The Iranian Hit te-42

by Don Pendleton

  Minera looked at Bolan. He looked at the mighty .44. He saw the expression, or lack of expression, in those frigid eyes.

  He stalked off without a backward word or glance.

  Which left Bolan and Carol Nazarour facing the general and Rafsanjani.

  The STOL was some fifty yards away. Its approaching noise caused Bolan to raise his voice when he addressed Nazarour.

  "I guess that about wraps it up, general. Except for the matter of who tipped off Yazid in the first place that you could be found in Potomac. And who arranged the arms smuggling.

  "That would be the same person who planted the cyanide canisters in the gatehouse so that Yazid's men could break in so easily. The same person who killed your brother last night."

  General Nazarour had been busy scanning the entrances to the airfield and the unmarked but obviously government sedans that were parked there. He looked back at the awesome American before him. His voice lost none of its animal strength as he raised it above the rumble of the approaching aircraft.

  "The man who betrayed me is dead, Colonel Phoenix. He was my brother. Rafsanjani killed him."

  Rafsanjani stepped closer to the general, offering a visible show of solidarity. "I saw Dr. Nazarour acting suspiciously," he said to Bolan. "I followed him out of the house to the pool. He had a pocket radio of some kind. I came forward to question him. He whirled and attacked me like a madman. He fought. I killed him."

  "My brother was a weak, loathesome person," sneered the general. "It doesn't surprise me, his betraying me as he did. Promise him drugs, and he would do anything."

  "You should know," growled Bolan. "But it wasn't your brother who was pulling dirty tricks behind your back. It was Rafsanjani himself."

  Rafsanjani's face twisted with surprise and rage.

  Bolan read fear there too.

  "What manner of madness is this?'' The Peter Lorre voice carried a taut edge, was less sibilant.

  But nothing fazed General Nazarour.

  "What is the basis of your accusation, Colonel Phoenix?" he asked bluntly.

  "Process of elimination mostly," Bolan announced, not taking his eyes off Rafsanjani. "I can't see Carol having the contacts to get word back to Tehran on where they could find you. Even if she had, you kept too close a watch on her for that. You knew about her escape tunnel. You knew about her lover. You even had Rafsanjani on top of her tonight when she tried to call me, even with all the pressure of being on the run as you were. So it wasn't Carol.

  "And it wasn't Minera," he continued. "If Minera had set the thing up, he sure as hell wouldn't have put his life on the line as he did tonight in Potomac."

  "And what of Medhi?" asked Nazarour. His voice was still emotionless, but he had about him the attitude of a man listening to and weighing Bolan's every word.

  "Medhi did not betray you," said Bolan. "He was too dependent on you for drugs to ever break away. And he died heroically. He suspected Rafsanjani of informing on you. He warned me to beware of a traitor in your ranks. He wanted to protect you at all times, general. That is, he wanted to protect his drug source.

  "But he wouldn't tell me names because I guess he was afraid of Rafsanjani, too. He probably went up to his room and got himself junked out. But instead of relaxing him, the junk just made him more paranoid. He must have decided that telling me about the traitor was not enough. He ended up stumbling outside again, looking for Rafsanjani with a stiletto. He was out of his league. Rafsanjani killed him instead."

  The general turned slowly in his wheelchair and looked up at the man before him. "I await your denial, Abbas."

  Rafsanjani only glared at Bolan. He seemed wound in on himself, ready to explode outward, sizing his options.

  "He can't deny it," Bolan growled. "It's all true. He has access to your funds, doesn't he?"

  Nazarour's eyes did not leave Rafsanjani. "Abbas handles all of my finances. I trusted him implicitly."

  "Then that's his motive. He's greedy. He waited until the last minute. Then he contacted Tehran. And part of his price for fingering you was that he specify exactly when the hit was to be made. That allowed him to plant the cyanide canisters to nullify your security."

  Rafsanjani had judged his options.

  He moved.

  He darted to the left, pawing beneath his jacket and coming up with a handgun. He brought the weapon up in Bolan's direction as he cut a sharp angle away from the man in black.

