The street was full of civilians, not soldiers. The gunmen of the different factions engaged one another blocks away, the sounds of the shooting muted by rows of bombed-out buildings and others like the garage that had somehow remained untouched thus far.
Bolan soundlessly closed the door behind him with his heel. Icy eyes and a cold Beretta fanned the gloom. He discerned rusted-out hulks of cars on blocks, stripped of parts over the years.
There was nothing else except a table and a dim lightbulb. Then Bolan noticed a djellaba-robed Arab who stood tentatively watching the fearsome combat figure approach him.
Another small business chewed up and spit out by the ravages of war.
"Yes, effendi, may I be of service?" The Arab's eyes took in Bolan's weapons fearfully.
"You address me in English," Bolan noted. "I am the one you expect. Where is Zoraya?"
Relief shone in the old man's eyes, then reverted to paranoia again as he glanced cautiously back in the direction of the door.
"You were not followed?"
"There are no government soldiers behind me."
"Bah! We have as much to fear from Amal and the Druse!" the old man spit.
He walked over and locked the street door, then returned and spryly stepped up onto the table.
He used a pocketknife to pry open a break that looked like nothing more than the juncture between ceiling and wall from where Bolan stood. The old man tugged. A ceiling panel angled down to reveal some wooden steps leading up into an attic.
The man gestured.
"If you please, effendi. I will remain down here and keep watch. Zoraya knows the signal in the event of... unexpected company." Bolan acknowledged this but did not drop his wariness of the man. He climbed onto the table and up those steps.
He emerged into the secret attic space ready to blast back at any trap waiting for him.
No trap.
Zoraya waited for him.
She had been sitting on a low bed, which, with a chair and overturned orange crate for a table, were the only pieces of furniture in the slant-roofed little place. A high window in one end of the attic wall let in sunlight marred by rising clouds of battle from a neighborhood nearby.
Zoraya stood and approached Bolan with a small sound of relief and happiness.
Bolan emerged fully into the attic. The hidden entrance to the room closed up after him.
He holstered the Beretta and took Zoraya in his arms. They hugged each other like dear friends who had parted and never expected to see each other again. There was nothing sexual, but no way could Bolan the man not be aware of the physical charms of this darkhaired Arab beauty.
She did not stop hugging him for long moments.
"I... thought I had lost you," she whispered, "as I lost Chaim! Soldiers came after you left me with Selim at Biskinta ... a force of Syrians, Russian advisors with them.... You made me promise to let nothing happen to the little one.... I wanted to stay, but... they were searching the area. They fired on us as we drove away."
"You did right," he told her. "The man downstairs. Can he be trusted?" She nodded against his shoulder.
"He is my uncle. He loved my brothers dearly and now he hates the Druse militia for what they did... for the murder of Adli and Aziz. He hides and protects me here... There is as much rape as killing now." Bolan remembered the action he'd halted in the alley before arriving here.
"I'm glad you're safe. Where's Selim?"
Zoraya sat back down on the bed.
"There is the good news. The government has an agency for exactly such situations: children separated from their parents and the like. I took Selim there first thing this morning when they opened and did not leave until I had their assurance that they would ascertain the whereabouts of the little one's parents. They were displaced during the fighting." Bolan felt a weight of responsibility lift from his shoulders. He straddled the wooden chair next to the bed and faced Zoraya.
"I'm glad to hear that. And I appreciate your getting word to me the way you did through Chaim's uncle."
"I had to tell Chaim's control officer about General Strakhov at Zahle and the Disciples of Allah in case you did not return. And... Chaim's partner told me more about you, Mack Bolan. They call you The Executioner."
"What else did they tell you?"
"Chaim's uncle has been detained for questioning regarding your presence here and how you got into Lebanon."
"And what are your orders from Chaim's partner?" She held eye contact with him.
"To report the moment you contact me."
"And your uncle?"
"My uncle knows nothing of any of this. Mossad cooperates with your Central Intelligence Agency. They must try to stop you. But I had heard of The Executioner before this. Your name is legend, you see, even in such a wasteland as this, Mack Bolan."
"And now?"
"I am your friend," she replied without hesitation. "I knew you would return; that you would not die in Biskinta."
"Or Zahle," he added dryly. He stood up, reached inside his blacksuit and sat next to her on the edge of the bed. He unfolded the blueprints retrieved during the battle at the Iranian base and spread the plans out on the blanket. "I need you to translate something for me, Zoraya." He directed her attention to the Arabic lettering along the bottom of the sheet of paper.
She read it, then looked up with question marks in those Mediterranean eyes.
"These... are floor plans of the presidential palace at Baabda."
Bolan refolded the blueprints.
"That clinches it, then. I've got to contact Mossad with this and I'll need your help."
"I will do anything to help stop this war, as I told you. But Mossad... are they not your enemies, too?"
"I've got an angle on that. Tell Chaim's partner that you've got me and I wish to talk with him. Tell him I've got information on an assassination plot, but start the conversation off by saying he's not to let on to whoever he's with. Most likely he'll be with a Company man and the moment they know it's me they'll try to trace the call. Even if Chaim's partner agrees to meet me alone, the CIA wouldn't let him. They want me real bad."
