He cupped her face gently in his palm, tenderly wiping away the tear.
"I am a soldier," she repeated.
"Fine. So live to fight another day."
She was resisting, but more weakly now.
"I choose my fights," she said softly, tearfully.
And Bolan knew he had her now.
"Sorry. This one's taken."
"And if I refuse to stay behind?"
It was a question more than a challenge. He could sense that most of the fight had drained out of her now.
"I don't have time to argue with you now," he said. "You know what I say is true." He paused, letting that sink in, waiting until she nodded, a barely perceptible motion of her head. "I'll need your car keys."
Another moment's hesitation, then she fished around inside her purse, finally coming out with them and handing them over to Bolan. He turned toward Hannon, frowning, knowing he had put the former captain of detectives on the spot.
"I'll be back when I can," he said.
If I can.
And Bolan pushed the grim, defeatist thought away from him as he shook hands with Hannon at the door. Behind the ex-cop, he could see Evangelina watching him, but she did not respond when Bolan waved his hand in parting.
"We'll be here," Hannon told him, glancing briefly at the lady.
Evangelina nodded, finally.
"Si."
And Bolan put that house behind him, hoping those two good people would be safe along the sidelines of his war. There were no guarantees, he knew, but at the same time he had done his utmost, short of backing off completely while he saw the lady to some haven out of town or out of state.
There was no time for backing off or backing down, the warrior knew from grim experience. The battle had been joined there in Miami, and although he still had no firm handle on the situation, he knew that there was only one direction he could travel on the hellfire trail.
His course was dead ahead and damn the enemy's defenses. The Executioner had come to shake Miami, and nothing short of death would stop him from accomplishing that aim.
He was rattling Miami, see what fell out of the vipers' nest.
And he would see Evangelina when he got the chance.
If he got the chance.
In the meantime, there were cannibals at large, demanding Bolan's full attention. He was carrying the fire. And someone in Miami was about to feel the heat.
15
Raoul Ornelas listened to the ringing of the telephone on the other end, his anger and frustration mounting by the moment.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
On the tenth ring he slammed down the receiver, cursing under his breath. It was a gesture out of place with the man's normal sense of control, but he could feel the cool slipping, giving way to the bottled emotions that he felt inside.
He had been trying to reach Julio Rivera, his second-in-command, all morning, ever since the news reports had started coming in, and so far there had been no answer.
Frustration gave way to puzzlement and Ornelas frowned. It was not like Julio to be away from home throughout the morning hours; even when he spent the evening with a woman, Julio never slept over, preferring the security of home.
Healthy paranoia kept his second-in-command alive. And that same paranoia, multiplied by the tempo of current events, told Ornelas again that something must be wrong.
Beneath his anger now there was something else — an uneasiness that bordered on fear. It was uncustomary for the Cuban to feel anything but self-assurance, but on the other hand, he had a lot to worry about these days.
Too many strange and unexpected things were going on around Miami for a man to feel secure. Within the past twelve hours ominous bits and pieces of a grim mosaic had been casually revealed to him, and now he felt the very fabric of his world beginning to unravel around him.
Ornelas stopped himself, cutting off the train of thought before it could progress to its logical conclusion. The soldado knew that he would need his wits about him if he was to cope with the several riddles that the past half day had handed to him.
And a quick solution to those riddles might be vital. To completion of the plan he had been nurturing along for months... to his very survival, if it came down to that.
He needed answers in a hurry — but the worst part of it was that, so far, he was still uncertain of the questions.
First things first. There was the death — no, the assassination of Tommy Drake the previous night. Someone had entered Drake's estancia and murdered him, along with several of his hardmen, making off again without disturbing anything around the place, from all reports. No robbery, no vandalism — nothing.
That made it an assassination, by professionals. It also cut off Ornelas's supply of cocaine for the moment and placed him in the uncomfortable position of having to seek out new contacts. He could handle it, but it was just another inconvenience, something else to occupy his mind at the very moment when concentration was so vital.
He wondered if the hit on Drake could be related to the near miss on John Hannon. Somehow, Drake's best men had failed to take the nosy private eye, and they had gotten themselves killed in the bargain. Ornelas had no faith in mere coincidence. He realized that the events were probably related, but beyond that realization he could not proceed. Without some leads, at least a clue to the identity of Drake's assassins...
No matter how it read, the failure to eliminate Hannon left some dangerous loose ends. He would have to try and snip them off before they had a chance to multiply like roaches in the woodwork.
Toro's jailbreak, naturally, had been the worst news of the day — hell, of the year. The timing, on the eve of Ornelas's bold scheme, could not be automatically dismissed as chance. If there was some dark, guiding hand behind it...
Briefly he reflected on the string of violent incidents around Miami through the morning hours and early afternoon, all seemingly directed at the operations Drake and Phillip Sacco had their fingers in: drugs, gambling, women.
Raoul Ornelas had not survived so long on the fringes of the underground by trusting chance or letting others do his thinking for him. He was worried now, and with good reason. Something was afoot around Miami and right now he did not have a clue as to what might be going on.
