Beirut Payback te-67

by Don Pendleton

  "I shall see to it immediately."

  "Also see to this," Strakhov instructed. He handed Kleb a scrap of paper. "We have traced the license number of a car seen leaving the Iranian compound at Biskinta two hours prior to our attack this morning. It was an unmarked vehicle of the Lebanese government." Kleb registered a puzzled frown.

  "The government?"

  "Apparently there are things happening in Beirut at this moment that we do not know. A situation I find untenable."

  "I shall... pursue the matter vigorously," Kleb promised.

  "See that you do, Major, and perhaps I shall have reason to be more generous in my report concerning you to Moscow than I have thus far had reason to be. And see that these, or, things..." Strakhov indicated with disdain the two corpses "...comare removed. The sight of them alive turned my stomach. Now they're worse. Tie the Iranian's neck with rope to the back of a vehicle and have him dragged through the countryside. He will be a lesson. I suppose we must be more subdued with General Abdel. Return the body to his family."

  "As you wish, comrade Major General." Kleb saluted smartly and fled the room.

  Leaving Strakhov alone with the dead.

  And the new dawn beginning to stretch beyond the mountains to the east.

  10

  The Executioner had been about to storm through that window into Abdel's office in an attempt to save Masudi's life. At least until the Iranian spilled what he knew about a plot to assassinate the Lebanese president.

  Then Bolan would deal with Strakhov.

  He checked his move, though, when the door of the office flew inward and Strakhov barged in.

  The penetrator on the ledge paused.

  He could continue to maintain this low profile and eavesdrop. Strakhov would want Masudi alive for the same reasons as Bolan.

  When Kleb killed Masudi, too fast for anyone to stop him, Bolan winced at the Russian major's miscalculation, but like Strakhov the Executioner understood that what had happened could not be undone.

  He remained listening on that ledge, the Beretta poised.

  The first light of dawn began to half illuminate the Syrian base. Birds chirped. The barracks beyond Bolan's line of vision started waking up.

  Bolan had better than working knowledge of Russian both written and spoken, and continued to work to master it during any available moment.

  He knew enough, however, to decipher the main ideas of most conversations he heard in the language and that included enough of the exchange between the two Russians in the late General Abdel's office.

  Bolan now knew he could not kill the man he had come all this way to find and terminate.

  The Executioner had traveled halfway around the world to this hellground and had his target under the gun, only to discover at that precise moment that The Executioner and the top savage of them all were allies with the same objective: to halt the assassination of the president of this undersized powder keg on the Mediterranean.

  Bolan appreciated that ultimate stabilization of the region could only result in diplomacy. Events were overtaking themselves. There was nothing for the powder keg to do now but blow sky high. Then the diplomats could come in.

  America would have to exert her influence in other ways, but it could be done. That's what diplomats did. Bolan's mission to terminate Strakhov had become Bolan's bid at making this part of the world safe for diplomacy.

  As the exchange in the office ended, with Strakhov seated at the desk while Kleb scurried off, Bolan pulled back from the window and prepared to withdraw, formulating strategy on the move. He pulled back to the open window along the ledge.

  He knew where he would be at noon today, if he lived that long.

  Right here.

  Strakhov had called an emergency summit of all the terrorist factions. The Syrian base at Zahle would be crawling with more of these vermin than Bolan could ever hope or expect to find in one place at one time.

  High noon in Zahle?

  Yeah, Bolan would be there.

  Bet on it.

  In the meantime, he intended to devote his energies to what had suddenly made him an ally of the cannibal chief he had come here to kill.

  He had those blueprints snatched from Biskinta and the lead from Strakhov of an unmarked government car tonight where it had no business being at an Iranian camp in the Shouf, well behind Syrian and Druse lines.

