The Executioner had turned away and disappeared into the gloom.

The nightfighter had not heard the lady's parting shot, whispered soft as a kiss after him.

"May Allah guide you, angel of death. You deliver His vengeance."

Bolan intended to play this penetration soft until he could isolate the commander, Masudi, and do all the damage possible before pulling out and leaving the Revolutionary Guards in total confusion. He had faith that such a hit by one man against such a sizable force had a damn good chance of succeeding, considering the hour.

He could see lights on in the building, but except for the sentries at the gates and foot patrols along the perimeter, no one stirred at the base. The guards would not be at their best at this hour.

And, of course, Bolan had faith in himself.

He had been doing this type of thing for nearly twenty years in one capacity or another from Vietnam to the present.

He understood the risks, the vagaries of such an audacious hit at the heart of the enemy. Talk about vagaries: the Disciples of Allah; an Iranian sadist; something about an assassination; and a KGB boss somewhere in the night with an armored column of Syrians.

Nothing could be planned on a hit such as the one Bolan now contemplated.

He clutched the silenced Beretta in his right fist and came in low at the wire fence, crouching to the base of it. He chose the darkest point between two of the nearest spotlights mounted atop a line of poles evenly spaced along the inside of the perimeter.

He tapped the fence lightly, tentatively. It wasn't electrified. Good.

From a pocket of the blacksuit he produced a miniature set of wire cutters made of a special alloy. He snipped a passage through the fence in seconds.

During his recon he had timed the movement of the sentry patrols. He gave himself another ninety seconds to cross to the back wall of the building.

He hustled the distance, taking his biggest chance, but he met no interference. Along the way he skirted a blacktop tarmac crowded with weaponry, armored personnel carriers, tanks, multiple rocket launchers mounted in the beds of camou — striped trucks — Russian hardware shipped from North Korea by way of Syria to Lebanon as "farm implements." He briefly considered the advisability of planting some plastique amid all this war machinery. But he could not discount the possibility that he might accomplish all he wanted and still withdraw undetected until his work was discovered in the morning. That would be ideal if Strakhov wasn't here and the track led somewhere else.

He almost made the shadows at the back wall of the headquarters building when three bearded soldiers in Iranian Revolutionary Guard uniform of hooded parka, knit hat and camou fatigues stepped from the back door of the building toting assault rifles. The Executioner figured they were sentries on their way to relieve one of the foot patrols.

Bolan saw them well before the Shiite fanatics saw his shadow emerge at them from the night. Then three sets of eyes widened in panicky reaction, and three mouths started to curse or shout something.

But before their rifles could swing up, Bolan knelt in a two-handed shooting crouch and the Beretta quietly sneezed its 9mm death buzzers.

The 3-round death burst sent the trio tumbling off their feet, piling lifelessly into one another.

Bolan continued past without slowing, gaining the door the three men had just stepped from. As he opened the door he realized he could save the play if he moved fast enough.

He found himself in a hallway leading to the front foyer of what appeared to have been a private home before the cannibals moved in and commandeered the building from its owners.

An IRG member stepped into the hallway inquiringly, drawn by the sounds of the commotion outside in the early-morning silence.

The soldier met Bolan eye to eye.

Bolan didn't stop for this one, either. His left hand grabbed the guy's throat, and he rammed the man's head backward against the doorframe hard enough to kill him.

The soldier collapsed, blood trickling from his ears and matted hair to the wood behind him.

Bolan extended his right arm through the doorway of the Orderly Room. As he sailed past he drilled two sleepy-eyed soldiers who started to get up but plopped right back down with tunnels cored through their heads.

The Executioner kept moving.

He reached the foyer and started up some stairs he found there.

The lights he'd seen from this house had come from both levels.

He fed a fresh clip into the Beretta, taking the treaders three at a time.

Survival depended solely on how fast he moved. His presence had only been detected by those he killed. But those bodies could be discovered anytime. And the patrolling sentries would soon begin to worry about their reliefs' delay.

The hallway on the second level was lined with closed doors. Through an archway to Bolan's right dim light filtered into the corridor along with a male voice chanting something in Arabic.

Bolan approached the archway, pressing himself to the wall. No one showed his face as Bolan stealthily breached the distance, the Beretta still in his fist.

The men beyond that passageway must have felt secure with the guards outside and downstairs in the Orderly Room.

The only way this thing played to Bolan was that something important had to be going down for 3:30 A.m. activity.

He reached the archway and crouched well below eye level of anyone in the room around the entrance frame.

The voice in Arabic took on a cadence like a prayer.

Bolan stole a glance around the edge of the wall.

His trained eye sized it all up with one sweep.

Six men.

Ib Masudi.

The slight stature of the Iranian commander did nothing to lessen the cruelty that glittered from eyes like black marbles separated by a hook nose. The Shiite general was in full IRG uniform.

That made this an official briefing.

The four men across a table from General Masudi were in mufti but wore Disciples of Allah armbands. One of them was an older man with gray in his beard, most likely the Disciples' military liaison. The others were younger, with the wary body language of street fighters. The terrorists and the general all wore holstered pistols.

They had unrolled and were studying large pieces of paper on the low table.

Blueprints.

Bolan took in the sixth man in the room, then the room itself, and he knew he had it.

Prayer rugs on the floor.

The sixth, a white-bearded old man doing the chanting and wearing traditional djellaba, was unarmed and clasped a Koran to his breast as he spoke fervently.

The Disciples of Allah and Masudi listened intently with downcast eyes to their mullah giving the blessing before another suicide squad stole into the night to bring terror.

Not this time.

The Executioner straightened and stepped from concealment into the room, the Beretta tracking on Masudi, who first noticed the grim specter.

The general's expression warned the others and they looked up, too. In the next heartbeat everyone scrambled for weapons, fanning away from each other with a flaring of survival instinct. The mullah faded back into a corner, wishing he could become invisible.

Then an earsplitting explosion from outside disrupted the confrontation.

Windows blew inward and the house shuddered to its foundations.

The sounds of gunfire opened up outside before the rumbling of the first explosion ebbed, followed by a cacophony of slaughter that meant only one thing.

The Iranian base had fallen under attack by someone other than The Executioner.

With Bolan caught right in the middle.

The action in the room resumed even as flying shards of glass, blown inward from the windows by the first explosion, sliced through the air.