The general paused. His grim face suggested a measure of wisdom, despite its dissolute features. Bolan knew there was truth to what he was saying, knowledge born of the observation of history.
"No," continued Nazarour, "I am not the victim of Iranian spies. I am the victim of someone around me here, someone who wants me dead. My enemy is within my own security...."
Suddenly there were sounds from beyond the study windows, outside in the night.
Dangerous sounds.
Shouts, then the rattle of automatic weapon fire.
The report of answering fire.
More shouting.
Bolan swung toward the bar, regaining his weaponry. "So much for Persian destiny," he muttered. "We'll have to continue our conversation later, General. In the meantime, I would advise holding hands with those two bruisers outside."
"It is happening so soon?" Nazarour's knuckles were white as he clutched the sides of his wheelchair.
"Maybe they're shooting rabbits," grunted the big guy as he slung the strap of the Uzi over his shoulder, ensuring that the gun would ride in the small of his back. He belted up with his collection of garrotes and other silent killing instruments, plus the custom-made British Special Service style flash and concussion rifle grenades.
"I guess you might all kill each other this night," he added. "And I'm in the goddamned middle. That is the special ferocity factor of this new war," he muttered to himself. But he was keen to begin.
He next unzipped the leather carrying case, hoisting and rapidly checking the action on the M1. The impressive weapon sported the Smith & Wesson Startron passive infrared night sight. The Startron magnified what little light there was, so that a warrior could easily pinpoint his position in combat in relation to anyone using an active night spot. The Startron/M1 combo would serve well tonight. The Ml fired 150-grain .30-caliber ammunition and threw it hard and fast, so that a 600— to 800-yard first round kill was not only possible but probable. Bolan always preferred accuracy — one round, one kill — as opposed to spraying bullets all over the place. In addition to an automatic mode that enabled him to fire short bursts if necessary, the M1 was equipped with a rifle grenade attachment.
With the .44 AutoMag riding at his right hip, the big warrior was ready for extreme action. And he had armed himself fully in less than twenty seconds.
Bolan had to move fast.
He must meet the assault head on, with full fury.
He didn't waste time with any parting comment to the general. He hit the light switch, plunging the room into darkness, and stepped out into the hallway.
The guards were up, their guns were out, but they seemed instinctively to eye Bolan for instructions. His orders were curt and sharp: kill all the house lights, get everyone in the main group accounted for, and sit on them.
The guards obeyed with alacrity.
So much for preparations.
There was more firing from outside and the sound of a small engine being gunned to its max, approaching the house.
The numbers were completely gone now.
The attack was on.
Bolan left the house to engage the enemy.
11
The small engine being gunned that Bolan had heard from inside was that of Minera's souped-up golf cart. The small contraption came flying full speed around the darkened Olympic-size swimming pool and shuddered to a wild fishtailing stop on the cobblestone walk near Bolan, who had hurried down the front steps to meet Minera.
The security honcho's surliness had disappeared. His eyes were bugged out. There was a sliver of blood along his right cheek. Bolan could see that the back of the cart was riddled with bullet holes.
The head cock leaped from the cart, holding his Dirty Harry .44 and eyeing Bolan with profound relief.
"Am I glad to see you! All hell's broke loose!"
The guy was close to losing it. Bolan spoke to calm him, quietly yet forcefully.
"You're throwing a party and not inviting me? What happened?"
"Damned if I know," Minera grunted, making an attempt to pull himself together. "I was out checking on the dog patrol. On my way back in, I couldn't see anybody moving around in Gatehouse Two. I was gonna pull in and take a look, but I never got that far. Some guys were already coming around from the front gate on foot.
"We saw each other at the same time, and they opened fire. I got a few rounds off, then got the hell out of there to find you. I don't know what the hell went down out front, but I'd say we've been invaded!"
"What about the guardhouse on the driveway?" Bolan snapped.
He had already set out at a stiff jog away from the golf cart, along the cobblestone walk that ran the circumference of the pool, heading toward the front grounds.
Minera stayed with him, trying to catch his breath.
"The boys in the guardhouse have a light machine gun," he told Bolan. "They should be able to hold 'em for a while."
The sound of a chattering chopper drifted in on the night air, as if on cue, from the direction of the guardhouse, a distinct nine hundred yards down the driveway from where they stood.
