Bolan's uneasiness about the mission gnawed some more at his gut.
"Let's have some names, you two."
"That's not acting very appreciative after all we just did for you," the blonde piped up from the back seat. "I'd say we saved your lives back there."
Grimaldi finished his smoke and snubbed it out in the ashtray.
"I guess my buddy and I are sort of wondering about that too, sweetheart."
The man next to Bolan pocketed his handkerchief.
"Hey, when we saw you guys in trouble..."
"Names," Bolan repeated.
The guy gulped audibly.
"Ah, yeah, okay... Chuck Talbot is my handle. This is my wife, Ellie."
Ellie spoke up from the back.
"Those soldiers wanted you guys real bad. How about that?"
Chuck appeared not to notice her question.
"Turn right at this corner," he told Bolan. "Our place is the second entranceway on the right."
Bolan made the turn.
None of this played right, and that's why he had no choice but to see what these two had in mind.
"Whoever you guys are, you can stay with us until it's dark," Ellie offered. "Then I guess you'll want to leave, right? Neither of you looks like a couple hundred night patrols would stop you, do they. Chuck?"
She had a candid style, not too brassy but ballsy enough, and Bolan liked her.
He hoped she would not die tonight.
The narrow side street onto which Bolan steered the Mercedes had a shaded exclusiveness about it, the incredible afternoon sun shielded by evenly planted oleanders that met overhead; a street lined with private villas behind ten-foot-high walls.
The heat and sweat and dying could have been a thousand miles away, Bolan reflected. He steered the Mercedes through a break in the wall.
A crushed-limestone driveway circled around a fountain that burbled merrily in front of a two-level Mediterranean-style residence, the grounds shaded by more oleander and date palms. The walls assured complete privacy.
Bolan braked the car and switched off the ignition beneath a carport at the front entrance of the home.
Talbot cleared his throat.
"Ah, maybe some tall cool drinks would loosen everybody up, huh? Come on in. It's a sort of temporary abode, you might say, but we stocked her up with all the comforts of home, if you know what I mean, right, Ellie?"
Ellie did not answer.
Bolan studied the house. He knew Grimaldi would have Talbot covered with the Ingram from the back seat.
"Anyone in there waiting for us?" he asked Talbot.
The American appeared more relaxed.
"Nope, just me and Ellie, and it's about time we had some homegrown company, if you know what I mean."
Ellie made an unladylike snort that could have meant anything, opened her door and started from the car.
"So what are we waiting for, gentlemen? Dodging bullets makes me thirsty."
They alighted from the car and entered the house and only towering Mount Damavand saw them.
The roomy, high-ceilinged interior had a chilly, aseptic, unlived-in look, thought Bolan. He followed the three inside and shut the front door behind him, Big Thunder still in his right fist.
"This way, gang," Talbot beckoned cheerily from where he headed the small group.
Talbot stepped sprightly through a doorway off the right of the entrance foyer, Ellie following her husband.
Grimaldi, behind Ellie, glanced at Bolan, his MAC-l0 unholstered.
Bolan nodded and Grimaldi returned the nod and went on in, striking up his standard easygoing patter to the husband and wife.
"Quite a place, yeah, quite a place. Didn't know they treated Americans so good over here."
Bolan noted another archway leading to a living room and dining room opposite this den-type room. He detected no signs of habitation about the house; no magazines, no personal belongings in sight anywhere.
"Sort of ungentlemanly," Grimaldi continued to Talbot, "letting your better half climb that roof while you sat in the car, I mean, don't cha think, sport?"
Bolan stepped last into the den, which was dominated by a well-stocked liquor cabinet by the far wall.
Ellie answered Grimaldi without hesitation.
"I'm the one who suggested 1 go up to that roof. I thought it would go better if one of their soldiers stopped me. This is not a liberated country, you know. Sexually, I mean. They would not have searched a woman; they would not imagine a woman could be involved."