  Strakhov's presence in Lebanon indicated how important the Kremlin considered his mission to consolidate these terrorist factions. It would be in the Soviets interest to eradicate the more volatile, unpredictable element like the Disciples of Allah, giving Syria carte blanche to escalate hostilities against Israel, paving the way for an expansion of control into the Persian Gulf. Some thirty thousand Israeli troops had already been massed along the Israel-Lebanon border.

  In those terms Bolan recognized the magnitude of his own mission in blocking this power play, yet he also appreciated that even when he hit Strakhov and, damn right, Bolan intended to live that long and damn large while he was at it. The Executioner would only be hacking off one more tentacle of a hydra he had given up everything else to fight.

  He would find a way.

  He would find Zoraya and little Selim, too.

  But first he had to get the hell out of Zahle.

  At least General Masudi had not bothered to tell Strakhov of the blacksuited nightfighter who interrupted that briefing of the Disciples of Allah before they could leave Biskinta.

  Bolan now knew their mission could only have been part of the Shiite assassination plot to kill the president. Masudi probably mistook the commando in blackface as one of the Syrians' strike force.

  Bolan almost made the open window along that second-story ledge of the headquarters building. He intended to retrace his route at least part of the way off the base.

  The sun would not show itself for a while although the morning was getting lighter by the second. There were still shadows and gloom and the eye had to strain to discern things.

  A three-man sentry patrol of Syrian soldiers rounded the near side of the building when the penetrator had only three or four seconds to go to reach that open window and disappear out of sight. The soldiers were marching abreast, AK-47'S slung over their shoulders. The man in the middle gazed up almost idly at the lighted window of General Abdel's office and the other two looked with him. Just one of those things.

  Two minutes earlier it would have been dark enough for the nightstriker to go undetected from down there, but Bolan had stayed too long in the heart of the enemy camp.

  The sentries saw him.

  Bolan jumped off the ledge feet first into the trio of soldiers before any of them could utter a sound or swing their rifles up at the blacksuited blur that descended upon them.

  He could have attempted to pick them off from his perch with the Beretta he had that much of an advantage before the soldiers saw him. But he knew Strakhov, in that office, would hear the silenced chugging of the Beretta, and Bolan much preferred to keep this as quiet as possible until the appropriate moment.

  Two of the soldiers blocked Bolan's fall when the heel of each boot caught a man in the forehead with enough force to impact skullbone deep into brain matter, rendering those two instantly lifeless.

  The momentum of the fall carried Bolan into a somersault, which he came out of just as the third soldier managed, while opening his mouth to shout an alarm, to begin tracking his AK on Bolan.

  Bolan moved lightning fast, his left foot coming up in a high martial-arts kick that deflected the soldier's assault rifle, knocking it from the man's hands.

  Bolan regained his balance and jabbed his right hand straight and hard in another thrust to crush the soldier's Adam's apple, cutting off the warning before it began. Then The Executioner brought his left hand down in a hard chop, breaking the man's neck, and the sentry collapsed on top of the other two, not quite as bloody but just as dead.

  Bolan took off, running across the tarmac toward the Russian tanks an
d munitions he had spotted coming in. He knew those tanks would be rolling in another hour or two, carrying more death in the world so the cannibals could grab a few more inches on the world map.

  A much better use for those war machines would be as a diversion, Bolan decided. He extracted a wad of wrapped plastique as he moved toward them through the growing light of approaching dawn.

  The motor pool sat next to that Soviet weaponry, he recalled, and most of the base security had been deployed along the perimeter.

  A two-man patrol emerged from between the rows of parked tanks when Bolan had only fifty paces to go. They saw him in the dawn's early light. They were holding their AK'S at port arms. The two rifles leveled as one on the figure in blacksuit, the Syrian soldiers diving sideways.

  Bolan assumed a combat shooting stance, steadied his aim with his left hand and the Beretta spit its muted death yip in the quiet air but far enough away from the barracks for the silenced chugs not to be heard.

  The two soldiers twirled into a macabre ballet of death, rifles flipping away as the two bodies sank against the nearest Soviet T-55 and collapsed.

