Lyons turned at the sound of footsteps. Blancanales and Powell stood on each side of the bullet-splintered door. Shia militiamen ran past the door. With the universal hand signals learned by fighting alongside soldiers of many languages, Lyons pointed to where he stood, indicating the interior of the high lobby in a wide sweep of his arm. The Shias nodded. One man squatted against the walls and watched the lobby, his AK rifle ready. The other Shia ran down the stairs to the garage.

Lyons returned to the door. Powell glanced at the two dead Iranians, then at the splintered door.

"Who's in there?" Powell asked in a whisper.

Lyons shrugged.

"Mademoiselle!" Powell shouted in his most nasal Texas accent. "Is that you shooting in there? What is going on?"

"Who is it? Is that you, American? Tell me your name!" a female voice demanded, the voice cracking. "Tell me, identify who you are!"

"This is you-know-who come to rescue you. Mr. Nothing."

"Captain Powell!" the woman shouted. They heard sheet metal squeaking. A weight shifted, then crashed. The door opened and Anne Desmarais looked out. Her face bore the marks and blood of a beating. She held a Kalashnikov. When she saw them, she tried to open the door completely. It banged against metal. She struggled with the door and sobbed. "Oh, finally. Thank you, oh my God I prayed..."

Blancanales spoke slowly, soothingly. "Do you have the door blocked, miss? Do you need us to push the door open? Set that rifle's safety so we don't have an accident. Do you know how to set the safety? That lever on the right side, push it all the way up. That one, good. Step back, we'll push the door open."

The combined force of the three Americans forced a filing cabinet back. Holding the Kalashnikov in one hand, her coat closed with the other, the young French woman sat on a desk top, crying. She wore nothing under the long coat. Her knife-cut sweater and jeans lay in the trash on the office floor. Blancanales went to her immediately, easing the autorifle out of her hands.

"They raped you?" he asked gently.

Desmarais nodded.

As Blancanales soothed the woman, the others checked the dead and wounded. A dead Iranian lay face down on the floor, his fatigue pants around his knees. A moaning man sprawled against a wall clutching a massive wound. Unlike the Revolutionary Guards, he wore the tailored suit and stark white shirt of a diplomat. He sat in a pool of blood, moaning, his eyes watching the Americans.

Powell laughed. "That's First Secretary Baesho, of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, also known as the Land of Khaddafi Duck. How are you doing, first secretary?"

"I am a diplomat!" the man responded tersely. "I expect the respect due a man of my position. You will take me to a medical facility immediately!"

Squatting in front of Baesho, Powell grinned into the suffering man's face. "I won't do nothing to you. Unless you cooperate. Then maybe we'll help you out, you miserable bag of pig shit. You had Clayton killed. You tried to get me. Why?"

"You are violating international law..." Baesho began.

Jerking back the diplomat's head by his greasy hair, Powell pulled him to his feet. The diplomat screamed and struggled, his bloody hands clutching at Powell.

Pink intestines bulged from the gut wound.

"See that man over there, First Secretary Pig Shit?" Powell pointed to Blancanales. "That man's a medic. That man can save your life. Talk or I let you die."

Baesho vomited blood. Powell dropped him and the diplomat fell on his face. Blood spread around his head as he vomited and choked. He stopped breathing. Shudders racked his body.

Powell jerked his head up and screamed into his face. "Don't die! Don't... Ah, shit! He's dead. And I wanted to kill him. Here's one for the road, first secretary."

Drawing back his booted foot, Powell released the shuddering man's head and drop-kicked him in the face with enough force to flop him backward. Against the wall, Baesho took a long last gasping breath, his eyes fluttering and rolling. His eyes fixed on Powell. Powell drew back his boot for another kick.

"Quit it, Powell," Lyons told him. "It's pointless."

Powell ignored Lyons and kicked the diplomat again, snapping the dead man's neck.

"One more thing..." Flipping off the safety on his Galil, Powell fired a burst into the dead man's face, spraying brains and bone. He fired again and again until he destroyed the man's head.

Lyons jerked the Marine captain back. "Quit it!" he shouted.

Powell changed the autorifle's magazine. "Hey, specialist. This is my business. That Libyan was in on the barracks bombing. Until you spend a week or so looking for pieces of friends — men that had wives and kids and babies they never got to see and futures they never got to live — until you do that, you can't tell me to quit. I could kill that creature a thousand times and it wouldn't be payback! You understand?"

"I understand we lost the chance to question him. Now we've got nothing but corpses."

"He wouldn't have lived long enough to question."

Akbar came into the ruined office. "We found the ambush. We killed them all."

The woman spoke quietly. "His briefcase. There, over there. Inside the briefcase..."

Lyons snapped open the gold-trimmed leather attache case. Inside, he found passports, stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills still in bank wrappers, and folders. The folders contained airline tickets and complete sets of identification — worker cards, university-student-union identification, and miscellaneous photos of families and places.

Lyons turned to Akbar. "You killed the Iranians outside? All of them? Not one escaped?"

"A wipeout," the Shia militiaman told him. "Totally."

"The tickets are for flights to Mexico," the young woman explained. "All these..." she paused to think of an obscenity, then spat out the word, "Iranians! That one would have sent them to Mexico. There was a Nicaraguan here. They did not know I spoke Spanish. They talked and laughed at what the Iranians did and then the Nicaraguan left. They were raping me, they thought I was unconscious. I tricked them. That one, the Libyan, he went out with the Nicaraguan, and the Iranians went out. Then that one came in to rape me again and he did not see me take a rifle..."

His voice soothing, slow, Blancanales asked, "Can you tell us what they discussed? What do they intend to do in Mexico?"

"No!" Desmarais looked around at the men. "I know but I will not tell you unless you take me to Mexico with you. This is my story."

"Miss, you're all beat up," Blancanales told her. "You need rest and a doctor's care. I don't think it will be possible..."

"No! I need no doctor. I can go. And only if I accompany you, will you learn the information you need."

In the front room of Akbar's family home, surrounded by stereo and video systems, the Americans enjoyed a traditional meal as they studied the contents of the first secretary's attache case. Akbar urged food on his American guests. Gadgets, who had finally received a radio call to give up the rooftop wait, drank hot tea.

"It was cold up there!"

Blancanales laughed. "I don't think you would have liked where we were, either."

"Far-out system you have." Gadgets pointed at the shelves of entertainment electronics. "But why five color televisions and all the VCR decks. Looks like Cape Kennedy in here."

Akbar only smiled. "My family is in the business," he said noncommittally.

"I eat with my hands?" Lyons interrupted.

"Right hand for eating," Akbar instructed. "Here you can use your left hand for picking up the bottles and dishes. In other countries they're more strict about the left hand. The best idea is to watch what they're doing and do that. That is a chili! Oh, man..."