Beirut Payback

12

Bob Collins awoke with a start and reached for the .45 automatic he always wore in a shoulder holster. He relaxed when he realized Also Randolph was the man shaking him awake. Collins sat up on the cot in their "office" and blinked the sleep from his eyes.

He and Randolph were partners and sort of friends, CIA agents who had risen through the ranks to find themselves stuck with the worst assignment of all.

"What the hell is it?" The sleep had been fitful but welcome just the same, a respite from Hell.

Collins and Randolph had not only been stuck with the undesirable job, but were right smack in the middle of it and there was no escape at all.

"Wake up." Randolph shook him some more. "We've got trouble."

Collins reoriented himself to the CIA monitoring station: the basement of a closed vegetable business owned by a Company front in the Christian sector of Beirut. Like living in a dungeon, Collins thought again. Then he shook the depression and glowered.

"Okay, Also. Trouble. Trouble in Hell. Give it a name."

"Bolan," Randolph replied, and that woke Coffins up all the way. Randolph moved to lean his bulk against the battered table in the corner where they kept the scrambler phone to the embassy. He lit a cigarette. "Just got it. Thought you'd want to know." Collins turned on the hot plate to heat water for instant coffee. The cellar room felt as claustrophobic as ever.

"And I suppose our orders are to keep this sector wired for public enemy number one."

"You got it. Make that world enemy."

"I know the standing orders on the guy," Collins grouched. "Shoot on sight. I wonder what the hell Mack Bolan is doing in Beirut, now that he's put himself against the KGB.. They're all over this rathole, sure, but nothing that hasn't been going on for a long, long time. Maybe our buddies in Mossad know."

Randolph grunted and lit another butt.

"Buddies, uh-huh. Depending on which way the wind is blowing out of Washington and Tel Aviv this hour. And I don't think we're going to be such buddies with Mossad after you hear the rest of what I just got."

Collins spooned coffee into a cup, added hot water and stiffed.

"So tell me, Also. We've got to hit the streets in the middle of everything that's going to bust loose today, keep our cover intact and monitor the fighting and not get killed. Now we've got Mack Bolan and orders to terminate a guy the Vietcong, the Mafia and all the terrorists in the world couldn't kill. A guy who was on our side until a few months ago and maybe he still is. And you say you've got something else."

Collins looked at his partner. "Maybe we ought to pack a suitcase and slip out and go home, Also. You ever thought of that?"

"What the hell brought us into this, anyway? A few months ago this guy Bolan would've come to us for help. Now we're supposed to kill him. And all the rest of it. I don't want to die in Beirut. Do you want to die in Beirut? We've been conned, Also. Let's go home." The cynicism disappeared from Randolph's face, and all of a sudden he looked honest and as tired as Collins felt.

"Dammit, stop it, Bob. Get it together. You know it's not as easy as that and it does mean something. Even if you did get out that way you'd get what Bolan got." Collins sipped his coffee.

"You're right. Sorry about the whining, Also. It won't happen again. But you want to know something... what Bolan got ain't so bad. He's got himself, buddy. They took him but he got himself back and his name and his soul with it." Randolph dragged on his cigarette.

"I know what you mean. We're on the same side as he is in a way, but orders are orders. The Company can't allow anyone running around tackling wild, unsanctioned actions in sensitive areas like this the way Bolan does."

"He gets results, Also. And I don't think we have to worry about too many people trying or even coming close to what Bolan has done. The Executioner is one in ten million. No, make it one of a kind. That's Bolan."

"So our orders suck," Randolph grunted and the cynical tone returned. "So call up the embassy on the scrambler and tell them the orders suck. And see what they give you back. These orders come from the top, pally. And the orders say: terminate Bolan."

"I said I know the orders. And you said you had something else about Mossad. So we don't share our intel with them. So how worse can it get?"

"Does the name Katzenelenbogen ring a bell?"

"Uh-huh. He's the honcho of the Stony Man Farm operation Bolan used to head before Bolan went lone wolf. I never heard anything bad about the Israeli."

"Lend an ear. Katz got Bolan over here using some old ties with Mossad, slipped Bolan in through Israel, and no one who helped knew the guy is on the hit list of every spy agency in existence."

"Must be something real big cooking to get Bolan in," Collins thought aloud. "That incredible dude has taken on the whole KGB. That's full-time work even for him."

"Crazy," Randolph grumbled.

"Yeah." Collins tried on the cynicism.

"Crazy when he took on the whole frigging Mafia. He tore that organization of scumbags to shreds and they still haven't recovered. Crazy when he let the government talk him into taking on the worldwide terrorist network. Well, maybe he did give the government too much of his soul for a while there, but take a look at what a shambles he made of international terrorism. Was Don Quixote crazy? People are still talking about that one a couple of hundred years later for inspiration." Randolph started to light a third cigarette but threw it away in disgust. "Damn things. I'll die of cancer before the guns get me." He looked at Collins. "The only way it figures is that Bolan hasn't tackled our local KGB opposite numbers up to now because the situation has been too damn fluid for anyone to get a handle on it, including Bolan."

"And now he's got the handle and we don't know what the hell it is," Collins muttered. "You're saying whatever has brought Bolan here came from Mossad, through Katzenelenbogen?"

"I'm saying what Control told me."

"And our orders?"

"We have a fix on Katzenelenbogen. He's with an Israeli military unit across the border. We pick him up. We interrogate him. Mossad will cooperate." Collins finished his coffee and set the empty cup down with a clunk.