  Their corpses were still trembling with the shock of death as the Executioner buzzed past, stooping without slowing after he holstered the Beretta to grab up one of the AK'S and one soldier's hip-clipped ammo pack.

  Time for the heavy stuff.

  It took less than thirty seconds to unwrap the plastique and place the puttylike explosive between the crawler tracks of one of the tanks.

  He found the ammunition dump in the center of the row of tanks. The ammo stash had a two-man guard. These Syrians were leaning against a T-55, chatting idly with no idea of their approaching death.

  Bolan rifle-butted the soldier nearest him across the back of the head and heard skullbone crack.

  The second man started to react to the strange sounds from his buddy when Death jerked the AK-47 sideways in one continuous motion from the first kill, smashing the rifle butt into the second soldier's head, killing him, too.

  Bolan spent eleven seconds planting the remainder of his plastique around the stash of rockets. He set the timer in this death putty for the appropriate seconds to coincide with what he left on the tank.

  Thirty seconds to blast-off.

  The sun splashed its first red traces over the hills to the east.

  Bolan dashed from the tarmac toward the collection of jeeps and trucks around the two-bay garage of the base motor pool.

  Four sleepy-eyed regulars were loitering around a coffeepot, girding themselves for another day of war. When they saw Bolan on his dash toward a line of jeeplike vehicles, the soldiers all swung simultaneously, coming wide awake. They dropped their coffee mugs and reached for weapons as the air clouded with spraying coffee and blood. The AKBLEDG yammered in Bolan's grip as he rode the heavy recoil of the assault rifle.

  Bodies tumbled in the garage like a little St. Valentine's Day massacre.

  The big fighter in blacksuit leaped into the nearest jeep and found the keys in the ignition as he expected.

  He paused only to slam a fresh magazine into the AK. Then he gunned the vehicle to life and stormed the hell out of there along a roadway that bisected the compound and led to the gate.

  The hammering of his AK had alerted the camp.

  Soldiers poured out from every building on the compound, freshly awakened and in various stages of dress, but every one of them carrying a weapon.

  Most were well behind the speeding jeep.

  Bolan roared full speed toward the main gate.

  He heard some firing at him from behind, but none of the whizzing projectiles came near man or rocketing vehicle.

  The gate sentries and the men in the sandbag-encircled machine-gun nests adjacent to the entrance guardhouse responded to something wrong, finding positions behind their weapons.

  But they held their fire as the Syrian jeep bore down on them. Bolan guessed they must have figured it was one of their officers coming with orders for them. Bolan saw the officer of the guard frantically jabbering on a field phone inside a window of the guardhouse.

  The Executioner would have preferred taking another way out, but because there were machine-gun emplacements along the perimeter he would still have to make it through multilayered rows of concertina wire. He did not have that kind of time before the troops behind him in the compound amassed with their own vehicles and gave chase.

  Then there came a deafening blast from the direction of the Russian tanks and munitions. The explosion shook the earth beneath everyone with a deep-throated roar and the tarmac area exploded into brilliant, blinding flame, blue-black smoke billowing straight up to blot out the rising sun.

  It was the diversion Bolan needed.

  Knowing the earth-shuddering blast would hit, Bolan did not look toward the area the way everyone else did, including the soldiers stationed at the gate.

  It took only the blink of an eye for every man there to whip his attention and weapons back toward the approaching Syrian vehicle. But by that time Bolan had steered the jeep into a sideways skid and heaved three of the grenades he carried.

  The first one sailed through the window of the guardhouse where the officer had forgotten his field phone, drawing a bead on Bolan with a pistol. The second landed unerringly into the nearest machine-gun nest, and the last grenade dropped at the base of the mesh-wire gates.

  The machine-gun nest of soldiers seemed almost to implode under the force of a blast intensified in the confines of the sandbags.

