Two of the guys had been leaning across the Malibu's hood, taking aim at the underpass with handguns, while a third had been pointing a pump shotgun over the trunk. Number Four must have been down out of sight, holding onto their captive. Now they spun around as one to meet this unexpected maneuver, and one of the handgun boys even had time to pull off a wild round before Death came for them.
Bolan squeezed off only a short burst from the Uzi, but it was enough to take all three men in a withering hail that stitched from left to right at upper-chest level, the Uzi's muzzle flashes illuminating the darkness like some unholy strobe light.
Dead bodies were still jerking and falling when motion erupted from the nose of the Malibu. Bolan had sized it correctly. Heavy Number Four had been pinning the girl. Now he was straightening, forgetting about the blonde as he pawed for hardware beneath his jacket.
The woman kept her head. She dashed from the man's side, losing herself in the night.
The guy had his weapon halfway out when the Uzi burped again, almost discreetly. The force of the 9mm rounds smashed the man back against the car; then he pitched forward onto the grass alongside the road, his right hand still reaching under his left arm in a final statement of purpose.
The sudden silence was absolute. The car, the bodies — Bolan could see no sign of the lady.
Cautiously, he approached.
Wondering, as he did, just what the hell had gone down here.
Wondering about the mission.
Wondering what would happen next.
2
The mission was not supposed to be a complicated one. Nor an easy one, no. Not easy by any stretch of the imagination. But cut and dried, just the same.
Brognola had briefed Bolan only ninety minutes earlier. Bolan could still hear the cigar-chewing head fed's words.
"The man's name is General Eshan Nazarour," Brognola had told him. "An Iranian. High ranker in SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, until the revolution came along. The general lost both legs in a mortar attack on SAVAK headquarters during the final days of fighting, but he still managed to get out alive, which a lot of 'em didn't. For the last nine months, he's been lodged incognito on a forty-acre spread up in Potomac. He's got influential ties with plenty of big money in this town, and some of that money has been putting him up. But legs or no legs, the guy's a mobster, plain and simple, and the administration doesn't want anything to do with him.
"His visa expires at midnight tonight. He's sticking it out until the last minute, hoping his lawyers will be able to pull some strings — which they can't. The kicker is that we learned today that Nazarour has been marked for death by an Iranian assassination squad. At any time from now on. Any time today or tonight.
"Now we all know what it's like to have a foreign hit team prowling the country. It makes people edgy, right? But this time around we have hard data on the bastards and we're going to get them.
"The squad is a fourteen-man paramilitary commando unit — the best they've got — and they've been on his trail ever since January '79, when Khomeini's government took power. During the first week of trials, Nazarour was sentenced in absentia to death, on charges of torture, massacre of people, treason, and earthly corruption, and our intel says he's guilty as sin of those charges and a whole lot more. So this hit team wants him bad.
"I don't know how they tagged him here, but our spook in Tehran reports that they picked up his scent the day before yesterday. The agent gathered the intel after the team had already been dispatched from Tehran — they left within two hours after learning of the general's whereabouts. They've probably been in D.C. most of today, reconnoitering and setting up the operation.
"This won't be their first hit, either. The team is led by a man named Karim Yazid, who made quite a bloody rep for himself with the Cherikhaye Fedaye Khalq— People's Sacrifice Guerillas — in Iran before the revolution. The group was trained by Libyan military personnel, financed by a radical Palestinian group, and was the toughest in the Mideast. Yazid drew from the Cherikhaye Fedaye Khalq when he put his present outfit together.
"So far, they've racked up a total of thirty kills in the past three years of Khomeini enemies around the world. Four in the Mideast, ten in Europe and sixteen — count 'em, sixteen — here in America. That's what's got the CIA and the other agencies asking us for help. We've advised Nazarour of our intel, and he's gone stone hard. He's been paranoid as hell the whole time he's been here, and I got the feeling after talking to him on the phone that he suspects this of being some sort of American trick.
