The mission was not supposed to be a complicated one. Nor an easy one, no. Not easy by any stretch of the imagination. But cut and dried, just the same.

Brognola had briefed Bolan only ninety minutes earlier. Bolan could still hear the cigar-chewing head fed's words.

"The man's name is General Eshan Nazarour," Brognola had told him. "An Iranian. High ranker in SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, until the revolution came along. The general lost both legs in a mortar attack on SAVAK headquarters during the final days of fighting, but he still managed to get out alive, which a lot of 'em didn't. For the last nine months, he's been lodged incognito on a forty-acre spread up in Potomac. He's got influential ties with plenty of big money in this town, and some of that money has been putting him up. But legs or no legs, the guy's a mobster, plain and simple, and the administration doesn't want anything to do with him.

"His visa expires at midnight tonight. He's sticking it out until the last minute, hoping his lawyers will be able to pull some strings — which they can't. The kicker is that we learned today that Nazarour has been marked for death by an Iranian assassination squad. At any time from now on. Any time today or tonight.

"Now we all know what it's like to have a foreign hit team prowling the country. It makes people edgy, right? But this time around we have hard data on the bastards and we're going to get them.

"The squad is a fourteen-man paramilitary commando unit — the best they've got — and they've been on his trail ever since January '79, when Khomeini's government took power. During the first week of trials, Nazarour was sentenced in absentia to death, on charges of torture, massacre of people, treason, and earthly corruption, and our intel says he's guilty as sin of those charges and a whole lot more. So this hit team wants him bad.