  The officer of the guard and his flimsy guardhouse disintegrated, and Bolan sought cover behind his vehicle as the earth rumbled again and pieces of building and bodies and the main gate rained down upon him.

  No gunfire issued from drifting clouds that were an that remained of the gate, the machine-gun nest and everything else that had barred his withdrawal.

  He launched himself behind the wheel of the jeep and flung a human arm, severed at the shoulder, the fingers still fluttering spasmodically, from where it had landed in the passenger seat. Then he steered the vehicle pell-mell through those drifting clouds.

  The jeep bumped over the gaping pothole left by the explosion that had demolished the gate.

  He risked a glance back over his shoulder as he steered up the incline leading from the valley of Zahle and the Syrian base.

  From the high ground as the jeep bounced along, he could see the tanks and munitions on the tarmac being eaten up, incinerated by hungry flames that some of the surviving soldiers were fighting to extinguish before the blaze spread.

  Other soldiers were piling into the remaining vehicles at the motor-pool garage.

  Getting ready for hot pursuit.

  11

  Major General Strakhov charged from the headquarters building less than thirty seconds after the explosions had rocked the base.

  The compound looked like a hive of insane bees.

  Syrian soldiers and Russian advisors were scurrying everywhere in the confusion, trying to find an enemy to fight. The light of the new day bathed an inferno ten times as bright when secondary explosions blew up the tarmac: and stung Strakhov's eardrums.

  He hurried to the motor-pool garage where he saw Major Kleb and two of the GRU man's. Russian subordinates trying to establish some order, dead bodies and destruction everywhere.

  Strakhov raised his voice above the melee.

  "Major! What is going on here?" Kleb's face shone in the flames around him, covered with sweat and soot, his eyes wild.

  "An attack, comrade Major General!"

  "I can see that, idiot! How many of them were there? Were any apprehended?" Kleb nodded to the Syrian officers ordering their men into troop trucks.

  "I have instructed them to give chase, as you can see. Those who saw the attack say it was the work of one man."

  "One man?" Strakhov echoed, gazing incredulously at the damage and bodies and fury of flames from the tarmac and the gate. "Preposterous!"

  "Uh, er, yes, my sentiments
exactly, comrade Major General. Nonetheless, as you can see, he, or, uh, they... shall not get far."

  Four troop carriers gunned their engines in final preparation for frantic pursuit.

  Strakhov grabbed the lapel of Kleb's tunic and shook him with barely contained rage.

  "Fool! Send one truck, imbecile. This could be a trick. A trap to lure us away. Triple the security around the perimeter. Have all officers report to me in the headquarters building immediately."

  Kleb saluted. "As you wish, comrade Major General."

  Strakhov turned and stormed back into the HQ building, wondering how the attackers had managed to breach the tight security measures and wreak such havoc.

  He did not for a moment believe one man could possibly be responsible for all this.

  * * *

  As he drove, Bolan found he had no difficulty remembering this route. He had paid close attention to the road into the base less than an hour ago, as the driver of the troop truck. He had memorized the prime spots for an ambush along the way. Now that paid off. In another hour or less these hilly back roads would be swarming with soldiers, but now he had this road to himself as he coaxed more speed from his vehicle, pedal to metal.

  When he did approach Beirut and the Phalangist positions, he would need to ditch the jeep, of course, but in his withdrawal from the Shouf, these wheels could serve him well. And if he encountered Druse or Syrian checkpoints and the Syrian army markings did not do the trick, well, he had the Beretta and Big Thunder and the AK-47.

  He negotiated a down-curving bend and found a spot he remembered.

  He tromped on the brakes and his vehicle shuddered to a grinding stop, halting sideways across the road.

  Bolan scrambled from behind the steering wheel and hustled up a steep incline beyond the culvert on one side of the road to a rim of wild shrubbery.

  He would have less than a minute before his pursuers rattled around that bend after him. Bolan hoped like hell they had not sent more than a truck or two, which could be manageable.