"Then they are using a double of the Ayatollah," Bolan growled. "It's a reasonable precaution considering all the people who want him dead. If there is an assassination, the body is whisked away and if the public is told anything, it's that an unsuccessful attempt was made."
Grimaldi grunted.
"If our objective is to take out Khomeini, I'd say this throws a real wild card in the deck."
Aswadi turned to Tanya.
"Perhaps our Russian friend knows something of this. I warn you, miss, I am not a cruel man, yet if these entrusted to me and those I fight for are in danger, I shall resort to whatever measures necessary to make you tell us..."
"I know nothing of any of this!" the blonde insisted. "I am little more than an amateur, sent as role camouflage for the operative, Yuri Steranko, and Steranko had no knowledge of any of this, I assure you."
"The amateur bit is exaggerated but not much," Bolan said to Aswadi. "Steranko was lower echelon, too. Strakhov? An organization man. I know that firsthand. He wouldn't allow his agents into the field, if he knew of our intentions to hit Khomeini, without a full briefing of anything he had on the possibility of a Khomeini stand-in. Strakhov would consider it foolish to send the woman and Steranko in blind like that, and Strakhov is not stupid."
"Even if I accept your reasoning," Aswadi replied, not turning from the woman, his expression hard, stoic, "there is the matter of the KGB informant."
Bolan casually positioned himself between Tanya and Aswadi. He tossed Grimaldi an almost imperceptible nod.
Jack eased back slightly, absently hefting and canting the AK-47 across his left arm.
"I promised Tanya she would be safe with me," Bolan reminded Aswadi.
"She is our enemy," the mujahedeen chief insisted. "She knows much that would benefit us greatly in our struggle."
"We must compromise and understand each other," Bolan countered. "And you need me, Karim, more than ever if our idea is right about what happened in Teheran today. The real Khomeini may be alive and laughing into his beard right now at what fools he made of us."
This got Aswadi's attention as Bolan intended it to.
The mujahedeen commander relaxed, easing the tension.
Bolan stayed between Aswadi and Tanya, hoping Aswadi would not pursue this stubbornly. He did not want to oppose Karim but would take his chances with Jack and Tanya in the hills before betraying his promise of safety to the woman.
"What shall we do?" Aswadi asked.
"The woman?"
"I must trust your judgment, against my wishes. Her true identity shall remain a secret from my men, as you wish. But hear me, Bolan. You shall pay with your life if this enemy brings about the death of even one of my people, directly or through design. She shall pay. You shall pay. With your lives. On my word of honor."
"I accept those terms, Karim."
"Then our conversation is ended for now. I must supervise the investigation for an informant. You three will have some time to rest if you wish."
"I wish," Grimaldi said, nodding. "It's been one hell of a day."
"There is a tent a short distance beyond this wall for messengers from other units who spend the night. It is unoccupied," said Aswadi. "You have ninety minutes before we move camp. I will see you are not disturbed."
"When you've set up a new base camp," said Bolan, "we must formulate an effort to nullify whatever Khomeini's people managed to accomplish today."
"Something inside warns me that I am making a terrible mistake by trusting this woman," Aswadi stated stonily. "And yet I acquiesce, and thank you for agreeing to see this through with us."
"I don't like puzzles," Bolan growled. "I want to make quick work of this one."
"And so you have my gratitude." Aswadi turned to leave, casting one parting glare at the blonde who remained standing behind Bolan. "Would that you had not seen fit to so endanger your mission and our lives as you have."
Aswadi left them.
"Let's find that tent," said Bolan.
The tent, U.S. Army surplus to match the others, was pitched well away from where the encampment buzzed with low-keyed, earnest activity, the dependents already vanished into the night during the conversation with Karim.
Bolan watched the proud, forceful figure of Aswadi stride toward the area where al-Hakim had assembled the guerrilla fighters. Then the Executioner turned back to Jack and Tanya.
The tent, pitched flush against a young oleander for shade during the day, looked big enough for one person.
