The Libya Connection te-48

by Don Pendleton

  The guy nearest to him was the first to spot the Executioner. He emitted a terrified yelp that drew the attention of the others. But he never got a chance to pull up his Thompson machine gun. Bolan's opening round caught him through his open mouth. There was no entry wound, but the 9mm parabellum needed more than skullbone to stop it. The wall behind the man's back-pedaling body was dirtied with a viscous red mess.

  The guy with the pump shotgun fell away from the wall, trying to make a smaller target of himself as he tracked up the weapon in Bolan's direction.

  Bolan's gunhand also tracked. The Beretta snapped off one chest hit and one head hit.

  Bolan in penetration had gone undetected thus far — except by those who were dead — and if Bolan could dust them all without their fingers finding triggers.

  Which is when it happened.

  And all secrecy was blown to hell by the hammering roar of the second tommygun.

  Having nowhere to go but back, a defender had braced himself against the door he was guarding and gotten his chopper leveled at Bolan before two final bullets from the Beretta tagged him out of this reality.

  But the dead man's finger had already tightened on the Thompson's trigger as death snatched him. The dying motion carried through. The dead merc sprayed off a wildly random, deafening burst. The whistling .45 slugs riddled the dirt floor of the passageway and ricocheted off brick walls, adding to the cacophony in those close confines. Then the guard's body collapsed and the brief burst ceased.

  Far too late for Mack Bolan.

  The echo of the reports still rang in his ears when the piercing sounds of an alert siren began sounding from upstairs and outside.

  Sounds of confusion and movement carried with it.

  It would be less than a minute before they found him down here. And his only way out was up that stairwell behind him.

  The mission had gone hard. So be it.

  And the moaning sounds continued from behind the door.

  Bolan hurdled across the bodies on the floor. He sloped to holster his Beretta and snatch up one of the dropped Thompsons. Then he flung himself to the brick wall next to the door. The moaning sound was all he could hear. Something terrible was happening to a human being in there.

  Bolan sent two hundred pounds of enraged kick into the wooden panel and followed through, storming in fast with the Thompson ready.

  Into a living nightmare.

  21

  The room was a chamber of horrors, rank with the stink of torture. It was low-ceilinged, dominated by a surgical table with a bright light overhead throwing down a pitiless glare upon the thing that was strapped to the table; something... that had once been human.

  Everything else was murky shadow.

  Jericho had not waited to give her to Shahkhia. Not after things had gone wrong in the desert tonight. Jericho had needed to know immediately what Eve knew; he needed to know how endangered this operation was, and in how much danger he was putting himself by remaining here at the Aujila base, waiting for Colonel Shahkhia's cautious arrival. So he had turned her over to Santos for questioning.

  The Butcher had worked fast.

  Only the victim's long lustrous black hair, cascading over the end of the surgical table, denoted her identity. All else was a mutilated red slime, naked to the harsh overhead light.

  Eve had been skinned alive from her head to toe.

  Both eye sockets were hollowed bowls of gore.

  But she lived!

  She had no perception of Bolan's entry, or anything else.

  The moaning sound came from a ghastly hole that had been her mouth.

  Bolan took this in as he burst through the doorway. He dodged into the deepest shadows near the door.

  Gunfire lanced out at him from the darkness beyond the table. A slug whistled harmlessly to his left.

  The torture master had fired a too-hasty round and identified his position.

  Bolan's Thompson submachine gun chattered off a full half clip, cutting to shreds whatever the room held... including an obese blob of human fat in a plastic apron stained with fresh bits of human crud.

  Santos.

  The Butcher was blasted into the circle of light as the heavy .45 slugs tore him apart, flopping his bloated body against the surgical table, then to the floor where it did not move, a rapidly spreading dark pool forming beneath him.

  Santos would butcher no more.

  But he had butchered this one...

  Bolan felt so many emotions tearing at him as he turned toward the victim on the table that he thought he would explode.

