Bolan stooped down and made a positive verification. The general's brother was dead, all right. Blood still oozed from the wound.

A fresh kill.

Bolan rose from examining the body.

"It doesn't play," he murmured, almost to himself. "They couldn't have made it in this far from the gate already. Not without us seeing them."

Minera couldn't seem to pull his eyes from the corpse. "If it wasn't the attackers, then who..."

But Bolan had already started away from the body, continuing on his way in the darkness toward the fighting. The chopper was still yammering from the guardhouse down the road, its chattering sound punctuated by the popping, of rifles and another handgun in the open air.

The guardhouse was holding its own, but Bolan could tell they were outnumbered. It would only be a matter of time. Unless he and Minera got there first to even things out.

Minera was at his side again, keeping stride. Bolan studied the guy from the corner of his eye as they trotted along together, heading away from the pool, traveling parallel to the opposite sides of the winding driveway.

Bolan knew that he and Minera had probably been on different sides of the fence in that last war of the Executioner's. That was against the Mafia. But that was then. This was now. Now Minera was an ally. Crazy, sure. Another twist in Bolan's life, thanks to the capricious whims of the jungle.

But Minera would be a good fighter in this battle if he was fighting for his survival, as indeed he was. Because Bolan had encountered no more formidable foe than the American Mafia, he knew now that at least he was sided with a man on whose fighting ability he could rely. Minera had lost the shakes he'd had when he'd first zoomed in on Bolan in that damned golf cart of his. The heavyset security chief even looked eager to get into the fray.

Both men were now jogging at full stride.

When it happened.

And Bolan knew they were too late.

The night air erupted with the hellfire roar of what sounded to him like a Russian-made RPG-7, and a fractured second later the guardhouse went up with an explosion of destructive flame and a thunderclap that lifted the roof off the building and blew out the windows, scattering glass and wood and human bodies into the night air.

The cloud of smoke drifting away on the breeze from farther down the driveway confirmed Bolan's guess. Only an RPG-7 smokes off a cloud like that.

The guardhouse blast echoed around the walls of the estate, then died away.

Silence.

Death stalked the hills and valleys of that walled-in hellground, and both Bolan and Minera knew it.

"Now what?" Minera growled in a low whisper.

"Get down," said Bolan. "Let me see what we're up against."

The question of what had happened to Medhi, the general's brother, would have to wait.

As Minera crouched low beside him, Bolan dropped to one knee and lifted the M1 to sight through the infrared scope. The Startron swept the acreage that undulated away from Bolan from this point.

At first he saw nothing. Whether the terrorist team had killed the general's brother back there by the pool or not, there was still no telling how fast the team commander would deploy his forces once they had gained entry past the front gatehouse and secured their escape route — or how long it would take for the individual teams to box in the house. They could already be splitting up as they advanced past the destroyed guard shack, to hit the house from different angles.

The Startron picked up three figures spread out and advancing cautiously along the left side of the pebbled driveway. Across the road, spread out in similar fashion as they approached, were another three men. And a point squad of four more were across the driveway, advancing past what was left of the guardhouse, without a moment's glance.

Bolan eyeballed AKS sniper rifles in the hands of the two flank squads. Two of the point men toted AK-47s; the other two hauled the rocket launcher gear. Ten men all told, advancing slowly but steadily in silence, never bunching together, never allowing one man to advance without a covering stance from other members of the team.

According to Brognola, there were supposed to be fourteen.

Bolan scanned upfield away from the right flank. In the greenish tint of the Startron's magnified light, he spotted more movement.

Minera's three-man cog patrol was hauling ass full tilt in from the outer environs, where they must have been patrolling when the assault had begun.

Bolan scanned back to the road. Minera's three-man patrol was approaching the Iranians on a direct collision course. But they couldn't know that. It was a heavy mismatch, with the outcome all too predictable. Those guys would die without knowing what had hit them. The Bolan response to that situation was characteristic of the man and without hesitation.

"Let's go," he grunted to Minera.

Minera was pretty sharp himself. He caught the play immediately and responded unquestioningly to Bolan's lead. The two set off at combat-quick pace along the drive, one to either side at about a 20-foot separation, advancing upon the invaders' rear. The security patrol was about a hundred yards out and closing fast.

With a bit of luck, the defenders could engineer a deadly cross-fire, which would make the contest a bit less predictable. But that was just a hope at the moment. In a firefight, anything could happen. As Bolan closed on this hot encounter, he experienced a brief flashback to another time and another war... and understood immediately why he had preferred to operate alone ever since. The unpredictability factor in combat increased geometrically with the numbers on each side. Bolan could think only for himself.

God alone knew how Minera's ragtag troops would conduct themselves in an encounter with a crack combat team. Or, for that matter, how Minera himself would react.

Bolan knew only that he would have the answer within a matter of heartbeats.

The moon was hiding behind scudding clouds, alternately lighting the scene with pale illumination just long enough to provide quick fixes on the developing scenario. The ten— man combat team was advancing slowly but purposefully across the darkened grounds, closing in on the house. They appeared to be formed into three-man squads with a point man leading a squad directly to his rear by about twenty paces, flanking squads to right and left twenty paces over, and another twenty to the rear in a wedge formation. These guys knew what they were doing. Which made the task more difficult for Bolan but certainly not impossible. He was getting cooperation from heaven... via those blessed little clouds that kept moving across the moon.

He had a quick, whispered conference with Minera, then went directly to work. The point man had evidently become aware of the approach of Minera's troops. He'd come to a halt, one hand raised high overhead in a cautionary signal. The flankers were moving discreetly forward, attention riveted to the front.

Bolan quickly seized the moment to make his move, coming up silently behind the right flank with weapons sheathed, stiletto in hand. He took the trailing flanker with a choke hold at the throat, pulling him expertly into the long blade of the stiletto. The guy died quietly in Bolan's embrace, aorta severed cleanly even as the larynx collapsed under the crushing choke hold, the departure unnoticed by his comrades. Bolan took his place and moved on with the others as the cautious advance continued.

He was a heartbeat away from tagging the next man when Minera lost his play on the other side. No discredit to the security chief — the terrain was uneven and the night alternately raven black — he stumbled or slid or did some clumsy thing to produce noise enough even for Bolan's distant awareness. The flankers on Bolan's side did not catch it but those three on the other side came around quickly with weapons at the ready.