Cold Judgment

by Don Pendleton

  "You," he told the nearest of his soldiers, "come with me. The rest of you will watch this man and kill him if he makes the slightest effort to escape." He spoke the orders first in Arabic and then repeated them in English, for the captive's benefit. It was important to him that the man should understand his life was hanging by a thread, that thread already stretched across the keen edge of a razor in Arrani's hand.

  He left the chamber with the guard in tow, proceeding along the corridor to the ferret's suite. Arrani took no pains to move with stealth; it did not matter if the traitor heard their approach. Any major secrets would reside with «Harrigan» and not his underling. A killing, now, might not be inappropriate.

  They reached their destination, and Arrani didn't bother to knock. He preferred to take his adversary by surprise, to push through the door with his escort close behind, prepared to spray the room with automatic fire at any sign of opposition. Rising apprehension gripped Arrani as he surveyed the empty room. The closed door yawned open, revealing the caftans hanging there and nothing more. He scanned the tiny bathroom in an instant, found it empty and took time to check beneath the bed before he put the suite behind him, barking orders to his escort.

  "Rouse the captain of the guards, and quickly. Sound a general alarm and seal all exits from the castle. No one, save the master, may depart without my personal inspection and approval."

  "To hear is to obey."

  "Be quick about it!"

  "Yes, my lord."

  The runner scuttled off, his submachine gun clasped across his chest. Arrani watched him go and hesitated at the door of "Harrigan's" suite. It mattered little that the ferret had escaped him, momentarily. As long as he was trapped inside the walls — and there was no escape for prisoners of Alamut — his brief evasion was of no concern. It was a minor inconvenience, nothing more, and he would pay for it upon his capture.

  If he fled the fortress, that would be another matter, but Arrani had no fear of such a failure on the part of their security. The traitor would be hunted down and captured. And before Arrani had finished with him, he would curse the day of his birth. Arrani had been clever in identifying the impostors, and he would not spoil it by letting one of them escape.

  The man who posed as Bryan Harrigan had scarcely moved. He stood beside the bed and scrutinized his captors with a kind of flat disinterest in his eyes. He might have been a jaded student caught at cribbing answers rather than a spy confronting torture and, eventually, screaming death. Arrani vowed to shatter that composure, bring the true man out and test his mettle in the fire.

  "Your comrade momentarily eludes us," he informed the tall man, watching for some trace of a reaction, finally rewarded by a shrug. "He will not be at liberty for long. While we are waiting for him to be found, you will accompany me."

  The master had insisted on an audience with «Harrigan» before the questioning began in earnest. If his personality and magnetism could not drag the answers out of their impostor, it would be Arrani's turn to try. And he was looking forward to it with anticipation.

  "This way."

  The impostor fell in step behind him as Arrani headed toward the banquet hall, his escort bringing up the rear. He had no fear of "Harrigan," no apprehension that the man might spring upon him from behind before the guards could riddle him and drop him in his tracks. Whatever else the man might be, he did not strike Tahir Arrani as a fool.

  He would present the captive to his master, watch and wait while the man refused to answer simple questions, and in time, he would be given charge of the interrogation. Then they would have answers, and to spare.

  Within the dungeon of his mind, Arrani knew precisely how to handle the impostor, how to keep his body and his mind alive — alive and screaming — through the night. It would not matter if the necessary answers were obtained immediately, if the actual interrogation took a moment or an hour. He would not be satisfied until the ersatz Irishman was broken, mentally and physically. Until he begged for death.

  And if the infidel was very, very fortunate, Arrani might decide to grant his wish. When he was finished. When he had extracted every ounce of pleasure from what promised to become a highly satisfying night.

  * * *

  The entrance to the garden stood unguarded, the sentries called away to other duties as a general alarm was raised. They might return to beat the underbrush, but scouring the garden would not be their first priority. They would be scrambling to find a second prisoner, and no one would suspect that he was hiding here.