  Bolan recognized the gun being pulled on him.

  It was his own Beretta, loaned the night before.

  The mighty AutoMag tracked upward and delivered one final load of thunder and death from Bolan's fist, spitting a 250-grain skull crusher that did just that. Rafsanjani never fired the Beretta. His near-headless body continued to run a few more paces before collapsing like a man pushing himself too hard and suddenly needing a long rest.

  Bolan lowered the .44, holding it at his side. Carol Nazarour spoke first, staring at the latest kill in this night and dawn of slaughter.

  "Oh, my God," came the lady's voice. "Thank God...."

  Bolan couldn't have agreed more.

  He walked over and retrieved his Belle, which was still clasped in Rafsanjani's fingers. Then he walked back to the general.

  Nazarour couldn't seem to take his eyes off the dead body of his aide.

  "I was a fool," he said, and Bolan detected genuine regret in the Iranian's voice. "I have never trusted Medhi because of his addiction. Abbas played on this. He convinced me of my own brother's guilt. After I gave him shelter and trusted him...."

  "Rafsanjani saw his chance and he took it, and he didn't give a damn about trust," said Bolan. "That's something a man like you ought to understand, General." He nodded to the Sky Terrier, which had idled to a stop thirty feet away. "There's your plane. Get the hell out of our country."

  The STOL's hatch and stairway were lowered. A man emerged. An Iranian. The guy wore civilian clothes, yet he had about him an unmistakably military bearing.

  But there were no weapons in sight.

  It was, yeah, only a pickup.

  As Carol Nazarour had said: Thank God.

  While Bolan and Carol watched, the man from the STOL crossed to the general and offered a sharp salute, which Nazarour returned. The general spoke something in his native tongue.

  The man nodded, stepped behind the wheelchair, and wheeled Nazarour around and off toward the STOL, which they boarded.

  General Nazarour never looked back at the woman who had been his wife.

  Moments later, the strange craft dramatically lifted off the ground, banking in an easterly direction toward the ocean.

  Probably toward a waiting yacht, thought Bolan.

  Toward another siege against the world.

  19

  Bolan was thinking that he should have blown the man away. In a different time, maybe he would have done so. A guy like Nazarour should not be given a diplomatic cloak to legitimize his savagery. But he was wearing one this time, and Bolan had to honor it.

  The general's STOL disappeared beyond the hospital district skyline, as though into some new slice of time and space, leaving the realities behind. Bolan sighed and allowed his mind to play with those realities for a moment. Minera, too, had disappeared.

  Unmarked federal sedans were clustered at both entrances to the bloodied airfield, awaiting their cue for entry. A hushed crowd of civilians was beginning to form beyond the fence, drawn by the gunfire.

  And, as though from another time and place, Carol Nazarour approached, still wrapped in the same leather coat, she'd been wearing when Bolan first saw her — was it just last night? Another time and place, yeah. Aeons ago.

  Many dead men ago. She told him in a breathless little voice, "Thank you, Colonel. Many, many thanks."

  Bolan smiled at her with eyes only as he lifted the transceiver to his head and spoke into it. "This is Stony Man One. All clear here."

  Brognola's somber tones bounced back instantly. "Okay. We're moving. Wher
e's Minera?"

  "Gave 'im a white flag," Bolan told him. "Guess he took it."

  There was urgency in Brognola's voice as he replied, "You may want to take it back. I've got two words for you: Arnie Farmer."

  Arnesto "the Farmer" Castiglione had been the big boss of the Eastern seaboard from Jersey to Florida when Bolan executed him during the Mafia wars.

  Bolan's voice was cold and clipped as he responded to that. "Cordon the field. Give me a sieve as fine as you can manage."

  "You got it," Brognola assured him.

  Bolan told the lady. "Stay put, right here. They'll take care of you." He brushed her cheek lightly with the back of his hand, then bent to kiss her quickly.

  "Thank you again," she whispered.

  But Bolan did not hear. He was already moving swiftly across the battlefield, seeking a rendezvous with his past.

