Teheran Wipeout

by Don Pendleton

  Annotation

  Ayatollah Khomeine, a power-mad tyrant is using religion to mesmerize his people and enforce his crazed will.

  Thousands of Iranians are butchered in acts that are pitching the country into a relentless downward spiral toward the Dark Ages.

  Combat specialist Mack Bolan answers a call from rebel forces to help save a once-great country from certain doom.

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  Teheran Wipeout

  The problem of power is really the fundamental problem of our time and will remain the basic problem of all future history.

  Herbert Rosinski: Power and Human Destiny, 1965

  No human being should be allowed to play God. Such misguided power only leads to oppression, and deaths, of innocents.

  Mack Bolan

  In memory of William Stanford and Charles Hegna American officials of the Agency for International Development, who were slain by Arab hijackers at Teheran airport, Iran, in December, 1984.

  1

  The marksman with the cool eye centered the cross hairs of the sniperscope on his target's forehead.

  Mack Bolan ignored the smothering midafternoon heat that baked him atop the flat roof of a five-story building in central Teheran. He had chosen the vantage point carefully, the site affording a clear view of the killing ground a quarter mile away.

  The target: Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, religious leader of this terrorized hell called the Islamic Republic.

  Weapon of the moment was a Weatherby Mark V, a bolt-action .460 Magnum hunting rifle equipped with a twenty-power scope, mounted on a swivel tripod; a big-game weapon with massive stopping power.

  And Bolan was hunting big game.

  The weapon matched the marksman: Mack Bolan, The Executioner.

  And the target centered in the cross hairs was worthy of this executioner.

  Bolan wore the nondescript standard attire of the male Iranian: jeans, shirt and jacket. His silenced 9mm Beretta 93-R nestled in concealed shoulder leather and Big Thunder, Bolan's stainless-steel .44 AutoMag, rode the soldier's right hip on military webbing.

  The Executioner studied the image behind the scope's cross hairs. The Ayatoliah's pale forehead looked gray under the fierce sun, like the skin of a dead man. Very soon.

  Khomeini: a power-mad maniac in the Hitler-Khaddafi-Amin league. But all the more dangerous, Bolan knew, because this slavering barbarian, howling at the gates of civilization was different.

  This lunatic fueled himself with irrational religious fervor rather than simple base greed. He was already responsible for the massacre of untold thousands of his country's people, in acts that were pitching Iran into a relentless downward spiral toward the Dark Ages.

  The difference was that Khomeini's murderous fanaticism so inflamed his followers that it threatened to suck modern civilization down the tubes to global Armageddon.

  Reason enough for an American "combat specialist"' named Bolan to risk against-all-odds penetration into the heart of bloody Iran for this one chance at a cannibal without peer. The savage needed stopping, needed killing, real bad before more of the madman's dreams became reality.

  Bolan had traveled far and hard to this Teheran rooftop to do just that in the name of civilization and for thousands of Iranians. These people badly needed and deserved a fresh start, Bolan felt, a reprieve from an eighty-three-year-old maniac on a death trip who exploited religion and hatred to mass hypnotize a country and enforce his own crazed will.

  A man like Bolan, indeed, any rational man of compassion for his fellow human beings, could never tolerate such madness as that espoused by the bearded Ayatollah now in the Executioner's sights.

  Most of the world's Muslim population felt nothing but repugnance for what this crafty old despot had done to his people. Yet far too many continued to blindly follow him, much as a good nation once followed a führer's ravings to its doom.

  Yeah, Iran today is just like that and it wouldn't stop, Bolan knew, until he squeezed the trigger of the Weatherby and stopped this Ayatollah.

  Khomeini generally made his presence in this corner of the Mideast felt by portraits of his likeness looking down sternly from every available space, especially in Teheran.

  The Ayatollah delivered his occasional addresses, more and more occasional of late according to intel reports, in well-guarded indoor sessions with his cabinet or his mullahs. But today marked the national celebration of a 1940s Muslim uprising.

  To commemorate this auspicious occasion, the Ayatollah had deigned to address thousands of his followers who now packed an open-air pavilion. They were waiting to hear their leader, who, Bolan guessed, would no doubt inflame their frustrations of poverty and lost hope with his monotonic denouncements and proclamations of a jihad, the holy war he vowed would turn the Persian Gulf red with the blood of Islam's enemies, including, especially, American blood.

  Bolan had reviewed U.S. intel reports theorizing on the Ayatollah's worsening health as evidenced by the recent cutback of personal appearances. Only on special occasions these days did the blackrobed, turbaned "holy man" make a showing, such as the present one.

  The slavering throng was raucously shouting anti-American slogans until its leader approached the podium and microphone on an elevated stage. Seated behind the speaker's position was a line of the Ayatollah's stern-visaged mullahs and henchmen who conducted a reign of terror over a land that once thought it would find peace and harmony after the revolution toppled the shah.

  There had even been vague rumors of the Ayatollah's death, but the boss terror merchant looked healthy enough for a target about to die, thought Bolan in the final heartbeats before he eased back the big Weatherby's trigger.

