Don Pendleton: The Iranian Hit

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.

"Forget it," Bolan frigidly advised the Mafioso.

Minera's gaze came up slowly, traveling the full length of the impressive "colonel," halting finally in a confrontation with icy blue eyes. He dropped the coveralls and kicked them away without breaking that eye contact.

"What's your problem, soldier?" the Mafioso asked quietly, a whole new voice and an entirely new personality behind it.

"You put on a convincing show," Bolan told him. "Good enough to fool me all the way. It would have worked... except the warp caught up with you."

Minera was moving slowly, carefully maneuvering toward a combat stance. "What warp?" he asked coldly. "I don't know what you're saying."

Both men's weapons were holstered. Minera was trying to square off, his right hand hovering stiffly at the butt of his pistol, but Bolan kept moving with him.

"I'm saying, Minnie, that you call the shots for Nazarour."

The guy laughed without humor as he replied. "Bullshit. I just ran the joint for 'im. But so what if I do? What's it to you?"

"Could be a whole lot," Bolan said quietly. "Depends on what it is to you."

A slow smile began at the corners of Minera's mouth, a smile that never quite reached the eyes. He said, "Okay. Maybe I could use a guy like you at this end. You got Pentagon connections?"

The weird little dance was still going on between the two men. "Better than that," Bolan told him.

"How much better?"

"Best you can get. But I'm not interested in a weekly envelope, pal."

The dance halted and Minera laughed, genuinely. "So maybe we'll talk a percentage... if you can really deliver."

"A percentage of what?" Bolan quietly inquired.

"The whole damn world maybe," said Arnie Farmer's heir. "The general will deliver a piece of the Middle East. Soon as he does that, other pieces will fall in line."

"Which others?"

Minera scowled. "We'll talk about it later."

"We'll talk about it right now," Bolan told him.

"Or what?" Minera sneered.

"Or you get what Arnie got," Bolan said coldly.