  Time out of sync, yeah. That warp of space and time was right here, right now. Minera was carrying it, not Nazarour. And Mack Bolan intended to find it.

  * * *

  Arnesto Castiglione, or "Arnie Farmer," had been one of those primal American savages who built an empire with jungle cunning, sheer ferocity, and untempered greed. Sometimes also known as "the Lord of Baltimore," the Farmer had "domesticated" the entire U.S. East Coast from New Jersey south by the time Mack Bolan first came onto the guy. He was one of the strongest Mafia bosses in the country, virtually uncontested by the law or the lawless, and he had become accustomed to the kind of absolute power that turns politicians and industrialists, bankers and businessmen, labor and management alike, into puppets.

  The common wisdom of the day had Arnie destined to become Capo di tutti Capi, or Boss of All the Bosses — and probably he would have, except for Bolan's explosive entry into the equation.

  He removed the Farmer early in the Mafia wars, but so strong was the man's empire, so well stocked with able and ambitious lieutenants who kept rising to power, that it was among the last to fall into disarray under Bolan's determined assaults.

  And, of course, the very turf now beneath Bolan's feet had been the heartland of the Castiglione empire. So it had required no great leap of imagination to understand Brognola's terse two-word report concerning the status of Minera as some dangerous echo of the Arnie Farmer empire.

  Bolan caught up with the guy inside an A&E hangar. He was stumbling into a pair of white service coveralls that had just been removed from the freshly dead body of a mechanic who unluckily had found himself in a sound wave of that echo from the past.

  "Forget it," Bolan frigidly advised the Mafioso.

  Minera's gaze came up slowly, traveling the full length of the impressive "colonel," halting finally in a confrontation with icy blue eyes. He dropped the coveralls and kicked them away without breaking that eye contact.

  "What's your problem, soldier?" the Mafioso asked quietly, a whole new voice and an entirely new personality behind it.

  "You put on a convincing show," Bolan told him. "Good enough to fool me all the way. It would have worked... except the warp caught up with you."

  Minera was moving slowly, carefully maneuvering toward a combat stance. "What warp?" he asked coldly. "I don't know what you're saying."

  Both men's weapons were holstered. Minera was trying to square off, his right hand hovering stiffly at the butt of his pistol, but Bolan kept moving with him.

  "I'm saying, Minnie, that you call the shots for Nazarour."

  The guy laughed without humor as he replied. "Bullshit. I just ran the joint for 'im. But so what if I do? What's it to you?"

  "Could be a whole lot," Bolan said quietly. "Depends on what it is to you."

  A slow smile began at the corners of Minera's mouth, a smile that never quite reached the eyes. He said, "Okay. Maybe I could use a guy like you at this end. You got Pentagon connections?"

  The weird little dance was still going on between the two men. "Better than that," Bolan told him.

  "How much better?"

  "Best you can get. But I'm not interested in a weekly envelope, pal."

  The dance halted and Minera laughed, genuinely. "So maybe we'll talk a percentage... if you can really deliver."

  "A percentage of what?" Bolan quietly inquired.

  "The whole damn world maybe," said Arnie Farmer's heir. "The general will deliver a piece of the Middle East. Soon as he does that, other pieces will fall in line."

  "Which others?"

  Minera scowled. "We'll talk about it later."

  "We'll talk about it right now," Bolan told him.

  "Or what?" Minera sneered.

  "Or you get what Arnie got," Bolan said coldly.

  "What?"

  "You heard it. I'm the one that wiped him, Minnie."

  "What?" The dance began again. Minera wiped his lips with the back of his left hand and chewed on a knuckle for a moment. "What'd you say?"

  "I also wiped Billy Garante and Mario Cuba."

  "Santelli?" Minera whispered. "Damon? La Carpa?"

  "Them, too," Bolan confirmed softly.

  Minera went for his piece then. He did not quite get there. Bolan delivered a judo kick to the elbow of his gun arm. It popped audibly and fell helplessly away, dangling in numb paralysis. Minera groaned and tried to throw a punch with his left. Bolan went inside of it and broke the arm against his chest, then pinned the howling Mafioso to the wall with a hand at his throat. That stopped the bleating. Minera's eyes were rolling wildly as he struggled to pull air through his constricted larynx.