Bolan positioned himself with his back near a wall that afforded him full view of t he room and entrance and a portion of the hallway outside the door.
Grimaldi took a similar position across the room.
"And what are you involved in?" asked Bolan. "I want to hear it all. Now."
The blonde avoided Bolan's icy gaze. She deferred to her husband for the first time.
Talbot paused at an end table beside a couch and opened a cigarette case, took one out, tapped and lighted it. He looked like a man considering several replies, settling on the most direct.
"Why, I'm an arms dealer, old buddies, or hadn't you guessed? I've always preferred 'gunrunner,' actually. A little more romantic, if you know what I mean." He turned his back to them and started to the liquor cabinet. "Now, what will it be, gentlemen?"
"The truth," Bolan growled. "If you know what I mean."
Talbot turned very, very slowly to stare across the room at the wide muzzle of the long-barreled stainless-steel hand cannon extended from Bolan's straight-armed aim.
Talbot chuckled without conviction.
"Hey, dude... ah, what's the idea? The only reason I'm even confiding in you at all is... them soldiers chasing you and all. I mean, you guys aren't exactly on the up and up yourselves, if you know what I... ah, are you? Maybe we can do some business?"
"I'll explain this to you just once," Bolan growled, his arm unwavering, AutoMag trained between Talbot's eyes. "You could be arms dealers and that could explain why two citizens of the most hated nation in Iran get vip treatment and a cabinet full of liquor that is strictly forbidden in this country, but it won't explain what put the lady here on that roof at the exact moment we needed help the most."
Grimaldi, his Ingram at his side, watched Mrs. Talbot closely.
"With a rope ladder, yet."
The blonde's chuckle sounded like rocks in a glass in the brittle silence. She regarded Chuck.
"It appears our guests have been underestimated by our superiors. I knew this was a foolish plan."
The man at the bar sighed resignedly and seemed to relax. He stared unblinking into the wide-bored AutoMag.
"I am Major Yuri Steranko of the KGB," he told Bolan. He nodded to the blonde. "This is my assistant, Tanya Yesilov."
The lady moved with a dancer's grace to stand between Bolan and her "husband."
She stared into the AutoMag's muzzle and into the eyes of the gunman behind it.
"And what will you do now, Mack Bolan? Execute us?"
4
KGB: The Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti; the Soviet Union's Committee for State Security.
More dangerous than the Mafia had ever been because these gangsters mask their lust for power beneath a network Bolan recognized as the most sophisticated terrorist apparatus in history.
Bolan held a most personal blood debt against the KGB.
Until recently, Bolan had commanded a covert, White House-sanctioned antiterrorist force that operated worldwide to curb a terrorist tide that threatened to drown the civilized countries of the world in a very uncivilized bloodbath.
Bolan's twenty-plus successful missions aimed at thwarting this orchestrated menace to the Free World impressed upon him that world terrorism in fact was a simmering volcano.
In fact it burned red-hot with nothing less than world exploitation, a goal that grew ever closer to becoming reality. A realization struck home tragically when the "volcano" itself — the KGB-staged an alm
ost successful commando raid on Bolan's base. Stony Man Farm, in rural Virginia near America's capital.
The KGB-organized assault team was repelled, but the cost to' the Stony Man operation and to Bolan himself was staggering. Good people, good friends in Bolan's fight, died during the attack, including April Rose, the Farm's projects coordinator and the woman Bolan had loved and still did.
Bolan could never conceive of a soul such as April's, that had lived so large, as ever being dead. She lived in the heart of this soldier and would forever.
In a way Bolan felt that this war of his, against an evil so widespread it would confound the average person, had nothing to do with anything like revenge. But deep inside, with all efforts to rationalize his motivations aside, the big warrior knew that just a small part of what he did may have been motivated by that savage emotion.
Bolan, however, was hardly average by any stretch of the imagination.
