Beirut Payback: MacK Bolan (10 page)

Bolan left Weizmann and returned to his Saab, which was parked nearby. He checked below the car and under the hood this time for explosives, but found nothing. Then he climbed in and gunned the Swedish relic to life.

He consulted his map for the most direct route to the Druse militia position in west Beirut.

Time had run out. The summit gathering of insurgents called by Strakhov would be getting under way at the base at Zahle within the hour.

Bolan had the in he needed, thanks to Uri Weizmann, who had broken all the rules of his organization and training to avenge a friend's death.

And maybe because he was in love with the friend's lady.

All that mattered now was that time had run out.

Bolan's knuckles shone white around the steering wheel. He bit off a curse at every delay he encountered through the bustling streets of this sector. His destination: the Druse militia position occupying what had been a small shopping mall, now concertina wired, the "liberated" shops functioning as offices and to billet fighters between rounds in the ongoing fight for the city.

The "Paris of the Mediterranean" throbbed and echoed under a white sun to the sounds of exploding rocket-propelled grenades. The sporadic popping of Soviet-made rifles intermittently chorused the throatier staccato of heavy machine-gun fire. Most thoroughfares were clogged with civilians being forced steadily from the densely populated neighborhoods near the front line.

At one point Bolan crossed an untraveled side street that bisected his route. He happened to glance down the alley and saw something he didn't like. He yanked the steering wheel, upshifting, and came down on the tableau of three Shiite punks towering over a woman in dark traditional Lebanese garb. Huddled next to her was a boy of about eleven and they were both cowering against a pile of rubble, each clinging to two bottles of water.

The woman was pleading for her life.

The camou-clad militiamen laughed and lifted their AK-47'S. The situation was ready to explode as sweaty nervous glances of anticipation darted from man to man before the barbarians opened fire. But when violence erupted in that street it came from the open driver's window of the passing Saab.

Bolan triggered the AK-47 he held across his chest, his right finger caressing the trigger while he drove with the left hand.

The blistering fusillade of automatic fire from the Saab pulped the three Shiite gunmen into flying shreds.

The woman and her son continued on with their precious bottled water.

Exiting from the alley, Bolan steered back onto a principal thoroughfare parallel to the first and approached the shopping center commandeered by the Druse militia.

Again, the contrast of everyday life so close to the killing touched Bolan with chilling awareness.

Almost every other Lebanese he saw along his route carried or stood near transistor radios, listening obsessively for new developments.

Beirut buzzed with desperation.

Static firing, grenade and rifle sniping continued all along the nearby Green Line that divided east and west Beirut.

According to the English-speaking announcer's voice from the Saab's dashboard radio, the conflict was escalating into severe clashes.

As Bolan listened, the broadcaster explained how Lebanese army armored vehicles were attempting to advance from the museum crossing point halfway down the Green Line but were being repelled in a fierce battle.

The prize was the crumbling gutted tower and rubble heap of destroyed St. Michael's Church, where heavy fighting had gone on since the week before for control of the church. The army said it had captured the church and lost it and now wanted to recapture it.

Big deal, Bolan thought.

It had to stop.

Piles of dirt had been placed around the entrance to the Muslim militia headquarters to prevent counterattack by the Lebanese. But the ten-foot-high pyramids of earth actually helped Bolan hide the Saab a block and a half from the base entrance. From his concealed position he could observe vehicles arriving and leaving without fear of detection from the Druse sentries inside the base. The dirt piles blocked their vision.

At one point a tank lumbered out from between the mounds of earth. The Soviet-manufactured machine rumbled past the Saab. Bolan leaned sideways below window level, hidden from the observation window of the war machine or the driver's or gunner's periscopes.

The tank clanked on past and turned a corner, then rumbled out of sight, the crawler track clattering on pavement toward the Green Line and the fighting.

Before the tank's noise had faded, another vehicle emerged from the Druse base and turned in Bolan's direction.

The Executioner got ready, finger on the trigger of the reloaded AK-47 in case this wasn't the connection Uri claimed he could use to set up Bolan's penetration of Strakhov's headquarters summit.

The meeting would be the biggest gathering of terrorist warlords that a peace-bringer named Bolan, a soldier who cared, could ever hope to target for extinction.