Bolan knelt, lifted back an end flap for a cursory look inside, then held the flap aside for Tanya.
"Chivalry dictates," he said, indicating the inside of the tent to her.
She remained standing.
"I am not tired. 1 shall remain outside."
"Don't make a scene," Bolan advised quietly. "I'm tired and when I close my eyes, I want to know where you are and where you'll stay."
She did not budge, glaring defiantly.
"And what makes you think I shall stay anywhere?"
"You're forgetting, Tanya," Grimaldi chided her in mock reproach, "you're a prisoner."
She started to bristle a response.
Bolan chose that moment from his kneeling position to grab Tanya's left ankle and tug the lady sharply off her feet.
She uttered a startled shriek, landing half in, half out of the tent. She started struggling wildly, but Bolan had already reached behind him and pulled his handcuffs from his belt.
He yanked her in after him and snapped one cuff around the slender trunk of the tree, the other to her wrist, effectively handcuffing Tanya in place.
He continued out the opposite end of the small tent and dropped both end flaps back into place, which did nothing to dim the red-hot blast of good old American swear words screamed at Bolan with inspired anger.
"Save your strength," he growled at her, stalking away. "You'll need it when we pull out."
Grimaldi sat nearby against a smooth boulder, grunting agreement as Bolan strode over to him from the noisy pup tent.
"I don't figure Aswadi is the type of guy to waste money on chartering us a couple of buses," Grimaldi said.
The snarling hellcat in the tent tapered off into silence.
Bolan eased himself down to sit on a rock across from Grimaldi. Bolan couldn't disguise the weariness of the involuntary sigh he emitted as he allowed himself to semirelax for the first time in seventeen tough hours.
"Grab some shut-eye," Grimaldi offered. "I'll take first watch."
"Thanks, Jack, but if our charge in that tent decides to pull anything, it will be in the next half hour. She'll be asleep after that, if she isn't sawing 'em off already."
"Well, if you insist," Grimaldi said. "Wake me in thirty."
He made himself comfortable and closed his eyes, already drifting off.
Bolan chuckled to himself, feeling better just from the chance to slow down, however briefly.
He fired up a cigarette and quietly edged over to the tent. Without a sound he crouched at the end flap from under which Tanya's wrist extended, securely handcuffed to the tree. He heard the deep, steady breathing of a person asleep or of someone pretending to be, and either way suited him.
He returned to the position that offered a view of the tent and where Jack slept sitting up.
Bolan allowed himself to relax without letting down his watch of the night around them.
He wondered what the hell to make of Tanya Yesilov.
Or Ellie Talbot.
Or whoever and whatever his lovely blond prisoner might really be.
* * *
The three helicopter gunships lifted off in formation like bloated primeval insects. The throb of the revving rotor blades rumbled through the desert night, creating a turbulent backwash of swirling dust on the ground behind and below.
General Mahmoud watched the night swallow the war birds as they gained altitude. He barely noticed the billowing dust swirls those around him turned to avoid. He knew no world
but that of the desert and his oneness with it and its laws.
Major Kravak turned again with the other three men of the group as the turbulence subsided. Kravak glanced at the luminous dials of his wristwatch. The Soviet army's GRU liaison "advising" Mahmoud's force wore piglike features and a coarse manner Mahmoud found nearly intolerable.
I will enjoy killing this one when the time is right, the general thought yet again.
"Precisely on schedule. General." Kravak spoke accented English. "I expected no less. You are certain of Aswadi's position?"
"Nothing is certain in Iran these days, my dear Major."
Mahmoud concealed his resentment, his hatred; the humiliation of deferring to this Russian pig he outranked. When the time is right, he reminded himself again. Very soon...
"If those gunships locate and deal with Aswadi and his pack of jackals, all the better," Kravak snarled. "In any event, our gunships have more than enough time to rendezvous with your force for the assault on Lavizan."
"We begin for Teheran at once," said Mahmoud.
He snapped orders at the three officers, coconspirators in the Russian-supported plot to overthrow Khomeini and install military rule headed by Mahmoud.