Bolan and Minera had come to the far edge of the pool, away from the house.
"We split up one hundred yards short of the guardhouse," said Bolan. "We'll close in on both their flanks. You take the left; I'll take the right. Let's just hope your boys with the chopper keep 'em pinned down and busy."
Minera seemed more than happy to let Bolan assume command.
"Just don't expect too much from me, partner." The guard boss tossed a nod at Bolan's weaponry. "Looks like you came prepared. All my heavy hardware is back at the goddamn command post — holyshitl What's that?"
Minera stopped and pointed at a dark human form that lay sprawled out on the ground alongside the cobblestone walk.
Bolan broke stride and stepped over to the form, the Ml held ready for business. With one foot he nudged the body over onto its back.
It was no trap.
The dead man was Dr. Medhi Nazarour.
Someone had rammed a stiletto into the physician's chest just above his heart. The blade had gone in to the hilt.
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.
W
hen 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.
This was, yeah, the kind of stuff flashbacks are made of.
The silent Beretta was in Bolan's big paw before there was time for the conscious mind to send the signal. It sneezed twice with hardly a gap between the two, dispatching twin 9mm projectiles across that no-man's-land to the left flank, instantly taking out the two Iranians on that side who were the farthest removed from Minera. The Security Chief under his own combat impetus was already furiously upon the third man with his bare hands.
It was at this point that Bolan lost track of Minera. He had problems enough of his own. The two remaining flankers on his side were now fully alert to the situation. They were scrambling, flinging themselves groundward in opposing directions while screaming warnings to the others. Meanwhile, the point man and those in the center had become occupied with Minera's three-man squad up front — and the night had come alive with the booming and chattering of combat weapons in open conflict.
Bolan himself was instinctively on the move, quitting his position as expertly triangulated fire raked the ground behind him. It was not a retreat but a planned withdrawal. Minera had been instructed to fall back to the pool area as soon as hot contact was made. Whether or not the guy was in any shape to do so was still a question... and Bolan could not wait around for the answer. The three-man security patrol had at least a fighting chance now. Maybe they would succeed in pinning these guys to the ground here, and there was even the possibility that they could drive them back or maybe even wipe them out. Bolan was not betting on any of that, however, and this particular commando team could be but one of several others also on the advance.
So he was not retreating, no. He was, in fact, advancing to the next line of heat.
He had covered about half that distance when the wheezing, disheveled security chief rejoined.
"Jesus Christ!" Minera panted as he jogged alongside.
"Make that a prayer," Bolan suggested.
"How many did we get?''
"Not nearly enough," the big man told him. "Four... maybe five."
"So what do we do now?''
"Now," Bolan replied quietly, "we do or die."
"I'll take do," Minera said.
"Or you could just bail out," said Bolan, giving the guy a quick, hard toss of the eyes.
"What the hell you think I am?" the security boss growled.
"I guess," Bolan muttered to himself, "I'm going to find that out damn quick."
And he probably would not like the answer. No, probably not any part of the answer.
The cabana was a solid brick structure, ten by ten, with a wooden ladder leading up to a sun deck on the roof.
Bolan started toward the ladder as he spoke over his shoulder. "Get back to the house," he instructed Minera. "There are four men on that squad unaccounted for."
Minera hesitated. "You're still not sure what happened to the general's brother, are you?"
Bolan was about to tell the guy that this was no time for conversing. But before he could speak, the sound of handguns, definitely more than one, carried from inside the main house.
Minera whipped around toward the sound. "Damn! Sounds like I'm too late!"
The gunfire from the house continued.
Other rounds were slapping into the far side of the cabana as the teams out front continued to advance, peppering the air before them.
"Forget trying to solve the murder," Bolan told the security man. "Get back to the house and give your boys some backup."
"What about you? Let's fall back together. There's six men closing in on you from out front!"
With one hand Bolan hefted himself up the ladder onto the sun deck, while he carried the M1 in the other.
"Suit yourself," he told Minera. "There's nothing you can do at this range with that .44. You can keep low and hide here, or you can fall back and help your men."
More rounds whistled into and around the small building. Some rounds made deadened plop noises as they hit the tarp covering the pool.
Bolan's analysis of Minera as a fighting man proved correct.
"I'm on my way," he called up to Bolan. He took off at a sprint around the darkened pool toward the big house.
The Iranian Hit te-42 Page 7