Frank Edwards had to be neutralized, and the Executioner was itching to apply his own unique method of neutralization.
The world was a precariously balanced entity, Bolan knew. Yet in some way, there was a force-call it destiny, cosmic influence, the hand of a greater consciousness — a force that worked to preserve that balance. In a sterile apartment in Rome, a young woman needlessly dies, the last link to another young woman's post existence. But then the other woman's voice is heard, the link reappears, and the world is in balance again. When Bolan had finally contacted Aaron Kurtzman at the Stony Man Farm base, less than six hours before, Toby's call had already set wheels a turning. U.S. military aircraft did not enter Libyan airspace, by mutual agreement; in fact, it had not been so long before that under orders from Khaddafi, Libyan fighters had fired on American jets flying in international airspace over the nearby Gulf of Sidra. Two planes had gone down — but they sure as hell had not belonged to the U.S.
However, several American oil companies maintained exploitation and development contracts with Khaddafi. It would come as no surprise to anyone to learn that certain people associated with one or more of these companies and stationed in Libya had certain quasi-official connections with American Intelligence. It was that channel that Kurtzman pursued. The pilot of the unmarked twin-engine passenger jet had been young, professional, an excellent aviator, and admirably taciturn.
He had spoken exactly three sentences to Bolan: "Good evening, sir," "Fifteen minutes to landing, sir," and "Good luck, sir." Between the first and the second, Bolan caught a couple of hours of combat sleep. When he awoke the pain in his shoulder was down to a dull throb that was merely bothersome. The vague silhouette of a pipe-head pumping station was visible near the private desert airstrip where they'd landed. The man in the Nebraska Cornhuskers sweatshirt standing beside the open trunk of the Jaguar had less to say than the pilot. He shone a flashlight over the trunk's contents. Bolan looked them over and nodded. It would do.
It would have to.
The man in the sweatshirt slammed the trunk, handed Bolan the keys, and slipped into darkness.
Seconds later the Jaguar's headlights were slashing across the sandy wasteland, pointed north.
Now, seated in the luxury vehicle across from the House that Betrayal Built, Bolan felt refreshed and ready. At that hour just before dawn, most men's biological clocks tick their slowest, and for that reason it would have been a good time for a strike. But everything else dictated against it.
Frank Edwards was no superstitious Mafia capo, nor a fanatic but ill trained terrorist gunman. He had survived years of espionage work, followed by a meteorological climb on the edge of the shadow world of international violence, because he was smart enough to know he was always living on the heartbeat. The safety of this Tripoli retreat was relative, and Frank Edwards would know that.
The guy was playing on his home court, and if Bolan tried some crazy-haired one-man cavalry charge into the midst of it, he'd never get near the renegade agent.
There was another, although secondary, consideration: the safety of one Toby Ranger.
Bolan's primary mission was to stop Edwards, and if he succeeded there would be one less threat to the gentle people everywhere. And if he succeeded in saving Toby's lovely butt at the same time, so much the better.
Until it was proven absolutely impossible, Bolan would aspire to achieve both goals.
So now it was time for planning, surveillance, logistics. That house across the street — any house was like a living organism, and in time would reveal its secrets. That was all the edge Bolan could hope for.
As it turned out, he got a good deal more.
The three men moved like a drill team that had rehearsed this routine so many times it was second nature. Two of them came around the Mercedes diesel sedan, sliding into front and back seat with movement so identical they could have been wired in tandem. As the first guy fired up the ignition, the one standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the woman pushed her into the back of the sedan from the house side, slid in beside her to sandwich her against his partner.
By the time they had started down the villa's curving driveway, Bolan had the Jag started. The Night Vision Goggles were on the dashboard, and pulling the head strap on and comfortably positioning the leather-covered foam face cushion took only a second or two. He had readjusted the eyepiece focus, eye separation, tilt and eye relief, and range focus, and needed only to flick on the power switch under the left tube. The Litton M-802 goggles were the stable-mate of the Pocket Scope, essentially two second-generation passive image intensifiers set in tandem as a self-contained binocular. The disadvantage of the Pocket Scope was the variable magnification of its zoom lens; the goggles were f1med at I X, or unity. But the goggles allowed hands-free operation ideally suited for, among other things, driving. And it looked like Bolan had some driving to do.