  She knew the American's accomplice had escaped. There hadn't been an opportunity for her to warn him, but she saw him scuttling in the direction of the stable as she left the sleeping chamber, dizzy from the shock of what had transpired. Somehow Arrani had discovered the American's identity, or he had learned enough to know that he had been deceived. Interrogation would supply the missing answers unless she could find a way to free the captive before it was too late.

  But first, she had a job to do.

  The American had given her his watch, and now the timepiece told her it was half-past six. The airborne strike was set for midnight, and she had to activate the homer now, aware that she might not be favored with another opportunity.

  Any plan she devised to rescue the American was almost sure to fail. Unarmed, against an army, there was little she could do to help him, but she had to try.

  She found the tree where he had clipped the small transmitter to a limb and jumped to catch the lower branches, locked her thighs around the trunk. She had not climbed a tree in years, but she was motivated now, and she was running out of time.

  How long would the American survive Arrani's questioning techniques? More to the point, how long could he withhold the news of Phantoms poised to strike at Alamut? If she allowed him to betray that secret, everything was lost, and all her work, the degradation she had suffered, would have been in vain.

  The bark was rough against her skin, but Sarah scrambled up the trunk and found the homer, concealed from casual scrutiny by leaves. By straining, she could reach the activation button with her fingertips, and pressing it, she was rewarded by a tiny click that told her she had done her job.

  Eight hours. More than enough time, provided the Phantoms were on schedule, that there had not been a change of plans. She could not be responsible for other hearts and minds, not when her own were still in turmoil.; She shrugged off the train of thought and descended swiftly to the ground.

  She had to warn Michelle and Mari. It was a pity that she could not trust the other women, did not know the master's spies by name, but she could take no chances. There was still a chance her friends could help to save the American, and they were certain to cooperate once she had made it clear their own escape was linked inseparably to his survival. If he died, if he was broken by Arrani and revealed the secret of the air raid, they were all as good as dead.

  But three against an army offered small improvement on her former odds, and Sarah knew that they would need a weapon, a strategic edge, if they expected to survive the night. Securing guns would be a decent start, and that would be a challenge in itself. She had been trained to fight — in military service, by Mossad — but to her knowledge, Mari and Michelle had never held a weapon, much less fired a shot at another human being. Sarah was convinced that anyone could kill, if suitably provoked, but there would be no time or opportunity to practice marksmanship, acquaint her gentle troops with firearms nomenclature.

  Abruptly Sarah stopped herself. She had not spoken to the others yet, and she was picturing the three of them in combat, ranged against a troop of dedicated, skilled Assassins. Taken in its proper light, the situation was disheartening, but she refused to crumble in the face of overwhelming odds. While they survived, there must be hope, and worry only cost her precious time.

  She must alert the others now, and formulate a plan for seizing weapons. After they were armed — assuming they survived that long and pulled it off — there would be time to scrutinize an angle
of attack.

  Arrani would convey his hostage to the cellars, where interrogation chambers had been fitted with implements of torture, both old and new. She had been «privileged» to view the chambers once, as part of her indoctrination in the harem, and although they had been vacant at the time, an atmosphere of latent menace, pain incarnate, made her glad to leave the musty rooms behind. If memory had not deceived her, the interrogation chambers were accessible by one route only, and the narrow staircase could be easily defended by a single man — or woman.

  It was something, but she would not let herself be lulled into the expectation of an easy victory. Or any victory at all. They would probably be killed or captured when they tried to arm themselves. The one thing Sarah could not do was trust her life to chance, allow herself to passively accept whatever might befall her. Taking action here and now might mean her death, but sitting back and doing nothing whatsoever would be tantamount to suicide.

  She had an opportunity, at last, to strike against her enemies, and she could not afford to let it pass her by. If she could stop one man, eliminate a single member of the killer cult, then she would not have thrown her life away without some purpose.

