Don Pendleton - Beirut Payback

"Major General Strakhov will be with us directly."

Kleb had dispatched an orderly to interrupt Strakhov in his meeting.

"And now, Mr. Bolan, you will kindly drop your weapons and if you try anything untoward, I shall be forced to shoot off your kneecaps."

Kleb started to say something else.

An ear-piercing sound signaled the approach of jet fighter planes.

The first in a line of explosions started eating up the perimeter with bellowing chomps.

Bolan seized the instant. He crouched, reversing the AK-47 in the flash that every eye in that room, including those of Major Kleb, were wrenched fearfully from the American. Bolan opened fire on the nearest four men, pulping them to sprawled carcasses before the line of explosions quit.

It ended only a few hundred yards from the annex building, the echoes swallowed up by shouts, then another high-keening fighter plane hurtled in low to blast two of the barracks to hell.

Some of the survivors in the annex turned and fled, preferring Israeli jets to the hell-bringer with the AK-47.

Two of the soldiers who stayed tried to bring up rifles, but the AK yammered some more on automatic and the pair were hurled back into a wall as if punched by an invisible fist. When their bodies finally came to rest, parts of them stuck to the wall, glistening red.

Some of the same heavy-caliber projectiles blasted Major Kleb's kneecaps in bloody splats of gore.

Kleb cried out and fell to the floor, his pistol flying from fingers numb with the pain ripping through his every nerve end. He cried out again when Bolan knelt beside this terror merchant and pressed Kleb's throat to the floor with the AK.

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.

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.