Tomorrow, or the day after, thought Mahmoud, and the time will be at hand; the godless Russian "advisors" would be dealt with, eliminated, and the power would belong to Mahmoud and only those to whom he delegated his power. The law of the desert, truly; Mahmoud knew it well: the right of power to those with the strength and cunning to claim it.
His officers departed toward the cluster of one dozen army troops secretly loyal to him, combat equipped, carefully chosen, experienced infantrymen armed with Kalashnikov rifles.
The general and Major Kravak watched the troops board the eight-wheeled BTR-6 armored personnel carrier idling near the landing pad of the military compound commanded by Mahmoud.
Kravak mirrored a mutual loathing for the Iranian.
"You are certain your superiors suspect nothing?"
"I have few superiors," Mahmoud reminded him. "Redeployment of troops as I see fit is unquestioned, attributed to our Ayatollah's war with Iraq, ceasefires notwithstanding. We operate under a cloak of complete secrecy, Major, and by this time tomorrow it will not matter. When we are certain Khomeini is dead, we will move in the open as will those in Teheran who await my orders. Then it shall be done."
"An unfortunate mixed blessing, this intelligence report regarding Khomeini's use of impostors, coming to us from your informant in Aswadi's organization," Kravak groused. "If your informant is discovered and forced to divulge this information to the mujahedeen..."
"I have considered the possibility," Mahmoud interrupted. He experienced a growing excitement as the vehicle full of rebel troops grumbled to life. "I anticipate confronting Aswadi's force, Major, particularly if the man Bolan is with them."
Kravak stared off in the direction of the departed gunships.
"Bolan is out there," the GRU man snarled.
"Major General Strakhov himself will order my promotion at the very least when I report liquidation of the Executioner under my directions. Then there will be no more filthy assignments to hells on earth such as this one."
Mahmoud ignored the insult, as always.
"And the woman you spoke of? The KGB operative with Bolan in Aswadi's camp?"
Kravak shrugged.
"A sacrifice of war. I remind you, General, you have your objective and 1 most assuredly have mine. At the top of my priorities is the extermination of Mack Bolan. We have one hundred experienced desert soldiers in armored vehicles with air support." The Soviet nodded to himself. "He will not die easy, but he is an outsider outnumbered and outgunned in a hostile land. The Executioner will not escape death this night."
11
Bolan snapped awake moments before he heard al-Hakim's muted approach.
Grimaldi pulled his rifle around, tracking on Karim Aswadi's second-in-command.
Bolan stood, appearing fresh from the half sleep interrupted by al-Hakim, whose first impression of this unusual American reconfirmed itself when he saw Bolan automatically reflex into a combat crouch. The impressive handgun remained holstered at Bolan's hip, but the big foreign fighting man appeared ready to confront Allah or the devil himself, thought al-Hakim.
Bolan had been roused from his rest not by al-Hakim, but by the barely noticeable first reaction of Grimaldi when he saw al-Hakim striding toward them from the knot of Aswadi's mujahedeen in the nearby darkness.
"Karim requests your presence."
He had met these men briefly when the Executioner and Grimaldi arrived yesterday.
Grimaldi lowered his rifle.
"Find your spy, al-Hakim?"
"It is urgent that you accompany me without delay." Al-Hakim glanced to the tent. 'The woman, too."
"I feel safer with this lady in sight, anyway," Bolan said.
Grimaldi and al-Hakim accompanied Bolan as they walked toward the tent.
Bolan produced a key for the cuffs.
The three men saw something wrong when they reached the tent: the handcuff snapped to the base of the oleander coiled empty upon itself like a metal snake, dully reflecting the moon glow.
Grimaldi swore.
"I think we goofed."
Bolan crouched, tossing back end flaps for a fast look into the tent, then rejoined Grimaldi and al-Hakim, who knew what happened by Bolan's grim expression.
"The damn fool!" Bolan growled heatedly, scanning the moon-tinted gloom around them. "I thought she had more sense. She stands one chance in a thousand of making it out there."