"Mossad might cooperate. Katzenelenbogen won't. Neither will Bolan. Not by a damn sight."

"Right. That's what I told Control, but those bastards never listen to advice from the street."

From somewhere above came the yammer of automatic weapons. Randolph thought it sounded strangely removed from their subterranean station, yet uncomfortably near. Too near.

Shouts and answering gunfire rang through the streets.

As on virtually all of the stores in the city, the sliding metal garage-doorlike front had been pulled down on the vegetable store. It had not been open for weeks, since the latest outbreak of serious fighting.

Collins glanced at his wristwatch, then in the direction of the warfare, as if he could see through the clay walls of the cellar.

"Hell, it's only 5:00 A.m. They're starting early today."

"We can get out now," Randolph suggested. He grabbed Collins's jacket from a peg and tossed it to him. "We'll be back by early afternoon."

"Is that Control's idea or yours?"

"Coming back? That's the mission, isn't it? We've still got the mission. And there's Bolan." Collins flicked off the cellar light. They started up the stairs toward the back entrance of the building.

"I've got a feeling," Collins told his partner, "there'll always be a Bolan. That bastard's too damn mean to die."

"Sir, the call you've been waiting for is on the field phone." Yakov Katzenelenbogen nodded and grabbed the phone's receiver.

Katz was certain the caller would be Mack Bolan. It would be the first time they made contact since the Phoenix Force leader and the Executioner had parted ways along the Israel-Lebanon border hours earlier. At that time, Bolan had been on his way to meet Yakov's nephew, Chaim.

This call would be from Bolan's miniature transceiver, boosted and scrambled by several Israeli stations until relayed through the wires to this communications tent on the Israeli army base at Acre.

Katz had expected to hear from Bolan well before this and had tried to ignore the worry that plagued him. The thirty thousand Israeli troops had been massed along the border with good reason.

Things were going to hell in a hand basket in Lebanon.

The first light of day warmed comfortably, but Katz felt cold inside.

"Go," he growled curtly into the field phone receiver.

"Mack here." Katz casually turned away from the others in the communications tent and pitched his voice low.

"What have you got, Striker?"

"Bad news, Yakov. Chaim is dead." The Israeli's throat constricted.

"How? Strakhov?"

"No. Chaim got hit in a cross fire between Druse and Phalangists."

"The woman, Zoraya?" Katz kept his voice hard. The senior member of Phoenix Force had been losing members of his family to violence since World War II, leaving him to carry the pain. He had almost gotten used to it.

Almost.

"I had Zoraya and I lost her," Bolan replied.

"Then you've got her again. She contacted Chaim's control officer in Beirut not ten minutes ago. He got the message to me and I got back to her. She... said nothing about Chaim. "

"She probably didn't know how to. I know how she felt. What did she say?"

"That you must contact her." Katz gave Bolan the address in Beirut that Zoraya had given him. "She wouldn't stay on. Chaim's control can't get to her. You must know how the situation is there. He's unable to move anywhere."

"I'll get to her," Bolan promised.

"And your target?"

"Still at large. I had him under the gun, but I gave him a white flag without him knowing it. The enemy is on our side of the street this once. For a few hours, anyway. There's a plot to hit the Lebanese president, but Moscow thinks it's the wrong time. They've sent our man to straighten it out."

"Any leads?"

"The Disciples of Allah."

"The ones who..."

"Right. Only the bunch I found tonight won't be massacring any more Marines or anyone else." Katz started to ask what Bolan intended to do next when he noticed three men strutting toward him with grim determination: the commander of this Israeli detachment and two men in American civilian apparel whom Katz read as CIA.

He lowered his voice even more and spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece.

"Trouble, Mack. I'm about to be arrested and interrogated, if I read this right. Uh, if I allow it, that is. How do I play it?" Katz had only seconds before the three men reached him. They would not buy his beret-topped professorial air but would know exactly how dangerous he was. All three of them carried pistols. What they did not, could not, know was that Katz already had them under the gun.

The one-armed ex-Mossad boss wore a prosthetic device attached to the stump of his right arm. This "hand," a state-of-the-art contraption of steel, insulated wires and cables with four fingers and a thumb, was not as practical or versatile as the threepronged hook Katz favored.

But the device featured an "index finger" that was in fact the barrel of a built-in, single-shot pistol that fired a .22 Magnum cartridge. The bullet was detonated by a nine-volt battery that could be activated by manipulation of the muscles in the stump of Katz's arm. There was a safety catch at the palm of the artificial hand to prevent firing the gun by accident.

Katz computed the odds of grabbing his holstered pistol while two of these men recovered if he fired the "index finger" at one of them, but of course that was only reflex thinking. He could not fire on these men and he knew it.

Bolan's voice crackled over the field phone.

"Cooperate with them like a stone wall. I need time, Yakov. Can you do it and not jeopardize your Stony Man position?" The Israeli chuckled grimly.

"You do your job, Striker, I'll do mine." He hung up the phone as the three men reached him. "Yes, gentlemen?"

"Colonel Katzenelenbogen," began the Israeli officer, "these men are American CIA. Mr. Collins and Mr. Randolph. Mossad has ordered me to cooperate with them fully."

"And those guns you're carrying say I cooperate with you fully, is that it?" Katz retorted. "Very well. Let's hear what you have to say."

Katz hoped these three and those who would certainly continue to interrogate him after these guys were done would not see through his stone wall.

Mack Bolan had just lost his one contact out of Lebanon.