The Mercedes came out of the drive with lights doused and turned north, the direction Bolan was facing; The NVD made the interior as visible to Bolan as if the dome light had been lit.
Her blond hair was disheveled, and what Bolan could see of her face was set in a hard mask that could have been frustration, anger or pain. But Bolan would have made her out if she were laughing and bald. It was Toby Ranger, for sure.
Someone was sending her for a ride. Bolan meant to make certain it was not her last one.
Ahead of him the Mercedes's taillights came on and began immediately to recede.
Bolan let the Jag gently idle.
Five beats later, a second vehicle came out of the villa's driveway, a sleek-lined Saab Turbo carrying two men. It turned after the Mercedes. Sure, a tag car was elementary tradecraft. Especially when the lead vehicle was carrying precious cargo.
Bolan eased the Jag into the parade, keeping the headlights off. With the Litton goggles, the brightness control automatically adjusting to streetlights, oncoming vehicles, and other changes in intensity, his night vision without lights was better than the other drivers with. Bolan had recognized one of them, one of the sandwich men in the back of the Mercedes. His name was T.W. Hansen, and he was one of the five suspect-terminations on the list that had also included Corey James, the Valais chalet houseman.
Until just three weeks before, Hansen had been a Master Sergeant in the Special Forces, with fourteen years of service and a record of several successfully completed and sensitive intelligence-related "hard" missions. Then he had suddenly turned up AWOL.
It looked like his status would have to be upgraded to "Deserted." Bolan's task was simple, and yet breathtakingly complex. All he had to do was stop two powerful vehicles, overcome the objections of five experienced and no doubt armed fighting men, and liberate one highly compromised undercover agent without catching her in the cross fire. And accomplish it all on terrain with which he was only vaguely familiar. He could not allow the two cars to reach their destination; the play had to be on neutral territory. But as long as they kept moving, Bolan could be reasonably sure that Toby would remain in one piece. His hunch was that Toby's cover had been blown too recently for them to have milked her of all the valuable information she could reveal. If that were the case — and Bolan had to believe it was — they were headed for a facility more isolated than the Giorgimpopoli villa.
Somewhere where her screams of anguish would go unheard. They entered the more congested part of Tripoli; even at this early hour traffic had picked up. Bolan risked the headlights and blended into the flow, two cars behind the Saab tail car. At the coast highway, the Saab turned right, to the east. On the left Bolan passed the drying flats of a marine salt distillery. A little farther on was the harbor, and opposite it the mosques of Gurgi and Karamanli, the marble triumphal arch of Marcus Aurelius. The city behind them, they passed through a shanty town, vague figures already stirring in the predawn darkness. Beyond it the Saab turned back south. Bolan doused the lights again and followed.
He was pretty sure now where the two-car caravan was heading.
Back in the early days of his military service, then Sergeant Mack Bolan had been aboard a troop transport plane that had landed at Wheelus Air Base for service and refueling. With an hour or so to kill, a couple of Sergeant Bolan's squad had anted up a couple of cartons of American smokes and talked him into trading them for the use of a Jeep for a little sightseeing. They had not had time to go far, but Bolan had a fair recall of the area around the USAF base which they had managed to take in.
Wheelus had been closed since 1970; Khaddafi had kicked out the American "imperialist warmongers" soon after he forcibly grabbed the reins of power. But the physical plant was still mostly intact: runways, hangars, maintenance shops, billets, offices.
It could provide a turnkey base for Frank Edwards's "black" CIA. The gate of Wheelus could be no more than a couple of miles farther on. Here the two-lane road ran straight as an arrow through scrub-grass plain, climbing a slight rise that might provide the last cover for Bolan's play. The two cars ahead of him had tightened to within six lengths of each other, running about fifty miles per hour through the black-gray of predawn.
Numbers moved backward in Bolan's head, and ran out.