A jeep with Syrian markings approached Bolan's position. It was driven by a Druse militiaman accompanied by a shotgun-riding gunman, his assault rifle pointed skyward.

The vehicle, much like the one Bolan had escaped in from Zahle a few hours before, upshifted past the Saab and this time Bolan did not hunch down but sat there with his AK ready to fire. But that proved unnecessary because the vehicle chugged by with neither driver nor soldier sparing the Saab a sideways glance as they drove past him.

As the jeep cruised by, Bolan recalled his parting conversation with Uri Weizmann.

"We have a man planted in the Druse militia," Weizmann had told Bolan before they split up outside the pub. "A driver. We've spent two years planting him. I can't afford to lose him."

"Your man will have time to pull out before the air strike."

"The driver and a soldier will leave the Druse motor pool at a garage they took over near to the area where the new recruits are billeted. The chauffeur is supposed to drive with the soldier to pick up Fouad Zakir, the militia's strategist and liaison with the Syrian command at Zahle."

The pair continued away from the Saab, away from the base, without turning off at the corner as the tank had.

When they reached the middle of the next block, Bolan pulled the Saab out from the curb and followed the vehicle at a discreet distance.

The jeep went a quarter mile, then the wheelman steered onto a several-square-block wasteland of completely gutted, devastated buildings that happened to be well behind the lines of heavy fighting.

The duo pulled over to what had been the curb of a trashed zone.

Bolan drove toward the jeep and could see the soldier who had been riding shotgun jumping awkwardly out from the vehicle and trying to bring up his rifle to aim at the driver. Then a pistol in the driver's fist barked once just as Bolan came to a halt behind the jeep.

The pistol blast spun the soldier around into a death sprawl, a human discard amid the rubble.

Bolan left the Saab and knelt beside the man to relieve him of AK-47 ammo clips at his waist.

The driver of the jeep shot worried glances in either direction.

"Hurry. The area is heavily patrolled by both sides. If it weren't for the fighting elsewhere..."

"I read you," Bolan returned, and quickly climbed into the dead man's uniform. The outfit was ill-fitting, too small, but with Bolan seated it would not be noticed.

Bolan and the driver dragged the body out of sight of the road and hid it in the rubble. Then Bolan took the dead man's place in the passenger seat. The Mossad plant gunned the vehicle away from there.

"Well done, guy." Bolan thanked the Israeli behind the wheel. "I appreciate the help. And the risk you're taking."

"Control said it was essential. After Zakir reaches the base at Zahle, you and I will be expected to wait on base until their meeting is finished." The driver steered along a deserted street.

"Will you be able to get off base without arousing suspicion?" asked Bolan.

The "Druse" chuckled.

"Their organization is a joke. I will drive off base once you and I split up. I will wait nearby until after the air strike. The soldier and I were separated in the fighting. At a time like this, no one will give much of a damn that he was found several miles away. The roads are full of deserters. I'll tell the same to my superiors even if there is no air strike." The Mossad man steel-eyed the American. "If Fouad Zakir survives this day my life will be forfeited."

"I don't think your control would risk a man in your position unless he thought you'd come out alive," Bolan assured the guy. "Leave Zakir to me."

The guy from Mossad braked the vehicle in front of a row of private residences.

"Gladly. He lives right here."

The two "Druse" soldiers proceeded to collect the militia hotshot whose very presence passed them through two Druse checkpoints without problems.

They entered increasingly hostile territory the farther they got from Beirut along the heavily traveled military road into the mountains toward Zahle.

Zakir emanated an arrogance that precluded conversation between himself and the chauffeur and bodyguard.

Bolan felt a gnawing anticipation in his gut with the ascending cool of approaching battle consciousness.

He had bought time for his Beirut payback. The anticipation had a lot to do with that. The payback, uhhuh, would be in the name of America's best, those much maligned, always — there fighting men of the U.S. Marine Corps, trained warriors who hold the front lines to keep American citizens and values alive and free.

Some people back home were starting to forget that — the soft, naive bunch who had lived too long in an artificial environment in which the reality of the world is concealed from view.

Bolan knew. He lived in a real world ruled by force. Diplomacy can function only if it's backed by force.

