Bolan sacrificed another twelve seconds from his numbers to plant one more clump of plastique. When the timer fuse was set, he continued on.

So far, so good.

But still much to do...

The building was silent and lifeless around him, like a tomb. His footfalls echoed faintly.

He approached the stairwell. He eased open the metal door. A lighted stairway slanted downward for fifteen steps, then doglegged to the right.

Santos the Butcher was down there.

With Eve.

Bolan quietly closed the stairwell door behind him, then descended the stone steps, his back to the wall, the Beretta up. The stone wall felt cool, damp against his shoulders. Man and weapon were ready for what ever lay around that dogleg at the bottom.

He heard the murmur of voices speaking English.

He reached the bottom step and eased an eye around the corner for a look.

Three of Kennedy's American mercs stood guard in a boxlike, earthen-floored passageway to a closed door behind them.

These boys weren't outfitted with anything exotic. They carried .357s on their hips. Two toted Thompson submachine guns, the third held a pump shotgun. Back in the States, they would have been cheap Mafia street hoods. Maybe they were.

They certainly weren't expecting anything in Libya like Bolan. Two mercs were leaning back against the wall of the basement. The third man, with a tommy-gun, stood with his back to the wooden door they were guarding.

They were smoking cigarettes, conversing in words too low for Bolan to overhear.

Then he did hear something.

It was a sound more subtle than the murmur of conversation. It was a sound that burned his nerve ends raw.

A barely human sound.

A wailing moan of suffering that had no beginning or end: an eerie, modulating pitch that came as if from some weird musical instrument of the damned. But it came, Bolan knew, from the depths of a living soul in torment.

A woman made those sounds.

Just behind that door.

Eve!

Bolan darted around the corner with the Beretta spitting lead.

The guy nearest to him was the first to spot the Executioner. He emitted a terrified yelp that drew the attention of the others. But he never got a chance to pull up his Thompson machine gun. Bolan's opening round caught him through his open mouth. There was no entry wound, but the 9mm parabellum needed more than skullbone to stop it. The wall behind the man's back-pedaling body was dirtied with a viscous red mess.

The guy with the pump shotgun fell away from the wall, trying to make a smaller target of himself as he tracked up the weapon in Bolan's direction.

Bolan's gunhand also tracked. The Beretta snapped off one chest hit and one head hit.

Bolan in penetration had gone undetected thus far — except by those who were dead — and if Bolan could dust them all without their fingers finding triggers.

Which is when it happened.

And all secrecy was blown to hell by the hammering roar of the second tommygun.

Having nowhere to go but back, a defender had braced himself against the door he was guarding and gotten his chopper leveled at Bolan before two final bullets from the Beretta tagged him out of this reality.

But the dead man's finger had already tightened on the Thompson's trigger as death snatched him. The dying motion carried through. The dead merc sprayed off a wildly random, deafening burst. The whistling .45 slugs riddled the dirt floor of the passageway and ricocheted off brick walls, adding to the cacophony in those close confines. Then the guard's body collapsed and the brief burst ceased.

Far too late for Mack Bolan.

The echo of the reports still rang in his ears when the piercing sounds of an alert siren began sounding from upstairs and outside.

Sounds of confusion and movement carried with it.

It would be less than a minute before they found him down here. And his only way out was up that stairwell behind him.

The mission had gone hard. So be it.

And the moaning sounds continued from behind the door.

Bolan hurdled across the bodies on the floor. He sloped to holster his Beretta and snatch up one of the dropped Thompsons. Then he flung himself to the brick wall next to the door. The moaning sound was all he could hear. Something terrible was happening to a human being in there.

Bolan sent two hundred pounds of enraged kick into the wooden panel and followed through, storming in fast with the Thompson ready.

Into a living nightmare.

21

The room was a chamber of horrors, rank with the stink of torture. It was low-ceilinged, dominated by a surgical table with a bright light overhead throwing down a pitiless glare upon the thing that was strapped to the table; something... that had once been human.

Everything else was murky shadow.

Jericho had not waited to give her to Shahkhia. Not after things had gone wrong in the desert tonight. Jericho had needed to know immediately what Eve knew; he needed to know how endangered this operation was, and in how much danger he was putting himself by remaining here at the Aujila base, waiting for Colonel Shahkhia's cautious arrival. So he had turned her over to Santos for questioning.

The Butcher had worked fast.

Only the victim's long lustrous black hair, cascading over the end of the surgical table, denoted her identity. All else was a mutilated red slime, naked to the harsh overhead light.

Eve had been skinned alive from her head to toe.

Both eye sockets were hollowed bowls of gore.

But she lived!

She had no perception of Bolan's entry, or anything else.

The moaning sound came from a ghastly hole that had been her mouth.

Bolan took this in as he burst through the doorway. He dodged into the deepest shadows near the door.

Gunfire lanced out at him from the darkness beyond the table. A slug whistled harmlessly to his left.

The torture master had fired a too-hasty round and identified his position.

Bolan's Thompson submachine gun chattered off a full half clip, cutting to shreds whatever the room held... including an obese blob of human fat in a plastic apron stained with fresh bits of human crud.

Santos.

The Butcher was blasted into the circle of light as the heavy .45 slugs tore him apart, flopping his bloated body against the surgical table, then to the floor where it did not move, a rapidly spreading dark pool forming beneath him.

Santos would butcher no more.

But he had butchered this one...

Bolan felt so many emotions tearing at him as he turned toward the victim on the table that he thought he would explode.

The living dead spoke to him.

"Q-quiero... please..."

It was a voice from the grave.

Bolan felt hot tears in his eyes.

"Eve... my God, Eve..."

"Please..." whispered a scratchy voice from that pitiful, butchered, ravaged person. "Quiero... Dios... let me die ..."

The moaning started again.

Bolan heard footfalls and equipment clanking as soldiers approached on the run from upstairs.

"Go with God," he bade her softly.

He ended her living hell, granting her last wish with a mercy round placed inches above the mouth-hole in the gory, skinned stump. And all he could think of was how beautiful she had looked that time on Lake Douglas...

The moaning ceased.

A soul was released to Infinity.

And a bellow of blind rage screamed up from his warrior's soul, bursting forth, erupting into this foul torture room.

Bolan the human being lost all conscious track of time and action then. He would never recall exactly what happened during the next fifteen minutes.

A machine does not think in such a contemplative fashion.

And Mack Bolan had become a killing machine.