"She must've sprouted wings," Grimaldi grunted. "I never heard a thing, and 1 was damn well listening and watching."
"I know you were, Jack." Bolan retrieved the cuffs, studied them a second and looped them back beneath his jacket. "She's good, that's all, and small boned and well trained. Muscle control and patience and maybe some spit got her free, and when our heads were turned at just the wrong moment , she made her break."
"What do you think she'll do now? Where can she go?"
Bolan's fists clenched at his side. He scanned the night-shrouded, hostile, uninhabitable hill country.
"If I knew that, Jack, I'd be out there right now trying to intercept her and bring her back."
Al-Hakim stepped forward.
"I regret to stress the urgency of Karim's request."
"When it rains, it damn well pours," Grimaldi grumbled without rancor, "even in Iran."
Bolan pulled his attention from the futility of contemplating which direction the woman could have taken in her escape and indicated Grimaldi to accompany him.
"Lead the way, al-Hakim."
The freedom fighter led them past the ruins and the doused fires where a sprawling camp had buzzed with life less than two hours ago.
Al-Hakim reflected for a moment on this man, Bolan. The guerrilla knew from his tenure as university head librarian before the revolution, when Americans had often come to the library, that their stoic discipline in the face of adversity constituted a national trait in a people al-Hakim happened to respect very much — the principle reason Khomeini's goons had ousted al-Hakim from his job before he and his family were placed on the death list. He thought this man Bolan and his friend Grimaldi personified the best in what America had to offer.
He led the Americans to a secluded spot of murky shadow, separated from the concentration of mujahedeen behind a dip in the terrain near a cluster of gnarled trees.
Aswadi and two of his men appeared to be examining one of the trees. Aswadi turned to Bolan, al-Hakim and Grimaldi stepping aside.
"Where is the woman?" Karim demanded. Then he pointed to a figure in guerrilla garb sitting at the base of the tree. "He will only speak to her."
Bolan and Grimaldi saw a man, his back arched against the pressure of a curve-bladed dagger protruding from his neck, his blood-soaked clothes indicating he had been sitting painfully like this for some time.
&nbs
p; The man's eyelids flickered like a fading pulse.
"Who did this?" Bolan asked.
He crouched beside the dying man.
Aswadi and the others crowded in close.
"His name is Mezhabi," said the guerrilla commander. "My men noticed his absence. They searched when no one could account for his whereabouts. They found him here, as you see him. He is a new recruit to our ranks. Inside his wallet, we found a paper on which were written some numbers. I recognized them as telephone numbers, in Mezhabi's own handwriting. I have often used those numbers to contact sympathizers to our cause, those who feign loyalty to the oppressors. The numbers are in government offices in Teheran, and two I know to be organizations sponsored by the Soviets." Aswadi spat angrily upon the daggered man. "This man is our traitor."
"Or a diversion for the real one." Bolan looked into fogged eyes of a dying man. "Mezhabi, do you recognize me?" The eyelids flickered.
"B... Bolan..." Crimson drool leaked onto a quivering, grizzled chin; the voice a faint wheeze. "Tanya..." Mezhabi labored hard for each tortured word. "Must... speak..."
"Why?"
"She... can help..."
"Tanya can't help herself. She's gone. I don't know where she is. Who did this to you?"
Mezhabi's blood-specked mouth tremored.
"I... do not know the name... I... attempted to contact... the woman..."
"You helped her escape?"
"No... sentries... questioned me... suspicious... searched me... found wallet... did this... tried to kill me..."
"An example," Aswadi intoned gravely, "to any who consider betrayal. It is good this one's death is particularly slow."
Bolan grasped the dying man's shoulder in an effort to prevent him from slipping into unconsciousness.
"What did you have for Tanya? Tell me."
The dying man coughed, pink spittle bubbling across trembling lips.
"Khomeini... they know..."
The murmured words faded like weak radio reception, becoming more and more disjointed, in a mind already gone behind glassy eyes that rolled back until only the whites showed.
Teheran Wipeout Page 7