The U.S. Army had trained this fighting man well, both in the jungles of Nam and during his antiterrorist wars.
The aftermath of the Stony Man Farm attack had seen the Executioner unmask a KGB spy planted at White House level. For Bolan there was no other course but to terminate the sleazeball who had pulled the strings resulting in the attack and April's death. And after that he had seen no alternative but to pursue this spreading cancer, this KGB.
Enough good people had already tried that, sure, but America's espionage apparatus has never recovered from the misuses of the Nixon years.
The CIA, the FBI, the NSA and all the rest had their operations brought into the light for all to study, including the cannibals in the Kremlin. These people talked "arms limitations" and the like when it suited them while they subjugated more and more of the world map for their dreamed-of world slave state.
These Soviet terrormongers guffawed up their sleeves at how stupid America continued to dig its own grave.
The Russian agent uncovered and executed by Bolan in the White House had meant to chip away from within at what little effectiveness remained.
Bolan terminated the guy and declared his intention to take on the KGB with or without official sanction.
He had realized since Vietnam that the meek would never inherit a savage earth; in fact, they were losing it inch by inch to the savages of the Mafia, of the Kremlin and of the terrorist networks who had no use at all for laws except to turn them on victims afraid to back up their laws.
Power, money and grab for both is the name of the cannibal's game, taking whatever he wants from anyone not strong enough to fight back, be it a defenseless nation or a defenseless elderly woman on an inner-city street.
Bolan drew no distinction between terrorists, KGB and the Mafia, except the terrorist and KGB hoods had the savvy to cloak their acts behind smoke screens of rhetoric.
The Executioner knew that anyone who didn't think the savages were winning need only compare the world map of today with one of thirty years ago. The contrast was stark and there for all to see.
Only a blind man or someone with nefarious intentions could not discern the threatening magnitude of what fired Mack Bolan's soul to undertake this most dangerous mile of a dangerous life: democracies, governments of the people, disappearing with alarming, increased regularity.
The soldier well understood that it would not be long before the cancer began eating at America's borders from the south. No one disagreed with this; it is fact. Bolan had seen the process with his own eyes in enough hellgrounds around the world to know, but a powerful government hog-tied by popularity-poll politicians and intimidated by the myth of "world opinion" seemed helpless to do anything about it.
And this is why Executioner Bolan saw no other course of action than the one he took: the very unsanctioned private war that had earned him Priority Number One on the Terminate On Sight lists of Communist and Western spy agencies, including the KGB and its seven hundred thousand agents worldwide.
Bolan's one-man war was called crazy by almost everyone.
Combat specialist Bolan, however, and the few like Grimaldi with whom he remained in contact, knew far better.
Bolan had fought some "crazy" wars before, first against the cannibalism of communism in Vietnam, then in another "crazy" one-man war against the Mafia that had brought that behemoth of savagery to its knees; then against world terrorism, whose network he had crippled beyond repair or reunification with the help of his Stony Man Team and his government-sponsored combat units, Phoenix Force and Able Team.
April was gone now.
Dammit.
And the ones responsible would pay.
Not for revenge, uh-uh.
Bolan had spent enough time in Russia, had met and befriended enough good people in that sprawling gulag, for him not to mistake the power mongers in the Kremlin for the citizens under their heel in Russia and elsewhere. Nor did he mistake the KGB as merely the "sword and shield of the Soviet Union" as one Kremlin boss went on record as labeling it.
The KGB's activities in the name of socialist expansionism were as capitalistic as could be; billions a year, extorted from Soviet-occupied and satellite countries, funneling through a Mafialike pyramid setup into the Swiss bank accounts of a select few boss savages who would feel right at home in any Mafia boardroom.
No damn difference at all.
And if no one else was willing, soldier Bolan saw it as his duty to turn away from his government and take on the unbelievably impossible odds.
Seven hundred thousand to one.
Some odds, yeah.
It was a war Bolan knew he would not, could not win.