"He's refused to allow any of our troops or security personnel onto the grounds. But he has agreed to allow Colonel John Phoenix to act in an advisory capacity to his own security staff.
"As I say, he has his suspicions, but he's not taking any chances in case our information is on the level. He's aware of this hit team, of course, and fully appreciates their capabilities. He's being guarded by a private security agency provided by one of these big-money friends of his, but he must know that better security than he's got hasn't kept Yazid's outfit from hitting effectively in the past. And he certainly knows that his 'protection' wouldn't stand a chance against this team in the dark.
"So he's refused to budge from the grounds of that estate until dawn. Which is fine with us. Striker, that hit team must attack tonight. Either at the place in Potomac or just after dawn, en route to the private airstrip in Rockville where Nazarour is planning to catch a plane out of the country. If they don't hit tonight, they run the risk of having the general slip through their fingers and disappear again, as he's done a few times in the past.
"So that's your mission. These assassinations have got to stop. All sorts of Third World hoodlums are starting to think they can march into this country and turn it into a shooting gallery whenever they please.
"When that hit team does launch their attack tonight, you'll be there to take them on. Sure, no one would cry if they did hit Nazarour, but the guy is excellent bait, and it's just too good a setup to pass by. The odds are stacked, but with Nazarour refusing to let us onto the grounds to protect him in force... well, your name is the only one in the hat, buddy. When that attack comes, do what you can. It's up to you. The top man says hit teams call for Phoenix."
It was quite a speech. Brognola had spoken those words that afternoon, only hours after a bone-weary Bolan had arrived back at Stony Man from Minnesota. That mission had sapped him to his very soul — mentally, physically, and emotionally. And now it was to be Potomac, Maryland.
There had been time to requisition the necessary ordnance, time for a change into night clothes, time to pick up the cassette with additional background on the mission, to be absorbed on the drive to Potomac. And time to be gone.
There had not been time for any personal words with Brognola or with April, that bright-eyed lovely with the genius IQ, who was both "warden" of Stony Man Farm and the most important lady in Bolan's life.
During Hal's briefing, Bolan could tell that April, sitting on the sidelines, had things she wanted to tell him. Important things, like how glad she was to see her man back from Minnesota in one piece. Bolan could read that much from those brown eyes, which could express so much without words. But those eyes also said that she understood that the mission came first. The mission always came first. April was, yeah, that kind of special lady. She would tell Bolan the important things — the man/woman things that existed only for the two of them — when she saw him again.
Bolan hadn't had time to listen to the full tape that Stony Man's computer wizard, Aaron "The Bear" Kurtzman, had compiled from the general's dossier, but he digested the particulars. And he didn't like any of them.
Bolan knew that since the revolution, Washington had welcomed any number of the Shah's regime into the country, especially those interested in someday restoring some kind of sanity to a homeland being systematically driven back into the Dark Ages by a religious madman.
But Nazarour did not fall into this category. The man
was as self-serving as he was ruthless, with nothing save his own shadowy interests at heart. Bolan understood that the Shah's rule had been far less than perfect, and Nazarour epitomized the corruption that had been one of the regime's continuing problems. A man with untold millions pillaged from his years as a top-echelon officer in what the Shah's military had perverted into one of the most dread secret police agencies in the world. Yeah, that was Eshan Nazarour. The man sounded like Savage incarnate.
But whatever else the general was, he would indeed be perfect bait for the trap Bolan hoped to spring when Karim Yazid's hit team came calling.
The world was growing smaller in many ways. There were fewer and fewer places where men could gather and talk of freedom and peace and plans for a better future without yesterday's mistakes. America was one of those places, and it had to remain so. If not for Eshan Nazarour, then for his countrymen who were more honorable than he, who cared about their Iran and dreamed and, yes, plotted for a day when freedom — real freedom — would ring in that torn land.