  Moving with a new determination, Sarah hurried off to find her «sisters» and explain precisely what the three of them had to do.

  16

  They would be hunting him now, without a doubt. Hafez Kasm shifted in the musty darkness of the disused storage chamber, conscious of the fact that he would not be safe much longer unless he found a better hiding place. If he was cornered there, the hunters might — might not — choose to capture him alive. With Belasko in their custody already, he was more or less an afterthought, a loose end waiting to be tied… or cleanly snipped away.

  His own escape, thus far, had been a fluke. Or was it fate? Perhaps the guiding hand of Allah? He had been relaxing in his room, if such was possible in present circumstances, when a sudden apprehension overcame him, urging him to cross the room and have a look outside. He was in time to see the raiders bursting in on the American, weapons testifying to the fact that it was not a social visit.

  And he had fled. Without a backward glance. While there was time.

  The memories of creeping along that corridor brought angry color to his cheeks. He was embarrassed by the fact that he was alive and still at liberty, of sorts. Instead of running, there had been the option of attacking the raiders from behind, empty hands against their submachine guns, desperately attempting to help his comrade. They would both be dead by now, of course; but as he huddled in the darkness, searching his mind for a plan, he wondered if his choice might simply have postponed the fate that was inevitably bearing down upon them.

  Their situation seemed impossible, from every angle. Belasko was in custody and under guard, perhaps already facing stiff interrogation at the hands of men who thrived on pain and suffering. Hafez, meanwhile, was free… if being trapped, unarmed, inside the fortress of his enemies could be construed as freedom. If he stayed in place, they would inevitably root him out, and he ran an equal risk of stumbling across a hunting party if he tried to find another, safer, hiding place.

  The Arab believed there was virtue in decisive action, even if that action, ultimately, might be wasted. He had promised the American he would try to save himself if anything went wrong, but he could no more leave his contact in the clutches of Sheikh al-Jebal than he could turn his back on duty, honor and self-respect.

  There were, of course, substantial obstacles he would have to overcome before he had a prayer of attempting a rescue. The borrowed caftan he wore was totally inadequate as a disguise, his stolen army uniform no better. He could pass for an Ismaili gunman if he dressed accordingly — the palace force was large enough for some men to be strangers to their fellows — but he needed proper garb and armament to perpetrate the masquerade. In that disguise, he might be able to locate the chamber where Arrani and his men conducted their interrogations, might surprise them, and…

  And what?

  Annihilate an army single-handedly? Fight his way past sentries, through the fortress walls?

  It seemed preposterous, but he was bound to try. He would need a weapon and the disguise that could be gained in one way only. Cautiously he cracked open the storage room door and peeked outside. The corridor was empty, but Kasm knew a hunting party might appear at any moment, bearing down on him.

  He thought about his wife and children, pushed their images away as he stepped out into the corridor. The tunnel suddenly reminded him of an esophagus, conveying him, a helpless scrap of food, into the dragon's belly. Still, a living morsel might find ways to make the diner feel uncomfortable, and foreign objects, swallowed rashly, might prove lethal to the largest, most invulnerable dragon.

  Conscious of his footsteps echoing along the passageway, the Syrian proceeded northward, toward the mountain's heart. There was a reason for his chosen course: the hunters would be expecting him to try to escape, so they would be concentrating on the exits, leaving fewer troops to search the deep recesses of the castle. If his logic served, the chances of encountering a solitary guard were better once he turned his back on the massive southern door and stable exit, to the east, deliberately moving toward an area from which there could be no escape.

  A moment later, while edging toward a hard right-angle in the corridor, he found his man. The guard was slender and young, attired in the standard turban, slacks and jacket of the sheikh's private army. He was carrying an AK-47 automatic rifle casually, as if he knew the danger had already passed him by.

