Mortal enemies.
Each had on previous occasions, wrongly thought the other to be defeated, indeed dead, only to witness the other's reemergence at a most unexpected moment to renew their personal war.
Like now, in Iran.
The sun set, the air turned cool. Darkness cloaked the world.
The Mercedes wobbled along.
Bolan tried the still-functioning headlight, which was knocked out of focus by the collision, its beam now pointed directly at a spot four feet in front of the car to the right and nowhere else. But it and the silver, surreal glow of a quarter moon in a cloudless sky illuminated the trail that wound higher into rugged, barren terrain.
No one in the car had spoken during the past fifteen minutes.
A lot had happened.
And it wasn't over yet.
Bolan steered around a steep, curved grade, negotiating the turn so Tanya, between Bolan and Grimaldi, had to tilt against him, her hair in attractive, shoulder-length disarray. He inhaled the subtle womanly scent of her, sensed her exhaustion and excitement, before her reflexes straightened her away from the brief intimacy of contact. He had her attention.
"You were about to tell me something a while ago before we were so rudely interrupted," he reminded her.
"Was I?"
"Tell me about Strakhov."
She smiled a pure Mona Lisa, more to herself than to him, and in that instant Bolan wondered if she was in truth the complex proposition she appeared to be, or more so.
"I will tell you what I choose to tell you, when I choose to, Mack Bolan. I have my orders. I have offered you an inducement. How would Ellie Talbot say it? Oh, yes, the ball is now in your court."
Grimaldi tossed Bolan a grin and a wink that said she's all yours, buddy and good luck!
"Some lady," he said, chuckling and making an unabashed appraisal of the lovely between them. Grimaldi was far too Italian to allow political ideology to stand in the way of his respectful appreciation of a beautiful woman.
Bolan gazed to their right, spotted what he was looking for and steered the Mercedes off the trail onto rougher ground.
"You're the one with the ball," Bolan corrected Tanya. "Let's see if you've got the balls."
He steered them over a rise in the rocky ground and for a few moments it looked as if the damaged Mercedes might give out on them. Then they topped the incline onto a sandy plain between two thrusts of higher land.
The old Achaemenid ruins shimmered in the dreamlike desolation on higher ground like a ghostly murmur from eternity. The ancient carved walls of brick and tile were eroded by millennia of wind and sand, the carving discernible, from another time, another world.
The Mercedes, as any vehicle approaching the ruins, had to pass through a natural culvert grooved through the rock by aeons of flash floods, the drain forming the only drivable approach to the ruins.
Bolan knew a dozen or more rifles were trained on the car he drove at a crawl, though his trained eye detected nothing. But yeah, he knew they were out there. He and Grimaldi had spent twelve hours with this unit, the People's Mujahedeen, temporarily base-camped at these remote ruins.
The Mercedes rattled to a wheezing stop.
Bolan turned off the ignition and headlight.
Shadowy shapes — six rifle-toting men — materialized from the gloom to stand directly in front of the car.
The camp in and around the ancient ruins looked unchanged from the night before when a team of Aswadi's men had met Bolan and Grimaldi and brought them there from across the Iraq-Iran frontier.
Security stretched several miles from the base, Bolan recalled from last night; teams of stationary and moving sentry teams in constant radio contact, some equipped with CIA-supplied infrared Night Vision Devices.
The night scene buzzed with muted voices around campfires near a dozen or more U.S. Army-surplus pup tents.
A man armed with an Uzi submachine gun stepped forward from the formation of five others behind him, aiming their rifles at the windshield of the Mercedes.
"Same routine as when we pulled in last night," Grimaldi noted. He glanced in all seriousness at the blonde beside him. "Here's where it gets close all over again, honey."
Tanya said softly, "You gentlemen saved my life when those bandits attacked us. We are even now, are we not; the debt repaid."
Bolan looked past the sentries to a figure approaching from the deeper gloom. Bolan knew the man had watched their approach, patiently biding his time before emerging to make a dangerous presence known..
