Mack Bolan melded with the violent shadows of war-torn midnight. A night of hellfire for Beirut. Golden-hued strobe flashes seared the dark Mediterranean sky like heat lightning, punctuating the steady rumble of impacting mortar and artillery shells inside the city not far to the north. The Executioner waited, togged in combat blacksuit. "Big Thunder," the stainless-steel .44 AutoMag, hung in quick-draw leather strapped low to his right hip. The silenced Beretta 93-R nestled snug in its speed rig beneath his left arm near a sheathed combat knife. Canvas pouches worn at his waist carried extra ammo for the handguns. A wire garrote, cigarette-pack-sized high-frequency radio transceiver and a lightweight array of hard punch munitions, plastique and grenades completed his gear, none of it cumbersome. Bolan crouched silently, restless for action, in a grove of jasmine and olive trees along an uninhabited stretch of road. He had been waiting there for the past thirty minutes. Too long, he decided abruptly.

He started to move out soundlessly on foot at a fast clip through the brush, parallel to but well in from the road, toward the city.

He would find his own transportation. Traffic past this rendezvous point had been sparse during the wait: a rumbling government tank on its way into the fray; two troop carriers hurriedly redeploying Lebanese soldiers into Beirut from the mountains; an occasional civilian vehicle daring to travel on a night like this to escape the holocaust Beirut had become after another fractured ceasefire in this country's ongoing civil strife. Tonight's hard punch into Lebanon held a very special meaning for Bolan. Too many American lives had been sacrificed for this raging hellground in the quest for an elusive peace. One U.S. serviceman lost would have been unacceptable to Bolan. The figures on the balance sheet were written in red the blood of U.S. Marines. And The Executioner had come to settle the account with the cannibals who ran wild in a country less than four-fifths the size of Connecticut. But even the gnawing gut urge to do something where his nation's military presence and diplomacy had failed took second priority to the mission's immediate objective.