And not just the Iranian exiles, but those from Afghanistan and anywhere else in the world where the flame of freedom had been extinguished. These men, good and true, had to be reassured that America was safe and open to them. That their dreams and plans for a better world could be nurtured in safety. That they could seek asylum here from those merchants of terror and violence who saw fit to ignore all conventions and rules of diplomacy or morality.
No, Bolan had no love for cannibals of Nazarour's type. Bolan was glad the guy was getting booted out of the country on his tail. He deserved no less. But if protecting Eshan Nazarour for the coming few hours and protecting the values and rights that made this country great were one and the same thing, then, yes, Bolan was ready to take on whatever the Iranian hit force could throw at him, and return it in kind.
There was far more at stake here than the life of one corrupt ex-military man.
Bolan had been thinking about that as he'd approached Nazarour's temporary residence in Potomac.
That was when he spotted the woman.
That was when the complications began....
3
He found the blonde standing near a clump of bushes about ten feet to the left of the Malibu. She was staring wide-eyed at what was left of the four men who had tried to abduct her. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her body as if fighting off a terrible chill. Moonlight cut through the bare branches overhead, illuminating the lovely face framed with silver blonde hair. The face was still stretched taut with fear. Bolan saw her lips drawn tight in a near hysterical grimace. She saw Bolan then, and her expression fluctuated between confusion and even more fear.
"It's all right," Bolan said quietly as he moved past her toward the carnage around the Malibu. "You're okay now."
It was not necessary to check the bodies of the four men who had waited for him in ambush. The rapidly spreading pools of blood on the moonlit pavement beneath them gave mute testimony to their fate. They would terrify no more women. They would kill no more men.
The corpse of their final victim, the man the blonde had been on her way to meet, was scrunched up on the floor of the back seat.
Bolan turned and approached the woman. She kept stepping back as he came toward her, until a tree stopped her.
"W-who are you?" she asked in a quavery whisper. "Did Eshan send you?"
"My name is Phoenix," said Bolan. His ears picked up the sound of rapidly approaching sirens from at least two directions on MacArthur. "We'd better get out of here. Or do you want to wait for the police?"
"No! Please... take me with you."
Bolan extended a hand. "Then come on. It's now or never. We have to move fast."
She accepted his hand. He was surprised to find that hers was warm and vibrant, despite all that had happened.
They started toward Bolan's Corvette. But they never reached it. They were halfway there when a sedan came wheeling in at doubletime and burned rubber into a sideways stop only inches behind the Malibu.
Bolan cursed silently as two more tough guys jumped out. One held a handgun. The other was armed with a Thompson.
Damn!
The boys in the Malibu must have been in radio contact with a backup team. And now here they were, on the kill.
Apparently they wanted the lady alive. The guy with the chopper began raising it at Bolan and opening his mouth to bark a command at his partner.
Bolan's Uzi barked instead, catching the man in a tight pattern in the upper chest area. The guy died on his feet, jerking around in a death dance — with a dead index finger squeezing back on the chopper's trigger.
Bolan saw it about to happen and pushed the woman roughly to the ground beneath him as the Thompson stuttered a short blast, sending a dozen or more rounds zinging into a wild semicircle as the corpse holding the weapon stumbled and fell.
When the Thompson's angry chatter subsided, Bolan lifted his head to pinpoint the second guy. It wasn't hard, and there was nothing to worry about from that quarter.
Backup Number Two must have caught some of the chopper's errant rounds. He was on his back amid all the other bodies, only he wasn't lying still. He was groaning — a murky, bubbly sound — and arching and twisting in pain as if he had no backbone.
Bolan looked at the girl. "Get in the car," he said.
Then, shifting the Uzi to his left hand, he un-leathered the Beretta and approached the wounded man.
The guy's hardware lay a few feet from his right hand. He didn't seem to be aware of it, but Bolan took no chances. He kicked the weapon aside, then knelt down next to the dude.