"Good, you sound tough. You'll need that, Tanya. Here comes our host."
9
Bolan opened his door with deliberate slowness, careful not to alarm the mujahedeen fighters aiming their weapons at the car. But they reflexed into near flash point anyway, until the sentry with the Uzi stepped forward to wave a hand. The men behind him accepted that and retreated.
Karim Aswadi approached the Executioner and his companions.
The lean-muscled, middle-aged guerrilla leader, turbaned and in desert combat fatigues like his men, wore a pistol holstered butt-forward at his left hip. His features were reminiscent more of a scholar than a soldier.
Aswadi had been neither before the so-called "People's Revolution." He had become both in the terrible years since.
The riflemen surrounding the vehicle stepped aside respectfully for their leader.
Aswadi had conceived the intricate operation that brought the Executioner there to help them. Good, brave men in Karim's group would be all too willing to sacrifice their own lives to slay the religious dictator who enslaved the country. But no one in his group possessed the pure skill to breach the security behind which the Ayatollah hid.
The mujahedeen chief needed a specialist to plan and carry out an assassination that would destabilize the power structure long enough for those already in place to move and shift the balance.
Aswadi learned of Bolan's sympathy to their cause and the means by which to contact him after the Executioner's recent mission into Afghanistan. Bolan had aided the mujahedeen in that country in an audacious, stunning counteroffensive against the Soviets.
Bolan exchanged a firm handshake with Aswadi, then nodded introduction to the woman at his side.
"Karim Aswadi, Ellie Talbot, an American citizen. She helped us today in Teheran."
Aswadi bowed slightly from the waist, regarding her.
"Miss Talbot. This is... an unexpected circumstance. Americans are not as prevalent in Iran as before."
She cleared her throat, stalling to form a proper response.
Bolan spoke before she could.
"It's a long story, Karim. I hope you'll extend to Mrs. Talbot the hospitality you've extended to Jack and myself. I bear full responsibility for her during our stay with you."
The guerrilla leader nodded.
"It shall be. Accompany me, please. There are matters to discuss."
The mujahedeen warriors who surrounded and overheard this exchange parted again for their chief to pass, with Grimaldi and Tanya following closely.
The woman stared straight ahead as Aswadi led them up the incline toward the ruins. She felt glad to escape the staring eyes of the guerrillas, which she knew had to be evoked by more than the blondness of her hair in this corner of the world.
Do they suspect I am their enemy, she wondered, and knew some of them had to.
She suddenly felt none of the confidence she had tried to muster with Bolan and Grimaldi.
She wondered, as she hurried to keep apace with the long, purposeful strides of the men, if Bolan had seen through her, too. Or had she been a good-enough actress, make that good-enough agent, to work the number on him she had hoped to. She realized she had felt relieved when the American chose to lie to Aswadi about her. Having seen the fighters of the mujahedeen up close, she appreciated anew that her safety depended on this most unusual man, the stony one called the Executioner.
Nothing in training or her briefing on Bolan ha
d quite prepared her for this strange man she felt beholden to, a feeling she tried to fight.
I must not forget my orders, she reproached herself. Yet I live because of him.
She felt a strange sort of liking for him, though she knew her orders were to kill Bolan. She wondered if this in fact could be the spark of the unsettling warmth she felt whenever the man spoke or in the few instances when they touched.
She assured herself it could not be lust, yet she knew deep down where the warmth felt good that lust was part of it. She had not had a man in months since the unsatisfactory experience with Yuri at the beginning of their assignment. And she'd had few men before that. But lust to her could only result from an appeal apart from sex.
The way this man spoke, though; his incredible life. She responded to all of these and when she realized this, she reprimanded herself angrily and told herself not to forget who she was. And what she must do.
Aswadi led them past charcoal fires where children crouched for warmth and women were roasting meager portions of lamb.
