“Go on! Kill me! If you think I am going to be some prisoner of the Americans, you are wrong! Never! I will kill you the first chance I get! Do it! You murdered the others, kill me!”
Bolan felt the Beretta lift a few inches. He wasn’t quite sure what was possessing him, bringing on a sudden murderous impulse, but he was tempted to shoot what he knew was a cold-blooded killer who lived only to create death and destruction. Perhaps he was infected by the evil he’d seen on both sides, whatever humanity he maintained during a mission eroded by the vile company he kept. It passed, as he knew it would. Being an animal was easy. It was being human that was more often than not the tough part.
“Get up.”
The Iranian shimmied to his feet as Collins rounded the corner.
“Problems, Colonel?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.” Bolan glanced over his shoulder at Khatani. “Him?”
“I decided I didn’t need him that bad.”
Bolan was tempted to ask why, but skipped it. He wasn’t in the mood for more lies.
“Grab our boy here, Colonel, I just called in our ride.”
THE RIDE WAS a Bell JetRanger, typical, Bolan knew, of what flew tourists around the islands. It touched down on the beach, near the wharf, a black op waiting in the fuselage hatch. Bolan slit his eyelids against the rotor wash and whipping sand, boarding behind Collins and Hamadan. He half expected Collins to give Paradise one final wistful look, but the major simply moved through the hatch.
As the Executioner grabbed a seat, the chopper up and away, that strange dreamy haze came back, settling a mist over reality that was part adrenaline residue but mostly exhaustion. He was only flesh and blood, after all, aware that he hadn’t slept or eaten…
Since when?
The time passed for the soldier in that murky film. Bolan felt every muscle sore and aching and burning, from scalp to toes, his empty belly grumbling, mouth and throat raw from dehydration. He was alert, just the same, but felt as if he were slogging ahead, running on pure energy reserves and will alone. So many questions unanswered, they were a jumbled echo in his brain. The miles of this campaign were already taking their toll, but he knew he would suck it up, the way of the warrior.
They were in the Gulfstream, what felt like an endless passage of time later, airborne from Mahé, Collins on his radio. Bolan heard a lot of monosyllabic grunting from the command center in the rear. Something very ugly, he knew, waited in the near future, and it didn’t involve hunting down the enemy. He decided to hold his tongue from there on, let Collins call the shots, go with the flow.
One of the Cobra gang.
Collins walked up in his mist, offered a cigarette. Bolan declined it and the proffered shot of booze from the major’s silver flask. Hamadan had been handed over to what Collins called his cleanup crew on Praslin. Whatever intelligence could be found at the beach house would become the property of Collins’s cleanup ops. Whatever became of the body of Gambler…well, Bolan didn’t much give a damn. It was a strange state of mind the Executioner found himself in, caring but not caring, patient but impatient to reach—discover—what waited at the end of the line.
“Warlock and Cyclops flew ahead with the prisoners,” Collins said. “They’re in charge of interrogation—that came from up top.”
“If there’s any prisoners left to talk to by the time they get them to wherever they’re going.”
“A Greek island,” Collins said. “That’s where they’ll be detained, and that’s where the tribunal will eventually be held.”
“Let me guess. The Greeks don’t know anything.”
“They know, or at least the ones who should. It was a hard sell, the way I heard it, but they finally agreed to let us in. The island—Camp Zero—is the sole property of the United States government. Black ops all the way, Colonel. This is something from beginning to end you won’t see splashed all over world headlines.” Collins took a seat, puffing, peering at Bolan. “You look like hell, Colonel. I got some sandwiches, bottled water and cold beer in the fridge. Why don’t you eat, grab a nap while there’s time. Lebanon is up next. From here on it doesn’t get any easier.”
