The tumbling bodies were swallowed from view in the vegetation to either side of the road before Bolan's passengers could see them.
He coaxed more power from the heap and that did get curses and shouts from the back, but nothing more. He rounded another turn in the road into a valley, and the taillights of the limo popped into view. And Bolan knew he still had a hold on this tiger of a night.
General Abdel tried not to let his fear show. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander felt himself shaking, felt shriveled in his uniform. They had not removed his handcuffs.
Masudi rode in one of the pull-down seats in the spacious tonneau of the Syrian staff car.
Three men sat across from him: a broad, bearlike man whom Masudi did not know and who was flanked by two others he recognized: the Syrian officer, General Abdel, and the GRU pig farmer, Major Kleb, who both had reputations for ambitious brutality.
Masudi eyed the stranger in the middle.
Russian, thought the IRG warlord, probably KGB.
Masudi made his appeal in his own language to the Syrian, inwardly cursing the telltale tremor he heard in his own voice.
"Am I to receive no explanation of what has happened, General Abdel? Why were my men attacked? What..." Abdel leaned forward and punched Masudi in the mouth with enough force to knock the Iranian to the floor of the jouncing car.
Masudi felt shattered teeth gouge flesh from the inside of his mouth.
"You will speak English," the Syrian snarled, "the only language known to all of us." Masudi spat chips of tooth and struggled with the language he had learned in Iran before the revolution.
"Yes, yes, of course... of course... I only wish to know..." Masudi saw Kleb glance to the man in the middle. The stranger barely nodded, and the GRU officer glared back at the bleeding Iranian.
"We are the ones to be informed, desertjackal"
"But... I do not understand..."
"Then it will all be made clear to you in Zahle," Kleb intoned with a trace of smugness. He nodded to the Syrian.
"Abdel."
"Wait!" screamed Masudi, not believing how terrifled he sounded. He had the briefest glimmer of what countless lost souls he had tortured over the years must have felt. He cowered in the corner of the tonneau.
With a snicker, General Abdel pounced, pistol drawn. The Syrian commenced pummeling the handcuffed man about the head, hitting him over and over again until Masudi lost consciousness.
Kleb watched, wishing he could see more in the dark.
Major General Strakhov appeared not to notice the beating. The KGB officer closed his eyes and leaned back against the staff car's plush upholstery. Sighing, he considered the report he must now make to the Kremlin regarding tonight's action.
Moscow would be pleased.
The thirty-minute journey to Zahle cut ever deeper into the Druse-held Shouf highlands. The terrain grew bleak, uninhabitable for miles at a time.
Bolan saw no activity amid the occasional clusters of houses they passed as he steered the Syrian deuce-and-a-half behind the taillights of the staff car. The country people had taken cover to await the dawn.
Zahle was cut from an identical mold to Biskinta, perched on the side of another mountain. But the Syrian base on the outskirts of this village showed a marked superiority to what had passed for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' security.
The Syrians had been in the country considerably longer than the Iranians and it showed in the three layers of concertina-wired perimeter and the heavily sandbagged defenses, permanent barracks and HQ buildings Bolan saw from the high ground as they approached the compound. The base was about four times the size of the one at Biskinta.
Dawn.
An hour away, maybe less.
Not much time, Bolan thought, looking at his watch.
The fighting would resume at dawn. He could feel it. The air crackled with it.
8
The gates in the fence opened. The captain of the guards saluted as the staff car sailed through without stopping.
Guard patrols and permanent machine-gun nests along the perimeter made the place five times tighter and harder than the one held by those Revolutionary Guard stumblebums, but the gate officer had already turned to step back into the guardhouse when the troop truck followed the limo into the base from fifty yards behind.
No one paid any attention to the indiscernible features of the driver high up in the cab.
Bolan eyeballed as much as he could from behind the wheel as he steered the troop carrier into the center of the compound past a cluster of parked Russianmade T-34 and T-55 tanks and orderly rows of Russian-made Katyusha rockets.
The limo stopped in front of the long, two-story headquarters building.
Bolan braked the vehicle to a halt some distance behind the staff car, directly in front of the end barrack of a row of similar squat structures twenty yards south of the HQ.
He reasoned that the Syrian command would have its own security in the head shed where Strakhov appeared to be taking Masudi. The men in the back of the truck would be weary from the fighting in Biskinta and, Bolan hoped, anxious to grab sack time on their return here. Their presence had only been required on the drive from Biskinta.
The blacksuit hustled away from the truck when it stopped, well before any of the Syrian troops debarked from beneath the tarp. Let them sort out the puzzle of the missing driver and his shotgun rider.
Bolan gained the far side of the headquarters building. He hurried along the back wall to a row of windows, all dark at this hour. He found one left open against the heat of the day, forgotten when the workday ended.
He used both hands to lift the window and it slid up soundlessly. Bolan moved over the sill.
He had been lucky so far not to be spotted by any of the two-man sentry patrols he had seen walking the base. Though what kind of luck was it was to be inside an enemy camp, about to lose cover of night was debatable.
He found himself in a deserted office. He unleathered the Beretta and padded stealthily between the inky forms of furniture to the door of the room. He turned the door handle and it emitted a soft squeak that sounded deafening to Bolan. He paused, motionless, but detected no response from the other side. The headquarters building reminded him of a massive tomb.
He hoped it wouldn't be his.
The hour: 0410 hours.
Tomorrow would be a big day for the battalions quartered here, if Bolan's gut instincts about this thing were right. The base would be coming to life within the next twenty minutes.
He cracked the office door inward and peered into an unlighted hallway.
He heard activity, the sounds of voices in Arabic down at the far end of the building: probably an officer giving orders to the night-duty staff.
Then footsteps headed upstairs to the second level of the building, leaving security tight on what they thought to be the only entrance in.
Bolan glanced in the other direction of the corridor and saw another unlighted stairway closer to his position. He moved swiftly, gaining those stairs and starting up without notice of the soldiers in their Orderly Room at the other end of the long corridor. He raced upstairs, the Beretta 93-R on 3-shot mode, ready to spit death. He reached the top landing and looked down this hallway just in time to see a door slam shut. The rest of this level felt more tomblike than downstairs.
The Syrian CO'S office would be up here.
That's where they took Masudi.
Bolan expected to find Strakhov here, too.
The target.
The execution.
And the job would be done.
He poised, ready, to make sure no one from below followed the party up here, then he eased around the corner, five quick paces to the door next to the one where they had taken the Iranian.