"Medhi did not betray you," said Bolan. "He was too dependent on you for drugs to ever break away. And he died heroically. He suspected Rafsanjani of informing on you. He warned me to beware of a traitor in your ranks. He wanted to protect you at all times, general. That is, he wanted to protect his drug source.

"But he wouldn't tell me names because I guess he was afraid of Rafsanjani, too. He probably went up to his room and got himself junked out. But instead of relaxing him, the junk just made him more paranoid. He must have decided that telling me about the traitor was not enough. He ended up stumbling outside again, looking for Rafsanjani with a stiletto. He was out of his league. Rafsanjani killed him instead."

The general turned slowly in his wheelchair and looked up at the man before him. "I await your denial, Abbas."

Rafsanjani only glared at Bolan. He seemed wound in on himself, ready to explode outward, sizing his options.

"He can't deny it," Bolan growled. "It's all true. He has access to your funds, doesn't he?"

Nazarour's eyes did not leave Rafsanjani. "Abbas handles all of my finances. I trusted him implicitly."

"Then that's his motive. He's greedy. He waited until the last minute. Then he contacted Tehran. And part of his price for fingering you was that he specify exactly when the hit was to be made. That allowed him to plant the cyanide canisters to nullify your security."

Rafsanjani had judged his options.

He moved.

He darted to the left, pawing beneath his jacket and coming up with a handgun. He brought the weapon up in Bolan's direction as he cut a sharp angle away from the man in black.

Bolan recognized the gun being pulled on him.

It was his own Beretta, loaned the night before.

The mighty AutoMag tracked upward and delivered one final load of thunder and death from Bolan's fist, spitting a 250-grain skull crusher that did just that. Rafsanjani never fired the Beretta. His near-headless body continued to run a few more paces before collapsing like a man pushing himself too hard and suddenly needing a long rest.

Bolan lowered the .44, holding it at his side. Carol Nazarour spoke first, staring at the latest kill in this night and dawn of slaughter.

"Oh, my God," came the lady's voice. "Thank God...."

Bolan couldn't have agreed more.

He walked over and retrieved his Belle, which was still clasped in Rafsanjani's fingers. Then he walked back to the general.

Nazarour couldn't seem to take his eyes off the dead body of his aide.

"I was a fool," he said, and Bolan detected genuine regret in the Iranian's voice. "I have never trusted Medhi because of his addiction. Abbas played on this. He convinced me of my own brother's guilt. After I gave him shelter and trusted him...."

"Rafsanjani saw his chance and he took it, and he didn't give a damn about trust," said Bolan. "That's something a man like you ought to understand, General." He nodded to the Sky Terrier, which had idled to a stop thirty feet away. "There's your plane. Get the hell out of our country."

The STOL's hatch and stairway were lowered. A man emerged. An Iranian. The guy wore civilian clothes, yet he had about him an unmistakably military bearing.

But there were no weapons in sight.

It was, yeah, only a pickup.

As Carol Nazarour had said: Thank God.

While Bolan and Carol watched, the man from the STOL crossed to the general and offered a sharp salute, which Nazarour returned. The general spoke something in his native tongue.

The man nodded, stepped behind the wheelchair, and wheeled Nazarour around and off toward the STOL, which they boarded.

General Nazarour never looked back at the woman who had been his wife.

Moments later, the strange craft dramatically lifted off the ground, banking in an easterly direction toward the ocean.

Probably toward a waiting yacht, thought Bolan.

Toward another siege against the world.

Bolan was thinking that he should have blown the man away. In a different time, maybe he would have done so. A guy like Nazarour should not be given a diplomatic cloak to legitimize his savagery. But he was wearing one this time, and Bolan had to honor it.

The general's STOL disappeared beyond the hospital district skyline, as though into some new slice of time and space, leaving the realities behind. Bolan sighed and allowed his mind to play with those realities for a moment. Minera, too, had disappeared.

Unmarked federal sedans were clustered at both entrances to the bloodied airfield, awaiting their cue for entry. A hushed crowd of civilians was beginning to form beyond the fence, drawn by the gunfire.

And, as though from another time and place, Carol Nazarour approached, still wrapped in the same leather coat, she'd been wearing when Bolan first saw her — was it just last night? Another time and place, yeah. Aeons ago.

Many dead men ago. She told him in a breathless little voice, "Thank you, Colonel. Many, many thanks."

Bolan smiled at her with eyes only as he lifted the transceiver to his head and spoke into it. "This is Stony Man One. All clear here."

Brognola's somber tones bounced back instantly. "Okay. We're moving. Where's Minera?"

"Gave 'im a white flag," Bolan told him. "Guess he took it."

There was urgency in Brognola's voice as he replied, "You may want to take it back. I've got two words for you: Arnie Farmer."

Arnesto "the Farmer" Castiglione had been the big boss of the Eastern seaboard from Jersey to Florida when Bolan executed him during the Mafia wars.

Bolan's voice was cold and clipped as he responded to that. "Cordon the field. Give me a sieve as fine as you can manage."

"You got it," Brognola assured him.

Bolan told the lady. "Stay put, right here. They'll take care of you." He brushed her cheek lightly with the back of his hand, then bent to kiss her quickly.

"Thank you again," she whispered.

But Bolan did not hear. He was already moving swiftly across the battlefield, seeking a rendezvous with his past.

Time out of sync, yeah. That warp of space and time was right here, right now. Minera was carrying it, not Nazarour. And Mack Bolan intended to find it.

Arnesto Castiglione, or "Arnie Farmer," had been one of those primal American savages who built an empire with jungle cunning, sheer ferocity, and untempered greed. Sometimes also known as "the Lord of Baltimore," the Farmer had "domesticated" the entire U.S. East Coast from New Jersey south by the time Mack Bolan first came onto the guy. He was one of the strongest Mafia bosses in the country, virtually uncontested by the law or the lawless, and he had become accustomed to the kind of absolute power that turns politicians and industrialists, bankers and businessmen, labor and management alike, into puppets.

The common wisdom of the day had Arnie destined to become Capo di tutti Capi, or Boss of All the Bosses — and probably he would have, except for Bolan's explosive entry into the equation.

He removed the Farmer early in the Mafia wars, but so strong was the man's empire, so well stocked with able and ambitious lieutenants who kept rising to power, that it was among the last to fall into disarray under Bolan's determined assaults.

And, of course, the very turf now beneath Bolan's feet had been the heartland of the Castiglione empire. So it had required no great leap of imagination to understand Brognola's terse two-word report concerning the status of Minera as some dangerous echo of the Arnie Farmer empire.

Bolan caught up with the guy inside an A&E hangar. He was stumbling into a pair of white service coveralls that had just been removed from the freshly dead body of a mechanic who unluckily had found himself in a sound wave of that echo from the past.