  The living dead spoke to him.

  "Q-quiero... please..."

  It was a voice from the grave.

  Bolan felt hot tears in his eyes.

  "Eve... my God, Eve..."

  "Please..." whispered a scratchy voice from that pitiful, butchered, ravaged person. "Quiero... Dios... let me die ..."

  The moaning started again.

  Bolan heard footfalls and equipment clanking as soldiers approached on the run from upstairs.

  "Go with God," he bade her softly.

  He ended her living hell, granting her last wish with a mercy round placed inches above the mouth-hole in the gory, skinned stump. And all he could think of was how beautiful she had looked that time on Lake Douglas...

  The moaning ceased.

  A soul was released to Infinity.

  And a bellow of blind rage screamed up from his warrior's soul, bursting forth, erupting into this foul torture room.

  Bolan the human being lost all conscious track of time and action then. He would never recall exactly what happened during the next fifteen minutes.

  A machine does not think in such a contemplative fashion.

  And Mack Bolan had become a killing machine.

  The thunder of approaching footfalls grew louder as they came into the HQ building overhead. A pause as the bodies in the CQ room were discovered. Seconds later, bootsteps came clattering down the stairwell.

  The killing machine stepped out through the doorway, leaving the torture chamber behind, into the narrow passage.

  Three soldiers charged around the dogleg at the bottom of the stairs.

  The killing machine was waiting.

  The Thompson stuttered in fury. Hammering bullets, on a sizzling firetrack of flame and smoke, blew away three rebels into piles of dead matter.

  The killing machine moved on. Back up the stairs.

  He reached for the small triggering device in his pocket.

  As he emerged from the stairwell into the main hallway of the HQ building, he activated the detonator.

  The night shuddered with sound and fury. A rapid series of explosions thudded from the direction of the armament and equipment stored on the tarmac across the parade field. A simultaneous blast from the armory blew out one wall into the hallway and shuddered the building to its foundation.

  The HQ corridor, filled with billowing smoke and dust, now boasted four Libyan rebel troopers who had heard the gunfire from downstairs and were advancing two abreast toward the stairwell. The killing machine stepped out to meet them.

  The guards had been ready for something, but the explosions from the armory room and outside still rumbled in their eardrums. The guards had glanced off in the direction of the noise. But they did not miss seeing the figure in combat black. They only missed the chance to do anything about it.

  The killing machine hit the deck. The tommy-gun blazed.

  All four rebels died from a stitching figure-eight hail of steel-jacketed shredders that pulped the men into oblivion. It came from a being of cold eyes and hot aim. The enemy had no hope in hell.

  The Executioner was up and moving out along the hallway in the same direction as he had entered, emerging moments later from the back door of the building, into the night.

  The Executioner jogged a bee-line away from the admin building, toward the private residence that stood across five floodlit yards to the southwest.

  A klaxon s
iren continued to blare.

  Fires raged out of control from across the parade field where he had placed explosives amid the Soviet war machinery.

  That equipment was now an inferno of golden tongues licking at the dark heavens.

  The commotion of running men and shouting filled the night.

  Most of the Libyan troops were breaking formation around the two Huey helicopters on the parade field and were rushing toward the fire.

  A cluster of Leonard Jericho's mercs maintained guard around Doyle's chopper carrying the Strain-7, their Galils and Largo Star machine guns held ready as the mercs warily scanned the night around them.

  The killing machine continued its course to the rear environs of the Moorish white stone structure.

  He gained the back wall of the house and moved to a door. It was unlocked. He stepped inside. A short hallway. He heard voices and a shuffle of activity beyond a closed swing door in front of him. The killing machine pushed on through.

  The big .44 AutoMag came unleathered as he covered the distance through an archway into what had been the dining room by original design.

  It was now a command post in the process of hurriedly breaking camp.