The guy was in intense pain and must have known he was dying. His lips were flecked with red. His hands were pressed against his abdomen but did nothing to stem the flow of life fluids that bubbled out between the fingers. His breathing was shallow, ragged, and forced. He seemed unaware that Bolan was beside him.
"Who are you?" Bolan asked calmly. "Who sent you after that woman?"
The guy's eyes opened into tight slits. He was a tough one, all right. A young guy who must have still thought that there was some honor among thieves. He spoke through teeth clenched against the pain, and Bolan could tell it was torture for him. But he spoke.
"Bastard...goddamn bastard...I'm not t-telling you shit....Bastard...."
Bolan sighed. "Have it your way," he said quietly.
He squeezed the Beretta's trigger.
Bolan hurried back to the car, climbed in beside the woman, gunned the engine, and got the hell out of there, continuing on into the park, away from the bodies and the two cars and the approaching sirens.
After passing two more turnoffs, Bolan pulled a left and took them back to MacArthur, catching MacArthur west toward Persimmon Tree Road, back the way they had come, toward that walled estate in Potomac, where Eshan Nazarour was temporarily residing.
He finally took time to give the lady beside him a long, sideways appraisal. She was hugging her door, watching him warily. He could see in the passing streetlights that the frightened lines of her face had softened some, but not entirely.
"Where are we going?" she asked quietly, nervously.
Bolan had the impression that she knew damn well, but he said, "Back home. Back where you started from."
"Do we... have to?"
"No. This is a free country. I can drop you off anywhere along here, if you'd like."
She mulled that over for a moment. Then she shook her head. There was something helpless about her that made Bolan want to reach out and touch her. To comfort her. But he did not.
"No, that's all right," she said finally, in a weak voice that was almost like a little girl's. "It wouldn't do any good. I'll go with you."
"Who were those men?"
"I — I don't know. I... don't know."
"Okay, we'll let that one go. Who are you? What's your name?"
He was pretty sure he knew the answer to that. He was remembering the first thing she'd said to him as he'd come in out of t
he darkness after killing all those men: "Did Eshan send you?"
"Don't you know?" she said, staring straight ahead through the windshield, not even looking at him. "My name is Carol Nazarour. I'm General Nazarour's wife."
"Who was that man you were meeting? The one they killed?"
"It doesn't matter," came the harsh reply. "None of it matters. None of it...."
That was, quite obviously, all she intended to say for the duration.
Bolan did not insist. There are times to push and times to lay off. For right now, the lady needed her space to recover from all that had happened, all that she had been through. Mack Bolan allowed her that space.
Complications, sure.
A corrupt Iranian general marked for assassination and his beautiful American wife who was up to her lovely blonde head in kidnapping and sudden death.
It promised to be one hell of a mission. And only he, because it was a hit team loose in American streets, was truly qualified to handle it.
Great.
Goddamn great.
4
Mack Bolan had mixed feelings about Washington, D.C., and its environs, which included Potomac, Maryland. The area had about it a sense of oneness with history that Bolan had experienced in few other places in the world. You could feel the spiritual presence of the great men who had walked this ground and done great things. The Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where Bolan had meditated on several occasions long after the city around him slept. Yeah. To experience Washington was to experience the essence of American pride and patriotism. But there was another side of Washington that Bolan cared for not at all.
A beautiful city, sure. If you ignored the sprawling black ghetto that surrounded the capital of this land of plenty. And that's exactly what most people did. Washington is not so much people as a state of mind. The city's only real industry is government, which employs nearly a half-million civilian and military personnel: about forty percent of the area's work force. And if it is a town of scenic parks and classical architecture and monuments to a great past, then it is also a city of lies and deceit and too many factions trying to buy too many pieces of democracy with a strictly what's-in-it-for-me philosophy. A city where the tax dollar finances wasteful bureaucratic nonsense, while the ghetto and the problems it represents only grow larger, and the only things that go up are the taxes and the bureaucrats' salaries.
The Iranian Hit te-42 Page 2