Ignorance was no way to survive in war. And it was war that had taught him to survive. He stared at the phone as he recalled the past.
As a teenager he had fought for Castro against the animal Batista, battling to release his native Cuba from a tyranny that had oppressed her people for a generation. He had lost a brother in the fight and counted it a small price to be part of history.
He had survived to see the people's revolution twisted and transformed into something else, with the appearance of the Soviet "advisors" and Fidel's admission that he was, indeed, a secret Communist.
When exiles started fleeing from their homeland to the coast of Florida, Ornelas went with them, vowing that someday he would return and finish what he had started as a young guerrilla in the mountains.
He had joined the anti-Castro movement in Miami at a time when it was smiled on by the U.S. government. He felt betrayed by the movement he had risked his life for, and he sought a way to win revenge against his traitors. The CIA had helped him hone his martial skills, and at the same time they had taught him all the grim realities of power politics, of working with the Mafia to gain your end results, of using anyone and anything that might aid the cause.
Then tragedy struck the Ornelas family again. Raoul had lost another brother at the Bay of Pigs, cut down by Castro's gunners on the beach when American air support failed to arrive on schedule. He had seen the exile movement betrayed by so-called friends, the U.S. pulling back support and closing down the training camps in Florida and Louisiana, harassing the movement's leaders, opening relations, finally, with Fidel.
To Raoul Ornelas, the missile crisis, all the rest of it since 1961, was window dressing. He was learn
ing quickly that the end result was all that mattered. Never mind the changing cloak of ideology that could be donned and then discarded in an instant, for convenience.
Power and wealth were the keys, and he was determined to secure them at any cost.
Ornelas served himself now, working free-lance for anyone who paid his price. Today, the price was brought by drugs and terrorism in the proper cause.
But it was tomorrow that worried him. A violent storm was clearly brewing in Miami and he could not tell which direction the wind was coming from. And now, somehow, Toro was on the loose again, perhaps already looking for him.
They had been friends once, Ornelas and Toro, back when both of them were young, idealistic soldados in the cause of Cuba libre. Somehow, Toro never quite outgrew naive idealism. He still believed in capitalismjustice for the people. He resisted all attempts to see the light. That made him an obstruction; one that had to be removed in order for Raoul Ornelas to advance himself.
Removal had been surprisingly easy. Toro's trust, his sense of honor and loyalty, worked against him in the end. He refused to see that there were those around him who would betray him if the price was right.
Ornelas had balked at killing Toro. It was a tactical mistake that Ornelas now believed he would soon regret. At the time it had seemed enough to frame Toro, pack him off to prison. By the time he won release, Ornelas would have Toro's soldiers safely locked into Raoul's own private army. They would be seeing more action, making more money. And when — if — Toro won parole, he would be a forgotten man.
Except he was out right now, and suddenly, things were starting to go sour for Raoul Ornelas.
He felt himself becoming more and more agitated by the moment, trying desperately to keep control of his emotions, of his men. His very life, he knew, depended on his ability to lead, to fill his men with confidence and make them do his bidding gladly.
So far, everything had gone according to Ornelas's master plan, the pieces falling into place as if by destiny. At the final hour, everything was ready. The money — most of it, at any rate — had already been deposited in Ornelas's clandestine bank account.
The thought of his employer only made Ornelas worry more. He had accepted payment, promised to perform... and now, he was beginning to have deadly second thoughts. Too late to call the operation off, of course; there would be no way to stop it. But for the first time in a long career of fighting for assorted causes, Ornelas had doubts about his own ability to pull a mission off.
And why had Toro's break come now, with Ornelas's biggest operation yet less than a day away? Toro might spoil everything — by bringing down the heat from his escape on Little Havana, or by himself, in his quest for revenge.
Ornelas knew that Toro blamed Raoul for Toro's time in jail. It had not taken the canny exile leader long to decide exactly who had fingered him. While he was in the lockup, Toro's rage was impotent, wasted on the walls that held him captive. Now he was free to track Ornelas, to take whatever action his enraged mind could conceive of.
Ornelas wondered who had helped his former friend escape. Someone was supporting him, at least with tactical assistance on the break itself — and that was what concerned Ornelas most of all. Alone, El Toro was a thorn in his side. But with support troops, a secret army of his own, he might turn out to be a dagger in the heart.
Ornelas felt his control slip another notch, knew that he was rapidly losing the battle to keep his wits about him. He knew what to expect if anything went wrong with the operation at this late date.
He decided to consult with his control on this one, brief him on what had been happening around Miami in the past twelve hours. If the man was dense enough to somehow miss the daily news, he had some shocks in store for him. And maybe he would have some ideas of how Ornelas could keep things from disintegrating into chaos.
Maybe.
There was a single heartbeat's tremor in his hand as he reached for the telephone receiver. At the last instant, he hesitated, deciding to try Julio Rivera one last time before he took the final step.