  The Executioner recognized Leonard Jericho. Two men were with Jericho. Doyle was toting a Largo-Star. The third man had a slick, simonized American lawyer look about him. The lawyer and Jericho carried briefcases and all three were on their feet; they had been in the process of moving toward an entranceway at the front of the house.

  All sensed the Executioner's presence and spun as one to confront him.

  "I... I'm not armed!" screamed the lawyer.

  "That's your problem," said the machine.

  The AutoMag roared. The slickster died.

  The giant handgun tracked next to Doyle. The number two merc's slate eyes registered panic as they realized he was about to die. He yanked the hi-power up from its holster. That was all. Doyle caught two rounds from Big Thunder. He died on his feet.

  The body was still thumping to the floor when the last man, Leonard Jericho, raised his arms.

  The renegade moneyman was in disarray. His eyes were rabid. The upraised hands trembled, as if trying to wave off his tab with eternity.

  "No! Stop! I can buy you! Name your price!"

  The killing machine in a single fluid movement holstered the AutoMag and swung the Thompson around into play by its shoulder strap.

  "That's what the other Jericho said. The one I killed in the Bahamas."

  This Lenny Jericho brightened. His breathing came faster.

  "Carlyle. Yeah, I knew him. Hey, guy — wait! What makes you think I'm the real Jericho?"

  "You'll do for now," grunted the Executioner.

  The Thompson bucked.

  And this particular Leonard Jericho was spun around by a flaming stream of millimeters that chewed his body into bits amid a curdling death cry. The steel-jacketed projectiles ate away at Jericho's death-jigging body, sections at a time, though the guy's final jig lasted less than ten seconds to pile his corpse into the corner.

  This kill was for Eve.

  Maybe machines could feel, sometimes.

  Mack Bolan swung away from the execution. He quit the dining room, moving into the front entranceway, punching off every light switch that he passed, plunging the house of death into blackness.

  When he reached the front door, he stationed himself against the inside wall.

  He reached over and unlatched the door, drawing it inward several inches; enough to allow him a view of the panorama of parade ground and the raging fire beyond.

  The two Bell Huey copters still sat side by side in the center of the parade field, thirty yards from him.

  The Executioner centered his attention on the chopper carrying the cargo of Strain-7. Colonel Shahkhia still had not arrived. Jericho still had his security on tight.

  Seven mercs stood guard near the aircraft that carried the living virus, their rifles held at port arms.

  The killing machine quit the doorway of that house in a full frontal assault, Thompson yammering.

  He must commandeer the helicopter.

  He must lift the cargo of Strain-7 up and out, away to safety.

  No matter what the odds.

  The killing machine kept right on killing.

  He blitzed five men between the house and the Huey. Two mercs were stitched in a tight pattern of blood before they even saw their executioner. Another came running and the Thompson sent him back-flopping across the paradise field with his head lifted away. Two mercs tried running for cover. They could not outrun the Thompson.

  The Executioner reached the chopper as the pilot tried to slam home the door and aim his .45 at Bolan at the same time. He accomplished neither. The Thompson erupted one more time and the pilot was ripped nearly in half by the hail of slugs. He dropped onto the ground beside the Huey.

  Bolan leaped into the aircraft, slammed shut the side door on its runners and bolted to the controls.

  He could see some Libyan troops across the parade field, by the burning equipment, who understood that a hijacking was taking place and were shouting out an alarm.

  He gunned the engine and listened to the rising high-pitched scream of the revving transmission and the blades activating overhead. His fist tightened around the collective pitch-control lever to his left and he powered the big bird into a lift-off.

  The commotion outside the Huey was lost below him.

  He just might make it.

  * * *

  The pilot of the Soviet-furnished Libyan army helicopter, transporting Colonel Ahmad Shahkhia and two of his generals, controlled the aircraft into a hover position one half mile from the scene of battle raging below them to the north. The bodies of General Pornov and one of his aides were stretched out in the rear of the aircraft, with their throats slit from ear to ear.