Not with his own government against him.
But a good soldier does not shirk his duty, and Bolan would continue this war of attrition. He would cut that seven hundred thousand down some.
Not for revenge, no.
This Executioner waged his war everlasting because he valued life. He was raised with the American ideals of peacefulness and respect of human life implanted in him from as far back as he could remember, and he still valued those ideals.
He was a gentle man who lived in a not so gentle world. The continual inner conflict of this warrior's soul was that he was an aware man with a reverence for life, and yet his own existence was turbulent and his war everlasting because of that reverence. But however distasteful in the eyes of civilized man, or, indeed, his own eyes, by God, Bolan would carry on.
Grandiose justification for wholesale slaughter, his critics called it from their safe, cozy sidelines well back from where the Executioner waded through rivers of blood. He was the one who trod the front lines to keep those critics safe from a savage world beyond the artificial existence they lived in.
This Executioner, living a sentence of death, walked his last bloody mile on earth doing what must be done; not exultantly but regretfully.
To believe in something is one thing, Bolan knew; to be willing to die for something is the true measure of commitment and a life lived large to the last heartbeat.
This Executioner knew no other way.
He attacked evil wherever he felt his presence could be beneficial, not limiting his operations to the KGB exclusively, his war taking him to every corner of the world since breaking away from government sanction; from the jungles of Cambodia to the plains of Kansas.
Bolan financed his operations with a "war chest" appropriated from the cannibals whose operations he destroyed. The few well-hidden links to his past, intel sources like Hal Brognola, Stony Man Farm's White House liaison, and "Bear" Kurtzman, the Farm's computer whiz, forever wheelchair-ridden by enemy fire the night of the attack that took April, aided and abetted Bolan's wildcat missions.
Bear continued to oversee operations at the Farm, which continued despite Bolan's hitting into the cold on his own.
Brognola remained as White House liaison.
And Grimaldi, ever the ace in the hole, like right now in Teheran.
Bolan knew, though, that for the most part, the hardest part, this bloody last mile,
could only be his own and he would have it no other way.
And now Blood Road had brought him to Hell Town itself.
Bloody Teheran.
And the KGB, again, where Bolan had not expected them.
This Executioner expected and anticipated only one certainty at this point.
Teheran would get bloodier before Bolan finished with it.
5
Whether or not I terminate you two here and now depends on what you have to say," Bolan told Tanya Yesilov.
He lowered Big Thunder slightly so the muzzle was not pointing between the blond lovely's clear brown eyes.
Grimaldi held his Ingram aimed at Yuri Steranko.
The atmosphere in the den pulsed with tension.
Steranko stepped next to the woman who claimed to be his wife. She stood facing the Executioner.
Steranko ignored the sweat beads along his hairline. The man who had called himself "Chuck Talbot" stared at the guy with the AutoMag, trying to discern something indiscernible in eyes like blue chips of death.
"We are mortal enemies, you and us." Steranko spoke quietly. "Why should Mack Bolan, the Executioner, spare the lives of two agents of the KGB?"
Grimaldi clucked his tongue.
"You sound real anxious to die, comrade."
"I am a realist. I would appreciate an answer."
"I'll take the answers," Bolan growled. "No more dodges. Talk, one or both of you. If you know anything about me, you know I don't bluff. Do yourselves a favor and believe I'm not bluffing now."
"I think, Yuri," the blonde purred, "that to cooperate with these gentlemen at this juncture would be in keeping with our orders." She studied Bolan. "I did not toss that rope ladder to you a short while ago simply so that you could put a bullet in my head, dear sir."
"Start with that, then. You know who I am. You were in the right place at the right time. You know why I came to Teheran?"
Tanya nodded.
"You came to kill someone who needs killing. Our orders were and remain to monitor your activities."
"You didn't trail us to that rooftop. I'd have spotted a pair like you. You knew I'd be there."
"An informer," Grimaldi grunted.
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