Or perhaps any down and dirtier, the Executioner thought.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hamid Bhouri wanted peace on Earth, goodwill toward all men. There was no animosity, no violence in his heart toward those outside the Muslim faith, no matter how much he might disagree with them, no matter how much they might despise him and his faith. It wasn’t even part of his character to take up arms against foreigners who might desire to impose their will on the people of the Middle East, and in the name of oil, if he chose to believe the propaganda of the extremists. As far as he was concerned, the sins of other men were theirs to own before the judgment of God when they left the world.
Over the years, surviving in a war-torn land, he had come to believe there was nothing he could say, nothing he could do to change the hearts of men bent on violence and destruction. Even with the best intentions of keeping his distance from the extremists, he was forever hounded, even railed at by militant Arabs at times to join their ranks, strike down the infidel, even if that meant a suicide attack, which, he knew, was an abomination in the eyes of God. Live and let live, he believed—if only that were true.
He still had to live in Lebanon. And no man, peacemaker or warrior, he thought, was ever allowed the luxury of choosing not to choose.
He prayed five times daily without fail, all passion and feverish imploring for paradise on Earth, free of violence and hatred and war, even though he knew it was little more than a fool’s dream. Considering the darker side of human nature, the present state of world affairs—what with all the wars and rumors of wars—he feared the future of mankind was bleak at best, dire at worst. His own country, for instance, was still a seething caldron of violence and ancient hatreds and religious intolerance, his land surrounded by other nations that could well push the entire region beyond critical mass, ignite the fuse to a cataclysm imaginable only in the very bowels of Hell.
With what he suspected was coming that night, he had to ask God one last time for help and guidance, his faithful servant, if not for the salvation of other men’s souls, then to watch over, protect and insure the safety of his own corner of the world. He was a family man, after all, with a wife and four children whose futures and safety he had to consider. It pained him greatly that his decision, the deceit of his task might very well have put their lives in danger.
To his family and neighbors, he was a simple farmer, a herder of goats and sheep, the rumors of his brief affiliation with Hamas and Hezbollah chaff in the wind, gone with brutal men long since dead and unlamented. Those days, he recalled—when the rumors could be misconstrued and edged toward fact—had been merely a charade in order to survive in the Muslim quarter of Beirut, the younger Bhouri publicly espousing extreme fundamentalism, faking it, to be sure, never firing a weapon even in anger. For that he was grateful, his soul still unstained by bloodshed, the taking of life. So very long ago, but it seemed only yesterday when, at the tail end of the fifteen-year-old civil war, he had inherited fertile land in the Bekaa Valley from his father, removed himself and his family from the strife and violence of the city. The warring factions and the extremists might have laid down their weapons in Beirut, no longer slaughtering each other, but the danger had followed him to the Bekaa.
Choices once again.
Lately there were more guns, more black-hooded terrorists in the countryside than he could count, much less cared to have live so close to his home in the town of Basri just north of the Beirut-Damascus Highway. With what he knew was a growing threat to the internal security of his country, the dream was losing its glowing allure. He no longer felt such a simple man with basic needs, wishing only to plow his wheat, see his children grow to have children, the fear now mounting that his country would once again be fractured by civil war or feel the wrath of invading armies or shattered to oblivion like Afghanistan by bombs fall
ing endlessly out of the sky.
Peace on Earth? His bitter chuckle was flung back in his face by a cold wind soughing down the mountainside. The awful truth, he knew, was that what he longed for was as worlds apart from reality as Heaven was from Hell.
He wasn’t sure whether he had made the choice, or if the choice had been made for him. As he crouched in a gully, searching the black skies above the snowcapped ridges of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, wishing for a moment he was armed, he pondered his fate and the past that had led him to this moment.
Long ago he had been an information broker for Mossad and CIA agents. It was dangerous work, spying on his fellow countrymen, but there had been a time when he wasn’t sure how he was going to feed his family. He had believed that by relocating to the Bekaa he would never have to tread those shark-infested waters again. How wrong he had been proven, wondering if a man ever really escaped his past.