"Because of what you will do?"
"Because of what I've done and what they think I am. Can you do this for me?"
"Of course. You will wait here?" He nodded and watched her lower the hidden stairs.
"Be careful, Zoraya."
She nodded, then left him, closing the partition behind her.
Bolan stretched out on the bed, then palmed the Beretta in his right hand.
This would be a good spot for an ambush, in which case he had read Zoraya one hundred percent wrong. It was a chance he had to take.
He rested his head on the pillow, relishing these few moments away from the fray. He appreciated the opportunity to recharge his inner batteries for what stretched ahead.
Zoraya returned minutes later and reclosed the secret opening.
The distant sounds of war could have been a thousand miles away.
"Chaim's partner will meet you in ninety minutes at a pub off the Avenue des Frangais."
She recited an address that Bolan committed to memory.
"Such establishments, you see, do a wonderful business at times such as these. Those who cannot escape the city drink while they wait to live or die. He will be there at ten-thirty." She briefly described what the Mossad agent told her he would be wearing. "He says he will recognize you."
"I bet he will. What's his name?"
"Uri Weizmann. He and Chaim were very close professionally and as friends. You can trust him, Mack, believe me."
"Thanks, Zoraya."
She paused, then said, "There is... something you can do for me in return, Mack Bolan."
He gazed up at her from the bed.
"Tell me."
"If you would just... hold me," she said quietly. "I feel... so alone. Just hold me, Mack... please... nothing more..."
Bolan read the sad, lonely look in her eyes and extended his arms.
She stretched out against him atop the covers of the bed, resting tousled midnight hair into the crook of his arm. No, there was not one thing erotic about it at all, only a need for the touch of someone humane and good to somehow balance out everything else and, yes, Bolan needed that, too. They held each other for a long time in the solitude of the attic far away from the war.
They comforted each other and reaffirmed themselves as decent human beings who could care and share gentleness.
14
Somehow, they were all together again at Stony Man Farm, and his heart soared with happiness for the first time in a long, long time because April was there with him.
April Rose and Konzaki and "Bear" Kurtzman.
Andrzej Konzaki, legless since Vietnam, armorer extraordinaire of the Phoenix program, exuded physical stamina from his wheelchair as he recounted a ribald joke to Kurtzman, the Farm's computer mastermind.
Kurtzman pretended the joke wasn't funny, but that was a joke, too, between the four friends on the patio on one of those rare occasions when The Executioner allowed himself to slow down between missions for some R and R-to be human again.
Bolan and April stood away from the patio and picnic table where the four of them had just devoured the steaks Bolan had prepared. The Virginia night had a pleasant coolness. Constellations spangled in the indigo heavens away from the illumination of the patio of the "rustic farmhouse" that was in fact the command center of Bolan's antiterrorist group.
Bolan stood behind April, the love of his life who was also the coordinator, the "warden" of this secret base. His arms enfolded her, the scent of her natural fragrance titillating his nostrils, his senses.
April uttered a contented sound from deep within and Bolan knew how she felt.
Everything was perfect.
The thud of an impacting mortar shell in the near distance awoke Bolan with a start. In a flash he crouched into a shooter's stance next to the bed, fanning the silenced Beretta 93-R around the attic above the garage in Beirut.
Empty.
Zoraya had gone.
Bolan blinked the sleep from his eyes and reprimanded himself, irked that he had allowed it to happen. But he had been forced during the past hours to push himself beyond endurance of even a combat-toughened pro. At least the lapse into deep sleep had occurred in the safety of this refuge.
Where was Zoraya?
And then for just one heartbeat, enough of his dream of April came back to burn through his gut like a bullet, and he brushed at a tear on his cheek. He blinked it away and the iciness of the trained executioner took over.
April and Konzaki were dead, killed in the same KGB-ordered commando raid on Stony Man Farm that had left Kurtzman a wheelchair case for the rest of his life.
Bolan moved to the secret-stair panel and glanced at his digital watch as he moved.
It was 9:55 A.m.
He had not been asleep more than ten minutes.
He still had time to make the meeting Zoraya said she had arranged with the Mossad man, Weizmann, at the pub across town — a town falling to insurgents; Bolan could feel it, sense it.
He slid open the partition and lowered himself to the garage of Zoraya's uncle.
The place was empty except for the hulks of stripped vehicles and the body of the old man — Zoraya's uncle lay sprawled on his side across the cement floor near the door, his neck twisted at an impossible angle.
Bolan stooped to check the old Muslim's pulse to make sure.
The man's neck had been broken.
A wallet lay alongside the body.
Bolan pried a quick look inside Elie billfold. It had been stripped of currency. The photo identification proved it to be the dead man's.
Bolan figured it three possible ways.
The enemy — anyone from the fighting factions in this civil war to sideliners like the CIA, Mossad or even Syrian Intelligence — could have spirited Zoraya away in an effort to locate Bolan. And not even the murder of her uncle had made Zoraya reveal Bolan in the hidden attic.
The enemy took her and left the uncle's empty wallet to mislead any Beirut police investigation, which wasn't very likely in the first place.
