Beirut Payback

5

They traveled a circuitous route out of Beirut. Bolan's blacksuit, weapons and gear were hidden beneath a blanket that covered him to the neck.

Zoraya steered her Volvo through the labyrinth of streets she knew so well. The Arab child snoozed in the back seat as the Volvo bumped along the crater-scarred road.

Bolan wished he could fully trust this woman.

Chaim had vouched for her, sure. Bolan had seen her ID, right. But The Executioner had kept breathing all these years, all these miles through blood, by not taking one damn thing as it appeared.

Especially in the heat of battle in a hostile, alien environment.

Especially not on a night like tonight.

The damn thing was, Bolan liked the human being who said she was Zoraya.

She had not faked the humane instinct that transformed the tough, gun-packing Zoraya to gentle protector of the Arab waif.

With the shelling of the city temporarily ceased, the streets funneled a surge of pedestrian and vehicular traffic trying to get out despite the pre-dawn hour. The mass exodus only served to blur already tenuous lines between Muslim and Lebanese Christian forces.

Lines that were impossible for even the militias themselves to determine.

No one slept in the war zone tonight.

The woman drove them from the city along the coast.

A sea breeze cooled the air.

The war seemed not so immediate out here.

They passed djellaba-robed Muslims standing before their homes, observing the noises of war from the direction of the city, ruminating camels tethered to trees.

Both sides of this stretch of the main road were littered with debris: the charred remains of trucks, tanks and human corpses.

Two miles north of Beirut, Zoraya turned onto a secondary road, taking them northeast.

"This leads to Biskinta."

"We've been damn lucky," Bolan noted, never taking his eyes from surveying the dangerous night.

"Twenty-four hours ago, we would not have gotten this far," Zoraya said. "Militia checkpoints were everywhere. But the new fighting has changed everything. The armies are busy with each other." As she spoke those words, the Volvo rounded a bend and Bolan saw the lights of a military checkpoint blockading the road a quarter of a mile ahead.

He positioned himself sideways in the seat, like a man taking a rest. He made a final check to ensure the blacksuit and drawn Beretta were fully concealed. Zoraya slowed the Volvo as they approached the lights.

"The instant it goes wrong," he told her, "get us out of here." The lady looked tough enough and competent behind the wheel.

Bolan kept his finger ready on the silenced 93-R's trigger beneath the blanket.

Zoraya braked to a stop at the checkpoint. A guard shack stood to one side and next to it three men, wearing the informal Druse militiaman's uniform of parka, knit hat, jeans and combat boots.

The three were armed with Russian AK-47 assault rifles.

Another soldier stood beside a jeep, near a radio in case anything went wrong.

Tension crackled in the night as one of the soldiers approached the car.

The others stood behind him, their AK'S leveled.

Bolan feigned sleep.

The Arab beauty would handle the soldier.

Bolan could not understand the dialogue, but the exchange did not need translation. He had briefed Zoraya on what to say.

She showed her papers to the militiaman.

"This is my husband and child. My husband was wounded in the fighting. We have been to the hospital in Beirut but had to leave after his surgery to make room for more wounded. He is heavily sedated, as you can see. We are Druse. We live in Biskinta."

"You are crazy to return," the soldier said gruffly, returning the ID with barely a glance at Bolan or the child. "The fighting in the hills is bad. You should not go back."

"It is our home. We return to get our belongings." At that moment, the little boy in the back seat let out a caterwaul that echoed off eardrums and did not stop.

Zoraya played it to the hilt.

"There, you see?" she bitched. "My child is awake. Do you want to nurse him back to sleep?" The soldier grunted something and stepped back from the car and waved her on through, already half forgetting the refugees and, like his companions, warily scanning the barren darkness around them for the enemy.

Bolan reached for the child, who continued to raise a hellish racket. He tried rocking the kid, making clucking noises that did no good. He became aware of a quiet chuckle from the woman behind the wheel.

"Perhaps we should trade places," Zoraya suggested.

When they made the first dip in the terrain that put them beyond sight of the checkpoint, she steered onto the shoulder.

Zoraya took the little one and when the kid's scared eyes saw her, the squawling diminished to a murmur.

By the time Bolan got behind the wheel, Zoraya had the boy in her lap in the passenger seat, the boy transformed once again into a purring angel.

Bolan allowed a chuckle of his own as he steered the Volvo back onto the road.

"Thanks again." Bolan went back to scanning the night beyond the cone of headlights.

They passed a caravan of four civilian vehicles traveling in the other direction, huddling together for mutual protection.

Zoraya watched the darkness, too, and began crooning soft, soothing tones in Arabic to the child again.

Bolan noticed that the terrain began to incline from the coastal flat into the harsh, rocky foothills of the Shouf mountains.

They would soon be surrounded by Druse artillery, quiet for now, allowing civilian refugees to haunt the roads until the next barrage upon the city.

The Druse militiamen did not want to betray their positions to possible retaliatory air strikes.

The mess in Lebanon ranked in a class of its own, but the issues were simple enough.