Roughly three months ago he had been approached by two men in Basri, one of them with a thick Israeli accent, the other foreigner with a hideous scar on his hand. He was to gather whatever information he could on the Arnous camp in the Bekaa. They seemed to know every detail about his life, from birth to present and that had shaken him to the core of his being. They knew he had cousins who were in Hamas and Hezbollah, both in Lebanon and Israel. They knew he valued his family more than anything in the world. They could make his life a living hell if he didn’t cooperate, putting out the word that he was a Mossad informant, which would leave his life and the lives of his family numbered in hours. After listening to their spiel with the thinly veiled threats and what was demanded of him, he had agreed. It wasn’t so much out of fear as he had been prompted by a growing sense of urgency that his country—a mass haven for international terrorists—had to be cleansed of extremists. Or his country, he feared, could well suffer the same fate as Afghanistan if America was attacked and the fists of retribution were directed at Lebanon.
So they gave him a small laptop with secured fax and e-mail, a promise of a cash reward if his services proved useful to them. They had given him a homing beacon, GPS module, night-vision scope to spy on the camp at night. He was to report in and check his messages daily, await further orders. He was to monitor the countryside, assess the numbers of terrorists, detail for them the easiest and quickest route by which to infiltrate a small commando unit, using his own canvass-covered truck to trek in the invaders.
He already knew about the sprawling Arnous camp to the northeast but, whether it was luck or some design of fate, he had discovered the cave in the foothills of the mountains at the southern edge of the valley. He had been ordered to monitor the comings and goings of the extremists in that cave. He had counted no more than five at any one time. He had no idea how deep the cave went or what was inside, but an e-mail had come back only last night, telling him to not worry about it, “they” knew. The last, cryptic message had told him tonight was the night, he was to hunker down approximately a mile south of the cave, three hundred feet up the slope of the foothills, and wait. Whatever excuse, flimsy or otherwise, he was to give his wife for his midnight absence was his business. Just be there.
So there he was, alone and shivering in the dark in his sheepskin coat, waiting on a group of foreign commandos, risking his entire world. It was a given these night invaders were coming to kill the terrorists he had been spying and reporting on. He was ashamed for a moment by the sudden flash of violent desire in his heart, hoping they left no one behind in the cave or the camp alive, the risk being that one of the extremists would discover he had betrayed them.
He checked the homing beacon, the module clipped to his belt. The light was flashing red, telling him it was on-line. The gnawing fear now was that he would be discovered before the commandos arrived, perhaps was even being stalked right then by the extremists in the cave. If found, he would be searched, questioned, the high-tech gear he carried nothing but red flags he was out there in the valley for more than just a midnight stroll.
He checked the foothills again, alert for shadows, wondering how the invaders would come to him. With all the checkpoints and Syrian military outposts, he couldn’t picture them just driving in, not unless they numbered in the hundreds, came in tanks, the beginning of some dreaded full-scale invasion, life as he knew it over. No, they needed a vehicle he had been told. The sky, then.
He was looking up, peering at the scudding clouds, thinking he spotted some dark shape sailing high above. It was a glimpse of a massive object, there in the cloud break, then gone, then he felt the muzzle of a weapon jammed into the back of his skull.
“You’d better be Hamid.”
It took a long moment, his knees trembling, but he recalled the password. “Welcome to my humble country.”
“That’ll work. You understand what will happen to you if you don’t play it straight with us?”
“Perfectly.”
Hamid turned, faced the big commando. His face, neck and hands, he saw, were covered in black war paint. There was a massive assault rifle in his hands with an attached rocket launcher, the big shadow nearly invisible in his blacksuit, the invader weighted down with spare clips, grenades, a side arm. The eyes peered through the dark, as if dissecting the inner man, searching for hidden motivations, Bhouri feeling the freeze ripple through him. Bhouri knew he had nothing to hide, but he couldn’t help but wonder right then if he was on the side of the angels, or if these commandos would prove themselves devils in human skin, march him to his own death.
He offered up a silent prayer that God be with him, wishing only to get this over with and return to his family.