If he could reach Rivera, they could get together and work out something on their own without involving Ornelas's sponsors.
He started dialing slowly. But his mind was racing, checking out contingencies, alternatives. Beneath it all, he wondered where a man could hide himself when his world went up in smoke.
16
The Cuban embassy located in Miami is a minifortress, built to keep its occupants inside and all intruders out. Some ninety miles from home, surrounded by the hostile thousands of their countrymen, the members of the consulate do not take any chance with security.
The gardeners who tend the yard and flower gardens so solicitously are, in fact, armed guards. With darkness, more traditional uniformed sentries take their place, prepared to shoot first and ask questions later.
The ornate wrought-iron gates, watched by uniformed patrols and television cameras, are reinforced to stop — or at least slow down — most vehicles available to rank-and-file civilians.
The ten-foot wall of masonry around the compound is surmounted by a coil of razor wire, protected by electronic sensors. Strategically positioned trees screen the embassy from the view of sightseers — or snipers; its windows are of special bulletproof glass, incorporating wire mesh to deflect rifle grenades and contain the initial blast within a restricted area. Inside the Fidelista outpost, no one is ever really quite at ease.
In case of an attack on the embassy, no self-respecting terrorist would bother with Jorge Ybarra's office on the second floor. Ybarra was well-known around Miami as the cultural attache of the Cuban mission, a man attuned to finer things than politics — such as art, good literature, vintage wine.
But the FBI and CIA agents realized Ybarra was, in fact, Miami station chief for Castro's secret police, the DGI — Direction General de Inteligencia. It was a covert outfit infamous throughout the western hemisphere for its involvement in exporting Castro's revolution to reluctant customers. In many cases, the organization was little more than an extension of the Soviet KGB; at other times, its officers came up with plans and exercises of their own, inevitably aimed at weakening prestige of the United States, advancing communism in Latin America or the Caribbean.
And agents of the DGI had surfaced everywhere the Cubans had a military presence — in Grenada, once upon a time, in Africa, in Nicaragua.
An early Castroite, Jorge Ybarra chose the service like a careful shopper picking out a suit he knows will fit him for a lifetime. He took to the clandestine world at once, a natural. He fought beside Guevara in Bolivia, before the roof fell in and Che was sold into captivity and death by traitors. As a charter member of the DGI, he had done service for Fidel in Chile, in El Salvador and elsewhere, prior to his posting with the Miami consulate.
Ybarra's specialty was terrorism and insurgency. He had been schooled by masters in Havana, completed training at Patrice Lumumba University inside the Soviet Union. The people's revolution had a use for terrorists now, with victory hanging in the balance for a dozen Third World nations. And Ybarra was the man to see about arranging incidents, assassinations — anything and everything along the lines of raw guerrilla warfare in an urban setting.
As noon approached, the section chief of DGI was alone in his office, mulling over the final details for his greatest coup to date. Everything was in readiness; all had been running smoothly until very recently, and he was beginning to feel some small concern that something might be going wrong.
Jorge Ybarra never worried. He was sometimes puzzled, but never for long; he was occasionally concerned, but only until he could figure out a plan of action to remove the momentary inconvenience. At no time did he seriously consider failure as an option in his plans.
Ybarra was nothing if not effective. In his thinking, problems existed to be solved. They were tests of his native ingenuity and he welcomed them, most of the time.
But he did not welcome any of the things that he was hearing from his c
ontacts on the streets of Miami. His agents in the exile community and in the syndicate were passing on disturbing news.
Another man might have been worried, even discouraged. As it was Ybarra felt concern.
There were some minor storm clouds building up on the horizon, true, but he felt confident that everything would go ahead on schedule.
The private phone on his desk was shrilling and the cultural attache frowned. He waited through three rings before he reached cautiously for the receiver.
Only a handful of men in the city knew this number, and he was not expecting calls from any of them at the moment. Unexpected news was often bad, and now Ybarra steeled himself for what would almost surely be another problem.
"Si?"
"This is Jose."
"I recognize your voice," he told the caller.
"Is this line safe?"
"Of course."
Ybarra had his people check the line each morning, scanning carefully for any sign of taps, any sort of interception that might indicate the FBI was listening in on his private phone. In times of crisis, as of late, he had the lines checked several times each day — and they were clean as of three hours ago.
"There may be trouble," his caller said cryptically.
"Oh?"
Ybarra kept his voice calm, noting a hesitation, a surprise at his reaction in the caller's own shaky tone.
"You've heard the news?"
"I hear much news. Be more specific."
"Toro. Drake. The rest of it."
"What rest?"
He felt concern, but was careful to keep all traces of it from his voice.
"There have been shootings, incidents..."
Ybarra released his breath in a weary sigh.
"There are incidents every day," he said, allowing a trace of annoyance to surface in his tone.
"Not like this. I am afraid..."
"I see."
"I am afraid the plan may be in jeopardy," the caller continued.
"You exaggerate."
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