These were truths Bolan lived by and had seen proved many times in and out of the hellgrounds.

Yeah, he appreciated his fighting buddies in all the armed services. And he mourned with every American soldier and patriot their sacrifices made in the name of honor and duty, words that meant something to Mack Bolan.

Bolan equally appreciated the impossible task these guys had been saddled with: trying to maintain a peace where none of the participants wanted peace.

With the Marines' role in Lebanon restricted wisely, Bolan thought — from taking any real, active role in the country's civil war, the U.S. fighting men had been unable to be anything but targets, and Bolan felt a sense of relief when they were at last ordered to pull out of a no-win situation.

Now was the time to payback for all that, with interest, to a summit of cannibal greed heads who schemed to cut up Lebanon like a piece of rotten pie once their slaughtering stopped.

And Strakhov.

Bolan anticipated getting the KGB'S Mr. Big in his sights and canceling a blood feud and a top savage that had both been around too damn long.

Bolan hoped he would learn the truth about Zoraya at Zahle, too.

The village clung to the mountainside exactly as it had that morning. But as the Mossad undercover man steered the military vehicle down the incline approach, Bolan could see that his hit on the Syrian base had caused even more damage than he'd had time to register before cutting out the first time.

What had been the two rows of tanks and rockets were now nothing but charred, mangled, indiscernible metal remains.

The guardhouse that had abutted the gate had not fared much better, nor had the gate itself been repaired.

Soldiers were working on filling the crater in the middle of the road, made when Bolan had blown his way out.

As Bolan guessed, the security around the base had been tripled at least, both as a result of his previous attack and because of the summit meeting taking place.

Bolan and the driver kept their eyes straight ahead when the jeep stopped for a new officer of the guard to personally check Fouad Zakir's credentials.

The officer waved the vehicle through to the guards farther inside the grounds and those men stepped back, giving the Executioner clear sailing onto the base, which would very soon be a leveled death camp.

Weizmann had said he might be able to delay the Israeli air strike, nothing more. That meant Bolan could expect it within the next half hour, and once Israeli fighter planes started swooping from the sky to rain hellfire on this scene, he knew he would have to get out of there pronto.

The vehicle rolled forward onto the base.

The sentries closed ranks after it.

Like the jaws of a closing trap.

Uri Weizmann had just begun searching the second of three drawers in General Chehab's desk. Lieutenant Franjieh, the uniformed Lebanese military police officer standing attentively at the door, backed himself to the wall alongside the door of the unoccupied office, his 9mm Browning Hi-Power raised defensively.

"Someone is coming."

Weizmann forgot about the desk.

He had hoped to find corroborating evidence to what he already had, but what he had would do.

The Mossad man and Franjieh, the MP, had gained access easily enough into this Phalangist building on the outskirts of Beirut.

Weizmann cross-drew his HandK.380 automatic and held his ground.

A key turned in the lock. The handle twisted downward. The door opened.

The office staff had gone to lunch.

Weizmann's Mossad ID had admitted him and Franjieh this far without incident.

General Chehab stepped into the office. The Lebanese officer froze when he saw Weizmann. The general's swarthy complexion darkened, the nostrils Chehab stepped all the way into the office and closed the door behind him. Then he saw the Lebanese officer holding the Browning Hi-Power aimed at him.

Chehab glared.

"What is the meaning of this?"

"You are under arrest, General," Weizmann informed him.

"On what charge?"

"I'll let Lieutenant Franjieh take care of that. He's all yours, Lieutenant. Get your men in here."

Chehab's hands clenched into fists.

"I demand an explanation. A couple of hours ago, Uri, you and I sat in a pub sharing a drink. Now this..."

"Correct. We also sat in a car, if you remember, and a man we spoke with suggested the car we sat in might have been the same one seen leaving the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' base at Biskinta last night. That was when the Disciples of Allah obtained blueprints of the presidential palace in their plot to assassinate the president.

"Well, our friend... my friend... was right, General. We traced every unmarked government care using Mossad and Lieutenant Franjieh's combined resources. The vehicle assigned to you, General, is the only one unaccounted for through routine investigation.

"And before Bolan and I separated this morning, he gave me the blueprints retrieved from Biskinta. Those plans have been chemically processed. Your fingerprints were all over them, General."