Suspicious, withdrawn eyes watched the three walk with their leader; hardship, determination and human misery pervading the atmosphere of the camp.
Sentries stood posted in two's at evenly spaced distances around the sparse remains of the ancient structure that Aswadi used as his personal quarters and office. Enough of the crumbling base at one section afforded a degree of privacy beyond earshot of the sentries who maintained an ongoing vigil of the night. They barely spared a glance for Aswadi, Bolan, Grimaldi and the woman as Aswadi motioned his guests to a small fire flickering near a corner of the wall beneath the star-splashed Iranian sky.
Aswadi gestured them to sit.
"Kindly accept what hospitality is mine to offer."
The mujahedeen leader poured tea into tiny enameled cups, passed the cups around, then lowered himself to sit cross-legged with them, eyeing Bolan.
"The first thing you should be apprised of, Karim," Bolan began, "is that you have a traitor in your group. Someone among you is informing to the Soviets or their proxies, or both."
Aswadi paused, teacup halfway to his lips.
"That cannot be."
"It is the truth, I assure you."
Karim set his cup down without tasting the tea.
"Who?"
"I'm sorry, I don't know. I only know you have been betrayed."
Aswadi stood abruptly.
"Then the traitor will be found at once."
He clapped his hands sharply.
One of the sentries stepped in.
Aswadi issued a series of sharp commands.
The guerrilla fighter nodded, saluted, turned and hurried away.
Aswadi returned to the others. He kicked dirt over the coals, dousing the fire.
Bolan and Grimaldi watched, unable to understand the language, Farsi, in which Karim and his man had communicated.
They remained alert, in tune with the night beyond the walls of the ruins, fingertips near their pistols, rifles within an arm's reach.
Bolan sensed no shift in the darkness, thanks to the mujahedeen's security, but this Executioner knew better than most how the best of defense perimeters can be penetrated; he had done it himself many times. It had happened the night of the Stony Man Farm assault, the beginning of the end of Bolan's government connections, and he wondered how much he could trust Karim Aswadi.
"I don't know how the informer passes his information, Karim, but he may have already told them you're here."
Aswadi stared into the flickering, faint embers from the fire, deep in thought.
"We will move from here within the next two hours. I have ordered the fires put out, our women and children relocated at once well away from here where they will not be found until we withdraw and they join us."
"Question," said Grimaldi. "Your men could pull camp and be gone sooner than two hours. I'd guess your emergency pullout time at thirty minutes or less. Why two hours?"
Bolan fielded that one.
"Karim wants the traitor identified before moving to another camp."
"I have charged my second-in-command to initiate this as we speak," the guerrilla chief acknowledged. "A handful of men, such as al-Hakim whom you met below, I trust implicitly. These men have served me long and well and have had countless opportunities to betray me in the past at times when it would have served our enemies well.
"You see, gentlemen, my organization differs from those radicals in Iran sharing the cause of Islam, extremist splinter groups as twisted by hatred as those who oppress us. They would slaughter the innocent, plant bombs in railroad stations and other public facilities to intimidate and destabilize the regime. I have never ordered an action against any other than military targets. I hope to defang the serpent rather than further victimize those for whom we fight. For this reason, I am high on the death lists of both the Russian and Khomeini's hoodlums.
"No, if someone in my command is a traitor, the godless ones would have used him to achieve my end long ago. We exist on discipline and trust. Each of my men has others he trusts, many related by blood and marriage or knowing one another since childhood.
"Al-Hakim is organizing a systematic investigation. Perhaps Allah will bless us with luck; the informer will be identified. If not... we move camp and pursue the traitor vigorously wherever we move."
Tanya Yesilov listened, fascinated, to the soliloquy.
"And when you know who the traitor is?"
"What would you think, dear lady?" Aswadi inquired in return, not unkindly. "He will tell us all that we demand of him, and he will be summarily executed." The mujahedeen leader addressed Bolan. "Tell me how you come to know with such certainty of a traitor among us?"