  Colonel Shahkhia recalled the icy premonition he had felt that afternoon when Jericho's people had informed him of the paramilitary hit on a Jericho base in the Bahamas.

  He had felt concern that this action around the world might cause local repercussions in his dealings with these people. That was why he was being so cautious concerning his rendezvous with Jericho tonight, in spite of his whetted appetite for the female slave that Jericho had promised.

  And of course there were Colonel Shahkhia's other plans for Leonard Jericho...

  Now a curt radio report from Aujila base had confirmed the earlier premonition. The communique sent word only that a sabotage team appeared to have them under attack.

  Colonel Shahkhia had responded by ordering that all radio communications be cut and the full company of men down below be deployed to pinpoint this "team" of paramilitary penetrators.

  Shahkhia was certain that the action had to be connected with whatever happened two days ago on Leonard Jericho's yacht in Exuma Cay.

  The fires on the base below were spreading. Shahkhia watched with a constricting throat as the barracks and motor-pool structures caught fire.

  Then the colonel saw an American Huey helicopter rising from the flames of Aujila oasis like some mechanical phoenix of war rising from the ashes of battle.

  The virus.

  The saboteurs were escaping with the virus!

  Colonel Shahkhia pointed in his helicopter and bellowed a command that had his pilot goosing the aircraft into full-ahead thrust on a course of hot contact with that copter.

  Ahmad Shahkhia understood the appalling chance he was taking. There was no way to ensure that the Huey chopper could be stopped without rupturing the container of Strain-7 aboard that machine. But the chance had to be taken. Shahkhia needed that cargo for what he planned...

  When their aircraft was some seventy yards to the Huey's starboard side, Colonel Shahkhia ordered his pilot to open fire with the Libyan copter's 40mm cannons.

  The generals and pilot understood what was at stake. There was dead silence around the cockpit.

  The pilot obeyed the command to attack.
<
br />   The Libyan warplane sailed in on the Huey with both 40mm cannons firing steady.

  The mighty hammering of the cannons in Colonel Shahkhia's ears sounded to him like the deafening approach of Armageddon.

  * * *

  The Executioner held the Huey at hover for a brief moment, once the copter had gained enough altitude to put him out of effective range of the rebel troops firing at him from the ground.

  The raging tide of fire across the weapons stash and buildings below was like a sea of flame.

  In the shifting, flickering patterns of light, the killing machine had one microsecond to see a Libyan chopper come zeroing in on him full-throttle from behind.

  He yanked the controls, jarring his big Huey smartly into a sharp evasive maneuver at the same instant that the other aircraft's cannons opened fire.

  The sound pounded at his ears. It enveloped him.

  22

  Jack Grimaldi, in the snappy Boeing 1041 V/STOL, entered the fray from out of the southeast. He confronted the Libyan chopper nearly head-on as they converged on the Huey piloted by Mack Bolan.

  The Aujila oasis army base below them was nothing but a burning hellground of devastation and confusion.

  One human being named Mack Bolan had been at work down there. Far larger than any machine.

  The Huey jarred to its port side and fell sharply.

  A stream of tracers lasered out from the Libyan aircraft's 40mm's into nothing but dark air.

  The Libyan chopper banked around for another run and a look at the sudden unexpected arrival of the unmarked V/STOL.

  Grimaldi sent a sizzling stream of bullets from his own 50-cal. machine guns after the Libyan army aircraft. He thought he saw a line of holes dotting across the fuselage of the chopper. But the Libyan aircraft was not stopped or even slowed.

  Grimaldi raised Bolan on the tac net.

  "Striker! Let's move tail outa here!"

  "Not yet, Jack." Bolan's voice came strong and in command across the crackle of static. "That's a slice of Hell down there. We've got to level it."

  "Evita? Is she all right?"

  "She's dead, Jack. They made turkey meat out of her."

  "Oh, sweet Christ."