  Procrastination would be fatal now; there was no time to formulate a detailed plan. Head down, arms clasped across his belly like a man in pain, Kasm lurched into view, his footsteps dragging, shuffling along the stony floor. He staggered, groaned, threw out an arm to catch himself and missed the wall by yards, collapsing on his face.

  The sentry barked an order at him, saw that a response was hopeless and approached with cautious strides.

  "Who are you?"

  The sentry's voice set his teeth on edge, and for the brief duration of a heartbeat, he was tempted to surrender, buy himself a little time, at least, by giving up his suicidal scheme.

  Too late.

  A rough hand settled on his shoulder and rolled him over on his back. The rifle muzzle grazed his cheek. He battered it aside with one hand, shot the other forward, rigid fingers digging for the sentry's larynx. Kasm was on the sentry in an instant, straddling his chest, knees pinning down the arms that sought to throw him off. There was no question of the sentry crying out, and with his rifle cast aside, his sole defense lay in his knees, and he pummeled his attacker's kidneys. Craning forward to escape the numbing blows, Kasm applied more pressure to his adversary's throat, and was rewarded by the bluish cast that crept across the young man's features, the obscenity of his protruding tongue.

  It ended suddenly, as if a switch had been flicked off, the sentry disconnected from his life without a hope of resurrection. Glazed eyes stared beyond the Syrian, beyond the rugged ceiling, locked upon the infinite. Withdrawing, working on the painful cramp that had knotted his arm, Kasm mused, briefly, whether the dead man had, indeed, found paradise.

  A door some yards beyond the kill zone opened at his touch. He laid the AK-47 on the dead man's chest, bent low to seize the body by the ankles and dragged it through into a room piled high with crates of ammunition and grenades. Unwittingly his quest had led him to a portion of the palace arsenal.

  He stripped the soldier swiftly, shed his robe and uniform beneath the glare of naked bulbs, then slipped on the man's slacks and jacket. Kasm had managed to achieve the first phase of his plan. If he was not subjected to intensive scrutiny or questioning, he was convinced that he could pass for an Assassin.

  He used the fallen sentry's knife to pry the lid off of a crate containing ammunition magazines. With trembling hands, he stuffed his pockets, tucking extra clips inside his belt. To these he added frag grenades from yet another box. He was aw
are that he might look suspicious with the extra hardware dangling from his waist, preferring firepower to perfect conformity at the moment. If he met a hunting party in the corridor, grenades might make the crucial difference between annihilation and survival.

  He was ready to confront the enemy. Thus armed, Hafez Kasm offered up a prayer to Allah and went out to meet his almost-certain death.

  * * *

  Sheikh al-Jebal was waiting when Arrani brought the infidel before him, flanked by guards with automatic weapons, tethered by a slender chain around his neck and wrists. The shackles on his legs prevented him from taking normal strides, but he maintained his bearing and revealed no sign of fear. Despite the proximity of death, there was defiance in his eyes.

  "Where is the other?"

  "We are searching for him now," Arrani said. "He was not in his room when we arrived."

  "He must be found!"

  "Of course, my lord."

  The sheikh turned his attention to the prisoner. "What shall I call you?"

  "Why not stick with Harrigan?"

  "We know that Bryan Harrigan is dead."

  "In that case, I don't think he'll mind."

  "You have been sent against us by our enemies."

  The captive smiled. "You haven't got a lot of friends."

  Amal stepped forward, primed to slam his rifle butt against Bolan's skull, until the sheikh restrained him with a glance.

  "If I was in your situation, facing certain death, I think that I would try to spare myself unnecessary suffering."

  "I had a hunch you were a coward."

  Rigid on his throne, the lord of Alamut absorbed the insult, felt the color rising in his face. It would be easy to command Amal or any of the other guards to kill the prisoner at once, erase the mocking smile with blade or bullets. But he realized that sudden death was what his captive had in mind. An execution — any sort of execution — would be infinitely preferable to the pain of the interrogation chamber. The infidel would not escape so easily.