The mess resulted from so many disparate Muslim factions forgetting their grievances and cross-purposes with each other and uniting — with considerable aid from the Soviet Union — under the banner of Islam in nothing less than a Jihad, a Holy War, against an opposing alliance of similarly disparate factions, in most cases pro-Western.

Bolan knew some history of the region.

In the eleventh century, a group of nonconformist Muslims infiltrated southern Lebanon, eventually coalescing into the Druse community. Unrest between Muslims and Arab Christians dated to the nineteenth century. Druse opposition to Christians was directed particularly against the Maronites, culminating in a series of bloody attacks.

After a massacre of twenty-five hundred Christians in 1860, France intervened and the Ottoman sultan was forced to appoint a Christian government, which still was in power.

The current trouble exploded when Israel's military invaded Lebanon to destroy once and for all the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israelis succeeded only in driving out moderate PLO factions while diehard PLO terrorists strengthened themselves in an alliance with the Druse.

Druse and PLO fighters operated jointly against the pro-Israeli, pro-Western Lebanese government, joined by the Iranian crazies and the Syrians, in open civil war. Both sides were driven by real grievances, feeding a bloodlust as exploitable as ever by the cannibals who sat on the sidelines and pulled the strings.

Syria, on Lebanon's border, backed the rebel factions in a bid to subordinate Lebanon without necessarily annexing it.

Syria functioned as the Soviets' muscle in this struggle, though Soviet and Syrian interests were often at odds. The Kremlin preferred its clients to remain relatively weak and thus dependent on Moscow's patronage, but the will of Islam is strong. The Soviet terror machine's strongarms in the Mediterranean would never yield to state over religion, the basic tenet of communism to control the masses.

The Syrian warlords in Damascus played the situation with a hope of making Syria the center of the Arab world. Real power, yeah, but not an easy task for a country with nearly no oil and only ten million people.

Damascus already had the PLO under its thumb.

Control over the terrorist network gave Syria sinister leverage over moderate pro-Western oil producers who were exceedingly vulnerable to terrorism.

The Russian "advisors," of course, played for the big stakes. They wanted this corner of the world-a key to the world slave state their leaders had always envisioned.

The Executioner had a shot tonight at cutting these savages off at the knees.

But first he had to find Strakhov.

Why had the KGB top cannibal risked it all to come to this hellground?

Did the answer wait in Biskinta?

Only one thing for sure, thought Bolan. The Disciples of Allah are next.

The slimebags who sent a truck bomb to massacre sleeping peacekeepers.

Bolan kept his combat-cool objectivity intact as he drove, but anger tightened his fists around the Volvo's steering wheel until his knuckles shone bone white.

The Disciples of Allah.

Craziest of the crazies, not giving a damn if they died, as long as they took plenty of the enemy with them.

The Shiite fanatics were the most dangerous foe of all on the battlefield, because they believed they had nothing to lose.

The desire for martyrdom is rooted deeply in Shiism, which in turn is rooted in Iran. The very word assassin comes from hashshashin after the gang of hashish-smoking hit men, directed by an eleventh century Persian cannibal named Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, who often sacrificed their own lives for his cause.

Less than ten percent of the world's five hundred million Muslims are Shiites, their zeal for martyrdom fanned by their Ayatollah in Tehran, encouraged by the mullahs.

During the Iranian revolution, anti-Shah marchers wore white burial clothes to indicate their willingness to die for the struggle.

Thousands of Iranian youths wearing red "martyour" bandannas and small "keys to heaven" around their necks volunteered for certain death in the Iran-Iraq war. Children as young as six had been sent to the front with Korans in their hands to clear minefields for the Iranian army.

To die in a Jihad offers a direct passport to Allah and Ali, the revered son-in-law and cousin of the prophet Mohammed.

To kill large numbers of infidels in the process is only a greater glory.

Some enemies, yeah, for one warrior to take on, but Bolan saw no other way.

Some enemies are worth following into Hell.

The Executioner would find Strakhov.

Tonight.

Assassination.

Bolan would find the truth and destroy whatever the KGB terror merchant hoped to feed on from the suffering of this war-torn land.

He glanced sideways and saw the little Arab boy again asleep in Zoraya's embrace.

"Anything?"

"Our little one's name is Selim. I do not think he knows where his parents are, if they are alive or dead. It is all too much for him to comprehend." Bolan grunted.

"I know how he feels."

"We must do everything we can to find his people when we return to Beirut," said Zoraya, "unless it is already too late." And a tear the size of a pearl appeared in the corner of one eye and rolled down her cheek. There were no more tears. But Bolan knew they were there inside for the man she had loved and lost to war and for the child in her arms. And if she felt anything like the icy-eyed warrior beside her, she shed a tear for the awful dark side of human beings.

"How far to the town?" Bolan asked, to change the tone and keep the lady tough.

They had driven for ten minutes since the checkpoint, climbing steadily as the road twisted into the hills.

"Very soon," Zoraya replied. "In the next quarter mile there is a trail. It will take you to a promontory overlooking Biskinta." That suited Bolan just fine.