Bolan felt the blonde's eyes implore him and he hoped like hell he had it figured right.
"I lied to you a while ago, Karim."
"No, please!" the woman gasped, then glared at Bolan, eyes imploring more than ever.
Grimaldi looked ready to move at any cue from Bolan.
"I thought we were friends," Aswadi said, frowning at Bolan. "Brothers against a common enemy. How have you lied to compromise this between us, and why?"
"There is sufficient reason, Karim, and for my part we remain brothers-in-arms. This woman's name is Tanya Yesilov. She is a Russian KGB agent. She is my prisoner. I intend to escort her out of Iran when Jack and I have finished our work. I didn't want al-Hakim or your other men to know these things. 1 have guaranteed this woman her safety and ask you respect that."
The tableau froze under the uncertain illumination of a quarter moon and stars in the crisp, endless dark.
Aswadi scrutinized the blonde.
"You have this man to thank for the breath you draw, young woman. Discipline and decency in the best of men would be tested when presented with the very personification of the reasons these decent people must survive like animals in the wilderness."
Bolan looked at her.
"Make your pitch," he growled. "This could be your only chance."
Tanya turned to watch the night, her back to the men.
"You taunt me. Perhaps I deserve it."
"I'd do it, lady," Grimaldi encouraged Tanya from where he carefully observed the unfolding scene.
Grimaldi remained near his rifle.
Tanya turned and said in a low voice, "As you must know, Mr. Aswadi, the interests I represent..." she faltered briefly "...are attached, in an advisory capacity, to certain elements in Khomeini's military."
Aswadi interrupted her with an irritable, derogatory gesture.
"Yes, yes, Mahmoud and his gangsters. We have our informants too, you see, miss."
"And did you know," Bolan added, "that Mahmoud wants an alliance with the mujahedeen? Their spy got word out about my involvement. Tanya and an agent posing as her husband had orders to approach you via me. The other agent is dead."
Tanya continued, "With the Ayatollah assassinated, the general's force is already mobilizing. We offer you concessions..."
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Aswadi spit vehemently at the ground.
"Bah! You spin fables like Scheherazade. My force has attacked too many installations commanded by General Mahmoud in his capacity of loyal murderer for Khomeini. We have cost him dearly in equipment, men, prestige. The general and I are opponents to the death."
"I assure you..."
"Dear miss, you cannot assure your own survival through this night, so kindly spare me further elaboration on such ludicrousness. Mahmoud well knows and fears the power of my mujahedeen and of the threat we would pose were he to obtain power. They would hunt us down exactly as they do now under the guise of loyalty to their Ayatollah while their real objective is to destroy us for their own motives, before they take power. And in any event, these absurd overtures from Mahmoud may prove premature. Tell me, please, the details of the assassination."
Bolan did so concisely, sensing that his premonition about something amiss was about to be proven correct.
When Bolan finished, Aswadi said, "It is very strange. We monitor all radio transmission, public, official... There is no mention whatever of the Ayatollah having been assassinated."
10
"Damn," Bolan growled under his breath.
Grimaldi emitted a soft whistle.
"Someone's up to slick tricks."
"There are only two ways it can be. Khomeini using a double for public appearances is one. I killed the double," Bolan said grimly.
Grimaldi agreed.
"It's been proved that Hitler and Churchill did it; plastic-surgery stand-ins. Castro supposedly still does it today for big open-air addresses and the like," the pilot added.
"They clamped a blackout so fast at the pavilion today, even the witnesses won't be sure of what they saw by tomorrow," Bolan pointed out.
"You mention a second possibility," said Karim.
"Strakhov," Grimaldi suggested.
"Strakhov," Bolan acknowledged. "Whether I got the real Khomeini today or not, the KGB or someone for them could be blacking the news out as a power play."
Aswadi considered, then shook his head.
"We would have heard something. They could not conceal the assassination completely. We have people highly placed in the Majlis and every official agency."
Teheran Wipeout Page 6