damn large while he was at it. The Executioner would only be hacking off one more tentacle of a hydra he had given up everything else to fight.

He would find a way.

He would find Zoraya and little Selim, too.

But first he had to get the hell out of Zahle.

At least General Masudi had not bothered to tell Strakhov of the blacksuited nightfighter who interrupted that briefing of the Disciples of Allah before they could leave Biskinta.

Bolan now knew their mission could only have been part of the Shiite assassination plot to kill the president. Masudi probably mistook the commando in blackface as one of the Syrians' strike force.

Bolan almost made the open window along that second-story ledge of the headquarters building. He intended to retrace his route at least part of the way off the base.

The sun would not show itself for a while although the morning was getting lighter by the second. There were still shadows and gloom and the eye had to strain to discern things.

A three-man sentry patrol of Syrian soldiers rounded the near side of the building when the penetrator had only three or four seconds to go to reach that open window and disappear out of sight. The soldiers were marching abreast, AK-47'S slung over their shoulders. The man in the middle gazed up almost idly at the lighted window of General Abdel's office and the other two looked with him. Just one of those things.

Two minutes earlier it would have been dark enough for the nightstriker to go undetected from down there, but Bolan had stayed too long in the heart of the enemy camp.

The sentries saw him.

Bolan jumped off the ledge feet first into the trio of soldiers before any of them could utter a sound or swing their rifles up at the blacksuited blur that descended upon them.

He could have attempted to pick them off from his perch with the Beretta he had that much of an advantage before the soldiers saw him. But he knew Strakhov, in that office, would hear the silenced chugging of the Beretta, and Bolan much preferred to keep this as quiet as possible until the appropriate moment.

Two of the soldiers blocked Bolan's fall when the heel of each boot caught a man in the forehead with enough force to impact skullbone deep into brain matter, rendering those two instantly lifeless.

The momentum of the fall carried Bolan into a somersault, which he came out of just as the third soldier managed, while opening his mouth to shout an alarm, to begin tracking his AK on Bolan.

Bolan moved lightning fast, his left foot coming up in a high martial-arts kick that deflected the soldier's assault rifle, knocking it from the man's hands.

Bolan regained his balance and jabbed his right hand straight and hard in another thrust to crush the soldier's Adam's apple, cutting off the warning before it began. Then The Executioner brought his left hand down in a hard chop, breaking the man's neck, and the sentry collapsed on top of the other two, not quite as bloody but just as dead.

Bolan took off, running across the tarmac toward the Russian tanks and munitions he had spotted coming in. He knew those tanks would be rolling in another hour or two, carrying more death in the world so the cannibals could grab a few more inches on the world map.

A much better use for those war machines would be as a diversion, Bolan decided. He extracted a wad of wrapped plastique as he moved toward them through the growing light of approaching dawn.

The motor pool sat next to that Soviet weaponry, he recalled, and most of the base security had been deployed along the perimeter.

A two-man patrol emerged from between the rows of parked tanks when Bolan had only fifty paces to go. They saw him in the dawn's early light. They were holding their AK'S at port arms. The two rifles leveled as one on the figure in blacksuit, the Syrian soldiers diving sideways.