Bolan tromped down on the gas of his darkened vehicle, and the Jaguar leaped at the rear of the car ahead. The wheelman of the tag car was good at his work, and the Saab was fully the Jag's equal in acceleration and speed. But the guy found himself sandwiched, with nowhere to go. His partner twisted in the passenger seat, and automatic weapons fire splattered through the louvered rear window of the Saab. One end of the spoiler wing tore loose and banged across body metal in a shower of sparks. But by then Bolan had already pulled up on the driver's side. His image eerily enhanced by the Night Vision Goggles, the wheelman was momentarily profiled through the Jag's passenger window. Bolan saw the guy start to wrench the wheel over hard, setting to broadside the Jag.
He never finished the motion.
The Beretta 93Rather machine pistol in Bolan's right hand chattered out a three-round burst of 9mm tumblers; though both cars were careening down the road, the range from the pistol's muzzle to the wheelman's head was no more than ten feet.
At the same moment Bolan floored the Jag.
The British sedan leapt forward like it had been goosed. The Saab caught the Jag's left rear quarter-panel and Bolan steered one-handed against the fishtail skid. A spasm of protesting pain shot through his left shoulder, but then the Beretta was in his lap and he was able to get both hands on the wheel again.
The two guys in the Saab weren't so lucky.
In the rearview mirror, Bolan saw the tag car tear diagonally across the road, momentarily going airborne as it cleared the shoulder. When it hit, the right front corner seemed to catch, and the car did a one-and-a-half flip through midair before landing on its roof.
Scant seconds had passed since Bolan had made his move. The driver of the big Mercedes was milking it for all the speed it had, but the boxy diesel machine was designed for reliability, not racing. Bolan's headlights were on now, high beams cutting a trail to the lead vehicle. It took the Jag only a heartbeat to close the thirty yards to it. One of the baby-sitters in the back seat twisted out the window, an M-16 cradled in his arms. Angry 5.56mm whizzers hemstitched starbursts across the Jag's windshield.
Bolan slumped in the contoured seat and eased more speed out of the rig. A moment later he felt the substantial thump, of his front end tagging the Mercedes, heard the distinctive whine of tearing body metal. The weapon's chatter stopped.
Bolan rose, dropped back ten feet to get the angle, and put three-round bursts into each of the Mercedes's rear tires. The vehicle settled down on its haunches, one tire throwing a ragged strip of rubber off into the night.
Bolan cranked the wheel hard, snaked the Jag around the crippled Mercedes, then tapped the brake and pulled the wheel all the way around with his good right arm. The car ceded around in a perfect one eighty. Leaving the high-beam headlights on, Bolan was EVA almost before the skid was over.
The Uzi hung from a lanyard around Bolan's neck. He sprayed a line of 9mm slugs across the front of the Mercedes, the big sedan still lumping toward him. Headlights blinked out in a shower of glass shards, and superheated steam wheezed from the punctured radiator.
Answering fire raked the Jag.
But by then Bolan was already circling for the Mercedes.
In the blacksuit he was nearly one with the encompassing night, but the NVD goggles revealed the other four players in this game of death as clear as daylight.
Three of the sedan's four doors were open wide. From the far side of the back seat, Toby Ranger and the Green Beret deserter T.W.Hansen had pulled out. Hansen was dragging her roughly by one arm into the scrub grass. Despite the unexpected ambush, the guy had stuck with his primary assignment.
The driver and his partner were crouched behind the cover of the other doors, frantically searching the dark for a target.
They were looking in the wrong direction.
From off to the side, the Uzi spoke again, the hider concealing any revealing muzzle flash. The upper half of the driver's body punched back inside, sprawling him across the front seat. His partner reacted automatically and sensibly, diving across the deck for the cover of the other side.
A precise line of 9mm hollow-points helped him on his way.
A harsh voice broke the momentary silence. "Hold it! You move and the woman dies!"
T.W. Hansen was maybe fifty feet into the scrub grass. He held Toby Ranger's arm in the vise grip of his left hand, and an Ingram M-10 machine pistol in his right.
Bolan let the Uzi hang free from its lanyard, unsheathed the big Beretta, setting the selector on single-shot.
The NVD goggles revealed a pulpy bruise on one side of Toby Ranger's forehead. Her eyes seemed half-closed.