"A trick," the Arab snarled. "Why should you believe Bolan? His own kind want him dead."

"And why should we trust you?" Weizmann retorted. "You are commander of a government force, yet have your own office and are saluted by the men here at a Phalangist base. We know it all, you see. The military dictatorship you envisioned with yourself in command, militarily conquering and driving out the Syrian and PLO forces with a last-ditch counteroffensive with or without the Israelis' help.

"But you needed a spark to ignite more fighting among people already sick and tired of it, so you decided the stakes were high enough to arrange to get those blueprints to the Disciples of Allah. You planned to make damn sure you were nowhere near the presidential palace when that squad drove into it with a suitcase of dynamite and made the hit for you. You reasoned that because it would be a suicide mission for them, you'd be covered. Face it, General. It's finished. Your dream is over."

"And what do you intend to do with me, Jewish pig? I am a powerful man in this country. I could have all of these charges dismissed."

"That's up to the Lebanese," Weizmann growled. "I did my part to pay back a friend. All right, Lieutenant, take him away."

Lieutenant Franjieh blinked twice and squeezed the trigger. The Browning in his fist high-powered a tunnel right through the skull of General Chehab, pointblank, to splatter the wall with the life forces of the treacherous general.

"Justice is served," Franjieh said softly and holstered his pistol.

They had taken Katz to a squat clay farmhouse set in the wood line beyond sight of the road. The building was accessible only by a winding drive that ran smoothly until it met the shell-marked country road that led back to Acre and the Israel-Lebanon border. The dwelling was one of thousands of such nondescript structures that dotted the countryside.

The two CIA men, Collins and Randolph, had finished their interrogation of Katz more than an hour before.

"And now that you are through detaining me, I trust I am free to go?" Katz groused in his best experience-honed air of command.

He started toward the door.

The Israeli officer, Colonel Lenz, blocked Katz's path from the room, unfurnished except for the wooden chair where they had sat the Phoenix Force leader while they interrogated him; the scene had been like a bad imitation of the third degree in some old police film.

The only difference was that these guys played for keeps.

"I have my orders to detain you here until further notice," Lenz barked, a hand on the butt of a revolver holstered at his hip.

Collins, the Company man who had done most of the questioning, snapped, "You don't think you get off that easy, Colonel. You may be big news in the States but here you're just a guy who used Mossad for your own ends. And I'll bet they've got something to say about that. Stay put."

They left Katz with a guard standing at the door and two more sentries outside the window.

Two Mossad agents then came in to question him for another hour. Katz stonewalled and gave them just enough to impress and interest them. But the Phoenix Force boss did not kid himself, either.

He had been one of their own kind for too long. They would consider torturing him for what he knew about Bolan, and quite likely with the blessing of Katz's own government.

The Mossad interrogators from Tel Aviv left Katz alone again. He knew they would be standing in the hallway on the other side of the door discussing, probably with a superior, the advisability of torture. Katz recalled spurts of electric current to the genitals as being a particular favorite in the Mideast with Mossad and everyone else.

He exploded into action.

He powerhoused from the chair in a blur of movement that belied the thickening waist of late middle age. He aimed at the guard by the door and before the man could shout any sort of warning, Katz crossarmed the sentry's rifle away with the powerfully swung prosthetic arm. The ex-Mossad agent caught the guard with a blow sharp enough to make the Israeli soldier unconscious for a while, but not to kill him.

Katz knelt and snatched the man's holstered pistol and rifle. Slinging the rifle across his shoulder, he took a running dive at the window of the room, his arms crossed over his face. He kept his body loose as he hurled himself through the panes, shattering the glass into a hundred fragments.

He landed smack into the two sentries posted outside the farmhouse. All three tumbled down in a tangled heap.

The guards were mere youngsters.

A seasoned fighter like Katz took them by the numbers, one elbow backward into a forehead, then the butt of the pistol snapped down to bop the other sentry on the temple.

Both men fell to the ground unconscious.

Katz hustled away toward a motorcycle parked alongside two unmarked vehicles behind the building. He figured the bike was there comfort running pieces of physical evidence gathered from interrogations at the Mossad house.

