As more jets flew low overhead and more shouts and antiaircraft gunfire and explosions rumbled from outside, Bolan spoke very calmly.
"The woman. Zoraya. Where is she?"
"Z-Zoraya?" the GRU man gasped. "Please... I cannot stand the pain!" Kleb screamed hysterically.
"The woman," Bolan repeated. "Where is she, Kleb?"
"This... there is no woman!" Kleb shrieked. "The pain! Please... kill me!" Kleb lapsed into a quick word or two of Russian.
The Executioner twisted the rifle with a harsh yank across Kleb's throat.
The Russian died instantly with a broken neck and no more pain.
Well, he did ask for it, Bolan thought as he moved on.
The soldiers had scattered from the buildings that they all rightfully considered the main targets of the air strike.
Bolan exited the annex building in a dash toward the nearest entrance to the Syrian headquarters.
His instinct told him to believe Kleb's dying statement.
No woman, Kleb had said.
Zoraya was not on the base.
And that left the Executioner's main objectives: a summit meeting of terrorist cannibals on the top floor of the Syrian headquarters. And Major General Greb Strakhov.
Antiterrorist guns pounded vainly at the expertly piloted attack jets that swooped in from unexpected angles. Their strafing runs turned the Syrian base into a shrieking feast of burning death.
Bolan knew the chance he took by entering this building. But the stakes were too high for the Executioner to turn back when he could accomplish what he would when he hit this bunch upstairs.
Bolan had committed himself totally to establishing a crack in the wall of violence that had kept this country destabilized for so long.
This hit would accomplish a lot and no way could a man like Bolan walk away from such a responsibility.
He gained entrance to the headquarters building easily enough in all the excitement. Those staring and crouching every time a jet whistled by or an explosion burst saw a Druse militiaman hurrying back to his post to protect Mr. Zakir.
No one tried to stop "Druse militiaman" Bolan. He took the steps upstairs at a run. Halfway up the stairs he passed a window that overlooked the area separating the building Bolan was in and the annex where he had slain Kleb.
Strakhov, a Russian officer and two Syrian soldiers were hurrying into the annex.
Bolan kept moving up the stairs, gripping the AK-47. He could not run back and forth.
First the warlords of terror.
Then Strakhov.
If Bolan survived.
The confusion he expected in the meeting area from the air strike would work greatly to Bolan's benefit, as would the element of surprise.
He hit the top landing of the stairs on the run.
The banshee shriek of a jet fighter screeching by overhead as Bolan hit that top step suddenly gave way to a thunderclap that made him deaf for a moment.
All he could feel were the shock waves of an explosion that catapulted him into the air. Amid flying mortar, sound and blinding fury, he knew he was airborne, a direct hit on the building pitching him into what seemed like a yawning pit.
He did not know if he was dead or alive as the maelstrom swallowed him whole.
20
Bolan kept himself stuntman-loose. The force of the blast deposited him roughly onto his back, the momentum propelling him along the ground. The explosion had rattled him, but as far as he could tell there were no bones broken.
He rolled over onto his stomach, his fists still clenched around the AK-47. He brought up the assault rifle instinctively to firing position while he shook his head to clear the sense-tumbling reaction of having been pitched through space.
The Executioner sized up the scene in the hallway at a glance, choosing his targets, squeezing off tight bursts from the AKBLEDG at anyone with a weapon.
Sunlight flooded through a ragged gaping hole in the wall and roof behind him at the top of what had been the stairs, onto the grisly remains of soldiers caught by flying brick or shrapnel.
Other men of the bodyguard force had been knocked to the floor and appeared stunned, a moment behind Bolan in reorienting themselves.
He targeted his first burst at those who had missed the intensity of the blast, the ones who now turned to face him, not sure if he was friend or foe. They death-jigged and toppled under the ha of automatic fire.
Then Bolan mowed down the ones who were just now realizing they were already dying. He took out three PLO hardguys with a stitching blast as they came through the open doorway of the meeting room where Strakhov's summit of death merchants had fallen apart into bedlam.
Bolan fed a fresh clip into the AK-47 and stalked into that room to deliver some long overdue tabs. With interest.
The savages in there had been in the hurried process of breaking camp, trying to escape the devastating air strike that seemed to gobble up the whole world outside the windows.
The rats were abandoning ship, all of them and their surviving bodyguards already on their feet and racing toward the door. But they checked their progress, reaching for hardware after hearing sounds of The Executioner at work in the hallway.
Bolan triggered the AK-47 before he came all the way through the doorway.
He remembered this as the office he had crossed in the dark that morning during his first penetration of this base. They were all standing in various attitudes around the table, lined up like targets in a gallery, pulling guns.
The PLO man caught a row of flesh-exploders across his chest and toppled sideways into a Shiite. The slugs missed the Muslim militia chieftain's gut, but they tore apart his head and shoulders instead. Both men collapsed, crashing into the table together, spreading puddles of blood as the AK-47 spit more death.
A volley of projectiles nearly ripped apart the IRG member at abdomen level, severing his head from his body when he doubled over.
General Abdel's successor, as commander of this base, forgot about his pistol and tried to shriek an order or entreaty to the doom-bringer in the doorway, but a burst from the AK silenced the Syrian savage rudely and permanently, and the officer fell atop the other bodies.
Fouad Zakir, the Druse terrorist mastermind, appeared unable to grasp the simple fact of what had happened. He gazed from among the bodies, still shivering in death throes, and squinted through swirling gun smoke into the diamond-hard gaze of The Executioner. Because Bolan still wore a militia uniform, the Druse warlord felt something could be worked out.
The cannibal who sat in guarded safety to plan the massacres of so many now held a pistol, but checked tracking it upward. He dropped his pistol and he put on his best snake-oil smile and earnestly implored something of Bolan in Arabic.
The Executioner triggered another burst from the AK-47 and blew Fouad Zakir's oily face off the face of the earth.
Now for Strakhov.
Bolan retraced his steps out of the briefing room, halting only when half a dozen Syrian regulars charged up the stairs from the other end of the building. Bolan opened fire and some fell, the rest diving for cover.
Bolan started down the rubbled, half-destroyed stairs at this end of the building.
A jet, maybe two in tandem, thundered by low overhead, their whine magnified by the hole in the side of the building.
Two Russian attache's peered up from the bottom of the stairs, paused, confused for an instant at the sight of the man in Druse uniform. Bolan's AK chattered again and the flunkies toppled backward, leaving trails of body pieces that The Executioner avoided as he charged down the steps.
His single objective now was to cross the killground to that office annex where he hoped to find and finish the king of the savages.