"Show yourself, hands empty," Hansen called. "You do it, right now." It was the odds on gamble for the tall professional soldier, but Lady Luck was riding with the Executioner.
Lady Luck, and the lady named Ranger.
Toby moved suddenly, wrenching hard enough to force Hansen to take a step to keep his balance, yet not hard enough to break his grip. In reaction Hansen jerked her back toward him, and Toby stumbled to one knee. The target was already framed over the Beretta's sight.
Bolan squeezed off the single round, and the heavy 9mm bonecrusher flashed through the night, seeking impediment, and found it in the middle of Hansen's forehead, punching him away and onto his back. When Bolan reached him his eyes were open, and he was still holding Toby in lifeless fingers.
Toby pulled free. She looked up at Bolan, gasped, and got her hands around the fallen Ingram.
She leveled the weapon on Bolan's midsection. "One more step, Mister Whoever-You-Are," she said. She was obviously hurting, and this was costing her more pain. "One more step, and you are stew-meat." Only then did Bolan realize that in the Night Vision Goggles, with their twin extruded vision tubes, he must have looked like some kind of bug-eyed apparition from someplace highly unpleasant.
He pulled the goggles off, keeping both hands visible. The Ingram in Toby's hand lowered, forgotten.
"Captain Cavalry," she breathed. "In the flesh." She managed to stand. "If you aren't a sight for sore eyes." Toby tried to take a step toward him and pitched forward instead. Bolan caught her soft bulk against his chest and lowered her gently back to the grass.
It was a reunion, for sure. But the popping of champagne corks and the rehashing of old times would have to wait.
Toby was out, but she didn't seem to be badly hurt. The laceration on her forehead was the only visible sign of abuse. Bolan's hard fingers, moments before gripped around gunmetal, took her wrist with infinite gentleness. The pulse was regular and strong, and her breathing, though a little ragged, was steady.
Bolan stripped off Hansen's jacket and covered Toby with it, then replaced the Night Vision Goggles in position and moved out along his backtrack. The Saab Turbo was a ruggedly constructed machine, built to take even the
kind of roll this car had endured without major structural damage. The same was not true of the human body.
The shotgun rider was slumped out of his seat belt into what had been the roof, his head bent over at nearly a ninety-degree angle to his torso, his neck snapped like a wishbone. The top of the driver's head was not even there, except as a gory smear on the upholstery; Bolan's three-round burst had obviously found a tight grouping in its target.
When he got back, Toby was sitting up.
"What's broken?" Bolan's tone was gruff.
There were too many other things be really wanted to say and ask, but right now there was only time for business.
Sooner or later — the later the better F— rank Edwards was going to miss his five hardboys.
"Nothing." She took the hand he offered, let him pull her to her feet. "I'm okay, Captain Quick, honest Indian." In the Jaguar he dug a first-aid kit from a pack. He swabbed the forehead wound with an antiseptic towelette; once the dried blood was gone it didn't look too bad, as if someone had hit her a glancing blow with a gun barrel or a hand on which a ring was worn. Bolan squeezed antibiotic ointment from a tube, smeared it over the cut, covered it with a small adhesive compress.
When he was finished, Toby twisted the rearview mirror to where she could get a look at herself. She made a half-hearted attempt to push tangled blond hair into some kind of order, then gave it up and slumped back into the seat.
"I'm beat, Captain Hard," she said, her usual sardonic tone thin and forced now. "The last thirty-six hours have been something of a drain — to say the least."
"Toby," Bolan said, gently but firmly. "I need to have everything you can give me, and I need it now."
Immediately she sat up straighter. "I'm down, but I didn't say I was out. From here on it's a two-pronged blitz, Captain Courageous."
Bolan let that pass. Sure, Toby had proven herself on the field of battle more than once, and he had no theoretical objection to her fighting at his side. He had put the days of purely solo warfare behind him for good when he had accepted the support and sanction of the man in the Oval Office. Still, though he could push it to the back of his mind, what he'd once had with Toby would always be there, and a part of his concentration, no matter how minor, would be concerned with her safety. A situational decision could be made when they reached the situation.
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