  The Executioner doggedly checked the range marks of the cross hairs, wiped the sweat from his eyelids and pressed his cheek against the wooden stock.

  The moment of the kill was at hand, and Bolan slid his trigger finger back into place.

  Like all cannibals who create death and slaughter, Khomeini existed behind a supposedly airtight, invisible shield of security surpassing even that of the President of the United States.

  Nearly one thousand plainclothes and uniformed Iranian Revolutionary Guard security men had all of central Teheran sealed tight.

  Minutes earlier, two IRG triggermen toting AK-47s and sidearms and stationed on this roof, the tallest building in the vicinity, were wasted with a classic one-two punch when Bolan and Jack Grimaldi had exploded on to the scene with silenced pistols spitting death.

  Bolan zapped one man with a brain-coring head shot from the silenced Beretta that chugged no louder than an angry hornet in the afternoon sun.

  Grimaldi had squeezed a silenced burst from an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol that stitched a row of blood-spurting holes across the other IRG goon's chest.

  With the roof secured, Grimaldi returned to the street where he now loitered in front of this building. He took up station in a narrow, cobblestone street of small shops that were closed for the Ayatollah's rantings at the nearby pavilion.

  Grimaldi stood near an ancient taxi, a rattletrap East European relic purchased from an equally age-worn driver for more rial notes than the decrepit cabbie probably ever saw at one time.

  The street fronting the apartment building had enough traffic for G
rimaldi's loitering to draw no suspicion, yet most of the neighborhood had interrupted its chores for the Ayatollah's speech and so should be a clear or at least uncluttered withdrawal track.

  Bolan had earned the tag Executioner in the Vietnam War where he racked up the highest number of confirmed hits of enemy and civilian targets of any American sniper.

  The fact that his compassion for Viet civilians in that conflict earned him the nickname of Sergeant Mercy has always somehow been omitted from media reportage of the man and his deeds during and since that conflict.

  Bolan was the personification of the ideal advanced by the Army psychologist who screened and evaluated sniper-team candidates during that war: "A good sniper has to be a man who can kill methodically and unemotionally. Killing in this manner is closely akin to murder in the conscience of many men. What we want is a man who can distinguish between murder and duty, and who can realize that a duty killing is not an act of murder. A man who is also cool and calm when he himself is in jeopardy completes the picture of our sniper ideal."

  Bolan had not lately, in his post-Nam campaigns against global evil, brought into use his sniper skills but he saw no other way for this job.

  The Ayatollah had to go and Bolan quite simply, quite objectively, saw no one around capable or willing to take on the job except himself. And it mattered not at all to the marksman behind the Weatherby that he operated without the sanction of his or any other government.

  Indeed, Bolan's own government had a worldwide Terminate On Sight order on him, issued to all its agents, as did the KGB and most Western powers, a direct result of the Executioner's unsanctioned one-man war against the KGB.

  Despite its remarkable success, Bolan's war of attrition rankled those who did not take kindly to a "civilian" treading such classified territory, no matter how successful.

  This did not matter to Bolan, either.

  The only thing that mattered to Bolan at this moment was squeezing the Weatherby's trigger and canceling out one all-too-powerful cannibal. And yeah, to Bolan it was worth putting everything on the line one more time; worth penetrating this hostile mountainous plateau country of some 636,000 square miles between the Caspian Sea, the world's largest salt-water lake, and the Persian Gulf; more than worth infiltrating into the very heart of the madness.

  Teheran.

  Founded by the Qajar dynasty, the hillside city nestled six thousand feet above sea level at the base of mighty snowcapped Mount Damavand whose cone shape towered to over eighteen thousand feet from the Elburz Mountains. A once-noble, stately city, Teheran was oppressed under the heel of terror for too damn long to Bolan's way of thinking. Many of Khomeini's own people supported this view, especially those increasing numbers who risked death by forming the People's Mujahedeen, the principal resistance group.

  They were the ones responsible for Bolan taking a direct hand in Iranian politics, which had become world politics with the ruling regime's long standing on-again-off-again war with neighboring Iraq. The volatile conflict had escalated to engulf the other Arab states and threatened to force the United States to intervene.

  Armageddon, sure. It could come to that.

  Washington had plenty of firepower in reserve, including a carrier task force in the Arabian Sea.

  American Airborne Warning And Control System — AWACS — surveillance planes monitored four hundred thousand Iranian troops — many of them adolescents and elderly men and women — poised for yet another strike at dug-in Iraqi defenses, waiting for a nod from their Ayatollah for more slaughter to commence.

  Bolan had long searched for a handle on the situation there with which to take personal action. Then the request from the mujahedeen reached him.

  Khomeini was no figurehead in the modern political sense. The guy was indeed a throwback in that his work, his very will, was the law in this Third World hell.

  Western intelligence agencies recognized this. The attempt to free the kidnapped American Embassy personnel from Teheran several years ago had hardly been the last such covert attempt at making things happen there, but all these "official" missions ended in dismal failure.

  Bolan knew the odds, yeah, but when this handle came his way he knew the odds did not count, because a time bomb ticked in Iran and this time it would take the world with it unless he could defuse it.