THE RECRUITMENT, grooming and handling of unsavory characters on the other side was how covert ops succeeded in thrashing the enemy inside their borders. They could be gunrunners, drug mules, even terrorists who had a change of heart, wanted out or were looking to turn a quick buck. In short, they were betraying their own, untrustworthy until they proved themselves, actors in a grim drama of death. Bolan knew it was the way of the black-ops world, gaining information on the enemy by using the enemy, and there was no point in standing around debating if Hamid could be trusted or was steering them into an ambush.
They were on the ground and moving.
The Executioner, the first one out of the C-130, had touched down at the end of the HALO first, using his GPS and homing beacon tuned in to the informant’s transponder. He had reached Bhouri first, landing roughly two thousand yards south of the man, silently padding down the slope, using cedar trees for momentary cover and surveillance of his surroundings while on the advance. It ground up critical time, thirty-two minutes before the other Cobra commandos were gathered, Hamid grilled again, and they were off and stalking through the night.
It was 0334 by the time Bolan, leading Gator and Wallbanger down the rocky slope, reached the ledge over the cave’s entrance. He took a moment, signaling his teammates to pull up, the sentry suddenly stepping into view, working on a smoke.
Bolan assessed the entire play, liking and trusting it all even less after the near fatal Gambler encounter in Seychelles.
Again, it was the major’s show, Collins detailing the strike since the moment they were wheels-up in Kenya. Their latest mobile base was near the Israeli-Lebanese border, the commanding officer, Colonel Ben David Yehudin, having greeted Cobra Force with less than a warm reception. Apparently the IDF and Mossad had their orders from up top, though, and the Israelis were on standby with the Gods of Thunder ready to unload an air strike on the Arnous camp, paving the way for a Cobra ground assault.
It was Bolan’s task to take down the cave and occupants, destroy whatever arms cache was buried inside. According to both Collins and Yehudin, the Syrian army, coddling extremists from all over the Middle East and inviting them into Lebanon, was using heavy machinery to dig out caves and tunnels in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. Whether they were storing weapons and explosives or preparing to dig in and ride out some massive air assault, no one could be sure. A potential suici
de bomber, though, had been snatched up in Jerusalem weeks before. He had been cooperating with both Mossad and American intelligence agents working in the shadows of the Cobra campaign, handing over information about the camp and the cave. Supposedly the tunnel ran some two hundred feet straight ahead into the foothills, veered left, a reverse L. Another thirty feet down, and militants—no more than six—were posted to guard a massive cache of assault rifles, grenades and explosives. Handheld heat sensors would paint the numbers, but Bolan was watching his own twelve and six again. It struck him as more than curious that Collins had pasted two nonserpent commandos to his hip, the soldier again disturbed by the feeling he wasn’t meant to make it out of the country, the three of them sacrificial lambs. Penetrating caves for an armed engagement was no easy chore to start with. Any number of dangers—booby traps, land mines and so forth—could rear up, with nooks and crannies concealing the enemy. The would-be bomber, or so Collins informed Bolan, swore the cave wasn’t rigged with mines or sensors and trip wires. A straight shot to the depot, allegedly.
Collins wanted the roof brought down on the cave, and Wallbanger lugged the C-4 and incendiary packages for the blast-and-burn job. Bolan didn’t have a problem with that; the less destructive capability the enemy had the better. The whiff of trouble he caught again wanted to paint the bull’s-eye on his back. One, he was peeled off from the bulk of the force moving in on the camp. Two, when they sealed the cave here, they would be forced to drive in on the camp, commandeering the Land Cruiser parked in front of the cave. They were supposed to link up with the others while the bombs fell and Collins was off and running. The air show should wipe out most of the militants at Arnous. Close to two hundred extremists, homegrown and taking refuge in Lebanon to train and carry out operations, were up for the doomsday touch. The standing order from Collins was to burn down every armed extremist. No prisoners, unless they threw their hands up and made their job that much easier.
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