The captain hesitated, but he had known that voice for the over thirteen years, and the code word was, of course, correct. He turned and smiled weakly at the prime minister, “All is well, sir, the threat is over,” and he turned back, ignoring a nagging sense of dread inside him, and pulled the lever to release the monumental door’s locking mechanism.

His only reprieve was that he would never know what he had done. Brandishing both his twelve-inch blades, Shahim flashed through the opening gap moments later into the long room. Before he even realized what was happening, the captain’s head had been severed completely from his body.

As he decapitated the poor soldier, Shahim’s right foot came up and braced against the reinforced wall just inside the still opening vault door. Firing his right leg’s phenomenal string of muscles, he launched himself headlong at the ten men formed in front of him.

Even as they reacted, even as their training kicked in and their fingers began to close on their assault rifles’ triggers, the flying warrior collided with the still formed line of guards, and they washed from his onslaught like paper before a hurricane.

Shahim landed straight in their midst. His left foot flashing forward to ram into the head of one kneeling soldier, snapping his neck back, as his right foot brought all the rest of his momentum to bear on another’s stomach, flattening him backward and driving his right boot through the man’s torso to the ground beneath.

His arms were already flashing up as his feet connected, the two blades in his hands lashing out in wide diagonal arcs, slicing like scythes through the soft abdominal flesh of the four remaining men in the center of the formation.

It was a blur of death. As six of the soldiers’ hearts completed their last beats, their blood spilling from their opened bodies, Shahim brought his terrible eye to bear on the two men still standing to his left. Their rifles were still turning to follow the path of the intruder, only a second having passed since hell had breached their haven.

The needle-thin antennae of his deadly stare focused an arc of super-low frequency sound into an oval, one meter across and a foot high, and laid it across the torsos of the two men.

To the petrified prime minister, it looked as if the two men had been struck at their waists by a spinning helicopter blade. They flew backwards, folding completely in two as they did so, then smashed into the bunker’s walls with brute pain and crushing force.