  Bolan eased off just a bit, enough to allow those dangling feet to find a little purchase.

  "You're Bolan!" the Mafioso gasped.

  "You got it, pal."

  "I thought you were..."

  "I'm not. But maybe you are. What's the scam with Nazarour?"

  Minera's eyes were reflecting the horror of a brutal soul at Judgment Day. It could have been the realization of a nightmare shared with all of his ilk, a dread that supposedly had found remission in the flaming wreck of a GMC motorhome in Central Park one rainy night, the night when Mack Bolan officially "died." Those horrified eyes were searching for an out, for some rebuttal to the awful truth. They found no comfort whatsoever in the icy stare of this adversary. Miner a groaned with pain and said, "Look, I don't... I was just... it's all bullshit. I got nothing with the general."

  "Then you can die with clean hands," Bolan suggested. He returned the pressure, lifting the guy away from earth again.

  Those eyes bugged and rolled, and spittle formed at the lips as Minera tried to squeeze airless words past them.

  Bolan gave him just enough adjustment and said, "I didn't catch that, Minnie."

  "I said okay," the Mafioso sputtered. "It's like you say. I call the shots."

  "For what?"

  "For the new thing. We're pulling it together again."

  "Starting where?"

  "Africa."

  "Uh huh," Bolan said softly. "What's the territory?"

  Minera's groaning response was unintelligible.

  "Say it again," Bolan commanded.

  Minera croaked, "Military stuff."

  "Nukes," Bolan decided.

  "Whatever." Minera tried to clear his throat but could not. The eyes rolled as he continued. "I'm dying, huh? You're killing me. Let off."

  "There are worse crimes than killing," Bolan told him coldly. "Letting off sometimes, for example."

  "Huh?"

  "One death against thousands, Minnie — maybe even millions. How do we balance that?"

  "I guess I don't get you," Minera groaned.

  Bolan reapplied the pressure as he told the dying man, "I guess you do." He lifted the guy completely off the floor, by the throat, and quietly held him there through the final agonized struggle, then slowly lowered the lifeless body to the floor of the hangar.

  Brognola came through the door while Bolan was verifying the lack of life signs. The fed turned about quickly and went back out. Bolan joined him just outside the hangar and told him, "A
rnie Farmer is dead again. How many times do I have to cancel the guy, Hal?"

  "Let's hope this was the last one," Brognola replied with a tired sigh.

  "Don't bet any lives on it," Bolan said. "The shit machines have an amazing ability to reassemble themselves. Even from the grave. Nazarour has to be stopped."

  "Why?"

  "I believe Minera was pulling together a combine to supply nuclear weapons to the Mideast. Someone over there obviously wants them very bad. Minera said Africa. I would have to guess Libya. And that could be only the beginning."

  "Of the end," Brognola commented.

  "Wherever and however, Nazarour is probably the central figure."

  Brognola stared sadly at the ground as he tried to bring it all together in his mind. "Hell," he growled, "we turned the guy loose. Now he's free as a bird."

  "Maybe not," Bolan replied. "Can you get me a link to Stony Man?"

  Brognola's eyes were question marks as he jerked a thumb toward his vehicle. "Channel A," he explained, referring to the two-way radio.

  Bolan strode to the vehicle, punched in the linkage to Stony Man Farm, and devoted some five minutes to quiet radio conversations with several different individuals. Brognola studiously avoided the vehicle during that period, approaching only when it was obvious that the Striker's business had been concluded.

  "I'll settle for a hint," the fed told the big man in black.

  Bolan lit a cigarette and took a deep pull at it, exhaling the smoke with a tired sigh. Then he gave the fed his "hint" for the day. "A STOL aircraft was observed attempting a rendezvous with a large yacht fifty miles off the coast. Funny thing happened, though. It suddenly burst into flames and fell into the sea several miles short of its goal. No way could there have been any survivors."