Too silent, too quick to awaken Bolan.
Damn, damn.
There was of course the likelihood that it had been wandering gunmen from a Muslim or Arab Christian faction who had not thought twice about snuffing a useless old man for the few Lebanese pounds he might carry.
And the final possibility.
Zoraya could have killed the old man.
Bolan wished like hell that he could rid his mind of these ungrateful thoughts about tough, brave, humane Zoraya, but he had a realistic sense of his importance to the real enemy.
Strakhov's KGB had a special unit assigned to terminate Bolan in revenge for Bolan's killing Strakhov's only son.
Considering the elaborate steps taken to frame Bolan for the CIA a while back, it only made sense they could consider and implement a similarly complex operation. But before terminating Bolan they would torture out of him what he knew of the operations of the U.S. intelligence community from his time as "John Phoenix." Zoraya's uncle could have discovered this and threatened to tell Bolan and, yeah, that would get the old guy killed.
Bolan did not have the time to pursue any of these possibilities. He had a Mossad agent to meet.
Unless that was part of the trap, too.
The shifting quicksand of this mission was as unpredictable as the future of Lebanon itself.
He stood up from the body and started toward the door leading out to the street.
The door burst open.
Bolan froze and dropped to a combat crouch, 93-R in hand, ready to kill.
Two veiled Muslim women, surrounded by seven scrambling children, burst into what they thought to be a temporary refuge.
Gunfire erupted outside.
The group regarded with wide eyes the dead body and the imposing sight of the warrior.
Bolan lowered the pistol, motioning them inside.
Seeing the gun, the refugees obeyed, breath caught in their throats, waiting for whatever would happen next. Their faces registered surprise when Bolan trotted out.
A military vehicle with two Muslim gunmen moved leisurely down the middle of the street, punks looking to prey on refugees, such as those who had dodged into the safety of the garage.
The gunmen saw Bolan. The driver braked and reached for his rifle. His buddy bandit scrambled to a mounted machine gun on the back of their vehicle.
Bolan holstered the Beretta and shifted to the AutoMag. A pair of well-aimed shots wasted the duo.
He had to kill another three Phalangists this time. He could have talked his way past, except that they opened fire on him before he had the chance. Bolan had no alternative if he wanted to live.
He arrived at the battered Saab he had bought from the family outside town. Bolan was sure no one had tampered with the decrepit vehicle.
He climbed in and started on his way.
Beirut presented a strange paradox. Although a civil war raged in its midst for control of the city itself, and the streets hosted an ever increasing number of refugees, you could turn a corner and find yourself stalled by rubble, bombed-out buildings and sniper fire. But you could also reverse your route and travel for blocks along peaceful thoroughfares just like those in any city anywhere.
Strange, yeah.
And very deadly.
From everything Bolan could see, today's action in the city equaled last night's fighting in intensity. Mortar and artillery shells fell with unsettling regularity. Dark smoke clouds blotted out the sun, intensifying the brassy heat.
There were no clearly demarcated battle lines between the fighting factions. Gunmen of both sides were everywhere.
At one point Bolan saw a group of about fifteen Lebanese soldiers walking along a road, an air of resignation about them.
They were turning their backs on the war and simply going home.
&
nbsp; 15
Bolan left the rattletrap Saab and rounded a corner on foot in his search for the designated pub.
The time was 10:28.
The bar was located midblock on one of the streets that appeared relatively normal and untouched by the fighting.
But even along there no one gave a second glance to the heavily armed soldier in blacksuit.
The businesses were mostly closed along the street, except for the taverns, which, as Zoraya had said, did a business almost as booming as the heavy artillery up in the hills.
Dozens of people in various stages of intoxication moved in and out of the pub in the ten minutes Bolan crouched around the corner of a building at the end of the block.
He recognized the Mossad agent and another man because of their sober intensity; this told him he had Uri Weizmann as surely as the guy's jacket matched the description Zoraya had given.
Bolan crossed the street and moved up the sidewalk, closing in on the Mossad undercover operative and his companion without letting them know it.
When they slipped into a Renault, Weizmann in the passenger seat, his associate behind the wheel, Bolan slipped into the back seat behind them, the Beretta in his left hand pressed against the base of the driver's neck, Big Thunder ready to shred the man from Mossad.
"Let's talk." Bolan nudged Weizmann with the barrel of the AutoMag. "You start."
"May I reach for identification?"
"Slowly. Very slowly." The man obeyed and held a thin leather packet open over his shoulder for Bolan to read.
The ID indicated he was Uri Weizmann, Israeli Embassy Staff personnel.
The silence grew louder inside the hot car.
Bolan read these men as unafraid, seasoned hellgrounders like himself.
Their grim expressions were blank masks.
"You realize anyone seeing me flash my ID in this neighborhood would make sure the mob in this street tore me apart," Weizmann snapped.
The driver grunted assent.
"The three of us would be dead."
"So put it away." Bolan pulled his guns back from the neck of each man, lowering the pistols but keeping them aimed below window level. "You're still covered." Bolan nodded to the driver. "Who's your friend?" he asked Weizmann.
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