  Iran's economy had been devastated by the war with Iraq, oil revenues plunged to only half of what Iran needed to keep the war going and to import basic necessities. Ethnic minorities continued to cause trouble for Khomeini's regime. Nomadic rebels fought in the northwest.

  Rebellion of another sort grew in the major cities, spurred by the hideous losses of the war. Army commanders were reluctant to launch a new offensive against well-entrenched Iraq. The army had bogged down, its leadership and a definite rift had begun to appear in the Iranian parliament — the 250-member Majlis. But Iran's ultimate authority gave no sign that he was prepared to abandon his holy war.

  Which is why Khomeini's own countrymen had implored Executioner Bolan to lend his expertise to the problem, giving this coolheaded "duty killer" exactly the handle he needed.

  He squeezed into the trigger pull.

  The roar of the big-game Weatherby shattered the broiling afternoon air.

  And through the sniperscope, the Executioner saw the distant head of Ayatollah Khomeini explode like the gut of a dead animal left in the sun too long.

  2

  Bolan got the hell off that roof and toward the street fast as he could.

  He reluctantly left behind the Weatherby. Earlier, when Grimaldi had parked the car in front of the building and Bolan brought the rifle up to the roof, the big weapon had been wrapped in cloth, carried like anything from curtain rods to a long pipe. But that had been minutes ago on a routine weekday afternoon except for the nearby rally.

  The Weatherby's report would have been heard by everyone in the vicinity.

  Bolan registered a quick impression of Iranian security men on nearby lower rooftops swiveling around, but none of them could pinpoint the source of the shot, though it would not take them long.

  It would take Bolan long enough to reach Grimaldi and the taxi and for them to get away; too long if he emerged from the building toting anything that remotely resembled a rifle so soon after the kill.

  He sidestepped the two dead men sprawled near the roof door and pulled it shut behind him. He hustled down the inside narrow stairway.

  He negotiated the sharp turns, picking up speed, passing deserted dimly lighted corridors that stank of too many people crammed too close together. He also discerned the smell of fear.

  He would have preferred taking out the whole row of the boss cannibal's cabinet who shared the stage with Khomeini, but the seconds wasted on such a whim could buy a safe withdrawal.

  The Iranian freedom underground unit that had requested the Executioner to carry out this "impossible hit" figured termination of Khomeini would do it. They and Bolan envisioned a more or less bloodless coup after this, wherein cooler heads in Teheran close to the top could steer this ravaged country back on the track to rejoin the twentieth century.

  He slowed his pace when he reached the bottom step. He approached the fly-specked half-glass front door of a narrow foyer.

  The world would be going topsy-turvey a quarter mile away at the open-air pavilion, a crowd out of control. Bolan knew that before the blistering sun set this day Teheran would be sealed tighter than a drum.

  Grimaldi had worked with Bolan as backup on missions for years. The Vietnam-vet pilot ace with the Italian-movie-star visage and happy-go-lucky style had as much skill behind the wheel of a car, any car, as he had in the cockpit of any warplane.

  Bolan grasped the door handle, then he saw the trouble.

  The ancient taxi was idling at the curb in front of the apartment-house door, Grimaldi behind the wheel.

  A uniformed Teheran policeman was leaning over the driver's side window in heated conversation with Grimaldi.

 
Bolan eased the door inward and stepped from the building onto the front step with a natural, casual move.

  He scanned the narrow cobblestone street, encompassing in a glance all that might lurk there as he closed the door behind him.

  Word about the assassination had not had time to reverberate this far. It would within another minute or two. The few pedestrians down there had heard the shot, but gunfire is common throughout Iran. Nobody seemed concerned.

  The policeman saw Bolan emerge from the building. The cop straightened and shifted his attention from Grimaldi.

  Bolan casually made his way down the steps toward the cab.

  The officer snarled something at Bolan in Farsi, and Bolan wondered if he would have to kill this man.

  The cop waved an irritated "the hell with it, get out of here" gesture at both the "cabbie" and the "fare," then turned and began to move away.

  Bolan started to slide into the front seat of the cab.

  A sedan with official markings careered, fishtailing, screeching, burning rubber into this cross street from half a block away. The vehicle straightened out from the turn and rocketed toward the cab, and the policeman, who had not gone very far, paused in his progress away from the taxi to turn and investigate the commotion.

  Grimaldi popped the car into a forward lurch the moment Bolan made it into the front seat alongside him. The momentum slammed the door shut after Bolan and the taxi shot away from the curb, its aged engine straining.

  Bolan unleathered Big Thunder.

  "U-turn us out of here, Jack."

  The numbers had run out, but all the while Bolan felt something nagging at him. Something more than a beat cop trying to shake down a cabbie over some minor traffic infraction, something more, even, than a racing sedan full of IRG security hardmen. Bolan felt sure of it in his gut.

  Something had gone wrong with the hit on the roof. And he could not identify it.

  Grimaldi palmed the wheel.

  The squeal of tires on cobblestone again filled the air, bounding from wall to wall of the narrow street. Grimaldi swung the car around without slackening speed.