Katz heard shouts coming from the shattered window behind him — the Mossad men demanding him to halt.

The hell with them.

He ran past the unmarked cars first, glanced in hopefully, but saw no keys in the ignitions. He hit the jackpot with the motorcycle.

Katz leaped onto the bike from behind, heeled up the kickstand and kicked the machine to life. He turned around and triggered off three quick rounds at the guys in the window who had been about to fire on him.

He aimed purposely high, and the Mossad men ducked back inside long enough for Katz to do a wheelie out of there, feeding the bike so much power. He roared down the driveway before additional personnel around the "farmhouse" could be alerted to what was happening.

The motorbike whizzed along the smooth surface of the driveway.

Katz knew the difficult part would be when he hit that shell-destroyed stretch of road leading back into Beirut. Right now he had no trouble controlling the handlebar accelerator with the prosthetic device on his right hand.

He thought he had a good chance. He didn't need to use the hand brake on that same side. If he had to stop he'd use the foot brake. But if the ride was too rough.... He dismissed the thought. He only had to get around the first bend in the road. They would be after him within seconds and would easily overtake him in those cars.

But Katz only intended to clear the bend, then ditch the motorcycle and cut into the rugged terrain. He'd lose them on foot in the undulating hill region and find other transportation.

He had no intention of rotting away under Mossad interrogation while Mack Bolan fought alone less than two hours away.

Katz had gotten Mack into Beirut, and he would damn well give everything he had to help the big guy get out.

He heard car engines waking up in the distance behind him and the popping reports of gunfire after him. But no bullets from the direction of the house found their mark. He reached the end of the driveway and leaned into the turn, feeding the speeding machine more gas instead of less for the curve onto the main road.

He had to make it.

Bob Collins crouched out of sight.

A Syrian supply convoy lumbered onto the base at Zahle.

When the trucks had passed, the CIA man returned to his prone position on a knoll overlooking the base. He focused his binoculars, waiting for something to happen.

Collins had parked his vehicle in the brush off the road. He was armed with a Colt.45 automatic.

As he had feared, the interrogation of Yakov Katzenelenbogen had yielded nothing, so Collins and Randolph had decided to play a long shot on intel Mossad fed them for coming in to help on the Katz thing.

The two CIA men had left the clay house where Katz had been questioned and started north back into the hellzone, their Company authorization passing them through Israeli forces happy to be rid of them.

Collins and Randolph had started toward Zahle, but only Collins made it alive.

They had driven over a land mine planted in the road, left by withdrawing Druse forces. The right front tire had touched the explosive, which tossed the agents' vehicle onto its side.

Collins had rolled free through his open window and for a moment thought his partner had made it, too.

Randolph had not made it.

Collins had walked around to the other side of the car and had seen that the force had ripped away most of the right side of Also's body into an awful palpitating red gristle.

Collins had turned his eyes away, puked, then continued on until another means of transportation — a car he hotwired and drove — brought him to Zahle.

He raised the glasses and scanned the base again, shaking his head at the loss of his friend.

Also was dead, no rhyme or reason to it all, and Collins was surprised that he felt nothing yet but a kind of emptiness over the death of a guy who had become sort of a brother.

Collins had pushed on to Zahle where Mossad said a summit of terrorist insurgent factions had been called by none other than Major General Greb Strakhov of the KGB. It was probably taking place down there right now.

Collins had a hunch that Mack Bolan would not miss a chance like this to take on the eradication of the terrorist camp. The CIA agent also knew the air strike would descend on that base and would hit sometime within the next twenty minutes. And if Bolan is down there, he'll be caught right in the middle of it.

Collins in his tour of duty had seen what the Israeli Air Force could do to a target. And if the air strike did not get Bolan... Collins would.

Because a good agent named Also Randolph was dead and Collins was mad as hell about that.

And because those were Collins's orders.

Terminate Bolan on sight.

The CIA agent panned the base and the vehicles appearing with the principals of this emergency summit, like the jeep carrying Fouad Zakir, the Druse biggie and his militiamen bodyguards.

No sign of The Executioner.

Yet.

Come on, Bolan, thought Collins from his place of concealment overlooking the camp. Where the hell are you? Let's have some action.